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Because I love cabbage... the blog post shows "Gai lan" as an Asian example. There are so much more!

You are probably aware of napa cabbage, but there's also Taiwan Cabbage (goes by other names of course...) https://www.westcoastseeds.com/products/taiwan-cabbage

It looks a lot like a flatter "green/european" cabbage. It's leaves and stems are finer and softer than a European cabbage, while still being pretty crunchy (as opposed to napa). Compared to European cabbage, you could actually just stir fry these.

Gai lan is just one variety of "Chinese broccoli" - there are multiple varieties with different stem thicknesses, and "branching ratios". This will let you pick to suit your preferred level of crunch and leaf area to coat with sauce =)

And finally, all of the bok choys are also part of this family.

If you look, you can straight up find the half way points between subfamilies https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/080bca1a659bf2f8b12bca1494c67...


Speaking of Asian vegetables, Brassica oleracea tends to get all the love because Europeans are more familiar with cauliflower, kale, Brussels sprouts, collard greens, etc but Brassica rapa is perhaps even more diverse.

You might be familiar with turnips, bok choy, napa cabbage, and mizuna, but within Asia, there are a dizzying array of vegetables barely documented that are all derivatives of this weedy mustard.

Vegetables like Jima Turnip of the Tibetan plateau, Taicai, Wutacai, etc are hardly documented in English at all


celery has a similar differentiation with stalk celery(the standard one in american supermarkets), celeriac, and leaf celery

Yeah, this current project uses external sensors (a camera array/grid) for guidance.

He's using potassium nitrate/sugar as his rocket fuel.


I agree that European militaries need to be able to generate a lot of mass.

But we would be remiss to pick up on some threads from both Ukraine and Iran.

In Ukraine, the VKS is still able to generate substantial damage (both in tactical support of ground forces, as well as part of the civilian bombing campaign) with glide bombs (carrying 500kg+ class bombs, launched by tactical jets from over Russian controlled airspace).

These tactics are effective, and are able to do things that Shaheds aren't quite capable of doing - for example ensuring destruction of certain targets with a single hit. I imagine Ukraine would love to be able to be able to take glide bombs off the table, but it can't.

It can't because it lacks the air force to conduct an offensive counter-air campaign, and it lacks the long range strike capability to permanently disable relevant airfields, or destroy enough airframes on the ground.

European militaries would like to be able to avoid this situation, and therefore certain relatively exquisite capabilities are needed.

In Iran, while Iran has demonstrated its ability to severely tax the much more exquisite forces of the US+Israel and the Gulf States, the reality is that they have NOT been able to meaningfully degrade the US or Israel's ability to bomb Iranian ground targets at will.

European militaries would also like to be able to prevent the VKS from just... bombing central to eastern Europe at will.

European war aims - which would be to able to defeat Russian forces so soundly and quickly that Russia will forever be deterred, requires exquisite capabilities, that are able to strike the Russian war machine from the front line, all the way back several hundred kilometers in high precision, and high density (in time and in weight of payload), in a way that can actually cause collapse (when combined with ground counter attacks). It cannot rely on a Ukrainian style war or Ukrainian style tactics purely because... well, Russia is infact actually fighting that war right now, and hasn't given up yet.

A Europe that has to fight at all, is a Europe that has already lost. A Europe that has to fight for more than a few weeks or months, is a Europe that has deeply lost.


Using a beaten down Russia in the current year is probably a bad way to plan for your future military. It should be considered against a real target like China where all of those fancy jets won't get close to China proper (w/ long range AA missiles and SAMs) so everything will be at standoff range including SEAD campaigns. Which is where mass drones and cheap cruise missiles/decoys will be much more effective.

Using high end jets as delivery platforms for high end missiles is not scalable in a conflict anymore. Likewise most estimates say even the US will run out of Tomahawks within the first 1-2 months of a conflict with China. They are gambling those missiles open up a big enough window to do anything else while their own Navy is under siege in the process.


I think the USA has ~3ish airframes/systems that are roughly in this category:

* The Kratos Valkyrie with the USMC in a SEAD role

* Anduril (YFQ-44) and General Atomics (YFQ-42) are battling it out for the USAF's CCA Increment 1 contract (we're apparently supposed to get a decision on that this year) - with Increment 2 probably getting spun up pretty soon

* USN has the Boeing MQ-25 as an drone tanker... once that gets up the speed, I'm fairly certain it's going to morph into something strike capable

Elsewhere, Boeing Australia's Ghost Bat seems to be doing well as well.


