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“Is that supposed to be a selling point?”

When Scott Morrison looked the camera in the eye and told us that “If you vote Labor, you get Bill Shorten. If you vote Coalition, you get me”, Tanya Plibersek rightly asked “Is that supposed to be a selling point?”

It’s little wonder that Morrison has taken this campaigning approach. When you have no policies, you have to find something to say. It has perhaps escaped his attention that nobody wields supreme power in Australia – well no-one in politics anyway.

So what would we get if a Morrison government was elected?

According to him, we would have $387 billion less to spend on health, education, infrastructure, action on climate change, skills training, research, aged care, child care, welfare, and paying down the debt.

On top of that huge hit to revenue, he is committed to spending $400 billion over 20 years on strike force armaments that will likely be obsolete before they arrive. Modern warfare is not going to involve manned submarines and jet fighters.

We will get new coal-fired power stations, underwritten or subsidised by the government as no financial institution or investor is interested, at the same time as we spend millions on feasibility studies for large hydro projects whose business case says they are not viable until coal is phased out.

Emissions will continue to rise. Billions more will be spent on the failed Direct Action plan which has been rebranded as the Climate Solutions fund. Reductions will continue to be claimed for projects that have not been delivered as rapacious land-clearing continues apace.

Water (mis)management will remain in the hands of the Nationals as unscrupulous farmers steal water for irrigation and fraudulently trap and sell floodwater back to the government.

Instead of an electric vehicle industry, we will become an arms exporter.

Wealth inequality will continue its inexorable rise as tax concessions and tax cuts for the wealthy are prioritised.

Wages will remain stagnant and workplace entitlements will continue to be eroded.

The “temporary freeze” on the Superannuation Guarantee will remain.

Foreign Aid will remain at record lows with money only spent to outbid China for influence in the Pacific.

Discrimination will be entrenched under the guise of freedom of religion and freedom of speech.

There will be no Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

There will be no increase to Newstart.

Foreign policy will be dictated by Trump.

The British monarch will remain our Head of State.

Migrants will be blamed for everything – traffic congestion, hospital waiting times, insecure employment, unaffordable housing, crowded schools, crime, diluting our culture and values – you name it, it’s their fault.

Live animals will continue to die in horrific conditions as they are shipped north during summer months.

Privatisation and outsourcing will continue as the government sells off assets and profitable enterprises and slashes public service jobs in favour of much more expensive consultants whose message they can control.

The ABC will continue to have its funding cut while the Murdoch media will get unexplained handouts and rule changes that allow them to increase their stranglehold on Australian media.

The CSIRO and university research will miss out on funding as money is given to private groups like the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.

The bullying tactics of the hard right, where they threaten and intimidate their colleagues in order to get their own way, will continue.

And we would have another three years of blaming Labor and attacks on Bill Shorten and unions. It seems no matter how long this lot are in office, they will never take any actual responsibility. Things happen to this government, not because of them.

Come on Australia, we can do better than this.

 

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23 comments

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  1. Frances

    In my opinion, Britain will become a republic before Australia does. Also, the UK, EU, Canada, NZ and Australia — All have no independent foreign policy and take orders from Washington, whoever is in charge there.

  2. Baby Jewels

    No. We do not want this caveman. We do not want his austerity. His cruelty. His backwards thinking. We do want decent social security. We do want to earn a living wage. We do want to share in Australia’s prosperity. We do want an end to being reliant on fossil fuels because we want a future for our kids. We do not want the Coalition.

  3. Barry Thompson.

    Good article Kaye Lee, but regarding your statement that “modern warfare is not going to involve manned submarines and jet fighters”-what do you base that on? given our defence experts are investing in such armaments.

