Superstring theories in ten dimensions allow spacetime supersymmetry breaking
at the string scale at the expense of controlled Minkowski backgrounds. The
next-to-maximally symmetric backgrounds, found by Dudas and Mourad, involve a
warped compactification on an interval associated with codimension-one defects.
We generalize these solutions by varying the effective field theory parameters,
and we discuss the dimensional reduction on the interval. In particular, we
show that scalars and form fields decouple in a certain range of dimensions,
yielding Einstein-Yang-Mills theory. Moreover, we find that the breakdown of
this effective description due to light Kaluza-Klein modes reflects the
swampland distance conjecture, supporting the consistency of the picture at
least qualitatively.
