Of course plenty of people expected it would happen the way it did, but it was not unanimous at all. I have no doubt many in the general staff were rudely surprised.

Also, the US military is still procuring broadly similar drones, and will be for a while.

The lack of survivability is not the fault of the drone design. The design set it has is to have high unrefueled endurance, a medium payload capacity, and a reasonably low cost. The nature of technology means that to do so it is going to be relatively slow and have a large wingspan.

Additionally, they were lost in missions which require loitering in predictable patterns near known targets, in which they were shot down mostly by optically guided missiles. There is no indication that there is an alternative design that would be more survivable. The only hope is that there would be one that is significantly cheaper, but that is not obviously true.

So all in all, these are valuable losses. When they are replaced, they are very likely to be replaced by a substantially similar design at a significant fraction of the cost of acquisition.

I'm really no fan of the US MIC, but the MALE/HALE drones are actually a decent design. While they are more expensive than they should be, they are and have to be pretty big aircraft with sophisticated sensors, and so a decent chunk of the cost really is justified. Chinese/Russian/Iranian equivalents are broadly similar in design and cost 25-50% as much, which is about what you'd expect.

All in all, the attrition is not necessarily unexpected but it is a real problem, will have real and expensive consequences, and ultimately reflects a tactical failure in how this war was prosecuted which is a material factor in the current bad outcome. Many people really did think they would be able to survive enough to loiter around the missile cities as a backup in case they failed to be drstroyed, and that turned out to be wrong.

The best defense for these is upstream, so that the plasmid provider refuses to make it for you if it looks like a pathogen or you're not affiliated.

Besides, biology grad students rarely or never have access to a lab with zero oversight.

It's still worth thinking about it, of course, but by far the way to mitigate risks are things like wastewater surveillance, tracing purchases of physical supplies, etc...

Of course, an LLM could provide advice that makes it easier for a virologist to do something like this, but there is little indication the effect size there is notable.

The life sciences are very hard. A motivated undergrad requires extensive in-person teaching to become useful in far simpler projects. It's not clear how an LLM can in the foreseeable future bridge that gap when human experts can't teach someone without a lot of time and in person interaction, and that is with access to a staffed, resourced lab.

Chinese cars have been sold worldwide for decades, they just weren't competitive with western cars even in very poor African countries.

We do have a pretty good idea of the quality of the current crop of Chinese ICE engines. They aren't great - I can go into more detail if you want.

My point is moreso that they can succeed in many domains, but it's mechanically unlikely they'll succeed on some domains unless we force their hand. Semis were one of them.

Lithography is very hard to dominate because if you want to do so, you have to convince your ecosystems to switch to domestic suppliers. But in the short term, they don't want to as that will hurt their competitiveness. That's why, for many sectors still and for lithography until the bans, there was no domestic program with realistic prospects to ever truly outcompete.

A second reason is that Chinese foundries still had to compete with foreign foundries. The cost of doing lithography with new Chinese DUV machines will be significantly higher than with ASML DUV and then significantly higher than with ASML EUV. So to build an ecosystem that can one day truly compete with ASML, you'd need the entire Chinese semi industry to take significant losses to get to the point where they can compete with ASML and pose a threat in the market.

There is still many sectors like this where China has some kind of parity, but at a total cost of ownership so much higher than western competitors than they are not a serious market threat in the near future. In fact, the US, EU, etc... are in similar positions. Unless the Chinese economy becomes much stronger than the US/EU across the board, one would expect it to be case due to comparative advantage - the cost of directing industry to ignore superior alternatives will slow them down in other fields, unless the Chinese economy is just that much more effective. So without sanctions, it's difficult for the Chinese state to force enough cooperation to solve the issue without spending amounts of money that are a significant drag even to China.

Of course, the extent to which they was true and for how long it would be true is up for debate, but it's not a prima facie foregone conclusion

The operational minimums for commercial crude inventories are estimated at 300-380mn barrels, with current inventories at . Weekly draw rate this week was 7.2mn just for the commercial inventories, and levels were ~400mn barrels. So there's 20-100mn barrels remaining in the commercial inventory. Even moreso than the SPR, this is uneven, and maximum draw rates will decrease as individual storage reaches minimums.

If you have an adaptive system that can react to attacks flexible (say, your own AI agent), then no, that's not correct. It is correct in the classical conception of cybersecurity where the defender is basically static.

At the end of the day Iran has more missiles than the US has interceptors. So when you get to the point when you're talking about running out, they just don't need to launch big salvos anymore.

Iran knows Israel won't stop itself from attacking for too long. So they are going to wait until that point and they are likely going to try the same targeting methodology to paralyze Israeli airbases. If they manage to do so, they will be able to significantly reduce the US/Israeli strike tempo and to be more successful using drones, not even missiles.