You know, I’ve given it some hard thought.I think ultra cheap guided munitions (otherwise known as drones) make nukes obsolete now.Hear me out.Nukes are messy, expensive, and there’s no actual evidence that their use in a war would be decisive or even meaningfully accelerate a surrender or peace deal.There’s only one weak correlation with the surrender of a very exhausted Japan, which many have debated that the surrender was actually caused by factors other than the nukes.Correlation isn’t necessarily causation, especially with a sample size of one.Really for evidence of something’s ability to end a war, you need a war that is started and ended quickly. For me my chosen example would be the US invasion of Iraq. The military defeat and surrender was wrapped up extremely quickly. Mostly by US jets dominating the air and using precise strikes on nodes of command, communications, and logistics until Iraq surrendered. In fact the US got kind of fancy with it using graphite bombs on power stations to keep them in-tact. They were being careful not to completely send the country to the stone age because they thought it would make the occupation and nation building afterwards much easier. Implying that this capability could easily do that.In the modern day, even poorer countries like Ukraine can get close to the same kind of long distance strike capability, but on a massive discount.The current Iran War is another example of cheap strike drones disassembling the nodes of industry and logistics.And since these countries aren’t playing “good cop” like the US was in Iraq, they can cause as much damage as they want.Each of these examples has been more damaging than a nuke in sum, both strategically and economically speaking.(1/2)
>>65433877If in an alternate timeline Ukraine had dropped a nuke on Russia, it wouldn’t be causing as much damage and disruption as their drone campaign has.And in order to have the same level of disruption to Russian supply lines, the Ukrainians would need a nuke for every target their drones have hit in our timeline.It also probably would have only escalated the war. Meaning the nuke would have provided negative strategic value for the Ukes.Same with Iran, if you added up the total cost of the drones they used on their targets, it wouldn’t have even been enough for one Iranian nuke.Even if they had a nuke from the start and used it, it would have provided less strategic value for the Iranians than the shaheed’s did.Nukes also come with a lot of negative attention, it invites pre-emptive strikes, suspicions, sanctions, the locations you keep them in become first strike targets, the procurement of nuclear materials will become harder and more expensive for you, etc. etc.The point of a nuke is deterrence, this idea that if you have them you can seriously fuck up a country with a push of a button.But they don’t end a country, they end only a small patch of land inside a country. Sure you can target for density, but there’s only so much density to target.Sometimes campaign-critical targets will just be in the middle of nowhere with nothing else of strategic value next to it, Wasting the nuke if that’s your only option.The better deterrence is a guided munitions fleet ready to deindustrialize your adversary through precise strikes. It’s faaaar cheaper, harder to preemptive strike, harder to stop you from procuring them, and can produce value out of dense and dispersed targets alike. It’s also a cleaner kill without any fallout, and not mythologized in the media like nuclear armageddon is.Same outcome of seriously fucking up a country at the push of a button, just better.(2/2)
Thirdie thread.
>>65433879Anon, if the Ukies had hit Moscow with a few tactical nukes, or a single strategic nuke, then that would have been fucking Game Over.
>>65433877>>65433879>dronesOnly useful as terror weapons, Ukraine has made no meaningful gains and is hitting civilian warehouses and tourist beaches. Iran is stuck with threatening civilian shipping and random bombing of civilian areas. Drones should be treated exactly as explosive or hollow point bullets and be outlawed, as they provide no meaningful military advantage and only increase the suffering of war.
>>65433935Not really, why would it be game over?Are the Russians really going to say “oh you nuked us, guess that’s game over now.”Would Ukraine still be getting the level of support it’s gotten after using a nuke?
>>65433942>Hollow points>OutlawedThirdie threads are an entirely different community from the rest of /k/. It's like visiting the zoo.
>>65433944i know a lot of people like to go 'uhh if we completely lost this city we'd be just fine!!! modern countries can take this!!!' but a lot of countries have cities that they flat out cannot afford to lose, period. if moscow is devestated that means russia is done for in any offensive capacity. moscow is russia.
>>65433942Nukes are more pigeonholed into the terror weapon category that guided munitions are.A nuke’s value is only in really dense targets, most of which are surrounded by civilians.The fact people take “nuclear armageddon” seriously is a testament to them being terror weapons. You talk about “drone armageddon” and people will just sneer at you.Yet they cause just as much if not more damage to the rival country for a fraction of the budget.