  4. Keith

    The state of the economy is almost immaterial in comparison to the state of the climate at present. Five minutes into podcast referenced, Dr Carl talks about the state of Thwaites glacier in Antarctica. Rather than being grounded by bedrock, it is slushy mud. Dr Carl discusses the astronomic costs being passed onto young people through no action on climate change. It means the further destruction of the biosphere, mass migration from coastal cities, and destruction of economies. Politicians generally are not taking into account the destruction of ocean habitats, coral reefs around Earth are already being hit hard; around 30% of insect populations have been lost. After the dire warnings of the IPCC, many new science studies are painting a very grim picture. We do not know when tipping points will be reached that are completely beyond any human ability to rectify. The combination of a blue Arctic Ocean and thawing permafrost creates one such danger. Any time within the next ten plus years an ice free Arctic Ocean is a strong possibility. Politicians from LNP, Labor and Greens are not taking into account the risk factors.

    https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/antarctic-coasts-melted-by-warmer-oceans/10997476?fbclid=IwAR1lQeaj5ZLtrFjlv5NLhM-MGOrU7hPJBPBca_e-rU9gkYkfbDet5wEYMyU

  5. Terence Mills

    The Turnbull initiated efficiency review of the ABC and SBS has backfired on the government and they will probably not release the report which they have been sitting on since December.

    The review recommends that the ABC should be funded for 10 years at a time, rather than the current triennial funding, to allow it to modernise its infrastructure and protect it from the whims of politicians.

    Giving the ABC more autonomy is probably not what the communications minister Mitch Fifield [the human toilet brush] had in mind when he announced the review of the ABC and SBS, along with an $84m indexation pause, in the 2018 budget.

    The review was conducted by communications bureaucrat Richard Bean and former chief executive of News Corp and Foxtel Peter Tonagh. They concluded the ABC needed expensive new infrastructure to keep up with rapid changes in technology, and long-term funding certainty. Congratulations to these two men who have managed to avoid a partisan review which could have been severely damaging to the ABC and would probably have been used as election fodder to damage the public broadcasters.

    This review is not what the Liberals wanted to hear and it certainly doesn’t reflect the demands of Newscorp and the IPA but unless it is released [or leaked] it may never see the light of day.

    Lots of ammunition there for Labor to work with.

    https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/apr/19/review-finds-abc-needs-long-term-funding-which-might-not-be-what-the-government-wanted

  6. Kaye Lee

    Barry,

    The pace of technological advancement has made traditional weapons basically obsolete. In the time from when you order these huge defence purchases until when it is actually delivered, enormous advances are made making the thing you ordered 20 years ago a waste of money.

    This article gives a few ideas about the different weapons they are developing today.

    https://www.techworld.com/security/future-of-technology-in-warfare-3652885/

    There is no reason for anyone to attack us when they can just buy everything of value for much less than a war costs.

  7. Jaquix

    It might work if the caveman was running for President. As it is, only the voters of Cook will be voting for him. Besides, Malcolm tried this line in the byelection campaign for Longman. Labor won with an increased majority.

  8. pierre wilkinson

    These fossil fools need to be given a huge wake up call and hopefully this election will see many of them consigned to the rubbish bin of history, never to emerge in public again…. until the federal ICAC calls them to try and recall all that transpired under their watch.

  9. Barry Thompson.

    That is mind boggling stuff Kaye Lee. I guess we can only invest in equipment that is currently known to us, whilst being aware that it may soon be outmoded. To do otherwise could leave us defenceless.
    I only hope the “experts” know what they are doing!

  10. Kaye Lee

    Barry,

    Jim Molan considers himself one of those ‘experts’. The military are given so much money they are looking for things to spend it on and they don’t always do that wisely.

    As far as leaving us defenceless is concerned, if anyone actually wanted to attack us a few submarines will not stop them. China already has more than 70 subs. India has been the biggest arms importer for many years. Indonesia has a population of 270 million.

    The best way to defend ourselves is by soft diplomacy – foreign aid and trade and education and health services and helping with disaster relief and medical emergencies and rebuilding infrastructure etc. More important than weapons is cyber-security. And food security.

  11. Alcibiades

    Kaye,
    Re the supplied link on advanced military tech, apologies in advance for the TL:DR ?
    Am a lifelong fan of Science Fiction, also have some trivial knowledge of actual Military Operations & Planning … so more a counterpoint to the validity of the offered article & it’s assertions & spin than anything else.