Does general atomics have plans on spinning off and going public?

It's completely different. Shaheds are low cost one way attack drones. They're basically just very cost efficient cruise missiles with fresh marketing (and to be fair, the cost efficiency is a true categorical difference).

These drones are "helpers" for fighter jets. It's a type of role that is still in development (no one has an operational collaborative combat aircraft as far as I understand), both technically and in concept.

But the basic idea is that you'll have drones that can somewhat keep up with your fighter jets and help it do stuff that might be too risky. Maybe fly ahead, or be the one with the active emissions or sensors or whatever. Or maybe it's just a way to increase the amount of ordnance/sensors you can fly per sortie / generate from a given amount of training/flight hours in a year.


Somehow closest concept I imagine is shmup pods.

https://shmup.fandom.com/wiki/Pod


There are multiple interesting developments wrapped together here.

First, these are intended to be "loyal wingman". They'll be commanded (but not really remotely controlled) from manned fighters nearbyish. Presumably, the "shoot authorization" will be delegated down to the pilots.

Secondly, the actual unmanned platform (the Kratos Valkyrie) is also part of a program of record for the USMC (US Marine Corps) to act as a partner SEAD (suppression of air defence) vehicle.

Thirdly, the "MARS" system chattered about looks to be Airbus' open architecture /system of systems pitch that they were developing for FCAS (the European 6th generation fighter program). MARS and all pitches like it are about ways to make individual platforms as software defined as possible, and to get different platforms/instances to really data/function share as much as possible.

If this program goes well, it shows that Airbus' MARS has the flexibility and capability required to just... layer into/ontop of some random other vendor's hardware/software and then "just work". I think it would be major demonstration/validation of the work.


Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch.

Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to make Blockbuster Online after Netflix.

Technology shifts rarely wait for these stodgy middle ground transitionary products to find a market.


Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.

The real question is basically - is full autonomy both technically possible and culturally/politically acceptable within 5, 10, or 20 years? Because full autonomy isn't really ready now (or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war). And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).

Because no one knows that answer, everyone (governments, militaries, manufacturers) is hedging, and CCA is part of that hedge.


I think we are underestimating and/or forgetting that the enemy gets a vote, and remote piloting something from Virginia all the way out to Japan or Korea or Taiwan involves many signals integrity steps along the way. This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization.

>or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war

I don't think this is the reason the systems are not fully autonomous right now ("fully autonomous" here meaning that they can complete the kill chain independently, no HITL). Even if we assume it true that the drones are not "good enough" to be at parity with a human operator, if you had an essentially limitless amount of them, would you really waste the manpower on operating them in FPV mode? You would not, you would completely saturate the battlefield with them. Thus, as it was in the beforetimes and ever shall be, logistics wins wars.


The reason that FPV drones are so easily disrupted is that they are too light to carry anything more than a radio and fly low.

Disrupting the signal for a normal-sized aircraft is much harder. If you're flying at 10s of thousands of feet and have a line of sight to multiple satellites it's going to take some serious weaponry to disrupt that.


True. But the next rung up the escalation ladder is of course disrupting the satellites.

I envision them all gone seconds into any large scale war.

The G forces are another thing. I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead.

Sure, winged flight has uses, but taking a missle platform, adding small munitions instead of a big bang?


I'm not sure about this. Space is big and these satellite constellations are getting very large, with lots of redundancy. I know I'm sort of arguing against my previous point, but bear with me for a sec. You'd need an anti-satellite system that either destroys them kinetically (accepting the cost of the debris field) or one that breaks them electronically (an EMP or another device that defeats them electronically). The United States' underlying philosophy on advanced weapons has, for a long time, been precision so I could see the emergence of in-orbit interception & defeat/disable platforms. But you'd need a lot of them for the doctrine to be effective, which means a lot of mass-to-orbit logistics. Adversaries do not have this, so I would expect e.g. PRC to have an alternate strategy of rendering entire orbits unusable or dangerous, which I think is easier.

Regarding your missile platform question, there are several companies that already manufacturing loitering munitions, and long-range loitering cruise missiles are on the roadmap, so to speak.


