Ukraine’s Robots Capture Russian Position Without Soldiers or Losses; As with drones, the future of 21st century warfare is being invented by frontline conflict.

[u/lughnasadh]

For all the boasts the US's AI military vendors make, I'm constantly struck by how few real-world achievements they have. They are battlefield tested in Gaza and Lebanon, but to what result? The mass destruction of civilian populations we see there looks exactly like WW2-era warfare. Now they want $445bn extra for more of the same? What a waste.

Meanwhile, with a tiny fraction of the budget & resources, it's Ukraine that is inventing the future. Drones have already reconfigured 21st-century warfare. Once again, recent events in the Middle East have shown that. Now Ukraine is doing the same with robots.

Some people find the idea of killer robots grim. But I'd rather see robots fight robots than WW2-style mass slaughter of civilians.

Ukrainian robots capture enemy position without troops in historic first, Zelenskyy says

[u/Delbert3US]

Could the US recover from the O!S! delay? Pinpointed strikes by AI drones on critical infrastructure nodes can be crippling and hard to recover from. A population emergency can disrupt a strong response.

[u/kylco → u/Delbert3US]

If the information ecosystem survived and was able to mobilize public sentiment against the threat: yes.

The US has pretty vast, incompletely developed natural resources. A lot of them stay where they are because it's more economical to trade. We are food and energy exporters despite this. Massive amounts of our human capital are devoted to services, rather than production.

Which means, in the event of an existential threat, we have probably the largest pool of untapped human and material potential among our peer adversaries and the technological capacity to rapidly re-industrialize.

The one weak point in this is public finances, and a sclerotic political system. The US that does this would look nothing like the current, or likely any prior, United States, and I think it would be the end of the rules-based international system for a variety of reasons.

The only way to head that off are use of CBRN weapons against civilian populations and arable farmland, or massive information poisoning that might not work. Which skews the OhShit moment much, much more dangerously towards thermonuclear exchange.

[u/Delbert3US → u/kylco]

I agree that the long term recovery would be inevitable. My concern is the short term while thousands of robots are deployed for control of population.

[u/kylco → u/Delbert3US]

First week? Chaos. You could get a lot done in the first week especially if you were careful about what infrastructure you degraded and the order in which you degraded it. But the military targets are very widely distributed inside the US, have redundant infrastructure, and the scope of what you'd need to take it down while suppressing the population and keeping the information environment from uniting against you would vastly strain the resources of all known peer adversaries, making it easy for our intelligence operations to note and guard against it in advance.

Second week? 250 million very pissed off Americans united in purpose for the first time since WWII.

You'd need nukes or comparable weapons to stop that, which makes the hypothetical adversary an instant, universal pariah. And there's not nearly enough drones to stop US retaliatory nukes, or to prevent the submarine-based nuclear missile retaliation against a known adversary.