Builds in Satisfactory will always start off simple, but within a few hours, they can become a complete mess of spaghetti conveyors and crowded machines. This is part of the learning process; nobody gets their first build right. However, these tips and tricks will keep your factories completely satisfactory. Ahem. How to avoid spaghetti conveyors There are a few little things to pay attention to while building that will keep things clean in Satisfactory. They need to be observed from the start, really, as building on messy foundations is never a great place to begin. Depending on how much of a logistical nightmare you already have, you may have to strip things back to implement these or just start again. Obey the grid The first piece of advice I have for any aspiring Satisfactory layout artist is to stick to a grid system. Avoid anything other than straight lines and right angles as much as possible. This means running things in straight lines with splitters heading directl...

Asking if there is an end to Satisfactory is like asking if there is an end to humanity’s relentless march toward expansion and domination. The only limits are those of the host we tirelessly suck dry. Is there an Endgame to Satisfactory The simple answer is no; Satisfactory is an open-ended game with no end. However, there are a few points at which players consider themselves finished and move on. These can be particular goals and levels of unlocks or as simple as making a well-oiled, self-sustaining machine. The Golden Nut and Mug By collecting the FISCIT Tokens from the AWESOME SINK, many little trinkets and baubles can be purchased from the AWESOME SHOP. One of the last ones that can be bought is the Golden Nut. This, for many players, is considered the end game of Satisfactory. This is a bigger task than it may initially seem. The price of tokens goes up exponentially. Eventually, planet-wide networks will be needed to feed into the machine to receive enough ...

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“Battles,” Carl Von Clausewitz said, “decide everything.” Yet the famed Prussian military theorist is wrong. Great battles and brilliant leaders can shape the course of events. But often it is…

Ukraine has been lobbying hard for the lifting of all restrictions on weapons use. During the recent visit, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Rustem Umerov identified a number of Russian airfields within range…

How do you say 'hello' in grass?

Foreign Affairs Modern Wars Are Wars of Attrition Quick conclusions are the exception, not the rule. Credit: image via Shutterstock “Battles,” Carl Von Clausewitz said, “decide everything.” Yet the famed Prussian military theorist is wrong. Great battles and brilliant leaders can shape the course of events. But often it is attrition that is decisive in modern warfare. As Stalin observed in the wake of the Second World War, “Hitler’s generals, raised on the dogma of Clausewitz and Moltke,” lost because they “could not understand that wars are won in the factories.” Too often the history of warfare is reduced to names and dates. Popular thought emphasizes military engagements, from Waterloo to Verdun and beyond, and it often underscores famous generals and admirals, from Napoleon to Robert E. Lee. Battles can be turning points, and leadership does matter. But as the historian Cathal Nolan convincingly argued in his 2019 book The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost, they are seldom decisive. Indeed, for all their brilliance, famous commanders like Napoleon and Lee both ultimately lost.  Austerlitz was a triumph for Napoleon, and the Seven Days Battles rightly contributed to Lee’s legend. But in the end, battlefield brilliance wasn’t enough to overcome greater forces, be it via coalition or otherwise, marshaled against both men.  “Exhaustion of morale and material rather than finality through battles marks the endgame of many wars,” Nolan observes. This has long been the case, he notes. “Many who won hugely lopsided battles went on to lose the wars of which they were apart: Hannibal won at Cannae; Napoleon at Ulm; Hitler’s panzer armies took 650,000 prisoners outside of Kiev in 1941, yet all three went down to defeat.” But “in each case, strategic losses came after protracted attritional wars against enemies who refused to accept those earlier tactical outcomes as decisive in the greater conflict.” Quick wars and conclusive victories, such as Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War, are the exception. Indeed, even in that instance, while Israel was able to defeat the numerically superior Arab armies in less than a week, it took two additional conflicts, the War of Attrition and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, before the foremost leader of the Arab world, Egypt, set down its arms. There are, of course, other exceptions. But often attrition is the decisive factor. In fact, as Nolan ably points out “more often war results in something clouded, neither triumph nor defeat.” When surveying the overarching history of warfare since the Napoleonic Age, protracted and inconclusive conflicts are the norm, not the exception. Brief wars like the Spanish-American War are unusual, and even that conflict eventually descended into a long-running and bloody insurgency in the Philippines.   