Selected Lesser Grievances

There are lots of big issues facing the United States, the biggest of which is the existential threat to its continued functioning as a democracy posed by Donald Trump's candidacy in this year's Presidential election. And, this blog spends plenty of time thinking about those big issues.

But, the world is also full of things that aren't "big issues" but are minor annoyances and lesser grievances that it would be nice to see remedied, even if they aren't really make or break issues. This post recounts some of them.

Computer System Treatment Of Hyphenated Names And Similar Issues

* There ought to be a law that mandates that government and big business computer systems accommodate people who have hyphens, apostrophes, spaces, and just one or two characters in their names. This may have been an issue at the start of the computer age, but we have reached a point where it is no longer that hard to do.

Fraud

* We do a poor job of dealing with fraud perpetrated by phone, text message, email, social media, the Internet more generally, and the financial system. It should be possible to click a 9-1-1 style universal fraud reporting code and send reports of fraudulent activity instantly to the appropriate law enforcement agency and telecommunications providers, with no further effort from the person reporting it required. This should shut down the fraudster's phone number, and email accounts, social media accounts, and freeze any associated financial accounts almost instantly, and launch investigations as a matter of course into the perpetrators and into the institutions used by them to perpetrate the frauds. The cost of an individual fraudulent communication is small and the fraudsters count on that to shield them from investigations, which when they do happen aren't nimble enough to address it because the perpetrators are long gone. Yet, we have a system that is much better a dealing with the much less serious problem of copyright infringement than it is at dealing with fraud. 

* We should do a better job of dealing with deceptive business practices by credit reporting agencies that try to trick you into paying for services that they are required to provide for free.

* We should do a better job at shutting down businesses that dupe people into paying to get government services that are available cheaper or for free from the actual government.

* Credit cards should have PIN numbers the way that ATM cards do. This would dramatically reduce credit card fraud and reduce the incentive to steal credit cards.

* Food labeling should be more tightly regulated to discourage spurious and misleading health claims like "antibiotic free" in foods where antibiotics aren't allowed anyway, or claims that a food that ordinarily would have sugar but not fat anyway is "fat free".

Regulated Occupations

* We should have a central database of people who are sanctioned or "disbarred" from particular professions in a particular state or local jurisdictions, so that these people are prevented from going to some other state or local jurisdiction, or some other licensed occupation where the same conduct would also be disqualifying.

* The construction trades should be regulated at the state level, not the local level. This prevents an unreasonable barrier to entry for legitimate reputable construction contractors, which causes construction trade licensing to be ignored or overlooked, while also making it too easy for someone who has had their construction trade license rightfully revoked to just go to another locality that hasn't caught up with them yet.

Arrest Records

* We should also have a way of purging the official arrest records of people who are arrested or charged, but are ultimately not convicted of anything, from public records and databases (that do not at least disclose the exoneration with the arrest record report). Similarly, there should be a better process to purge or annotate criminal convictions that are vacated.

Mail, Package Delivery, And Porch Piracy

* The U.S. Postal System and all other package delivery firms should be liable for damages when it delivers a package to the wrong address (or doesn't deliver it at all), preventing the intended recipient from receiving it, even without requiring the sender to procure insurance, at least up to a certain dollar amount. 

* A parallel and similar system for dealing with fraud via mail to the one suggested above for telecommunications fraud should also be put in place. Violators (both firms and their managers and principals) should have their right to send mass mailings suspended for some period of time in addition to any other relief.

* A certain percentage of packages should have tracking chips that can be used to locate the packages if they are taken by porch pirates, allowing the perpetrators to be found, and creating too high of a risk for people contemplating porch piracy to consider doing so.

* Mutual funds should be required to make information about their funds publicly available, but mailing prospectus-like disclosure documents to their investors on a regular basis just kills trees without providing meaningful improvements in investor knowledge.

* The same is true of privacy policies. Require them to be made available in some standardized place, but don't mail them out to everyone connected to a business.

* Low advertiser postal rates for "junk mail" that don't reflect reduced costs for the postal system due to, e.g., pre-sorting, should be abolished and instead, all mail should have to pay first class mail rates. If it isn't worth sending a first class mail rates, it isn't worth bothering people with the unsolicited junk mail.

* Congressional franking privileges should be abolished and replaced with a budget for postage for each U.S. House and U.S. Senate office, based upon the population of the state in question for U.S. Senate offices. This privilege is widely abused by office holders and undermines the economic viability of the U.S. Postal Service.

* Mail-In Ballots should have business return postage type treatment so that the voters doesn't have to attack any postage to return their ballot through the mail, paid for by the governmental body conducting the election.

* Registered voters should indicate (in a database that is not public record at an individual level, just at a statistical level), their preferred language for election related information and communications. Thus, election related disclosures and ballots would go to voters only in their preferred language rather than in both English and Spanish with other language versions available upon request. This would make ballots more readable, and cut in half the amount of paper wasted in pre-election disclosures. It would also significantly reduce the burden on voters who need to receive translations into languages other than English or Spanish.

Long Ballots 

Ballots are too long, in part, because we have voters do too much. But long ballots discourage voting generally and lead to uninformed decision making.

* We should not elect, at any level coroners, surveyors, engineers, dog catchers, assessors, treasurers, clerks, or secretaries of state, who are supposed to be carrying out technocratic tasks with only limited discretion.

* Elections should not be administered by partisan elected officials, or by partisan political appointees.

* Judicial retention elections like the ones held in Colorado make ballots much longer (just short of half the questions on my ballot this year are judicial retention elections) and demand a great deal of effort from voters who try to make those decisions in an informed manner, but provide very little benefit. Typically only one or two judges in the entire state are not retained in any election cycle, and sometimes, none are. Only about 1% of judges are ever removed this way, which inadequate purges inadequate judges. And, a significant share of judges who are removed are removed for decisions that are legally required but unpopular. Simply put, the general voting public is ill-equipped to make this decision even with state supplied information pamphlets, and it is a great burden on voters that makes ballots too long. There might be a place for retention elections, but only in cases which are singled out as "high risk" in some reasonable manner, for the voting public to focus upon.

* In Colorado, the Taxpayer's Bill Of Rights, requires voters to approve tax increases and to authorize retention of revenues from existing taxes if those revenues grow fasters than a formula in the state constitution. I don't have a problem with the first kind of voting requirement for new taxes. But, votes on retention of revenues from existing taxes (called "debrucing" ballot issues, after Doug Bruce, the author of TABOR in Colorado) should not be required and make our ballots unnecessarily long.

* Similarly, while voters should have to authorize increased debt limits for local governments, they should not have to authorize incurring debt at levels previously authorized by voters and paid for with existing taxes, after the original debt is paid down, at least in part.

* The CU Board of Regents and the state school board, should not be chosen by the general public in elections, let alone, in partisan elections.

* Perhaps in addition to petitions to establish a minimum threshold of support for a ballot measure before putting it on the ballot for the general public to consider, citizen's initiatives should face a public opinion poll test and only be granted ballot access if it can garner at least, say, 35% support, in a public opinion poll conducted by a reputable and certified firm.

