I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper's author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC as they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries, specifically by analyzing the impact of mobile penetration in the poorer regions of Mexico.
González overstates the impact of the DIU and In-Q-Tel and clearly ignores similarly large procurement and R&D projects with companies like Cisco, Crowdstrike, ZScaler, Nvidia, etc. The author is essentially trying to extrapolate the JEDI/JWCC fiasco onto the entire Defense R&D space, which FAANG is not a notable player in (notice how I used FAANG in order to exclude MSFT from that list). Furthermore, the talking points in the paper's executive summary are the same made against the entire MIC throughout it's history. Furthermore, González also appears to make the very basic mistake of clubbing Big Tech players with VC funded startups, as both are diametrically competing with each other, and Big Tech has not raised VC funding for decades (as they are all publicly listed) and in fact have a tense relationship with the VC world.
I'd highly recommend reading Miriam Pemberton's Six Stops on the National Security Tour [0] is a good overview on the American MIC (and who is also an Associate Fellow at Brown's Cost of War research group, which is the group that published this paper).
There is a critical need for an in depth analysis on the War Economy (and ideally a comparative one digging into similar ecosystems in China, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Israel, UAE, Saudi, Turkiye, South Korea, Japan, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc), but this paper just ain't it.
>I try to steer clear from shooting the messenger, but the paper's author is not exactly a credible source on the intersection of Tech, Business, and MIC
...
> they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries
So obviously truncated your quote, but this seems like exactly the types of training that would make this person a credible source to make such observations?
is the issue they aren't credible or you disagree? you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone.
Cultural Anthropology is a good field, but it is a qualitative field, and not a quantitative one.
While there are quantitative Cultural Anthropologists (UChicago, UC Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford have good researchers working on this), Roberto González is not one of those.
Furthermore, the truly interesting things to dig into w/ regards to the MIC are more Economics, Finance, or Commercial Law driven - namely digging into how fair or unfair RFCs are, analyzing changes in procurement regulations, actually testing whether anti-competitive measures in the Defense industry have a positive or negative impact on efficacy, differentiating between different types of budget spend (Cloud/Infra Security research vs foundational ML research vs simulations reasearch), etc.
These are questions that need a quantitative background in Business, Law, Politics, and Technology.
Also, not naming Nvidia is a MASSIVE red flag, as they are balls deep in the Defense R&D space (that was the only reason they were able to survive the dot com bust).
Finally, how STEM Innovation works in the Military/Defense space is entirely different from how it works in much less regulated spaces, due to the limited set of buyers and the massive impact that asymmetry can potentially have.
> you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone
I agree! There are a lot things to disagree about w/ regards to the MIC, but the questions and problems González surfaces aren't new nor unique to the Tech industry. This feels less like a research paper and more like a surface level op-ed.
He brings up very good points about the impact CNAS (and more specifically Eric Schmidt) and other peer think tanks (imo CSIS is not that hawkish) is having on the vision of innovation R&D on the Hill, but that is an entirely separate investigation (and something that absolutely needs to be done), and the larger paper seems to ignore that.
Regardless of what side you are on the "warfighting software good" or "warfighting software bad" spectrum, what we really need as an industry is more individual software engineers questioning and judging the ethics of the use cases they are supporting with their software. Too many techies just want a "challenging problem" to work on, and as long as the technical problems are complex and challenging, that's where their judgment ends. We should be more willing to look at the end uses of our creations and refuse to work on things that go against our own ethics.
I have quit a job where I knew that my software was going to be used by the military and law enforcement in order to target people, among other reasons. Yes, I am lucky and privileged to be in a financial position where I am free to up and quit a company, but I'd like to think that even if I weren't I'd do the right thing and refuse.
Perhaps ambitious for a weekend but Chris Miller’s Chip War will enlighten you quite a bit about both Silicon Valley’s history and the current politics around semiconductors.
San Fran and the greater bay area were huge Naval installations and grew massively in WW2, and much of the early silicon valley was directly funded by US Fed'Gov R&D efforts.