Interesting point re: satellites, I'd say the best tactic here is to presume all gone immediately. Eg, from a planning perspective. The reality may be that the war may need to stretch out a bit, before action is taken.

Of course any planned action would likely try to strike first, by some means.


> I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead

Price and ease of manufacture. Missiles are expensive and hard to build.


Latest FPV drones in Ukraine became much more resistant to electronic countermeasures. Plus other drones are used as retranslators.

Seems they are using kilometers of fibre optic cables, so they fly tethered and communication can't be disrupted.

I'd hate to be part of the clean-up crew when that war ends. Broken fibre is nasty stuff.


I believe they’ve also deployed hybrid solutions: FPV fibre drones launched and piloted via link to an unmanned platform.

So a drone boat with good/secure signalling pulls up and a bunch of fibre optic drones launch from that point penetrating inland.


I'll gladly take up the fibre clean up. You deal with the mines :)

FPV drones cannot have powerful GPU yet to enable truly autonomous flight. And the issue is not only weight/energy restrictions, but also cost.

Autonomous flight is significantly easier than autonomous driving. You just fly between points in space, and there's nothing but air inbetween. The ground control handles most of collision avoidance, and if that's not available, it's easily achieved by moving 300ft/100m up or down.

True, but take into account that plants need to be able to fly/fight with instruments only and without vision.

Also dogfights are much rarer now, most people just fling rockets at each other (so you know how much these cost, a b200 seems cheap in comparison)


You don't need a super powerful GPU to do computer vision. There are cheap small devices that can do it.

> This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization.

Only if every mission is absolutely critical. If disruptions are rare then you don't need autonomy.


Or more interestingly with the low-earth sat/data network. Seeing as projectssuch as starlink are basically mil in nature with a side of barely profitable civilian use. The whole data centers in space makes more sense. These are not for running cat blogs and video streaming , which is waht they are/will be marketed as. Realworld application will always be a command and control node spanning the globe for the mil use. And as its rolloed out globally can basically provide jammingfree links for the autonomous commands from space.

How do you defend them?

>Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.

The said that about the 5th though. Like I've personally talked to people who were actively working on the F35 and they were saying "last manned aircraft" in like 2011ish.

I expect autonomy to be a long steady improvement of taking on additional subroutines of increasing complexity of decisions being made along the way. Fly here, land there, kill that, go over there without being detected, etc, etc, until humans are making only a select set of decisions that will probably be randomly sprinkled at the high and low levels.

Kind of like how when we build a brick wall the "vision" and the actual laying of bricks still get done by human but all the intermediary steps are drudgery that can be trivially automated (not to say they are all automated, just that they could be if labor $$ vs software $$ penciled out that way)


Yeah, I remember thinking that about the 5th gen myself. But I think part of that way unclarity around when the 6th gen would appear. 2011ish would be a weird timeframe.

Obama didn't announce the "pivot to Asia" until 2012. A lot of the world was still believing in the whole unipolar moment thing. The F-35 hadn't even started training squadrons in service yet. 6th generation probably felt really far away. 2016 onwards has been a major acceleration in all sorts of ways.

In my eyes, 6th generation was really ignited by the focus on China. The PCA/NGAD/F-47 was first out the gate, and really set the tempo and got everyone else going.

I agree with your estimation of the likely development path. I expect that approach to merge/converge from the other direction - I expect there to also be a parallel path of fully autonomous systems growing to occupy ever greater mission sets. Imagine telling a drone "I need an ELINT mission in the area and timeframe" (and it plans its own launch time, flight route, calculates fuel loads, communicates with ground staff), or "I need you to airdrop this supply pallet".


I don't think there's a way that the 6th generation will be manned.

> And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).

I mean, they wouldn't think that, would they? It would put their pilots out of a job. But most flying has been done by autopilot long before AI, and even if/when you need a human in the loop, why would you want to put that human in the cockpit rather than safely in Virginia?


Manned-Unmanned teaming is not a new concept created in the last couple months to placate fighter pilots in the age of ai. With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar.

If you can outsource the radar on a jet it is not a huge leap in logic to put the very hot missiles onto a unmanned aircraft. All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US


> With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar.

What benefit does a human pilot offer in this case? Are going to be using their eyes to track their location or see a Chinese fighter jet launching a standoff antiair missile at them? Drones can do AWACS and deep sensor roles, with a pilot and sensor operators far away from the planes.

