[HN Gopher] The Pentagon's Silicon Valley Problem
___________________________________________________________________
The Pentagon's Silicon Valley Problem
Author : NDAjam
Score : 280 points
Date : 2024-03-27 14:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (harpers.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (harpers.org)
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > The system knows everything about [the terrorist]: where he
| went, who his friends are, who his family is, what keeps him
| busy, what he said and what he published. Using artificial
| intelligence, the system analyzes behavior, predicts risks,
| raises alerts.
|
| 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.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| I don't support ubiquitous spying at all but are you hanging
| out with known ISIS members or members of White Nationalist
| Militias regularly? Because I'm pretty sure that's where the
| line begins.
| 7thaccount wrote:
| I think they're just saying it's a slippery slope. It starts
| out with good intentions we all agree on, but then continues
| to slide and more and more of our freedoms erode as they
| crank up the boiling pot ever so slowly.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| There's a lot of grey here. What does "hanging out" mean? If
| my weird uncle is (unknown to me) in ISIS does spending
| thanksgiving with him count as "hanging out"? ISIS is at
| least pretty specific, but what counts as a White Nationalist
| Militia? Both of these can be redefined to capture more and
| more of the population if desired.
| forgotmyinfo wrote:
| This is what we have attorneys and judges for. And no,
| obviously Thanksgiving isn't "hanging out". But going to
| the same weekly meeting and practicing lynching minorities?
| Yeah, that's a little more than just mashed potatoes and
| gravy, isn't it. (These contrived "whatabout" gotchas are
| exhausting. It is abundantly obvious who is and who is not
| involved with white nationalist militias.)
| nurple wrote:
| Yes, all the legal arguments presented before the FISA
| court by the lawyers working on behalf of those targeted
| have been really interesting reads!
| dragonwriter wrote:
| There aren't legal arguments by the targets in law
| enforcement search (either physical or wiretap) warrant
| cases either, that mainly only happens if (as does not
| always happen) the product of the search is used in
| criminal prosecution later.
| sakjur wrote:
| None of those things seem particularly obvious to me.
| chasd00 wrote:
| It's really the court of public opinion that has the
| greatest risk of harm at the day to day level. A non-poc
| going to the gun range and then posting on social media
| could cause a "White Nationalist Militia" label to get
| attached by a jilted coworker and then go viral. That can
| cause serious harm.
| mindslight wrote:
| Maybe gun clubs should implement DEI programs. Then those
| pictures would have some colorful people in the
| background.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| If you don't know, who they are and just happen to serve a
| 'bad guy' ( hate that term ) a burger, should you be in the
| crosshairs? Because this is where this is heading. If you
| think I am overselling it, remember that police in US can ask
| for all users from specific location.
|
| To your point, if there is indeed a line, it need to be
| clearly articulated so that the rules of the game clear.
| hwbehrens wrote:
| > _I 'm pretty sure that's where the line begins_
|
| 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.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| As another poster mentioned this is literally why we have
| courts. There is a clear line for obtaining a search
| warrant for example. Precedents exist.
| raisin_churn wrote:
| Are you familiar with FISC? I'd say go familiarize
| yourself with its case law, but you can't, because it's
| secret. And it authorizes methods much more powerful and
| invasive than a simple search warrant. Precedent exists,
| but nobody outside the national security state actually
| knows what it is.
| humansareok1 wrote:
| You're maybe proposing another line where no spying is
| legal at all and we should just submit ourselves to the
| whims of terrorists or other lunatics? Surely there is
| actually a line where there are tradeoffs between
| security and privacy and its probably not 0% security and
| 100% privacy.
|
| 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?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Everything the FISA process overseen by the Foreign
| Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Foreign
| Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review can authorize
| (and much more invasive means, contrary to your claim)
| can be authorized by regular search warrant.
|
| 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/
| wpietri wrote:
| Maybe that's where the line starts, but does it stay there?
| As an example, look at how the US's anti-communist fervor led
| to things like COINTELPRO:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
|
| 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.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| Did we give it, or was it taken? Yeah, maybe we consented
| to The Patriot Act. But when it was renewed, it was
| *expanded*. Too late now.
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| You've heard of guilt by association, well guilt by co-
| location isn't that far off. Along the same lines, the
| rationale is going to be, "We need to track everyone so we
| can be sure to see _all_ relationships and connections, and
| connections to connections, and so on.
|
| Try to draw the line wherever you want, but they're going to
| step over it, and never look back.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I think, in a sense, that part is already over. Entities that
| encompass both ends of the spectrum exist and any remaining
| gaps are filled by public/private partnership ( and hailed as a
| great thing just about anywhere ).
|
| 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.
| nurple wrote:
| I think one of the things that scares me most about API-
| accessed LLMs is how powerful they are as data collection
| tools in their own right. OpenAI, for example, recently
| updated their terms of use to be more vague about how they
| work with the gov and I have no doubts that giving the NSA
| access to conversational feeds is absolutely a requirement to
| their continued operation as an entity, a la lavabit.
|
| 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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| That API is one the main reasons companies are not as keen
| on jumping on the bandwagon. They don't want to have OpenAI
| to have access to their corporate data. But then, there are
| options of running models locally..
|
| I think your concerns are valid.
| nurple wrote:
| The terrorist ends wherever a threat to the state's power
| exists, it's been shown quite well that they don't care if
| you're domestic or not. This, IMO, is why "self-radicalized"
| and "domestic terrorist" were injected into our vernacular, to
| normalize and justify the need to surveil the general public.
|
| 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-...
| chiefalchemist wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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."