ARPAnet comes to mind, for example. Vint Cerf had (has?) security clearances and worked for DARPA
> The Pentagon also quietly launched Project Maven in 2017, an effort to use machine learning (a form of AI) for analyzing massive datasets consisting of surveillance images taken by drones in the Middle East and other locations.
I see a lot of huge contracts for big initiatives listed here. Maven and similar projects have had problems adapting to conditions on the ground in Ukraine at least according to a recent NYT article. [0] It would be comforting to see more ground-up projects that start from actual battlefield conditions and work from there to the tech solutions.
Technological advances in the military sector are always very interesting and research into them is to be welcomed.
From ARPANet to GPS, we have benefited greatly from this and despite the moral concerns of some, AI-controlled drone swarms and fully automated target acquisition are also very interesting and important developments that future armies will need for its defense.
It’s been happening for a long time. Meredith Whittaker left Google over their drone contracts five years ago. But I thought the kings of encroaching consolidated doom these days were private equity firms and the medical industrial complex.
I think that giant leap in Vulture Capital is just an indication that the wealthiest people are pretty sure we're heading into war, and they want to make sure to make money from it...
need to form a group to infiltrate these projects and purposefully add holes into the project and allow exfiltration or sabotage. Even just good ole stalling at project management levels can work wonders.
> need to form a group to infiltrate these projects and purposefully add holes into the project and allow exfiltration or sabotage.
Out of curiosity, how do you see that playing out if the U.S. ends up relying on these technologies for its national defense? Would you still be okay with sabotaging them?
I think you're bumping into a more fundamental problem: it's not clear how to enable the military for highly effective defensive missions, without also making it useful for offensive military adventures.
The US will never be involved in a defensive war - geography makes that more or less certain. It's not like we'd ever allow a neighboring nation to join a military alliance with an adversarial force, and so there simply will never be a ground threat. And ocean based threats are also probably obsolete. Send a bunch of carriers and destroyers against any modern nation, and they're going to go pop. This, famously, is exactly what happened in a wargame over a hypothetical war with Iran! [1] So if another country ever attacks the US, it's going to be in the form of a massive nuclear strike. Conventional military forces have been largely relegated to invading non-nuclear nations, or engaging in proxy wars against other nations.
> It's not like we'd ever allow a neighboring nation to join a military alliance with an adversarial force, and so there simply will never be a ground threat.
For what it's worth, I agree with your argument, but I want to point out that the only reason we have the luxury of never allowing a neighboring nation to join alliances is because we have such massive military and technological advantages that aren't being sabotaged from within.
If you are invaded by another country, then you are in a defensive war. Beyond that, countries often will claim they are in defensive wars, when reality is somewhat more ambiguous. Imagine Mexico announced plans to enter into a military alliance with China, which would entail setting up nukes right on the US border. We would invade Mexico approximately 0 seconds later, to ensure such an outcome never happened. The closest we ever came to intentional nuclear war happened over this exact sort of scenario with the Cuban Missile Crisis. Is that defensive?
Let's say we're slightly more subtle with the above. And we 'compel' a region in Mexico to declare their independence and announce an association with the US; we immediately acknowledge their independence. Mexico predictably seeks to shut down said rebellion and invades. We then come to their aid, and start a war against Mexico. Is that defensive? What if said independence seeking was completely organic instead of compelled?
I'm not speaking rhetorically. These questions are difficult, if not impossible to answer. So when I say defensive war, I am speaking literally of the most basic form imaginable. Otherwise, you end up with a million scenarios where the line between defender and invader often come down to one's perspective, instead of some objective qualification. You also risk recreating WW1 where a Bosnian Serb assassinating an Austro-Hungarian royal results in Brits killing Germans over it, and everybody has a plausible claim of behaving defensively, somehow.
I'm always irked to no end when someone omits the context of the cuban missile crisis.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre) in Cuba, or the Caribbean Crisis (Russian: Карибский кризис, romanized: Karibskiy krizis), was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba.
They were just a response, tit for tat. And were only removed after the USA removed theirs.