>>65433944Russia has two meaningful cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg. That's it.
>>65433877>Nukes are messy, expensive, and there’s no actual evidence that their use in a war would be decisive or even meaningfully accelerate a surrender or peace deal.Except for Japan in WWII?Then there's the sheer destructive power of a nuke.
>>65433960Then you can beat them with an even smaller drone fleet targeting important infrastructure.Don’t really see how that makes nukes the better option.
>>65433923What makes it thirdie?
>>65433973You're shifting the goalposts from "would Russia tank a nuke" which is an obvious no to "is Ukraine's use of drones effective", which is an obvious yes. If we gave Ukraine their nuclear weapons back the war would never have started and would end very quickly, but that is a separate argument.
>65433877>65433879
>>65433984My position is that no country can reasonably tank either.Nukes just come with far more costs and difficulties than they’d be worth if a drone fleet provides close to the same value.
>>65433942lmfao>>65433944Russia has been a sickly and weak country for almost 50 years, and they have only gotten more sickly and weak in due to their latest war.Russia is not a nation which could at all afford to lose its capital under normal circumstances, and these days, it would be an even bigger catastrophe for them, and this would also decapitate their leadership.
>>65433994>Nukes just come with far more costs and difficulties than they’d be worth if a drone fleet provides close to the same value.It's much easier to shoot down drone strikes than it is nuclear weapons. Even russia, country with completely dogshit AA, tends to shoot down most drones.Drone fleets do not do anything nukes do. As proven by all the current wars ongoing with the threat or use of drones.
>>65434000This will only get worse for drones when we see laser rollouts and more comprehensive AD arrangements, BTW.
>>65433975>frog poster>competely innane thought they beleived was profound filtered through a chatbotMy guess is underaged and third worlder. I remember a lot of teens back in the days of forums would shit up the board with "i just thought of this arent i so smart and innovative?!" This reeks of that shit.
>>65434003Two more weeks.
You aren’t killing Cheyenne Mountain with drones.
>>65434016LOL. this man does not keep up to date on developments. so sad. like a quarter to half the frontline FPV drones go down to EWAR alone.
>Uhhh you use too many words>Uhhh you remind me of [internet ad hominem]>Uhhh I’m going to ignore your argument about easier proliferation and cost-benefits because, nukes are just killy-er, ok?!This thread has been a real treat so far.
>doesn't understand what the word "obsolete" means >no understanding that different weapons systems have different strategic and tactical uses to meet different aims >walls of text bases on misapprehensions and which just circle >frog OP has to be a bot otherwise she is the biggest retard that has ever posted. Just trying to fucking read this shit is causing me brain damage.
>>65433994I'd say that they have a different value. Drones are a lot more accessible and not as much of an escalation, drones are a lot less lethal to huge masses of noncombatants, but a nuke ends wars a lot more decisively. I use the hammer in my toolkit a lot more than my power drill, I still want both.
>>65434156Correct deduction.>>65433975Absurd overestimation of drones. They are good weapons in correct circumstances, but thirdies think they are utterly magical and can trump any and all other weapons in any circumstance, being impossible to counter.>tanks are obsolete because muh droons>don't need CAS because we have the droons>don't need a fleet of carriers because droons>don't need nooks because droons
>>65433942>hollow point bullets>increase sufferingIm so fucking sick of noguns tourists on this board. You don't even realize how retarded you sound. It's genuinely unbelievable.
>>65434200>dont need nook because drooons If a nuke is practically impossible to obtain, why not use droons? The argument here really should be,>implying any country can replace nooks with droons WITHOUT extensive wartime experience and homegrown industry innovationIts like NZ suddenly thinking it can terrorise Australia with drones without needing nukes. No, it fucking can't because they wouldn't know how to. But place Ukraine where new zealand is, and the adf would struggle.
>>65433877I hate you fucking dronetards like you wouldn't believe. "Muh drones make XYZ obsole-" no you lobotomized fucking ape, they don't, drones are force multipliers in infantry combat and nothing more and the only reason they work on Russia is because it's a dozen oligarchs in a trench coat larping as a real country, their air defense can only shoot down 747s and their internal security is looser than your mother's blown out asshole, hardly a benchmark for the future of peer combat
>>65434026watch out anon, next he's going to say that he was merely pretending to be retarded this whole time and that you got epically trolled by his profoundly retarded behaviour.
