Bureaucrat. Penguin enthusiast.
JohnofCharleston
Karma: 393
Manifest x DC After Action Report
I’d be interested to discuss this more sometime.
I’ll be at Lighthaven next weekend, Friday and Saturday, happy to discuss in person. This isn’t my focus, but I can present some common views. I can’t discuss specific developing tech or countermeasures, and generally don’t know the specifics anyway. Some sort of countermeasure always develops, though how costly and effective it is, how it changes the various warfare niches, remains to be seen.
Who would win in a fight: an Abrams or six million dollars worth of drone troops?
It’s worth noting that tanks will basically always lose a one-on-one fight to dismounted troops of an equivalent cost-to-equip, given reasonable cover, morale, and equipment. This was true in 1940, in 1970, in 2000, and now. Sending unscreened tank columns alone into battle in anything other than a flat desert is suicidal. Tanks shine in combined arms, but are vulnerable on their own. Combined arms warfare is extremely difficult to coordinate; neither Russia nor Ukraine have been able to pull it off much in recent years, with the initial Kursk offensive as a notable exception. It shouldn’t surprise us that heavy tanks struggle in geography they’re not suited for, used by armies who are unable to use them to best effect. That is not the only relevant scenario.
NATO is certainly not “dangerously unaware” that drones are flipping the table of armored warfare. Drones are a huge focus of the new Army Secretary, DoGE, and major defense contractors (particularly Anduril). A few months ago, we had what was sadly not called “Bring Your Drone to Work Day” with all sorts of new prototypes set up in the Pentagon courtyard for us bureaucrats to see and touch and get a real felt sense for what’s new.
But quadcopters aren’t everything! They certainly haven’t allowed Russia to conquer Ukraine, if anything they seem to favor the defender. American military power was already built on drones, in terms of intelligence, electronic warfare, loiter munitions, and even “traditional” precision bombs (as @Hastings pointed out below).
Yes, the incumbent Defense Primes are over-specialized in “exquisite” hardware that’s expensive, technologically advanced, and produced in low numbers. But that also means they’re very incentivized to develop drone countermeasures. Most things they try won’t work. Some likely will. Even early things they’ve tested have helped in Ukraine, it’s just not the case that an Abrams tank is “dangerously outdated”. There are more threats to a heavy tank than there have been in the past, and lighter tanks are a better fit for Ukraine’s geography, but you’d still rather have the tank than not. This is not always the case!
Western militaries are acutely aware of that viral tweet from a while back:
every Pacific naval encounter from late 1943 onward is like the IJN Golden Kirin, Glorious Harbinger of Eternal Imperial Dawn versus six identical copies of the USS We Built This Yesterday supplied by a ship that does nothing but make birthday cakes for the other ships
Original source lost, but here’s an exampleYes, if given the choice, you should prefer six identical copies of the USS We Built This Yesterday + the ice cream support ship. That doesn’t mean the IJN Golden Kirin, Glorious Harbinger of Eternal Imperial Dawn was useless.
Disclosure: Literally written from the Pentagon. (Off duty, speaking in a personal capacity, waited to type this until after hours, etc.)
Lighthaven-ish Ticket Strategy: Three Pillars of FOMO
Understood, thanks for explaining. I’ll reach out to Foresight about a one-day ticket, since I’ll be in the area.
Just to confirm, the unconference stuff will be Friday and Saturday, but not Sunday? I was planning to fly out Friday evening, but if this is the plan I’ll swap flights.
Manifest X DC Opening Benediction - Making Friends Along the Way
Another thing I’ve been thinking about is a retreat on something like “high-integrity AI x-risk comms” where people who care a lot about x-risk and care a lot about communicating it accurately to a broader audience can talk to each other.
I think this is a great idea that would serve an urgent need. I’d urge to you do it in the near future.
Agree with both the OP and Habryka’s pitch. The Meetup Organizers Retreat hosted at Lighthaven in 2022 was a huge inflection point for my personal involvement with the community.
My conflict got bumped to next week, so I’ll make it after all. Have a large strawberry cheesecake to give for the cause.
there’s likely a kind of “position warfare” going on in policy circles to make sure your position is the one that’s primed to win if the conditions for its enactment are suddenly met
I’m not sure how much “position warfare” happens for all but the most predictable events. After policy surprises there’s usually a big fight to claim credit for predicting the crisis and a mandate for what to do about it. People and organizations certainly prepare for that (and I think our community should prepare more), but it’s more by making predictions, finding allies, refining arguments, and writing plans.
A shocking event led to the dominance of a political faction that previously had just been one of several competing factions, because that faction’s basic vibe (that we should make use of American hegemony, and that rogue states are a threat to national security) was roughly supported by the event.
The response was substantially driven by elite judgements rather than popular judgement.
I think this is entirely correct. The Iraq War is one of the best examples of outside-the-Overton-Window policy change in recent memory.
In my understanding, the key trigger for the “Milton Friedman Model of Policy Change” is the Policy Community being surprised. At its core, the Overton Window is a set of norms enforced by this community. In the wake of crisis those norms aren’t enforced, so rather than shifting in some linear way, the window is temporarily suspended. Then, as Friedman said, “the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” Thalidomide is another great example of when the policy change in the wake of a crisis has little to do with the trigger other than a particular faction winning the narrative fight.
