Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free.
The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Fear is a better attention grabber than the slog of compromise and mutual understanding.
Edit: Fell into the trap of commenting on politics. To an actual curiosity technical position. Has anyone seen any good content on living underground from an energy efficiency point of view?
Are you American? Because if you are from the country that dominated the world since WWII it feels different than being from the rest of the world.
Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.
Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.
The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.
That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.
The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.
The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.
If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.
Given the immense capabilities of the United States government, I don't think there is going to be a war inside the US. Or at least not one that lasts any amount of time.
>The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
The fallacy in the line of thinking that "why don't we all just shake hands, say something nice, and get along with each other" comes from the erroneous belief that everyone in the world just wants peace and material prosperity for themselves and their people. This isn't the case, for countless reasons.
Peace is what you and I want, because we're living in highly privileged lives where maintaining the peaceful status quo (one in which we're on top) for as long as we live is the best outcome for us, and because we have a fairly rational view of life and the world (e.g. we are not convinced that killing a certain people is the only key to an eternity in "heaven", or have bought into some myth of ethnoracial/cultural exceptionalism that needs to be defended by any means). We also aren't emburdened by some great injustice for which we have a burning itch for vengeance (e.g. no one has bombed your whole family).
This just isn't the case for everyone in the world.
Globalization offered the model for this. When the economy is globally linked there is more pressure for stability than conflict. I think that theory still holds. The fallout of the last 10 years is that the distribution of the wealth created in that system has not been even at all, and we are seeing huge wealth gaps. Jobs were redistributed to poorer nations and lost in a lot of wealthier markets.
If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.
>Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Because nature is filled with examples.
Look at the plants around you. They are nice and peaceful, right? No wars with other plants, no battles for life and death and resources... Well if you don't know anything about plants that's exactly what you'd think.
And I'm not really talking about animals and insects that are trying to consume them, plants themselves, rooted into the ground are in a constant war. Some breed very quickly to compete, making millions of seeds or growing at insane speeds. Some plants poison the soil around them with horrifically toxic substances so only they can grow. Some plants grow broad leaves flat against the ground strangling anything that tries to grow. Other plants make vast canopies creating a world of darkness below them to snuff competitors. Some plants have symbiotic relationships with bacteria to fix nitrogen so they grow faster than other plants. Some plants have relationships with ants and the ants keep competition away.
War and peace are simply game theories in real life. Take your statement
>Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Anything that doesn't involve you smashing someone's head in and instead doing anything that is even slightly cooperative is a peaceful scenario. Pretty much everything you do every day is just that.
Furthermore you need to dream up every possible conflict idea that you possibly can if you want to defend against it. The difficult part there is not using it against others. This is why you see people worry about things like advance AI. Because while it could come up with all kinds of peaceful ideas, even just a few good conflict ideas could make mankind go extinct.
> Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Sadly, war is often a driver of economic growth. WWII pulled the US economy out the Great Depression and transformed it into one of the most prosperous in human history. I'd argue that the proxy wars the US has been waging largely exist to satiate a military industrial complex that is focused on growth. Hard to grow when your business is war if there are no wars to fight.
And I'll wade into political waters. The US government has no problem waging war because it's not unpopular enough of an issue to threaten an administration. We're spending $1B a day now to fight Iran but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
I think the reason we can imagine conflict easier than peace is pretty structural. Wars usually happen because of disequilibrium, and we're sitting right in the middle of a big one.
The world order we know was built by and for the US when it was the uncontested superpower. Thats just not the case anymore. Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either. Both sides have real competing interests, this isnt some misunderstanding that better diplomacy can fix. Its a genuine redistribution problem.
Thats why peaceful outcomes are so hard to picture. They require everyone to accept losses and nobody is lining up for that.
I've never understood the post-WWII goal of permanent peace. Its a great vision to have, but unless its completely infeasible.
Unless we've managed to find ourselves alive at the point in all of history where humanity forever abandoned war all together, there will be another war at some point.
That doesn't mean it needs to happen today or that fighting to sustain peace isn't an admirable, and necessary, action to take. It does mean one still needs to consider the next war though, in case its forces upon us despite wanting peace.
