One thing is that “underground” is not a homogenous single thing. Sometimes it is loose water logged sand, or clay, or gravel, sometimes it is solid hard rock, sometimes it is large very hard pieces of fractured hard rock forming a loose rubble. Which kind of obstacle are you thinking when you are thinking of your method of digging? Based on your method description it sounds like you are thinking of loose soil with a few big rocks?
> The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.
That sounds very complicated. Actuators are expensive. Actuators which are strong enough to drill through stone are even more so. Having many of them per arm and many arms per machine sounds very expensive and also a maintenance nightmare. Look at a real world tunnel boring machine: they have a cutting head rotated around by a single electric motor and hydraulic jacks to keep the cutting head pressed against the formation. It is conceptually simple, even though of course real world constraints make it complicated in practice. You are proposing to replace that conceptual simplicity with something much much more complicated. It is not clear what benefit you are hoping to achieve with the complexity you are thinking of.
> tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate
How would that work in practice? Would people live in tunnels under a pristine forests? I’m not sure i understand your concept.
> what if the Army could cut and cover 100 meters of precast tunnel segments in a day
If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?
Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day?
Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled by hitting it anywhere along its length with a “bunker buster” amunition? Or a backpack full of explosives and a shovel? Or a few cans of fuel down the ventillation and a lit rag?
And if the answer is that you will patrol the topside to prevent such meddling, how do you protect your patrols? And if you can protect them why don’t you do the same for your logistics?
That cover dirt materially adds to the resistance of the structure.
This is why even above-ground bunkers are almost always buried underneath a giant mound of dirt instead of being bare concrete. It is a cheap structural multiplier that greatly increases the amount of explosive required to damage the insides. It is also very cheap. A bunker buster is a very heavy and specialized munition which limits its scope of practicality.
There are entire civil engineering textbooks that focus exclusively on the types of scenario you are alluding to. It is a very mature discipline and almost all of it has been tested empirically.
I used to have a civil engineering textbook that was solely about the design of structures to resist the myriad effects of nuclear weapons. It was actually pretty damn interesting. Civil engineers have contemplated at length just about every structural scenario you can imagine.
> Civil engineers have contemplated at length just about every structural scenario you can imagine.
I bet. Do they recommend cut and cover highways in contested environments? Or do they recommend shooting back until the area is no longer contested? (Which you practically have to do anyway to build the cut and cover tunnel in the first place.)
I don’t doubt that it is a good idea to cover with earth C&C bunkers and launchers and such. But those are point installations. Miles and miles of tunnels used for logistics are lines. They scale very differently.
> If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?
I have no opinion on this, but TFA makes it pretty clear: visibility and susceptibility to attack.
TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce compared with actual tunnels "30-40 feet below the surface".
Use your mind and develop an opinion. I read the article too, i’m just disagreeing with it.
> visibility
There are two kinds of visibility to be had. Not knowing where the tunnel is, and not knowing who and when passes in it.
Cut and cover doesn’t help with the first kind of visibility. Disturbed vegetation and soil will reveal your tunnel’s path to even a senile adversary. One who somehow missed your whole construction. If you just want to hide your movements and somehow you have the budget for hundreds of miles of prefab concrete tunnel you can hide inside it without it being burried.
> susceptibility to attack
Undoubtedly burrying the precast concrete segments under dirt makes it harder to attack, but it won’t make it impenetrable. And once the enemy cracked it the whole tunnel becomes useless for transportation. On the surface you can just buldozer a way around the damage and keep on trucking. Underground you need to excavate, re-line with precast concrete and cover again, under enemy fire.
> TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce
I think they could have just left the mention of cut and cover out and the article would have been stronger for it.
> Use your mind and develop an opinion. I read the article too, i’m just disagreeing with it.
I have no particular interest or knowledge of military tactics, and no desire to expand it. I do, however, recall what is written in an article that I've just read, particularly when it already answers, all by itself, questions that people are asking about it.
The suggestion from the author sounds like someone early in WWI suggesting the problem with the war effort was a lack of entrenchments to conduct infantry charges from
It sounds more like somebody from WWI suggesting the entrenchments absolutely _needed_ to be staggered and zig-zagged so that artillery blast shock waves don't kill everbody.
Which was a solid observation.
Now the solid advice is to leave _nothing_ above ground and parked for very long - roll everything .. including radar .. in and out of bunkers to protect assests when wave upon wave of wooden cheap arse semi smart bombs come in on the back of Chinese / Russian / Indian / US satellite targeting.
> Idk what to tell you, but any target that seems to get marked in Iran blows the fuck up.
I’m sure that is true. And yet, the oil is not flowing. We keep “winning” like this for a few more weeks/months and we lose. Not because we sudenly stop “blowing targets the fuck up”, but because we cripple our economies.
The flowing of oil is not of primary importance to the US in this conflict. The oil was already flowing. So I think we can reasonably rule that out as an objective.
> The flowing of oil is not of primary importance to the US in this conflict.
You think so? Then why did the US make it the condition of cease fire? Why did the US even agree to a cease fire? It is not like Iran is hurting the US mainland kinetically.
> The oil was already flowing. So I think we can reasonably rule that out as an objective.
Sometimes you have a thing and you don’t appreciate how important it is for you until you don’t have it anymore.
Because having air frames constantly cycling in the air for six weeks straight is hard on both soldiers and air frames, so having a breather for maintenance and recovery is crucial.
And Oil is not crucial for the US at all, it is hitting Europe and poor countries the most by far.
> When the choice is "let Iran have nukes" or "bomb Iran", you bomb Iran every time.
There was also the choice of “Iran let us verify that they are not making nukes, and in return we remove economic sanctions from them”. It was called the JCPOA, and according to non-proliferation experts it worked. And then on the 8th of May 2018 Trump unilaterally withdrew from it.