> All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US

Defense contractors and the gov planners are often the same group of people, the same small community, there's not that many vendors. They show up at defence trade shows and see what industry is offering them. They tend to stick with the same big safe companies that change slowly. Bold ideas are infrequent. The smaller countries can take those risks easier than America.


My read is that the "loyal wingman" thing is a ploy to get around all the pilots / expilots in Air Force brass who might otherwise gatekeep anything they think is a threat to the careers of human pilots. These people want the Air Force to be about hotshots flying planes; this is part of the reason the US spun off the space stuff, because Air Force brass is institutionally incapable of taking anything other than manned flight seriously.

Really loyal wingmen are just an extension of jets.

Ultimately a carrier strike group could achieve many of the missions a F35 can through cruise missiles, ballistic missiles etc.

What an F35 provides is a sensory platform deep into enemy airspace.

But with the F35 being very expensive, and required to stay silent in RF to maintain stealth it's further desirable to have a loyal wingman out there.

The whole thing becomes one large sensor network with th added weapons.

It makes most sense in a near adversary situation and as it stands that particular scenario is why the F22 is not exported.


mistakes in A/A combat can have serious repercussions. not only loss of expensive air vehicles, but things like civilian airliners.

'loyal wingman' gives the kill / no kill decision to an Air Force officer. And having the decision maker geographically close eliminates jamming, delays, and the requirements to have a satellite infrastructure (like is required for Predator UAV's).

i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.


> i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.

This is already a past station, just not at Airbus.


> just not at Airbus

Airbus has publicized that it is working on a Project Maven style project with France's DGA [0][1].

Thales also publicly launched and demonstrated SkyDefender a couple days ago [2].

Mistral AI also announced in January 2026 that it is working with the DGA to productionize it's models for military applications [3] - ironically similar in manner to how the DoD was using Claude but is now using Gemini and GPT.

No country is going to leave networked, autonomous offensive and defensive capabilities on the table.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-wi...

[1] - https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-news/defence/ai...

[2] - https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-news/air/thales...

[3] - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marjorietoucas_were-happy-to-...


Yes, we are ~4-5 years into AI kill-chains now, though maybe only 1-3 with full autonomy.

You haven't been paying attention. We are at least 47 years into AI kill chains.

https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/m...


That's not really what they meant. They meant that the weapon is guided by software that decides which targets to pick and autonomously makes that decision without a human in the loop. The device seeks you instead of you going to it.

A landmine has no friend-or-foe-or-noncombatant decision engine, it will kill you or maim you just like it will kill or maim the guy that laid it or any other passer by.


You missed the point. The Mk 60 Captor is not a "land" mine. It is guided by software and autonomously makes the decision to launch a homing torpedo without a human in the loop.

A homing torpedo/release mechanism is not AI by the normal definition of the word. You're welcome to redefine words as much as you want but it's a bit silly. We also don't use that term for heatseekers or for line followers.

The 'signature' bit is interesting, but I'd still not label that AI, and neither does anybody else. It is a loitering munition, I'll give you that, and I think that that brings it closer to the 'mine' definition of things than the 'AI killbot'.


It's odd how some people now think the term "AI" only applies to LLMs. I guess they're just ignorant of computing history.

https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/proposed-dod-princ...


No, it obviously does not only apply to LLMs. It just does not apply to loitering munitions from decades ago. And I'm pretty sure nobody ever labeled that thing AI before you did.

Those don't self launch.

I'm talking about systems that classify thousands of targets at once and can self-launch. Computerized kill chain.


Drones doesn't automatically mean no pilot or no human in the loop. Motherships and relays to command centers solve nearly everything loyal wingman offers. The only question is data access (which is still a major issue in manned jets operating in EW conditions far from home).

Same with the idea that drones can't have high end radars and other stuff which requires a fancy human jet in the loop. Decidated single purpose drones with high end sensors can solve a similar purpose with a much lower risk and cost.


One argument is that fighter airplanes are becoming more like airborne control centers than actual fighters. You don't get the same level of situational awareness from a remote controlled drone camera than from inside a cockpit. And if you look at the F-35, what is often put forward is its stealth and communication capabilities. Radars, electronic warfare, etc... that's what's important, and yes, having a human in the loop is important too. These planes can dogfight too, but ideally, they shouldn't, but they still have to be able to defend themselves when things go wrong.