I've had the same challenge when an argument is raised that nukes haven't been used since 1945 so they may never be used. It is quite a feat for sure, but in my opinion the only way a nuke is never again used in conflict is if we invent an even worse weapon and someone eventually uses that instead.
> Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict.
There have been wars ongoing since more than centuries. Since way before the US even existed. We could name names and point to movement that have enslaved people, conquered many countries and brought misery everywhere they went way before the european/american slave trade took place, for example. And countries in which slavery persisted long after that one slave-trade was stopped.
Even if you don't go to war, war and misery has a way to come to your country.
While in the US the current president is 2/3rd of his total terms (counting the eight years) and things may go better later on, there are beliefs and cultures in other parts of the world that make it so they are nearly always at war. And this won't stop even should the US "play nice".
I do not think mural understanding works. It just allows you to merely accept someone, but it doesn’t mean that you want to work with them.
What America pushed after the WW2 was the “American world order” which was primarily “if we can trade, let’s forget about war and make money.” America would sit in the middle, protect shipping routes, provide a stable currency to ease trade, and encourage trade pacts.
Surprisingly, unlike beliefs, religion, language, or almost anything else, wanting to make money is… somewhat universal. It breaks down barriers. Countries wanted to work together and make money from trade. It exploited human materialistic tendencies.
Why do we insist on building cars to be safe in a collision when it would be so much nicer to not have accidents? Why do we build cancer treatment when not getting cancer is a much better option?
If anything, the prospects for war are far higher now, because drones provide economic victory to a gigantic number of countries against a larger foes.
I would agree, except that de-escalation generally assumes there's a rational reason for conflict. That is, both sides want or need something that makes sense, and the failing to come to some sort of terms is what leads to war.
In the case of both Russia/Ukraine and US/Iran, there's nothing rational here. You can't de-escalate in these cases, because the aggressors (Putin and Trump) are making war for ideological or ego reasons. Putin wants glory and more territory for the Russian Empi-- oops, I mean Federation. Trump wants to distract from Epstein and other problems at home (which hasn't worked as well as most manufactured wars often do), and is in general just someone who likes to break things.
I often see these angles, how we should have prepared better or attacked this instead of that, or the unexpected strategy from the adversary. What about not bombing? The best safety trick the US can use is not bombing others.
Imagine the cost of a shahed drone being as low as $5,000, or less. Imagine the cartels south of the U.S. having tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of them. It could get painful fast. That's one thing this war is showing.
> what if the Army could cut and cover 100 meters of precast tunnel segments in a day
If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?
Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day?
Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled by hitting it anywhere along its length with a “bunker buster” amunition? Or a backpack full of explosives and a shovel? Or a few cans of fuel down the ventillation and a lit rag?
And if the answer is that you will patrol the topside to prevent such meddling, how do you protect your patrols? And if you can protect them why don’t you do the same for your logistics?
The ridiculous AI slop image of troops posing around a TBM that's apparently just dug a tunnel several multiples its own diameter is a good illustration of how clueless the author is about tunneling. TBMs are hugely complicated and expensive machines, need vast amounts of materials and the associated logistics network to operate, and drill 200 to 700 meters per week depending on the terrain. Deploying and operating one in battlefield conditions is absurd, all the enemy needs to do is fly a suicide drone into the open end of the tunnel and now you have a multi-hundred-million-dollar paperweight.
I was also thinking about this and I think it has to go a step further: Assets don't just need to be underground, they need to be on mobile rails underground. They need to constantly be moveable and pop out of one of thousands of holes to attack or if it comes to defensive e.g SAM sites they need to be moveable so that when an incoming missile is not interceptable that it can simply move away to a different underground location, pop out somewhere else and be able to keep defending. All you should be losing when a missile hits is a one of the underground exit holes. And of course to defeat such underground networks you need vast armies of small intelligent drones that can go in there and explore every tunnel where no human wants to risk setting foot in.
That's totally not the case. Asymmetry is that when the adversary starts doing it, US is politically and socially not allowed to reply in kind. For instance: ensuring they have no electricity makes it impossible to continue producing drones - knock out every power plant and grid transformer and conduct surveillance using IR cameras to find everything that resembles thermal power plant cooling, and knock it out as well - without electricity, industry can't work.