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I don't understand the headline "problem" of the article. Or the
| "How Big Tech is losing the wars of the future".
|
| 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.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| TIL 'under (heavy) manners'
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| TIL 'put manners on'
|
| (in combination, it would appear that whatever 'manners' may
| be, they are located distal of the cranium)
| tivert wrote:
| > Nevertheless, Hamas's devastating attack on October 7 caught
| Shin Bet and the rest of Israel's multibillion-dollar defense
| system entirely by surprise. The intelligence disaster was even
| more striking considering Hamas carried out much of its
| preparations in plain sight, including practice assaults on mock-
| ups of the border fence and Israeli settlements--activities that
| were openly reported. Hamas-led militant groups even posted
| videos of their training online. Israelis living close to the
| border observed and publicized these exercises with mounting
| alarm, but were ignored in favor of intelligence bureaucracies'
| analyses and, by extension, the software that had informed them.
| Israeli conscripts, mostly young women, monitoring developments
| through the ubiquitous surveillance cameras along the Gaza
| border, composed and presented a detailed report on Hamas's
| preparations to breach the fence and take hostages, only to have
| their findings dismissed as "an imaginary scenario." The Israeli
| intelligence apparatus had for more than a year been in
| possession of a Hamas document that detailed the group's plan for
| an attack.
|
| > 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.
| wpietri wrote:
| Ooh, very interesting point:
|
| > 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?
| chasd00 wrote:
| > 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.
| danlugo92 wrote:
| This is pretty much it yeah...
| hackerlight wrote:
| Precautionary principle and defense-in-depth would have
| prevented this.
|
| 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.
| hayst4ck wrote:
| More succinctly: _hope is not a strategy_.
| lostlogin wrote:
| In both situations, is it 100% certain that war wasn't seen
| as a good thing?
|
| There were plenty of Ukrainians who wanted Ukraine invaded.
|
| There are some hawkish types in Israeli politics.
| orange_joe wrote:
| Since the article talks about the failure of AI in the context of
| the 10/7 I think it's worth discussing the situation directly.
| Everything points to the Israelis not having taken their security
| seriously beyond the tactical level. I'm certain they thwarted
| other attacks, but it was an inevitability that a major attack
| was successful at some point. Such an attack would necessitate a
| military response. However the Israelis have no strategic vision.
| They lacked serious plans for such an eventuality and still lack
| a serious goal for their invasion of Gaza. They haven't
| articulated anything that indicates a vision to meaningfully
| change the situation from the 10/6 state to something more
| sustainable. Therefore, it doesn't seem like a reasonable
| takeaway to say AI failed.
| nkozyra wrote:
| > Therefore, it doesn't seem like a reasonable takeaway to say
| AI failed.
|
| 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.
| cameldrv wrote:
| To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued the
| U.S. since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars because no
| one ever sets out clear achievable goals. The notable exception
| was the Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm. For that one, the goal
| was to kick Iraq out of Kuwait and restore the Kuwaiti
| monarchy, which was achieved. If you look especially at
| Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, there is this magical thinking
| that if we destroy the Evil Dictator and run an election, that
| everyone will naturally vote to ally with the U.S. and
| completely change their social organization to be in accordance
| with western values.
|
| 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.
| treflop wrote:
| I don't think the language barrier or anything was an issue.
| We entered Japan and helped rebuild it and now we have some
| of the best relations in the world.
|
| 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.
| cameldrv wrote:
| Yes. We did not try to radically transform Japanese society
| down to the level of the family. Same in Germany. Both of
| those countries also had a fairly cohesive sense of
| nationhood without massive ethnic divisions. We just had to
| deprogram the hyper-aggressive militarism, but the rest we
| could pretty much leave alone.
|
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| This isn't true. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union,
| there was an Afghan state that was able to motivate enough
| of the population to believe in it and fight for it in
| order to largely defeat the Mujahideen.
