Imagine an assassination that is done with a drone mailed internationally to a PO Box. Send a gig driver to pick up a small box and drop it off at an abandoned lot.
The box has a machine inside that cuts the box open and opens up to release a drone that pops out and hits the target.
Bonus points if the box itself can fly away and self destruct so there's even less of a physical trail to figure out where the drone came from.
While you define a legal act of war, that can stil be terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic that works by insipiring fear and causing a response. The attack itself usually doesn't do enough damage to change the outcome of the war.
By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia. The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.
> Terrorism is a tactic that works by insipiring fear and causing a response. The attack itself usually doesn't do enough damage to change the outcome of the war.
But this wasn't that. This was taking out bombers. If anything, it reduces the amount of terror.
> By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia.
By that definition, every war is terrorism. And maybe it is, but this war was started by Russia. Russia is still the only terrorist state in this war, no matter how you spin this.
But that can be said for most actions in a war. Multiple actions taken together is what changes the course of a war
Giving one example, you could imagine that for internal reasons, the Russians must keep a facade of a war that is far away, changing that equation may produce enough pressure for them to eventually stop the war
> But that can be said for most actions in a war. Multiple actions taken together is what changes the course of a war
Yes, great point.
> you could imagine that for internal reasons, the Russians must keep a facade of a war that is far away, changing that equation may produce enough pressure for them to eventually stop the war
I wrote above,
By creating fear among Russian officials and, possibly, the population, Ukraine causes Russia to divert resources to protecting more places in Russia. The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.
And as you say, it brings the war home somewhat. Imagine the response of Americans if a military base on US territory was attacked successfully.
We can debate the definition of 'terrorism', but a fearful pscyhological effect was, I suspect, the primary aim of the attack.
And that's a perfectly legitimate thing to do (if you attack legimmate targets, which Ukraine did). I think people on this thread think 'terrorism' is an insult.
I think generally terrorism has some other connotations which is why this is raising antagonism among Ukraine supporters
I don't think this is causing fear as the citizens do not feel threatened, as these are military targets. I think the feeling is more of the sort of "humiliation", which can indeed have valid political implications that may affect the war.
Putting aside that, denying the enemy its strategic bombing methods has various advantages in a war, such as less damage to infrastructure and in this case increasing domestic morale due to military success, and reducing Russian ability to demoralize by bombing cities
> Terrorism is a tactic that works by insipiring fear and causing a response. The attack itself usually doesn't do enough damage to change the outcome of the war.
Yeah, like the Blitz Terror bombing in WW2. But this isn't that. They attacked strategic enemy assets, so it's not terror bombing.
We agree, other than a matter of definition. I don't think the definition of terrorism excludes legiimate military targets, though it certainly includes illegitimate civilian targets.
> The loss of the planes, while a substantial economic blow, doesn't change the outcome of the war.
Are. You. For. Real?
The planes terrorised Ukraine each and every night. Now obviously they’re gonna do it less. Since they mostly target civilians, it might not do much to the frontlines situations, and technically you can be correct here …
But my dude, are you aware you mostly push a Russian side in this thread? Eliminating so many war targets is a huge benefit for Ukraine. They eliminated one third of their strategic aviation, literally overnight.
I don't understand that. Nobody would debate that the countries are Russia and Ukraine, that they clearly are at war, and that the target was a military facility.
The mode is new, but you must agree that choosing cluster munitions for a church on Sunday is an actual nightmare compared to a slight background hum of latent independent drone missions.
When it comes to abuse of trust, I'm worried about goods coming from China. Israel's compromise of the pager supply chain shows that innocuous seeming devices can be weaponized via trust.
Imagine if every IoT appliance decided to burn down/self destruct and every phone with satellite connectivity decided to weaponize its battery pack. If every car with cell service connectivity decided to accelerate with brakes disabled at once. If every access point/router decided to make itself inoperable/turned into a bot net removing home internet all at once and likely shifting traffic to cell towers which could overload them resulting in zero communication. Imagine that as many devices as possible were programmed or constructed in a way to create failure on a specific date or period.
Sounds insane, but I would have said the pager thing sounds insane too. All those things definitely sounds possible to me.
i recently heard a podcast where a16z claimed this was one of the main reasons why you need a US electric vehicle and robotic industry - what if Chinese device could be weaponized at will in the event of a conflict?
A less far-fetched reason is that modern EV and robotics technology (lithium ion and LFP batteries, motors, power electronics, embedded electronics, RF electronics etc) is dual-use and absolutely crucial for building all modern weapons
It's not far fetched, not only is it perfectly feasible, there's now been precedence. If nation-state wants any hope of security, they need to have control of the entire stack. That's why countries are banning Huawei 5G networking equipment.
Ding, ding, ding. Welcome to the "Circus of Globalist's Externalities come home to Roost!"
At a certain point, you as a country can only be said to be capable of what you can do without external aid. The possibility that your Allies will always remain as such, either at their behest, or your own, is simply never zero.
Queue the Globalist's in the crowd going "The entire point was to maximize the amount of time before peace broke down through economic interdependence. Wrong. They optimized for that metric while maximizing the vulnerability to supply chain based attacks. They made individual countries less resilient and accepted the risk that if a much greater worldwide action potential was actually reached, everyone would be potentially fucked.
its much easier to buy them in the USA, like guns, bullets, grenades. to damage an airplane you dont need much: just a mix of molotov cocktail, and aluminum and metal shavings a-la Walter White in order to penetrate and ignite the fuel tank of a strategic nuclear bomber.
No need to buy compound and trigger authorities. Thermite is just metal oxide powder and aluminum powder that can be made at home, just add magnesium from matches to ignite and thats it.
I can now understand Palmer Luckey's point of intelligent weapons. It truly brings to life the quote from Game of Thrones, "Why is it more noble to kill 10,000 in battlefield than dozen at a battle." Intelligent weapons enable the second scenario. Civilian lives are mostly unharmed.
How about an automated weapon you shoot from a howitzer 15 miles away that autonomously surveils the area under it's impact zone for a couple armored vehicles and reliably eliminates them?
The box has a machine inside that cuts the box open and opens up to release a drone that pops out and hits the target.
Bonus points if the box itself can fly away and self destruct so there's even less of a physical trail to figure out where the drone came from.