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https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/04/ai-goes-to-war/

AI Goes to War

Will the Pentagon's Techno-Fantasies Pave the Way for War with China?  

On August 28th, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks chose the occasion of a three-day conference organized by the National Defense Industrial Association (NDIA), the arms industry’s biggest trade group, to announce the “Replicator Initiative.” Among other things, it would involve producing “swarms of drones” that could hit thousands of targets in China on short notice. Call it the full-scale launching of techno-war.

Her speech to the assembled arms makers was yet another sign that the military-industrial complex (MIC) President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about more than 60 years ago is still alive, all too well, and taking a new turn. Call it the MIC for the digital age.

Hicks described the goal of the Replicator Initiative this way:

“To stay ahead [of China], we’re going to create a new state of the art… leveraging attritable, autonomous systems in all domains which are less expensive, put fewer people at risk, and can be changed, upgraded, or improved with substantially shorter lead times… We’ll counter the PLA’s [People’s Liberation Army’s] with mass of our own, but ours will be harder to plan for, harder to hit, and harder to beat.”

Think of it as artificial intelligence (AI) goes to war — and oh, that word “attritable,” a term that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue or mean much of anything to the average taxpayer, is pure Pentagonese for the ready and rapid replaceability of systems lost in combat. Let’s explore later whether the Pentagon and the arms industry are even capable of producing the kinds of cheap, effective, easily replicable techno-war systems Hicks touted in her speech. First, though, let me focus on the goal of such an effort: confronting China.

Target: China

However one gauges China’s appetite for military conflict — as opposed to relying more heavily on its increasingly powerful political and economic tools of influence — the Pentagon is clearly proposing a military-industrial fix for the challenge posed by Beijing. As Hicks’s speech to those arms makers suggests, that new strategy is going to be grounded in a crucial premise: that any future technological arms race will rely heavily on the dream of building ever cheaper, ever more capable weapons systems based on the rapid development of near-instant communications, artificial intelligence, and the ability to deploy such systems on short notice.

The vision Hicks put forward to the NDIA is, you might already have noticed, untethered from the slightest urge to respond diplomatically or politically to the challenge of Beijing as a rising great power. It matters little that those would undoubtedly be the most effective ways to head off a future conflict with China.

Such a non-military approach would be grounded in a clearly articulated return to this country’s longstanding “One China” policy. Under it, the U.S. would forgo any hint of the formal political recognition of the island of Taiwan as a separate state, while Beijing would commit itself to limiting to peaceful means its efforts to absorb that island.

There are numerous other issues where collaboration between the two nations could move the U.S. and China from a policy of confrontation to one of cooperation, as noted in a new paper by my colleague Jake Werner of the Quincy Institute: “1) development in the Global South; 2) addressing climate change; 3) renegotiating global trade and economic rules; and 4) reforming international institutions to create a more open and inclusive world order.” Achieving such goals on this planet now might seem like a tall order, but the alternative — bellicose rhetoric and aggressive forms of competition that increase the risk of war — should be considered both dangerous and unacceptable.

On the other side of the equation, proponents of increasing Pentagon spending to address the purported dangers of the rise of China are masters of threat inflation. They find it easy and satisfying to exaggerate both Beijing’s military capabilities and its global intentions in order to justify keeping the military-industrial complex amply funded into the distant future.

As Dan Grazier of the Project on Government Oversight noted in a December 2022 report, while China has made significant strides militarily in the past few decades, its strategy is “inherently defensive” and poses no direct threat to the United States. At present, in fact, Beijing lags behind Washington strikingly when it comes to both military spending and key capabilities, including having a far smaller (though still undoubtedly devastating) nuclear arsenal, a less capable Navy, and fewer major combat aircraft. None of this would, however, be faintly obvious if you only listened to the doomsayers on Capitol Hill and in the halls of the Pentagon.

But as Grazier points out, this should surprise no one since “threat inflation has been the go-to tool for defense spending hawks for decades.” That was, for instance, notably the case at the end of the Cold War of the last century, after the Soviet Union had disintegrated, when then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell so classically said: “Think hard about it. I’m running out of demons. I’m running out of villains. I’m down to [Cuba’s Fidel] Castro and Kim Il-sung [the late North Korean dictator].”