Notarization

* The requirement that statements made under penalty of perjury be presented in a notarized affidavit made under oath should be replaced with a rule allowing unnotarized declarations made under penalty of perjury in court documents, something that is already the case in the federal court system, and the court systems of Colorado and Utah, at least.

* Notarized but not otherwise witnessed wills are valid in Colorado. This should be the norm nationally.

Copyrights, Rights Of Publicity, And Privacy

Copyright laws are too strong for a digital age. Some examples:

* There should be more legally binding safe harbors for fair use. Far too many cases are in gray areas decided on a case by case basis by a particular judge and jury.

* Some version of a fair use defense or dramatic remedy limitation should be available in the cases where someone is sharing content made available by a copyright holder or a licensee for free on the Internet or via freely available broadcast television or radio.

* There should be a mechanism for mandatory licensing of orphan works and for translations of works that are not available in a particular language.

* There are overly expansive protections for derivative works in areas such a fan fiction that should be dialed back.

* Statutory damages in lieu of actual economic damages, and the availability of attorneys' fees in actions for copyright infringement, should also be greatly curtailed. In general, copyright remedies and rights should be closer to an unjust enrichment tort remedy and less like a property right. 

* Rights of publicity should be governed by a single, preclusive, federal law, not by a mishmash of state laws.

* Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is far too expansive and far too protective of privacy rights to the detriment of other legitimate interests.

* The scope of the applicability of the GDPR to people who are not in Europe, but can have dealings with Europeans over the Internet is far too unclear.

Traffic Laws

* Speed limits should reflect the speed that an ordinary reasonable driver would travel on a road as it is designed. Local governments should not be allowed to set lower speed limits than the road conditions reflect in response to local community pressure. If a local government wants traffic to move more slowly than the legally authorized speed limit given the road conditions, it needs to redesign the road, rather than just creating a speed trap.

* When push comes to shove, bicycles should be regulated as pedestrians not as motor vehicles. They should go on sidewalks and designated bike paths in most cases, rather than being expected to share designated highways and arterial streets with automobiles. A bicycle crashing into a pedestrian is much less serious than a car crashing into a bicycle.

Debt Collection

* It should be a serious offense to try to collect zombie debts that are barred by the statute of limitations or have been discharged in bankruptcy.

* It should be a serious offense to try to collect debts from the next of kin of debtors who have not guaranteed the debt in writing, rather than the decedent's probate estate.

Medical Billing

* Until the day when we have universal health care, health care providers to patients with health insurance should be forbidden from trying to collect their bills directly from the patient beyond a health insurance policy authorized co-pay to be paid at the time of service. Any provider that accepts any payment from that patient's health insurance should be required to honor the health insurance company's disallowance of their charges. And, health insurers should have to pay the full allowed charge to the health care provider and then collect the patient's share of that charge under the insurance policy from the patient. Patients shouldn't be put in the middle and as a guarantor in the face of disputes between health care providers and health insurers. A patient should be able to know exactly what he or she will owe simply by reading their health insurance policy.

* Emergency rooms shouldn't be allowed to charge more to someone who errantly went to an ER instead of an urgent care facility for the same services. The task of getting someone to the right level of care takes medical knowledge and should be the responsibility of the health care provider.

* Health care providers shouldn't be allowed to charge different rates for the same work done at a hospital affiliated facility (which is often billed at a higher rate) than at another facility.

* When there are contingent fee lawsuits for personal injuries, health care providers with health care liens on the recovery should have to share the risk in a way that afford the injured person some benefit of the lawsuit according to a standard formula that doesn't have to be negotiated on a case by case basis.

Court E-Filing Discrepancies

* Court E-Filing systems should have much less authority to just reject filings. Instead, if there is problem with the way that the filling was put into the e-filing system, that correction should just be made by the system, and if there is a problem with the document filed itself, it should issue an order to show cause directing the filer to correct it in a clearly described manner before a reasonable deadline to prevent it from being stricken with a loss of the original filing date.

Municipal Ordinances

* Municipalities and local governments should not be permitted to punish ordinance violations with incarceration or arrest. Incarceration should be limited to violations of state laws.

* Colorado should abolish municipal courts and require municipal ordinance violations to be enforced in civil actions brought by city attorneys in county courts that are part of the state court system.

How Urban Are U.S. States?

This map from 2010 shows the percentage of the population of each state that is urban. Some of the results are odds with our intuition. While it isn't a full explanation, a lot of the red state, blue state divide is a rural-urban divide.

This in turn, sheds light on the use of transit in different places in the U.S. The West has lots of empty space. But the places with people in them are often urban and high density.

Quote Of The Day

Love is not earned—it’s something we crash into. Being flattered that someone has fallen in love with you is sort of like being flattered by an automobile collision. Really, most of the time it’s an impersonal accident.

From bookbear express.

U.S. Navy Vulnerable To Unconventional Tactics

This was classified information until this year. Indeed, the final report on the exercise lied about it. The bottom line is that U.S. surface combatants are vulnerable to surprise attacks in addition to other threats.

As a U.S. Navy carrier battle group entered the Persian Gulf, it came under surprise attack by adversaries launching missiles from commercial ships and radio-silent aircraft that quickly overwhelmed its missile defense systems. Nineteen U.S. ships, including the aircraft carrier, were destroyed and sunk within 10 minutes.

Fortunately for U.S. forces, this scenario was only a simulation in a massive, $250 million war game named Millennial Challenge 2002. After the unexpected and humbling “loss” in July 2002, military officials at Joint Forces Command in Norfolk paused the war game, “refloated” the ships and restarted the exercise. They also imposed limits on enemy tactics. After the restart, the U.S. forces defeated their adversaries in a more conventionally fought simulation.

From the Washington Post.

Other Polling Averages

FiveThirtyEight's polling averages are the most credible in my opinion. It gives Trump a 52% chance of winning the Presidential race, and provides these swing state averages:

In national polling averages, Harris leads by 1.3 percentage points, which is probably too little to win the Electoral College (this takes a lead of about 3.4 percentage points in national polls for a Democrat).

The national polling also presents the conundrum that Harris has a positive 0.1 percentage point favorability rating, while Trump has a -8.5 percentage point favorability rating, a disparity that isn't reflected in the head to head general election polling.

But FiveThirtyEight isn't the only game in town.

Real Clear Politics, which is right leaning and not nearly as sophisticated or credible provides this data set (which emphasize the 2020 and 2016 elections as a benchmark):

The New York Times provides these averages (which would also probably imply a Trump win if they are perfectly accurate):

CNN's latest polls of likely voters have a tie in Pennsylvania (48-48) and a lead for Harris in Michigan (48-43) and Wisconsin (51-45).

The Presidential race is clearly very close in many of the seven swing states. Trump has improved his position in the polling in the last week or two, giving him a slight edge in all three sets of polling averages, and all three have the critical state of Pennsylvania leaning slightly in Trump's favor.

But given systemic polling biases against Trump in 2016 and 2020, and efforts to overcome those biases by pollsters in 2024, the race is too close to call.