Secretly, the United States agreed to dismantle all of the offensive weapons it had deployed to Turkey. (same source)
That aside, what about some conventionally armed IC/SLBM-swarm advising via ADS-B: NONUKE/JUSTTNT/KINETIC/GODSRODS/HELOKITY/WHATSUP/DIPLOMAT/COURIER/MESSAGE/AIRMAIL/DELIVERY/BLOWME/FORFUN?
Let's call it the W69-MK6...maybe deployed by some LongDong YeeHaa...
>The US will never be involved in a defensive war - geography makes that more or less certain.
It should be pretty clear by now that the next actual war won't be boots on ground, it will be fully digital.
The fact that in 2024, a large number of people are going to vote for Trump if he makes it to the ballot is pretty much an indicator that a country like China can use the existing AI technologies to pretty much throw US into a civil war and then take over economically if there is no active defense against it.
Less "offense". America's modern foreign policy doctrine has centered around "strategic control" of key infrastructure and chokepoints. Economical, Informational, Militarily.
“Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about orders” - Simple Sabotage Field Manual
Basically lean-in on what management was likely doing anyway. Brainstorming, consensus building, endless meetings, risk aversion, empire building, horse trading, stack ranking etc.
The main thing keeping us free from would be fascist overlords is their own lumbering burocracias. What I fear more than nuclear weapons is effective management science.
Prior to 2016, I wouldn't have blamed you for having this sentiment, as its an indicator that a country has done exceptionally well in developing its defensive/deterrent capability since you grew up without knowing what strife actually looks like.
But now, given that US got massively weaker with Trump being in power for 4 years, and a mentaly ill madman with access to nukes straight up murdering civilians in Ukraine in the name of nationalism, you have to be living under a rock if you don't realize how important defense spending is. If not for US, then for countries that don't have the talent/funding to develop it themselves.
Yes. Even though not illegal (or at least not enough info to claim it was illegal), its pretty obvious that Trump had ties with Russia. Who knows what kind of info he leaked.
US is basically the worlds police already btw. We effectively subsidize R&D for Europe military, and have bases all over the world.
Arguably the government was doing VC investment before he concept existed . DARPA even has the same concepts in their competitions at Defcon . Fail fast and evaluate many solutions at once.
This reminds me of the stories of industrial improvisation in WW2. Casablanca-class escort carriers and hundreds of other successful kludges changed history.
A few lines from the paper stand out to me:
* "A lack of transparency." How much transparency do you expect from military R&D, since that would give away US military secrets? I recall stories of the Soviets copying the US AIM-9 Sidewinder to create their K-13 Atoll. Military secrets need to be secret.
* "Multi-Year Big Tech Software Contracts Could Lead to Dangerous Dependence on the Private Sector" The US Army does not build tanks. They buy them and maintain them. Even then, most maintenance is done by civilian contractors.
* "grandiose claims about the effectiveness of artificial intelligence" I suspect AI will change warfare forever. Humans freak out under fire, AIs may not. A semi-competent person under fire is a rare gem that you treasure.
* "overestimation of China’s military and technological capabilities" I would rather overestimate my opponent than underestimate them. Underestimating a military opponent is usually a fatal mistake.
* "the idea that America has the ability and duty to protect the world’s democratic societies" The deployment of the US Military in the last century has mostly been to protect other countries. We can debate how democratic many of those countries were, but protecting other countries is the most common use case of the US Military. The last two times we let someone bomb US territory was either 911 or WW2 in the Pacific. If you have to fight, it may be preferable to defend Taiwan rather than Hawaii.
* "a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a free market that prioritizes corporate needs" A strong economy that could not be bombed by the enemy won WW2 for the US. A strong economy won the Cold War for the US. If anyone has counter-examples, I'd like to see them.
I'm no fan of the US Military; I'd disband the entire US Army and Marine Corps.
But this author is just anti-American. Let's look this guy up..."Roberto J. González | Department of Anthropology - San José State University in California."
He's strongly linked to https://equaljusticesociety.org "The Equal Justice Society (EJS), California Black Power Network (CBPN), and six former members of the California Reparations Task Force ... formed a new collaboration called the Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation, and Truth."
It would be a bad story if the DoD was trying to, for example, host their own email. I'm happy that they spend a bazillion dollars on first-in-class cloud services.