Needless to say, that posed a grave threat to the Pentagon’s financial fortunes and Congress did indeed insist then on significant reductions in the size of the armed forces, offering less funds to spend on new weaponry in the first few post-Cold War years. But the Pentagon was quick to highlight a new set of supposed threats to American power to justify putting military spending back on the upswing. With no great power in sight, it began focusing instead on the supposed dangers of regional powers like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. It also greatly overstated their military strength in its drive to be funded to win not one but two major regional conflicts at the same time. This process of switching to new alleged threats to justify a larger military establishment was captured strikingly in Michael Klare’s 1995 book Rogue States and Nuclear Outlaws.

After the 9/11 attacks, that “rogue states” rationale was, for a time, superseded by the disastrous “Global War on Terror,” a distinctly misguided response to those terrorist acts. It would spawn trillions of dollars of spending on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and a global counter-terror presence that included U.S. operations in 85 — yes, 85! — countries, as strikingly documented by the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

All of that blood and treasure, including hundreds of thousands of direct civilian deaths (and many more indirect ones), as well as thousands of American deaths and painful numbers of devastating physical and psychological injuries to U.S. military personnel, resulted in the installation of unstable or repressive regimes whose conduct — in the case of Iraq — helped set the stage for the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) terror organization. As it turned out, those interventions proved to be anything but either the “cakewalk” or the flowering of democracy predicted by the advocates of America’s post-9/11 wars. Give them full credit, though! They proved to be a remarkably efficient money machine for the denizens of the military-industrial complex.

Constructing “the China Threat”

As for China, its status as the threat du jour gained momentum during the Trump years. In fact, for the first time since the twentieth century, the Pentagon’s 2018 defense strategy document targeted “great power competition” as the wave of the future.

One particularly influential document from that period was the report of the congressionally mandated National Defense Strategy Commission. That body critiqued the Pentagon’s strategy of the moment, boldly claiming (without significant backup information) that the Defense Department was not planning to spend enough to address the military challenge posed by great power rivals, with a primary focus on China.

The commission proposed increasing the Pentagon’s budget by 3% to 5% above inflation for years to come — a move that would have pushed it to an unprecedented $1 trillion or more within a few years. Its report would then be extensively cited by Pentagon spending boosters in Congress, most notably former Senate Armed Services Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-OK), who used to literally wave it at witnesses in hearings and ask them to pledge allegiance to its dubious findings.

That 3% to 5% real growth figure caught on with prominent hawks in Congress and, until the recent chaos in the House of Representatives, spending did indeed fit just that pattern. What has not been much discussed is research by the Project on Government Oversight showing that the commission that penned the report and fueled those spending increases was heavily weighted toward individuals with ties to the arms industry. Its co-chair, for instance, served on the board of the giant weapons maker Northrop Grumman, and most of the other members had been or were advisers or consultants to the industry, or worked in think tanks heavily funded by just such corporations. So, we were never talking about a faintly objective assessment of U.S. “defense” needs.

Beware of Pentagon “Techno-Enthusiasm”

Just so no one would miss the point in her NDIA speech, Kathleen Hicks reiterated that the proposed transformation of weapons development with future techno-war in mind was squarely aimed at Beijing. “We must,” she said, “ensure the PRC leadership wakes up every day, considers the risks of aggression and concludes, ‘today is not the day’ — and not just today, but every day, between now and 2027, now and 2035, now and 2049, and beyond… Innovation is how we do that.”

The notion that advanced military technology could be the magic solution to complex security challenges runs directly against the actual record of the Pentagon and the arms industry over the past five decades. In those years, supposedly “revolutionary” new systems like the F-35 combat aircraft, the Army’s Future Combat System (FCS), and the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship have been notoriously plagued by cost overruns, schedule delays, performance problems, and maintenance challenges that have, at best, severely limited their combat capabilities. In fact, the Navy is already planning to retire a number of those Littoral Combat Ships early, while the whole FCS program was canceled outright.

In short, the Pentagon is now betting on a complete transformation of how it and the industry do business in the age of AI — a long shot, to put it mildly.

But you can count on one thing: the new approach is likely to be a gold mine for weapons contractors, even if the resulting weaponry doesn’t faintly perform as advertised. This quest will not be without political challenges, most notably finding the many billions of dollars needed to pursue the goals of the Replicator Initiative, while staving off lobbying by producers of existing big-ticket items like aircraft carriers, bombers, and fighter jets.