Drones work for Ukraine and Russia because neither side has a viable air force. If any of them had, they'd win without the need for drones. They work for US because political constraints prevents US from making appropriate use of air force.
There is a layer over this that should be noticed. Nowhere is safe, because international order is a joke. You can conduct invasions for land, to exterminate population, to whatever Trump is doing, every instrument of international law was just useless, or even cooperative with the stronger offender. Which will be the ones taking advantage of this situation? China, Brazil?
Everything is forgotten or accepted with the right media campaign, there are no war crimes, no punishment, as much you can get a commercial embargo or taxes if you are going against the interest of the biggest economic players.
Drones have upended the unit economics of combat and made older doctrines less relevant. Drones seem to combine the benefits of missiles level payloads, aircraft level control and ability to project force over a distance.
I don’t see any technical way we can stop them - but it’s not like we stopped guns.
The drone and LLM era are the end of many things we older folk are used to. The information commons are sunk with LLMs - we simply do not have the capacity (resources, manpower, bandwidth, desire) to verify the content being churned out every second.
I think the solution is more drones(sorry, American here). The only cost effective way to fight drones is similarly cheap drones or possibly energy weapons. Given the cost of energy weapons, you can't deploy them everywhere you want protection.
Therefore the only solution is drones.
You could try an idealistic approach like making drones illegal and attempting to control proliferation, but as we've seen with other weapons that's really not an effective strategy.
"The U.S. needs a coherent protection and survivability strategy across the DoW and all sectors of our economy. This conversation needs to be not only about how we do it, but how we organize to do it, how we budget and pay for it and how we rapidly deploy it."
This is all predicated on creating thousands of drones which is a state actor level threat. The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy. Digging tunnels and the like is unreasonable in peace time and likely not that effective in reality. Standing defenses become well planned targets. The real answer here is to spend the time and effort on diplomacy before there are issues and to stop appeasing countries like the US, Israel and Russia when they act badly. 'Special relationships' that are abused should be abandoned and trust should matter.
Against subsonic, low supersonic threats, short / medium term it's still about magazine depth and interceptor economics and sheer attrition math, i.e. PRC can build cheap interceptors at scale... has magnitude more targets due to sheer size, many of which are hardened, entire underground civil/mic infrastructure etc etc.
Physically, there is nothing preventing near 100% interception rates on subsonics and low supersonics. But once high end supersonics proliferate, things get spicy.
That was an interesting article, but this comment is what made me sit up:
The B-1 is only stationed at 2 bases with public access <2mi from the flight line. Often with all or most birds out of hangars.
The B-2 is only stationed at 1 base with public access <1mi from the flight line and hangars.
The US is not prepared at all for near-peer conflict.
I had this idea for a "drill" that I'd like to make someday.
Basically it was a box with several tentacles snaking out of it. The tentacles would each have a drill on the end, and they would dig holes in a surface. These holes would be spaced apart and they would be on the outer edge of where the tunnel is meant to be. The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.
After drilling around the surface, they'd turn (hence tentacles) and tunnel inward. Then, a big hammer or other impact would hit the main surface (after ensuring there were no tentacles below) and the shock of the impact would significantly reduce the amount of rock to carve through.
I really want to know why this wouldn't work, but I'm a designer, not an engineer, and I don't feel like making products. gee I sure wish I knew a bunch of engineers who would make this for me or at least tell me why it wouldn't work so I could use it sometime. Oh sorry for wanting there to be tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate, I'm just a forest witch who doesn't fit in with startup founders and product engineers. gee wish there was a market fit for me.
"we don't have to dig through the rocks, just dig around the big ones and let them fall free" every digger knows this
I find this vaguely analogous to the proliferation of cheap handguns in America. If drones are a response to asymmetrical power, the solution would be diplomacy. It undermines existing power paradigm, the solution isnn't complicated. Don't pick needless fights with your neighbors and allies. Maybe drones ultimately make better neighbors.
i already wrote that drones (or more precisely - cheap semi- and fully autonomous high-precision weapons) are a new strategic parity weapon https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44203848 - it has been playing that role in Ukraine vs. Russia, and now in Iran vs. USA.
