Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
POSTED BY: captaincrunch
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 21:09
VIEWED: 562266
PAGE 1026 of 1104
The Institute of War is a wife- husband Nuland- Kagan project. Aside from handing out cookies on the Maidan, "Fuck the EU" Nuland was recorded handpicking the government of Kiev following the 2014 coup, and Kagan is a well known arch neocon.
Hardly an objective source.
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Ukraine and Iran are Changing Warfare
Here's what to pay attention to.
Francis Fukuyama
May 27, 2026
https://www.persuasion.community/p/were-in-the-midst-of-a-warfare-revo
lution
It is clear that we are living through a dramatic revolution in warfare brought about by changes in technology. Classic airpower, manned by human pilots, is increasingly being displaced by pilotless drones and ballistic missiles. This has led to surprising developments, as seemingly weaker powers like Ukraine and Iran have been able to stymie larger ones like Russia and the United States.
Over the last several weeks, the mainstream media has begun picking up on the fact that Ukraine has been doing much better on the battlefield, and that the war with Russia may at long last be turning in its favor. But some of the claims about the underlying technological revolution have been exaggerated, and we need to understand the precise ways in which warfare is changing.
Airpower by itself has always had great difficulties in achieving political objectives, something aptly demonstrated by the ongoing Iran war and Operation Epic Fury. What I want to investigate here is how airpower affects the land battle, which remains the main way that war influences political outcomes. In this realm, there are three main domains in which it has been used historically.
The first is strategic: the destruction of large targets deep in the enemy rear that have important roles sustaining the enemy’s war effort, like factories, railroad junctions, power grids, and the like.
The second use of airpower is operational: hitting military targets closer to the battlefield, perhaps 10 to 100 kilometers behind the front lines, including supply lines, air defenses, troops massing for an attack, communications facilities, command posts, barracks, or fuel storage needed by mobile armored forces. Such attacks are critical in “shaping” the land battle by disrupting communications and resupply.
The third mission is close air support: that is, attacking enemy forces that are actively engaged in battle on the front lines.
The first and the third of these have already been greatly impacted by new technologies, and we are about to witness big changes in the second category. Let’s see what recent wars have demonstrated.
A lot of recent media coverage concerns the Ukrainian campaign of long-range drone strikes that have targeted Russian oil and gas facilities, in some cases thousands of kilometers from the Ukrainian border. Observers have noted the lack of military hardware at this year’s May 9 Victory Day celebrations in Red Square for fear of Ukrainian strikes during the ceremony, and Vladimir Putin’s reported fear of assassination by drone.
Technology has made a huge difference in this realm. During World War II, the British Bomber Command and U.S. Eighth Air Force attempted to hit strategic targets like ball bearing factories in Germany. But Nazi air defenses forced bombers to fly at night, when their accuracy was atrocious. This led to the Allied decision to indiscriminately bomb urban civilian targets, leading to the flattening of cities like Dresden, Hamburg, and Tokyo, with accompanying civilian casualties in the hundreds of thousands. Despite the armchair strategizing of people like Lindsey Graham, these kinds of civilian attacks are both morally repugnant and have a poor track record in changing the political calculations of targeted countries. The Russians have been hitting Ukrainian civilian targets throughout the war; though they have made life miserable for its citizens, they have not brought about the country’s capitulation.
It is in the realm of close air support that drone technology has had the most revolutionary effects. This mission has historically been very difficult to carry out: until the advent of precision-guided munitions in the late 20th century, like the Maverick missile or guided GBU 10 and 12 bombs, it was hard to hit point targets from the air. Even so, “low and slow” aircraft like AC-130 gunships or the beloved A-10 Warthog
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Orwell saw it all...
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Philip K Dick foretold it all in a novelette that became the 1995 sci-fi horror film Screamers, set in 2078 on a war-torn mining planet, where humanity is hunted by "Screamers"—self-replicating, AI-powered autonomous weapons. The surviving Alliance commander travels to negotiate a truce with the enemy, only to discover the machines have evolved into deceptive, humanoid killing devices.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Orwell saw it all...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Philip K Dick foretold it all in a novelette that became the 1995 sci-fi horror film Screamers, set in 2078 on a war-torn mining planet, where humanity is hunted by "Screamers"—self-replicating, AI-powered autonomous weapons. The surviving Alliance commander travels to negotiate a truce with the enemy, only to discover the machines have evolved into deceptive, humanoid killing devices.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Orwell saw it all...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Variety
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Second Variety is one of my favorite short stories of all time, my dude.
When you're being a normal person, you're not half bad. You know that?
But I was thinking about the bombs just falling all over the place, and what it would be like to live a life where that's become normalized for you. Winston never thought about that while he was home or at work, but venture too far outside of polite society and it sounded like the bombing wasn't so frequent where everyone lived in abject terror 24/7, but they all walked around knowing deep in the back of their mind that any moment could be their last with a random bomb dropped right on their heads.
P.S. The movie Screamers was a great big pile of steaming horseshit though, wasn't it?
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Didn't Fukuyama declare "the end of history"?
I guess history didn't end after all!
-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Didn't Fukuyama declare "the end of history"?
I guess history didn't end after all!
I was looking for a (very) short sci-fi story I can't think of the name of at the moment to post in reply, but then I got distracted after I finally figured out what I was looking at after Google's AI interpreted my query. It was quite a bit more interesting to me...
Dr. Aris Thorne pulled the main lever, intending to leap forward five minutes to prevent a spilled coffee. Instead, the temporal displacement tore a microscopic hole in the fabric of spacetime.