I’ve been meaning to write more about this, would any particular angles be helpful?
I’m glad Jenn came to town and helped fix this policy proposal. I think her claim to 1-3% credit is an underestimate. I’m grateful for the first-hand account of how to fix policy that will not have the effects that the issuing body intends. Sometimes the best “technical correction” to a bad policy proposal is just start over.
The DC Policy Community is smaller than most people think. It’s smaller than many people who are in it think. This miscalibration causes problems. There’s a fundamental tension between performing your role to the best of your ability and taking on responsibility for the whole outcome. I think that tension, fiat justitia ruat caelum vs heroic responsibility, is key to understanding the bureaucratic soul. But that will need to be its own post someday.
Millions of people are employed in industries that export. The flaw in this policy proposal was easy to understand using only publicly-accessible data. Wikipedia gets you most of the way there. How is it possible that one small non-profit was the only organization to officially point out this basic flaw?
Jenn’s explanation is great and entirely correct, but I’d like to highlight one of the drivers: something like the bystander effect. Balsa was not the only group to notice this problem. Everyone knew that this problem was easy to spot, knew that it must have been easy for the authors of the policy to spot it. But pointing it out has costs, risking the relationship if you’re right, looking dumb if there’s something you missed. Once the obvious error is pointed out in the record, even once, that should be enough to prevent the worst version of the rule from going into effect (by threat of an Administrative Procedures Act action, if nothing else). So if the pool of public commenters is large, and you’re a prominent-but-not-overly-powerful group that has higher-priority problems on your plate, it’s entirely rational to want someone else to bear the cost of pointing out the problem.
The problem comes if you’re miscalibrated about how big the policy community is. If you expect an action to get thousands of well-informed public comments, it’s probably safe to assume most such flaws will be pointed out. If the action only gets 586 comments in total, and most of those are focused on a more headline-grabbing aspect of the proposal, that assumption is no longer safe.
There are hints of this in the record. The National Retail Federation’s analysis implies there were back-channel communications. Their written testimony makes clear that they spotted the problem, yet chose not to mention it directly. “Surely someone else will point out this problem so we don’t have to...”
This story has a moral: Do not assume what is obvious to you is obvious to the DC Policy Community. Even if you’re right and the issue is obvious, you might still be the only person to speak up about the issue.
Not on my screen, not for the line breaks at least. See here:
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/balsa-update-springtime-in-dc
Though you’re right, the footnotes aren’t links in the substack version either.
(Formatting Note: line breaks and footnotes got broken in the cross-post)
Note this event says June 27th. Was this intended? Thought I was RSVPing to one this coming Friday, June 20th
It’s certainly plausible that you’re right, but I worry about this a lot more now after the supply chain disruptions from Covid and tarrifs. I worry that we’d have real cold-start bottlenecks that would take years to resolve, not weeks or months, in any scenario where we lose access to Chinese parts. Scenarios in which ocean shipping is substantially disrupted are even scarier in one sense, though China would probably be symmetricaly affected, or worse.
The best counter-argument to my worry, and biggest update I’ve had on this in recent years, is the success of the TSMC chip fab in Arizona. I predicted it would not go well. I’m delighted to have been wrong.
Defense technology production is no longer about manufacturing. It’s culturally artisanal. In peer competition, the ability to scale is typically more decisive than artisinal quality (with the notable exception of the Manhattan project).
I think you’re right that American drones would likely be several times better, perhaps an order of magnitude better, than Chinese comparators. But we would have substantial bottlenecks on scaling production, could not simply resolve those bottlenecks with money, and even if we manage to scale appropriately would face huge cost disadvantages.
That’s a huge problem when the use case is swarm tactics. China could probably afford a strategy to saturate defenses with its drones, we probably could not, with our current mindset and processes.
Back at home now, this album is excellent at summoning the particular mood blending intensity, playfulness, and weltschmerz[1] that Lighthaven consistently instills in me.
Note: “You Have Not Been A Good User” seems to be missing, with 7 seconds of silence as a placeholder.
I didn’t listen closely to the lyrics two weeks ago, but I’m finding time now. “Friendly Fire” is particularly affecting. I don’t see a co-author listed, no obvious hits on the language. Was that you? How are you doing?
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Claude’s helpful suggestion for “word for ennui + dread + hopelessness + obligation + duty”
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Maneuver warfare. Combined Arms Offensives. Breakthrough operations against prepared defenses in high-intensity conflicts. Counter-offensives to stop enemy advances (i.e. Kursk).
Here’s some published US Army discussion of this problem. Yes, Armor officers have tanks and are motivated to say they’re the solution to every problem. But they have a point that other countries failing to successfully execute combined arms does not mean that NATO would. There’s some things we’re good at, skills that we’ve invested in disproportionately compared to peer competitors. Joint Operations at all scales (nations, services, combined arms), is top of that list.
https://warontherocks.com/2025/07/steel-in-the-storm-recent-wars-as-guides-for-armor-transformation/