> They probably have way more now 18 years later though.
I wouldn't neccesarily think so. Nukes are really expensive to create and maintain, but once you have "enough" getting more doesn't really provide much additional benefit.
Its also kind of weird, as the article is basically just an executive summary. Did they really need AI to come up with that? Its hardly in the weeds of the details.
From the IAEA perspective, Israel is not a party to the nuclear non-proliferation treaty so they are not bound by IAEA rules (and in exchange they do not get the benefits of being part of the treaty, which are substantial)
Nowadays it's about efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Sure, 99% of the time a Shahed-136 might "lose" against a Patriot, but a Patriot missile costs 200x what a Shahed does.
Laser and EWar approaches are going to be more successful long-term as the price per "shot" is dramatically less, but deployments are slow.
The US uses APKWS and similar against Shahed-136. These guided missiles are cheaper than the Shahed-136. Why would you assume the US uses Patriot missiles against a Shahed-136? That isn’t part of their doctrine and the flight profile is a poor fit.
These have been operational in the US military for almost 15 years now and are widely deployed in the Middle East. You may want to update your priors. The US military anticipated all of this.
While these are cheaper than the Shahed-136, lasers have the advantage of unlimited magazine depth, so it is obvious why the US would invest in that.
I can't read either of those because they are paywalled but ghe first paragraph of the first one doesn't seem to support your position.
In any case, almost everything i've read is that the majority of drones are shot down with APKWS, with a patriot sometimes used as a last resort if one gets through.
> In the statement, a Bahraini government spokesperson said the [Patriot] missile successfully intercepted an Iranian drone mid-air, saving lives.
> Wars in the Middle East and Ukraine have put a spotlight on how limited supplies of sophisticated missiles—including multimillion-dollar Patriot interceptors—are sometimes being used to defend against mass-produced drones that cost just a few thousand dollars.
> Gulf states are also spending big on the war. Nations including Saudi Arabia have launched multimillion-dollar Patriot interceptors and fired missiles from aircraft to take out Iranian drones.
The E-3 Sentry that got blown up was reportedly hit by drone. I'd guess they wish a Patriot had stopped that one.
Bahrain is not the usa. There are many reports that gulf states use patriot missiles much more freely than usa does.
> are sometimes being used to defend against mass-produced drones that cost just a few thousand dollars
"Sometimes" being the key word here. I think 1% of the time would technically constitute sometimes and changes the ecconomics considerably.
It should be noted the Shahed-136 drone that was mentioned above cost $100,000, not a couple thousand.
My position is not that it never happens, just that its relatively rare and a bit overblown in the media. Military does need to figure out better solutions, but the status quo is not use a patriot on every drone.
"“Often they [the US and its allies] were firing thoughtlessly,” the officer said. “For example, they used SM-6 missiles — from a ship, a very good anti-missile missile. This missile costs about $6 million, and they used it to shoot down a Shahed costing $70,000.”"
> It should be noted the Shahed-136 drone that was mentioned above cost $100,000, not a couple thousand.
> Sure, 99% of the time a Shahed-136 might "lose" against a Patriot, but a Patriot missile costs 200x what a Shahed does.
From what i understand, i think people use other systems than patriots to shoot down Shaheds except as a last resort. So the cost difference is bad, but its not nearly as bad as it would be if you were using something like a patriot for every drone.
Nonsense. Every military is built to counter certain types of enemies. Nations that win predict correctly, nations that lose predict incorrectly. History is littered with examples.
I think that says more about our political leaders than our military.
Politicians choose the war and our military fights the battles. We're very good at winning battles. But some wars can't be won. The problem then lies in their choosing.
I imagine Sisyphus became the best, most effective rock push in the world. Unfortunately despite his talents, the task he was assigned was insoluble.
I generally agree that Americans tend to downplay the impact of Russia in WW2 but there is zero chance Russia would have won the war without the US. Even Lend-Lease going away would have resulted in a loss. Both Stalin and Kruschev agreed there.
The British Commonwealth was the biggest factor in Africa, but it's questionable how quickly they could have won out and taken the Suez without the Americans coming in late in 42, which was critical for both vital supplies like oil and also invading Italy. Japan was already getting bogged down with China and even Burma so they wouldn't have suddenly been free to do much in the European theater but just getting Italy out of the fight and forcing Germany to replace their divisions elsewhere. Italy exiting the war removed 30+ divisions between the Balkans and France, while another 70 Axis divisions were being held down by Allied forces in the Mediterranean during D-Day, with there being 33 Axis divisions in Normandy for D-Day itself. A lack of US involvement also likely means that Germany is able to hold Caucasus for longer (and take more of the oil fields), solving a sizable portion of their oil shortage issues.
With Lend-Lease but no active participation in the war from a military deployment standpoint, the UK and USSR do likely eventually win but at much greater cost and not without risk of losing. Without Lend-Lease it is highly possible that the Axis wins, at least in the European theater. Japan had kind of set themselves up to lose from the start no matter what the US did.
Perhaps you're considering only the European theater, but even that would have been significantly more challenging for Russia without the U.S. tying up (and degrading) Axis resources and manpower throughout Europe and elsewhere (e.g. the Pacific). Japan could have very well opened an eastern front for Russia.
