Seems like you expect changes in offense/defense balance to show up in what percentage of stuff gets destroyed. On my models it should mostly show up in how much stuff exists to be fought over; people won’t build valuable things in the first place if they expect them to just get captured or destroyed.
To make that more concrete:
On Cybersecurity:
Computers still sometimes get viruses or ransomware, but they haven’t grown to endanger a large percent of the GDP of the internet.
This seems borderline tautological. We wouldn’t put so much valuable stuff on the Internet if we couldn’t (mostly) defend it.
In WW2, when one nation wanted to read another nation’s encrypted communications (e.g. Enigma), they’d assemble elite teams of geniuses, and there was a serious fight about it with real doubt about who would win. A couple centuries before that, you could hire a single expert and have a decent shot at breaking someone’s encryption.
Today, a private individual can download open-source encryption software and be pretty confident that no one on earth can break the encryption itself—not even a major government. (Though they might still get you through any number of other opsec mistakes).
This is necessary to make modern e-commerce work; if we hadn’t had this massive shift in favor of the defender, we’d have way way less of our economy online. Note especially that asymmetrical encryption is vital to modern e-commerce, and it was widely assumed to be impossible until its invention in the 1970s; that breakthrough massively favors defenders.
But in that counterfactual world where the offense/defense balance didn’t radically shift, you would probably still be able to write that “viruses and ransomware haven’t grown to endanger a large percentage of the Internet”. The Internet would be much smaller and less economically-important compared to our current world, but you wouldn’t be able to see our current world to compare against, so it would still look like the Internet (as you know it) is mostly safe.
On Military Deaths:
Does anyone have a theory of the offense-defense balance which can explain why the per-capita deaths from war should be about the same in 1640 when people are fighting with swords and horses as in 1940 when they are fighting with airstrikes and tanks?
On my models I expect basically no relation between those variables. I expect per-capita deaths from war are mostly based on how much population nations are willing to sacrifice before they give up the fight (or stop picking new fights), not on any details of how the fighting works.
In terms of military tactics, acoup claims the offense/defense balance has radically reversed since roughly WW1, with trenches being nearly invincible in WW1 but fixed defenses being unholdable today (in fights between rich, high-tech nations):
The modern system assumes that any real opponent can develop enough firepower to both obliterate any fixed defense (like a line of trenches) or to make direct approaches futile. So armies have to focus on concealment and cover to avoid overwhelming firepower (you can’t hit what you can’t see!); since concealment only works until you do something detectable (like firing), you need to be able move to new concealed positions rapidly. If you want to attack, you need to use your own firepower to fix the enemy and then maneuver against them, rather than punching straight up the middle (punching straight up the middle, I should note, as a tactic, was actually quite successful pre-1850 or so) or trying to simply annihilate the enemy with massed firepower (like the great barrages of WWI), because your enemy will also be using cover and concealment to limit the effectiveness of your firepower (on this, note Biddle, “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare” Foreign Affairs 82.2 (2003); Biddle notes that even quantities of firepower that approach nuclear yields delivered via massive quantities of conventional explosives were insufficient to blast entrenched infantry out of position in WWI.)
I’d note that acoup’s model of fires primacy making defence untenable between hi tech nations, while not completely disproven by the Ukraine war, is a hypothesis that seems much less likely to be true/ less true than it did in early 2022. The Ukraine war has shown in most cases a strong advantage to a prepared defender and the difficulty of taking urban environments.
The current Israel—Hamas was shows a similar tendency, where Israel is moving very slowly into the core urban concentrations (ie it has surrounded Gaza city so far, but not really entered it), though its superiority in resources relative to its opponent is vastly greater than Russia’s advantage over Ukraine was.
Seems like you expect changes in offense/defense balance to show up in what percentage of stuff gets destroyed. On my models it should mostly show up in how much stuff exists to be fought over; people won’t build valuable things in the first place if they expect them to just get captured or destroyed.
To make that more concrete:
On Cybersecurity:
This seems borderline tautological. We wouldn’t put so much valuable stuff on the Internet if we couldn’t (mostly) defend it.
In WW2, when one nation wanted to read another nation’s encrypted communications (e.g. Enigma), they’d assemble elite teams of geniuses, and there was a serious fight about it with real doubt about who would win. A couple centuries before that, you could hire a single expert and have a decent shot at breaking someone’s encryption.
Today, a private individual can download open-source encryption software and be pretty confident that no one on earth can break the encryption itself—not even a major government. (Though they might still get you through any number of other opsec mistakes).
This is necessary to make modern e-commerce work; if we hadn’t had this massive shift in favor of the defender, we’d have way way less of our economy online. Note especially that asymmetrical encryption is vital to modern e-commerce, and it was widely assumed to be impossible until its invention in the 1970s; that breakthrough massively favors defenders.
But in that counterfactual world where the offense/defense balance didn’t radically shift, you would probably still be able to write that “viruses and ransomware haven’t grown to endanger a large percentage of the Internet”. The Internet would be much smaller and less economically-important compared to our current world, but you wouldn’t be able to see our current world to compare against, so it would still look like the Internet (as you know it) is mostly safe.
On Military Deaths:
On my models I expect basically no relation between those variables. I expect per-capita deaths from war are mostly based on how much population nations are willing to sacrifice before they give up the fight (or stop picking new fights), not on any details of how the fighting works.
In terms of military tactics, acoup claims the offense/defense balance has radically reversed since roughly WW1, with trenches being nearly invincible in WW1 but fixed defenses being unholdable today (in fights between rich, high-tech nations):
I’d note that acoup’s model of fires primacy making defence untenable between hi tech nations, while not completely disproven by the Ukraine war, is a hypothesis that seems much less likely to be true/ less true than it did in early 2022. The Ukraine war has shown in most cases a strong advantage to a prepared defender and the difficulty of taking urban environments.
The current Israel—Hamas was shows a similar tendency, where Israel is moving very slowly into the core urban concentrations (ie it has surrounded Gaza city so far, but not really entered it), though its superiority in resources relative to its opponent is vastly greater than Russia’s advantage over Ukraine was.