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The notable exception was the Powell Doctrine in Desert
| Storm
|
| 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...)
| cameldrv wrote:
| That's a great point, and I think that Yugoslavia was one
| of the very few successful post WWII major military
| interventions. There's a common pattern where you have a
| multiethnic state that's held together by a brutal
| dictator. Often the boundaries of this state were drawn a
| long time ago in London. There's usually a lot of pent-up
| ethnic resentment. If you remove the brutal dictator, it
| spirals into civil war. The Yugoslavia solution of just
| breaking up the country into tiny ethnic states actually
| worked pretty well. So well, in fact, that now the
| constituent parts of Yugoslavia are even coming back
| together through the EU.
|
| 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.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| I'm unconvinced that the lack of success in Afghanistan
| was not primarily driven by the shift of focus to the
| naked war of aggression in Iraq in 2003, and the
| subsequent mismanagement of the occupation of Iraq,
| starting with radical de-Baathification and other
| rejections of lessons learned in previous (e.g., post-
| WWII) occupations, both because of the message that war
| sent to peopke everywhere, including in Afghanistan,
| about the US and because of long diversion of resources
| and focus it produced. (And, obviously, the US
| involvement in Syria was largely a product of that.)
|
| 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.
| cameldrv wrote:
| It's hard to say exactly what would have happened in
| Afghanistan without the distraction of Iraq, but my
| feeling is that making Afghanistan into a functional
| western style democracy with western style human rights
| is more like a 50-100 year project.
|
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > but my feeling is that making Afghanistan into a
| functional western style democracy with western style
| human rights is more like a 50-100 year project.
|
| 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.
| foobarian wrote:
| It's too bad that the borders there are leftovers from
| colonial map-making. I wonder what "United States of
| Arabia" would look like if allowed to form on their own
| terms.
| woooooo wrote:
| They tried a few times in the 60s (pan-arabism) but it
| always broke down over the question of who to put in
| charge.
| specialist wrote:
| Yes and:
|
| 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.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| I'd be interested in your take on the UK documentary The
| Death of Yugoslavia[0], available on YouTube. It gave me
| the distinct impression that the US didnt have a
| strategic vision so much as they got unwillingly dragged
| into it and felt that they had no option but to try and
| solve it.
|
| 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...
| foobarian wrote:
| I don't remember the US directly doing much of anything
| in ex-Yu, other than some sorties, though they did a lot
| indirectly by recognizing the new states and providing
| aid in various forms including armaments and other
| military supplies and training to make sure the stronger
| neighbors don't get too aggressive. (Which is way
| understating what happened in Bosnia, but still).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I don't remember the US directly doing much of anything
| in ex-Yu, other than some sorties
|
| 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...
| foobarian wrote:
| That's fair enough. I should not come off as critical of
| their involvement; without it (especially the less
| visible non-active pieces) who knows how things would
| have turned out. And most people I know from there are
| grateful for the help and view them as heroes. But
| compared to a theater like Kuwait or Afghanistan they had
| a lot less active deployment. IIRC there were many air
| missions out of Aviano.
| cess11 wrote:
| That documentary is very, very well done. The BBC
| journalists also wrote a book with the same name, which
| has more detail.
| cameldrv wrote:
| I'll check it out. We generally supported the
| independence claims of each breakaway state in turn. Some
| of that may have sort of been a default for the time
| given that the USSR had just broken up without too much
| violence, and shortly thereafter Czechoslovakia broke up
| fairly amicably. That probably made Clinton and his
| people more pro-breakup.
|
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| Just FYI, many of the early Greek city-states were
| democratic, and they fought like cats and dogs.
|
| 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.
| vasac wrote:
| There's nothing stable in ex-Yugoslavia, and that will
| become evident once the current hegemon gets busy
| elsewhere.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| What exactly is Vucic on about these days?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| Nothing lasts forever. "'Instability' that exists but is
| suppressed so as to be not evident for a few decades" is
| not meaningfully different from "stability for a few
| decades".
| tivert wrote:
| > To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued
| the U.S. since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars
| because no one ever sets out clear achievable goals.
|
| > ...
|
| > 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.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> I think in Afghanistan 's case, the goal was clear but
| it was not achievable._
|
| 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.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| Germany and Japan were culturally different and
| scientifically, economically superior to how Afganistan
| was before they were invaded and bombed.
| vkou wrote:
| > 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."
|
| 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.
| gknoy wrote:
| > scorched-earth, mass-graves liquidate every single
| participant in the old regime, and all of their
| supporters
|
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| It takes a few generations of extreme overwhelming force,
| at a minimum typically.
|
| See: the Roman Empire. They had a timeline of several
| hundred years before the new territories were 'roman'
| bilbo0s wrote:
| I don't know man?
|
| 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.
| Omniusaspirer wrote:
| It's simply not true that everyone failed in Afghanistan-
| the Mongols were very successful and the Mughals after
| them created a roughly 600 year period of relative peace.
| They just understood the realities of that region and
| operated in ways that modern western nations (thankfully)
| aren't willing to. The fact we tried a different way was
| admirable despite ultimately being unsuccessful and a
| poor allocation of resources.
|
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| Which is why you shouldn't get into this business unless
| you're fully committed to it, as opposed to just doing a
| flavor-of-the-week invasion and destabilization of a
| country.
|
| 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.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >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.
|
| 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.
| shuntress wrote:
| > How exactly does providing the latter do anything but
| piss surviving conservatives and hardliners and
| reactionaries off even more?
|
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| Did any of those societies have as many hard-liners who
| were both running the country prior to a regime change,
| that were fully committed to political violence to
| achieve their cultural goals?
|
| It's one thing to slowly shift the goal posts in a civil
| society over decades through these kinds of soft
| changes...
