Comment by captainmuon
4 years ago
The flaw in that logic is that, if it weren't for the people who develop lethal weapons for the bullies, we wouldn't have to fear the bullies.
Also, I think the design space of "radical defense" is under explored. Our (western) armies are still designed for attack and force projection, although we have long since renamed our war ministers secretaries of defense.
But I wonder if you could develop defense capability to make your country unattackable. Not by threat of retaliation, but for example by much much stronger missile defense. Or by educating ("indoctrinating") your own population, so that an occupier would not find a single collaborator? Or by mining your own infrastructure, and giving every citizen basic combat training (a bit like the swiss)? Or by fostering a world-wide political transformation that is designed to prevent wars from happening at all?
I think if we wanted to spend money researching stuff to keep us safe, it doesn't necessarily have to be offensive weapons.
The flaw in this logic is somewhat related to law enforcement, in that if your military is min/maxed for defense, someone who wants to do you harm only has to be right once in order to actually do you harm. Looking at nuclear weapons and missile defense (ignoring the existence of dirty bombs etc.), your opponent needs to only be right once for one of your cities and hundreds of thousands of civilians to be gone. And likewise, if you've focused on defense you're likely wholly unprepared for any sort of retaliation.
The Swiss approach what with literally bunkering in the mountains and everything is interesting, but the logistics for larger countries would be exponentially harder (and most lack the geographic help). "Fostering world-wide political transformation" is so pie in the sky it's honestly not worth serious discussion. It's fanciful.
Someone will always be willing to make weapons for the bullies because a lot of people don't view them as bullies in the first place. Ask people in Iraq, or Chechnya, or Ireland, or Pakistan, or Taiwan, who the bullies are, and you'll get wildly different answers that will cover approximately 90% of the worldwide population.
> The flaw in that logic is that, if it weren't for the people who develop lethal weapons for the bullies, we wouldn't have to fear the bullies.
You can't uninvent weapons, and you can't prevent the bullies from making their own weapons.
The problem with an impenetrable defensive shield is that it gives your potential enemies the heebie-jeebies (technical geopolitical term) that, now that you have the shield, you can attack them without fear of reprisal. If the enemy thinks you're working on a credible shield (or even a shield you think is credible) their best option is to attack now before you, emboldened by your sense of invulnerability, attack them.
This is an ongoing concern of US weapons policy. By refusing to back down from improving our missile defense capabilities, we undermine MAD and our adversaries’ willingness to engage in disarmament (thereby making it more likely these weapons will be used).
> The flaw in that logic is that, if it weren't for the people who develop lethal weapons for the bullies, we wouldn't have to fear the bullies.
False. Bullies are a problem even if no one has weapons beyond what can be grabbed and used from the environment without any invention. Heck, bullies are a problem if everyone just has the weapons built in to their bodies.
> But I wonder if you could develop defense capability to make your country unattackable.
Not without incidentally developing a huge edge in offensive weapons that would make you attackable when it inevitably diffused to others. Uniquely defensive technology mostly doesn't exist.
> Not by threat of retaliation, but for example by much much stronger missile defense.
Much better interceptor missiles mean the technology for much better missiles generally. Directed energy interception means direct energy weapons. Hypervelocity kinetic interceptors are general purpose hypervelocity kinetic weapons.
> Or by educating ("indoctrinating") your own population, so that an occupier would not find a single collaborator?
That kind of indoctrination can also be used offensively, but the enemy doesn't need collaborators to attack you. (They might need it to conquer without genocide, but attackers willing to commit genocide for land are not unheard of, nor are attackers whose goal isn't conquest.)
> Or by mining your own infrastructure, and giving every citizen basic combat training (a bit like the swiss)?
Mining your infrastructure is itself creating a vulnerability to certain kinds of attacks.
> Or by fostering a world-wide political transformation that is designed to prevent wars from happening at all?
It's been tried, repeatedly. The League of Nations, the Kellogg-Briand Pact, the UN. It’ll be nice if someone ever finds the “one wired trick to prevent war forever”, but it seems distinctly improbable and particularly suicidal to bank your defense on the ability to find it.