I knew a guy who worked on a VR war the room for the DoD. Not like a VR battlefield simulator, but like... simulated folders being passes across simulated desks.
The point being that they're innovating away from the pencils. The future is digital pencils.
I strongly believe that all computers and phones and social media have been engineered as weapons more than anything else and they are some of the strongest weapons everyone carries around. Its crazy that 20-25 years ago no one had any of these and now if you don’t have one that’s somehow crazy. Most of the tech in phones comes from military from wifi to gps etc. they just gave everyone a powerful weapon and made us want to have it.
Apparently this is the closest a post can get to discussing the in-progress genocide without being instantly removed from the front page.
A few other comments here are saying the Brown study is rather sparse on details or recent examples. Have a quick peak into the [flagged] graveyard and there’s plenty of examples of Amazon and Google’s projects in support of the IDF.
I clicked through to the article. I think the title is inaccurate. The paper primarily goes into detail about the Department of Defense heavily investing in startups, incubators and silicon valley. That's the vast majority of the paper. The paper has significantly less in the way of laying out how that's been successful, or how that's transformed the MIC.
This follows (NYT?) reporting that Project Maven hasn't yet been successful, with it under-performing human analysts significantly in core missions (identifying targets).
I think a more accurate headline might be, "how the Defense Department is transforming the MIC; a bold bet on silicon valley, high-tech systems and AI"?
Note: I dislike settlements in the West Bank. I think it makes the problem needlessly more intractable than it already is. I especially dislike the nigh-terroristic behavior of a portion of the settlers and the seeming inability or unwillingness of the state to properly apply rule of law against them.
Nonetheless. Legally speaking, if a deal isn't signed by both sides, then it's a worthless piece of paper. Settlements in the West Bank are only possible because the Palestinian side refuses to ever say "these are the borders of our state, that which is outside these borders is Israel". There's no sense in talking about "deals" that never happened, or were immediately violated by e.g. 1973 invasion, as though they have a bearing on current reality.
My entire point when I first commented is that there have multiple opportunities for proper long-term peace and Palestinian statehood that were either rejected or violated in short order by the Palestinians and/or their allies.
> ...there have been multiple opportunities for long-term peace and Palestinian statehood that were either rejected or violated in short order by the Palestinians and/or their allies.
Palestine is occupied and has been losing more and more land to Israel for decades. Any peace deal that Israel offers that does not establish Palestinian borders as they were in 1967 is a slap in the face for any and every Palestinian who had their homes, livelihood, and history colonized by Israeli settlers. Israel needs to allow Palestine to operate as an independent nation in control of their own borders, energy, trade, etc.
The Palestinians refuse to be served dog food to then be told by their oppressors to appreciate it or they won't be getting any more.
>Any peace deal that Israel offers that does not establish Palestinian borders as they were in 1967 is a slap in the face for any and every Palestinian who had their homes, livelihood, and history colonized by Israeli settlers.
Who broke the peace after the 1967 agreement? What happened in 1973?
You can't accept a peace agreement, then declare a new war, lose it, and then call it a slap in the face if you aren't given the exact same deal you were already given before you started and lost a war.
The 1967 agreement gives the West Bank to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt. The fact that Egypt doesn't want Gaza anymore and Jordan doesn't want the West Bank anymore is a rather material roadblock to implementing the 1967 agreement in 2024, don't you think?
I don't pretend to have an answer here, I just reject the notion that Israel should be solely blamed for the lack of a Palestinian state, as the initial person I responded to implied.
And also, the use of colonization rhetoric is absolutely fucking crazy to me. Nearly all people who "settled" in Israel are refugees in the exact same sense as Palestinians, and half of Israeli Jews are literally ethnically from elsewhere in the middle east - "settling" in Israel after being forced out of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, etc.
You also said that Palestinian "history" has been "colonized" by Israeli "settlers". Do you understand what a cruel joke that sounds like considering the particular bit of land we're talking about?
Was 1948 unfair to Palestinians? Yes. That decade was unfair to literally everyone involved, including the people who became Israelis. It was also unfair when Czechoslovakia kicked out (and worse) hundreds of thousands of native ethnic Germans, but we're not still having wars over that 75 years later.