Drones like they have in Ukraine are more like cheap missiles, they don't compete against fighter jets, and they can't do anything to them once they have taken off.


Those low-cost drones are just a fad. Fiber optic TV guided exploding thing is literally the oldest kind of anti-tank missiles. Russian winged cruise missiles are even older, early cold war kinds of stuff. It just so happens that none of Ukraine, Russia, Iran etc has air dominance nor proper war time production capacities, and so they must resort to substituting military equipment with remixes of AliExpress stuffs.

Just in the invasion in Iran we all saw Apache handling drones with ease. They can probably put on the minigun or even microgun on an MQ-9, which is a drone, but not like the ones discussed here. Or someone might realize a turret on a Super Tucano is cheaper than the Reaper ground control trailer. My point is, Ukraine and Russia throwing drones at each others is not a sure sign that that's the war of the future.


The war in Iran proves the opposite: It is actually the future. The US could easily establish air dominance over Iran, yet it can't stop their military from launching smaller drones both in the air and at sea. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and air power alone seems unlikely to fix the situation. If you want to effectively eliminate an opponent nowadays you need an army of drones - the economics don't work out if you are only fielding expensive ships, planes and missiles. And regarding your point that an Apache can easily shoot down a drone: Roughly 9/10 drones in the Russia Ukraine frontline get shot down and the remaining 10% make up for about 80% of the casualties (rest being mostly artillery and mines).

Exactly. "An Apache can shoot down a drone" is like "Tiger tanks were better than Shermans": the relative numbers of each matter.

Right - the relative cost matters very much.

A Shahed drone costs $20K each. The Patriot missile interceptor costs $4 Mil each.

And the inevitable result is that the interceptors run out first

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-war-israel-tells-us-...

https://www.economist.com/international/2026/03/13/gulf-stat...

https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5gr...

The only lasting solution to low-cost drone attacks is low-cost defences. Ukraine knows this. The US apparently does not yet. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain...

But the end result is not "low-cost drones are just a fad." it's drones vs. more drones vs. yet more drones.


You expect drones to replace civil passenger aircraft any time soon?

I think GP's point is more relevant than your question implies. The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now. (I'm not close enough to the aviation industry to make a confident guess, but +90% wouldn't surprise me.) Humans are there to take (decision or control) over when something goes off the happy path - in fact, pilots are encouraged / required to hand-fly landings that could be done automatically in order to keep their skills current. Obviously no one would accept even a 0.01% crash rate for civilian flights, so we're many orders of magnitude of improvement away from replacing pilots in that sector.

Military calculations are very different. Every military asset - most definitely including humans - is disposable, and all wars are (in some dimension) wars of attrition. Holding mission success constant, when the cost x capability x ability to manufacture for autonomous platforms becomes cheaper than all that plus training / replacement cost of human pilots, then human pilots will disappear. The logic of war being what it is, I expect HITL decision-making to very quickly be dropped as soon as it is seen to be retarding the progress of a cheaper option.


CSIS is republishing work from PLA affiliated writers from PLA affiliated think tanks, published an a PLA affiliated journal because it does in fact capture aspects of internal PLA thinking. This article is from 2023, it's not written in the context of the current administrations policies and rhteroic. While we can always be certain that there are aspects of external facing PR/propaganda, we also should consider "how does China view the militarization of Starlink and Space".

And to that end, we can clearly see that the PLA sees Space Dominance as being strategically destabilizing. They see threats to their ability to disperse and hide their nuclear launch systems.

In fact, from a 2026 lens, the best way to read this paper would be "the PLA has mapped out its vulnerabilities, and all of its risk control and escalation options (basically its suggestions in the conclusions) are basically off the table. Therefore, it's very obvious that the PLA will attempt to compensate through simultaneously achieving its own space based capability similar to Starlink, develop additional ways to hold US strategic assets (read nuclear strike platforms) at risk, and find asymmetric means of deterrence".

EDIT: Just made a connection in my head - there's been a lot of news about Chinese nuclear arsenal increases in recent years, with a uptick starting around 2023, and the DoD estimating a rough tripling from 2025-2035. I suspect these developments might be connected.

EDIT2: I think to summarize what I think would be important take away from reading this paper is that while the most immediate examples of militarized Starlink use are all very tactical level (thinking about drones in Ukraine), this piece clearly signals that the PLA also believes that Starlink militarization poses treats at the strategic (read nuclear) level. And therefore, if we think purely in terms of tactical/operational capabilities, we may be caught off guard by certain reactions by the PLA/China.