| shuntress wrote:
| > Did any of those societies have as many hard-liners who
| were both running the country prior to a regime change,
| that were fully committed to political violence to
| achieve their cultural goals?
|
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| > Yes
|
| 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.
| shuntress wrote:
| > Examples?
|
| 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?
| vkou wrote:
| It should be trivial of you to provide examples of this,
| if you are so confident in your claims. You bring the
| point up, the onus is on you to at least provide an
| example of this claim.
|
| 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.
| shuntress wrote:
| You seem to be confused.
|
| 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?
| krisoft wrote:
| > Look into it yourself if you care so much. I don't care
| to get so far off topic.
|
| 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.
| shuntress wrote:
| Whoops! You got me! I guess every time a society starts
| to empower women after a violent overthrow of a political
| regime it has been stopped by backlash from surviving
| conservatives and hardliners and reactionaries.
| ramblenode wrote:
| This sounds a little vague. Do you have a citation I
| could learn more from?
| shuntress wrote:
| This is a good general summary:
| https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/gender-
| equ...
| Detrytus wrote:
| Many people naively think that liberal democracy, where
| human rights are respected is kind of the natural state,
| which can be distorted by some evil regimes. Nothing
| could be further from truth: natural state of mankind is
| slavery with a small elite exploiting the masses.
| Democracy is a product of European culture and it slowly
| evolved from: Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Roman
| law, and Christianity as a religion. Countries that do
| not share the same cultural background are simply not
| compatible with democracy.
| goatlover wrote:
| The natural state of humanity was hunter/gatherer.
| Civilization is kind of a later comer, although it might
| be older than previously thought.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| So, Japan is not a democracy then?
| krapp wrote:
| Ancient Greece and Rome both had a small elite exploiting
| the masses, and both states practiced slavery. The Bible
| endorses the institution of slavery as God's natural
| order numerous times in both the Old and New Testament.
| Europe held the greatest slaveowning imperialist powers
| the world has ever known - and monarchies to boot.
|
| 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_t
| he_Isl...
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| > _... Ancient Roman law, and Christianity as a
| religion._
|
| Were Mussolini alive today, he'd have another form of
| government to sell you!
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Unfortunately, that's literally genocide.
| xanthor wrote:
| Go check the annual opium poppy production in Afghanistan in
| the years leading up to and following the US invasion if
| you're interested in a more coherent justification.
| resource_waste wrote:
| >the lack of strategic vision
|
| 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.
| lazide wrote:
| Occupation over generations with severe and autocratic
| control of daily life and institutions maybe.
|
| Not dudes driving through on patrol once a day and never
| stopping unless they are attacked.
| ramblenode wrote:
| > Religion and Military occupation do this, lets not
| pretend this doesnt work.
|
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| Occupation is very labor-intensive. The Allies did it after
| WWII.[1] It took a huge number of Allied troops, and
| continued until 1952.
|
| [1] https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/Occ-GY/ch16.htm
| sirspacey wrote:
| The Economist did a great deep dive on why we lost. Short
| version: a major export of Afghanistan was wheat, which we
| wouldn't let them sell to us because of US agricultural
| interest. With no ready markets, their farmers switched to
| opium. We wouldn't prevent it because it would destroy
| livelihoods, a sure way to spark insurgency. Al Qaeda became
| drug lords, made a fortune, and bank rolled a resistance and
| eventual overthrow.
|
| 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.
| nradov wrote:
| Something is missing in that story. Afghanistan isn't a
| great location for any sort of agriculture: it lacks the
| reliable rainfall and flat plains needed for optimal cereal
| cultivation. And as a landlocked country it's impossible to
| export large volumes of grain. Most of what they grow has
| always been for domestic consumption.
|
| 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.
|
| https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24489703
| underlipton wrote:
| One might consider that it would give something for these
| farmers to subsist on that didn't enrich the Taliban.
| With that issue settled and stable, you could make
| inroads elsewhere without inadvertently filling up the
| enemy's coffers.
| boppo1 wrote:
| I dunno, I'm gonna go with the parent comment's version of
| the failure instead of 'No we just didn't neoliberal _hard
| enough_ '.
| overstay8930 wrote:
| Mountainous arid country economy collapses because of a
| rough wheat market lol come on do you really think the
| taliban was going to be unseated by competing with the
| economies of scale of an American wheat farm? How do people
| fall for this
| ripe wrote:
| > we keep losing wars because no one sets achievable goals
|
| 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",
| ks2048 wrote:
| What were our goals in Afghanistan, _exactly_?
| ripe wrote:
| Bush said it was to kill or capture Al Qaeda leaders and
| to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base for terrorism
| again.
| lupire wrote:
| Thank you, cameldrive, for this perceptive commentary on
| culture clash in the mideast :-)
| vkou wrote:
| Their strategic vision seems to be using attacks against them
| as a pretense for more land grabs, which in the future,
| promotes more attacks against them, which provides a fig leaf
| for more land grabs.
|
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| But it just isn't true. Israel's neighbors can very credibly
| pose an existential threat, which only external intervention
| can thwart.
|
| 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.
| cess11 wrote:
| One neighbour and some militias they cooperate with, plus
| the de facto government of Yemen, pose a threat, but it's
| probably not existential and probably not enough to save
| the palestinians from a genocidal catastrophe that at the
| very least will affect generations.
|
| 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?
