Sure, until someone says "hey can we stick this on a truck and use it against cars?" "Hey can we stick this on the belly of a plane and use it on a building?" "Hey what happens if we do a flash of this at protestors?"
It’s not going to do anything useful against cars, let alone buildings. It would blind people, and that would be bad, but it’s a very expensive way to hurt people. I think this one is for what it says it’s for.
The point is, why would they bother when there’s cheaper and easier ways to do it? A high tech laser system is great for shooting stuff down because it replaces missile systems that cost even more. If you want to cripple people, why would you use it instead of a cheap gun or baton?
“It could be used to hurt people” doesn’t mean much. You at least need “it could be used to hurt people, and it’s better at it in at least one way than what’s already available.”
Quit listening to the propaganda, listen to the actual claims.
We have one clear noncombatant child death--killed by the device aimed at her father (who was a valid target). We have a handful of people who are underage, but no details about them. Plenty about the one innocent, nothing about the rest. Are they truly that inept, or would looking into the rest reveal they weren't non-combatants?
The fact that they only managed to find one case to parade in front of the cameras says a lot. The beeper attack is probably the best special operations move pulled off in recent times.
Even if your goal is terror, cost effectiveness means you can commit more terror.
The pager attack was incredibly cost effective. It would have cost orders of magnitude more to achieve the same thing by dropping bombs.
Cost isn’t a number subtracted from a bank account. Cost is, how much of this can you actually do?
That’s the whole reason this system exists. Their other systems work fine for shooting stuff down. But they cost too much. That is to say, they can’t shoot enough stuff down. This system can shoot more stuff down.
Countries dont generally invest in shitty weapons when they already have good weapons. Bombs & missiles already exist and are much better than lasers if your goal is to destroy a stationary target.
In Batman Begins, the villian just makes the drinking water toxic. With todays AI and Biotech, one can create a new bacteria or virus and cripple water supply of cities. I am sure a suitable trained AI can get more creative with such low cost attack vectors.
Nah. You can't just engineer some sort of pathogen which will survive water purification treatments, or grow and reproduce in pure water without any nutrients. Real life isn't like the movies.
This just means, the addition of the pathogen has to happen after purification treatments. Viruses can stay dormant and activate only within human body, no need for food.
“Viruses” have a very broad feature set-beyond evoking Batman, it seems like a lot of details need to be hammered out here, even residually chlorinated water can be problematic in maintaining titers.
IMO, These days, public health policy (conspiracy?) seems to be a more efficient way to spread pathogens. Not precise targeting tho.
Won't work very well. Such things need great stability.
And it's not like there's any need of a fancy weapon to do that. This exists to engage high speed targets. Just because you can use a GBU-28 to kill a gopher doesn't mean anyone ever will.
You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
I agree if we reframe it as “purely defensive,” though there is a bit of tautology invoked with the “weapon” qualifier.
That said, there is legitimacy to developing defensive arms, even if one doesn’t like the ones doing it.
> the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield
This hypothesis is not sustained by Iran’s reduced firing rate throughout the conflict. All evidence suggests Iran lost its war with Israel and would lose it again if they go for round 2.
> You might be tempted to say "what about a missile shield?" but such a thing allows the owner to act with impunity with levels of violence we arguably haven't seen since 1945.
I would still say "what about a missile shield?".
If a missile shield is a weapon, because of its affordances, then any object is a weapon. And while that's marginally true I don't think we get anywhere by entertaining category errors.
If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of, in a world where destruction is far too easy and construction is fairly hard.
> If something enables aggression, because it makes counter attacks unreasonable, that seems like a fairly nice thing to have more of
You’re imagining a world where this kind of tech is equally distributed. It’s not. Israel spends something like $30b/year in defense (in part due to ~$7b/year from the US). Gaza has something like $0.3b to spend. The consequence of that asymmetry is one of them has a missile shield, the other has more than 80,000 dead citizens, famine, and virtually no infrastructure left standing.
Gaza's "air defense" is hundreds of miles of tunnels, civilians just aren't allowed to shelter in them. Hamas having better technology wouldn't change the fact that they're not interested in protecting civilians.
I’m not going to defend hamas’ choices, but i think it’s disingenuous to say that they have the ability to protect the people of gaza. A few thousand fighters in tunnels is possible, but millions of civilians? And wouldn’t that be more of this “using human shields” stuff people like to point out so often?
I am imagining a world, where cheaper access to defensive technology will make defense more viable. That's seems like it will simply be true directionally.
If you want society to be more vulnerable to military action, then the biggest innovation is health care. Improved health care is what allowed nations to create and maintain larger military forces. Through out history, disease and malnourished caused more death by a large margin than actually violence in combat, and many war campaign stopped suddenly because one or both sides became unable to continue.
I think they mean communicable diseases, not combat injuries. For example, around 2/3rds of the military deaths in the American civil war were from disease, not combat. I don’t think much of the medical advances that prevent that came from combat medicine.
Right, those are relatively minor improvements compared to soldiers no longer dying en masse from typhoid, smallpox, measles, etc. Good improvements to be sure, but not quite as significant.
That’s gross. You’re basically saying that hundreds of millions of people need to be held as hostages to ensure good behavior, and that trying to rescue those hostages is morally wrong.
> As a real example of this, the only reason a deeper conflict didn't develop with Iran this year was because Iran demonstrated they could overwhelm the various layers of Israel's missile shield and Iran seriously depleted the various munitions used by those air defense systems (eg interceptors, THAAD) and those take a long time to replenish.
Lol no, Iran was utterly humiliated in this conflict, and outed as a paper tiger.
I didn't mean that Israel doesn't do any crimes, but still the main things that triggers all the rockets, terror attacks etc. is Israel existing. Better defence for Israel will make the region safer, including even for Palestinians
Could definitely be used in an offensive capacity. I don't think it'll be a red alert 2 style prism cannon, but I do think it can be used to gain air superiority. With a long enough runtime, this thing could definitely take out a plane.
That said, it's pretty tame. We can already take out planes with flak cannons. This is just more efficient.
