US has some laser system they don't talk about much. All that came out is it was used in el paso in friendly fire incident then the story seemed to be swept under the rug.
Well pipeline costs money and would be deeply provocative for Iran to lose this massive "kill the global economy" button they lord over today. They'd probably have their houthis or hezbollah try and sabotage construction until costs are too unaffordable relative to paying the bribe to IRGC to sail through freely.
>That is not to say carriers are going away any time soon, you need to ship the firepower to the target somehow, but one filled to 3/4 with drones would probably be far more effective
Why would you do it at the slow speed of a carrier though? Just load up a couple C17 or B1B and you can dump that payload anywhere in the world in under a day I expect. Better yet, engineer a minuteman to hold a drone swarm. Deliver that swarm anywhere in the world in 20 minutes.
>destroying much of Iran's military and leadership was done from US carriers. If anything it demonstrates how powerful they are.
When you have a hammer that costs billions of dollars in budget you tend to find excuses to use it lest you lose that budget. Imagine if their were no carriers. US airpower just takes off from gulf state airbases and same thing happens to iran.
Unless the US is fighting an air battle in the middle of the ocean, they can probably get by without carriers.
>Russia has been trying to do that to Ukraine for years now.
To be fair this is basically a weakness of modern kid gloves warfare not really due to any asymmetric advantage. If the year were say 1941, Kiev and the rest of Ukraine would have been reduced to rubble and conquered years ago by now and not thanks to technology but the state of what is seen as politically acceptable. Really, Putin could do this today if he really wanted to waste a couple million ukrainians. There is no technological moat protecting kiev from destruction today. People claim if he did something like that then western nations would rally to arms and prevent that, but they said the same before he invaded ukraine in the manner they did, too. Maybe Putin doesn't even realize the bluff is a bluff, or maybe he does have a bit of a conscious unlike Stalin.
FWIW the populations weren't actually as small as a lot of these articles (including about human bottlenecks) allege in the popular press. This comes from a knowledge gap in the public compared to a biologists understanding here. The biologists are talking about effective population size (1) in most all these cases. This is an idealized sort of population size based on the idea of using the smallest possible population size that can fully capture the observed genetic diversity. It makes sense to use this measure, considering you are never fully sure how large a real population can be beyond its effective population size. So you just use the effective population size and implicitly acknowledge its assumptions.
This is well past HS biology though so popular press just skips that nuance and equates it to true population size.
False equivalence here. The slop generators are not the tooling used to fingerprint you. But you should fear the slop generator anyhow, because even if it's shitty, your boss might not be aware and might fire you anyhow thinking your coworker can handle two people's jobs now with the tool. And maybe the wheels don't even come off with that decision because it isn't like engineering quality is 1:1 correlated with sales.
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