>>65434285because droons aren't an equivalent to nukes in any way and trying to create a massive swarm of genocidal drones that kill everything in their path in an actualy effective way is going to require a bigger budget for the average thirdie than just quietly trying to acquire nukes and the systems used to launch them.
>>65434200They are becoming Cope Kites
>>65434270The idea that my daily carry is a war crime to thirdies is really nice and uplifts my spirits.
>>65434300The main reasons drones are a big deal isn’t because they make any specific weapons or platforms obsolete, or because they enable strikes against infrastructure or logistics without an Air Force. The real issue is that they enable long range precision strikes of armored columns. In the old days, if you achieved air supremacy you could mass armor and just steamroll everything. Nowadays, even if you have total air supremacy you can’t do that. If you can’t physically organize ground forces for maximum shock and mobility than you can’t have Iraq style invasions. What made air power the dominant force wasn’t what air power itself could achieve, it was what air power enabled you to do with concentrating mass.
>>65434362yeah, you can, you just need better and cheaper anti-drone munitions.
>>65434026>sheThank you! Solidarity!
>>65434370This is a cope. The attrition math doesn’t work since making a drone swarm big enough to punch through an armored columns drone defenses is an order of magnitude cheaper than making drone defended armored columns.
>>65434362>IraqI love when the thirdies out what they're actually seething about. AchMAD has been wandering the board for weeks trying to set a narrative that the US isn't putting boots on the ground in Iran because they can't, rather than it escalating the conflict to the point where we yet again have to babysit goatfuckers. I'm noticing all the talk about Iraq being an Iranian puppet is gone though, lmao.
>>65434385It isn't.
>>65434386The US could put boots on the ground in Iran, but it would be stuck fighting a positional, attritional war instead of a blitzkrieg.
>>65434400No, it would in fact be a much more one sided Desert Storm because Saddam had a functioning military when the US rolled in and your Cope Kites can only hit stationary objects, ie not tanks.
>>65434390You can also find all kinds of footage of battleships blasting the shit out of airplanes with truly impressive AA firepower
>>65434386The brown worlder cannot comprehend the difference betwen 'cant' and 'wont'
>>65434410You don't even know what's happening in that video, do you?
>>65434412They also can't understand the concept of alliances and think purely in terms of master and slave. Which means by their own logic they are slaves of China as the junior partner in the Axis of Third World Retardation.
How long do you reckon until Achmad makes a new thread in the "is X obsolete?" vein? He's made multiple today because he keeps getting btfo and abandoning his old threads.
>>65434415It looks like drones being knocked down by wake turbulence.
>>65434420Who are you talking about specifically? All I’m talking about is how long range, ground based, cheap and distributed precision fires have made massing armor impractical.
>>65434438Also incorrect. That is the White Man's sorcery denying unwanted drones the right to fly. One unit can knock down an entire swarm, and that is why the idea of a giant drone swarm doesn't work.
>>65434442>Long range>Precision>CheapPick one and only one.
>>65434409>because Saddam had a functioning military when the US rolled inlol keep telling yourself that
>>65434442Russian armor. You know what else beat Russian tanks? The Toyota Hilux piloted by Chad's strongest warriors against Libya. Does the Toyota Hilux make armor obsolete?
>>65434438>>65434443>Electronic Warfare is incomprehensible sorcery to brown worldersI see it all now.
>>65434449Third largest in the world with an air force of what were at the time believed to be jets comparable to those in Western use because nobody had quite realized yet how shitty Soviet birds were.
>>65434452Iran was literally putting out infographics about how the US is using djinns against them. So yes.
>>65434449maybe we should ask a djinn.
>>65433973The fact that this has not happened already in itself shows that you're retarded and should stop trying to talk about modern war and return to lurking for at least another couple years.
>>65434449I actually agree with him there. In the 90s and 00s, the US could have achieved similar results against any military military’s armor, if they couldn’t compete with the US in air superiority. >>65434452EW is a cat and mouse game. All it does is raise the cost somewhat of blowing up an armored column with drones. It doesn’t change the fact that ground based precision fires can land enough explosives onto an armored column to destroy it, and that this is both relatively affordable and difficult to suppress directly with classical fixed wing capability.