Members of Congress will defend such current-generation systems fiercely to keep weapons spending flowing to major corporate contractors and so into key congressional districts. One solution to the potential conflict between funding the new systems touted by Hicks and the costly existing programs that now feed the titans of the arms industry: jack up the Pentagon’s already massive budget and head for that trillion-dollar peak, which would be the highest level of such spending since World War II.

The Pentagon has long built its strategy around supposed technological marvels like the “electronic battlefield” in the Vietnam era; the “revolution in military affairs,” first touted in the early 1990s; and the precision-guided munitions praised since at least the 1991 Persian Gulf war. It matters little that such wonder weapons have never performed as advertised. For example, a detailed Government Accountability Office report on the bombing campaign in the Gulf War found that “the claim by DOD [Department of Defense] and contractors of a one-target, one-bomb capability for laser-guided munitions was not demonstrated in the air campaign where, on average, 11 tons of guided and 44 tons of unguided munitions were delivered on each successfully destroyed target.”

When such advanced weapons systems can be made to work, at enormous cost in time and money, they almost invariably prove of limited value, even against relatively poorly armed adversaries (as in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century). China, a great power rival with a modern industrial base and a growing arsenal of sophisticated weaponry, is another matter. The quest for decisive military superiority over Beijing and the ability to win a war against a nuclear-armed power should be (but isn’t) considered a fool’s errand, more likely to spur a war than deter it, with potentially disastrous consequences for all concerned.

Perhaps most dangerous of all, a drive for the full-scale production of AI-based weaponry will only increase the likelihood that future wars could be fought all too disastrously without human intervention. As Michael Klare pointed out in a report for the Arms Control Association, relying on such systems will also magnify the chances of technical failures, as well as misguided AI-driven targeting decisions that could spur unintended slaughter and decision-making without human intervention. The potentially disastrous malfunctioning of such autonomous systems might, in turn, only increase the possibility of nuclear conflict.

It would still be possible to rein in the Pentagon’s techno-enthusiasm by slowing the development of the kinds of systems highlighted in Hicks’s speech, while creating international rules of the road regarding their future development and deployment. But the time to start pushing back against yet another misguided “techno-revolution” is now, before automated warfare increases the risk of a global catastrophe. Emphasizing new weaponry over creative diplomacy and smart political decisions is a recipe for disaster in the decades to come.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/10/03/patrick-lawrence-tampering-with-history/

Patrick Lawrence: Tampering With History

The first sign of trouble to come, I recall thinking, was in June 2014. June 6 fell on a Friday, and that weekend leaders of what used to be called the Allied powers gathered on the Normandy beaches to celebrate the 70^th anniversary of the D–Day landings and the beginning of the Allies’ final triumph over the Nazi Reich.

No Russian official was invited to join the gathering.

How shamelessly undignified, I recall thinking. What a pack of embarrassing slobs, those second-rate “leaders” who assembled for photo ops on the sand.

Then I thought of a book Tom Engelhardt brought out a few years after the Soviet Union collapsed. The Commissar Vanishes (Metropolitan, 1997) is a collection of before-and-after photographs showing how, during the Stalinist years, the Soviets airbrushed those it judged political enemies out of official photographs. The book is mildly amusing but mostly frightening.

And then I thought of how diabolically powerful it is, how Mephistophelian, to tamper with history. And now I note bitterly how common this practice is among those who purport to speak for us but who, in reality, act against us.

A year after the D–Day events it came time to mark the Red Army’s liberation of Berlin in April 1945. And again: No American leader and no European of any rank so far as I recall, attended the ceremonies in Moscow. No speeches, no public messages honoring the Soviets’ extraordinary sacrifices and heroism, barely any mention of the anniversary in the Western press.

Another airbrush job. This time I felt a sting of indignation that made me ashamed of the nationality fate has assigned me. A worthy Western leader would have stood and said loudly, “We are all Russians today.”

