Nowhere is safe

Drones, Production, and Targeting Industry

• Debate over whether drones are fundamentally constrained by industrial bottlenecks:
  • One side: mass use of cheap drones depends on concentrated, sophisticated manufacturing (especially chips, motors, batteries). In a total war, adversaries would target factories, power plants, and industrial districts.
  • Other side: many effective drones can be built from commodity electronics (e.g., phone-grade sensors, consumer parts) and assembled in distributed workshops and homes. Bombing a few “drone factories” would not stop production.
• Some see drones and cheap precision weapons as a new “strategic parity” tool enabling weaker actors (Ukraine, Iran, cartels) to hurt stronger ones at low cost.

Defenses: Tunnels, Bunkers, and Counter-Drone Systems

• The article’s call for large-scale tunneling and undergrounding of infrastructure is widely questioned:
  • Cut-and-cover and deep tunnels are seen as massively expensive, slow, conspicuous, and vulnerable along their length.
  • Earth cover greatly improves protection, but repairing long underground logistics routes under fire is harder than fixing surface roads.
• Alternatives discussed:
  • Point-defense guns and radar-assisted turrets, interceptor drones, and possibly lasers as more scalable counters to cheap, low, slow drones.
  • Simple concealment (covers, vegetation) vs heavy earthworks.
  • Some suggest mobility (assets on underground rails with many exits) but note astronomical costs.

War, Diplomacy, and U.S. Power

• Strong current against “digging in” as primary strategy; many argue the first line of defense against state-scale drone campaigns should be diplomacy and restraint, not hardening everything.
• Long argument over whether U.S. bombing, sanctions, and regime change efforts are primary drivers of blowback (e.g., 9/11, Middle East conflicts), versus attacks being rooted in ideology or local power ambitions.
• Dispute over “petrodollar” and whether U.S. financial hegemony rests mainly on oil pricing vs broader capital-market attractiveness.

Global Order, Law, and Deterrence

• Multiple commenters see international law and institutions as largely powerless: great powers invade, bomb, or close straits with minimal consequences.
• View that the U.S. itself is undermining an order that historically benefited it.
• Nuclear MAD is cited as the main reason great-power war has been avoided; some argue cheap drones are a new equalizer, others see them as still far from existential without escalation to nukes.