Today's AI Thing

A new technology starts to come of age, and as usual, some jagoff sees its usefulness as a way to fuck with people.

BTW:

(pay wall)

Drones

Here's one scary-as-fuck video from Simon Whistler.

And don't get too comfortable, thinking we're OK because we're such good buddies with those Ukrainian fellers - people are already marrying drones with AI, and tech does not stay in one place for long, so we can expect plenty of trouble from the assholes who will surely be jumping all over that shit for nefarious purposes.

Nerds Can Be Dangerous Too

Grable, the only nuclear artillery shell ever fired by the U.S. (sound on)
byu/splityoassintwo ininterestingasfuck

A Change Has Come

Elliot Ackerman - Vanity Fair:

A Whole Age of Warfare Sank With the Moskva

A fierce debate is raging within the U.S. Marine Corps about what comes next.

On March 9, 1862, the Union warship Monitor met its Confederate counterpart, Virginia. After a four-hour exchange of fire, the two fought to a draw. It was the first battle of ironclads. In one day, every wooden ship of the line of every naval power became immediately obsolete.

On December 7, 1941, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. If the battle of the ironclads settled once and for all the wood-versus-iron debate, Japanese carrier-based aircraft settled the battleship-versus-carrier debate by sinking the cream of America’s battleship fleet in a single morning.

On April 14, 2022, the Ukrainians sank the Russian cruiser Moskva with a pair of Neptune anti-ship missiles. And that success posed an urgent question to the world’s major militaries: Has another age of warfare just begun? After 20 years spent fighting the post-9/11 wars, the United States military’s attention is again focused on a peer-level adversary. The Pentagon hasn’t been thinking this way since the Cold War, and it is attempting a profound transformation. Today, fierce debate attends this transformation, and nowhere more acutely than in the Marine Corps.

In March 2020, the Marine commandant, General David Berger, published “Force Design 2030.” This controversial paper announced a significant restructuring based on the belief that “the Marine Corps is not organized, trained, equipped or postured to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving future operating environment.” That “future operating environment” is an imagined war with China in the South Pacific—but in many ways, that hypothetical conflict resembles the real war in Ukraine.

The military we have—an army built around tanks, a navy built around ships, and an air force built around planes, all of which are technologically advanced and astronomically expensive—is platform-centric. So far, in Ukraine, the signature land weapon hasn’t been a tank but an anti-tank missile: the Javelin. The signature air weapon hasn’t been an aircraft, but an anti-air missile: the Stinger. And as the sinking of the Moskva showed, the signature maritime weapon hasn’t been a ship but an anti-ship missile: the Neptune.

Berger believes a new age of war is upon us. In “Force Design 2030,” he puts the following sentence in bold: “We must acknowledge the impacts of proliferated precision long-range fires, mines, and other smart weapons, and seek innovative ways to overcome these threat capabilities.” The weapons General Berger refers to include the same family of anti-platform weapons Ukrainians are using to incinerate Russian tanks, shoot down Russian helicopters, and sink Russian warships. The successes against a platform-centric Russian Goliath by an anti-platform-centric Ukrainian David have elicited cheers in the West, but what we are witnessing in Ukraine may well be a prelude to the besting of our own American Goliath.

Like its Russian counterpart, the American military has long been built around platforms. To pivot away from a platform-centric view of warfare is both a cultural challenge—what does it mean to be a fighter pilot without a jet, a tanker without a tank, or a sailor without a ship?—and a resource challenge. It asks the U.S. military, as well as the U.S. defense industry, to divest itself of legacy capabilities like, for example, a $13 billion Ford-class aircraft carrier, in order to invest in new, potentially less profitable technologies like, say, $6,000 Switchblade drones that can kill tanks.

Divestment is central to Berger’s strategic vision. Several months ago, he announced that the Marine Corps would reduce its size. Several of its infantry battalions, aircraft squadrons, artillery batteries, and every last one of its tanks would go. According to Berger, the Marine Corps is “operating under the assumption that we will not receive additional resources” and “must divest certain existing capabilities to free resources for essential new capabilities.”