They weren't asked to settle in Palestine by its local inhabitants, but they were chased by mobs with clubs and metal pipes from the places they did live. I'm not sure what litigating this gets you, rhetorically.
It's worth noting that (excepting maybe Egypt?) all the surrounding Arab states were also the creation of European imperial colonialism, a fact that only seems to matter when the people implicated happen to be Jewish. But for a couple quirks of history, Palestinians would have a universally recognized, sovereign homeland; today, we call it "Jordan", and it is ruled by a dynasty of monarchs who conspired to prevent what was, around '67, a Palestinian majority from obtaining political power.
I think what's happening in Gaza is an atrocity, and that Israel has done as much as anybody in the region to dispossess and abuse the residents of the West Bank and Gaza. But I also understand why people read antisemitism into blank "colonialism" complaints about Israel. Clearly, colonialism is only situationally worth getting riled up about.
But I also understand why people read antisemitism into blank "colonialism" complaints about Israel.
Whose "complaints", specifically?
If it's in reference to what I've been saying, then you're going to have to either explain what you mean - or dial back the rather offensive insinuation that you're making above.
I'm happy to dial back any offensive insinuation I've made, but I'll have to ask you to tell me what it was first. I don't know you, you're just a message board abstraction to me, and if I've wrongly attributed some sentiment to you, I'll be glad to correct the record.
It was not your remark. So far as I know, I'm one of a very few people who have read your comment (just by dint of the age and depth of the thread). There is no mass mobilization over any supposed racism or antisemitism embedded in your specific statements, the way there is over the claimed "whiteness" or "Polishness" or "European-ness" of Israeli citizens. That is to say: I thought that in referring to common complaints in the discourse, I was clear that I was talking about a wider phenomenon, not this particular thread, but message boards are tricky and I could have done better.
I'd have no trouble using direct language, describing a particular argument as "racist" or "antisemitic", if I felt that was what the argument was. But there's no reason you'd have known that, and I understand if I read as sort of cagily making that accusation without making it directly. Nope, not my intent, sorry to drive up your cortisol that way. I'll be more cautious going forward.
I am not even commenting about these peace deals, for now. But Oslo accords, were they violated by Palestinians and their allies? Do you deny the current and long time PM supporting Hamas against PA? Or the killers of Rabin were also Palestinians and their allies?
González overstates the impact of the DIU and In-Q-Tel and clearly ignores similarly large procurement and R&D projects with companies like Cisco, Crowdstrike, ZScaler, Nvidia, etc. The author is essentially trying to extrapolate the JEDI/JWCC fiasco onto the entire Defense R&D space, which FAANG is not a notable player in (notice how I used FAANG in order to exclude MSFT from that list). Furthermore, the talking points in the paper's executive summary are the same made against the entire MIC throughout it's history. Furthermore, González also appears to make the very basic mistake of clubbing Big Tech players with VC funded startups, as both are diametrically competing with each other, and Big Tech has not raised VC funding for decades (as they are all publicly listed) and in fact have a tense relationship with the VC world.
I'd highly recommend reading Miriam Pemberton's Six Stops on the National Security Tour [0] is a good overview on the American MIC (and who is also an Associate Fellow at Brown's Cost of War research group, which is the group that published this paper).
There is a critical need for an in depth analysis on the War Economy (and ideally a comparative one digging into similar ecosystems in China, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Israel, UAE, Saudi, Turkiye, South Korea, Japan, India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc), but this paper just ain't it.
[0] - https://www.routledge.com/Six-Stops-on-the-National-Security...
...
> they are a cultural anthropologist by training and research. Kinda sad, because Roberto González is actually a really good researcher on the impact of localized and bottom up technological development in developing countries
So obviously truncated your quote, but this seems like exactly the types of training that would make this person a credible source to make such observations?
is the issue they aren't credible or you disagree? you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone.
While there are quantitative Cultural Anthropologists (UChicago, UC Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford have good researchers working on this), Roberto González is not one of those.