    War & the seeking of military technological advantage over an adversary is as old as humanity, & is the impetus for much of our advanced technology today. Yet the promise of autonomous AI, outside of very specific circumstances, is still merely that …promise.

    Only a human grunt can effectively hold & occupy ground, or for that matter occupy a province or a nation.

    All of that hi-tech is really merely ever more advanced ‘weapons systems’, to aid & supplement as force multipliers of conventional military forces. Not wholesale substitution of them. And all of it entails higher training, technical & logistic support burdens, let alone the inflationary economic costs.

    The Tank, a ‘weapon system’, introduced in WWI was revolutionary but did not begin to approach its potential until the late 1930’s, the same with all forms of modern combat aircraft, again first introduced in WWI. Air power alone, for example, in any form, can not win a war against even a lesser near-peer. Hence, complementary weapon systems.

    Supposed autonomous systems of all kinds have fundamental inherent flaws & weaknesses, assumptive programming, physical movement, communications & electronic sensors dependency & vulnerabilities, & vulnerability to Electronic Warfare (Jamming, spoofing of comms or GPS, Electro Magnetic Pulse, sensor deception, etc).

    The rise of tanks & combat aircraft weapon systems, resulted in the development of Anti-Tank Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher (Pfaust/RPGs) & Surface to Air Missiles(SAMS), operable by a single human individual at trivial cost.

    In the Italian Invasion of Ethiopia in the 1930’s, the Ethiopians with no advanced technology or armaments, destroyed Italian tanks by thrusting short lengths of lumber between the track wheels from a concealed position on a flank.

    In the Korean War the US & Allies with the most capable and advanced military forces in the world, including Naval & Air Forces fleets, were almost defeated, then fought to stalemate by a reconstituted Korean Army & Chinese peasant troops basically armed with little more than small arms, mortars & limited light artillery. Negligible Armor, no Navies nor Air Force worth mentioning.

    In the Vietnam War, the Septics spent $100’s millions dropping ‘ultra-advanced’ sensors all over the place, pathetical’y childishly disguised as flora, to try to detect & monitor logistics & troops movements up & down the Ho Chi Minh trail, and ingress across the Laos/Cambodia border into Sth Vietnam, especially the central highlands & into the Mekong Delta. A handy source/supply of
    good long life batteries, electronic components & wiring, for the Communists,,gratis. A large investment was in ‘state of the art’ sensors that detected human ‘scent’. The NVA & VC simply relocated the remotely monitored sensors to out of the way locations and hung buckets of mud mixed with urine in a trail line amongst the trees, on ‘swinging’ branches. The septics would get all excited by the scale/frequency of ‘detected traffic’ and call in B52 carpet bombing runs on empty jungle, in the middle of nowhere, then pat themselves on the back and write up a ‘well done’ report for higher command. The large amounts of unexploded ordnance(UX) left behind by defective bombs & incendiaries was then meticulously recovered afterwards by non-combatants in pyjamas wearing sandals and turned into booby traps and undetectable wooden mines en mass.

    The ‘west’ is exceptionally dependent & extremely vulnerable to disruption of global, regional & even localised Areas of Operations(AOs) regarding Command, Control & Communications(C3). Take out or locally spoof satellite comms ? Result is no GPS for the invincible AI ‘terminator’ robot, autonomous drone, cruise missile and all associated dependent systems. Destroy or suppress global military satellite systems or even their dependent ground station links, all that hi-tech re C3, becomes a catastrophic point of failure, not an advantage. The common US grunt is so dependent upon tech systems now, few can even read & interpret a topographical paper map. And the advanced weapon systems certainly cannot. The Empire has studiously avoided fighting any War since WWII with any nation State that even approaches ‘near peer’ status for one very good reason, what if it all goes to shit ? The Paper Tiger is exposed ?

    China & Russia especially have a myriad of advanced systems that target the vulnerabilities of advanced weapon systems & C3, ie EW & associated warfare, that the ‘advanced’ West lack. In a conventional, non nuclear, actual War between near peers, Satellites, ground & relay stations will absolutely be the very first casualties. Then what ?