Nine years ago, eight years ago: We all recall what had transpired at the time of these disgusting perversions of the past. In February 2014 the U.S. orchestrated an antidemocratic coup in Ukraine and installed a viciously Russophobic puppet regime in Kiev. Moscow responded, as a first-year poli sci student could have predicted, by reannexing Crimea and supporting the Russian-speaking majority in Ukraine’s eastern provinces.

By the spring of 2015 Kiev was daily shelling civilian populations in the east, a campaign that would last eight years and claim roughly 14,000 lives. Moscow had by then decided to support Luhansk and Donetsk as autonomous republics, while co-sponsoring accords — the two Minsk Protocols — that would have held Ukraine together as a federated republic.

These events marked out the battle lines with which we are now condemned to live. NATO approved of the merciless shelling of noncombatants to the extent it trained the Armed Forces of Ukraine to achieve maximum effect. The West never had any intention of backing the Minsk accords, which, in addition to saving Ukraine as a unified nation, would also have saved many thousands of lives.

The Russiagate years followed these events, erasing all possibility that, at least for the foreseeable future, any kind of balanced, mature understanding of Russia, its people, and its conduct in international affairs can be restored.

Our topics here are two. One is hatred, prevalent as the reigning Russophobia now is. The other is history and how this is abused to bring hatred to the desired pitch.

History is among our most precious treasures. It is our essential anchor. It is our village green, our corner tavern, and each generation writes it to reflect how those alive understand it. History tells us where we are in the human story and what we, alive now, must do to advance this story as others have delivered it to us.

Do we have to continue on in the direction of those who came before? Do we have to turn in a new direction? These are the kinds of questions history hands us.

Let me go out on a limb here. To tamper with history is among the gravest of sins against the human cause.

Those Soviet propagandists who were clever in the darkroom understood very well the power of perverting history. As we say now, if you control the past you control the present.

All those who stood on the Normandy beaches nine years ago, along with those who stayed silent a year later, were the political descendants of leaders who once condemned the Soviets for their ruthless trespasses on the past. Now these same people are the trespassers — not just on Russia’s past, or Europe’s, but on my past and your past, too.

I bring the anger readers will scarcely miss to two events that occurred last week. Let us consider each of these injuries briefly.

There is, first, the mess in which the Canadian government has landed itself by celebrating a Nazi officer.

A week ago last Friday the Canadian Parliament responded with a standing ovation when the speaker, Anthony Rota, introduced a 98–year-old named Yaroslav Hunka as a hero for having fought on the side of Ukrainians during World War II. Hunka stood, the picture of modest valor, just after Volodymyr Zelensky had addressed the chamber. When Hunka’s service against the Soviets was noted, the Ukrainian president pointed towards Hunka in approval.

As it quickly emerged, Hunka served as a member of the Galicia Division of the Nazi Waffen SS. This unit was among the more brutal in its extermination of Jews during the war.

Rota resigned as parliamentary speaker last week. Zelensky, who knew good and well who a Ukrainian fighting the Soviets was fighting with and for, has had nothing to say. And amid a considerable political kerfuffle in Ottawa, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau offered this apology:

“For all of us who were present to have unknowingly recognized this individual was a terrible mistake and a violation of the memory of those who suffered grievously at the hands of the Nazi regime…. It is extremely troubling to think that this egregious error is being politicized by Russia and its supporters to provide false propaganda about what Ukraine is fighting for.”

The Western powers, with the collusion of the Kiev regime’s leadership — and I don’t want to hear another word about Zelensky’s Jewishness — have spent years blurring the Nazi past in Ukraine and erasing the considerable presence of neo–Nazis in the Armed Forces of Ukraine and at all levels of the bureaucracy and government.

This is what you get — a dog’s dinner, a present devoid of a past. And instantly the Canadian PM, an American puppet in his own right, violates memory once again — in defense of memory, of course — by telling us Russian propaganda is what we must first worry about.

I am sick of this murk, this hypocrisy — all of it the consequence of an insidious campaign to tamper with history so that the U.S. and NATO can harness the visceral hatred of xenophobic extremists to wage a proxy war against Russia.

Hardly was I finished thinking through the travesty in Canada when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken issued forth with this rendering of the same contentious chapters in European history:

“Eighty-two years ago, Nazis murdered 34,000 Jews at Babyn Yar. Soviets buried this history, which today Putin’s government manipulates to provide cover for Russia’s abuses in Ukraine. The U.S. is committed to justice for Holocaust survivors and accountability for atrocities.”