Let’s not pretend that there were no other options.
Unilateraly on the level of countries. The other signatories (China, France, Russia, the U.K., Germany and the EU) believed that the deal was good and Iran was holding up their end of the bargain at that time.
If the USA government had credible evidence that it is not so, they could have picked up the phone and presented their case to the other signatories. Or at least to their allies. Then once those countries were convinced that something is off they could have withdrawn together from the agreement. Would have less of a terrible optics than how it went down.
I seek only to point out that we, the United States, have a constitutionally-outlined treaty-making process which involves Senate ratification, and that in the case of the JCPOA, the Senate did not ratify.
Re international agreements: yes, the idea is that _broad support_ is required for binding international agreements. Senate ratification represents broad support.
> It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.
Depends on what you mean by “orbital weapons”. I assume you are not thinking of the sidearms of astronauts, or anti-satelite satelites.
If you are thinking about nukes pre-positioned in space then the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in outer space. And this is not just paper prohibition. The reality of space based nukes is that the time between deorbiting and touch-down is so short that nuclear armed states would treat their launch (the time when they are placed into orbit) as an attack and launch in retaliation against the launching country.
Basically if you try to sneak them into orbit and the enemy finds out about them you will be anihilated. This is just simple MAD doctrine. So the strategic balance which is preventing you from launching your ground based warheads is the same which is preventing you from launching your future space based warheads into orbit.
> Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.
I wouldn’t assume that you or me would learn about it. But it is almost given that the peer nations would figure it out. They spend considerable resources trying to figure out if you are doing this. And then they get MAD and your country is no more.
If by “free” you mean “very very expensive” then i agree with you. It would cost a fortune to even just attempt a pilot project proving feasability. Then we would need to send up regular replacements to the “sending the harvest down” hardware at the minimum. Just imagining the cost of a tank which can be launched into space, autonomously dock with the collector sails, then deorbit and land makes my head spin. And then doing that at scale, paying people to launch it, paying people to operate the system.
It could be free if we imagine some crazy advances in autonomous self-replicating spacecrafts. But by then we live in the post-scarcity diamond age probably.
I meant some semi permanent harvesters (which would cost a fortune to build and deploy).
Sending the harvest down could maybe happen inside plastic containers built in place, made with the abundant sunlight, some Co2 and water (not sure if there's CO2 this high though. In retrospect we'd need also some metals to print some sort of the antenna reflecting radar frequencies (for the ground stations tracking them on the approach)?
And with the hundreds of small containers (carefully balanced so they don't smash in the ground but slowly rain onto the area) maybe it'd be easier.
I don't know. I think it's hard sci-fi, achievable within our lifetimes :)
Everyone talks about the AIS signal being turned off in the strait as if it is an insurmountable problem.
Ships had their AIS on before the war, and will turn it on again once they left the area. So we can just filter for ships which previously reported a location in the Persian Gulf, and now are reporting outside of it. Similarly we can count ships which were outside of the Gulf and now are inside. We don’t need the AIS to be on while they are transiting.
> This weakened Iran would have no ability […], close the strait, […]
Here is where we disagree. And i think this is the only point which matters.
I agree with you that the US always had the ability to destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure. I agree with you that doing so would cause catastrophic economic damage, civilian unrest, regime overthrow etc. It would seriously disrupt their nuclear program for sure.
What it wouldn’t do is reopen the strait. As long as some ships pay the toll those monies can be used to pay the “warfighters” and their weapons. It is relatively cheap to do so. Ukraine demonstrated this with their unmanned surface vessels. This they can do even if the whole hinterland of Iran is in flames and turmoil.
In fact the more their economy collapses the more lucrative this coastal piracy “business” relatively to other opportunities becomes. People who “before the bombing” had better things to do will find that shaking down foreign ships is still doable “after the bombing”. Some of it will be out of ideology and hate for sure, destroying all the civilian infra of a country tends to whip up emotions in people. But fundamentally they can keep doing it because it is a business which pays.
And regime overthrow won’t help with this either. In the absence of a strong central coordinating force you might get multiple separate pirate outfits camping at different parts of the coast trying to take tolls. That obviously wouldn’t improve their economic success, but would increase chaos and hinder transportation even more.
In short while the USA could destroy Iran as a nation, doing so would not eliminate the threat to shipping in the region.
Iran's "toll booth" only functions because they shoot missiles at ships that don't pay up. If they didn't shoot missiles, nobody would pay. They have no legal ability to do this; the strait is split between Iranian and Omani territorial waters. Iran does not have legal control over Omani waters. Actually enforcing their "toll" means firing missiles at ships in Omani waters who don't pay. It's a combination of piracy, terrorism, and an act of war (violation of Omani sovereignty).
This situation is unacceptable for every other Gulf country. It may not be dealt with in the coming weeks, but will be addressed in the coming months, in a similar fashion to how Somali piracy was neutralized.
Also, a neutered Iran would not have the capability of producing anti-ship missiles, which is the primary enforcement mechanic of this toll.
> The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.
That sounds very complicated. Actuators are expensive. Actuators which are strong enough to drill through stone are even more so. Having many of them per arm and many arms per machine sounds very expensive and also a maintenance nightmare. Look at a real world tunnel boring machine: they have a cutting head rotated around by a single electric motor and hydraulic jacks to keep the cutting head pressed against the formation. It is conceptually simple, even though of course real world constraints make it complicated in practice. You are proposing to replace that conceptual simplicity with something much much more complicated. It is not clear what benefit you are hoping to achieve with the complexity you are thinking of.
> tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate
How would that work in practice? Would people live in tunnels under a pristine forests? I’m not sure i understand your concept.
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