    IMV, all of this gushing war-porn-propaganda re weapons technology is marvelous for war-profiteers & military for profit R&D, yet isn’t very well grounded in large scale military conflict reality.

    If autonomous ‘Terminators’ are deployed, the ‘capable’ opposing side will widely deploy dramatically less comparatively expensive individually operated shoulder fired Rocket Propelled launchers that will disable sensors & comms, isolating & blinding it, &/or the equivalent of a non nuke EMP/Static pulse to ‘fry’ its electronics. Or just use a simple RPG near 70 year old design ? Attack v Defence, Hi-Tech v Low-Tech, Counter Measures v Counter Counter Measures & exhorbitant venal economic expenditure for questionable, untested or unproven on the battlefield, hi-tech junk …

    The $Bn US Stealth Littoral Combat Ships have had their hi-tech ammunition & Naval guns removed, and their supposed ‘Stealth’ nullified because of exorbitant individual round(shell) cost, and the absolute practical need for functional external comms & sensors. Now glorified missile boats, could do the same for a fraction of the price with re-purposed merchant vessels.

    The Boondoggle of the F-35 supposed ‘Stealth’ Fighter at $1.5 Trillion and counting ? Japan recently lost one due to multiple systems failures, along with previous prior failures in the that same aircraft, along with multiple failures in others, inclusive of seven forced landings. They only have 13 F-35’s so far. Pilots asphyxiate, engines catch fire, navigation systems fail, VR headsets fail, cannot fly if it’s hot, humid or there’s a chance of a thunderstorm or lightning, etc …it’s one size fits all multi-role design with a barrel shaped fuselage necessary for internal VTOL systems in Marine versions, renders it a flying brick re maneuverability at high mach speed …

  12. Barry Thompson.

    Kaye Lee, soft diplomacy did not work with Hitler and I daresay would not work with the countries you mentioned.
    Perhaps a country of our size geographically can only be defended with a nuclear capacity.
    I do not think Molan has any input to our strategic plans, I certainly hope not.

  13. Florence Howarth

    Maybe the ships, the submarines will be of little use when we remember the number of satellites that orbit this earth. Maybe drones would be of more use. Then we have the power to shatter all on the web.

  14. Keith

    The LNP do not have any kind of vision for Australia, their tax plan is a con through expecting to be re-elected in 2022.

    A fair go is being changed to you’ll get a fair go if you have a go. In the past generally it was felt everybody was due for a fair go.

  15. Kaye Lee

    The countries I mentioned have no reason to invade us. They invest lots of money here. They benefit from our resources and agriculture, and they send lots of students here to study. Many Australians are of Chinese, Indian and Indonesian descent.

    As for Molan, he recently wrote this article….

    “Last month, as chair of the defence sub-committee of the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, I tabled a report in the Senate titled Contestability and consensus: a bipartisan approach to more effective parliamentary engagement with Defence. Based on the bipartisan judgement that the sub-committee cannot do its job as it is currently structured, the report recommended the establishment of a new statutory committee with an exclusive focus on defence—a joint parliamentary committee on defence.

    Based in particular on the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS), the proposed committee would have the ability to review defence planning, strategy development, administration and expenditure on behalf of the parliament after a referral by the minister or the parliament, and would have access to classified information from the Defence Department and other security agencies for reviewing purposes.”

    Andrew Hastie is also pushing for more input from politicians on defence strategy.

    I must disagree with you about nuclear weapons. NO-ONE should ever contemplate using those despicable weapons of mass destruction ever again.

  16. Barry Thompson.

    The very threat of using nuclear weapons is what makes them a deterrent. Had the Americans not used them in the second world war, the Japanese would have fought to the death island to island, causing thousands of more casualties on both sides.
    As I understand it, the Japanese were unaware of the nuclear power that faced them.

  17. Kaye Lee

    Japan had no allies; its navy was almost destroyed; its islands were under a naval blockade; and its cities were undergoing concentrated air attacks. The civilian cost of the bombs and the, at the time, unknown after-effects can never be justified. They killed hundreds of thousands of civilians immediately and caused birth defects for generations to come.

