Thoughts?
It does concern me a bit that MAD isn't nearly as assured as it used to be. War is changing a lot faster than militaries can reasonably keep up with, and I feel like if a war was declared now between two superpowers there's no way to predict how it would be fought.
Thanks, Jonathan Marcus, for your concern.
>if a war was declared now between two superpowers there's no way to predict how it would be fought
There's never been a way to predict how it will be fought. The only constant in international relations and great-power conflict is that no one can predict anything, and the people who claim to are almost always proven wrong
I read a thing recently where the US marines and royal marines did an exercise together where they basically tried fighting each other. The main thing I found interesting was that apparently they had to resort to WW1 tech like wired phones and because all radio could be monitored at all times.
I don't know what this means for MAD but I thought it was interesting.
Emission control and radio discipline in general are the utmost basics of modern combat under EWar and sigint conditions. Personal meetings and miles and miles of cable.
How does that work when you can have micro drones doing constant surveillance of your lines though?
MAD was never assured
A twisted pair cable's magnetic field is externally minimal and the cables are concealed when built.
I mean I'm the sense that face to face meetings will mean important officers will be in the same place. Small drones could watch their arrival and immediately provide coordinates for a precision airstrike.
Drones are a meme and so are you.
MAD isn't assured.
But the collapse of the global economic system and the resulting bloodbath is.
Only reason why I'm a fan of globalism desu.
>I mean I'm the sense that face to face meetings will mean important officers will be in the same place.
As they'll be regardless of emission control. Face to face meetings are still needed to actually plan things effectively and ensure everyone involved understands the situation and orders.
>Small drones could watch their arrival and immediately provide coordinates for a precision airstrike.
No. There are no such small drones, concealment and dispersion are in effect, everyone wears an uniform so identifying the officers from the air is not an easy task, there are no aircraft in place for precision airstrikes and there's going to be an alarm blaring in the HQ as as soon as radars detect probable strike aircraft heading towards it.
If anything, as soon as a drone locates a headquarters, regardless of officers, indirect fire is going to focused on it. MLRS, tactical missiles, are exceptional for this purpose, for example.
You shoot the gay drones you fucking faggot.
Effectiveness of drones under the conditions of modern EW are yet to be seen.
Notice how you didn't see many Ukrainian drones in East Ukraine conflict?
That's because of Russian EW.
Drones aren't autonomous, they have to be controlled by an operator, and the link between the drone and the operator can be jammed.
MAD was always a lie, a conviction threat to keep politicians from stumbling into wars on everyone's behalf.
You underestimate the power of stupid to continue to do ever dumber things.
To be fair both the Holohols and the Vatniks also use short range radio and keep listening in to each other, so we shouldn't take everything in the war as a vision of the future.
When you factor in robots, genetic editing and organ farming even the most incompetent system can be brute forced into surviving.
Convenient* threat, sorry.
Just look at how fucked the end of the 20th century was, that's when brainless officials thought their actions had world ending consequences. Imagine the stupid shit they'd do if they thought they could survive WWIII.
Didn't that conflict degenerate into PMCs slap-fighting and shit-posting on YouTube?
You are implying that the Ukranians can afford PMCs.
How exactly is MAD doctrine a lie?
Not every PMC is Academi/Blackwater/whateverthefuckitisthisweek. Some can be had for enough per diem to buy cheap vodka a cheap hooker and two day old cabbage rolls.
There have never been enough nukes, nor has the doctrine of use allowed for, the destruction of two nations. Even their infrastructure or government, let alone the entire world.
No shit. Everyone knows that. But it would destroy vast quantities of national infrastructure and cause unprecedented casualties in large population centres.
Unsurprisingly, that's not popular.
but THIS time we were sure we'd eradicated war. The economists assured us that was the way of it now. Mathematical certainty. Just like last time. And the time before that. And the time before that.
You forgot the artillery duels.
Firstly, that's not MAD you just described. Secondly, no not 'everyone' knows that, most people think ANY level of even limited nuclear exchange == fallout, and that includes politicians. People are fucking retarded dude.
>slapfighting
MAD does not require total destruction of the nations involved. When 75% of your ability to wage war, 2/3 of your national government and ~50% of your total population are lost in the first three hours of fighting, whatever's left isn't really in a position to do anything but frantically try to survive the collapse of civilization as they know it.
>Firstly, that's not MAD you just described
Uh, how?
>Yeah I've destroyed his major cities and military installations causing millions of deaths
>And you've retaliated and done the same to me
>But since there are some farmers still alive in bumfuck nowhere it's not MAD
THESE THINGS ARE NOT REALISTIC OUTCOMES YOU IGNORANT FUCKING FAGGOTS
Jam 'em
You average nuclear warhead in the arsenal of Warpact and NATO can level a city, Warpact had 2500 such devices and NATO had 2500 as well.
