The Internet Feels Dead, Doesn’t It?

A person born in 1992 does fucking not remember the early days of the internet. That’s so LOL-worthy. They’d barely even remember the middle days. The real early days of the commercial internet were people creating pages and writing out of interest, passion and desire to form a connection, to meet someone who also liked collecting 1950s bottle tops or glass power line insulators.

No one was making any money and it was a lot of fun. This era ended with the IPOs of many major tech companies in 1998-1999 (when the writer was eight years old). The early internet is mostly how I wish it had stayed. It was better in most ways; it at least it wasn’t a surveillance apocalypse as it is now.

Navies are obsolete, but no one will admit it.

This is not really true and it also goes further than this. This person just doesn’t understand modern warfare well, or historical warfare. Or, well, much of anything. It veers into “not even wrong” territory significantly.

Navies are not obsolete — no more than they were after the invention of aircraft. But the balance of power is shifting, as well as the strategies, tactics and practices of how a navy must operate in a drone-rich environment with the possibility of strikes by hypersonic missiles. The Russian Navy getting spanked in the Black Sea doesn’t really signify much either way. Their Black Sea Fleet operated more like a bunch of kindergartners and is illustrative of a decaying military structure with poor force protection practices operating in a tiny area than it is the future of naval warfare.

I don’t feel like writing an entire monograph on naval strategy and doctrine and the evolution thereof, but here’s the thing: drones aren’t magical. Neither are hypersonic missiles. Most likely in the future each Navy will have its drone swarm and will stand way, way off from each other as the drones battle it out. Then it will be a chess match of feints and approaches until one side or the other comes out ahead. Casualties will be high, but countries will still want what navies can provide even at that price.

As for subs and their detection, 95% of what the poster claims is absolute crap. The ocean is vast; finding and tracking a quiet nuclear sub is always going to be nearly impossible no matter how many satellites or drones you have. And then doing something about it before it disappears will be even harder.

Too many academics write authoritatively about topics on which they are completely clueless.