Travel advise: prepare for a trip to the US like you’d prepare for a trip to Russia or China. (Note: being an anarchist who thinks Putin, Xi and Trump don’t deserve a separate rope for each, I wouldn’t consider a visit.)

Don’t bring your real computing device. Bring an empty device from which you can VPN to a system that actually has your data.

If you need to bring an encrypted device, consider the possibility that authorities will attempt to coerce you into unlocking it (and will cause you great disruption and indignity if you won’t). You might be safer bringing a concealed + encrypted microSD card and a device loaded with an OS intended to be searched. If the data matters, make sure you cannot unlock your device under coercion.

(Trivial method: send your friend in the US a snailmail letter. Ask them to keep the letter until your arrival. Into the letter, steganographically embed the OTP key material to obtain the passphrase to decrypt your device. Now to decrypt the device, three things will be needed: your cooperation and knowledge, the device, and the letter. And you can deny that the letter contains anything.)

I wish the protesters luck. I hope they achieve their goals, achieve them with minimum loss, and stay unharmed.

Sadly I know this won’t happen. :(

As an exception to most regulations that we hear about from China, this approach actually seems well considered - something that might benefit people and work.

Similar regulations should be considered by other countries. Labeling generated content at the source, hopefully without the metadata being too extensive (this is where China might go off the handle) would help avoid at least two things:

• casual deception
• training AI with material generated by another AI, leading to degradation of ability to generate realistic content

Cards are ever-changing, but the main card of both sides is possibly agreeing to stop, if certain conditions are satisfied.

If Ukrainians could have stayed in Kursk, it would have been something to trade back during negotiations. But apparently, Putin didn’t like that prospect and made Russian troops concentrate a lot of force in Kursk. This force came at the expense of other fronts. During the time Russia was bombing Russian territory, it spent less energy bombing Ukraine.

I don’t think Ukrainians are very cheerful about losing Kursk, but it was meant as a distraction - this direction was weakly defended, they got in easily, stayed for six months, just the coming back out turned ugly.

Sadly, the situation was considerably more dire.

In Kursk, at the end, Ukrainian troops (about 12 000 men) were supplied using a single good road. Russia brought in enough offensive power (about 70 000 men) to push on that road, and despite heavy losses, reached artillery and drone range. Russia then relocated some of their best droners to the area (both countries have elite drone units with better equipment and experience) and started attacking nearly every supply vehicle that they could. Logistics broke down.

Then Trump pulled the intel and HIMARS strikes ceased for a while.

As a result, the Ukrainian contingent in Kursk received orders to do an orderly retreat. But they received them late. In reality, they had to save themselves using rather ungraceful methods, often abandoning vehicles (bridge was blown up) and moving on foot.

The Kursk offensive helped distract Russia more than a little, but shouldn’t have ended that way. I’m fairly certain ISW will write in detail about the Kursk events in their next review of developments, but the lesson as it appears to me: “retreat before your movement routes come under fire”.

As for long range strike drones, Ukrainians have some of the best in the world, and they’re working hard with them. Also, recently, what appeared to be an Ukrainian cruise missile circumnavigated Crimea and hit an oil depot south of the peninsula. Which means 1000+ km of cruise missile range. Moscow needs only around 700 km.

Could, but should not. It would be against everyone’s best interest.

Not continuing to buy aircraft from a country whose current leader threatens with hostile action seems only 100% reasonable.

I would advise them to keep the ones they have, though - given their current threat model, until the US president changes, they need a “red team” to practise against.

It’s migration season, and this is only the first bird - I predict there’s more of them.

I think we have an interesting conflict of interest on the US side of the ocean: “the US military industrial complex” vs. “Trump, driving away their customers”.

With generative AI (I would say that language models are a subset of this, they generate text) you can trick a reasonably naive person for a long period (and a reasonably skeptical person for a short period):

a) into believing that something really happened

b) into believing that many people support an idea

This is potentially highly damaging to electoral representative democracy.

There exists a form of representative democracy (representative direct democracy) that’s invulnerable - it’s called sortitition and allocates offices by lottery - but no country currently uses it and no country seems prepared to use it.

So in short term, the solution is to be skeptical of the information we receive. For many people, that’s quite a lot to ask.

This would be a real possibility.

It depends on how insulated Putin is from reality.

If he’s still surrounds himself with yes-men, he might send their proposal where sun doesn’t shine. But if the quantity of yes-men has dropped since he started the war, then maybe. He might know that their economy is falling apart.