Considering that with the exception of some Warpact Nation all of the countries involved had more than 50% of their population in urban centers. That means that they are vulnerable to nuclear strikes.
Factor in mega urban areas like the Great Lakes, Ruhr Valley and Cali Coast and the Cluster Nuclear warheads specifically designed to destroy them. And it's quite clear how in the first hours of the war you could wipe out something along the lines of 800 million people.
And a THIRD of all US weapons were actually duds, eho knows how many of the Russian warheads wouldn't have fired, targeting civilian centers wasn't doctrine, and multiple warheads were assigned to individual buildings, let alone military bases.
No MAD is not realistic, no we wouldn't have wiped eachother out, no you don't know what you're talking about.
>not drafting an army of fudds with 12 gauges for drone season, no bag limit
>targeting civilian centers wasn't doctrine
It was during WW2, especially when so many production centers and harbors are in or around urban areas it's inevitable they get hit.
>and multiple warheads were assigned to individual buildings
You are forgetting that you are at the very least dealing with warheads 5 times as powerful as the Hiroshima bombs.
Just targeting the army concentrations in Germany would turn the country into a wasteland.
If you airburst a 10MT "clean nuke" Over San Francisco California (you know, right next door to the GIANT naval base) it's going to kill about a million people. Now do that for every coastal naval and airforce base and every airbase within 300 miles of the coast (almost all of which have HUGE cities co-located with them) and the death toll skyrockets. Additionally, you're going to want to completely fuck your opponents economy, so you might as well nuke NYC so you can take out the WTC and Wall Street at the same time. Thats 8.5 million people right there. Ditto for LA, Miami, Galveston, NOLA and Seattle.
Something like 50% of the US population lives within 300 miles of a coast and near a large city with a military base nearby.
I'd be intrigued to read that if you can remember.
ICBMs aren't the only MT-range nukes in the arsenal buddy. Those B-2s weren't developed to fly JDAMs and MOABS to the sandbox.
Also, Boomers fire THEATER ballistic misses, not ICBMS.
60% of 2500 nukes is still more than enough to FUCK any Nation on earth.
You guys are vastly overestimating the power of nuclear weapons
The B-83, standard nuke bomb for the USAF, has a maximum yield 80 times what was dropped on Hiroshima. Even one of those bombs hitting a military base near a populated area would produced an unprecedented catastrophe for whoever is living nearby. Nobody who survives is even going to care about the war, they'll be too busy just trying to survive.
A really shitty (i.e. inefficient and "dirty" 10 KT nuke will vaporize an area about a Mike across.
A 10 MT "efficient" Nuke produces about 1000 times the energy, even if it doesn't produce the same everlasting contaminant field that a dirty nuke does. And all this assumes that you're airbursting them to minimize fallout instead of ground bursting them to maximize the suck for your opponent.
>hur dur it isn't MAD if people survive
Humans can literally wipe 99% of life off this planet if they wanted to. The USSR planned to build a massive ship filled to the brim with fissionable material and if they ever detected radiation spikes in USSR they'd detonate the ship. The ship them vapourises a huge part of the ocean and forms a radioactive cloud that then spreads around the Earth and kills off 99% of the food and thus the people. USA did a similar design, a nuclear powered rocket that would fly around enemy cities dropping radioactive substances into the air so it'd contaminate the entire country and when the fuel was spent, would land on the nearest important target and detonate as a normal nuclear warhead.
If you want to kill a nation you kill the food and water and prevent any other nation from helping out. For USA that's easy as they produce a huge amount of the worlds food and their farms are located in concentrated areas. Bioplague that wipes out all the food and done. Contaminate the water supply. Done. Russia has 80% of its population in the West the rest is in Vladivostok and dotted elsewhere. Easy to deal with that too. Also rumours of their Dead Hand System is worrying.
In short, if humanity wanted to blow itself the fuck up it could do it. Destroying shit is much easier than building shit.
Would it be possible to scale down a nuclear bomb to have it fit inside a backpack, and also have it be light enough that a single person would be able to carry the backpack to a target, leave it, and get away without visibly struggling from the weight?
Yes. There are backpack nukes.
ah yes the radiation magic. gotta watch out for the radiation magic and the CCCP's evil radiation wizards
>needing to carry the nuke to the target
What? You just need to get the target within the blast range. You could also just stick it in a car too.
Found it, but you'll need to find a way to get around the paywall.
telegraph.co.uk
Are you gonna tell us that radiation is a conspiracy?
I've seen pictures of small nukes, but they were designed to be carried by a team of 2 people, and they looked too big to fit inside a backpack.
No but you are a fucking autistic retard who needs to spend more time reading better authors who aren't retards aswell.
Not really. The shielding material make it too heavy.
Yes, there are "backpack" Nukes. They weigh about 150 lbs and look like a pony keg with computer humping it.