The universe didn't explode—it simply began unraveling from the edges in, erasing time, space, and memory into absolute nothingness. The catastrophic tear cascaded outward at the speed of light, folding galaxies into infinitesimal points before annihilating them.
As Aris watched his laboratory walls dissolve into shimmering, colorless static, he realized his fatal error. He had not just broken causality; he had erased the very canvas upon which the universe existed. In the final, blinding fraction of a second—as his own atoms scattered across the void—the scientist let out a hollow laugh. He had successfully destroyed all of time, permanently ensuring that no future scientist would ever make the same mistake.
Jesus Christ. It just wrote me a 3 paragraph short story about a scientist ending the universe and fit Time Travel in there. And it's not bad either. It made me laugh.
Not just the ending, but also when it decided that the Doctor leaping forward 5 minutes into the future to avoid spilling his coffee is the proper direction we need to be going in.
And yeah... I'm pretty damn sure it ripped off some of that from the story I was thinking about.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Oh... By the way. I've mentioned it before about A.I., but one of the (at least for now) telltale signs that you're reading something made by A.I. is seeing the Em Dash.
Known as: U+2014 : EM DASH
Symbol: —
The A.I. used it 3 times in that short story. Hardly any human uses it unless they've got a job or some hobby with a real specific purpose for using it since it's not something you can normally type on a keyboard.
I'm not sure if I use the ellipsis more than AI uses EM DASH, or the other way around.
Oh... and it also should be noted that the only reason A.I. still uses the EM DASH is because TPTB want stupid people to believe that they can always spot A.I. writing by checking if it has EM DASHes or not.
That obviously is not the case. The people who control the A.I. and/or the A.I. itself is already very aware of this action taking place. If they weren't before, they are after people on YouTube started talking about it.
Why would they remove this odd behavior now that people know about it?
Except for choice documents that maybe you don't want people believing were A.I. generated...
Ammiright?
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Back to reality, there are gadgets to keep you alive in a drone war:
By the time you hear the UAV coming, it’s often too late. It’ll be upon you in seconds — not enough time to react. All you can hope for is that the operator is bad at their job and the explosion misses your vitals.
With a good detector though, you can spot a drone coming from kilometers away, giving you time to scatter, jump into a dugout, switch on the jammer, or just grab the shotgun. When dealing with FPVs or drones with similar roles, maximizing reaction time is critical — both for troops on the front line and civilians like first responders and journalists.
Drone detectors have been a staple technology in Ukraine for years. These tools typically pick up on the signals transmitted between drones and their operators to provide a heads-up. As drone control systems and tactics evolve complexity, so too must detectors.
Kara Dag Technologies bills itself as a leader in this space — Euromaidan Press reviewed positive feedback from an investor and testimonials about its Obriy series of detectors, whose latest Obriy 1.3C and 1.4C iterations recently dropped. Several warfighters said the system “performed well in field conditions” while a foreign volunteer said "they save lives on a daily basis, especially in Kherson."
Much more at https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/05/28/in-the-age-of-drone-warfare-ear
ly-detection-grows-ever-more-urgent-not-just-in-ukraine-but-worldwide/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:This really happened:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I was looking for a (very) short sci-fi story I can't think of the name of at the moment to post in reply, but then I got distracted after I finally figured out what I was looking at after Google's AI interpreted my query. It was quite a bit more interesting to me...
Dispatches from the possibly last days of human relevance
By Scott Aaronson | May 27th, 2026
https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9782
. . . OpenAI helpfully included commentary from Timothy Gowers, Noga Alon, Will Sawin, Daniel Litt, and many other experts, reflecting on the breakthrough, the path that GPT took to get to it (which can actually be seen by examining its chain-of-thought), and what this might mean for the future of mathematical research.
I heard the news maybe an hour after it broke, when some UT grad students came to my office to tell me. For what it’s worth: these students were morose, musing about how everything might soon be over for young scientists and mathematicians like themselves. I don’t know whether they’re right, but I feel like I should tell the truth about what their reaction was. . . .
And then, just today, Jelani Nelson alerted me to a new CS theory paper, which solves a longstanding open problem about electrical flows on graphs using a proof from GPT5.5Pro.
It seems to me that we’re now over the top of this particular rollercoaster, and it will keep accelerating until we reach the bottom, wherever that might be. I don’t know whether to hope or dread that solutions to P versus NP and all our other great problems will be included in the ride—that our role, as human mathematicians, will be reduced to (at most) deciding which questions we find interesting and then understanding AI models’ answers to those questions.
But maybe that won’t happen. Maybe the new AI mathematicians will soon hit a wall, because they lack the uncomputable quantum gravity microtubules of Penrose and Hameroff, or some other magic human ingredient. The fantastical thing is that, one way or the other, we’re going to find out empirically before very long.
_______________________________________________________________________
. . . But maybe we should just throw in the towel—as some of my colleagues have already done in the context of undergraduate projects? Maybe we should simply say that a good story is a good story, regardless of what manner of entity produced it?
As it happens, just last week I read my very first AI-written story that affected me as a story, to the extent that I wanted to read it more than once. This happened when I gave GPT5.5Pro the following simple prompt:
Write me a story about the most ancient Israelites that’s riveting like the stories of the Bible but that’s also consistent with all of the archaeological evidence.
You can read the result here. https://tinyurl.com/y8xa3ust One of my Facebook friends called it “disturbingly good,” and I share that assessment. Of course, I’m well aware that GPT could easily generate a thousand stories like this one—sampled from the same probability distribution—and then I could even do statistics on which tropes were the most common. This makes it feel silly to overindex on the first story that happened to be output, and yet somehow I did.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME