The Pentagon's Silicon Valley Problem
harpers.org
harpers.org
The US even warned Russia of the attack in Moscow, but it was treated as political interference. That was almost certainly signals intelligence ignored.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-intelligence-duty-to-warn-...
Incidentally, there is speculation that the attack may have been planned for March 9th. One of the terrorists was photographed at Crocus on the 7th, and on the 9th there was a large concert by Shaman - a patriotic Russian singer who's regularly made songs glorifying the war in Ukraine, performed for soldiers in Russia's claimed territories, and so on. This would also have coincided with just before the Russian elections, which happened on the 15th. But security was extremely high during that concert - very possibly in response to the US warning.
By contrast when Russia warned the US about the Boston Bomber, the warning was precise to the point of even naming him.
That was the public "travel advisory" by the US department of state. We don't know what the CIA told their Russian counterparts according to their "duty to warn".
Insightful thread: https://twitter.com/laurae_thomas/status/1773094283320668526
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"Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the director of the F.S.B., emphasized Tuesday in public comments that the information the United States provided was “of a general nature.” “We reacted to this information, of course, and took appropriate measures,” he said, noting that the actions the F.S.B. took to follow up on the tip didn’t confirm it.
The adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow prevented U.S. officials from sharing any information about the plot beyond what was necessary, out of fear Russian authorities might learn their intelligence sources or methods.
In its March 7 public warning, the U.S. embassy said the risk of a concert venue attack in Moscow was acute for the next 48 hours. U.S. officials say it’s possible Russian authorities pushed hard around the 48-hour warning period but later grew more relaxed and distrustful when an attack didn’t occur."
It is unclear whether U.S. intelligence mistook the timing of the attack or the extremists delayed their plan upon seeing heightened security.
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It's amusing contrasting the very few facts the article provides, buried deep within it, with the framing, implications, and non sequiturs scattered through the first 60% of the article. Irrefutable and undeniable [2], all over again.
[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/world/europe/russia-conce...
[1] - https://archive.is/l6BYv
[2] - https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable-and-u...
p.s. part of the deal Nixon made with Mao was that CPC would no longer support various cells in the 'Global Energy Zone' since they were now "partners" in the Global Economy. Overnight thousands of Maoist flowers all over campuses and in middle east went away. All these groups existentially require a powerful patron or two. So ISIS has a mommy and a daddy and it aint Russia and it aint Iran and China has been out of that game since 70s as a matter of historic fact. That leave US, UK ("the Empire"), the Europeans (French? Doubtful), and Israel, KSA, Qatar and UAE. Qatar is Muslim Brotherhood [& so is Turkey] so that seems to eliminate it [them]. That basically leaves Western and Abrahamic patriarch wanna-bes at the table of candidates.
The "fact" that this question is never asked by "news" organs is very telling. It is a very hot topic on the other side of the geopolitical fence, this patron of ISIS ..
Effective leadership is a continual struggle against this entropic tendency of organizations towards management of appearances over world-of-atoms results. During those rare interludes in history when a strong leader manages to temporarily reverse this organizational entropy, magic happens. Consider ULA versus SpaceX or DeepMind vs. OpenAI
Imagine how much further up the technology ladder we as a species would be if institutional competence were the norm, not an unstable and fleeting miracle.
That was actually spot on, as recent events show.
The fact that anyone needed a warning was ridiculous. It was plain as day that Russia was committed to entering the country either immediately before or immediately after the Olympic games.
You don't bother sending a large part of your navy all the way around Europe and into the Black Sea just for fun. And you definitely don't send supplies of blood to the staging area near your border if it's just a drill or a show of force.
Russia had built up a similar sized ground force in the border in past years, either as drills or threats. Those never included major naval movements though, and definitely didn't include blood supply on the front lines.
As soon as the blood showed up a week before the Olympics everyone should have known it was game on, even if naval actions alone could be written of as not a sure sign.
I really don't mean this as a condescending arm chair quarterback statement. The intelligence agencies would clearly have access to much, much more information than a civilian. That said, I don't know who, with any level of military understanding, would expect medical facilities and large amounts of blood to be setup and delivered to the front line of fear mongering campaign.
Edit: rereading this theory, it does read pretty terribly for any civilians living there. Effectively, in that scenario the government decided to mislead the public in order to purposely keep civilians in harm's way rather than allow them to flee (and get in the way). This matches my cynical views of government, but if true it should still piss off a number of people that actually believe governments are there to serve us above all else.
It doesn't look so as Ukrainian government made a huge effort to evacuate the population from the war zone when the conflict started. It's just that they prioritized moving assets to the front (winning the war). Though I agree with you, governments doesn't serve the population but rather themselves.
Absolute legend of a guy.
What a great idea!
Stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin%27s_December_20... which Putin doubled down on harder and harder until the invasion finally started. Couple that with all the reports of the military and supply build-up, I found it weird that everybody was so skeptical. It felt more likely to me every day that we got new information about what was happening to the point that I didn't see how it couldn't happen.
The Russians had, and continue to have, a very strong presence in online communities aimed at shaping consensus, disrupting community, and obfuscating efforts. it is plainly active here on HN, on Reddit, and on Twitter -- often quite blatently. "hypernormialization" and all that. there was a concerted push prior to invasion across all platforms of "Russia would never do this".
China, NK, Iran, are also very active in this game, though often more focused on specific areas. India, Europe, and even Brazil have also dipped toes in aggressive online efforts, though mostly focused on very specific things, like stymming the flow of Indian ex-pats to Canada (and killing Canadian-Indian activists...), or consensus shaping around Brexit.
They had been telling us the Cubans have a secret microwave superweapon in the weeks prior to Ukraine going off.
You mean this? Seems legit enough to me to consider a possibility. This just shows that you and others are unable to properly evaluate and analyze the news that you consume.
My evaluation and analysis capabilities don't include just believing whatever the CIA says.
Unless you're deep in policy circles and those people you talked to are some of the people who would be crafting a govt response to a Russian invasion, then that's not really what "anybody who would listen" refers to. It's not the internet hoi poloi that Biden was trying to convince, but anyone who could help stop it, or at least formulate govt reactions to it.
As we saw, 200 000 definitely weren't enough to take Ukraine, but possibly Putin believed that the country was going to collapse immediately instead of fighting back.
I really think the Russians believed they either were going to be welcomed by many Ukrainians, or that a blitz for Kiev would be a quick 3-7 day affair. The downed planes of paratroopers in the first day or two, plus the convoy of trucks that only brought a few days of diesel seem to line up with the second scenario.
Anyway, I just happened to be right once among the countless times I have been wrong about similar situations. My main surprise is that anyone considered the idea of an invasion impossible once blood was being delivered to the line.
What? They were warned multiple times of an attack and chose to do nothing.
I had a Ukrainian model over February 21st, 2022 and I had mentioned it, she was very dismissive about the idea of invasion, and I gave a quizzical look because I wasn't sure if this was a coping mechanism, a real belief, her playing devil's advocate, or just a cultural way of responding - you know how some cultures or individuals have toxic positivity like ingrained in all their responses.
To me, it was obvious, like short position, prediction-market level of obvious. 0 days to expiration options contracts obvious. I saw the buildup on the border, the chatter, what Biden was saying, how Republicans politicized it based on nothing.
But I still think about her reaction, like in the future how I would respond. It seems pointless to have a differing worldview than people, and that leaves me with either complete inaction or just financial bets. I like "betting on my beliefs" as that's rewarded decently, and I'm fine with things not panning out like I predicted.
Just seems more natural to have discussions and seek a shared understanding of reality. But that seems pointless nowadays.
That an LLM is a part of a system that includes a large amount of ML is not surprising. It's a great human interface. Do I for a second believe that it played a much larger role, such to be implied as responsible in any non-negligble way for missing the attack. Of course not.
My point here is that ML continues to play a role, ML continues to both succeed and fail, and ML will continue to be imperfect, even moreso as it competes against adversarial ML. Blaming imperfect tools for inevitable failures is not a useful exercise, and certainly not a "problem" considering the alternative being even more failure-prone humans.
Corporate Decision Maker #2, sure, theyll get hoodwinked. They and their company may have only 50 years of experience and institutional memory to draw on. But State Militaries? What excuse do they have? War changes, but the armed forces have a long memory, and their poor decisions cost lives. Maybe Im off base, but I would expect each mistake to be an opportunity to learn for that industry. The industry has had plenty of lessons learned over the past 100 years. Why is the latest hype cycle to blame, and not those whose job it is to ensure they maintain capabilities and extensively game out scenarios and responses?
Bad bets on tech happen even in institutions with lifetimes of history to draw on, but I see that as a failure of the institution, not on the completely mundane hype cycles which occur naturally.
Obviously mistakes happen, and maybe thats what the article is getting at. But if we’re going to point fingers (not saying you are) then lets not let decision makers off the hook whose job is to prevent that hot new thing getting their people killed.
Modern military doctrine can be attributed to the Prussian General staff that defeated Napoleon III in the Franco Prussian war. Moltke the Elder was in charge of the Prussian army at the time. Moltke the Elder was a student of Clausewitz who literally wrote the book on modern strategy. But Clausewitz when he was in active service was not some world beating general. Clausewitz fought for the Prussians during the Napoleon’s time and was actually at one point a prisoner of Napoleon. Clausewitz and his boss Scharnhorst spent the rest of their careers developing a scheme to defeat Napoleons’ tactics of massive concentration at a single point. They developed modern combined arms with a logistical backbone of railroads.
But, you can look at the Chinese real estate market for an example of what happens if you try to keep inflating the bubble for too long.
The phrase AI has much more weight behind it than what we give it credit for, and using the term for LLMs cheapens it.
The average person hears AI and expects much more than an algorithm that can attempt to predict and mimic human written word, no matter how clever or impressive it is.
As an industry we seem to have agreed to call the next round of machine learning algorithms "artificial intelligence" because it sells better and raise a hell of a lot of funding. What does that to the very real safety, moral, and ethical questions that need to be asked before we actually create an AI?
Research, really theory, in the area of AI has been around for decades but focused on artificial intelligence rather than how to weigh and compress massive amounts of written language to used by a text predictive algorithm.
Calling LLMs artificial intelligence is either (a) cheapening the meaning if intelligence, (2) embellishment for the sake of fund raising, or (d) subtle acknowledgement of vastly more powerful systems behind the LLM tools than is currently being publicly described.
It's hard to cheapen it more than perceptrons and expert systems. The lay impression of artificial intelligence may be all skynet and c3p0, but AGI isn't really even a goal of most AI research, let alone representative of the current state of the art.