This is much more plausible given the size and weight of the nuke. These tend to be very low yield devices though (10 - 100 KT).
What the fuck you on about?
Thanks.
This is an issue already addressed during training at bde events like ntc. Typically the meeting (usually a combined arms rehearsal) is at the bde toc. It's during a time when the enemy is too busy during reconsolidation/retrograde, and after the toc has jumped to a new location to minimize the chances of all the commanders getting killed by deep fires. Is it 100% effective? Nothing in war is, but it's a great ttp to reduce detection and mitigate risk.
Also important, the timing is, preferred, after neutralization of enemy uas assets. The bde toc is usually only observable from higher echelon uas, a man portable or small drone does not have the range to find the bde TOC.
Do you not understand how fisionable material, bombs and radiation work or are you just fucking with us?
counter value retards DIE. you don't know shit about nukes
Gave it a read, basically UK forced to go low tech because USA is just hilariously superior and seeing as he refused to answer 'who won' then I suspect either USA did or he was told not to say. But I'd side with USA winning that particular conflict. Again, UK is falling behind with lack of training for urban environments. Not enough space or money.
Tbh, us marine high echelon was very clever. They recognized their inability to remain an amphibious exclusive organization and now spend the vast majority of their training on urban and mountainous terrain. That isn't to say they can't fight in the woods, but their real value for the us military is going to be urban and mountain.
Currently the army has few mountain warfare oriented units, but they're limited to GWOT fighting, not peer, and all army echelons are just now struggling to convert from urban GWOT tactics to urban peer tactics. Marines have a solid head start. If it were army v Brits it wouldn't be as single sided.
And I'm in the army, so it's not like I'm biased towards the marines.
UK's system is hilariously fucked. Royal Marine Commando's used to be top then got supplanted by SBS and SAS and SRS and E Squadron (tho, granted, latter is essentially just MI6 with army tier firepower) and this has lead to Royal Marines being a really dodgy situation. They're better than regular army units but nowhere near where they should be. Doesn't help that, again, UK doesn't have the money, manpower or the care to be relevant. I'd fix so much shit if I could in either nation. I'd start setting up elite Electronic Warfare divisions and Cyberwarfare Divisions and work on elite urban taskforces since that is always going to be the issue for modern armies. Yeah you have Special Ops and shit but not good enough really.
>Winning
It was a fucking exercise, and the royal marines were outnumbered. Nobody expected them to "win". I posted about it because I thought the methods they chose to use were interesting given the context - and are relevant as it's probably close to what opponents like Russia would do.
It's at the point on this board where you literally can't even mention the Brits without immediate shitposting. Almost like someone has an interest in trying to undermine the Brits. Really makes you think.
They're all different types of soldiers, I don't see how the SAS somehow make a difference to the marines when they're completely different in what they're trying to do.
>he doesn't even know about the linear model
tfw an interlocutor is too ignorant to understand how badly they're outclassed.
Take your schizo posting back to /x/.
It's a scientific interpretation of cellular radiation damage that is highly probable, but can't be confirmed without testing impractical today. It asserts residual radiation isn't as bad as claimed.
You should have stayed on /x/, user
>not really
en.wikipedia.org
At less than 60 kg you'd be able to carry one of these around.
Wouldn't be a comfortable trip, but you're carrying a few tons' equivalent of TNT.
M.A.D. Stopped being the go to strategy ever since ICBM's became a thing. The concept of MAD works as a natural limitation to nuclear warfare, as in. "If you're gonna nuke someone, you might as well nuke yourself." But that is not our strategy to nuclear warfare, it merely guides it. In a real nuclear exchange, Nations will actively avoid things such as cities and non strategic sites like the fucking plague. Your only goal is to take out the enemies C2, nuclear launch sites, and early warning systems while also withholding nukes of your own for leverage in the peace talks to come. If you nuke an enemies city, he is just gonna nuke yours, which falls back to the concept of committing nation-wide seppuku. Hence why you or your enemies are simply not gonna touch non strategic sites.
The sad reality of strategic nuclear warfare is that it is not only survivable as a nation, it is also winnable, and that is something that we have known for quite a while.
Looking at the rates of Thyroid cancer in Belarus, we can see even minimal exposure from one accident can lead to a lot of bad you dumbass.
Then again I am talking with someone that fails to realize how a big bomb that can blow up a city might be bad when there are thousands of such bombs.
>The ship them vapourises a huge part of the ocean
wut
Countries using a Rothschild central bank will never nuke one another. Nuking prospective customers (e.g. Iran) is also off the table.
I mean, when the largest and most prosperous empire the world has ever seen collapses into irrelevance and a hilariously Orwellian situation on the Homefront in the span of a few decades it’s a bit hard to not want to laugh and kick them while they’re down.
>miles and miles of cable.