Interesting that the original post demonstrates the same reaction to that new strategic parity weapon as the one caused back then by the original strategic parity weapon - the nuclear - to dig into the ground on the basis of the same key principle of "nowhere is safe"
I'm sure that even in the future when another strategic parity weapon emerges - say it would be a throwing rocks from space or a cheap mass production of autonomous nanobots precisely delivering some strong poison/pathogen - our first reaction would be the same urge to dig into the ground.
Laser weapons are the answer to this, and they’ve been around for a long time. The first drone shot down by a laser weapon happened in 1973! We have the technology. There just hasn’t really been a need to scale them until now, but they are being deployed to many ships in recent years.
I think it would be really interesting to study the costs/ benefits of digging a tunnel 10 meters underground compared to placing a sturdy building where you want it, and using bulldozers to cover it with 10 meters of earth and rock.
The irony is that we know it’s vastly cheaper to curtail war with treaties, diplomacy and mutually assured destruction… the US is the primary force moving away from it.
Seems to me that instead of digging a tunnel, you could get the same protection from ISR by building those road coverings out of corrugated metal, plywood, or even just laying vines over them. The benefit of the vines is they are cheap and could regrow after a drone hit.
Also, in addition to underground and outer space, we should consider underwater. Underwater bases would be safe against most missiles and drones. Cargo submarines could bring gear to our bases safe from drones and anti ship missiles. And we may want to revisit the idea of a submarine aircraft carrier but with drones instead of manned aircraft.
302 comments
Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict. Despite the proxy wars we've had a relatively peaceful world since WW1/WW2. Please humor me here, I'm not saying the world is horror free.
The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios? Fear is a better attention grabber than the slog of compromise and mutual understanding.
Edit: Fell into the trap of commenting on politics. To an actual curiosity technical position. Has anyone seen any good content on living underground from an energy efficiency point of view?
Bretton Woods gave the Americans an "exorbitant privilege" that basically meant the US could live extracting wealth continuously from the rest of the world.
Then later the petrodollar system was established. People needed oil, the US would protect the Arabs with its immense army (financed with the dollar system) and in return the oil had to be sold in dollars, so all the world needed dollars if they wanted energy.
The US could just print dollars, and the rest of the world would suffer inflation.
That was great for the US for sure. Why not continue? Because the rest of the world do not want to continue supporting the US system.
The US was ok with Sadam using chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians until he decided to change the currency for paying the oil to euros.
The US does not want to de-escalate if that means the world stops buying US bonds and suddenly they are bankrupt and can not pay its debts exporting inflation to the rest of the world.
If Americans suddenly lose 50 to 70% of purchasing power then there will be war inside the US, not outside.
>The emphasis I would hope would also be for improved negotiation tactics, better resource sharing and goal alignment between groups of people.
The fallacy in the line of thinking that "why don't we all just shake hands, say something nice, and get along with each other" comes from the erroneous belief that everyone in the world just wants peace and material prosperity for themselves and their people. This isn't the case, for countless reasons.
Peace is what you and I want, because we're living in highly privileged lives where maintaining the peaceful status quo (one in which we're on top) for as long as we live is the best outcome for us, and because we have a fairly rational view of life and the world (e.g. we are not convinced that killing a certain people is the only key to an eternity in "heaven", or have bought into some myth of ethnoracial/cultural exceptionalism that needs to be defended by any means). We also aren't emburdened by some great injustice for which we have a burning itch for vengeance (e.g. no one has bombed your whole family).
This just isn't the case for everyone in the world.
If nations can solve wealth and job distribution under globalization then I think we return back to peaceful times. The current problems stem from people getting left out and then voting in leaders who do not understand diplomacy or the global market at all.
>Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Because nature is filled with examples.
Look at the plants around you. They are nice and peaceful, right? No wars with other plants, no battles for life and death and resources... Well if you don't know anything about plants that's exactly what you'd think.