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Your comment relies on three basic assumptions. The first
| is that the US will intervene militarily to defend
| Israel. The second is that a military threat to Israel
| (ex: a blockade) would need military collaboration from
| Sunni Arab states. The third is that the Sunni Arab
| states that have relation with Israel do it from direct
| self-interest.
|
| 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.
| cess11 wrote:
| The US _is_ intervening militarily to defend Israel,
| mainly in Iraq, Yemen and Syria (as well as nearby
| oceans). Moving those air strikes to iranian territory
| would in practice be easy, if the political conditions
| allow it, which Iran knows.
|
| 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.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Airstrikes against a nuclear-armed state just isn't
| something that the US is willing to do right now, and
| it's something it will be less willing to do in the
| future.
|
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| One could say they almost wanted to the security to fail - so
| they could respond with disproportionate and indiscriminate
| force to achieve their actual goals.
|
| Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable
| from malice.
| falserum wrote:
| if you replace "they" with "prime minister that is hanging by
| a thread for quite some time", you would get my personal
| conspiracy theory.
| mc32 wrote:
| I dunno, that sounds awfully close to saying, "the victim
| deserved it" rather than the attacker being at fault for
| attacking because the victim dressed in a certain way or did
| not cross the street when the victim saw a potential
| aggressor.
| shuntress wrote:
| > One could say they almost wanted to the security to fail
| - so they could respond with disproportionate and
| indiscriminate force to achieve their actual goals.
|
| 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.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| Only if you conflate the residents and citizens of a state
| with the organization/people/bureaucracy that runs it.
| Everyone (afaik) concedes that US intelligence failed
| catastrophically before 9/11, but nobody think that is
| blaming the victims who died.
| c420 wrote:
| https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-border-troops-
| women-h...
|
| According to Politico, they did indeed ignore the
| intelligence.
| traceroute66 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67082047
| underlipton wrote:
| Apparently something that also happened recently with the
| ISIS attack in Russia (US intelligence warned them).
| Unstable or vulnerable regimes using terror as a pretense
| is not _that_ farfetched, is it? I think _we_ should also
| be paying attention to this dynamic, considering who is
| going to be on the ballot this fall.
| hackable_sand wrote:
| Trump has been more routinely advocating and threatening
| violence with a well-established gallery of Hunnic boogie
| men to provoke his base.
|
| 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.
| underlipton wrote:
| I agree. I'm also going to say something a bit
| controversial: the effect of Roe vs Wade being overturned
| has been the institution of, effectively, a terror
| campaign. And while that campaign has been carried out by
| Republicans... it's been allowed by the Biden
| administration and congressional Democrats, because
| they're vulnerable against Trump and need something
| powerfully persuasive to run on. Securing a woman's right
| to choose is something that we should have seen Profiles
| in Courage-type sacrifices for; instead the party under
| whose watch it was lost are using it in their emails
| asking for donations.
|
| 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.
| roenxi wrote:
| I don't see how that is relevant to the parent comment. The
| question isn't whether they ignored the intelligence; did
| they ignore the intelligence because of incompetence or
| because they wanted to ramp up their colonialist programs?
|
| 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.
| Supermancho wrote:
| This is a common tactic for someone trying to hold power
| at any cost. Seems good for the leadership if the country
| can last long enough for the world to blame it on old
| leadership, long after they are dead...or if they are
| successful enough that it's a statistic.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| One could say that that's an insane take.
|
| Any sufficiently sign of incompetence and negligence is
| usually just that - incompetence and negligence, you know,
| occam's razor and all.
| persolb wrote:
| Do you think the 1 km wide DMZ isn't meaningfully changing the
| situation?
|
| (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.)
| lenerdenator wrote:
| > However the Israelis have no strategic vision. They lacked
| serious plans for such an eventuality and still lack a serious
| goal for their invasion of Gaza.
|
| 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.
| downWidOutaFite wrote:
| So Gazans are blamed for voting for Hamas's "from the river
| to the sea" 15 years ago, but Israelis are blameless and
| "just want the hostages back" even though they have
| repeatedly voted for Likud's "from the river to the sea" over
| and over again ever since Likud's terrorist branch
| assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and his peace plan 30 years ago.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| It seems quite plausible that another aim of today's war on
| Gaza is to push the international community into accepting
| the evacuation of Palestine on humanitarian grounds.
| Netanyahu might be prepared to accept some Palestinian Arabs
| in his Israel, but he'd be even happier if they were all
| gone.
| nerfbatplz wrote:
| Yeah the Israeli left has come to accept that the final
| solution is to push the Gazans into Sinai as exemplified by
| Benny Morris' opinion that he has stated repeatedly since
| October 7th.
| nerfbatplz wrote:
| > Hamas has, for a very long time, refused to recognize that
| Israel has any right to exist anywhere in former Mandatory
| Palestine.
|
| Why is this piece of misinformation so pervasive?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-
| char...