    It is extremely unlikely that we will ever face a similar war. Times and methods have changed.

  18. Alcibiades

    In China’s past, vassal States were required to offer annual ‘Tribute’ of submission to the Emperor.

    The vast majority of major arms purchases starting in the $Billions are merely precisely the same, monetary tribute for weapon systems of questionable value, to Empire, yet deceptively marketed by the vassal State as something else entirely. Same for NATO members. The Saudis have $Billions upon billions of military hardware gathering dust in huge warehouses that they can neither competently support, operate or ever man. Masked tribute.

    For defence, all we require is capable integrated Air Defence Systems & Anti-Ship Missiles at strategic locations, with associated surveillance & targeting systems. All ships, especially larger ones, & all aircraft are merely targets … and in the 21st century extremely expensive yet vulnerable ones. Plus our own intermediate range conventional missiles(IRBMs) since we retired the F-111 as a credible regional retaliatory threat.

    For defence all in conjunction with the existing ADF, which is really merely little more than a core all arms & technical cadre to be expanded upon in time of a perceived credible imminent threat, nothing more.

    Frankly, militarily we are a joke, we are incapable of supporting our own armaments & ammunition requirements let alone POL. Our War stocks are laughable. We routinely have to purchase bombs & missiles from our Allies to conduct operations. In the 2003 Iraq War we had ~300 air dropped dumb bombs available(IIRC), less than required for 24 hours of operations, had to go begging to the Brits & Yanks.

    $50Bn for an untested unproven prototype conversion of French Nuclear submarines to Dieel, designed for northern hemisphere operations yet to be used in the southern hemisphere(critical difference) with no real industry, technology or capability transfer, & maybe just ~10% of the workforce ? How will they be manned ? We cannot even crew our current Collins subs …

    Molan, IMV, is a dangerous, beholden rabid warmonger, same for Handy Hastie. Be glad to see the last of him come the election. Unfortunately similar ex-ADF, mostly Brigadiers, scored profitable sinecures under this venal lot in the AAT & elsewhere, even heading Human Services/Centrelink. Um, Linda Reynolds, reservist Brigadier ?

    @Barry,
    The Japanese surrendered to the ‘West’, in preference, after two atomic bombs, that incidentally only did as much damage from their point of view as strategic conventional fire bombings of their cities had by B29 air fleets, in order to avoid occupation by the USSR. Their attempts to surrender were repeatedly dismissed by the ‘Allies’ over the prior six months because the US wished to combat test both design types of nukes. Japs decision to actually commit to unconditional surrender was because commencing August 9, 1945, the Soviets invaded the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo, terminated Japanese control of Manchukuo, Mengjiang (Inner Mongolia), northern Korea, Karafuto, and the Chishima Islands (Kuril Islands). Within mere days the Soviets had utterly decimated their ~1.2Million strong & most capable Kwantung Army on the mainland, and begun occupying the Japanese Island chain … only immediate surrender, and therefore the formal end of the war & cessation of hostilities, would prevent the reality of imminent Soviet occupation, of which it had just been clearly demonstrated they literally had no means to resist.

  19. Barry Thompson.

    Hiroshima was bombed by the atomic “Little Boy” on 6/8/45. 3 days later “Fat Man” was dropped on Nagasaki. On the same day,1.5 million Soviet troops invaded Manchuria. The campaign cost the lives of approximately 12,000 Soviet troops and about 80,000 Japanese troops. Those events coincided to cause Emperor Hirohito to convene his military and political leaders to tell them he wanted to end the war. Some senior military officers and the Japanese War Minister committed suicide as a result of the decision.
    The 2 atomic bombings reportedly killed at least 70,000 at Hiroshima and 30,000 at Nagasaki.
    The actual damage may only have equalled previous conventional bombing as Alcibiades stated, but to suffer such loss of life in only 2 raids was instrumental in the Emperor’s decision to end the war in my opinion.