Furthermore, the truly interesting things to dig into w/ regards to the MIC are more Economics, Finance, or Commercial Law driven - namely digging into how fair or unfair RFCs are, analyzing changes in procurement regulations, actually testing whether anti-competitive measures in the Defense industry have a positive or negative impact on efficacy, differentiating between different types of budget spend (Cloud/Infra Security research vs foundational ML research vs simulations reasearch), etc.
These are questions that need a quantitative background in Business, Law, Politics, and Technology.
Also, not naming Nvidia is a MASSIVE red flag, as they are balls deep in the Defense R&D space (that was the only reason they were able to survive the dot com bust).
Finally, how STEM Innovation works in the Military/Defense space is entirely different from how it works in much less regulated spaces, due to the limited set of buyers and the massive impact that asymmetry can potentially have.
> you can disagree without immediately dismissing someone
I agree! There are a lot things to disagree about w/ regards to the MIC, but the questions and problems González surfaces aren't new nor unique to the Tech industry. This feels less like a research paper and more like a surface level op-ed.
He brings up very good points about the impact CNAS (and more specifically Eric Schmidt) and other peer think tanks (imo CSIS is not that hawkish) is having on the vision of innovation R&D on the Hill, but that is an entirely separate investigation (and something that absolutely needs to be done), and the larger paper seems to ignore that.
I do both quant and qual research. I generally find my qual peers more methodologically rigorous, more thorough, and more trustworthy.
As far as I know there is no qual equivalent to Numeracy/precision bias.
All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war.
The US is the largest weapons manufacturer already with the largest military-industrial complex. How many more drones and bombs do we need?
> All of our rivals have absolutely no qualms about using AI or other advanced technology to build weapons of war.
You act like we do.
Doesn't the US already spend more on military than all our rivals and allies combined?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-she...
The Navy's fleet is actually shrinking because we lack shipyard capacity, and can't even maintain the ships we already have.
https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/navys-new-30-year-shipbu...
https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-vladimir-putin-moscow-r...
I have quit a job where I knew that my software was going to be used by the military and law enforcement in order to target people, among other reasons. Yes, I am lucky and privileged to be in a financial position where I am free to up and quit a company, but I'd like to think that even if I weren't I'd do the right thing and refuse.
Nope. I'll be doing neither.
We're fucked...
<https://steveblank.com/secret-history/>
Something of an HN favourite as well:
<https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsteveblank.com%2Fsec...>
Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet (Desc: The internet is the most effective weapon the government has ever built.)
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/yasha-levine/survei...
ARPAnet comes to mind, for example. Vint Cerf had (has?) security clearances and worked for DARPA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
by Malcolm Harris
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/61108472-palo-alto
I see a lot of huge contracts for big initiatives listed here. Maven and similar projects have had problems adapting to conditions on the ground in Ukraine at least according to a recent NYT article. [0] It would be comforting to see more ground-up projects that start from actual battlefield conditions and work from there to the tech solutions.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/us/politics/ukraine-new-a...
Edit: added source.
And are even fine with encouraging it...
Need a “jia tan”
Out of curiosity, how do you see that playing out if the U.S. ends up relying on these technologies for its national defense? Would you still be okay with sabotaging them?
I think you're bumping into a more fundamental problem: it's not clear how to enable the military for highly effective defensive missions, without also making it useful for offensive military adventures.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
For what it's worth, I agree with your argument, but I want to point out that the only reason we have the luxury of never allowing a neighboring nation to join alliances is because we have such massive military and technological advantages that aren't being sabotaged from within.
The US has repeatedly been involved in wars to defend our allies from external attack.
Let's say we're slightly more subtle with the above. And we 'compel' a region in Mexico to declare their independence and announce an association with the US; we immediately acknowledge their independence. Mexico predictably seeks to shut down said rebellion and invades. We then come to their aid, and start a war against Mexico. Is that defensive? What if said independence seeking was completely organic instead of compelled?
I'm not speaking rhetorically. These questions are difficult, if not impossible to answer. So when I say defensive war, I am speaking literally of the most basic form imaginable. Otherwise, you end up with a million scenarios where the line between defender and invader often come down to one's perspective, instead of some objective qualification. You also risk recreating WW1 where a Bosnian Serb assassinating an Austro-Hungarian royal results in Brits killing Germans over it, and everybody has a plausible claim of behaving defensively, somehow.
