Ukraine

The war following Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. It appears in the wiki in two roles.

As a live-testing ground for modern warfare. On the podcasts about the Anduril book, Ukraine is the leading example of high-volume, low-cost, “attritable” conflict: Operation Spiderweb, in which about a million dollars of drones smuggled in under a truck’s false floor were described as autonomously identifying targets and causing roughly $7B of damage, destroying about a third of Russia’s long-range bomber fleet. Ukraine is also described as the military-industrial complex “in production”, fielding and learning from equipment faster than the US, and as a wake-up call that changed how defense is viewed. Neros is cited as a company that went directly to Ukraine to test. A TBPN host calls the work there some of the most meaningful founder-mode innovation of recent decades, and asks whether Anduril might acquire companies from it. See Defense Tech.
As a breaking-news case study. A saved thread by Samuel Breslow documents how volunteer Wikipedia editors built the invasion article in real time: created on Feb. 23, 2022, edited 178 times in the first three hours after Putin’s speech, and later 2,100+ times by 500+ editors, with 28 spinoff articles and 77 other-language editions.

Where this appears

Podcasts:

Saved tweets:

Companies: Neros