I don't think that Starlink affects nuclear deterrence / the MAD doctrine in any meaningful way. But it does seriously affect "conventional" warfare. And China is rather visibly preparing for a conventional war.

I believe it's exactly that thinking that CSIS was trying to check when they chose to translate and publish this specific article. They are trying to get analysts and policy makers to think through, and make an active decision on if they believe that China will treat military/militarized mega constellations as destabilizing in a nuclear/strategic sense.

It's fair to decide that that is not major factor, but it should be an informed decision. It requires looking at the nuclear risk issues that the piece raises, and finding reasons to dismiss them.


Even the best space comms system does not make your ICBMs invisible to your adversary, and does not allow you to shoot down your adversary's return salvo of ICBMs. Hence the mutually assured destruction is not going away, and the side starting an all-out nuclear war still cannot win. I don't see how anything what's available now changes this; do you?

What might be destabilizing would be long-range hypersonic missiles that fly relatively low (30 km above the surface, not 1000 km), so they can't be easily detected until it's pretty late, and can arrive from multiple directions. This is exactly the kind of weapon that is China apparently developing, BTW.


The article argues that space and AI dominance meaningfully threatens China's second strike (mobile land based ICBMs) survivability, which would bias China to act more proactively (ie, more hair trigger) in escalation scenarios.

Chinese and Russian developments (HGVs, FOBs, the Russian "superweapons" like Poseidon) are all destabilizing to an extent. But as long as none them challenge/hold at risk the US second strike capability (a robust C2 network and the SSBN fleet), they won't be massively destabilizing.

For what it's worth, HGVs that could strike the US from China still need to be launched off what are effectively ICBM class rockets. The launch signatures would almost certainly be detected.

And finally, let's not even get started with what Golden Dome would do to strategic stability.

There's simply no need to go pointing fingers right now. The reality is that all sides are taking various self-interested actions that in the absence of communication or coordination will lead towards less stable environments. No side has the ability to compel the others to not take these actions, and so the best we can do is try to anticipate the new operating environments and be ready for them as best we can.


I think the issue is that one side having an overwhelming non-nuclear, conventional advantage might push the other to a nuclear response in the event of a catastrophic loss in a conventional conflict. Imagine Chine tries to invade Taiwan and they are defeated so badly that the CCP might fall -- then perhaps a nuclear response becomes more likely.

However, I think this is not the case. In the end no one wants to reduce the world to ashes over losing power. But... well, I suppose there are people crazy enough to want that.


I'd broadly agree that EU is pretty behind the curve. But I think China is probably only ~5 years max behind the curve in terms of Starlink.

But in terms of defense needs, I don't think you actually need the thousands and thousands for reasonable returns. DoD/NRO has bought maybe ~500 Starshields (https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/03/26/spacex-starshield-...) from SpaceX.

I think China is well within reach of being able to put up those numbers within a few years, even if they don't get re-use figured out (which I think they will within a 2-3 years - basically what SpaceX did from the first landing attempts to success).


China did 92 launches in 2025. If they only need to put up 500, and if they can put up 22 per launch like SpaceX can, they have the capability now, let alone 5 years from now.

i don't get why more folks aren't just going for the much cheaper option like this https://www.solaris-suborbital.space/

That looks like a very cool option and effort. Like the Chinese balloons that overflew the US in the last (few?) years, it would likely be challenging to shoot down. Otoh, it might cause some diplomatic disagreements about overflight.

  There are a number of competing theories in international law, with varying 
  criteria, to delineate the upper limit delineating airspace versus outer 
  space. This debate is unsettled. [0]
There may also be some technical challenges having to do with beamforming rf to the vehicle. Starshield like Starlink has the predictability of orbital vehicles for tracking. It would be interesting to understand how a ground station focuses on the solar glider.

0. https://opil.ouplaw.com/display/10.1093/law:epil/97801992316...


Found those balloons very strange, hope they were up to something nice

Probably silently dispersing an exothermic surprise.

There might be less societal objection to "satellites in space orbiting the planet" than to "planes flying continuously over the same area," even if both can be used for similar purposes. I'd assume it'd also be easier to disrupt suborbital systems like that than satellites, but I could be wrong.