The odds that the control of the U.S. Senate will flip to the GOP are very strong. FiveThirtyEight puts it at 89%. The close Senate races are as follows, and Democrats need Ohio, plus the states where they are leading, plus Florida or Texas, to keep a majority even if Harris wins.

FiveThirtyEight estimates the odds of the Republicans holding onto the House at 52% with a most likely result of a narrow 218-217 seat majority, which would be a few seats less than the House GOP's current majority. There are two House seats (in California and Washington State) that lean GOP by less than a percentage point and two House seats (in New York State and Michigan) that lean Democratic by less than a percentage point.

Analysis

A mere one or two percentage point difference between the polling averages and actual voting outcomes could dramatically swing these races one way or the other (and these results are likely to be strongly correlated).

Harris is unlikely to win and get control of both the House and the Senate if she wins. A Harris Presidency would also have to swim upstream against an ultraconservative U.S. Supreme Court. Arguably, these are plus factors for voters who dislike Trump, but are worried about expansive legislative action from Harris. 

If Trump wins, he will almost surely have a majority in the Senate, and he has a very good chance of having a thin majority in the House, which might be less factious than it is currently, with Trump as President to mediate their internal disputes. A GOP trifecta compounded by the current ultraconservative U.S. Supreme Court would give Trump immense power. If Trump wins the Presidency, but Democrats flip the House, in contrast, his power would be at least somewhat restrained.

Stray Military Procurement Ideas

* Modularity is a commonly touted feature of military systems but doesn't seem to work very well in practice. One system is rarely traded out for a different module on the fly.

Modularity has not been a valuable feature, for example, of the Littoral Combat Ships, not of which has changed its mission since it entered service.

* Likewise, one size fits all tends to not optimize a system's effectiveness in any mission, while systems purpose built for a particular narrow mission seem to fare better, with fewer procurement hiccups and a better final product. 

For example, the F-35A jet fighter has not been a good successor to the A-10 in the close air support role, and the commonalities that were so highly sought between the F-35A for the Air Force, the F-35C for U.S. aircraft carriers, and the F-35B, primarily for the U.S. Marine Corps for launches from both aircraft carriers and helicopter carriers, has not been very useful. Maybe commonalities between the F-35C and the F-35B have provided minor benefits, but the commonalities between these models than the F-35A have been very modest, if there have been any benefits. The F-35A's high costs and technical complexity have also led the U.S. Air Force to purchase new F-15Es which lack the F-35A's stealth, a feature that is irrelevant in places where U.S. forces have neutralized anti-air missile systems and secured air superiority.

Likewise, the F-35A is expensive overkill in the role of providing security to the airspace in the vicinity of U.S. cities against rogue civilian aircraft, even if lightly armed. Even an F-16 is really overkill for this role. Homeland defense of U.S. cities against rogue civilian aircraft does not require stealth, supersonic speed, or any capacity to drop bombs, and requires only a small compliment of air to air weapons relative to most fighter jets. But since these missions keep fighters in the air for many hours a year, keeping operating costs down is important. And, an aircraft purpose built for this mission could be much less expensive per plane than an F-35A or an F-15E, let alone the proposed Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) fighter aircraft whose development was recently put on hold.

While there is a place for a supersonic stealth fighter that can carry a decent sized load of missiles and bombs, not all missions require that capability, especially once air superiority is achieved. Dispensing with those capabilities in different military aircraft models where these capabilities aren't needed can greatly reduce the cost of the overall Air Force fleet of warplanes without unduly reducing its capabilities.

However, often a military system designed for one narrow mission can be adapted later with variants for different missions once the original version has proven itself. For example, most U.S. fighter jet designs have had second lives as electronic warfare aircraft, like the EF-18 Growler. The success of both M113 and Bradley M2 tracked troop transports, and the wheeled Stryker armored personnel carrier, and the Humvee, have led to many successful, single purpose variants of each of them. There have likewise been many variants of the UH-60 Blackhawk military transport helicopter.

* Another problem with one size fits all is the need to have military systems proportional to the missions that they carry out, even in cases where there are different kinds of conflicts with the same opponent.

For example, the kinds of military systems that would be best for repelling an invasion of Taiwan by the People's Republic of China are not necessarily or even usually the kinds of military systems that are best for dealing with maritime harassment of civilian boats and ships near the Philippines and Vietnam by the Chinese Coast Guard, and paramilitary Chinese commercial ships.

In the same vein, the kind of warplanes and Air Force tactics that make sense in a "permissive" environment where the opponent lacks modern anti-aircraft missiles is very different from the warplanes and Air Force tactics that make sense in a non-permissive environment where the opponent has advanced air defense systems.

The military systems that make sense for U.S. National Guard and U.S. Coast Guard forces charged primarily with homeland defense, low intensity counterinsurgency responses, and disaster response in the United States and its coastal waters is very different from the military systems that make sense for the active duty forces of the Department of Defense (in peacetime) engaging in expeditionary military activities.

It is all good and well to have anti-drone and anti-missile missiles. But if they cost $1 million each and the incoming drones and missiles cost $10,000 to $100,000 each, this is still a losing proposition in a war of attrition in the long run.

Not every country has a military large enough to make multiple different kinds of military systems for different situations. But the U.S., with the largest military budget in the world by far, is large enough to do so, and has a greater need to do so because it could potentially be involved in a much broader class of conflicts.

* U.S. National Guard forces and the U.S. Coast Guard are mostly adequate to maintain domestic security and protect against military invasions of the United States. It doesn't take much to defend the U.S. from Canada and Mexico, or from other nearby countries in the Caribbean, Central America, or South America. These forces might need some assistance from the regular U.S. Navy and U.S. Air Force and U.S. Space Force to defend U.S. borders from an attack across the Pacific Ocean or the Atlantic Ocean with warships or warplanes or long range missiles (possibly nuclear), but only a small fraction of their resources are needed, and neither the U.S. Army nor the U.S. Marine Corps are very well suited to defend U.S. territory against this kind of military invasion.

Homeland defense missions don't require bomber aircraft, heavy main battle tanks, or numerous artillery batteries. Insurgent forces are likely to have small arms up to 0.50 caliber that are either semi-automatic or have been modified to be automatic assault rifles and improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and armed drones adapted from commercial off the shelf models, but not tanks, armored personnel carriers, artillery, anti-armor missiles, rocket propelled grenades, recoilless rifles (i.e. bazookas), cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, nuclear weapons, or heavily armed warships.

* Predominantly, the U.S. Department of Defense is tasked with conducting military operations abroad and on the high seas against state actors and insurgent or terrorist groups that rival state actors (and may be funded and supplied by state actors such as the Houthis). This means that speed of deployment should be a major consideration for all of these forces. A 70-80 ton tank does not do any good in foreign wars sitting at domestic U.S. military bases. If slow and heavy military systems have any place in modern warfare, they need to be prepositioned where they are likely to be needed.

For example, while they both launch identical artillery missiles, the M270 multiple rocket launcher based variant of the M2 Bradley infantry fighting vehicle has ended up being much less in demand than the C-130 transportable, wheeled HIMARs system which carries half as many missiles and is unarmored.

How Safe Are Townhouses and Duplexes?

