There are plenty of people in the comments here arguing that the Biden administration didn't do anything on drones either, so the blame can't fall entirely on Trump. I don't think this is a fair take. The Biden military was quietly starting to acknowledge drones were a threat (although they could have been quicker about it). Critically, Biden didn't start any wars against powers that would use cheap drones. Trump revealed that our military was a lot of bark and not a ton of bite once there was pushback.
Yes, trump is dumb but the military is either asleep at the wheel or corrupt. I say that as an engineer in the defense industry who does mostly space stuff. I remember thinking back in 2019 when the Houthis attacked the Saudis "Wow this changes warfare" And I now sit here and ask where are the drones? Where was the spending for that?
That was 7 years ago and today they're proposing a golden dome, an antique battleship and a new fighter aircraft when the F35 was exceptionally behind schedule, exceptionally over budget and exceptionally complex and their idea is "lets do that again"
The average cost of F-35C, $102.1 million. The F-35C was released in 2019 - the same year they first saw what drones can do for a cost of like 1/100 of 1 percent (10,200) or maybe 5/100 of 1 percent (a little over 50K per drone).
It all is either incompetent or corrupt or both. From the lets build obsolete stuff to Iran. Anyone who was slightly familiar with Iran could have told you don't start this idiotic war. But either the military is silent or complicit and I don't know which. I also don't know when silence becomes complicity but it looks like were are there.
Military's fight the new war with the last wars technology, at least in the beginning. If they learn quickly they can win, if they are slow to innovate they will likely not win.
Russia and the United States are not winning. It will be hard lessons, not easy lesson's. Putin and Trump and the people they put in charge are not the quickest when it comes to new. They are both very old school. One is a genius the others insane. Like white mice in a lab always trying to take over the world. Which one is Pinky and which one is The Brain?
"You know what that difference was? Iran has a huge, home-grown drone industry."
In addition, Iranian leaders appear to accept that death may be part of the job. This is a concept that is very foreign to Trump's Vietnam dodging brain.
Annoying: the U.S. has problematic Middle East relations, but needs access to cheap oil, so grits its teeth and plays nice with some not-very-nice people.
Part of the solution: invest heavily in an alternative fuels and shift away from oil as fast and as completely as possible—eliminating Middle East leverage over us. And a whole lot of positive collateral effects.
There’s another revolution in which we will get pantsed in much the same way: AI.
Our models rely on the idea that we have unlimited resources to throw into development and infrastructure and energy. To hobble the Chinese in this race, we restricted their access to important infrastructure.
This was a mistake. Their top model, DeepSeek, performs at about the same levels as ours (if a step/version behind) at a fraction of the size with a fraction of the required compute, infrastructure and energy.
What they did was what the Iranians and Ukrainians did: They adapted and innovated because resource constraints required creativity to solve problems. We throw money and force at problems.
What this may mean for us is slimmer Chinese LLMs will be widely adopted because they’re cheaper and, at a minimum, good enough. Ours aren’t because they’re larded up whales.
Meanwhile, after we dump trillions of dollars into AI infrastructure, we’ll be saddled with tons of expensive, useless stuff that won’t be generating the promised revenue. Pop!
It’s not just Trump’s stupidity, though there is that. It’s also our own entitlement and arrogance. Look at these tech people! We’re not being creative in an economical, sustainable way because we don’t believe we have resource constraints. We bludgeon problems with force and money.
I caught Tim Miller’s podcast with Bob Kagan, and boy did it go off the rails at the end. Kudos to Tim for getting Kagan to drop the shroud by comparing him to Ben Rhodes. But there is a massive blind spot here: it was precisely this brand of neoconservative hubris and the disaster of "global order management" that hollowed out American trust and paved the way for Trump's "America First" backlash in the first place. You can't defeat Trumpism while rehabilitating the very doctrine that fueled it.
Tim could have pushed back much harder on some truly dangerous claims:
1. Kagan: "Even the misses I don't regard as entirely misses... the world depends on American power." The Missing Counter: "Bob, if Iraq and Vietnam were necessary for 'credibility,' why did they leave the U.S. more diplomatically isolated, economically strained, and militarily wary than ever before? Didn't those 'misses' actually destroy the credibility you claim to protect?"