OpenAI has an explicit goal of developing AGI for the "greater good," whatever that means. If LLMs are indeed AI, as many assume, then OpenAI would fall squarely in the space of AI research that is the current state or the art.
Looks like the kind of error a low-parameter LLM would make
”Well aware of this Hamas members fed their enemy the data that they wanted to hear. The AI system, it turned out, knew everything about the terrorist except what he was thinking.”
When your opponent can see everything you do and hear everything you say, the only defence is privacy. In the novel The Three Body Problem this is taken to an extreme: the only privacy is inside the human mind and so select individuals are allowed to make decisions based on strategies known only to them which they have never said aloud. Science fiction has become reality.
Ukraine has these use cases, also high motivation to tackle them. Ukrainians are controlling battlefield with commodity computers https://en.defence-ua.com/news/how_the_kropyva_combat_contro... They sunk multiple Russian warships with long-range naval drones https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68528761 They recently started large-scale testing of cheap flying drones with computer vision-based target recognition on board https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/03/21/ukrain...
However, US is at peace. Which is a great thing by itself, but it means it’s too easy for them to waste billions of dollars developing technologies which look awesome in PowerPoint, but useless in practice.
Doesn't hold.
"Downfall" by Richard Frank
https://www.amazon.com/Downfall-End-Imperial-Japanese-Empire...
"Code-Name Downfall" by Thomas Allen
https://www.amazon.com/Code-Name-Downfall-Secret-Japan-Dropp...
summarize those please
The second bomb made it clear that the first one was not a one-off, and that the US was going to nuke the cities one by one. The Japanese also had intelligence (that turned out to be false) that Tokyo was the next target.
I've read a couple accounts by anti-nuclear activists who held that the USSR was the reason for the surrender, but if you compare those accounts with the ones written by historians, the former are crackpots.
An invasion of Japan would be an absolutely massive operation (see D-Day) and the USSR was in no position to mount one.
Long before Ukrainian war, I've many times talked with Russians about bombs used on Japan.
And now I must say you very important thing - Russians are so crazy anti-humanists, that this really could be reason for fears of Japanese about USSR invasion.
To be honest, I think bombs was enough to intimidate Japanese, but I think, even without bombs, Russians behavior at war, with US Land-lease technical/economical support would be enough to convince Japanese to surrender, may be later, sought.
There’s a minute-by-minute historical analysis[1], a 1967 film[2] (starring Toshiro Mifune! Gotta find this one…), a 2015 remake[3] of the 1967 film, and apparently a forthcoming graphic novel[4].
Fundamentally, the idea of “Japan” making a decision to surrender the way (say) Truman made the decision to drop the bombs is a misleading framing.
At this time, political, military and—crucially—effective police power in Japan was distributed among individuals and groups, notably the young officer corps, with very different motivations, beliefs, and principles.
The atomic bombs, the Russian invasion, the particulars of the negotiations with the US over terms of surrender… all were “merely” external forces influencing a chaotic, unstable equilibrium.
Ultimately, in some combination those forces tipped the center of that power from one equilibrium: “The war is lost, but if we surrender now internal forces will destroy Japan as a nation even if the Allies don’t.”
…to another: “The Emperor must make an extraordinary intervention to end the war immediately.”
And it was a most close run thing!
[1] https://www.tohokingdom.com/books/japans_longest_day_kodansh...
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062041/
[3] https://youtu.be/tDgQqnDKrdI
[4] https://greenbeanbookspdx.indielite.org/book/9784805317792
I don't raise that as justification and personally wish we were never stupid enough as a species to build such a weapon, but we tend to be that stupid. I do, though, agree that we likely would have lost more people on both sides and for Japan that number still would have included a large number of civilians.
Frankly, I don't know how one could ever make the decision that killing 100,000 is "worth it" and I hope I never have to.
Personally I think we should never have tried to invent the nuclear bomb to begin with, avoiding the decision entirely. I understand the whole "but then the enemy would have it first" argument, I just don't buy it. Sure, maybe the "enemy" would go on to invent it but that's a burden they'll have to bear.
Sometimes standing on principle includes dying on principle, we seem to have lost the importance of all that along the way. I chalk that up to the increase rate of invention making it too scary to take a step back, even for a moment, to decide whether we should do something that we know we can do.
See "Impact" by Benjamin King
https://www.amazon.com/Impact-History-Germanys-V-weapons-Wor...
https://www.nationalww2museum.org/visit/exhibits/traveling-e...
Last week, surviving members of the Ghost Army were honored in DC being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/21/1239871379/ghost-army-congres...
The Nazis had the issue that they wanted to field massive superweapons, but were nowhere near as mechanized as the allies, leading to them being unable to actually practically support those superweapons (and probably also why they went with such over-the-top ideas, hoping that they could do the job with a few units only and relying on scaring and demoralizing the allies into submission).
It's always easier to develop weapons in wartime because the requirements and effectiveness are much easier to find, but it's not cheaper. Billions will still be wasted but it will be spent on rebuilding buildings, bridges, infrastructure and lives destroyed by the war.
Ukraine has done some amazing things with cheap and boot strapped technology but the cost is the $486 billion required to rebuild the country.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-needs-486-bln-r...
This has always been a difficult concept for me given that we have decided to maintain a very large standing army since WWII. Where is the line really drawn between being prepared for imminent war and being at peace?
we are seeing them actively used, in practice, now. In Ukraine. And they work
Like, WW3 quantities of cluster munitions, destined to be decommissioned and thrown out, handed over to the AFU. aging Bradleys, Javelins, Stingers, etc., designed to blow up T-72s and Hind-Ds -- and boy howdy, that's what they're doing. wait until you see what the "awesome in powerpoint" stuff can do.
and remember, a sizable chunk of Ukraine's military effectiveness is NATO intelligence sharing. of those combat controllers and naval drones are sideshows without NATO mapping of Russian EW, ship, and troop movements.
And now, what I’m reading is that if you do go contract for the military in AI, your function is partially some kind of scapegoat insurance. Blame those eggheads with their computers who can be fooled, not the fools who hired them and acted on that signal above others I guess?
The idea that a chatGPT model would have been a deciding factor in preventing 10/7 is laughable on its face to anyone who works in the industry, except maybe a consultant selling LLMs to the IDF.
The guy in charge is former spec ops, murder of anybody without battling an eye is part of the deal so dont expect some humanism from that direction.
If I didnt read similar stories from other times and places, where it played almost exactly like this... AI is not going to solve political issues, just make them more complex than they already are
For example, Naval Undersea Warfare Centers, Division Newport, had a job fair a few weeks ago. IIUC a number of attendees were given offers very soon after.
But NUWC is a DoD DEMO organization, so maybe it's easier for them than some other parts of the DoD.
And salary definitely is an issue. Even with the Boston pay scale, I think they have a hard salary cap for most software positions at about $150k + very small annual bonuses.
you've got an active TS/SCI and we'll get you onboarded next week.
and if you don't... it'll be at least 6 months. and that's assuming people aren't too upset about ties to China, a polyamorous lifestyle, or how much weed you smoked.
FAANGs did a lot of stupid interview BS, whiteboarding and leet-code nonsense, but I got an offer letter a couple weeks after, or a rejection, and a start date a month later.
Defense contractors often want candidates to have an active clearance, but AFAIK that's not at all a requirement for DoD labs.
I'm guessing the contractors want to avoid the financial cost and scheduling uncertainty of applying for the clearance. Especially because the clearance follows a person when they change employers.
> and if you don't... it'll be at least 6 months.
I'm not sure where you got that information, but it doesn't match my experience. You get an interim (non-TS) clearance very quickly, and a permanent clearance eventually.
> and that's assuming people aren't too upset about ties to China, a polyamorous lifestyle, or how much weed you smoked.
I have no idea what exact criteria OPM uses for denying a clearance application.
But last I knew, DoD does do random drug testing. I'm not sure what the consequences are for failing a marijuana test, but it wouldn't shock me if it causes loss of clearance.
That image problem goes away when you want to close a 7-8 figure TCV Fed deal to make your quarterly sales KPI.
The bigger stumbling block is procurement.
Software Procurement by Federal standards is relatively straightforward so a Series E+ startup can make it if they spend around $7-10M and 1-1.5 years on a dedicated roadmap for FedRamp and FIPS compliance.
Once you step out of software, procurement becomes paperwork hell. Throw in the paperwork hell from R&D Grantmakers like the DoD and DoE, and you end up with a quasi-Soviet procurement system.
Ironically, most of these compliance and regulatory checks were added for good intentions - primarily to minimize corruption and graft, yet it basically clogged up the entire system, and dissuades startups and innovators from working directly with the Defense community.
Some projects like DIUx and and In-Q-Tel are trying to change that, but it's too little too late, and our defense base is entirely dependent on firms like Microsoft, Cisco, Crowdstrike, Zscaler, etc acquiring promising startups to evangelize their innovations internally.
This is how it works at the Fed just like any other corporation, as well as with any other peer country.
While there are internal R&D projects, most agencies aren't having their engineers design and productionize bespoke environments from scratch - they're implementing existing tooling and buying it off the shelf.
For example, if you want an internal cloud platform, you'll just use Azure GovCloud. If you want to spin up a K8s cluster, you'll spin up an AKS cluster. Want to protect your cluster? You'll just purchase an off the shelf CNAPP.
For defense, R&D is important, but that isn't the DoD's forte and distracts from it's core mission, which is why they offload innovation to the private sector. Even the USSR did this to a certain extent by the 1970s by supporting defense corporations like Mikoyan and Sukhoi that basically operated as state owned corporations that competed with each other.
The issue is the amount of suppliers in the US has shrunk dramatically since the 1990s due to the compliance overhead and requirements such as a single platform DoD wide (a major reason for F35 cost overruns).
On top of that, any fundamental research requires a significant amount of paperwork to justify funding and sets limits on salaries for PIs and Postdocs that are significantly lower than market rate.
Basically, American private industry has largely been divorced from the MIC, and aside from a handful of major enterprises, there isn't an incentive to enter the procurement space. We've accidentally remade the entire 70s-80s Soviet procurement system in the US today.
There are some changes happening in Software and Satellite procurement, but not as much in other sectors like Avionics.
Most FFRDCs and UARCs are staffed by civilians employed concurrently with a regional University or Industry Vendor, and these labs in turn are PPPs often operated by a private sector firm like Lockheed or a university like UCB.
On top of that, the bulk of the budget goes to funding research done outside of FFRDCs and UARCs via programs like DARPA, grants from the DCTO S&T, SBIR/STTR, etc
This fusion of university research, private sector research, and some limited in-house research is what's called Civil-Military Fusion.
The issue is the private sector portion has increasingly been divorced from the private sector, as up and coming private sector opportunities or promising startups don't have an easy on-ramp into the existing defense procurement or research infrastructure, and grantwriting+compliance overheads plus limited grant funding dissuade most companies aside from your Charles River Analytics types from going thru the hurdles.
> FedRamp and FIPS compliance
It’s odd to see these in the same sentence. FedRAMP is so insanely complex/difficult to achieve in a straightforward way. Even by your own estimate for a series E startup (with lots of capital and the ability to spend >18 months< on compliance) there’s a 3M$ variation in cost.
That rules out every startup or SME in software and that’s why you have Palantir, half baked tech that rarely delivers/is somehow more universally hated in USG than ServiceNow. Yet able to seize the space and hike prices endlessly due to compliance being so difficult to achieve — they realize/accept this as their edge as well and it’s why they so aggressively pursued IL6.
The good news is that this is going away and USG is strongly reconsidering its approach here. CMMC, imo, is a huge step in the right direction.
Agreed! Hence why I said "relatively". It's an easier procurement system than for other products in the Federal space.
> That rules out every startup or SME in software and that’s why you have Palantir
Tbf, Palantir's federal usage is kinda overstated from what I've heard from peers.
But yea, I agree, and made this point in another comment
The "mission" they tout as being the main driver to work for then is often ill-defined and what is best known typically has an atrocious public image problem surrounding it.
There are people in the Valley who will work for less money if it's for a cause they believe in.
The Pentagon's work? It isn't a cause they believe in. In-fact many see it as a more noble cause to thwart all military actors - our own included.
Since the 1970s, it's almost all outsourced to the private sector via PPPs because private sector players can deploy capital and execute much quicker than the DoD or DoE who have regulatory requirements and need to have specific line items defined for them within budgets.
Also, I think you underestimate or don't realize how much DoD related work is done in the Valley today. I'd estimate that 30-40% of startups in the Bay Area are in some way funded by the DoD - either via Federal sales or via strategic investments via In-Q-Tel or their private sector counterparts.
On top of that, most STEM research grants at Bay Area universities come from either the DoD, DoE, or DHHS.
This public private partnership model is what China copied, which is unsurprising, as most of their middle level leadership and policymakers attended these programs and benefited from the US-China Science and Technology Agreement which evangelized the American PPP R&D model in China since the 1970s.
The difference is, the Chinese system is much more lax about compliance and graft, which allows for it to be much nimbler. The downside is graft can be MASSIVE, such as the corruption scandals surrounding China's Big Fund and fiascos such as the collapse of Tsinghua Unigroup
One way to “get around” this is work it as a 1099, charge a high bill rate, and then just work less overall.
But, if you’re trying to move outside of a major contracting area like DC, youre probably better off just getting a remote private sector job.
Now I'm building software, involved intimately with designing and interfacing with specialized hardware, and travelling to interesting places doing interesting things with interesting people-- occasionally toppling off of combat machines. I took a 30% pay cut to do it. No regrets whatsoever, living life.
Most Top Secret work occurs in a SKIF. Basically you enter, lock your phone, smartwatch, and whatever else in a locker, then enter the area where the work gets done. This area is regularly swept for bugs and whatnot.
You can't work on "top secret" stuff on your own due to OpSec.
If you have broken the law in the past, the clearance processes mostly seem to care that a) you acknowledge it and have stopped b) you are upfront about it, and it can't be used as leverage against you.
If you're currently routinely breaking the law, yes, it's going to be hard to get clearance. That seems pretty reasonable to me.
generally they don't take weed to seriously, but want to know you've been drug free for roughly a year.
By comparison, several / most of the Cali tech firms I've worked for / with / around had devs hitting a THC vape at lunch. Might have had to pass a piss test to get the job, but that's just 30 days, and no one is knocking on your neighbor's doors to verify your drug and employment history.
That could be due to things like sexism, ageism or discrimination against conscripts, or it could be due to the settler organisations having their people in government and a strong wish to resettle the Gaza strip.
Either way, the signals were there, they had been watching the preparations and exercises for a year or so. Even if the resistance groups had kept that secret even a mediocre officer in intelligence or the army should be able to conclude from 'first principles' and what they were doing that there would eventually be a violent response.
The people running the Israeli government and army are tools. They fucked up, plain and simple. Whether through malice or just ineptitude and incompetence, they failed.
21% of Israel's population are arab-israeli muslims. How many jewish people are living in Iran? How many jewish people are living in the Gaza strip?
Who hates who here?
Note also that there is a distinction between Hamas and Gaza. Prior to the invasion, Hamas had weak support among Gazans - I think in part because they understood that their extremism was to blame for the blockade and ongoing hardships in the region. It may also be because Hamas systematically embedded its military infrastructure in civilian areas, and they knew what this would mean for them if war broke out. So its particularly evil that Netanyahu propped up a weak Hamas and then invaded with the intention of wiping it out. He prevented the Gazans from voting out the extremists and saving themselves the experience of this atrocity.
FWIW Netanyahu (or Israel, as a state) has never spoken once about wiping out "Arabs". Whereas Hamas' stated goal, as with Iran, is to wipe out Jews (and the West).
He did tell people to "remember Amalek": https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjamin-netany... . Amalek refers to a verse in the Bible where God told the Jews to: "go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."
He's not talking about Hamas specifically, which is a political movement running a party and charity work. He's not even talking about Hamas and the al-Qassam brigades specifically.
How you can know? Because a splinter group from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, is the second largest political force in the Gaza strip and that's not a movement he intends to help by removing Hamas.
If you dig up some israeli television you'll find that pundits and other talking heads are quite clear with their genocidal feelings, and that's how they're using the Amalek terminology. Same goes for pop songs high on the charts in Israel.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-nakba-israels-far-ri...
https://www.972mag.com/intelligence-ministry-gaza-population...
https://www.axios.com/2023/03/01/hawara-israeli-smotrich-wip...
So they helped Hamas rise.
People like to point to “from the river (Jordan) to the (Red) sea” as “evidence” that Palestinians hate the Jewish people, but that ignores that that phrase was literally the election campaign for Likud (Netanyahu) in the 1970s and formed the back bone of the Israeli rights policy to this day.
Also, Hamas is less than 40,000 people in a country of 3 million, so generalizations aren’t helpful.
The important thing to me is those guys don't lead to Islamic theocracies.
Israel has also transported jews to Israel from the entire region with fervour for decades, sometimes with dubious consensuality, similar to how immigrating ethiopian jews have been given contraceptives without making sure they really wanted it.
It's also a state claiming to be jewdom, period, and uses religious imagery in its warfare, so it's not surprising if people who aren't aware that many, maybe most, jews aren't zionists fall into antisemitic tropes and conspiracism.
Israel has rescued Jews from places they were persecuted- Yes.
Israel also doesn't "claim to be jewdom" whatever that means. I can't even parse it. The US or Canada or most of Europe are decidedly Christian. In Israel you find more diversity (partly because the other religious minorities are much larger).
I wouldn't reduce e.g. Operation Magic Carpet to rescue from persecution. The main zionist motivation was to expand the jewish population in Palestine.
Sure it does. It's The Jewish State. It's were jews belong, as famous zionist Joe Biden puts it, no jew would be safe unless it existed. Inbetween messages about 'death to arabs' the IDF puts up menorahs and paints the star of David when they're operating in the Gaza strip. In the Knesset they've tried to expel Ofer Cassif for defending international law over the religious fervour of the Likud and far-right settler parties.
Edit: As for surveys, take a look at those from Israel Democracy Institute.
Doesn't US money say "In God we trust"? Don't various Christian countries put up Christmas decorations and trees everywhere? Aren't there courthouses in the US with the "bible" statues in front of them? I think the US is more of a "Christian" state than Israel is a Jewish state.
Israel is primarily founded as democratic free secular society, not a Jewish State in the sense you're implying: "will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture; will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of the shrines and Holy Places of all religions; and will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations."
Anyways, in the sense that Israel is the country of the Jewish nation, like Japan is the country of the Japanese, and China is a country for Chinese, and India is a country for Indians, that's sort of true. But I don't think this is the point you're trying to make here?
I did a quick Google for surveys from the Israel Democracy Institute and I failed to find a survey saying Israelis hate Palestinians. Maybe point me to the specific survey(s) you had in mind?
I don't think Ofer Cassif was being expelled for "defending international law". Israel is abiding by international law. Anyways, if he wasn't that shows you democracy in action. How many senators e.g. in the US were "defending international law" by opposing their country internationally post 9/11 e.g.? Israel has a diversity of opinions (of which Ofer is on some extreme) and the freedom to voice them.
I don't think it's a jewish state because I believe zionism and judaism to be fundamentally incompatible, but it's the mainstream zionist position that it is.
You can look at pretty much any survey they've done during al-Aqsa Flood. You can also, you know, just look at israeli television? Listen to some politicians and pundits?
No, even the ICJ has concluded that Israel is plausibly committing genocide. What do you mean by "extreme"? Are you seriously claiming that he is free to voice his opinions, even though he is routinely harassed by the state for trying to do so? To my knowledge the arab parties in the Knesset has been allowed one, maybe two if the managed one in november, demonstrations. Look at photos from the israeli anti-government protests and count the palestinians, you'll find that they are very, very absent.
Or, you know, listen to some popular israeli pop songs, like Shager or Harbu Darbu? Look at some IDF TikTok:s where they say the genocidal stuff out loud while looting some dead or displaced peoples home?
The conflict isn't about who hates who. It's about how to deal with millions of stateless people living in an occupied, blockaded, besieged territory where they can't control how much of any kind of import or export they do with the outside world because their integration into their occupiers legal system would upend its ethno-nationalism.
If there truly was this kind of conspiracy, far too many people would have known about it, and this would've been leaked. Even if Netanyahu wouldn't mind the death of a thousand of his citizens (and personally I don't think anything is beneath him), there is no one else who would be so stupid or evil.
Also, Netanyahu almost certainly lost most of his public support because of this. Even if he truly was cynical anything to do something like this for his own personal gain, almost no one thinks that this has gained him anything. He will almost certainly go down in history as the worst Israeli leader of all time.
Also also, Israel isn't wiping anyone off the map. If this was all a ploy to do that, why wouldn't it just do it? I'm fairly certain that three days after Hamas's invasion of Israel, Israel had far more leeway from the world to do what it wanted.
Observing that the man will be forced to retire at age 76 after a decade longadder climbing career is hardly a resounding proof of incompetence
EDIT: I don't think on Oct 6th, 2023 (e.g.) many Israelis were concerned about wiping Gaza off the map. As long as it was quiet nobody cared (which was sort of the problem here).
Perhaps if he were more focused on governing or stepping aside rather than keeping himself out of jail by any means necessary, there would have been fewer distractions at the national level. I'm not saying it's his fault but the chaos he caused can't have helped.
'He then focused on defense work, lamenting that people with the relevant tech skills to build the weapons of the future were “largely refusing to work with the defense sector.”'
I wonder to what extent that is still true. There is clearly a lot of money flowing and some definitely followed the money ( Palantir exists after all ).
Easy: Give potential employees similar salaries to MAMAA companies, and a similar amount of freedom and independence (at least in the ways in which it is possible at a defense company) as it existed in the early days of Google and Facebook, and I think a lot of potential employees (though of course not all, but this is not necessary) will "forget" their initial moral objections and go for the money. :-)
Still, a person who knows what he/she is building can likely predict how it is going to be used. Would I want to be responsible for popularizing portable black hole generators?
You just developed an insanely small part of this machinery. Compartmentalization of the work appeases the mind a lot. :-(
If you still have bad feelings, there exists the charity-industrial complex: donate some decent paycheck to give a poor, starving child a better life - something that you could not have done if you hadn't accepted the well-paid defense contract.
Definitely. When I worked at a aerospace co some of the young engineers had internal conflicts they rationalized away by saying "we aren't building bombs." No, they were just building the targeting systems. Pointing the gun but someone else pulling the trigger. So it's all good.
Getting tech people into defense was easier when they never saw the aftermath of what those weapons did or were largely unaware of what they were actually building (a la Manhattan Project). But when people can watch a live-streamed bombing of a random neighborhood on Twitter, they may have second guesses about assisting in that...
I imagine approximately every single person that worked on this project wouldn't be there if the Nazis and Japan weren't actively trying to kill... well whatever share of the world's population they desired to kill. (I'm pretty sure the union would be close to 100%)
Scientists were unaware they were building an atomic bomb to use in WW2? Oppenheimer certainly was aware.
So this was where all the surplus of Western civilization was going to for the last 3/4 of a century. Now the surplus is no more, and soon to turn negative as the critical resources and energy sources run out, I hope the US loses its global dominance as soon as possible. I’m sorry, but at no point in time have they been just rulers over planet Earth. Entire countries of mine have been demolished and entire populations have been killed/forced to migrate, so that you can buy the new Xbox to your child, and your neighbor can buy a new yacht.
Our Middle East clusterfuck has cost us at least 8 trillion dollars since 2003.
Enough to convert the entire US to clean energy, feed every hungry person on the planet, and house every homeless American. With change.
Instead it was spent on murdering millions, displacing tens of millions, and riddling generations of children with cancer and birth defects (again).
It's so, so far beyond evil and stupid that even Noam Chomsky says there's no word for it.
[1]:https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&...
"At the end of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington said, "I do not expect the Constitution to last for more than 20 years." Today, the United States has the oldest written constitution in the world."
If anything what the country has achieved over the years is pretty darn good. For a large part of its existence, the US also wasn't this super power that we know of today. The future is unwritten but maybe we will see an isolated US that is left to tend to only its own internal issues.
This is factually inaccurate, both of these were proven capabilities several decades ago. The biggest technical issue with ballistic missile intercept was getting the new hypersonic rocket motors they wanted to use to respond to guidance commands with sufficient precision. It was a materials science problem; if you put the same package on a normal rocket motor it (demonstrably) worked just fine.
"if you put the same package on a normal rocket motor it (demonstrably) worked just fine." Except that the interceptor wouldn't be able to reach the target traveling at hypersonic speeds.
In other words, the guidance didn't work. Either the interceptor missed because it was off target or it missed because it was too slow. Dressing it up in technicalities doesn't negate the failure for the purposes of SDI.
Yeah the best way to fix errors is to ... just ignore them.
I think any sophisticated system that requires a bureaucratic staff to operate is doomed to fail.
Somebody high up in the Israeli military was probably like, "After very careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks."
How Big Tech is losing the wars of the future
The underlying assumption of the article is that we want AI to further centralize military power into the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Whenever that goal has been achieved in the past, it has been disastrous for human rights, scientific progress, and things like life expectancies and food security.
I’d rather Silicon Valley keep producing stuff like the printing press and gutenberg bible, and not work on reducing the costs of operating a new Spanish Inquisition or an S.S.-style surveillance apparatus.
Even if you trust the current Pentagon, there’s some other government that would misuse the technology. Also, you have no way of knowing who will control the Pentagon in 50-100 years.
The AI marketing hype and lobbying stuff fills the pockets of a few people but it doesn't make soldiers more effective, "cloud computing controls the battlefield" is such a meme worthy sentence I don't understand how anyone can take someone seriously who says that out loud.
What you could see in the Israel-Hamas conflict mentioned in the article is what you also see with the Houthis or in Ukraine, that the best technology on the battlefield is cheap, resilient and simple enough to be understood and operated by the least competent soldier, not some 10 billion dollar fantasy tool out of a sci-fi novel.
The example in the article of Hamas feeding Israeli informants deliberate misinformation to strengthen the notion that Hamas would not attack, now imagine this amplified by even more gullible LLM powered "intelligence analysts". It's a theme of the "AI age", the people who stand to benefit the most are critically thinking humans able to exploit the tool induced stupidity of everyone else. Hackers, appropriately enough.
Silicon Valley has always been a part of the US military complex. Maybe there was a period sometime in the 90es where it was irrational exuberance and don't be evil. But now we are surely back under manners.
(in combination, it would appear that whatever 'manners' may be, they are located distal of the cranium)
I am amazed how confused, historically ignorant, but intelligent my coworkers are. It’s like they’ve never even heard of NATO, world war 1 or 2, and almost each one when they’ve asked what I did has then had the follow up question “what’s the infantry”. This used to seem cute, but lately I’ve wondered if it’s something to be concerned with.
If the people who are being paid all this money and building all these products are incredibly intelligent but have zero wisdom, what does that look like when war comes? Do they just step aside, point at a stock price, and tell me I’m barbaric and living in a past century? I wonder about it almost daily now as the conflict looks more and more likely to spread and I see an electorate more and more isolationist and looking to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Hmmm, not even sure my point. I guess it’s that I find many Americans insanely smart and intelligent, but they lack any wisdom but act as though they are all Martin Luther king jr when they pronounce a name correctly, or some such morally insignificant thing compared to life and death.
Something is totally fucked with how people are valuing things. What I’m not sure, but when a US Republican senator named JD Vance (a fucking veteran!) starts going around literally spouting Kremlin propaganda lines about Ukraine, and conservatives agree and repeat it, I just feel sad about my society.
Also, obviously some people do know these things, I’m being loose with language here. But a huge majority of the people have asked me those questions.
The author exhibits essentially zero knowledge of the advances in military intelligence in the past 10-20 years. He’s talking about problems in the Vietnam war and IBM 360 mainframes as if all of the stuff Macnamara dreamed of weren’t daily reality now.
The US sends $3.8B in military aid to Israel yearly...
I know there are other interests (oil), but the complete freedom to do anything that the US gives Israel is not entirely helpful to the US.
No, do you remember the terrorists attacks in USA and in Europe? Have you watched the Argo movie? Do you know about terrorist attacks in Latin America where Iran is involved? Seems people don't check history beyond Israel (21k km^2)and Jews (16m).
If someone gave their friend a gun, would anyone ever call it aid?
Much of this so-called "aid" comes with the condition that it be spent in the US. This prevents us from developing our own weapons, selling them to whomever we want, and diversifying our sources of military supplies.
In addition, the US provides much more "aid" to our enemies.
Also, part of this "aid" is used to financially bribe our generals. Essentially making them American "Foreign Agents of Influence" in the spirit of FARA[1], not as literal spies. Unfortrunatelly we lack legislation like FARA, so it's still legal here.
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Could you explain this? The US arms Israel’s enemies?
We only have "peace" with Egypt and Jordan on paper.
This is much worse than a cold war situation between the US and the Soviet Union back in the time.
Their armies still define Israel as their main enemy.
These countries are not safe for Israelis to travel.
In Jordan's case we only have "peace" with the foreign royal family imposed by Britain. And even that doesn't include their queen ;)
And yes, US provided and still provides military aid to terror group such as PLO, Fatah, even Hamas and PIJ (under the pretext of humanitarian aid).
US even removed Houthis from the list of terror group in order to give them money (and just recently put them back on the list).
Similarly with lifting sanctions on Iran, which resulted in giving them $10B.
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U.S. Foreign Assistance to the Middle East:
Historical, Recent Trends, and the FY2024
Background Request
Updated August 15, 2023
Hamas was elected if memory serves, and while getting them to renounce violence would seem ideal, how could they? Israel wasn’t going to. They have behaved terribly and until someone starts behaving better, it’s going to carry on as it has for so long. Peace with Egypt has been maintained and relations with Egypt seem to be improving and are ok - what am I missing? There seems very little chance of war.
Sinai was supposed to be a demilitarized zone, slowly it was filled with the Egyptian army. Egypt built multiple tunnels under the Suetz canal.
Yet our governments and military still trying to appease them, in the same way as they did to Hamas.
And how do you think all these advanced weapons (RPGs, anti-tank missiles, thermal bombs, etc.) got into 'azza[1]? How did their terrorists go to train in Iran?
Why do you think Egypt opposes an Israeli presence on the border in Raphiakh[2]?
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[1,2] I'm using the original biblical place names here, instead of the English distortion of a broken Arabic pronunciation of their Hebrew names.
They turn a blind eye and try to appease Egypt, but it never works in the long run.
Our politicians and generals think short-term, they just want to finish their term and get their lavish pensions, and lucrative security contracts from the US, or a high-paying position in some Washington-funded military research think tank.
>> Similarly with lifting sanctions on Iran, which resulted in giving them $10B.
In the case of Iran, it was not a matter of receiving $10 billion in aid, but rather the release of $10 billion of Iranian funds that had been frozen.
Neither meet my definition of ‘aid’.
OK, let Putin have his money then.
The truth is, US giving "aid", imposing or lifting sanctions exactly to protect their interests, and to increase their leverage, not because they care about other countries in question.
For decades our country tries to get rid of this "aid", but it's virtually impossible.
It’s the reason US State Dept treats us like Puerto Rico, without giving us any of the perks of Puerto Rico's status, like tax exemption and unrestricted access to the US mainland.
Netanyahu tried to get rid of American military "aid" in the past, but he failed to do so.
Aid must be spent to purchase arms from American suppliers at greatly inflated prices.
It also creates perverse incentives that ultimately weakens, if not cripples, our military.
Israel without US backing seems a perilous place for Israel to go, and if accepting the aid keeps the alliance alive, surely that’s in Israel’s interest?
Thanks for the explanations - I haven’t come across these viewpoints before.
Check again, the majority of the "aid" got to our enemies in MENA (and that excluding non-Arab enemy and semi-enemy countries, which are for some reason not included in MENA).
Look at:
- Figure 2. U.S. Foreign Aid to MENA Countries: FY1946-FY2020
- Figure 3. Israel, Jordan, and Egypt in the FY2024 Assistance Request for MENA
- Table 1. U.S. Bilateral Aid to MENA Countries: FY2021 - FY2024 Request
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>> Similarly with lifting sanctions on Iran, which resulted in giving them $10B.
> In the case of Iran, it was not a matter of receiving $10 billion in aid, but rather the release of $10 billion of Iranian funds that had been frozen.
Did I wrote somewhere that Iran got $10B aid?
What you wrote is factually correct, but the net effect is that Iran got $10B which they didn't had access to before.
For example, Jordan has maintained a position as a key major non-NATO ally of the United States within the Middle East (since 1996).
Also starting from 1989, both Egypt and Israel became major non-NATO allies of the US.
Just b/c somebody is an ally of the US, doesn't make them automatically an ally of Israel.
Paraphrasing: An ally of my ally is not my ally.
But with the current leadership and State Dept we are not sure that even US is our ally.
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Türkiye is a member of NATO, with antisemitic leader. Is Türkiye a friendly country? It used to be, but now it's a gray area.
[Trans-]Jordan's royal family is on life support from Israel, but it still openly acts like an enemy.
Egypt is the most obviously an enemy, even though there is "peace" on paper. Instead of asking me, ask an average Egyptian or [Trans-]Jordanian if they see Israel as an enemy.
Just b/c US pays them extortion or "protection" fees, doesn't make them any less of an enemy. It only delays the coming inevitable military conflict with them.
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We are not that far from NATO planes bombing Tel Aviv and carrying out SEAD operations[1].
If in the past it was a Sci Fi scenario, nowadays it becomes much more plausible.
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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_Enemy_Air_Defen...
I think you might be perceiving things as more threatening than is warranted. Lebanon and Egypt are complicated neighbours and may not quite be friends. NATO isn’t going to bomb Tel Aviv.
>Another combat veteran, now with a Pentagon agency working on these issues, told me that the AI developers he works with didn’t seem to understand some of the requirements for the technology’s military application. “I don’t know if AI, or the sensors that feed it for that matter, will ever be capable of spontaneity or recognizing spontaneity,” he said. He cited a DARPA experiment in which a squad of Marines defeated an AI-governed robot that had been trained to detect them simply by altering their physical profiles. Two walked inside a large cardboard box. Others somersaulted. One wore the branches of a fir tree. All were able to approach over open ground and touch the robot without detection.
Oh..
>I was curious about Palantir, whose stock indeed soared amid the 2023 AI frenzy. I had been told that the Israeli security sector’s AI systems might rely on Palantir’s technology. Furthermore, Shin Bet’s humiliating failure to predict the Hamas assault had not blunted the Israeli Defense Force’s appetite for the technology; the unceasing rain of bombs upon densely packed Gaza neighborhoods, according to a well-sourced report by Israeli reporter Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine, was in fact partly controlled by an AI target-creation platform called the Gospel. The Gospel produces automatic recommendations for where to strike based on what the technology identifies as being connected with Hamas, such as the private home of a suspected rank-and-file member of the organization. It also calculates how many civilians, including women and children, would die in the process—which, as of this writing, amounted to at least twenty-two thousand people, some 70 percent of them women and children. One of Abraham’s intelligence sources termed the technology a “mass assassination factory.” Despite the high-tech gloss on the massacre, the result has been no different than the slaughter inflicted, with comparatively more primitive means, against Dresden and Tokyo during World War II.
Don't try to "fake-news" it because it doesn't fit with your narrative.
Tech is being abused and combined with already authoritarian-fascist policies, is killing civilians en masse.
Here is the original report. Why are you so confident that there is no evidence? Not the curiosity we generally expect at HN.
https://www.idf.il/%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%A8%D7%99-%D7%99%D7%97%D7%...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39582863
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39482220
No one is allowed to attack other users like that, regardless of how right they are or feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The bombing of Dresden killed 25K people in 3days, not months of war.
The bombing of Tokyo killed 100K people in 1 day.
Furthermore, those cities were not where the military was actually operating. Hamas is operating its offensive throughout Gaza.
But it’s okay because Hamas exists?
What led you to this conclusion?
If the enemy is in a group of civilians, you use the police, arrest them, put them for a trial and send to prison.
If the enemy is in a group of civilians, and your immediate action is to bomb them along with the civilians, then you don’t value the lives of those civilians. At best you don’t care whether those civilians are alive or dead, and at worst you actually want those civilians dead. In the former case, you are doing a war crime, a crime against humanity, in the latter case you are doing a genocide and using the enemy as an excuse or justification.
In any case, there are plenty of ways to get around that. Unless the mass casualty is the point.
People are so desperately wanting to believe that AI will give them the revealed truth. Such systems should be named "Racist Uncle Dave" because they hallucinate some answer everytime they open their virtual mouths with some probability of being somewhat correct this time.
there is no perfect product, I don't know how well Palantir AI works, but I would be surprised it doesn't work at all
https://www.psypost.org/new-study-suggests-you-can-bullshit-...
I'm sure you can find more.
from your link. Given that it's pretty hard to get into a top MBA program, I think we can put this nonsense to bed.
It's hard because it's expensive fluff bs for jobs that have it as requirement. Useless without a position where you can exploit having MBA diploma.
There's a case in Poland that one "university" was giving MBAs like candies to party officers so they can have some higher education to occupy well paid leadership positions in publicly owned companies.
Nobody said MBAs buying Palantir or whatever came from "top" MBA programs. In Poland they would come from this "university".
Betnie Madoff was $64 billion and he had nothing but words. I'm sure Palantir has a bit more, but not by much.
Palantir is a real company. "I am sure Palantir has a bit more but not by much". Why are you so sure?
I said that "I'm sure" that Palantir has a bit more than Bernie because they actually produced some software, I believe.
"Not by much" was my guess given my experience of living 45 years on this planet through AI winter and spring (multiple?), working with software and computers. Experiencing how much of marketing is straight up lies. Seeing firsthand how government spends money on future predicting software that doesn't actually accurately predict anything, just presents results of some modelling.
But that's just my guess. Maybe it is magic this time. After all my expectations were contradicted once already with ChatGPT. Not strongly, but somewhat.
I wonder if they were a part of decision making process that caused Isreal to methodically bomb Central World Kitchen aid convoy manned with foreign volunteers. We'll never know because if they were this information won't be publicized because of relationships between Isreal, US and business.
When you read up on Palantir budiness in Israel there are question being raised why money is funneled back to a US corporation instead of developing local Isreali competence in processing intel.
People are definitely dying and that includes civilians, but facts matter and a lot of these numbers are simply made up by Hamas. Here's some analysis that demonstrates that it's extremely unlikely Hamas's Gaza Health Ministry numbers are based in reality: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-he...
Stuff like almost perfectly linear growth of deaths over days and so on, take a look at the article.
This is also Hamas who claims that every person killed was a civilian. Try to find "number of Hamas combatants killed" in the Gaza Health Ministry numbers, they don't even count this. Isn't that a bit weird? Israel will tell you how many people killed were armed soldiers and how many were civilians, as most places will do.
I don't know why people believe the numbers coming from Hamas. I wish there were a more reliable source in the area, but believing Hamas because you have no other numbers to go on is plain stupid.
> Well aware of Israel’s intelligence methods, Hamas members fed their enemy the data that they wanted to hear, using informants they knew would report to the Israelis. They signaled that the ruling group inside Gaza was concentrating on improving the local economy by gaining access to the Israeli job market, and that Hamas had been deterred from action by Israel’s overwhelming military might. Such reports confirmed that Israel’s intelligence system had rigid assumptions of Hamas behavior, overlaid with a racial arrogance that considered Palestinians incapable of such a large-scale operation. AI, it turned out, knew everything about the terrorist except what he was thinking.
That sounds a lot like a company that's implementing data-driven "best practices" from some expensive management consultants.
It truly is the best system, regardless of how bad the results are. It's best by definition.
> That sounds a lot like a company that's implementing data-driven "best practices" from some expensive management consultants. > > It truly is the best system, regardless of how bad the results are. It's best by definition.
Well that rings some bells. It's as if there's a religion where the sacred totem is a graph that goes up and to the right.
Some question for the crowd: How do systems like this insulate themselves from failure? Before something goes wrong, what prevents seeing the problem? And after something goes wrong, what are the words and behaviors used to avoid fundamental change?
in my experience it's one of two things.
1. it's declared the process is what was wrong and so immediately everyone is off the hook. Then a year is spent refining or adjusting the process but it's still the same people making bad decisions and underperforming and then, eventually, leadership changes and the "well, what we have seems to be working" will start. The process changes fade into the sunset.
2. someone will leave, retire, resign, or be fired. Then all the blame leaves with them and any additional discovery of what went wrong will also somehow be their fault. It's assumed all the problems left with this person and so no change is needed.
I sound pretty jaded and cynical but i'm actually not, it's just that's the way i've seen it go down before.
You plan for the worst, but most importantly you plan for multiple different versions of what "worst" could entail, and you have uncorrelated redundancy such that the probability of disaster reduces from p to p^3.
Ukraine made the same mistake by not putting mines along the border. Just taking it for granted that an invasion wouldn't happen.
Hedge your tail risks with cheap real options, folks.
There were plenty of Ukrainians who wanted Ukraine invaded.
There are some hawkish types in Israeli politics.
There are a lot of reasons - from quite intuitive to conspiratorial - to not take the idea that AI caused or meaningfully contributed to this failure at face value. Or that it was a failure of intelligence in the first place.
The place we spent the most time in the 21st century, Afghanistan, somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights. That sort of societal transformation is not possible even with 100,000 troops when they don't even speak the local language. Can you imagine the hubris of trying to tell people in some remote village that the way men and women relate to each other has to change through a translator, because some tall buildings in a place they've never heard of got destroyed? The obvious result was total failure and the Taliban picking up right where they left off in 2001.