Real “victory,” Nolan writes, “must usher in political permanence.” Otherwise, hostilities are likely to continue—it is often just a matter of when they will break out again. The Hundred Years War, the wars of Louis XIV and Louis XV, the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and “the modern thirty years war more often discretely recorded as World War I and World War II,” are cases in point. Nonetheless, people are drawn to the idea of decisive battles. This is easily explainable; both people and places are key to forming narratives. But it contributes to the idea, popular among policymakers, the press, and the public, that a quick victory is potentially just around the corner. All that is needed is the right general, the right weapon, or a single, conclusive engagement. To be sure, generals do make a difference and certain battles are turning points in campaigns. But focusing on engagements and personalities and failing to appreciate the attritional nature of modern warfare can lead to overly optimistic assessments. Indeed, it leads to a belief, not unheard of in the annals of history, that war will be brief. As one former Pentagon official once told me: “The boys will always be home by Christmas.” The War Hawks of 1812 predicted a quick and easy campaign against the British, only to watch the White House burn. Both the North and the South thought that the American Civil War would be a quick affair. Leading Union generals, such as George McClellan, kept pushing for a “magic bullet,” including an ambitious amphibious invasion and the capture of Richmond. But what was needed, as Abraham Lincoln eventually realized, was a commander who grasped the “awful arithmetic”; a general who used the North’s numerical advantages in men and material. It was going to be a brutal slog, and the war wasn’t won until the Union had commanders like Grant and Sherman who grasped this fact. Nor has this phenomenon been limited to the United States. The Franco–Prussian War, which lasted from July 1870 to January 1871, contributed to the delusion that modern war could be a quick affair. Ditto for the Russo–Japanese War of 1905. Both led to a generation of Japanese and German strategists who emphasized decisive campaigns over wars of attrition. This bred overconfidence, and with it, tragedy. Technology was a contributing factor. As Nolan observes, “the way World War I ended suggested to all the planners that trench warfare was over, that mobility was restored to battle…. Maybe by restoring maneuver to battle, genius and decision could also be restored?” Consequently, German planners “put faith in the revolutionary capabilities of tanks and aircraft.” Early successes led to more overconfidence. Combined with the ideologies of Nazism and Japanese militarism—ideologies that emphasized racial and ethnic supremacism—it was a toxic brew.  But, as the historian Victor Davis Hanson pointed out in his book The Second World Wars: “The once ascendent Axis powers were completely ill-prepared—politically, militarily, and economically—to win the global war that they blundered into during 1941.” Yet only the Allies grasped a central fact: “In any existential war, only the side that has the ability to destroy the homeland of the other wins.”  Indeed, the Axis decision to wage war was nothing short of insane. Germany’s decision to invade the Soviet Union and Japan’s decision to attack Pearl Harbor were epic mistakes. The United States had ten times Japan’s industrial capacity. And Hitler himself would later claim that had he been aware of the nature of Russian tank production he would never have invaded the Soviet Union. “The later German-Italian-Japanese axis was far less impressive than the alliance that would soon emerge of Great Britain, America and Russia—having only a third of the three Allies’ combined populations, not to speak of their productive capacity,” Hanson records. By war’s end, the U.S. alone would have a wartime gross national product nearly greater than that of all the other Allied and Axis powers combined. As Paul Johnson noted, “By the end of the first year of the war America had raised its army production to the total of all three Axis powers together, and by 1944 had doubled it again–while at the same time creating an army which passed the 7 million mark in 1943.” He added, “one reason the Americans won Midway was by reducing a three-month repair-job on the carrier Yorktown to forty-eight hours, using 1,200 technicians round the clock. The construction program for the Pentagon,” he points out, “was cut from seven years to fourteen months.” These historical facts are fraught with implications for today’s policymakers.  In wars of attrition, quantity has a quality all its own. Scale matters. Productive capacity matters. As Johnson observes: “War is about waste; war is waste.” Accordingly, a healthy and dynamic defense industrial base matters; one can only win if, to paraphrase Churchill, the “tools to finish the job” are at hand. Strategy can’t be divorced from resources. Deterrence matters—perhaps most of all. “Starting wars is far easier than ending them,” Hanson writes. The United States did indeed have a far greater productive capacity than Imperial Japan. Yet even against an enemy whose GDP was leagues smaller, the U.S. and its allies were still forced to fight for more than three brutal years in the Indo-Pacific. Only the use of nuclear weapons brought that war to a conclusion. Notably, Imperial Japan’s economic and military capacity pales in comparison to today’s China—and the U.S. defense industrial base is but a shadow of what it once was.  Similarly, claims that the latest weapon will make a pivotal difference in the Russian-Ukrainian War should merit skepticism. Ditto for promises of an impending victory. Putin himself erred in thinking that the war he launched would be over quickly.  History says otherwise. The post Modern Wars Are Wars of Attrition appeared first on The American Conservative.