| bushbaba wrote:
| More sustainable is what exactly? The Gazans dont want peace,
| don't want their own state while the Israeli state
| exists,...etc. if you have a solution that can be done by
| Israel alone without changing how ruling parties of Gaza and
| West Bank operate, please share.
| nkozyra wrote:
| I think - like a lot of media reporting on the space - this
| overgeneralizes (heh) artificial intelligence. The predictive
| aspects of ML have been in use in modern militaries for
| _decades_, and the opening graf handwavely indicates that an LLM
| was a bigger chunk of the perceived intelligence failure of the
| October 7 attack.
|
| 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.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Blaming the excessively grand claims that were made for those
| tools, however, is absolutely a useful exercise.
| jonchurch_ wrote:
| But grand claims made by technologists are nothing new.
| Certainly I don't know, Ive never been in the military, but
| aren't people always trying to sell The Next Big Thing to the
| military? Is it not the responsibility of those in charge to
| evaluate the capabilities and limitations of new systems
| being integrated into their forces? If someone said "we dont
| need the rigor we used to have anymore, we have AI" I see
| that as a failure of the org, not an indictment of the claims
| being put forth by boosters.
|
| 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.
| rawgabbit wrote:
| Yes. It is a military maxim you will lose if you want to
| fight the next war with the tactics and equipment from the
| last war. Your future opponents have been studying the last
| war and have invented all kinds of ways to destroy you if
| you use the same tactics again.
|
| 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.
| blitzar wrote:
| Doing so in all seriousness would collectively wipe trillions
| off the valuations of companies and reduce peoples net
| worths.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| It would also redirect resources towards boring stuff like
| manufacturing, that actually increases real wealth. But
| you're right, the fact that so much of our theoretical
| wealth is in hype, and there's a lot of people who don't
| want that brought down to more realistic valuations, is
| what's driving this.
|
| 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.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Part of the ongoing confusion, in my opinion, is that we as an
| industry leaned full into calling LLMs artificial intelligence.
|
| 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?
| thfuran wrote:
| Are you unaware that the field has been called AI for
| decades?
| nkozyra wrote:
| My read is they're complaining about the conflation of LLMs
| with AI in general.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Language models weren't considered "AI" until very
| recently.
|
| 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.
| thfuran wrote:
| Natural Language Processing is a long-standing area of
| research in the field and, though it hasn't always been
| based on ANNs, ANNs have themselves also long been
| considered AI regardless of application.
| mattnewton wrote:
| I can't speak for Israeli tech, but the pentagon has an image
| problem in the valley, I don't believe they are getting the best
| recruits even for contracting companies like Palintir. Our
| generation is closer to Iraq and Vietnam than WW2, and many of
| the bright minds are first generation immigrants. Despite the
| more recent image problems ad tech has (now that people are
| seeing more of how the sausage is made), it's still sexier to
| work on big consumer companies than defense. You'd have to pay my
| colleagues more to work for the US government, even indirectly,
| instead it's often less (and often with less freedoms of what
| they do off the clock).
|
| 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.
| jajko wrote:
| I am still not 100% convinced they didnt just let it happen on
| purpose (and then were surprised just by the scale), having an
| excuse to raze the place down for good, which is exactly what
| they are doing. The signs were there, everywhere, and mosad
| aint bunch of clueless paper pushers.
|
| 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
| kjellsbells wrote:
| There's another issue here as well, which is that many of the
| tech folks who would be ok working for the government, even at
| reduced rates, cant get through the hiring morass that uncle
| sam puts up. The fed gov simply isnt set up to quickly acquired
| talent from industry. They also remain remarkably hidebound by
| old rules like requiring advanced degrees for senior positions.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| That hasn't been my experience.
|
| 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.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| how many of those hires already had clearances and/or
| military experience?
|
| 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.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| > how many of those hires already had clearances and/or
| military experience? > > you've got an active TS/SCI and
| we'll get you onboarded next week.
|
| 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > pentagon has an image problem in the valley
|
| 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.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I think they're talking about hiring, not purchasing.
| alephnerd wrote:
| At the end of the day, most work done by technical teams
| within Defense Agencies is implementation, and the R&D
| related work is done by specific vendors or very autonomous
| labs (either National Labs or a specific PI at a
| University)
|
| 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.
| cuuupid wrote:
| > Software Procurement by Federal standards is relatively
| straightforward
|
| > 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.
| alephnerd wrote:
| > It's odd to see these in the same sentence. FedRAMP is so
| insanely complex/difficult to achieve in a straightforward
| way
|
| 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
| rockskon wrote:
| The Pentagon has more image problems than being a difficult
| customer to work with.
|
| 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.
| robotnikman wrote:
| It also seems like many defense companies do no offer remote
| work opportunities either last I checked
| nradov wrote:
| Some offer hybrid work arrangements, but if you're doing
| classified work or dealing with hardware then there's no
| practical way to do that remotely.
| dmd149 wrote:
| hybrid is likely the best case scenario, and very unlikely if
| you're in an individual contributor role with a higher level
| clearance.