TL;DR Townhouses and duplexes are probably not much more or less dangerous than single family homes, and on balance are probably a little safer from structure fire risks.

A friend on Facebook, in reaction to the meme above, expressed concern that townhouses and duplexes might be more vulnerable to threats like fire and insect infestations (relative to single family homes) or unlawful entry via the attic, and that even if current building codes address these concerns, that codes are not widely complied with to alleviate this risk. My own home which is half of a duplex, does not have a firewall that extends to the attic and has a shared open attic space (it was built in 1925, long before current fire and building codes were in place).

While this is a facially plausible possibility, I am skeptical of all of these points.

Structure fires were way down in the U.S. from 1977 to 2021, which suggests that more stringent building and fire codes are having the desired effect of reducing the risk of home structure fires:

Structure fire statistics are lumped by 1-2 unit homes v. "apartments" which seem to include everything from structures with three or more townhouses to high rise apartments, so the distinction between single family homes and duplexes is hard to evaluate:

Another fire statistic publication provides raw data in chart form, and reveals that there are slightly fewer deaths per fire in duplexes than there are in single family homes, despite the fact that duplexes have more residents, on average, than single family homes:

The structure fire statistics aren't provided as rates relative to the percentage of housing stock of each time in residential units, although another source sheds some insight into the existing mix. If the chart below is right, there are about 1/3rd as many townhouses and duplexes as there are single family homes (or less), but the number of fires in duplexes is about 11th of the number of single family homes (with considerable uncertainty because the distinction between single family homes and duplexes isn't made in about half of the data).

There are about 32% as many apartment fires as there are single family home fires, but it is unclear from the illustration above where the percentage of housing stock that counts as apartments rather than 1-2 unit residences fits between 10%/62% (for 20+ unit apartments) and 32%/62% (for all attached residences except single family homes), so somewhere between 1/6th and 1/2. The 5% of the housing stock that is not elsewhere classified probably fits into the other categories of residential structure fires in the fire statistics. The statistics aren't inconsistent with the likelihood of a fire being roughly the same for apartments as for 1-2 unit residences, but don't definitively establish this point either and could err in either direction.

Apartment fires are much less deadly per fire than single family home and duplex fires, despite having far more residents per fire, on average, in a distinction that has arisen since 1980, probably due to more strict building codes for apartments built since then:

The statistics above don't completely and finally resolve the issue, although they do seem to suggest that duplexes and townhouses at a minimum, aren't materially less safe than single family detached homes. The homeowner's insurance bill for my duplex is not very much different than for a comparable single family home, which suggests that there isn't much of a difference in risk.

Also, modern townhouses and duplexes do require a firewall between each unit, in a building and fire code requirement that I suspect is followed in a very high share of all new builds, although though my friend is more skeptical about code compliance (and I would agree that code compliance is patchy in smaller scale renovation work).

Note also that these trends exist despite the fact that apartment dwellers tend to be younger and less affluent than duplex and townhouse dwellers, who in turn tend to be younger and less affluent than single family home dwellers, on average, and one would generally expect, a priori, that younger and less affluent residents would be more likely to do things that would cause fires (although younger people are less likely to smoke and are probably more likely to live in more recently built housing).

Shared walls (and ceiling/floors in apartments) also have benefits. Most notably, they increase HVAC efficiency.

We Need An Immunity Amendment

Legislation can't really overcome the U.S. Supreme Court's dangerous expansion of Presidential immunity from civil and criminal liability. This calls for a constitutional amendment, and if it is prospective, it might secure bipartisan support. I would suggest the following language:

No person acting under the color of state or federal law shall have immunity from civil or criminal consequences arising under federal law for their actions, except to the extent expressly provided by law by Congress.

This would put Presidential immunity, judicial immunity, prosecutorial immunity, and qualified immunity back in the hands of Congress, as a legislative decision, rather than allowing the U.S. Supreme Court to unilaterally decide its extent. 

The Dawes Act Hammered Native Americans

In contrast to earlier United States policies of open war, forcible removal, and relocation to address the “Indian Problem,” the Dawes Act of 1887 focused on assimilation and land severalty — making American Indians citizens of the United States with individually-titled plots of land rather than members of collective tribes with communal land. Considerable scholarship shows that the consequences of the policy differed substantially from its stated goals, and by the time of its repeal in 1934, American Indians had lost two-thirds of all native land held in 1887 (86 million acres)—and nearly two-thirds of American Indians had become landless or unable to meet subsistence needs. Complementing rich qualitative history, this paper provides new quantitative evidence on the impact of the Dawes Act on mortality among American Indian children and adults. Using 1900 and 1910 U.S. population census data to study both household and tribe-level variation in allotment timing, we find that assimilation and allotment policy increased various measures of American Indian child and adult mortality from nearly 20% to as much as one third (implying a decline in life expectancy at birth of about 20%) — confirming contemporary critics’ adamant concerns about the Dawes Act.

Grant Miller, Jack Shane & C. Matthew Snipp, "The Impact of United States Assimilation and Allotment Policy on American Indian Mortality" NBER Working Paper #33057 (October 2024).

It turns out that suddenly switching from a communal land ownership regime to an individual land ownership regime is just as deadly as socializing individual land ownership.

Motorcycles Are Still Dangerous

 

The B-2 Is Rarely Used

Despite the small size of the U.S. B-2 bomber fleet, it isn't a heavily used resource despite its immense cost.

The U.S. bombing yesterday of five bunkers where Houthi rebels in Yemen stored weapons (which killed no civilians) was carried out by a B-2 bomber.

The last time that this class of bomber was used in combat before this week was seven years ago in 2017 in a January 18 strike on an ISIS training camp by two B-2s. 

Before that it was used to strike targets in Libya in March of 2011. 

They were used 49 times in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003. 

It was first used in combat in the Kosovo War in 1999 (where it was used heavily), two years after it entered military service in 1997. The first B-2 bomber flew thirty-five years ago on July 17, 1989, eight years before it entered military service.

The B-2's global range (6,900 miles, which can be greatly extended with aerial refueling), stealth capabilities, and heavy bomb payload (20-25 tons) is a combination unmatched in the world. It has a crew of two. 

Just 21 were built (driving up the per unit cost immensely) and 17 remain in service, while four had accidents or crashes that removed them from service. This is quite unimpressive for such a small number of aircraft when the number of combat missions it has flown in the 27 years it has been in military service is so small. 

The U.S. is in the process of fielding a replacement B-21 bomber which is quite similar in design and capabilities to the B-2. 

Electronic Warfare

General Dynamics has put an "Electronic Warfare" suite in its new squad sized dune buggy the Army called the "Infantry Squad Vehicle." This post isn't about that vehicle in particular.

Instead, this post is a short gripe about the term "Electronic warfare" which generally obscures more than it elucidates. It is about as clear as saying "explosive material warfare" to refer to everything from bullets, to tanks rounds, to artillery rounds, to missiles, to bombs. It might be accurate, but it isn't informative.