Re-building Afghanistan was more like building Afghanistan. We weren’t fixing a collapsed patio like in Japan — we had to build a whole housing tract, and at no point did we or anyone in the world have that amount of money.
Your point about rebuilding Afghanistan really being building Afghanistan is very true. I remember hearing a soldier in Afghanistan talking about how surprised he was at the number of people he met in Afghanistan that had never even heard of Afghanistan.
Were it not for external support for the Mujahideen, it is almost certain that an Afghan state would have succeeded in achieving some form of monopoly on violence.
The idea that nation-states were something alien to Afghanistan that we had to force on them just isn't true.
I dunno, the NATO-Yugoslavia war is both more recent and produced a much clearer and more stable, positive local outcome than the 1991 Iraq War. (And if you argue “but didn't that restart US-Russian geopolitical rivalry, making it worse than Desert Storm,” I would counter that it didn't, Yeltsin designating Putin with his yearning for a return of the USSR’s Eastern European empire as his successor did that, the aftermath of the NATO-Yugoslavia war is just when the West realized it, plus, Desert Storm—well, actually, Desert Shield, but the two are inseparable—by the same token, was, in fact, the proximate trigger for the formation of al-Qaeda, so...)
We've seen abject failure in Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, and mixed results in Iraq with the strategy of keeping the country together and assuming democracy will solve everything.
Afghanistan was never going to be easy to succeed at something more than a punitive mission against al-Qaeda, but I think that the fundamental root of much later failure including the ultimate failure in Afghanistan is the 2003 Iraq War.
In Iraq though, it was always going to be messy simply because of the fact that there are three major ethno-religious groups, two of which had been long repressed. I don't know enough of the details about the 2003-2005 time period to really specifically address radical de-Baathification, but if you institute democracy in Iraq and keep the country together, you're naturally going to get de-Baathification because the Shia will vote the Sunni out. The Sunni will resent this, and as we've seen, this is how you wind up with ISIS.
Easily a 50+ year project, because progress effectively happens one death at a time. A large percentage of the old guard harboring outdated ideas will simply never change. The only hope is changing the minds of the new generations.
Post 9/11, the USA had the moral authority to "do something" in Afghanistan. Iran, Russia, and nearly everyone else offered to help. Alas, whereas GHWB was an internationalist, the Cheney Admin's neocons were belligerently stubborn unilateralists. So instead of seizing the opportunity to reset troubled relations (and boost their internal reformers), we further spited them (and empowered their hardliners).
Further, Afghanistan was a failed state. Iran and Pakistan were struggling to manage the refugees. And could do nothing to address the flood of drugs plaguing their people. Afghanistan's neighbors wanted us, needed us, to help them restore stability.
Lastly, the Cheney Admin won in Iraq without firing a single shot. Hussein conceded to ALL of our demands. If Bush had simply declared victory and gone home, he'd've become an int'l hero and considered one of our greatest presidents. (Until Katrina.)
Such a stupid waste. So many dead, so much wrecked and wasted, the middle east further destabilized... Et cetera.
As a lay person not from the Balkans, I was impressed that the filmmakers got all the major players to speak candidly, on camera, about their involvement. Mladic, Tudjman, Milosevic, all there for example. Reminded me of another great series, the World At War.[1]
[0] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-ur6mGQeTOmuwxnBW-ssXWDD...
[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYxy4la9w2tfotW1Xs-7oICGf...
Reducing the US/NATO involvement in the former Yugoslavia (both the intervention in the Bosnia War and subsequent deployment of IFOR/SFOR and later the NATO-Yugoslavia War and the subsequent deployment in KFOR) to “some sorties” seems to be missing a bit.
I mean, sure, the combat involvement prior to achieving agreements in both cases was application of air power, but...
This was discussed a lot in Iraq as well, but I believe the worry was that the Shia state would basically be absorbed by Iran. It’s not clear that what’s happening there now is much better, but Iraq had been seen as a useful counterweight to Iran and the neocons wanted to preserve that. The only problem is that they also wanted democracy, and most of the voters are Shia, so democratic Iraq is always likely to be friendly to Iran.
Tito kept Yugoslavia in check for decades, and he was Not A Nice Man. The Romans probably had the longest-lasting empire in history, and they were very "not nice."
I'm not sure that there's any "magical" system of government that works better than others.
Also, you have governments that work well for the governed, and ones that don't bother others. Whether or not it is a "good" government probably hinges upon which side of the border you're on.
I remember reading that the best system of government is an absolute monarchy, and the worst system of government is an absolute monarchy.
People are really complex, and "one size fits all," tends not to work for us.
> ...
> The place we spent the most time in the 21st century, Afghanistan, somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights.
I think in Afghanistan's case, the goal was clear but it was not achievable. A bombing campaign, some boots on the ground, and killing some leaders could not actually achieve the "objective of destroying Al Qaeda," because it would just re-form afterwards. You'd have to change the society so it wouldn't reform, hence "ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights."
Though I suppose installing and supporting some brutal warlord as a secular dictator (e.g. a Saddam Hussein) would have achieved the objective too, but the US would have gotten so much condemnation for that I'm sure the option was not on the table.
I suspect some people thought it was achievable because they looked at post-WW2 Germany and Japan and concluded that:
1. Cities reduced to rubble in a war with America and its allies.
2. Lengthy occupation, plenty of money & loans for rebuilding.
3. Occupation transitions to an democratic government. Some American forces stick around just in case, but they don't have to fight anyone.
4. ????
5. Successful, stable, western-style democracy with an aversion to armed conflict, a strong economy and a renowned car manufacturing industry.
Obviously it didn't actually work in Afghanistan or Iraq, but I can see how politicians surrounded by yes men and pro-war types might have thought they had an achievable plan.
How exactly does providing the latter do anything but piss off surviving conservatives and hardliners and reactionaries even more?
If you want lasting change, the new regime either needs widespread support from its subjects (Why wasn't it in charge to begin with, then, why did it need to be installed by an occupier..?), or you need to scorched-earth, mass-graves liquidate every single participant in the old regime, and all of their supporters (And not just fire them from their jobs, as we did in Iraq. All the ex-Baathists went on to gainful employment in the various insurgent groups, instead.)
Not doing it is exactly why Reconstruction failed. The slavers lost the war, but won the peace, and their politics reasserted as soon as they were allowed to govern themselves.
I feel like this would be an excellent way to speed-run the creation of a large group of people (and their descendants) who hate us _specifically_, and are even more motivated to cause us harm. I can't imagine many people would say "yep, I guess you won!" when you've killed their fathers, uncles, grandparents, and older brothers.
See: the Roman Empire. They had a timeline of several hundred years before the new territories were ‘roman’
Everyone failed in Afghanistan.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but even Alexander himself failed in Afghanistan. The Persians tried for centuries, and always failed. The Caliphate was the most successful, but only because they never wanted any kind of real change. The place is just unique.
The thought that we were gonna go in there and change things was probably ill considered at the outset. When you objectively consider the historical record of the people of Afghanistan. Force was extremely likely to not work. I believe there doesn't really exist anyone out there with a good idea on anything that could have worked. In the end, we left. Just as everyone before us did. And I'd be willing to go on record now and say that everyone who goes into Afghanistan after us will leave Afghanistan in the end as well.
It's never as simple as, "more bombs", "more money", "more education", etc etc. Afghanistan is a unique problem, that is uniquely resistant to all of the common solutions.
Relevant wiki quotes:
“In the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire (1219–1221), Genghis Khan invaded the region from the northeast in one of his many conquests to create the huge Mongol Empire. His armies slaughtered thousands in the cities of Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad etc. After Genghis Khan returned to Mongolia, there was a rebellion in the region of Helmand which was brutally put down by his son and successor, Ogedei Khan, who killed all male residents of Ghazni and Helmand in 1222; the women were enslaved and sold. Thereafter most parts of Afghanistan other than the extreme south-eastern remained under Mongol rule as part of the Ilkhanate and the Turko-Mongol Chagatai Khanate.”
And:
“From 1383 to 1385, the Afghanistan area was conquered from the north by Timur, leader of neighboring Transoxiana (roughly modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and adjacent areas), and became a part of the Timurid Empire. Timur was from a Turko-Mongol tribe and although a Muslim, saw himself more as an heir of Genghis Khan. Timur's armies caused great devastation and are estimated to have caused the deaths of 17 million people. He brought great destruction on Afghanistan's south, slaughtering thousands and enslaving an equal number of women. Allied with the Uzbeks, Hazaras and other Turkic communities in the north his dominance over Afghanistan was long-lasting, allowing him for his future successful conquests in Central Anatolia against the Ottomans.”
The Mughal empire rose out of this and ruled until the 1800’s.
Historical track record shows that it takes at least a generation of war and incredibly brutal repression to actually accomplish the kind of regime change that the war's architects were aiming for.
If the issue is a few leaders, sure, invading and removing them can work. If your issue is with the entrenched system that produced those leaders, I've outlined what it takes to replace it.
Well there are more peaceful ways of achieving this: Look at post Nazi Germany and how they tried to eradicate even thinking about Nazism just to try and limit these thoughts from festering and growing.
In the US Reconstruction failed because of circumstance. Lincolns assassination led to what is considered the worst president in the US taking the reign. For goodness sake he was drunk out of his mind during his inaugural address! He systematically started to reverse the progress his predecessor made and gave cover to the losers to regroup and make gains again. We are still suffering to this day because of that one event.
It is fairly well understood that decreasing gender inequality by empowering women is one of the most effective ways to reduce instability in struggling societies.
It's one thing to slowly shift the goal posts in a civil society over decades through these kinds of soft changes...
Yes
> It's one thing to slowly shift the goal posts in a civil society over decades through these kinds of soft changes...
Are we talking about the same thing? "Shifting goal posts" usually means confusing positions in an argument by changing the point of the discussion. I'm not sure what relevance that has here.
Also, the US occupation of Afghanistan did last for decades so, again, I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
Examples?
> Also, the US occupation of Afghanistan did last for decades so, again, I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
There's a world of difference between 'Occupation security forces sometimes kind of control some of the major towns', which accomplished nothing[1], compared to the decades of incredible political repression in the USSR/China, that actually moved the cultural needle and destroyed organized internal opposition within those societies.
[1] The country reverted back to its previous state before the occupation even ended.
Look into it yourself if you care so much. I don't care to get so far off topic.
> [1] The country reverted back to its previous state before the occupation even ended.
Ok, so, you would agree then that ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights is an important part of the plan when the objective is to destroy Al Qaeda?
You also seem to be confused as to the difference between the Taliban and AQ, and seem to mistakenly believe that there weren't efforts to drive women's education in Afghanistan. It turns out that it didn't accomplish what you were hoping it would.