I’m almost sure that the Kremlin still polls Russian people for their opinions via VTSIOM, or at least bothers to read Levada when they publish their polls. Polls say that the public would accept simply stopping the war. What the public would not accept is giving up conquered territories. :(

So any real negotiations where Ukraine will demand its occupied land back, will be harder.

Polls in Ukraine show that Zelensky has a massive approval rating. Right behind him (or sometimes ahead, depending on how you ask) - not a politician, but the first wartime commander of the armed forces, Valery Zaluzhny.

It would take mind-bendingly much engineering to change the direction of Ukraine currently.

Finally. He’s likely responsible for thousands of executions of random people (naturally without trial, legal defense or due process). But the court will sort that out and let others know what they found.

Note: Iran still uses F-14 Tomcats.

Possibilities for implanting a logic bomb are endless, but there are still no case reports about an US-originating plane becoming remotely disabled.

(Russians would absolutely like to listen to a message which accomplishes that, meanwhile allies would definitely want ot change encryption keys on any plane which is supposed to receive that. I also don’t think that military planes will accept unencrypted messages. And their communications subsystems are separate subsystems, which can be disabled or replaced.)

Meanwhile, in a hypothetical doomsday scenario, Danish F-35s would land (or be unloaded from a container) in China, and be greeted with cheers, red banners and golden confetti. Damage to the US would far exceed anything that Denmark could do by firing something.

Note: these are scenarios which are not supposed to happen, but dramatic loss of trust among allies can actually result in that - if country A backstabs country D, there is nothing that really prevents D from betraying A to C.

There is an aftermarket for F-16 planes and their spare parts.

Also, I should note that Iran (of all countries) is still flying its F-14 Tomcats, unless I’m mistaken.

The most immediate effect is ceasing updates for then AN/ALQ-131 countermeasures pod. If Russians come with a new radar or make their existing weapons behave differently, this could have considerable effect on the survivability of an F-16 in a hot situation.

There is also debate in Sweden, and polls in South Korea have turned in favour of having them.

I have not yet heard of a single case report of US-sourced military jet becoming remotely disabled.

Also note: Iran has been flying F-14 jets which the Islamic Revolution took over from the Shah’s regime.

When a country buys military aircraft, they demand extensive knowledge of the system they are buying, and demand ability to independently perform maintenance.

If they are prudent, they will review all its wireless reception and transmission capabilities, possibly on their own. There may still be a possibility for a logic bomb somewhere, but a logic bomb in flight softtware would ordinarily mean two things:

• the industrial company involved pays obscene compensations
• nobody will purchase aircraft from the country involved

These are pretty big disincentives.

P.S. Cryptography: one can likely configure an aircraft so that it won’t accept a message through its data link system, unless the message authenticates and decrypts. Subsequently, one can change keys to no longer match a compromised ally’s keys. As a result, direct data links would no longer be possible with planes of that compromised ally. So introducing a specially crafted message into a military plane would likely be hard.

This could be an important move, since Ukraine does not have satellites of its own currently.

Ukraine has been relying on US and commercial satellites to monitor Russian activity in areas where drones cannot reach, or where they cannot communicate.

Commanded by the Trump administration, the US military recently stopped sharing intelligence data with Ukraine. Commercial data tends to have a higher latency and lower resolution, so I think Ukrainians will highly appreciate French assistance.

To my understanding, EU countries aren’t in a shortage of aircraft - their air power is enough to match Russia. However, they are in a shortage of bombs to drop and missiles to fire.

They’re also in a shortage of artillery and rocket artillery and air defense.

As for the industry that can be scaled up fastest (drones), everyone is in a shortage of them. Fortunately there is one country in Europe that’s been doing absolutely everything to scale up their production. So much that it currently out-produces the US, and maybe out-produces both the US and the EU. I’m fairly certain that this country is willing to help on the matter (it’s called Ukraine).

I assure you, the factory will be too small to supply all demand, and 2 generations behind the cutting edge. And its construction will get delayed by unforeseen mishaps.

Came here to post this, but saw that this thread existed already. :)

• Previously, this was speculated about as a rumour, now it’s being publicly negotiated.
• In rough terms, 800 billion is approximately 0.8 US defense budgets.

So, as a result of the US abandoning its previous role, the EU is moving to replace the capabilities offered by the US previously.

The sum is not impossibly big, the total volume of the EU response to COVID was about 2 trillion, so this is about 40% of the volume of the COVID response budget.