The Cuban Missile Crisis, also known as the October Crisis (Spanish: Crisis de Octubre) in Cuba, or the Caribbean Crisis (Russian: Карибский кризис, romanized: Karibskiy krizis), was a 13-day confrontation between the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union, when American deployments of nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey were matched by Soviet deployments of nuclear missiles in Cuba.
(according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuban_Missile_Crisis and countless other sources)
They were just a response, tit for tat. And were only removed after the USA removed theirs.
Secretly, the United States agreed to dismantle all of the offensive weapons it had deployed to Turkey. (same source)
That aside, what about some conventionally armed IC/SLBM-swarm advising via ADS-B: NONUKE/JUSTTNT/KINETIC/GODSRODS/HELOKITY/WHATSUP/DIPLOMAT/COURIER/MESSAGE/AIRMAIL/DELIVERY/BLOWME/FORFUN?
Let's call it the W69-MK6...maybe deployed by some LongDong YeeHaa...
It should be pretty clear by now that the next actual war won't be boots on ground, it will be fully digital.
The fact that in 2024, a large number of people are going to vote for Trump if he makes it to the ballot is pretty much an indicator that a country like China can use the existing AI technologies to pretty much throw US into a civil war and then take over economically if there is no active defense against it.
Basically lean-in on what management was likely doing anyway. Brainstorming, consensus building, endless meetings, risk aversion, empire building, horse trading, stack ranking etc.
The main thing keeping us free from would be fascist overlords is their own lumbering burocracias. What I fear more than nuclear weapons is effective management science.
But now, given that US got massively weaker with Trump being in power for 4 years, and a mentaly ill madman with access to nukes straight up murdering civilians in Ukraine in the name of nationalism, you have to be living under a rock if you don't realize how important defense spending is. If not for US, then for countries that don't have the talent/funding to develop it themselves.
US is basically the worlds police already btw. We effectively subsidize R&D for Europe military, and have bases all over the world.
A few lines from the paper stand out to me:
* "A lack of transparency." How much transparency do you expect from military R&D, since that would give away US military secrets? I recall stories of the Soviets copying the US AIM-9 Sidewinder to create their K-13 Atoll. Military secrets need to be secret.
* "Multi-Year Big Tech Software Contracts Could Lead to Dangerous Dependence on the Private Sector" The US Army does not build tanks. They buy them and maintain them. Even then, most maintenance is done by civilian contractors.
* "grandiose claims about the effectiveness of artificial intelligence" I suspect AI will change warfare forever. Humans freak out under fire, AIs may not. A semi-competent person under fire is a rare gem that you treasure.
* "overestimation of China’s military and technological capabilities" I would rather overestimate my opponent than underestimate them. Underestimating a military opponent is usually a fatal mistake.
* "the idea that America has the ability and duty to protect the world’s democratic societies" The deployment of the US Military in the last century has mostly been to protect other countries. We can debate how democratic many of those countries were, but protecting other countries is the most common use case of the US Military. The last two times we let someone bomb US territory was either 911 or WW2 in the Pacific. If you have to fight, it may be preferable to defend Taiwan rather than Hawaii.
* "a steadfast belief that the best way to preserve U.S. dominance is through a free market that prioritizes corporate needs" A strong economy that could not be bombed by the enemy won WW2 for the US. A strong economy won the Cold War for the US. If anyone has counter-examples, I'd like to see them.
I'm no fan of the US Military; I'd disband the entire US Army and Marine Corps.
But this author is just anti-American. Let's look this guy up..."Roberto J. González | Department of Anthropology - San José State University in California."
He's strongly linked to https://equaljusticesociety.org "The Equal Justice Society (EJS), California Black Power Network (CBPN), and six former members of the California Reparations Task Force ... formed a new collaboration called the Alliance for Reparations, Reconciliation, and Truth."
I will not elaborate on the FARA implications.
The point being that they're innovating away from the pencils. The future is digital pencils.