The initial comment was this: > The place we spent the most time in the 21st century, Afghanistan, somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights.
Which implies that the commenter does not understand how decreasing gender inequality would help "destroy Al Qaeda" in Afghanistan.
The next commenter then very clearly points out the missing information stating:
> I think in Afghanistan's case, the goal was clear but it was not achievable. A bombing campaign, some boots on the ground, and killing some leaders could not actually achieve the "objective of destroying Al Qaeda," because it would just re-form afterwards. You'd have to change the society so it wouldn't reform, hence "ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights."
You then re-assert the initial flawed reasoning by stating > How exactly does providing the latter do anything but piss off surviving conservatives and hardliners and reactionaries even more?
To rephrase my previous answer with a quote you won't bother to look up: "Women's full participation in politics and the economy makes a society more likely to succeed"
And you want to splinter the discussion further into the difference between the Taliban and Al Qaeda?
You don’t need to get “far off topic”. You said yes there were such examples. So kindly name one. Clearly you were thinking something when you wrote “yes”.
Right now it sounds like you bluffed, you were called on it and your argument collapsed. Not a good look.
Also there is no such thing as "European culture" or "Western culture"[0] per se, that's a modern retrofiction meant to lend credence to white nationalist ideology, much less any credibility in the claim that such is the sole originator and inheritor of the concept of democratic government. India had its own democratic ideals[0], as did Africa[2], and America's own democracy is derived in part from that of the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy[3].
Also... since you're implying (as everyone who makes this argument does) that Islam is "simply not compatible with democracy," the cultures of the Islamic world have been influenced by ancient Greek and Christian philosophy since Islam began[4,5]. That's why European culture(s) had to recover much of the knowledge they lost after the Dark Ages from Muslim sources. So your statement disproves itself even by its own ethnocentric standard.
[0]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/western-civili...
[1]https://thediplomat.com/2023/03/is-india-the-mother-of-democ...
[2]https://trueafrica.co/article/why-democracy-is-just-as-afric...
[3]https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2023/09/the-haudenosaunee-confeder...
[4]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_influences_on_the_Is...
[5]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_contributions_to_the_Isl...
Were Mussolini alive today, he'd have another form of government to sell you!
The vision is that through liberal democracy we can achieve world peace.
Believe it or not, it doesnt matter. That is the core of US foreign policy and there are ~300M americans that believe that. Only leadership can really change that.
Also
> Can you imagine the hubris of trying to tell people in some remote village that the way men and women relate to each other has to change through a translator, because some tall buildings in a place they've never heard of got destroyed?
Religion and Military occupation do this, lets not pretend this doesnt work.
I find it interesting, you have some mix of realpolitik but you have a cynicism that takes away your ability to see reality.
Not dudes driving through on patrol once a day and never stopping unless they are attacked.
Most successful occupiers seem to intermarry into the society they are occupying. Without this, there is always a clear distinction between occupier and occupied, that even shared culture, language, and religion will not smooth over.
As with Charlie Wilson’s war, it is precisely because we wouldn’t fund health economic and development projects that we lost a war we had already won.
It is precisely because of those obstacles that opium poppies are one of the few practical cash crops. One motorcycle can carry the refined output of an entire farm.
In Afghanistan, our goals were in fact achievable, but we screwed up the execution.
In 1979, when we used the Mujahideen to kick the Soviets out, we succeeded because we had Pakistan to give us logistical support from the sea, and to do some of our our dirty work. General Zia was a true Islamist, so there was no daylight between him and William Casey in going after the godless communists.
After 9/11, George W. Bush had a blank check from the American public. But he went back to the Pakistan military, and this time their goals were very different from ours.
The generals took our billions and cooperated with us as little as they could to escape sanctions, while continuing to harbor the Taliban. They themselves were thoroughly penetrated by Al Qaeda. [1]
We could never defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as they could just retreat to their sanctuary in Pakistan, get arms and healthcare.
But publicly we kept saying that Pakistan was our ally. No wonder the public are confused about why we lost.
[1] Steve Coll, "Ghost Wars: the CIA's secret wars in Afghanistan",
The end game, as Likud's party manifesto makes very clear, and their PM helpfully pointed out two weeks ago is a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, with no Palestinian sovereignty. They'll likely accomplish this goal in a generation or two (And no, it won't happen by enfranchising the natives. Israel's government is looking for lebensraum, not building a partnership with its subjects.)
It doesn't really need any strategic vision past that. It's a nuclear power, none of its neighbors can credibly threaten it, its main enemies are the people trying to live within its occupation zones.
Imagine for example the very realistic scenario where Iran obtains nuclear weapons. Then, should Iran decide to fund a missile blockade of Israel in the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Israel has zero capability to protect shipping. Since Iran would be a nuclear power, it's very obviously not in Israel's interest to escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, so a threat to do so wouldn't be credible.
The only way Israel could achieve its goals in such a scenario is through external intervention, which the Yemenis have shown even now would be difficult.
Israel does need strategic vision, desperately. It's a tiny country that's existentially depend on the US and Western Europe, and doesn't have the industrial capacity to independently defend itself while it's neighbors increasingly can. This is the first time this ever happened - in the past, Israel and it's neighbors were on an equal footing because while Israel couldn't produce its key weapons on it's own, neither could it's neighbors.
This isn't true anymore. It's a momentous strategic shift in the region. What's worse is that this happens at the same time as the balance of power is tipping away from its main allies. What's even worse is that public opinion, especially in the US, is undergoing an unprecedented shift.
Something else that has not been reported on is that China, which historically was agnostic on the issue, now has an official policy that Palestine has the right to armed resistance. It's a sizeable diplomatic shift because historically neither of the dominant powers openly supported armed Palestinian resistance.
If this grand strategem is to take more than 15 years, and it is, it's extremely risky strategically. It's not true that strategic vision past that is unneeded, it's more important now than it ever was. I imagine that many in the leadership of the IDF realize this but that it's just not something that's politically viable to run with.
Israel is a surprisingly large exporter of diamonds. Does it have diamond deposits in its own territory? No. They are friends with neighbours that have a long history of exploitation on the african continent. UAE is infamously ruthless when it comes to slavery and supporting genocidal coercion, and they are buddies with Israel since years back.
Iran would have to arm and train opposition in the arabian sunni-states to make them existentially dangerous to Israel, since the US is quite clear that it will try to be an existential threat to Iran if they go hard against Israel on their own. How would Turkey react if Iran engaged in active politics in Saudi Arabia and the UAE? Do the ruling elites in Iran consider establishing normalised relations with the saudis and emirates less important than the palestinian cause?
None of those are truths you can rely on right now, let alone for 1-2 generations.
It's doubtful that the US, should Israel really fly off the handle, would be willing to intervene against a nuclear state - it hasn't in Ukraine despite much more favourable circumstances. As time goes on and the balance of power shifts away from the US this will become more and more true. Additionally, the US cannot militarily stop antiship missiles even at a relatively small scale, so the only intervention that would be guaranteed to work would be an invasion of Iran, which if it had nuclear weapons would probably not be undertaken.
Secondly, there is no need for cooperation from any Sunni Arab state. In theory, all it would take would be missile launches from Iraq, Syria or Lebanon to shut down traffic to Israel from the Mediterranean - that would be enough to basically collapse the Israeli economy, as it would not be economical to ship overland from Egypt or Jordan, even if those countries would be willing to collaborate (and they might not).
Thirdly, no Arab country has diplomatic or economic ties to Israel out of the goodness of their heart. They only do due to massive pressure from the US, who either gives diplomatic concessions in exchange (ex: recognition of Western Sahara) or hangs the military umbrella (Saudi Arabia, UAE). This is not something you can bank on when shit hits the fan, let alone for the next 1-2 generations.
At the end of the day Israel's strategic situation is extremely precarious and is completely dependent on foreign powers who not only have greatly waning influence and relative capability, but also declining sympathy. This used to also be true, to some extent, for it's neighbors, but it isn't anymore because Iran managed to make its own sanction-proof and relatively competitive MIC. In the future, Iran might not even be the only state in the region to manage such a thing, and structurally any state which aims to do this aims for strategic independence, and a state which is strategically independent doesn't have much of a reason to be sympathetic to Israel right now, let alone in the situation you presented. Additionally, it's not unlikely there will be nuclear proliferation in the Middle East, which will greatly weaken Western influence as Western nations will oppose proliferation and because states which attain nuclear weapons are no longer reliant on the US for defense.
The US might not be able to stop anti-ship missiles, but that's not the strategy either. The strategy is to keep starving Yemen and showing off military equipment, reminding every nearby state, including Pakistan, how the US conducts diplomacy in hostile situations.
An existential threat to Israel needs to invade, which means military bases in a neighbouring area where the US doesn't already have thousands of soldiers and a lot of equipment. Nasrallah doesn't have the people or equipment needed, Iran wouldn't be allowed to use saudi or jordanian territory.
Sure, it's not about goodness, it's more about not having to arm their own populations and trade in blood commodities from Africa. It's also about the US and Israel being a relatively reliable enemy, that isn't going to perform surprise missile strikes on your territory for obscure reasons like Iran did a while ago. They'll do air strikes, but they'll also tell you why in advance. It might be a lie, but they'll look a bit mad rather than devious and mainly attack civilian or paramilitary targets.
Israel's strategic problem is the same now as it has been for almost a century. How to get away with ethnic cleansing, and if that doesn't work because no other country wants to participate, how to get away with genocide? US protection has been the answer for most of that time, and is likely to continue, with Europe using Ukraine as a domestically communicated reason to produce more weapons which will then be transfered mostly to Israel. I might be wrong and Iran more reckless than I expect, we'll see over the coming decade or so.
Additionally, American airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Yemen are ineffective, so I'm not sure why you mention them. In Syria it's only Turkey that's preventing Assad from a complete victory; Iraq's primary military force is an Iranian proxy, while Yemen is still hitting ships in the Red Sea.
There is no need to invade Israel to pose an existential threat. Israel is a tiny country with very little resources - should it be blockaded it would fall apart, even just for lack of energy.
Israel's strategic problem just isn't the same. For the first time ever, it has to deal with an adversary that is almost completely strategically independent and that it simply cannot defeat militarily.
There's nothing here that needs recklessness either - as it is right now we are at the stage of threats. That's part of what the Houthi missile strikes, it's Iran sending a message that it can threaten shipping in the region and that no one can actually stop them. If Iran wanted to actually hurt Israeli shipping, the missiles would be fired into the Mediterranean, not into the Red Sea. Just the fact that the Houthis are still hitting ships today is a momentous geopolitical shift - it's a Suez crisis lite edition.