  20. Alcibiades

    Barry,
    The casualties suffered by either the soviets or the Japanese are, respectfully, irrelevant. The 1.2Million Kwantung Army, the most capable force the Japanese had left, literally ceased to exist. Total Soviet Victory. The 1.5Million Soviet Army was extant & had commenced actually occupying the northern Japanese Home Islands.

    B29 Firebombing casualties, on one night alone, 9/10 March 1945, Codenamed Operation Meetinghouse:

    The first firebombing attack was carried out against Tokyo on the night of 9/10 March, and proved to be the single most destructive air raid of the war. 279 B29 bombers dropped 1,665 tons of bombs. The raid caused a massive conflagration that overwhelmed Tokyo’s civil defenses and destroyed 16 square miles (41 km2) of buildings, representing seven percent of the city’s urban area.

    Estimates of the number of people killed in the bombing of Tokyo on 10 March differ. After the raid, 79,466 bodies were recovered and recorded. Many other bodies were not recovered, and the city’s director of health estimated that 83,600 people were killed and another 40,918 wounded. The Tokyo fire department put the casualties at 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department believed that 124,711 people had been killed or wounded. After the war, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey estimated the casualties as 87,793 killed and 40,918 injured. The Survey also stated that the majority of the casualties were women, children and elderly people. Frank wrote in 1999 that historians generally believe that there were between 90,000 and 100,000 fatalities, but some argue that the actual number was much higher.[34] For instance, Edwin P. Hoyt stated in 1987 that 200,000 people had been killed and in 2009 Mark Selden wrote that the number of deaths may have been several times the estimate of 100,000 used by the Japanese and United States Governments.

    Bombing of Tokyo, 10 March 1945)

    What was the actual Japanese governments deliberative perspective at the time ? What do the Japanese primary source records show ? What about Japanese researchers themselves ?

    The Atomic Bombs and the Soviet Invasion: What Drove Japan’s Decision to Surrender?‘ – The Asia-Pacific Journal, Japan Focus, Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi (17 August 2007)(PDF)

    … Even after the Nagasaki bomb, and even though Anami made startling assertions that the United States might possess more than 100 atomic bombs, and that the next target might be Tokyo, the military insisted upon the continuation of the Ketsu Go strategy.

    Anami’s revelation did not seem to have any effect on the positions that each camp had held. The Nagasaki bomb simply did not substantially change the arguments of either side.

    The official history of the Imperial General Headquarters notes: “There is no record in other materials that treated the effect [of the Nagasaki bomb] seriously.”[32]

    Thus, it is fair to conclude that the Nagasaki bomb and, for that matter, the two bombs combined, did not have a decisive influence on Japan’s decision to surrender. Remove the Nagasaki bomb, and Japan’s decision would have been the same…

    Conversely …

    LTC David M. Glantz, ‘August Storm: The Soviet 1945 Strategic Offensive in Manchuria‘. Leavenworth Papers No. 7, Combat Studies Institute, US Army Command & General Staff College, February 1983, Fort Leavenworth Kansas

    The Soviet entry into the war was a significant factor in the Japanese government’s decision to surrender unconditionally …

  21. Miriam English

    Alcibiades, strange… you begin to argue against what Kaye said, then basically supported her point. Only on artificial intelligence (AI) do you really disagree… and I must disagree with you there. AI is growing more sophisticated and capable daily, and while I emphatically do NOT want AI fighting in wars I expect their presence on battlefields will only increase. It is an incredibly stupid thing to do, but already begun.

    And I greatly doubt any country will mess with GPS satellites. All sides in any conflict need them. It would be like poisoning the water that your own people drink from in order to kill the enemy. It would be too stupid. Interfering with the GPS signals might be possible over a small area, but you’d have to know where the drones are already, and you have the same problem in areas where your own forces are: all sides depend upon GPS. Your objection is no objection at all.

    Personally, I think the future of war is in economic and cyber attacks. Killing people and blowing up cities is wasteful and expensive, and this is gradually becoming increasingly clear to the excessively powerful idiots around the world. Destroying a country’s currency ends their ability to pay wages to soldiers or to buy fuel, ammo, or food for them.