As divest to invest has become the new Marine Corps catchphrase, a bevy of retired generals has spoken out publicly against Berger in an unprecedented display of disunity among senior commanders. One of the dissenters is a former commandant, retired General Charles Krulak. “You’re divesting yourself of huge capability to buy capability that’s still on the drawing boards,” Krulak told me. “We’re being painted as a bunch of old farts who want the Marine Corps to remain as it was and don’t understand the impact of technology on warfare. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

To discount Krulak’s views would be a mistake. His tenure as commandant ushered in significant innovations for the Corps. He laid the intellectual groundwork that allowed the Corps to fight in the post-9/11 world. He also acquired the V-22 for the Marine Corps, a first-of-its-kind tilt-rotor aircraft that is both a plane and a helicopter. Berger’s strategic vision is also the first of its kind; in the event of a war with China, it imagines a 21st-century island-hopping campaign in which bands of 60 to 70 highly trained, lethally equipped Marines would infiltrate onto islands in the South Pacific to target the Chinese navy with advanced missile systems and other long-range weapons. The war at sea, in Berger’s vision, would be decided by a slew of Moskva-like engagements.

Berger’s critics don’t buy it. “The assumption that Marines can get on contested islands without being detected and conduct resupply missions is unrealistic,” Krulak said. “Plus, you’re underestimating the capability of the Chinese. The belief that these forces will shoot and scoot counts on Marines moving faster than a Chinese missile flies. You’re going to lose Marines and be unable to evacuate our wounded and dead. The Navy won’t sail in to get our wounded.”

Admiral James Stavridis, who spent much of his 40-plus-year Navy career in the South China Sea, is a believer in Berger’s vision. “The Army of tomorrow will look like the Marine Corps of today,” Stavridis told me. “What General Berger is doing is critical.” A truism among Marines is that the Corps must be at its most ready when America is at its least. In the 1930s, the Marine Corps pioneered the amphibious doctrine that would pave the way not only for the island-hopping campaigns in the Pacific but also the amphibious landings that allowed the Army to liberate Europe. Innovation, according to Stavridis, remains a core Marine mission.

The debate in the Marine Corps is more profound than the internecine politics of one service branch; it’s a debate about which form of warfare will dominate in the next decades of the 21st century, a platform-centric one or an anti-platform-centric one. Historical precedent abounds for these types of debates. Before the First World War, in the opening years of the 20th century, many militaries adhered to the cult of the offense, a then-stale belief that well-trained, determined troops would always carry the day over a defending force. In the Napoleonic Wars 100 years before, this had often proved true. But up against the 20th century’s breech-loading rifles and machine guns, the offense had become the weaker form of warfare. Tragically, it took the Marne, the Somme, and countless other bayonet charges into the teeth of chattering machine guns for the generals of that era to accept that their understanding of warfare was dated.

Representative Seth Moulton, a former Marine and Iraq War veteran who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, believes that today’s dissenting generals are failing to comprehend how much technology is changing the battlefield and how quickly the services must adapt. “When you look at what weapons are on top of the Ukrainians’ wish list,” Moulton told me, “it isn’t towed howitzers. Top of their list are armed drones, anti-tank missiles, and anti-ship missiles.”

But what if Berger is wrong? What if his “divest to invest” strategy winds up over-investing the Marine Corps in a highly specific vision of warfare that never comes to pass? According to Moulton, much of this comes down to the role the Marine Corps has traditionally played as an incubator for new ideas as the smallest, nimblest of the services. “Our country can afford to have the Marine Corps over-invested in a new type of warfare that never comes to pass,” Moulton explained. “What our country cannot afford is to have the Marine Corps under-invested in a new type of warfare that does come to pass.”

Phillips Payson O’Brien: Why Ukraine is winning

Events in Ukraine seem to validate Berger’s anti-platform-centric view of warfare, in much the same way that World War I validated those who had argued that defense had become stronger than offense. Of course, no form of warfare maintains primacy forever. Krulak made this point as we finished our conversation. “We need to be careful we don’t learn the wrong lessons from Ukraine. You have a great measure. The next thing you know they come up with a countermeasure. So you come up with a counter-countermeasure.”

One of the most famous countermeasures developed after the end of the First World War was France’s Maginot Line, a physical shrine to the primacy of defense. What the French failed to account for was that in two short decades, certain developments—more advanced tanks, aircraft, and combined-arms doctrine—had once again swung the balance, allowing offense to reassume its role as the dominant form of warfare. The result was a German blitzkrieg in June 1940 that simply maneuvered around the Maginot Line.

The wager that Berger and the Marine Corps are making is that anti-platform systems won’t be an American Maginot Line, but the best way to save a generation of Americans from their own Somme or Moskva.

But what really chaps my balls is that we seem to be assuming ( if not outright insisting) that war is inevitable, even as everybody - and I mean every-fucking-body - is always lamenting the tragedy of war.

Fuck that shit. Wage peace instead. Make love, not war. It's cheaper and a helluva lot more fun.