Electronic devices can be used in warfare in all sorts of ways. They can be used to jam enemy communications and guidance systems, to locate enemy radar, to spy on enemy electronic communications, to locate the source of enemy communications, to determine one's own location, to determine someone else's location with radar or electronic device homing, to jam GPS signals, to do calculations and coordinate information, to communicate, and probably far more. In a vacuum, it doesn't tell you much that is helpful.

As explained in the article in this case:

The electronic warfare kit is part of the Tactical Electronic Warfare System-Infantry Brigade Combat Team, or TEWS-I, which was initially a quick-reaction capability built by General Dynamics, providing a smaller system designed for infantry vehicles. It was a prototype activity to serve as a risk reduction and requirements pathfinder for the Army’s program of record, the Terrestrial Layer System-Brigade Combat Team (TLS-BCT).

That system was designed as the first integrated signals intelligence, cyber and electronic warfare platform and as initially conceived, was to be mounted on Strykers and then Army Multi-Purpose Vehicle variant prototypes.

The service has now decided to split up the platform, separating the signals intelligence and electronic warfare capabilities and pursuing a new architecture for its EW suite. That leaves a gap in vehicle-borne systems given there is now a man-packable capability for direction finding and limited electronic attack, and a larger system in development for higher echelons. . . .

The TEWS-I ISV technology is “a middleweight fighter in the electronic warfare space because it has the capability at distance to have an effect and be able to sense at a distance. It has a wide frequency range that it covers. It has an extensive peer-relevant set of signals that it handles,” Derek Merrill, chief engineer for tactical signals intelligence, electronic warfare and NetC2 at General Dynamics Mission Systems, said in an interview at the annual AUSA conference. “It has the capability to detect, identify, locate, report and attack targets … It also handles software-based signals integration from the government, so they can give us a signal [and] we integrate it very quickly onto the platform.”

So, yeah, the terminology could be more transparent. 

American Politics Right Now Are A Horror Story

This morning I read a guest essay in the New York Times by Eric Hagen entitled "I Grew Up in Bucks County, Pa. I Went Back to Try to Make Sense of the Election." 

It recounts what the author learned talking to sixty voters in an evenly split small town in rural Pennsylvania (in 2020, Trump got 276 votes and Biden 274), about 40 miles away from Philadelphia: precisely the sort of place where this year's Presidential election will be decided. The model at the FiveThirtyEight blog puts Pennsylvania's odds of being the marginal state that decides this year's Presidential election is 20.4% which is higher than any other state, with Harris's odds of winning currently at 53% as I write, nineteen days before the election.

Every single person he interviewed who backed Biden in 2020 backs Harris this year. Every single person he interviewed who backed Trump in 2024 backs Trump this year.

The justifications that Harris supporters have for backing their candidate are unexceptional, unsurprising, and mirror my own. A Harris supporter notes that: 

We were sitting at an outdoor table, overlooking the river. Riegelsville is in the far north of Bucks County, surrounded by corn and soybean fields, and only about 10 miles closer to Philadelphia than to New York City. “You see it’s so nice here,” he said. “It’s an amazing town. But politics has kept people a little separated. It has broken up some friendships.”

The horror comes from the Trump supporters, who make up about 47% of Americans, and about 49% of voters in the marginal swing states that are necessary for the winner to capture the electoral college in the latest polling averages. 

They utterly confound me and make me wonder how American politics became so broken, and how it can be fixed. In a better system, it would be the popular vote and not the electoral vote that would matter, but it would still be very close. I'll recount their side of the story in depth from this essay, in the hope of understanding it.

In Riegelsville, I was curious to know if the two-vote margin in 2020 was a signal that the town’s residents might be open-minded as they consider the candidates running this year — or if they are cleaved into two tribes like much of the rest of the nation. Would the fact that they live in proximity and actually mix with one another make any difference?

Over the course of five days, in two visits, I talked with 60 voters. All of them were white, reflecting the nearly all-white town. Riegelsville is, however, economically diverse: Among those I talked to were small-business owners, teachers, an architect, a retired stone mason and a couple of retirees from a now-shuttered Bethlehem Steel plant in nearby Easton, Pa. . . .

The more time I spent reporting, the more I realized I was not really writing about the numbers — or even the candidates. This election, more so than any I can remember, is about us, and how we think about our presidents. The people I talked to in this friendly little town expressed two starkly different visions of what a president should be — and what he or she represents in American society. . . .

Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many said that was an outdated or even naïve notion. They know who Mr. Trump is and don’t care.

“He’s a shyster, but I’d take him over her,” Marvin Cegielski, 84, the retired stone mason, told me. “He’ll block off the border.”

“I detest him as a person,” said Natalie Wriker, 37, who works at the Lutheran church in town, “but he’s the lesser of two evils.” She said she believes that politicians are “easily bought” but that Mr. Trump has less motivation to do things for money because of his wealth.

The Trump supporters had a more complicated story to tell. They did not express fears that Ms. Harris would take away their guns — or, for that matter, even mention if they owned guns. None of them were QAnon-level conspiracy theorists who claimed that Democrats were pedophiles. In other words, they did not seem insane.

But in their defense of Mr. Trump — of his serial lying; his misogyny; his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection — they offered a range of explanations and rationalizations that did not align with any knowable reality.

“I think it was a crowd that just got out of hand,” Gary Chase, 72, said when I asked him about Jan. 6. “Some of it was set up. There were feds in the crowd who whipped it all into a frenzy.”

Mr. Chase is one of five members of the Borough Council in Riegelsville, an elected but unpaid position. He is a Republican, though the party affiliation is not, as he put it, “a nametag you wear here.” Like most of the Trump supporters I talked with, he gets his information from Fox News.

He viewed Jan. 6 not as a national tragedy but as a partisan event. “It was a political show, a distraction from the whole Hunter Biden scandal,” he said.

Those sentiments were echoed by others. Jon Libasci, 62, an architect, said, “How was it different from the police headquarters burned down during the B.L.M. protests?”

I first talked with Mr. Libasci and his wife, Yeyi, at the post office and then again one evening over drinks at their home. They had moved to Riegelsville several years ago from upstate New York, and live in the John L. Riegel House, built by a son of the town’s founder.

Mr. Libasci commutes by car to his office in Manhattan, a drive of about an hour and 15 minutes. “Gas was $2.25 a gallon when Trump left office,” he said. “I just paid $4 for mid-grade. You hear what Trump says: ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ I’m OK with that.”

Ms. Libasci, who emigrated to the United States from Panama as a teenager, is an interior decorator who has been spending her time painstakingly restoring their home. I asked her about Mr. Trump’s long history of using language that denigrates women. “I have no concerns about his rhetoric,” she said. “I’m a big believer in you get the treatment you allow people to give you. I won’t let you cross that line with me. But I’m not a fool. I know that when men get together, they speak like men.”

I asked Trump supporters about his performance in the debate with Ms. Harris. None argued that the result for him had been anything other than a sound defeat. Several, though, observed that Ms. Harris had clearly spent more time rehearsing — as if preparing for an important event were not a quality you’d want in a president.

“I think she practiced very well,” John Shoemaker, 78, said. “Trump didn’t. And you could tell the moderators were out to get him.” 

. . .