Foreign Affairs The U.S. Is Playing Nuclear Chicken in Ukraine The decay of the post–Cold War bilateral nuclear order has made escalation in the Ukraine war a risky prospect. Ukraine has been lobbying hard for the lifting of all restrictions on weapons use. During the recent visit, Ukraine’s Defense Minister Rustem Umerov identified a number of Russian airfields within range of U.S.- and European-provided long-range weapons, and Kiev is now seeking the green light to take the conflict to the next level. Zelensky himself will travel to Washington this month to present Biden with a “victory plan” that will reportedly outline Kiev’s path to achieving its war aims. Such a plan will undoubtedly include the acquisition and use of more long-range weaponry with offensive capabilities for striking Russia proper. As of right now, it hasn’t happened. The likely reason is that even our otherwise myopic policy makers understand that Kiev’s dire situation on the battlefield leaves it with one strategic option: getting the United States more involved. Moscow has subsequently been signaling that the threshold between proxy war and open engagement has been reached. Whether this threshold will be crossed is dependent on the decisions arrived at in the halls of Washington (and perhaps Brussels) over the next several weeks.  The present peril has been significantly exacerbated in the past several weeks by reported changes to the respective nuclear strategies of both Russia and the United States. As Ukraine has lobbied for further long-range capacities, Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov took the occasion to further chide the West for “playing with fire.” The United States was “asking for trouble” by allowing for strikes on Russian territory, he stated, and it would be irresponsible of those “entrusted with nuclear weapons” to engage in such reckless brinkmanship. Russian media also reported, following Lavrov’s announcement, that the Kremlin had now decided to “refine” the country’s nuclear doctrine in light of such provocative and escalatory behavior. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov confirmed the ongoing changes as well, citing Russia’s “Western adversaries’ escalation course in regards to the special military operation.” Current Russian doctrine states that nuclear weapon use is allowed either in retaliation for a first strike by an enemy or if there is an existential threat to the Russian state. The doctrine also states that an attack on Russian facilities responsible for a nuclear response are treated as acceptable justification for nuclear deployment. Kiev has already launched drone strikes against nuclear EWS (early warning system) assets in Russia’s southwest in the recent past. Given the prospect of Western-supplied long range weaponry, it seems reasonable that the Kremlin is signaling a heightened readiness to respond in case such attacks should continue to expand in both frequency and intensity. As a part of his statements on nuclear doctrine, Lavrov subsequently ridiculed Washington’s belief that it can maintain an open-ended proxy war with the express intention of weakening the Russian state, degrading its military capabilities, and encouraging regime change while still pretending to “sit on the sidelines.” As things currently stand the Ukrainian fighting position in the east appears increasingly precarious. Kiev is in desperate need of changing the strategic dynamics of the conflict, which currently favor Russia’s industrial production capacities and its ability to keep fresh men cycling into frontline units. One of the intentions behind Kiev’s ongoing Kursk offensive is to reassure its allies in their support of the Ukrainian war effort, and subsequently use any alleged success to lobby for the expanded use of Western-supplied weapons. For instance, Ukraine’s former Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba recently stated that the “biggest problem” facing Ukraine was the role of “the concept of escalation in decision-making processes among our partners.” Zelensky himself has regularly argued that Putin’s “redlines” are mere bluffs designed to scare the United States from providing Ukraine with the means to win the war. But this is only logical if Russia views the commitment to its newly annexed territories and the neutrality of Ukraine as negotiable positions, rather than existential considerations for the Russian state. All signs point to the latter being the case. Putin has continually referred to his readiness to use “all available means” to protect Russia and its territory, including, in October 2022, at the state ceremony formalizing the annexation of the four eastern oblasts—Donetsk, Lugansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. Betting on Russia bluffing is a risky gamble. It is no coincidence that Russian media is seizing on recently released reports of the Biden administration’s “Nuclear Employment Guidance” to warn that the U.S. is seeking to “increase its deployment of nuclear weapons after existing limitations under a bilateral reduction treaty with Russia expire in February 2026.” Some of the details of this NEG were also recently covered in the New York Times as well. Washington’s recalibrated “deterrent strategy to focus on China’s rapid expansion in its nuclear arsenal” is intended to address a world in which the nation’s enemies are coordinating to undermine America’s international position. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran are all identified as nuclear-armed states that could pose a unified threat to the United States. The new strategy therefore aims to provide a framework for effectively responding to coinciding crises across multiple regional theaters that include the potential use of both nuclear and nonnuclear weapons. Yet it is of course Russia—the country with the most nuclear warheads in the world—that is singled out as the most irresponsible actor in international politics. The Times quotes foreign policy pundit Richard Haass, who stated that the West is “dealing with a Russia that is radicalized,” and that it is therefore no longer safe to discount the use of nuclear weapons in a conventional conflict. The operative term in this statement is, of course, “radicalized,” implying a normative framework for right—rational, even—action from which Russia has subsequently departed. Quoting a nuclear strategist from MIT, the Times reports that it is now the West’s “responsibility to see the world as it is, not as we hoped or wished it would be… It is possible that we will one day look back and see the quarter-century after the Cold War as nuclear intermission.” While both countries played their role in this process, the United States certainly took advantage of its position of relative strength following the Cold War to increase tensions. This was a missed opportunity, as that same position could have allowed for it to take a very different track in promoting international security and non-proliferation. One of the first truly provocative actions that had important implications for nuclear doctrine was the decision by the Bush administration to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002. Despite the fact that it had been in place since 1972, the White House argued at the time that the treaty was no longer workable since “longer-range ballistic missiles” were being used as tools of “blackmail and coercion” against the United States by rogue actors. Russia was explicitly not included in the latter category, since it was assumed that they too were undergoing the process of surrendering their rights of national self-defense and political sovereignty. Anti-ballistic missile (ABM) systems provide defense against the second-strike capabilities of other nuclear armed states; this is of paramount consideration particularly for Russian defensive doctrine, since not only does the U.S. maintain a massive military presence on the European continent, but any such outbreak of hostilities would inevitably carry the risk of bringing the full weight of NATO against the Russian state as well. In other words, the guarantee of second-strike capabilities on the part of Moscow ensured equilibrium, since it provided a means of responding to—and thus deterring—a Western first strike. This is also particularly important because the United States continues to maintain a first-strike option as a part of its own nuclear doctrine. For its part, the United States argued that its abrogation of the treaty was actually in Russia’s interest, too. To quote the official justification provided in 2002, “The Cold War is over.” Moscow would now be expected to work with the United States in confronting the rogue actors of the world. While this may have made sense at the time, it quickly became apparent that it would be the transatlantic elite alone led by Washington who get to define what constitutes a “rogue actor.” The latter turns out to be an inherently expansive category and is largely qualified by a refusal to integrate into the supranational framework of globalized liberal democracy. This reaffirms the line of reasoning and conclusion mentioned above: Moscow’s concern with nuclear deterrence was no longer to be considered as legitimate or reasonable. The ABM treaty withdrawal was then followed by the planned construction of the ballistic missile defense systems in Poland under the Aegis Ashore program, a part of the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense framework run by the U.S. Missile Defense Agency. After a temporary delay, Aegis Ashore was made operational in Poland as a part of the “larger NATO missile shield” in July 2024. Despite initial assurances provided to Moscow that the missiles were intended to protect Europe from threats emanating out of countries such as Iran and North Korea, diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks revealed that—unsurprisingly—Poland was primarily concerned with Russia. Another Aegis Ashore system has also been operational in Romania since 2016, located at the Deveselu Air Base. The strategic importance of the Black Sea to Russia both militarily and economically cannot be understated, as the current war with Ukraine makes only too clear.  