The Rise Of The Machines

Ever wonder why the "Don't Tread On Me" gang seem to ignore the fact that the big bad gubmint has weapons that are about to make AR-15s look like pop guns?

And actually, it makes me wonder if they've already picked the wrong side.

Here it comes, kids.

Business Insider:

A rogue killer drone 'hunted down' a human target without being instructed to, UN report says

A "lethal" weaponized drone "hunted down a human target" without being told to, likely for the first time, according to a UN report seen by the New Scientist.

In the March 2020 incident, a Kargu-2 quadcopter autonomously attacked a person during a conflict between Libyan government forces and a breakaway military faction, led by the Libyan National Army's Khalifa Haftar, the Daily Star reported.

The Turkish-built Kargu-2, a deadly attack drone designed for asymmetric warfare and anti-terrorist operations, targeted one of Haftar's soldiers while he tried to retreat, according to the paper.

The drone, which can be directed to detonate on impact, was operating in a "'highly effective' autonomous mode that required no human controller," the New York Post reported.

"The lethal autonomous weapons systems were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect, a true 'fire, forget and find' capability," the report from the UN Security Council's panel of experts on Libya said.

This is likely the first time drones have attacked humans without instructions to do so, Zak Kallenborn, a national-security consultant who specializes in unmanned systems and drones, confirmed in the report.

Kallenborn has concerns about the future of autonomous drones. "How brittle is the object recognition system?" he said in the report. "How often does it misidentify targets?"

Jack Watling, a researcher on land warfare at the Royal United Services Institute, told the New Scientist that the incident demonstrates the "urgent and important" need to discuss the potential regulation of autonomous weapons.

Human Rights Watch has called for an end to so-called "killer robots" and is campaigning for a "preemptive ban on the development, production, and use of fully autonomous weapons," according to a report by the nonprofit.

Acceleration

It took us longer to go from bronze weapons to iron weapons than it did to go from iron weapons to thermonuclear weapons.

Kaboom

Speaking of shit - which I kinda do in the next post down from this one - I've had this one in mind for a good long while.

This is a screen shot from Google Maps of an area to the northwest of Las Vegas and to the southwest of Papoose Lake in Nevada:

Every little round-ish feature (they look like barnacles to me) on the above pic is where the US detonated a nuclear bomb of some kind, to test it out; to make sure it worked as advertised.

And this is just Nevada.

It's Pretty Sad, Really

In general, I can get with anybody who has the smarts and the ingenuity to make stuff work.  I just wish we could move the culture forward enough to convince these Gun Geniuses to turn their talents towards Distributed Power Generation or Bio-Mechanics or Robotic Waste Recovery or or or.

The New Navy

From Addicting Info:

Since its launch 18 months ago, the USS Independence has come down with a severe case of corrosion. You see, the hull construction is a composite structure with some components utilizing steel, and other components using aluminum. If you expose an item made up of both steel and aluminum to an environment containing an electrolyte, such as seawater, it produces galvanic corrosion...

So the US Navy will be able to continue America's totally righteous domination of the world - anywhere, any time - except in places where they have oceans.

A Step At A Time

Just inching our way closer to Robocop II.



What could possibly go wrong?

War Tech

(hat tip = JG)
From Wired Magazine:

The U.S. military has been after self-guided bullets for years. Now, government researchers have finally made it happen: a bullet that can navigate itself a full mile before successfully nailing its target.

Got me to thinking - sometimes dangerous, always obsessive - and just a few quick Googlies later:

Hacked By Iran

So here's something I hope somebody on our side's been working on really hard.

From Empty Wheel:

I’ve been saying for some time that America’s hubris about drones will end as soon as one of our antagonists figures out how to hack them.

Which is why it’s interesting that Iran has updated its claims to have “shot down” an American drone to suggest they had “brought it down.” (Note, I found this statement on the Mehr website, but not the Fars one.)

And won't it be interesting in a few years (maybe a lot sooner) when we start to hear about the need to build a defensive shield capable of shooting down enemy drones which could be launched from any seemingly innocuous vessel from a few miles off the shores of Virginia or New York or or or.

I've been worried that "our enemies" would develop a way to deliver an EMP device into the general vicinity of over-flying American aircraft, which would disable the avionics (for even a short time), which would result in our planes falling from the sky in large numbers.
Now I see we have a fuckload more to worry about.  Ain't that just won-fuckin'-derful?

It's the dawning of a New Golden Age of Paranoid Isolation in America.

(hat tip = The Agonist)