I sat with this group two mornings. They reflected the town’s somewhat eccentric nature. Mr. Schaffer is a dressage trainer. Another man at the table had owned a tavern, which he referred to as a gin mill.

I asked them about Mr. Trump’s business history, which includes six bankruptcies, numerous instances of cheating his vendors and years of paying minimal or no federal taxes. Their responses were similar to what I heard from other Trump supporters: They accept that the rich play by different rules. Rather than resentment, they expressed admiration. “Every rich businessman goes bankrupt,” Mr. Shoemaker said.

A retired car dealer at the table, who asked that his name not be used, said he believed that Mr. Trump, as president, “took care of big business, and that’s smart because it’s good for all of us.”

On one issue — women’s reproductive rights — there was agreement at the table that Mr. Trump’s positions were hurting him and might cost him the election.

“It was a mistake,” the retired car dealer said of Mr. Trump’s role in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. He said his wife, daughters and granddaughters were all voting for Ms. Harris, and some had contributed to her campaign.

“Trump puts his foot in his mouth just about every time he speaks, but on abortion it’s the worst,” the man said and added that “the abortion thing is going to kill him.”

In Riegelsville, several Trump supporters brought up former President Bill Clinton’s sexual encounters with a 21-year-old intern in the Oval Office, which may have caused more damage to the institution of the presidency than many Democrats are willing to acknowledge.

I ended up talking to a pretty good chunk of the town’s voters. As I made my way around, what struck me was the difference in expectations. Ms. Harris’s supporters expressed a sense of hope that she might lead us into an era that feels sunnier. It wasn’t quite blind optimism, but they were willing to let her fill in the details.

Mr. Trump has activated darker impulses. His followers were unbothered by his constant denigration of women, of immigrants, of political opponents and even, if he loses, of Jews he says will be at fault for not having proper gratitude for how much he’s done for them.

A president is called on to lead, especially in times of crisis. But if Mr. Trump’s supporters remembered that his response to the Covid epidemic was an exercise in chaos, disinformation and divisiveness, that did not bother them, either. They were not looking to be led or inspired. They said they want him to lower gas and food prices and close the southern border.

The relationship seemed purely transactional — even if the specific things they expect him to deliver would be largely beyond Mr. Trump’s control. Presidents don’t set food and gas prices, and to truly solve the problems at the border would require an act from Congress — like the one Mr. Trump quashed in the spring for his own political benefit.

Character flaws in a national leader are not just about an individual — they speak to the character of a nation, its aspirations and ideals, and the type of government we want. Mr. Trump often isn’t campaigning on a recognizable version of recent Republican policies. He is not bound by any party-coalition give-and-take. He is the party, and whatever he says, those are its positions. His product, solely, is himself.

What if what his supporters really want, and do not express, is the Trump vibe? All the name-calling, coarseness and bullying? The hypermasculine, authoritarian rhetoric? Mr. Trump is peddling that poison like political crack, and half the nation is hooked, the other half repulsed. If it works and he is elected, it promises four more years of national political warfare. . . .

When I began to explore Riegelsville, I’m sure I had some of this in mind. As I walked its pleasant residential streets, Riegelsville really did, at times, feel like a Hallmark town. 

I figured that if there was a place that former Trump supporters might have grown sick of him — weary enough of all the ugliness and constant sense of grievance to cast him aside — this might be it. I was wrong. 

One of my last conversations was with a construction worker at the general store who asked that his name not be used. He brought up the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in western Pennsylvania. “It was Biden’s fault,” the man said. How so? I asked. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “The deep state tried to take him down. You have to be an idiot not to be able to see that.”

I also heard Riegelsville described as “quintessential Americana” — and in a slightly altered way, that also felt apt. It is America in 2024. It’s defenseless, like everywhere else, from the ever-rising tide of division and madness in the civic life of our nation.

Active Defenses Are The Future Of Warfare

Offensive Weapons Can Overcome Any Passive Defense

There is no tank (or other armored vehicle or mobile ground based military system) on Earth that can't be destroyed with a hit from a single anti-tank missile launched from a device about the size of a golf club bag, that comes close to a one shot, one kill ratio, and has a range longer than the range of a tank's main gun. Often, it takes less to at least disable even a heavily armored tank, like a well placed tank round, an extended barrage of 25-40 mm canon rounds, some land mines, mortar and artillery rounds, IEDs, or even a well placed hit from a rocket propelled grenade or recoilless rifle, although heavy tank armor is pretty much impervious to small arms fire from assault rifles, machine guns, and the like.

There is no warship on Earth that can't be destroyed with a hit from a single, typical, anti-ship missile, which can have a range of 100 miles or more, and can be fired from land, from other surface ships, from submarines, from fighter aircraft, from bomber aircraft, from maritime patrol aircraft, and even from cargo aircraft like the C-17 and military helicopters. One or two torpedoes, or bombs are also up to this task. So are many anti-ship mines. 

A variety of torpedoes, sea mines, and anti-submarine missiles are capable of destroying or disabling any military submarine in the world with a single hit.

Most air to air combat involves the launch of a single guided air to air missile that the target aircraft is aware of for a few seconds before it hits, but too late in the vast majority of cases to evade. Jet aircraft sometimes evade air to air missiles or surface to air missiles fired within the range of the missile, with flares and extreme maneuvers, but this is the exception and not the rule to the point of being a minor miracle.

The largest conventional bomb in U.S. service at the moment, the MOAB has an explosive yield of 11 tons of TNT and a 0.6 mile blast radius (deployed via a C-130 intra-theater transport plane). This is about the same as the smallest nuclear weapons every built (which weighed about 60 pounds). While it may not literally be able to bust any bunker or fortification, it will destroy pretty much any building not buried deep within a mountain or deep underground.

The only modern aircraft to have any meaningful armor protection is the A-10 fighter, which while not really effective against modern anti-aircraft missiles provides meaningful protection against small arms fire from ground troops, shrapnel, and perhaps even somewhat against anti-aircraft guns firing grenade sized canon rounds. Other military aircraft rely entirely on active defenses (including staying out of range of enemy fire, and hiding and dodging).

Active Defenses

Because there are viable means of defeating any kind of passive armor that are available to pretty much any national military force worth its salt, and even select non-governmental insurgent forces (e.g. the Houthis right now, or the Afghan insurgents during the insurgency against Soviet rule there), war in the 21st century against any opponent of this caliber is all about not getting hit in the first place.

Hide and Dodge

One approach is to hide and dodge. 

For example, it is now standard for artillery forces to "shoot and scoot" before the volley of fire it launched is used to identify its location and fire back destroying it. 

A few U.S. aircraft currently in service (the F-22, the F-35, the B-2, and soon the B-21, as well as the out of service F-117), and possible a few very new Chinese and Russian planes, have radar stealth. But they can still be seen visually if one is close enough, they have significant heat signatures, make lots of noise, and have locations that can be tracked back from the bombs and missiles they drop. 

The SR-72 Blackbird spy plane can outrun and can stay about the maximum altitude of many war planes and even missiles, but it has no great offensive capabilities.