If all you're looking forward is a decade, then it's probably true that there isn't going to be something huge. But if you're talking about 1-2 generations, there are clear strategic trends that threaten Israel's current strategy of relying on the US for protection and pressure. The idea that the US can no longer ensure maritime safety in any major trade route, let alone in the ME, or that there is a nuclear threshold state with a missile industry advanced enough to export to Russia in the ME is something that would get you laughed out of the room just 15 years ago.
What do you mean by Assad "complete victory"? Syria is devastated, something like ten million people are food insecure, the country is occupied by both other countries and militias.
What do you mean by "proxy"? Does your definition imply that the ukrainian army is a "proxy"?
What do you mean by "Houthi missile strikes"? It's the de facto government of Yemen engaged in a blockade against Israel, which is composed by more groups than the Ansar Allah. It is also quite popular due to its position against the genocidal colonial governments of the US, UK, Israel and so on.
Edit: I now realise that "and so on" could be interpreted to include the UAE which is occupying part of Yemen together with Israel, which is not the case. At the moment Yemen is not directly engaged against the UAE, presumably because its leadership considers a future arab peace more important and the US-israeli influence a driving factor in the UAE transgressing against Yemen.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
Is very clearly not saying "the victim deserved it".
It is saying "the 'victim' was looking for an excuse".
Either way, both statements are harmfully reductive.
According to Politico, they did indeed ignore the intelligence.
It has also been reported[1] that they ignored intelligence handed to them on a plate by the Egyptians three days before the raid occurred.
I suspect this galvanization is a fear response to a contracted race for immunity.
Considering that violence is his response to every effort towards his accountability, lawful exchange of power, and deposition, it follows that he would justify disproportionate violence under even more tenuous pretense.
Altogether, it's very worrying, because both sides of the establishment seem willing to threats of violence should they lose as motivation to vote for them. We're aching for a third party.
Either way, this seems stupid for Israel. They're a group of Jews in the middle of a sea of muslims, their military edge is weakening and they will be relying on goodwill in the future. Their long term interests are not served by solving problems with large scale military operations, or by doing anything that fuels the perception that they might be genocidal.
Any sufficiently sign of incompetence and negligence is usually just that - incompetence and negligence, you know, occam's razor and all.
(I obviously don’t like the idea… but from my view there have been multiple attempts to have Gaza develop, and they generally fail out of apparent spite. If the adjacent country is a failed state run by a terrorist group… I’m not sure what better ‘meaningful change’ can be reached.)
They have competing strategic visions.
The current ruling coalition under Bibi Netanyahu, which is far more conservative, wants Israeli control of the entirety of what used to be Mandatory Palestine between the West Bank of the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Palestinian Arabs would have some presence in such a society but it would be as a minority, and only if said minority plays nice with the majority. There would be a single state with a Jewish ethnic majority and government acting under Jewish jurisprudence as opposed to secular, Christian, or Islamic.
The goal for the invasion of Gaza for this coalition is simple: break the will of the Gazans. The coalition points to the fact that the Gazans elected Hamas over the more secular Fatah in 2006, and that Hamas has, for a very long time, refused to recognize that Israel has any right to exist anywhere in former Mandatory Palestine. The coalition under Netanyahu sees them as a thorn in their side and will commit total war on Gaza, seeing that as a way to convince the Gazans that there will be no success in raising a military challenge to Israel. They've shown themselves to be right while committing a whole host of actions that probably deserve ICJ review. While Hamas still holds Jewish hostages, they have virtually no control over the current war. The Israelis conduct military operations at will in the territory and Hamas has no real way to prevent that.
The other vision is that of a significant portion of the Israeli population and most of the rest of the international community, which at this point just want the hostages back. Some believe in a two-state solution. There's probably no way to achieve that with Hamas in charge of Gaza, but that will come later: the hostages are the main priority. This part of the population sees Netanyahu's government as incompetent for failing to stop the massacres on October 7th and for not having gotten the hostages back.
Why is this piece of misinformation so pervasive?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-char...
Where does "the terrorist" end and me, you and anyone else just minding our own business get inserted instead? And let's say it's not even the gov doing this but some private company with public data, what's to stop the gov from buying "reports" from that company. 100% legal. That is, no rights being violated, etc.
Anyone who says, "I have nothing to hide" is a fool, at best.
To your point, if there is indeed a line, it need to be clearly articulated so that the rules of the game clear.
Based on what?
From my perspective, the easiest way to design such a system would be to create entries for every 'actor' in the system, feed in as much data as you can get your hands on, and then let the weights sort themselves out. So for example, if you're hanging out with ISIS members obviously your weights would be higher, but even if you're a server at Applebees you'd still be in the system somewhere.
Doing it the other way necessitates some kind of bright-line division, and any such boundary, once defined, becomes susceptible to exploitation. e.g. I won't hang out with the White Nationalist Militia because that puts me "into the system", but I can hang out with insert radical right-wing group where I can talk to 80% of the same people without being flagged. In practice, I imagine that the gradient of extremism is rather gradual and with blurred boundaries.
Perhaps you think all FISA rulings should be public and any sufficiently savvy malicious actors can just read them to know exactly how to avoid suspicion?
The FISC process is used when the purpose is foreign intelligence rather than domestic law enforcement, and it exists because prior to that there was no limit on the covered activity when it was done for that purpose.
> Precedent exists, but nobody outside the national security state actually knows what it is.
Well, some of it.
https://www.fisc.uscourts.gov/public-filings
https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/fiscr/
Especially today, I think we have to look at every power we might give to government and ask, "What happens if the worst people get access to this?" Because they're certainly going to try.
Try to draw the line wherever you want, but they're going to step over it, and never look back.
The scenario of a private corporate entity wielding that power has already come to fruition if you look at what Google or Facebook has available on its users.
I think that is the main reason why I am not as.. restrictive on use of LLMs and AI, because I see it as a form evening out the playing field at least a little bit.
In fact, part of me thinks that the Sam/Ilya drama and sam's god complex are at least partially rooted in this, alleged, collaboration.
Imagine the questions you could pose to a GPT trained on all the conversations had with users that's been enriched with their biographical data. These conversations are often intimate and curiosity driven in a way that seeking the truth could easily be framed as self-radicalization.
I think your concerns are valid.
The thing is, and like I mentioned in a post awhile back: technically competent actors, the ones bound to cause the most harm, would absolutely be using a bespoke method of covert communication. There's really little value, IMO, to the countrywide dragnet outside of sentiment analysis and control.
The military complex wove itself early into the tech industry in ways that they could intentionally side-step laws meant to keep such public/private collusion from happening[0]. The impetus for the founding of the collaboration was a report on the importance in controlling perception in future wars.
We saw the same strategy deployed directly against the American people during the election "fortification" where DHS and social media colluded to control perception with little regard for truth[1].
[0] https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
[1] https://homeland.house.gov/2023/11/06/chairmen-green-bishop-...
Agreed. And yet their persistence to surveil continue to expand. They're not trying to watch those who are sure to be hiding. They're watching the rest under the guise of "We gotta get those terrorists."
Like no, the AI doesn't know everything other than what the terrorist is thinking. It summarizes what it's being fed.
If a chatbot was being fed reports concerned about border activities then it's going to raise concern about border activities.
This is an unnecessary and misleading angle to the article jumping on a bandwagon.
The failure here is a broader failure of human intelligence across Western intelligence services in favor of contracts with third party defense contractors. There's a story for that.
For "AI not knowing the terrorist mind" not much of a story.
"Using artificial intelligence, the system analyzes behavior, predicts risks, raises alerts..."
No, not very well, it doesn't. And this claim was not at all equivalent to "it summarizes what it's being fed".
Until we can define it, I think we should stop using the term 'intelligent' at all. It misleads people precisely because it means different things in different contexts.
If something can comprehend language, solve word problems, get a really high score on the SATs and LSATs and translate perfectly from any language to any other, we could definitely say it is 'intelligent' in all of those contexts. Is it 'intelligent' in other contexts?
Applying a technology that is really good at many things to things which it is not good at and selling that as a panacea is not a new idea. If we want it to change in this instance, we should start at least defining the terms we use so that we can determine the scope of its relevance to any area. Otherwise people make assumptions to their detriment and we can't agree even on what we are arguing about.
At some point you have to hazard the notion that they let it happen on purpose. "Wag the dog" trended around that time, and with Netanyahu's various woes, maybe they went ahead and built the Torment Nexus.
There are issues with innovation in the DoD and DHS, but a lot of this is offloaded to private sector vendors anyhow.
I notice how the article didn't mention any of the companies I personally know doing stuff in the space, nor actually sourced from members of the VC, Business, or Defense community.
The fact that the author took Palantir's marketing at face value is proof enough - the CIA let their contract with Palantir lapse a couple years ago (and I think they only even bought it because of their stake in In-Q-Tel), and they haven't had great success selling to the Fed.
I actually work in this space btw.
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The bigger stumbling block is procurement.
Software Procurement by Federal standards is relatively straightforward so a Series E+ startup can make it if they spend around $7-10M and 1-1.5 years on a dedicated roadmap for FedRamp and FIPS compliance.
Once you step out of software, procurement becomes paperwork hell. Throw in the paperwork hell from Grantmakers like the DoD and DoE, and you end up with a quasi-Soviet procurement system. Ironically, most of these compliance and regulatory checks were added for good intentions - primarily to minimize corruption and graft, yet it basically clogged up the entire system, and dissuades startups and innovators from working directly with the Defense community.
Some projects like DIUx and and In-Q-Tel are trying to change that, but it's too little too late, and our defense base is entirely dependent on firms like Microsoft, Cisco, Crowdstrike, Zscaler, etc acquiring promising startups to evangelize their innovations internally.
Fundamentally, this is why I dislike the New America/Khan/Chopra vision of anti-trust. It doesn't actually help innovation from a federal standpoint, as small companies and startups have no reason to work with the Fed given the amount of red tape that exists.
If the same effort was put to harmonizing and simplifying procurement across the Federal Government, you could directly make demands on competition.
This is what China does, and is a major reason their MIC was able to grow leaps and bounds in just 20 years.
Palantir's whole "CIA" marketing schitck appeared to be a ploy to build a strong reputation to help hiring.
At the end of the day, they're just another Datalake company that makes money off professional services, except Databricks and Snowflake can actually execute.
Dude has a dictator complex. Of course he fully the embraces the "just fucking lie and make money" ethos
It is just a classical confirmation bias.