A few other comments here are saying the Brown study is rather sparse on details or recent examples. Have a quick peak into the [flagged] graveyard and there’s plenty of examples of Amazon and Google’s projects in support of the IDF.
This follows (NYT?) reporting that Project Maven hasn't yet been successful, with it under-performing human analysts significantly in core missions (identifying targets).
I think a more accurate headline might be, "how the Defense Department is transforming the MIC; a bold bet on silicon valley, high-tech systems and AI"?
How certain tools are used fully depends on the Politics of the person using the tool.
At some point, you can't keep turning down every deal that would provide a state and then complain that there's no state.
Nonetheless. Legally speaking, if a deal isn't signed by both sides, then it's a worthless piece of paper. Settlements in the West Bank are only possible because the Palestinian side refuses to ever say "these are the borders of our state, that which is outside these borders is Israel". There's no sense in talking about "deals" that never happened, or were immediately violated by e.g. 1973 invasion, as though they have a bearing on current reality.
My entire point when I first commented is that there have multiple opportunities for proper long-term peace and Palestinian statehood that were either rejected or violated in short order by the Palestinians and/or their allies.
Palestine is occupied and has been losing more and more land to Israel for decades. Any peace deal that Israel offers that does not establish Palestinian borders as they were in 1967 is a slap in the face for any and every Palestinian who had their homes, livelihood, and history colonized by Israeli settlers. Israel needs to allow Palestine to operate as an independent nation in control of their own borders, energy, trade, etc.
The Palestinians refuse to be served dog food to then be told by their oppressors to appreciate it or they won't be getting any more.
Who broke the peace after the 1967 agreement? What happened in 1973?
You can't accept a peace agreement, then declare a new war, lose it, and then call it a slap in the face if you aren't given the exact same deal you were already given before you started and lost a war.
The 1967 agreement gives the West Bank to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt. The fact that Egypt doesn't want Gaza anymore and Jordan doesn't want the West Bank anymore is a rather material roadblock to implementing the 1967 agreement in 2024, don't you think?
I don't pretend to have an answer here, I just reject the notion that Israel should be solely blamed for the lack of a Palestinian state, as the initial person I responded to implied.
And also, the use of colonization rhetoric is absolutely fucking crazy to me. Nearly all people who "settled" in Israel are refugees in the exact same sense as Palestinians, and half of Israeli Jews are literally ethnically from elsewhere in the middle east - "settling" in Israel after being forced out of Syria, Iraq, Egypt, etc.
You also said that Palestinian "history" has been "colonized" by Israeli "settlers". Do you understand what a cruel joke that sounds like considering the particular bit of land we're talking about?
Was 1948 unfair to Palestinians? Yes. That decade was unfair to literally everyone involved, including the people who became Israelis. It was also unfair when Czechoslovakia kicked out (and worse) hundreds of thousands of native ethnic Germans, but we're not still having wars over that 75 years later.
It's worth noting that (excepting maybe Egypt?) all the surrounding Arab states were also the creation of European imperial colonialism, a fact that only seems to matter when the people implicated happen to be Jewish. But for a couple quirks of history, Palestinians would have a universally recognized, sovereign homeland; today, we call it "Jordan", and it is ruled by a dynasty of monarchs who conspired to prevent what was, around '67, a Palestinian majority from obtaining political power.
I think what's happening in Gaza is an atrocity, and that Israel has done as much as anybody in the region to dispossess and abuse the residents of the West Bank and Gaza. But I also understand why people read antisemitism into blank "colonialism" complaints about Israel. Clearly, colonialism is only situationally worth getting riled up about.
Whose "complaints", specifically?
If it's in reference to what I've been saying, then you're going to have to either explain what you mean - or dial back the rather offensive insinuation that you're making above.
Whose colonialism remarks ("complaints") were you referring to, specifically?
Was it mine, or was it not?
I'd have no trouble using direct language, describing a particular argument as "racist" or "antisemitic", if I felt that was what the argument was. But there's no reason you'd have known that, and I understand if I read as sort of cagily making that accusation without making it directly. Nope, not my intent, sorry to drive up your cortisol that way. I'll be more cautious going forward.