Submarines are good at hiding. Non-stealth aircraft, surface warships, and tanks, are not. Tracked vehicles and surface warships and submarines are all extremely slow. Wheeled vehicles are faster but don't rival missiles or aircraft. Helicopters, most smaller drones, and many transport aircraft are still much slower than a missile or a jet fighter.

Camouflage can help a little, but only on the margins in most cases for large military systems, as opposed to individual soldiers. 

Confuse

In the face of guided missiles and "smart bombs" and drones (and sometimes even manned aircraft), electronic jamming, dazzling visual sensors, sending out decoys and/or covering smoke, or even hacking the guidance system is sometimes possible. Indeed, these confusion oriented defenses are sometimes called "soft kill" active defenses.

U.S. Navy destroyers also have some soft kill type electronic warfare active defenses against income drones, smart bombs, and missiles, and torpedo defenses that use both soft kill electronic warfare type jammers, and decoys, all of which are active defenses designed to confuse incoming ordinance.

F-15 fighters sometimes carry ADM-160 MALD missiles which have electronic countermeasures and are used as decoys. Many aircraft have flare systems designed to be used as decoys against heat seeking anti-aircraft missiles.

Hard active defenses

Finally, there are "hard" active defenses, that destroy incoming ordinance before it gets too close.

Lasers

Laser weapons (and other directed energy weapons like microwave beams) are a class of "hard" active defenses that are just about ready for viable use on the battlefield. They prematurely ignite fuel or explosives, destroy guidance systems, or melt critical control surfaces. No practical laser weapons have the punch to pierce tank armor or sink a blue sea warship, but they can, in principle, prematurely ignite an incoming missile or artillery shell or naval gun shell or even a tank main gun shell, crash a drone, and can disable a speed boat or even a helicopter. It could even cause an externally carried bomb or missile on a fighter aircraft to explode and disable it. But the faster moving a target of a laser weapon is, the harder it is to get enough beam time on target to destroy it before it destroys you, during the possibly brief window when the target is in a line of sight.

Boeing's 5 kilowatt laser (shown above with the image from this link) intended for Army use against smaller drones, it typical of the state of the art, although these are still very novel and I'm not aware of any actually use of them in combat yet. There are some similar lasers that have been deployed on select U.S. Navy ships and experimentally in the Army up to 50 kilowatts.

Why military lasers are so low powered is a question I don't have an answer for. I have burners on my kitchen stove that use more than 5 kilowatts. There are ordinary civilian electric cars that use 350 kilowatts at full acceleration. There is no reason that I can see that a military laser defending a naval ship or forward operating base shouldn't have at least 1 megawatt of power, which would greatly reduce the amount of time that it would need to dispatch each target, making it more effective against swarms of targets and fast moving targets.

The pros of a laser weapon are that it is the cheapest per successful kill ($10 or so of electricity; it would still be cost competitive at 200 times that price), can be powered with batteries or super-capacitors charged with a military system's existing electrical power sources (so in the long run, its ammunition supply is basically unlimited), and the weapon itself isn't particularly large or expensive to build relative to conventional military guns. Improved battery technology may make it more viable going forward.

The cons are that the lower the wattage the more time the beam needs to be on target to destroy it (which makes it ineffective against targets that are approaching too fast like hypersonic missiles), it needs an energy source such as a battery or super-capacitor that is quite substantial (the exact demands depend on the wattage of the weapon), it can only hit targets in a line of sight (and struggles beyond about 2 miles in many cases), and it can be impaired by dust, smoke, rain, or mist.

Still, laser weapons could soon be a standard part of a layered active defense system. A powerful enough laser weapon could give an armored vehicle a fighting chance against an incoming anti-tank missile. It could be well suited to protecting a military base or artillery battery or naval ship against an incoming kamikaze drones or artillery shells or missiles. A fighter jet with an anti-air missile coming at it might be able to use a strong enough laser to shoot the income missile out of the sky before it hits, while it is trying to evade.

Guns

Another option is a "slug thrower" that fires "dumb" or minimally "smart" rounds (like grenades with timed fuses or proximity fuses). 

Historically, this was the idea behind cannon artillery style anti-aircraft guns, which are now mostly obsolete because of their limited range against high altitude fighter and bomber aircraft. 

The main example of this approach in the modern U.S. military is the Phalanx Close In Weapon System (CIWS) that shoots a rapid barrage of 20 mm (i.e. grenade sized) cannon rounds set to explode at a certain range if it doesn't make contact at incoming missiles and shells and drones. This was originally designed for the U.S. Navy where it is intended as a last line of defense against income missiles, and is in place on many U.S. warships, although a U.S. Army variant for point defense has also been developed on a limited basis.

The Phalanx CIWS (SEE-wiz) is an automated gun-based close-in weapon system to defend military watercraft automatically against incoming threats such as aircraft, missiles, and small boats. It was designed and manufactured by the General Dynamics Corporation, Pomona Division, later a part of Raytheon. Consisting of a radar-guided 20 mm (0.8 in) Vulcan cannon mounted on a swiveling base, the Phalanx has been used by the United States Navy and the naval forces of 15 other countries. The U.S. Navy deploys it on every class of surface combat ship, except the Zumwalt-class destroyer and San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock. Other users include the British Royal Navy, the Royal Australian Navy, the Royal New Zealand Navy, the Royal Canadian Navy, and the U.S. Coast Guard.

A land variant, the LPWS (Land Phalanx Weapon System), part of the Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar (C-RAM) system, was developed. It was deployed to counter rocket, artillery and mortar attacks during the 2021 US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The U.S. Navy also fields the SeaRAM system, which pairs the RIM-116 Rolling Airframe Missile with sensors based on the Phalanx.

These rounds are a bit more expensive each than a laser shot, and a barrage of rounds from a CIWS fires lots of rounds at some expense. Rounds fired by the Phalanx cost around $30 each and the gun typically fires 100 or more when engaging a target. The ammunition has to be stored, loaded, and resupplied. The concept of any system like this it that most of the 75 rounds per second that it fires will never hit the target. The range is limited to less than one mile of effective range (although it has a maximum range that it can lob a round of up to about three miles) and has a radar to detect income targets with a range of about 4.5 miles. It weighs about 6 tons and draws 555 volts of electric power (apparently at about 250 amps which is 138.75 kilowatts) when fully operational. It isn't cheap either at about $12 million each for the system, before considering the ammunition (fully loaded it carries 1,550 rounds) or its power and transportation demands. It is also only effective against targets traveling at up to about Mach 2, so it can't defeat a hypersonic missile.

A much smaller and more precise version of the same concept is the Israeli Trophy system, an 1810 pound system used on armored vehicles like tanks (a lighter 1,080 pound version exists as well) that has a combination of "soft kill" electronic warfare defenses and "hard kill" explosively formed penetrators (basically anti-missile bullets) along with, like the CIWS, an automated targeting system. The system costs about 30% of the cost of a new Israel main battle tank (i.e., about $1.8 million domestically for Israel, and $3 million for foreign sales).

Trophy's radar and covered projectile launcher (via Wikipedia)

Trophy (Israel Defense Forces designation מעיל רוח, lit. "Windbreaker") is a protection system for military armored vehicles. It is termed an active protection system (APS) and is designed by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems.