And I'm not really talking about animals and insects that are trying to consume them, plants themselves, rooted into the ground are in a constant war. Some breed very quickly to compete, making millions of seeds or growing at insane speeds. Some plants poison the soil around them with horrifically toxic substances so only they can grow. Some plants grow broad leaves flat against the ground strangling anything that tries to grow. Other plants make vast canopies creating a world of darkness below them to snuff competitors. Some plants have symbiotic relationships with bacteria to fix nitrogen so they grow faster than other plants. Some plants have relationships with ants and the ants keep competition away.
War and peace are simply game theories in real life. Take your statement
>Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Anything that doesn't involve you smashing someone's head in and instead doing anything that is even slightly cooperative is a peaceful scenario. Pretty much everything you do every day is just that.
Furthermore you need to dream up every possible conflict idea that you possibly can if you want to defend against it. The difficult part there is not using it against others. This is why you see people worry about things like advance AI. Because while it could come up with all kinds of peaceful ideas, even just a few good conflict ideas could make mankind go extinct.
> Why is it that we can dream up more conflict but not peaceful scenarios?
Sadly, war is often a driver of economic growth. WWII pulled the US economy out the Great Depression and transformed it into one of the most prosperous in human history. I'd argue that the proxy wars the US has been waging largely exist to satiate a military industrial complex that is focused on growth. Hard to grow when your business is war if there are no wars to fight.
And I'll wade into political waters. The US government has no problem waging war because it's not unpopular enough of an issue to threaten an administration. We're spending $1B a day now to fight Iran but we somehow can't find the political courage to improve healthcare or hunger here at home.
The world order we know was built by and for the US when it was the uncontested superpower. Thats just not the case anymore. Countries that spent decades being the West's cheap labor pool have risen up, industrialized, built real militaries, and they are not going back to where they were. But the West isnt going to voluntarily get poorer to make room for them either. Both sides have real competing interests, this isnt some misunderstanding that better diplomacy can fix. Its a genuine redistribution problem.
Thats why peaceful outcomes are so hard to picture. They require everyone to accept losses and nobody is lining up for that.
Unless we've managed to find ourselves alive at the point in all of history where humanity forever abandoned war all together, there will be another war at some point.
That doesn't mean it needs to happen today or that fighting to sustain peace isn't an admirable, and necessary, action to take. It does mean one still needs to consider the next war though, in case its forces upon us despite wanting peace.
I've had the same challenge when an argument is raised that nukes haven't been used since 1945 so they may never be used. It is quite a feat for sure, but in my opinion the only way a nuke is never again used in conflict is if we invent an even worse weapon and someone eventually uses that instead.
> Interestingly one does not look at the solutions to de-escalate conflict.
There have been wars ongoing since more than centuries. Since way before the US even existed. We could name names and point to movement that have enslaved people, conquered many countries and brought misery everywhere they went way before the european/american slave trade took place, for example. And countries in which slavery persisted long after that one slave-trade was stopped.
Even if you don't go to war, war and misery has a way to come to your country.
While in the US the current president is 2/3rd of his total terms (counting the eight years) and things may go better later on, there are beliefs and cultures in other parts of the world that make it so they are nearly always at war. And this won't stop even should the US "play nice".
What America pushed after the WW2 was the “American world order” which was primarily “if we can trade, let’s forget about war and make money.” America would sit in the middle, protect shipping routes, provide a stable currency to ease trade, and encourage trade pacts.
Surprisingly, unlike beliefs, religion, language, or almost anything else, wanting to make money is… somewhat universal. It breaks down barriers. Countries wanted to work together and make money from trade. It exploited human materialistic tendencies.
But we are reaching the limits of it.
In the case of both Russia/Ukraine and US/Iran, there's nothing rational here. You can't de-escalate in these cases, because the aggressors (Putin and Trump) are making war for ideological or ego reasons. Putin wants glory and more territory for the Russian Empi-- oops, I mean Federation. Trump wants to distract from Epstein and other problems at home (which hasn't worked as well as most manufactured wars often do), and is in general just someone who likes to break things.
When all you have is a hammer…
The Smedly Butler book was eye opening to read for me.