|
| 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.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Often, no. This is serious work being carried out by adults
| that need to come together. There is no replacement for the
| water cooler yet. I made the decision to explicitly seek out
| in-office, on-location defense work. The seridiputous
| conversations and relationship building was not happening in
| remote work. I'm someone who has always worked from home and
| I still do every week but my career and life were going no
| where typing at people through Slack and building meaningless
| web apps--despite making enough money to be reticent to tell
| most people my earnings level.
|
| 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.
| joncrane wrote:
| It has little to do with collaboration.
|
| 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.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| A lot of the issue is that tech workers want to "smoke weed on
| the way to the interview", and in doing so, they become
| ineligible for a clearance.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| That sounds like an imaginary problem.
| datavirtue wrote:
| It's very real. Having smoked or taken other illicit drugs
| in the recent, or not so recent, past is a major source of
| stress for people applying for clearance. You have to be
| sponsored at a significant expense by a current employer
| and if you don't get clearance your career is going to be
| upended. It's up to the worker to judge if they pre-qualify
| based on opaque information and anecdotes you find on
| Reddit.
| lazyasciiart wrote:
| I'd venture to guess that more tech workers lack
| citizenship than lack the ability to pass a drug screen.
| More importantly, the problem _you_ describe is problems
| with the opacity and risk of failure for a clearance: not
| "fuckin' druggies", which is what I responded to.
| Yodel0914 wrote:
| > Having smoked or taken other illicit drugs in the
| recent, or not so recent, past is a major source of
| stress for people applying for clearance.
|
| 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.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| serious problem.
|
| 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.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I personally think this is the most interesting part of the
| entire article:
|
| '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 ).
| gamepsys wrote:
| It's clearly true to some degree, there are documented cases of
| people that refused to work with the defense sector at great
| personal costs. The questions are how much resistance is there
| in the labor force, and how does that impact the ability to
| recruit talent?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > The questions are how much resistance is there in the labor
| force, and how does that impact the ability to recruit
| talent?
|
| 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. :-)
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Wasn't DARPA kinda close to that idea ( I am honestly not
| sure, but it seemed like a lot of interesting stuff came
| from there )?
|
| 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?
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > 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.
| geomark wrote:
| "Compartmentalization of the work appeases the mind a
| lot."
|
| 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.
| notaustinpowers wrote:
| > ...lamenting that people with the relevant tech skills to
| build the weapons of the future were "largely refusing to work
| with the defense sector".
|
| 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...
| Terr_ wrote:
| There's also the general government red-tape issue, which
| cascades down into bureaucratic projects with two year long
| waterfall designs, etc.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > a la Manhattan Project
|
| 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%)
| goatlover wrote:
| > or were largely unaware of what they were actually building
| (a la Manhattan Project)
|
| Scientists were unaware they were building an atomic bomb to
| use in WW2? Oppenheimer certainly was aware.
| gallegojaime wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron_Girls
| civilized wrote:
| I suspect it's way less true than tech folks who hate the US
| defense industry think. The correlation between liberal
| opinions and problem-solving intelligence is nonzero but it's
| not all that high.
| cameldrv wrote:
| I have no idea how Silicon Valley could be held responsible for
| an Israeli intelligence failure. Israel is not a part of the U.S.
|
| 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.
| luaybs wrote:
| > Israel is not a part of the U.S.
|
| The US sends $3.8B in military aid to Israel yearly...
| wslh wrote:
| It is not too much if you think Israel is covering US
| military mistakes and cybersecurity (e.g. Iran).
| lostlogin wrote:
| Isn't this policing of Iran needed _because_ of the US
| supporting Israel?
|
| 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.
| wslh wrote:
| Isn't this policing of Iran needed because of the US
| supporting Israel?
|
| 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).
| sangnoir wrote:
| I remember the JPCOA and egging on the Trump
| administration to break the agreement and the subsequent
| escalations.
| lostlogin wrote:
| It makes me laugh how it's always described as aid.
|
| If someone gave their friend a gun, would anyone ever call it
| aid?
| luaybs wrote:
| well said
| bushbaba wrote:
| That's over simplifying it. but it's not aid, more like
| strategic interests aligned. For example the U.S. aid
| prevented Israel from continuing development and selling
| its own fighter jets. It gives U.S. arms actual military
| exposure in dense urban warfare. There's lots of joint
| benefits here.
| luaybs wrote:
| There is no benefit other than the profit made by the
| companies manufacturing this "aid", payed for by the
| American taxpayer via the US congress and government.
| nivertech wrote:
| Real aid must be provided with no strings attached.
|
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| [1] https://www.justice.gov/nsd-fara
| lostlogin wrote:
| > the US provides much more "aid" to our enemies.
|
| Could you explain this? The US arms Israel's enemies?
| nivertech wrote:
| The only real peace (aka "normalization") we have (had?)
| is with the UAE.
|
| 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.
|
| --- U.S. Foreign Assistance to the Middle
| East: Historical, Recent Trends, and the FY2024
| Background Request Updated August 15, 2023
|
| https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46344
| lostlogin wrote:
| It's so complicated.