It is designed to supplement the standard armor of light and heavy armored fighting vehicles. The system is in active use on Merkava Mark 3 & 4 tanks and the Namer armored personnel carrier (APC). It is also found on the Abrams M1A1/2 tanks, and has been tested on Stryker APCs and Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

The Trophy system protects against a wide variety of anti-tank threats, while also enhancing the vehicle's ability to identify enemy locations.

Trophy is quite effective against anti-tank missiles (although not perfect), and has been used with success against them since the year 2011, but not so effective against "kinetic energy anti-tank weapons" (basically fast moving tank rounds with no internal explosives  and railgun rounds). As explained at the kinetic energy link:

Critics have liked Trophy to “a shotgun blast. It’s not,” the Rafael official insisted. “It’s a sniper shot…. a small number of EFPs in a very small area, aimed at a specific point on the warhead itself.” Rather than just blow the threat out of the air, Trophy tries to disable the threat so it doesn’t detonate.

It also has other vulnerabilities:

The system utilizes small EFPs which are projected towards the incoming threat; energy, debris and explosive pressure waves disintegrate the incoming projectile. As such, the system has a risk to dismounted infantry, and this system impacts traditional infantry supported mechanized warfare tactics.

The Trophy system have a donut-hole like window of vulnerability to attacks from directly above, or the slow speed of the drone and the gravity-dropped grenade might have caused it to be filtered out by the Trophy’s sensors. In October 2023, Hamas used civilian DJI and Autel quadcopter drones, which dropped shaped-charge grenades to damage several tanks.

According to an informational 'flyer' distributed by Hamas, the system can be defeated by firing an RPG-7 from within 50m, or using a weapon with a projectile that exceeds the speed of sound, such as the SPG-9 recoilless gun. 

Firing multiple rounds in quick succession is also a tactic for overwhelming this system. In October 2023, Hezbollah used AT-14 Kornet missiles during engagements with Israeli forces after the onset of the 2023 Israel-Hamas War. The missiles were used from the Tharallah Twin ATGM system, which is a quadripod equipped with two Kornets fired in rapid succession. This arrangement is designed to overwhelm the Trophy APS of Merkava tanks by having a second missile available before the APS can react after the first intercept (reloading requires at least 1.5 seconds).

The Trophy system protects only a single vehicle sized target, that needs some armor to protect it from shrapnel from the intercepted incoming ordinance, and operates only at a quite short range against subsonic targets. The EPFs used by the Trophy system are presumably similar to or less expensive than tank shells. 

Whether heavy passive armor beyond what is necessary to stop small arms, shrapnel (including active defense system related shrapnel), and perhaps canon rounds up to about 40 mm really adds much value in questionable.

Interceptor Missiles

A third kind of "hard" active defense system is a guided interceptor missile. Most modern warships have something of this kind, which is basically an anti-aircraft missile optimized for incoming anti-ship missiles. The are potent, effective, have long ranges in many cases, and are very expensive. And, while some of the cost is basically amortization R&D and intellectual property costs, the price of the oldest interceptor missiles suggest that the prices will remain high long after all of their relevant patents expire.

The U.S. Patriot Missile system, the Israel Iron Dome system, and some Russian and Soviet-era anti-aircraft missiles are in this category.

The size and range of these missiles vary considerably, but they tend to be smaller than anti-ship missiles, surface to surface missiles, and air to ground missiles. They generally have longer range than lasers, directed energy weapons, or slug throwing guns, sometimes much longer. They can be fired from aircraft, ships, submarines, or ground launchers (often mobile ones). They are generally supersonic and have sophisticated guidance systems. At their best, as demonstrated in recent conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, they can be close to 99% effective at stopping relatively large and slow moving incoming ballistic missiles and cruise missiles and kamikaze drones. But these missiles are very expensive ($100,000 to $1,000,000+ each), often the total radar and launch system is quite large.

For example, the U.S. Patriot Missile system cost the U.S. $1.09 billion each as of 2022 (foreign buyers pay up to $2.5 billion each), plus $4 million per missile (up to $10 million each for foreign buyers). It has a 99 mile range and its missiles are hypersonic (3,500-3,830 mph depending on the missile). It entered service in 1984 and has been used in ten different wars (all of which, except the Ukraine War, were in the Middle East). Each missile is up to 2,000 pounds and a C-17 can carry just one of them (which takes about an hour to set up once off-loaded). A full system with six launchers requires about 600 soldiers to support it, although each launcher can be operated by just 3 people once it is set up, loaded and ready to go.

U.S. Navy surface combatants such as Arleigh Burke-class destroyers use a variety of anti-air interceptor missiles such as the:

•  RIM-66M surface-to-air missile (1558 pounds, 45-100 mile range, Mach 3.5, $238,000 each, entered service 1967)
•  RIM-156 surface-to-air missile (2980 pounds, 70-150 mile range, Mach 3.5, $409,000 each, entered service 1999 with prior version entering service in 1981)
•  RIM-174A standard ERAM (3330 pounds, 150 mile range against aircraft, 300 mile range against land targets, Mach 3.5, $319,000 each, entered service 2013).
•  RIM-161 anti-ballistic missile (1.5 tons, up to 720 mile range, Mach 13.2, $12 million each, entered service 2014)
•  SeaRAM (195 pounds with a six ton launcher which carries a 21 missile load, 5.6 mile range, greater than Mach 2, $905,000 each, relies on sensors for other weapons systems, entered service in 1992)

These are used in conjunction with the Phalanx CIWS sensors for the SeaRAM and the many other sophisticated sensors of the Aegis Combat system for its other missiles.

U.S. fighters like the F-22 (which cost about $360 million each including R&D cost and $191 million 2023 dollars as the marginal cost of each new plane) use air-to-air missiles including

• AIM-120C/D or AIM-120A/B AMRAAM (356 pounds, 110 mile range, Mach 4, $1,090,000 each, entered service in 1991),
• AIM-9M/X Sidewinder (188 pounds, 22 mile range, Mach 2.5+, $400,000 each, entered service in 1956).

The fighters have their own advanced avionic sensors in addition to those in the missiles themselves, but these missiles are primarily used against other manned aircraft or large, advanced drones. But fighter aircraft have been used as recently as this year to interdict the same kinds of threats that Patriot Missile batteries, the Iron Dome, and naval interceptor missiles are used against.

As far as I know, there is not an interceptor missile system for warplanes designed to intercept an air-to-air missile after it has been launched, as an active defense. These would presumably need only a small warhead allowing them to be fairly small, would need to be hypersonic, would have a relatively short range, would need advanced sensors and guidance systems, and would presumably be very expensive.

As far as I know, there is also not an interceptor torpedo designed to target and prematurely detonate or disable an incoming torpedo with a hard kill, as opposed to a decoy torpedo. One would imagine that a small, fast, super-cavitating interceptor torpedo would be technically feasible, however.

Implications

I'm weighing whether to expand this post, or to make a new one, working through some possible implications of the observations in this way in a narrative style context (i.e. brief near future fiction vignettes). I'm leaning towards a new post as this one is already long enough.