Given their locations, Moscow has also consistently expressed concern at the ability for such weapons systems to provide offensive strike capabilities, including with the use of nuclear-tipped missiles. In conjunction with the abandonment of the ABM treaty and the subsequent development of defense concepts such as the Aegis missile defense program was the U.S. withdrawal in 2019 from its INF treaty with Russia. The latter banned ground-launched missile systems with ranges between about 300 and 3,500 miles, and, given the strategic dynamic outlined above, was perceived by Moscow as yet another major escalatory step contributing to a less secure security environment. NATO live-fire exercises such as “Rail Gunner Rush” in Estonia in 2020 and “Fires Shock” in 2021 also set off alarms in Moscow; for instance, the former utilized “long-range precision fire assets” with ranges up to about 200 miles, while the latter included M270 multiple launch rocket systems simulating attacks on Russian targets. Russia has of course also had a hand in raising temperatures. Its “Zapad” (Russian for West) military exercise took place most recently in 2021, and included the simulation of similar long range strikes on NATO targets. While the event occurs every four years, the scope of the exercises has expanded significantly in the past decade or so, from about 20,000 participants in 2009 to around 200,000 in 2021. And as for the the withdrawal from the INF in 2019, the Trump Administration justified the move due to Russia’s alleged failure to abide by its terms, specifically concerning its deployment of an intermediate-range missile in 2018. Secret Russian military documents leaked earlier this year additionally discuss operating principles for the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons at a threshold below anything previously revealed. The latest report from the same cache of files was released in early August, and revealed that the Russian navy was also identifying targets across all of Europe (although it was allegedly also playing out scenarios for hostilities with other non-European countries like China and Iran). The files are from the years 2008 to 2014, but one would expect that the information around standards for nuclear weapons use remain pertinent. Still, a great deal of this can nonetheless be traced back to the evaluation of Russian behavior as “radical.” Whereas the provocatory Western actions taken above are presented as in service of ensuring international security, those committed by Russia—whether provocatory themselves or simply responding to NATO and U.S. moves—are seen as fundamentally irrational. As a result, tensions have never been higher. The degradation in U.S. relations with Russia and the mutual engagement in nuclear brinkmanship between the two during the past several decades means that this fact carries real danger. The war in Ukraine is no longer simply a regional conflict; what may have started off as a fight over historically disputed lines on the map now has the real potential of spiraling into something much larger. Of course, the United States doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) want such escalation. The use of Kiev as proxy is perceived to be a relatively low-cost means of weakening a geopolitical rival and ideological obstacle—while also keeping the coffers of defense contractors full and opening up the potential of further exploitation of Ukrainian natural resources—even if that relies upon a cynical strategy of bleeding the Ukrainian nation white. But whether Washington can reel in its dependent is at this point another matter entirely. The war may end with a significantly more dangerous and unstable security environment, on the European continent in particular and in the world more generally. But conversely, it may also provide opportunity to revisit the subject matter of some of the various treaties listed above. Issues such as nuclear disarmament, arms control and limiting nuclear proliferation, opening up new and better lines of communication between nations that do not depend upon an ideological commitment to any particular regime type, limiting the scope and breadth of military exercises, and other bilateral actions between the United States and Russia specifically that move away from a hair-trigger nuclear threshold are more important now than ever before. But for this to happen, leaders in the Western world must first be willing to take off their ideological blinders. The post The U.S. Is Playing Nuclear Chicken in Ukraine appeared first on The American Conservative.