2. Kagan: "The countries that rely on us... counted on us being willing to use force." The Missing Counter: "Which allies? The ones who begged us not to go into Iraq? Or the ones who saw Vietnam as a distraction from the defense of Europe (like Charles de Gaulle, who literally pulled France out of NATO’s military command over Vietnam)? Isn't ‘order management' just a way to ignore the fact that our allies often find our use of force destabilizing?"
3. Kagan: "We're not going to use power unerringly." The Missing Counter: "There is a difference between an 'error' and a systemic failure of doctrine. At what point does the cost of your 'global order management'—trillions of dollars and millions of lives—outweigh the benefits of the abstract 'order' you're trying to keep?"
JVL: “He did this. He did it because he is vain and stupid. And now we will all pay for his idiocy.”
In Hawaii, but interrupting my vacation to say it is the American people who did this by reelecting the man who fucked COVID up. As such, we thoroughly deserve what’s coming to us.
Whoa! Get a grip everyone. I think if you check the record, you will find that Mr. Trump was/is a stable genius. He would not have said so if it weren’t true. C’mon now. Settle down.
It’s a Trump thing, but not only a Trump thing. The world is changing. It’s true enough that not every change is good but not every change is bad either.
Thirty years ago, people were excited about Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century. A candidate of either party now talking about being a bridge to the future would get pelted with stones.
That video clip is a horrifying reminder of the sheer stupidity of the man.
I am still astonished that over 70 million people could not grasp the stupidity of 2020 had further deteriorated by 2024.
I'll edit Dickens to offer an insight on these times:
“...it was the worst of times,...it was the age of foolishness...it was the epoch of incredulity...it was the season of darkness,...it was the winter of despair.”
War is politics by other means. It is also economics by other means.
This is my new favorite piece by JVL.
It is not economics per se, any more than my buying groceries is. I believe it's more accurate to say economics is present and still wins in the end.
But it's a dam good line, and better than my alternative.
I hope this piece is soon replaced as my favorite with a piece on how well we're rebuilding our democracy.
Gotta start somewhere...
There are plenty of people in the comments here arguing that the Biden administration didn't do anything on drones either, so the blame can't fall entirely on Trump. I don't think this is a fair take. The Biden military was quietly starting to acknowledge drones were a threat (although they could have been quicker about it). Critically, Biden didn't start any wars against powers that would use cheap drones. Trump revealed that our military was a lot of bark and not a ton of bite once there was pushback.
My cat LOVES rodentia and birds around my house. In fact, they often don't survive the amount of love he shows.
Yes, trump is dumb but the military is either asleep at the wheel or corrupt. I say that as an engineer in the defense industry who does mostly space stuff. I remember thinking back in 2019 when the Houthis attacked the Saudis "Wow this changes warfare" And I now sit here and ask where are the drones? Where was the spending for that?
That was 7 years ago and today they're proposing a golden dome, an antique battleship and a new fighter aircraft when the F35 was exceptionally behind schedule, exceptionally over budget and exceptionally complex and their idea is "lets do that again"
The average cost of F-35C, $102.1 million. The F-35C was released in 2019 - the same year they first saw what drones can do for a cost of like 1/100 of 1 percent (10,200) or maybe 5/100 of 1 percent (a little over 50K per drone).
It all is either incompetent or corrupt or both. From the lets build obsolete stuff to Iran. Anyone who was slightly familiar with Iran could have told you don't start this idiotic war. But either the military is silent or complicit and I don't know which. I also don't know when silence becomes complicity but it looks like were are there.
Military's fight the new war with the last wars technology, at least in the beginning. If they learn quickly they can win, if they are slow to innovate they will likely not win.
Russia and the United States are not winning. It will be hard lessons, not easy lesson's. Putin and Trump and the people they put in charge are not the quickest when it comes to new. They are both very old school. One is a genius the others insane. Like white mice in a lab always trying to take over the world. Which one is Pinky and which one is The Brain?
"You know what that difference was? Iran has a huge, home-grown drone industry."
In addition, Iranian leaders appear to accept that death may be part of the job. This is a concept that is very foreign to Trump's Vietnam dodging brain.