Because they will be destroyed immediately

To shoot something down at 70,000 ft (21 km) all you need is a conventional military jet fighter, and a long-range rocket, or even a MiG-31 with a conventional cannon. At best you can make these birds cheaper than the rocket + flight time.

Something that flies at the upper edge of the stratosphere, at 40-50 km (160,000 ft) would be hard to reach with currently available means. You can of course fire a THAAD at it, but you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.


> you can fire a THAAD at a Starlink satellite as well.

You can fire a THAAD at one Starlink satellite, but probably not at 8000 of them.

For comparison we’re currently producing THAAD interceptors at a rate of 96 a year (though Lockheed is aiming to increase it to 400).


Exactly; it's a limited and very expensive capability. Nobody would want to spend it on a $100k stratospheric flying vehicle, if the latter existed. It does not exist though, if you do not count weather balloons.

The f-22 balloon kill was at the same height as the altitude quoted on their website .

Like you said either any fighter jet + missile or an high altitude jet + auto cannon will shoot it down reliably.

This is probably a good solution for redundancy if you already have air superiority.


They won’t be shot down over land without debris falling to the ground.

>put up those numbers within a few years,

And potentially exceed Starlink cumulative payload a few years after that.

US via SpaceX generates most launches/payload due to reusability PRC built 2x more disposable launch vehicles. PRC figures out disposables and they can operate reusable fleet 2-3x the size of US and simply throw more payload per year and catchup/exceed cumulative SpaceX volume in a few years. A few years after, permanent kgs in space advantage due higher replacement as old hardware deorbits.


Spy satellites you can have way fewer, but for an internet connection you really need Starlink's scale. Otherwise you need full 360 deg view of a horizon (good luck with that on the battlefield), and a much higher power use.

Having said that, I double checked the numbers - it would take ~60 launches at the minimum to replicate Starlink 1.0. This is how many launches China does per year right now. So it is doable indeed for them, just absurdly expensive - $10-$30B, but they can afford that.

EU on the other hand - no way. We're doing 5 launches a year with Arianne, due to incompetent management over the last decade. Unless China or US allow us to use their infrastructure, we have no way of doing all this.


Ya, I guess one other thing to China's advantage is that they don't need true global reach. They can prioritize coverage over their relevant latitudes (roughly the same as contiguous USA). From what I understand from Starlink distributions, roughly ~60% of the overall Starlink constellation is required for that latitude range.

I imagine UH-60 and variants will continue to serve (who knows, maybe with new airframes) along side the MV-75 for quite a while, in a similar way to how UH-1s continued to be in use well after UH-60s were deployed in large numbers. This Congressional Research Service summary of the FLRAA/MV-75 program states that the Army has plans to continue ordering UH-60s (on the order of 255 between 2027 and 2031) - https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12771

The key requirements that drive MV-75's downsides (size, complexity, cost) is the Army wants to play game in the Pacific. The UH-60 is deeply limited there.

For example, the MV-75's range should let it go (one-way) from Guam to the Philippines, straight from Okinawa to Taiwan (no need to island hop) - potentially as a two way mission. Same as Philippines to Taiwan.

The "comparability" is that the MV-75 and UH-60 can be delivery ~14 troops into an order magnitude similar size clearing.


Thank you! This context really clarifies what the use case is for this. The range difference matters.

Cancelling Anthropic's contract, and maybe even restricting Anthropic's use as a component to DoD certain contract work might be reasonable.

However, Anthropic's lawsuits are broader than that - partly because the government's actions were broader than that.

* Trump did post a "truth" ordering all Federal agencies to stop using Claude. Anthropic claims that many federal agencies did stop using Claude, and is suing saying that the order is not lawful.

* Hegseth then posted saying that no DoD contractor can work with Anthropic or use Claude at all. This is much broader order than the actual delivered letter which is much narrower - contractors can use Claude, but you can't use Claude as part of your solutions that you deliver to DoD. Anthropic is claiming damages from the difference between the first announcement, and the actual delivered scope, and is also claiming that the actual order did not follow procedures.

* Finally, Anthropic is claiming that the pattern of behaviour by the administration demonstrate that the administration is not simply trying to protect against supply chain risk, but is actively trying to harm Anthropic out of spite.

Frankly, you just have to read Trump's or Hegseth's posts to just get the vibes that this isn't just a technocratic calculation.


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