Diplomacy and trade works wonders when the enemy still wants you to buy things.
Sanctions work when they've got things to sell (and raw materials to buy), not bombed out craters where their factories were.
Si vis pacem ...
> what if the Army could cut and cover 100 meters of precast tunnel segments in a day
If you have the precast tunnel segments to do that why wouldn’t you just plop them down on the ground? What benefit does cutting and covering provide?
Also how would you protect your construction crew and construction supply chain as they are slowly plodding along 100m a day?
Once built, could this cut and cover tunnel be disabled by hitting it anywhere along its length with a “bunker buster” amunition? Or a backpack full of explosives and a shovel? Or a few cans of fuel down the ventillation and a lit rag?
And if the answer is that you will patrol the topside to prevent such meddling, how do you protect your patrols? And if you can protect them why don’t you do the same for your logistics?
What you need is small automated point-defense turrets, mounted on whatever you want to protect.
Drones work for Ukraine and Russia because neither side has a viable air force. If any of them had, they'd win without the need for drones. They work for US because political constraints prevents US from making appropriate use of air force.
Everything is forgotten or accepted with the right media campaign, there are no war crimes, no punishment, as much you can get a commercial embargo or taxes if you are going against the interest of the biggest economic players.
I don’t see any technical way we can stop them - but it’s not like we stopped guns.
The drone and LLM era are the end of many things we older folk are used to. The information commons are sunk with LLMs - we simply do not have the capacity (resources, manpower, bandwidth, desire) to verify the content being churned out every second.
Therefore the only solution is drones.
You could try an idealistic approach like making drones illegal and attempting to control proliferation, but as we've seen with other weapons that's really not an effective strategy.
This is all predicated on creating thousands of drones which is a state actor level threat. The first line of defense at this level should be diplomacy. Digging tunnels and the like is unreasonable in peace time and likely not that effective in reality. Standing defenses become well planned targets. The real answer here is to spend the time and effort on diplomacy before there are issues and to stop appeasing countries like the US, Israel and Russia when they act badly. 'Special relationships' that are abused should be abandoned and trust should matter.
Physically, there is nothing preventing near 100% interception rates on subsonics and low supersonics. But once high end supersonics proliferate, things get spicy.
Basically it was a box with several tentacles snaking out of it. The tentacles would each have a drill on the end, and they would dig holes in a surface. These holes would be spaced apart and they would be on the outer edge of where the tunnel is meant to be. The silicon arms would be full of actuators that measured their resistance in terms of the momentum they want plus the gravity weight of any nodes after them.
After drilling around the surface, they'd turn (hence tentacles) and tunnel inward. Then, a big hammer or other impact would hit the main surface (after ensuring there were no tentacles below) and the shock of the impact would significantly reduce the amount of rock to carve through.
I really want to know why this wouldn't work, but I'm a designer, not an engineer, and I don't feel like making products. gee I sure wish I knew a bunch of engineers who would make this for me or at least tell me why it wouldn't work so I could use it sometime. Oh sorry for wanting there to be tunnels in every city on earth so we didn't have to destroy woodland to build suburban cities at such a gorgeous rate, I'm just a forest witch who doesn't fit in with startup founders and product engineers. gee wish there was a market fit for me.
"we don't have to dig through the rocks, just dig around the big ones and let them fall free" every digger knows this
Interesting that the original post demonstrates the same reaction to that new strategic parity weapon as the one caused back then by the original strategic parity weapon - the nuclear - to dig into the ground on the basis of the same key principle of "nowhere is safe"
I'm sure that even in the future when another strategic parity weapon emerges - say it would be a throwing rocks from space or a cheap mass production of autonomous nanobots precisely delivering some strong poison/pathogen - our first reaction would be the same urge to dig into the ground.
Also, in addition to underground and outer space, we should consider underwater. Underwater bases would be safe against most missiles and drones. Cargo submarines could bring gear to our bases safe from drones and anti ship missiles. And we may want to revisit the idea of a submarine aircraft carrier but with drones instead of manned aircraft.
I guess there's just no other option. Freedom isn't free.