>>65434385>t-this is copeit isn't>t-the attrition math doesn't workit does, lol.>drone swarmlel>making a laser that costs only a tiny bit of fuel and can cut shitty drones down like scythes is less cheap than a bunch of flying vehicles with motors, batteries, frames, processors and antannaeyou're retarded.
>>65434481>Raise the cost somewhat And that makes every drone in the swarm more expensive and if your strategy is saturation it stops being viable. And you know, also stops you from landing those "precision" cope kites on the armored column. Not that Iran can stop the US from doing whatever it wants anyway.
>>65434489You forgot just using cheaper drones that don't need range to shoot down the cope kites.
>>65434285> If a nuke is practically impossible to obtainThey’re not that hard for a nation state to acquire. Most countries just don’t have the desire to deal with all the bullshit that comes with being a nuclear power, and those that do tend to either be Africa-tier shitholes or they can’t keep their mouths shut for FIVE GODDAMN MINUTES about how they want to destroy [INSERT RIVAL NATION HERE]
>>65434451I get your point but the math of attrition makes the long term trend obvious. The US could probably still achieve a shock and awe blitzkrieg against a low tier drone power, but it’s now a lot easier for any country with a lot less money to have a reliable method of blowing up tank columns at long range without classical air power.
>>65434481>i-it just raises the costno, you retarded nigger, when you have X drones in the area able to respond to the a threat at any one moment and they can't fucking do anything because they get shot down, you just fucking lost, because that threat is now free to keep walking forward.>ew is a cat and mouse gamethat you lose when the enemy has way better EW technology than you.>ground based precision firesyou mean drones, just say drones, you do understand how time works right?if the US convoy has enough time with it's defenses to take ground and resupply or get relieved by another convoy, then you just lost the fucking war because they're free to keep advancing until you have no space left.you also keep forgetting about the part of the equation where the US will also have drones and iran will in fact NOT have any of the relatively difficult to design and expensive countermeasures that the US does.
>>65434497brownoids don't seem to understand that a really slow, shitty, cheap cruise missile can be dealt with by a really slow, shitty, cheap interceptor.
>>65433968Japan was facing an overwhelming american invasion into their home islands with them cut off from any supplies, and they knew it. Nooks help drive the point hone, but alone they would not have cut it
>>65434531Alternatively, slow death via starvation.
>>65434514>that you lose because the enemy has better EW. That’s the thing, you’re basically admitting here that massed armor is only viable against massed drones when the drone side is poor and weak. The cost ceiling of fucking up blitzkrieg with drones is a lot lower than the cost ceiling of building your own fixed wing Air Force to compete with the US.
>>65434409I would give them a week before they open a burger king in tehran
>>65434449Your precious ayazuttahs could not defeat him in a ten year grind. Already memoryholed the iran-iraq war?
>>65434457Oh my god, that's fucking amazing, does anyone have it?
>>65434449It wasn't great, but it was large. Probably functionally comparable to Russia's.
>>65433877Nukes made nukes obsolete as soon as more than one country had them.
>>65433945>>65433998>>65434270>americian education Stop fucking embarrassing us already.>1899 Hague DeclarationWhich has been upheld by every nation since, hollow point or explosive bullets served no use besides making wounds more gruesome and maming, neither of which achieve any meaningful action in warfare. Drones are the exact same, providing no definitive advantage for either side and only causing suffering to soldiers and civilians. Now fuck off you dumb niggers.
