Mutual Assured Decivilization

The takeaway from Peter Zeihan's latest

Iranian drones have bedeviled Ukraine since the start of the war. The little Shahed 136 has proven to be a huge, rapidly evolving problem. These fifty horsepower devices pack a similar punch to the GLSDB and costs are in line with the typical three tier sedan offerings from U.S. auto manufacturers. A MANPADS intercept will cost as much as a Mercedes Benz AMG GT and fighter launched solution has a price tag like a Ferrari 599 GTO.

Policy wise, defenders have to set aside the cost of the problem vs. the solution and look at the value of what is damaged, but this leads to an even darker place. Zeihan points out Iran’s entry into the arms export business and notes that developing nations can afford to claw each other to bits by using these things on the high value civilian targets of their opponents. If your capitol city has one central office for phone services, one power plant, and one major liquid fuel depot, a successful strike on any one of the three is a major problem that could take years to resolve.

So we’re going to see the drone equivalent of Iaido, a Japanese sword martial art with an emphasis on drawing, striking, cleaning, and sheathing the blade in a single fluid series of motions. Defense is hard - the goal is to strike first and finish the job.

Conclusion:

War in Ukraine has revived the World War I trench warfare vibe, which I think is mentally even uglier for the men, since there are no rear areas, and the randomness of a WWI rolling barrage is replaced by the intensely personal one on one drone pursuit. Rear areas are seeing the first glimmers of the World War II tactics employed against Coventry, Dresden, and the endless horror of Operation MEETINGHOUSE.

But we need to understand that the other side of that very same coin will be immediate Mutual Assured Decivilization. The fringes of our global population, in less developed places, likely more at risk due to climate change, and certainly less capable of responding, will quickly knock each other back a generation or two in terms of development, once the drones come out.

Peter’s climate assessment … that as things get harder, many places are going to turn to the even dirtier, less efficient lignite coal they have rather than give up their electricity … this rang true for me. What I’ve been trying to accomplish to one degree or another since 2007 is simply not how our species is going to behave en masse.

But CO2 reductions because we blast each other’s power plants to bits? Russia is systematically doing this in Ukraine, the less developed margins will go there even more quickly, and they’ll have less capability to come back from it.

I revisited Bruce Sterling’s The Caryatids about two years ago. This has some of the development of archetypal characters that you find in Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon … but I think it’s maybe a fair representation of the direction we have chosen.

God help us all …