There are only two ways to read this nonsense. Either the secretary of state should fire the underling who writes his social media posts, or Tony Blinken now goes so far as to assume he can mangle history beyond all recognition, and in our confused present the result will stand.

For the record, Babyn Yar (also spelled Babi Yar), a section of Kiev, was the site of multiple Nazi massacres during World War II. Blinken’s reference is to the events of Sept. 29–30, 1941, when 34,000 people were massacred. In total, 100,000 to 150,000 Jews, Soviet POWs, Romani and others were killed there.

While the Nazis attempted to cover up the Babyn Yar atrocities, the Soviets instantly publicized them when they liberated Kiev in 1943. After the war they tried those deemed responsible.

Where did Blinken get such an idea from? It appears he is not the only person to believe this version of events. A September 2021 article in The Times of Israel about the 80^th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre said that virtually no one was prosecuted for the massacre and that the Soviets refused to commemorate the killings, thus “buried this history.” The newspaper said:

“At the Nuremberg Trials of the 1940s, one Nazi, Paul Blobel, was sentenced to death and executed for crimes at Babi Yar, among other places. Two others were given prison sentences. A 1968 trial ended with prison terms of 4-15 years for seven defendants; three men were acquitted in those trials, the last of any Babi Yar perpetrator. …

In Ukraine, Babi Yar is also relatively obscure, partly due to communist authorities’ decades-long refusal to commemorate it. It was part of a broader policy that downplayed the suffering of Jews in the Holocaust, coopting it into the Soviet narrative about patriotic sacrifice in a fight against Nazism.”

But the facts do not support the idea that the Soviets buried the story or that only a handful were tried at Nuremberg. The Soviets conducted trials in Kiev in 1946 and a dozen perpetrators were hanged in the city’s Maidan square, scene of the 2014 neo-Nazi-backed coup that has led to the current war. Wikipedia says:

“In January 1946, 15 former members of the German police … were tried in Kyiv over their roles in the massacre and other atrocities. Twelve of them were sentenced to death. … The other three received prison sentences. Those condemned to death were publicly hanged in the town square of Kyiv on 29 January 1946.[57]”

In memorials, the Soviets treated the Babyn Yar victims equally, without singling out Jews or Roma, leading to a popularly held notion that the history was buried. Wikipedia says:

“After the war, specifically Jewish and Roma commemoration efforts encountered difficulty because of the Soviet Union’s emphasis on secular remembrances honoring all nationalities of the Soviet Union, so memorials (including at Babi Yar) would generally refer to ‘peaceful victims of fascism.’ Memorials were not explicitly forbidden, but successive Soviet leaders preferred instead to emphasise the wide-ranging origins of those murdered at the site.

This meant that both Jewish and Roma peoples were not specifically memorialised at the Babi Yar site until the Soviet Union collapsed.[61] Indeed, Yevgeny Yevtushenko‘s 1961 poem on Babi Yar begins ‘Nad Babim Yarom pamyatnikov nyet’ (‘Over Babi Yar there are no monuments’); it is also the first line of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13.”

While The Times of Israel story also spoke of the upsurge of support in Ukraine for the Ukrainian fascist collaborators who took part in the massacre, Blinken makes absolutely no reference to it.

Those with little respect for history, and so none for us to whom history belongs, have many reasons to pervert it. For the past decade their cause has been to abuse history to induce a deep an enduring hatred of Russia and its people.

And as the events reviewed here indicate, the specific cause now is to recruit us to the side of a nation with a long history of Russia-hating so that we will excuse its disgraceful excesses, or pretend, even better, there are none.

Comment to article:

" Patrick another brilliant piece! Thank you for keeping the Trudeau debacle front and center not to mention that every party politician in the house of commons applauded this Nazi “hero” displaying their full utter ignorance of the history of WWII. This shameless lot should all resign if they had any dignity but Trudeau and the Canadian flunkies of Zelensky are this war’s greatest supporters. However, as one of the commenters has said the battlefield is now clearly revealing the truth as the NATO/Ukrainian offensive rapidly comes to a screeching halt. Even the most ardent media supporters of the proxy war are starting to acknowledge this uncomfortable truth! Once again great work Patrick! "