>>65434457WHAT
>>65433877not necessarily, but i do think they will become a tool for deterrence>leave me alone or ill unleash my swarm of AI controlled drones which i have trained to detect and destroy all of your power plants, water plants, government buildings, etcas long as you maintain the ability to deploy a huge number of them at once, it becomes almost like second strike capability>it doesnt matter if you defeat me, my drones will cause so much damage to your country it will take decades to repairthat can be an effective deterrence
>>65433877this falls apart when you realize a nuke will always get you more bang for your buck, nevermind how hard it would be to coördinate a drone strike that is in any way comparable in effect to a nuke would be or the fact that certain things simply can’t be touched by a drone because they’re hardened against nuclear strikes
to put it into perspective best korea invested a few billion into nukes and can delete a large part of los angeles with a single icbm if the u.s. fucks with them too much, it would take literally millions of drones that cost millions of dollars a piece to achieve anything like this
>>65433877Frogposters should be gassed, thanks for listening to my ted talk
>>65434598Hague Declaration was always fucking retarded and gay, only the Geneva Convention actually matters. You should be able to freely load up a Papashaw, Thompson, or Suomi, with a drum of hollatips and then let fucking rip.War is war, soldiers fight soldiers to kill each other, and expanding bullets outright do so better than ball (at least for handgun calibers). The soldier bleeding out faster is objectively more humane killing, and the reduction in overpenetration outright reduces the risk of unintended casualties.
>>65434598>hollow point or explosive bullets served no use besides making wounds more gruesome and maming, neither of which achieve any meaningful action in warfarelmao no. The core premise of that was that the wounds were uglier and grislier, and therefore not politically correct by the standards of the time, as well as copes about how roundnosed bullets would leave more survivable wounds and thus were "more fair."In reality, when you blow off an enemy soldier's arm with an exploding rifle bullet (like Russia and Germany both did to each other in WW2 at times), that soldier is most likely gonna die in really short order. That said, lightweight spitzer rifle bullets (again, like most fighting powers were using in WW2), already do brutal cavitating wounds which would make any good modern pistol hollowpoint blush, rendering this shit moot.
>>65434616>and can delete a large part of los angeles with a single icbm if the u.s. fucks with them too much
>>65434362>Nowadays, even if you have total air supremacy you can’t do that.Are you retarded? The entire reason ukraine-russia is stuck as it is is because neither side has favorable air conditions. The #1 counter to drones is to bomb them. Best counter to everything outside of hardened and buried positions.
>>65434598Then why did the army adopt M1153 JHP with the M17 during the MHS trials? Does the military just not care they're violating the law? Or maybe, possibly, the Hague and St. Petersburg Declaration of 1868 (the one that actually banned explosive bullets) have long since been ignored. Especially the whole "no incendiary ammo" rule
>>65434598>americian>served no use>maming>achieve any meaningful actionMeanwhile, your education proves to be quite stellar.
>>65434454>Third largest in the world2 years after they had lost an 8 year long war against iran? why did the 3rd army in the world struggle uselessly against iran the if it was so powerful? make it make sense.
>>65434682because the united states military is the only good one in the world, other than ukraine and they have a lot of improving they could do.
>>65434673The U.S never ratified a lot of stuff in the Hague convention to begin with, because a lot of that shit was obviously gay and retarded even at the time. Go and tell a nation which used buck & ball loads for their smoothbore muskets to win their independence from the British that they can't use shotguns in war, they aren't going to listen, and neither should they.
>>65434512Russian tank columns.
>>65434549The bacon cheeseburger is civilization.
>>65434547No, he isn't. Hence the weasel word "basically", he is saying that cope kites will not stop a US column that operates in tandem with other US assets and that it isn't a matter of cost, it simply does not work.
>>65434556To quote from a history podcast.>In April 1514 after the exchange of delightfully insulting letters and much posturing, Selim mustered his army for the 1,800 km march from Edirne to the Safavid capital. On the way he had tens of thousands of Redheads, the religious followers of Shah Ismael I executed. And on August 23rdthe two armies met at Caldiran near lake Van.>10,000 Janissaries, armed with muskets, hundreds of cannon and a further 90,000 men wreaked havoc with the Safavids, who did not have a single firearm. The Ottoman Sultan may not have an exalted bloodline nor did he have a hundred thousand fanatical followers who believed him to be a god, but he had guns. And that was enough. Shah Ishmael survived the battle and fled. The Ottomans captured his capital but could not hold it for logistical reasons. Still the spell was broken. The man so many people believed was a god had been defeated. There were no more Shia uprisings in Anatolia and the gap between the two branches of Islam became a chasm.TL:DR Iran has always been this autistic and inept and reverted to shamanistic belief in some kind of talisman (shaheds and raising magical flags of defiance) when faced with superior technology and fighting ability.
>>65434575Anonymous delivers.
>>65434601See >>65434734
>>65434598Ah yes, things the US doesn't bother with.
