I had no idea that conflict was so deadly. It's still well below the war in the 90s, but still much bigger than I had previously been aware of.

I think this is the first time I heard about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. I'm tempted to blame 2020 but I have to admit I don't pay as much attention to the news as I should.

The really striking thing here is how big the American Civil War was.

I'd be tempted to ask for fatalities scaled to US 2020 population per year, but we might as well get into the rate of change of inflation.

What is it good for? Not quite absolutely nothing if you were an enslaved person and lucky enough to survive the war and its ugly aftermath.

MC, thanks for the perspective. Notably, though, it's still less deadly per capita, combining both nations, than the pandemic in the US.

Alternative bloodthirsty American take: if we didn't have the pandemic, we could've had one more war! Oh, the opportunity cost!

From April 2008: "Azerbaijan has heaps of oil money and is putting significant chunks of it into rearmament. That may or may not tip the strategic balance [NARRATOR from 2021: It tipped the strategic balance], but it certainly raises the chances of renewed conflict. The sequel to the piece linked here was always going to be titled 'Just Add Oil and Money.'"

This is the piece that was linked, now nearing its 25th anniversary: http://fistfulofeuros.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/n-k_merrill.pdf

The really striking thing here is how big the American Civil War was.

But civil wars always look big in that way because of course you're counting both sides' casualties as your own.

And Armenia is a very small country, so more or less any war would look huge in terms of dead as a proportion of population. I wonder which country in modern times suffered the worst proportional casualties from a war? I have an awful feeling it's probably some tiny island state in the Commonwealth that had four of its young men killed in WW2 and this turned out to be 5% of the total population or something.

It's probably Poland.

Paraguay! According to this anyway -- https://knowledgenuts.com/2013/11/08/the-paraguayan-war-killed-most-paraguayans/

Azerbaijain seems to have built itself quite the drone capacity. Apparently drones are no longer just a superpower thing and will be a feature of regional wars from here on out. That's going to be trouble.

I feel like it deserves some mention that putting together high and low estimates, between 1.1 and 1.8 million Vietnamese died in that war.

The bat is just so great. Perfect musical accompaniment, too.

Thanks for putting the table together! Lazy me had been going along as the COVID death count passed various milestones, always too lazy to put the denominator under previous war deaths but my laziness had been nagging me and now I don't need to. COVID will pass the American Civil War in absolute numbers but we won't hit 7 million. I would bet my Gamestock windfall on it.

It is a bit disconcerting how little attention I have paid to the outside world during the past year. What I tell myself is that the world has lots of problems, but given who and where I am, the one I was best suited to provide assistance in dealing with was Trump. So that's what I paid attention to. Of course, after November 3, I was mostly just working and stressing and still not paying much attention to other things.

9. I imagine every country will have terrifying drone capacity. You can buy drones on Amazon for chump change in terms of even the smallest national budget. Working out how to convert them fot military use would be an entertaining weekend project for the president's high school kids.

Plus you have countries like Turkey developing capacity to manufacture military-grade drones which they can sell around the neighborhood at a good value.

Turkey is Aldi of drones.

You can buy drones on Amazon for chump change in terms of even the smallest national budget.

Pretty sure military drones share little but the name with the ones you buy on Amazon. (Surveillance drones, sure, that might be the same.)

Maybe they will be Aldi Sud and Russia or someone can be Ajdi Nord.

I think that militarized off-the-shelf drones are probably more appealing to non-state actors.

Of course, if you buy off-the-shelf, you may get your flying freedoms cancelled by a tech company.

We're at a very interesting point right now where low-end drones are cheap, user friendly, excellent at battlefield surveillance and virtually unstoppable. Aeroplanes in 1914 were at a similar point. But there's no reason to suppose that will be a permanent thing. In 1915 there were high angle mounted HMGs and QF guns and, of course, purpose built fighter aircraft. No reason to assume the same won't happen with drones.

I guess iteration on a cheap model is possible, and the existing military drones aren't the endpoint as they're probably as expensive as anything in the military-industrial complex.

I'm wondering what can be done in the range of low-end counter-drone tech. Probably just drone detection is the biggest thing, and that ought to be possible by rigging up a web cam with a detection algorithm.

After that, its a matter of pointing an open microwave oven at the sky and pressing "potato."

International law prohibits using "defrost".

Well, the best anti aircraft weapon is a bomb landing on the enemy's pilots' mess. And drones are (mostly) radio controlled, so I suppose you DF the ground station and then hit it with GMLRS or similar? Or just jam the control link (and hope your jammer doesn't get DF'd and similarly flattened). But autonomous drones would be trickier. There's a great Doonesbury from the early nineties where Lacey asks a general in a committee hearing "One B2 costs $2 billion. For that you could buy two thousand cruise missiles. Which would you rather defend Moscow against?" "Uh, how deep is my bunker?" "Oh, you can dig yourself as deep a hole as you like, General..."

I wonder if small, focused EMPs are physically possible. I bet someone's working on it.

My son is positively obsessed with them. Apparently, you can google how to make them. We now have a house rule against building an EMP.

Yeah you can make tiny home-EMPs that could reboot a Tickle-me-Elmo if you were standing right next to it, but the kind of EMP you would need to knock out all the electricity in Las Vegas so you can rob a casino vault is still, sadly, out of reach.

I was thinking more of something that can reach 500 meters into the sky, but only going up, so it doesn't knock out your own stuff.

I figure first, you make a big magnetic dish...

If you don't have time, store-bought is fine.

Seems like a major drone counter would be other drones, dropping nets on them or something.

Trained falcons. That's where the action is.

Yeah, there are also counter-drone drones that see a drone and then go crash into it.

Apparently the militarized use case for off-the-shelf drones is to attach an explosive to one and go land it on your enemy's position and blow it up.

A flying IED, basically. Sounds like bad news.