    Barry Thompson nuclear weapons are a waste of time and money, as well as utterly abhorrent in nature. And they would be almost completely ineffective against any potential adversary Australia might have. Our only real choice is to make ourselves valuable assets to those around us so that they benefit more from us as ally than alienated. This is why the idiots in the LNP are taking exactly the wrong approach. You don’t make fun of, and sneer at dangerous neighbors, and withdraw humanitarian aid and funding and outreach. I can’t believe how utterly stupid those in the LNP are. They are utter morons. Their rampant xenophobia puts Australia at genuine risk.

  22. Alcibiades

    Miriam, there is not only agree/disagree, black or white,no ?

    For example the in the current War in Yemen, the Houthi’s have used swarms of cobbled together miniature primitive drones with an attached contact explosive to selectively target, overcome & destroy the very expensive search radars of Advanced Saudi Air Defence systems, in order to create a ‘gap’, to then launch locally manufactured modern derivatives of WWII V2 rockets into Saudi Arabia, even to the outskirts of Riyadh. So much for US Patriot AD systems, etc, Lo-tech v Hi-tech ?

    AI combat systems will be introduced onto the battlefield, at what financial cost & burden v benefit ? Yet, their ‘promise’ against a human foe is far from certain. A Tesla’s sensors can be deceived into changing lanes, a cruise missile can have its GPS signal spoofed so it believes it is at a higher altitude than it is while following it’s digital mapping & terrain following route, tricked into plummeting into the terrain. A combat drone or surveillance drone can be jammed so it reverts to it’s preprogrammed fallback to return to base, then suddenly re-acquire a spoofed alternate GPS signal convincing it to crash or land in a selected directed location, it’s faux base.

    Unless an AI bot has serious all over armour protection, mobility degrading & expensive, it can be taken out by a single sniper with an Anti-Materiel Rifle(.50 Cal). Even if, then it’s sensors or comms can be destroyed by same single sniper, rendering it blind &/or ‘disconnected’ … useless ? Cunning humans placing concealed/masked & inventive mines, IEDs & booby traps, beyond the AI sensors/programming perspective or capabilities ? An expensive waste of resources & logistics support ? The troops that attempt to recover their perceived valuable asset ambushed ?

    GPS is the US Global system with a more accurate signal available (toggleable) region by region for exclusively US & allied military use. Equivalents: The Russian Federation has GLONASS, China Beidou, the EU Galileo, & even other regional only systems.

    Respectfully, all sides do not rely upon GPS. The US military re C3 is entirely dependent on high bandwidth secure data communications, provided by high bandwidth secure comms satelites & ground & relay stations, in order to attempt to fulfill the technical aspects of its doctrine of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’, along with almost total dependency on secure GPS. Without this functionality its military is like a tank without fuel or vision devices. Near peers do not have this self selected critical, crippling vulnerability. It will inevitably be exploited.

    Surveillance drones & cruise missiles have already been compromised in the past, in conflicts, in select regions.

    Alas, War, killing & destruction will inevitably continue, because it is the ultimate act of a States political will, force of arms.

    Weapons of war, the arms trade, will continue to be produced because it is extremely profitable, and self sustaining from the perspective of the US Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC), let alone the venal equivalents in other nations. As well as the nation States that are forced to prepare to defend & deter, as well as vassal states forced to purchase as masked tribute. And every conflict, every war, even the mere prospect of, only means more MICC profit in replacing all the armaments & ordnance deployed & especially expended, let alone researching, developing ever more ‘capable’ weapon systems to defeat the newest bogeyman, the ‘manufactured’ enemy of the day. Every Tomahawk Cruise missile fired is another sale of ~$1.4Million(USD) re its prompt replacement for Raytheon.

    Unless, Utopia.

  23. Barry Thompson.

    Miriam, if nuclear weapons are a waste of time and money, why are countries such as North Korea and Iran striving to obtain them?
    I agree that their use is abhorrent, but not that they would be completely ineffective against any potential enemy our country might have.
    Let us hope that we do not live to see our opinions tested.

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