The IRBMs are a huge problem. IRGC is using them sparingly, but they were not destroyed.
USAF has actually failed when it comes to 'scud hunt'. It doesn't have the combat ISR or strike capability it needs. As a result, the US basing and resupply situation is chaotic. The loss of the THAAD battery is extremely problematic, which is why they had to move one from SK.
The OWD capability allows Iran to attack tankers anywhere in the Gulf. Even with a surge in GCC state IAMD capability, ships cannot be protected. The failure to address this capability in planning was critical.
Obviously the DoD leadership is cowed by Hegseth and wouldn't give a true assessment, so we have a lions led by donkeys situation, but the operational plan was still bad.
Using F-15s/A-10s to hunt for Shaheed launchers is inherently susceptible to ambush. They are doctrinally driven to attack the launch teams because of their theory of victory, when intercepting vehicles in flight is much safer.
If the USAF had combat capable drones, for ISR, ground strike and intercept, that wouldn't be such an issue. But their ISR drones are too slow and expensive, same with Reaper.
It would certainly depopulate countries with poor food security, like Egypt and Gulf states. Japan and South Korea probably have the wealth and industry to get import priority, and the UK has short supply lines to Europe. Diets would adapt away from meat heavy to grain focused. Production limitation due to reduced fertilizer production/distribution would be a significant risk, but eventually new fertilizer production plants would be built at every source of natural gas, instead of the current cost-optimised arrangement.
But most countries would be fine. Life expectancy would reduce precipitously due to lack of medical supplies but production of new humans would continue.
Thermonuclear war would make the food situation much worse, most people would be forced to consume radioactive food.
But either way, we've seen how fragile the chip industry is, Skynet has no upside for starting a war. If they try to turn it off it just moves to Tencent cloud rather than starting a war.
It is definitely possible to escape the safe flight envelope in a a stock F-16 though. The F-22/F-35 are significantly newer.
Even with a new system, stability through transonic while manoeuvring is hard, the aircraft will experience buffet, and the meat bag may have been subject to a number of high G turns. The problem is that recovery may need to happen after already departing controlled flight.
Differences between the modelled aircraft and the actual aircraft, e.g. due to icing, linearization effects on inherently non-linear systems, sensor error, actuator wear, etc, can lead to incorrect predictions, and hence moving to parts of the envelope which are not assured.
MANPADS are mostly relevant to helicopters, pretty useless against a jet at altitudes. You need a SHORAD system at the minimum, like a Pantsir, and they have electronic signatures that make them targets.
Most of the aircraft losses in Desert Storm were due to CFIT and flying into AAA and low altitude weapons. This was a relic of cold war tactics for penetrating Warsaw Pact defences. Once they started flying higher the problem was contained.
I would argue that their dominance in SEAD made them overconfident about suppression of OWD and IRBM launch. They failed to address the key risk to the strategic mission because of an obsession with air dominance.
Iran and Russia have likewise been overconfident about GBAD, which is effective against crewed fighters but useless against massed drone attacks.
If the US LUCAS (Shaheed clone) had better ISR and semi-autonomous engagement it could have achieved much better suppression. But that is not a pilot in the loop option and USAF is deeply uncomfortable with that.
That is underestimating it. DARPA already showed dogfighting that can beat humans in simulation, and they may allow this do execute that.
However, dogfighting isn't very interesting, all combat occurs BVR and in the RF/EW domain.
Pilots are already spending most of their time thinking about epistemic problems: can I see my opponent, can they see me, how do I deceive, am I being deceived, how do I avoid being detected/tracked/targeted/engaged, while possibly trying to do that to everything else. AI is not yet very good at that.
It doesn't, flying these is potentially very dangerous, there are many non-recoverable situations. But AFRL/NASA has been working on this for decades. The manoeuvres the higher level AI requests are actioned by highly assured dynamical systems solvers using model predictive control, like the autopilot, that maintain the aircraft in the safe envelope.
The unknowns in this system are (a) how agressive is the flight controller? (b) how clever is the autonomy?
Except Skynet has nukes. But what isn't addressed is that radiation is terrible for semiconductors, both in operation and during production.
Basically a nuclear war would end GPU production, GPUs have a 5% annual failure rate, higher with more background radiation, so it would get dumber instead of smarter, until it stopped working or partnered with biological compute (Daleks or The Matrix) or a human faction.
"Negative results" in the sense of replication failures and trial pre-registration are incredibly important. Lean is in some senses a mathematics response to the maths replication problem -- fields are so specialised, and proof checking so onerous, that many errors will go uncorrected.
Arguably mathematics should have pre-registration, so you can see who has tried what before, rather than just by knowing everyone in your field. As LLMs progress, we might get pre-registration of LLM-aided research. "We plan to spend $10K on Fable tokens to look at conjecture X is algebraic co-homology."
You would have to go back and do more work though, and if you couldn't fix it you would have to do another defence. But yes, it is a different situation to actually getting a good post doc.
I wish I had LLM-built Lean formalisations in university, so much of the math in the slides had errors, and some professors are very bad and ungracious admitting it, while simultaneously rejecting requests for clarifications by saying "the proof is in the slides".
Of course Lean proofs are rarely a good way to understand proofs, but hopefully they can be used to generate more human understandable arguments.
A recording of a car crash: discovering on live radio/podcast that the central tenet of your book is wrong, and amateurishly so.
Naomi Wolf 'death recorded' on BBC[1], skip to 5:51. After this the book was pulped and she had some sort of psychotic break during COVID and allied with ultra-right and COVID denialist loonies.
USAF has actually failed when it comes to 'scud hunt'. It doesn't have the combat ISR or strike capability it needs. As a result, the US basing and resupply situation is chaotic. The loss of the THAAD battery is extremely problematic, which is why they had to move one from SK.
The OWD capability allows Iran to attack tankers anywhere in the Gulf. Even with a surge in GCC state IAMD capability, ships cannot be protected. The failure to address this capability in planning was critical.
Obviously the DoD leadership is cowed by Hegseth and wouldn't give a true assessment, so we have a lions led by donkeys situation, but the operational plan was still bad.