#generalization vs specialization

The date is June 6th, 2025, and recently a wave of discussion has been sparked by Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb on June 1st pre-empting (according to Igor Sushko on bluesky) an intended record-breaking missile strike on Ukraine that same night, meant to intimidate ahead of negotiations the following day.

This comes at a time when general onlookers have been doubting sustainability of Ukraine's resistance efforts due to supply reduction from the States, and undisputably cements in the public's minds that it is indeed possible to inflict extremely disproportionate damage to military equipment in terms of dollar-per-dollar commitment needed, by making use of small but precise and most importantly cheap FPV drones to take out entire bombers, escorting fighters, and helicopters, some of which Russia literally cannot produce replacements for at this time. There's various other warblogs you can go to for analyzing the precise operational details and intricacies of planning and operational secrecy, but for me the highlight is the asymmetry. The US has seen drones used in various conflicts in the 21st century, to publicly controversial and politically bipartisan ends, but those were still comparatively expensive and used on definitely not disproportionately expensive military equipment. It's also seen asymmetrical warfare tactics in Vietnam, where creative underdog locals made taking over literally hell, but that was due to technique rather than technology. The things these are most comparable to, I think, is how cost-effective it is to make good use of anti-tank missiles, but even then these can be literally hundreds of times cheaper than that, and definitely cheaper than blowing up an area by brute force. Rather than shelling out in high explosives and artillery, going in the direction of being more effective by hitting a greater area, using technology that only hits the small target areas in those typical blasts you actually care about, Ukraine has shown a significant force multiplier for the resources it does have to minimize its own rate of attrition, as well as call into question the efficacy of reliance on only high-expenditure equipment and the rough comparisons of defense strength by military spending.

I'm not here today to call for everybody to shuffle their militaries or start drone operator training programs or whatever, obviously the situation varies country to country, force to force, and I'm not a military expert.

What I am here for, is to point out that the principle of cost reduction compared to brute force via increased specificity can be seen in more peaceful domains like the Event Horizon Telescope, which combined telescopes from all over the planet to form a tiny subset of an effectively Earth-sized telescope, in order to create the first black hole picture in 2019 as well as our own Milky Way's black hole's picture in 2022. It's seen when downgrading stellar-scale megaprojects like Dyson spheres to tiny practical versions like a partial Dyson swam of satellites reflecting more sun at solar generators on Earth, or away from equatorial Global South countries asymmetrically impacted by climate change, and when that is combined with meteorological models to smoothen impacts on the planet. It's seen when instead of obliterating an entire region of your body that hopefully contains every fibre of a metastasized tumour of cancerous cells we try to target just the malignant cells specifically, via nanobots or specific chemical candidates. There is power in specificity, efficiency, and increased understanding. In war, astronomy, infrastructure, medicine, and society, where addressing specific community needs if accurately done can be so much more sustainable than throwing catch-all solutions at an entire province or even nation. It is for this reason I advocate for more granular study of specifics, and autonomous teams of assessment/input closer to on-the-ground situations, and I hope people learn to appreciate power in local governance more if nothing else from this today.

This is part of a series on overarching themes of how understanding spectrums, specialization, nuance, and being open to hidden options broadly help us all in the end, even those who consider themselves mostly in the majorities! Feel free to ask me anything in the notes, and l’ll catch you on the next flight.

yours,