>>65434682>LostLmfao the Persiacuck cannot help itself.
>>65434547>is poor and weakno, they can be pretty strong, we're just stronger lol.
>>65434682literally nobody won in that retarded war, not even the backers lel.
>uh akshually all the stuff that specifically makes america the number one superpower? that doesn't matter.
>>65433877bro just like listen broNUKEDRONESwhoalikehooooly shit
>>65433879>If in an alternate timeline Ukraine had dropped a nuke on Russia, it wouldn’t be causing as much damage and disruption as their drone campaign has.First off, why only one?Secondly, one decently sized nuke on Moskow would have absolutely fucked the entire Russian economy in a single day.The current death by a thousand cuts is good fun, but come the fuck on.
>>65434836you'll notice they often spare things they consider to be thirdie endemic weapons from the list of "obsoleted by drones">n-nonono cheap ballistic missiles are still allowed in dronenigger land>ohohohoh and le hypersonics, those are welcome to dronenigger land>and speedboats with little 50cals on them, those would totally survive in dronenigger land>only the icky 1st worlder stuff that we all don't have and can't build or afford is not allowed into dronenigger land!
>>65434624>>65434645>>65434673>>65434740Wrong. >/k/>i are very smart and know more about warfare than legal experts, generals and defense planners
I'm glad this thread was kept up while the Lincoln threads get deleted.
>>65434877>legal expertsknow absolutely fuck-all about guns or warfare
>>65434734This is entirely unsurprising.
>>65435002>gets hanged Many such cases!
>>65434877>are very smart and know more about warfare than legal experts, generals and defense plannersBold of you to assume that there are no /k/ommandoes with a /k/ job.
>>65434734That's not an infographic.
>>65433945How stupid are you to have never heard of the Hague while acting like a know it all
>>65436200America doesn't care about the Hague.
>>65434877NIGGER, THE AMERICANS QUITE LITERALLY NEVER RATIFIED ANY OF THE SHIT IN THE HAGUE CONVENTION REGARDING HOLLOW POINTS OR OTHER EXPANDING AMMUNITION, YOU ARE WRONG AND YOU COULD NEVER EVER HOLD THEM TO IT IN AN INTERNATIONAL COURT OF LAW.
>>65435138Nobody can hang you in a war tribunal if you have the military might to curbstomp anyone who tries to go to war with you.
>>65436200Call the Hague, I don't give a FUCK.
>>65435138Not for America.
>>65436418>>65436424A-anon, no, you'll get hanged in a war tribunal for this! The Hague Convention says you heckin can't!
>>65433877>People have argued nukes didn’t force a Japanese surrenderPeople have argued a lot of retarded things.>Guided precision munitions are more effectiveNo they’re more politically correct. Wipe the capital of a nation off the face of the earth and you’ve left them brain dead.>But now the rest of the world wants you dead!Do they though? Everyone is terrified of nukes but I’m skeptical of the one bomb launches a thousand claim. Nobody is going to press the button over Palau or Greenland. Nobody actually gives a fuck.Now drones have their uses as we’ve seen in Ukraine. I think Iran has shown us the real biggest advantage of drones which is if you can mass infiltrate like Israel has you can fuck up some important shit pretty fast. Potentially including nukes.Imagine if the Chinese that bought up all that land around Whiteman were able to launch on site assembled drones at our long range bombers and cause even mild damage while they are still on the ground. Thats a fucking big problem. But dropping a nuke on Missouri is still a bigger problem.
>>65433942Someone's dildo got lost in a warehouse fire
>>65436446Don't worry, he has many spares ready.
>>65436432I'm not done, either. I'm going to load it into my gun, and then I'm going to carry it around, and then I'm going to shoot it. My protest. My sacrifice. For freedom. Witness me, /k/. When the Hague comes for me, give my whiteness to Clarence Thomas, he's earned it.
>>65436385No one does, the weak want to use it as a tool of oppression on the strong, pathetic
>>65436449
>>65434598>Hague Declaration
What if Fayetteville arsenal made a trapdoor rifle instead percussion system while its Richmond model counterpart was a needle rifle similar to Prussian and Greene one?
>>65433877Nah the final future is nuke power drones with nuke warheads
>>65433877>there’s no actual evidence that their use in a war would be decisive