Annoying: the U.S. has problematic Middle East relations, but needs access to cheap oil, so grits its teeth and plays nice with some not-very-nice people.
Part of the solution: invest heavily in an alternative fuels and shift away from oil as fast and as completely as possible—eliminating Middle East leverage over us. And a whole lot of positive collateral effects.
Why, oh why would we do THAT.
There’s another revolution in which we will get pantsed in much the same way: AI.
Our models rely on the idea that we have unlimited resources to throw into development and infrastructure and energy. To hobble the Chinese in this race, we restricted their access to important infrastructure.
This was a mistake. Their top model, DeepSeek, performs at about the same levels as ours (if a step/version behind) at a fraction of the size with a fraction of the required compute, infrastructure and energy.
What they did was what the Iranians and Ukrainians did: They adapted and innovated because resource constraints required creativity to solve problems. We throw money and force at problems.
What this may mean for us is slimmer Chinese LLMs will be widely adopted because they’re cheaper and, at a minimum, good enough. Ours aren’t because they’re larded up whales.
Meanwhile, after we dump trillions of dollars into AI infrastructure, we’ll be saddled with tons of expensive, useless stuff that won’t be generating the promised revenue. Pop!
It’s not just Trump’s stupidity, though there is that. It’s also our own entitlement and arrogance. Look at these tech people! We’re not being creative in an economical, sustainable way because we don’t believe we have resource constraints. We bludgeon problems with force and money.
I caught Tim Miller’s podcast with Bob Kagan, and boy did it go off the rails at the end. Kudos to Tim for getting Kagan to drop the shroud by comparing him to Ben Rhodes. But there is a massive blind spot here: it was precisely this brand of neoconservative hubris and the disaster of "global order management" that hollowed out American trust and paved the way for Trump's "America First" backlash in the first place. You can't defeat Trumpism while rehabilitating the very doctrine that fueled it.
Tim could have pushed back much harder on some truly dangerous claims:
1. Kagan: "Even the misses I don't regard as entirely misses... the world depends on American power." The Missing Counter: "Bob, if Iraq and Vietnam were necessary for 'credibility,' why did they leave the U.S. more diplomatically isolated, economically strained, and militarily wary than ever before? Didn't those 'misses' actually destroy the credibility you claim to protect?"
2. Kagan: "The countries that rely on us... counted on us being willing to use force." The Missing Counter: "Which allies? The ones who begged us not to go into Iraq? Or the ones who saw Vietnam as a distraction from the defense of Europe (like Charles de Gaulle, who literally pulled France out of NATO’s military command over Vietnam)? Isn't ‘order management' just a way to ignore the fact that our allies often find our use of force destabilizing?"
3. Kagan: "We're not going to use power unerringly." The Missing Counter: "There is a difference between an 'error' and a systemic failure of doctrine. At what point does the cost of your 'global order management'—trillions of dollars and millions of lives—outweigh the benefits of the abstract 'order' you're trying to keep?"
JVL: “He did this. He did it because he is vain and stupid. And now we will all pay for his idiocy.”
In Hawaii, but interrupting my vacation to say it is the American people who did this by reelecting the man who fucked COVID up. As such, we thoroughly deserve what’s coming to us.
Whoa! Get a grip everyone. I think if you check the record, you will find that Mr. Trump was/is a stable genius. He would not have said so if it weren’t true. C’mon now. Settle down.
"As Noah Smith and Shawn Wang recently wrote, all non-drone militaries are now obsolete."
This is an absurd statement outside of about 1000 words of context.
K-Pop/Potato 2028
Trump: the PMD, President of Mass Destruction. Ours.
It’s a Trump thing, but not only a Trump thing. The world is changing. It’s true enough that not every change is good but not every change is bad either.
Thirty years ago, people were excited about Bill Clinton’s bridge to the 21st century. A candidate of either party now talking about being a bridge to the future would get pelted with stones.
That video clip is a horrifying reminder of the sheer stupidity of the man.
I am still astonished that over 70 million people could not grasp the stupidity of 2020 had further deteriorated by 2024.
I'll edit Dickens to offer an insight on these times:
“...it was the worst of times,...it was the age of foolishness...it was the epoch of incredulity...it was the season of darkness,...it was the winter of despair.”