And, it was the U.S. that forced a two front war that prevented Germany's fuller focus on Russia's western front (millions fewer troops). Not to mention U.S. logistical and material support to the Soviet Union, which may well have prevented their industrial collapse.
Even with all of this support, the fatality rates for Russia were astronomical. To this day, it boggles my mind that one nation lost ~26 million people in a single war.
Hard to imagine how they would have succeeded without the U.S.
Sure, they will find out it is a good military. No doubt about that. What the US has found out repeatedly but fails to acknowledge is that the opposition proves to be a match. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Somalia have shown just how deep reserves of human resilience and arsenal of guerrilla tactics they have. This doesn't fit the US's mindset about how war is to be waged.
Meanwhile, the American public wants a quick skirmish and a bold "We WON" claim .. it has no appetite for body bags coming home and the price of oil rising.
Which is why if China makes a move on Taiwan, the US can do nothing.
I agree with your statement that human resilience can outlast a better army.
But then you go on to say:
> Which is why if China makes a move on Taiwan, the US can do nothing.
If your opening thesis is true, then it's strange you follow it up with that. Taiwan has just as much a chance of outlasting a stronger competitor as those other countries that resisted US dominance.
And with the US providing them weapons, intelligence, and support, maybe a better chance. See Ukraine.
> Pretty sure anyone who fights the US military finds out pretty fast it’s a good military.
I am not sure about that. Iraq, Afghanistan, to name the new ones and Vietnam to name an old one.
Sure you can take an easy/undisciplined target like Maduro. But many armies in the world can also do that. Another thing that has to be recognized: alternative warfare (ie: terrorism) is a legitimate form of warfare regardless of its morality. You can't, in my opinion, claim military supremacy while not being able to contain these other risks.
> Even stuff like Spectre and Meltdown, which I highly doubt an LLM can find on its own without specifically knowing about speculative execution attacks, are incredibly hard to use. People made a big deal of those being able to be used from javascript, but to actually leak anything of importance you need to know memory layouts, a bunch of other info and so on.
In fairness, i think part of the reason people made a big deal was the novelty of the attack. It was something new. The defenses weren't clear yet. The attack surface wasn't clear. It was unclear if anyone was going to come up with a novel improvement to the technique. Humans love novelty.
Bugs are not the same as (real) high severity bugs.
If you find a bug in a web browser, that's no big deal. I've encountered bugs in web browsers all the time.
You figure out how to make a web page that when viewed deletes all the files on the user's hard drive? That's a little different and not something that people discover very often.
Sure, you'll still probably have a long queue of ReDoS bugs, but the only people who think those are security issues are people who enjoy the ego boost if having a cve in their name.
Eh, with browsers you can tell the user to go to hell if they don't like a secure but broken experience. The problem in most software is that you commit to bad ideas and then have to upset people who have higher status than the software dev that would tell them to go to hell.
> That’s why, for example, every OS has a POSIX layer even though technically the process/namespace/security model could be radically reimagined possibly to create more easily engineered, correct software.
But that is because everyone has to switch to the new system. There are no shortage of experimental OSs that do things in different ways. They fail because of switching costs not because making them is hard.
A machine checked proof is valid if it happens once. You dont need the whole world to switch.
Yes, Anubis is just non standard and obscure, the proof of work bit is completely irrelevant (except for getting people on their phone to not visit your website).
It doesn't matter if your hottest loop is using string comparisons, as another poster pointed out in C you aren't even doing the majority of the second hash because you know the result (or enough of it) before finishing it. The JavaScript version just does whole hashes and turns them into a Uint8Array, then iterates through it.
I dont understand what you mean. Are you saying that in C you only calculate the first few digits of the hash? That's not how sha256 works.
Edit: oh i think you mean in c the string comparison short curcuits. I would expect the same to be true in javascript too. Its true in most languages.
Maybe you are just worried about general language overhead, which is a fair point. Is the anubis check even using multiple threads? For the c case, the real benefit wouldn't be if you can use C, but if you can use the GPU.
The whole thing is kind of silly though. SHA256 is a terrible choice of hash for PoW. They should be using argon2 or something memory heavy.
The language matters, but your original guess was actually correct, you can do tricks with sha256 where you only end up calculating a fraction of the total double hash in order to get a pass or fail.
Modern bitcoin miners do a double sha256 hash and increment in just a little bit more than a single hash of work. The input is 80 bytes, which is two compression rounds of 64 bytes in sha256, only the data in the second round has changed (the appended nonce), so you don’t bother doing the first compression round again. With other quirks you can end up doing multiple hashes at once “asicboost” due to partial collisions within the input too.
Oh good point. It looks like anubis is using 64 byte random plus a nonce. Unless i'm missing something it seems like using 56 bytes random plus 8 byte nonce would be a better design or maybe hmac'ing the nonce & data together.
But then again using sha256 doesn't make sense at all.
I wouldn't neccesarily think so. Nukes are really expensive to create and maintain, but once you have "enough" getting more doesn't really provide much additional benefit.
reply