Does any military deploy comms cables by way of rocket? Like a tow missile with an airbag and a USB socket for a warhead.
Who has 10 mt nukes in operation?
>big bomb that can blow up a city might be bad when there are thousands of such bombs
not that guy but this is a fundamental misunderstanding of reality it isn't 1950 anymore, additionally the only states that plan a counter value strategy have a limited number of weapons not only available but that they would be willing top use like France and China. not to mention their yields aren't anywhere near as high as you seem to believe.
Additionally radiation in low doses takes forever to kill you because cancer is slow as fuck relative. The real casualty effects on civilians would be due to infrastructure failures and lack of trade/flow of necessary goods, but to be fair large scale conventional war could have similar effects on many nations.
I'm also going to guess you don't know why a country would use a larger warhead? I'll give you a hint it's not because big bomb kill big many.
Urban populations are consumers, killing them off is actually doing your enemy a favor
How do you get passed the paywall.
>Russia relevant, RELEVANT
Yeah, another Russian shill piece.
Nobody would notice if all Russians disappeared.
I know Richard Marcinko is a bit of a meme but didn't he end up implementing similar 'low-tech' tactics to deal with 'high-tech' security?
MAD was always a concept whose foundation was built on quicksand.
*see Germany in 1939, Uganda in 1979, Iraq in 1990, and every other country that has ever started a war it had absolutely no hope of winning
An amusing trend in intelligence these days is to go back to keeping paper records locked away, because you have to assume other countries are sniffing your wires and paper can't be hacked.
It follows that typewriters might actually be in occasional use for tip top secret documents that cannot be risked by ever putting them on the network.
I like the thought of some secretary buried in the Fort Meade's basement sighing and breaking out the typewriter.
Wait, doesn't that mean the most absolutely top fucking secret shit on the planet is probably stored in plaintext on ordinary paper inside a filing cabinet in some random building? I'm talking about the shit that nobody would dare keep inside a secure CIA facility, like MKULTRA.
Democrats and Neocons want a nuclear war. Destruction of white countries, post nuclear war, would solidify Israel as a world power.
Microfilm would be a lot more rational, user.
this place is filled with tards that unironically think war crimes help win wars and the four rules of gun safety is stupid theres no hope arguing
>Democrats and Neocons solve the overpopulation problem and get Israel accidentally nuked in the process
Israel won't get nuked in a Russia vs US nuke war.
Nuclear weapons don't exist :P
Lmao.
I unironically wish everyone would just let the nukes fly already.
Blanket the earth in hellfire. Fuck it.
The USMC had superior numbers, tanks, drones, arty etc while the Royal Marines were light infantry. It was an exercise.
Yeah. Talked to a few naval intelligence guys who do lots of stuff on paper, passing info ship to ship via morse lamp and so on
Nothing about that has anything to do with MAD. MAD is turning saturation bombing into a god damn guarantee. This is sort of a panic about using nukes as a tactical option vs strategic. MAD turns the thing into strategic since it can be effective enough. Tactically it's probably a mistake we didn't elect barry goldwater and we're just starting to get the fall out of tactical nuclear use from that now. OFC between two super powers MAD will never happen, either side can afford to flee before any of that happens from any area they actually control and start to pretend their living some witness protection lifestyle. The difference between conventional and mad is, conventional warfare likes to use the poor as meatshields, and MAD generally makes the bourgeoisie flee instead of listening to reports about how the poor died and gleefully encouraging it.
fake news on par with 'the atmosphere with ignite'
Could have something to do with Marines not being marines anymore. They're just a wannabe army.
This isn’t really anything new, WWII had radio interception and a whole mini war of encyption and decryption going on.
The thing is diring this globally war on terrorism, it’s been really just been a proper military vs. loose organizations with limited hardware.
There hasn’t been a proper developed national military vs. developed national military fight in recent memory. So I am not surprised some troops are surprised that they actually can’t just go balls out on their comms when they fight an actual military with about the same tech and resources as them.
It might not literally wipe humans off the earth but it will sure as fuck cripple the shit of a nation if they survive it. Even if that’s the case, no country is going to wage MAD actions right from the start. Maybe if the invading country has pushed you up against a wall and the survival of the nation is at a point where you got nothing to lose in launching nukes and getting counternuked. Even if MAD doctrine is way more hyped up than it is, the effect is still very real because no one wants nukes going off on their city centers and infrastructure and the longer they can delay that, the better.
While I agree that most people, especially in libshit cities, are consumers and all and all useless, you’re underestimating what happens when a nation reverts to all hands on deck war production mode. Of course the context to the war matters as well in either whipping the population up or pissing them off and bringing on social revolt.
>Thoughts?
Nuclear war will always be too costly to take part in, even if it isn't even a full scale exchange.
Not even Jane's knows for sure.
Bring on the annihilation. Fuck it.