|
| 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.
| nivertech wrote:
| Egypt violated almost every signed treaty.
|
| 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]?
|
| ---
|
| [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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I'm surprised at this. According to the Wiki, Israel has
| agreed to Egyptian military being there. Relations have
| thawed a lot as far as I can tell.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egypt-Israel_peace_treaty
| nivertech wrote:
| _> Yet our governments and military still trying to
| appease them, in the same way as they did to Hamas._
|
| 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.
| JacobiX wrote:
| From the same report, "U.S. Foreign Assistance to the
| Middle East": Israel has been the largest cumulative
| recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,
| receiving $158 billion. Jordan for example received $26.4
| billion from 1951 to 2020.
|
| >> 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| That puts rather a different spin on things. Arming one
| with weapons, versus letting the other have its money.
|
| Neither meet my definition of 'aid'.
| nivertech wrote:
| _> versus letting the other have its money_
|
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I completely agree. However I assume you exclude Israel
| and you'd like to keep American aid?
| nivertech wrote:
| No, we don't need it. This "aid" is a net loss for us.
|
| 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.
| lostlogin wrote:
| You want US backing but not the military aid?
|
| 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.
| nivertech wrote:
| _> From the same report, "U.S. Foreign Assistance to the
| Middle East": Israel has been the largest cumulative
| recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,
| receiving $158 billion. Jordan for example received $26.4
| billion from 1951 to 2020._
|
| 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
|
| The majority of this "aid" (~56%) goes to enemies and
| semi-enemies (and that's even excluding hostile non-Arab
| countries in the region).
|
| --
|
| _> > 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.
| JacobiX wrote:
| Not sure why you consider those countries as ennemies (or
| semi-enemy) ?
|
| 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.
| nivertech wrote:
| _> 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.
|
| --
|
| Turkiye is a member of NATO, with antisemitic leader. Is
| Turkiye 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.
|
| --
|
| 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.
|
| ---
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_of_Enemy_Air
| _Defen...
| lostlogin wrote:
| > We are not that far from NATO planes bombing Tel Aviv
| and carrying out SEAD operations
|
| 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.
| lesuorac wrote:
| In the world where ask is a noun (and you wanted the gun),
| yes.
| neonate wrote:
| http://web.archive.org/web/20240327152111/https://harpers.or...
| alephnerd wrote:
| No offense, but this article is MASSIVE BS.
|
| 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.
|
| -----
|
| 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.
| nceqs3 wrote:
| The way Palantir talks about the CIA really rubs me the wrong
| way. For years, they would leak to journalists that Palantir
| "found bin Laden" when, of course, it had nothing to do with
| finding him. Several CIA employees died trying to find Bin
| Laden, all for some schmucks in Silicon Valley to try and
| capitalize on their sacrifice.
| alephnerd wrote:
| If you want to give a Silicon Valley company kudos for Bin
| Laden, give it to Cisco, VMWare, and Equinix.
|
| 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.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| What more do you expect from a project from Peter Thiel,
| which is named after the most evil guy's magic all seeing orb
| from LoTR, which is explicitly made for governments to target
| whatever they want to call "bad guys" by slurping up as much
| data as possible from people who shouldn't be collecting it
| in the first place?
|
| Dude has a dictator complex. Of course he fully the embraces
| the "just fucking lie and make money" ethos
| hayst4ck wrote:
| What's funny is that Thiel is a believer of nominative
| determinism:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172475
| l3mure wrote:
| Critical support to Palantir in their quest to steal CIA
| valor.
| outside1234 wrote:
| The thing we should all really be terrified about is how Trump
| and Stephen Miller will use of all of this technology we have
| built against us when elected.
| cess11 wrote:
| 'Caught by surprise' is a weird description. Israeli press has
| repeatedly run stories about how frontline analysts sounding the
| alarm were ignored.
|
| 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| This is just a blaming the wrong tools.
|
| 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.
| dmurray wrote:
| Or, they intentionally ignored the intelligence hoping for a
| casus belli and an excuse to wipe their hated enemies off the
| map.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > ... an excuse to wipe their hated enemies off the map
|
| 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?
| javajosh wrote:
| The composition of the population is less important to
| this calculus than the composition of Israel's political
| leadership. It was already known that Netanyahi/Likud
| allowed Hamas to grow stronger to prevent unification of
| Gaza and the West Bank. Allowing the Oct. 7 attack gave
| him every excuse to prosecute total war on the Gazans,
| while maintaining a great deal of moral and financial
| support, especially from the US and Britain. Allowing
| your enemy to take first blood in order to justify
| annihilating them is a ploy as old as time.
|
| 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).
| logicchains wrote:
| >FWIW Netanyahu (or Israel, as a state) has never spoken
| once about wiping out "Arabs".
|
| 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."
| edanm wrote:
| Not that I like that kind of talk, but he wasn't talking
| about Arabs in general. He was talking about Hamas or, at
| worse, about Palestinians in general. Certainly not all
| Arabs.
| cess11 wrote:
| Why do you think that?
|
| 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.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| They do speak about erasing specific towns (and after
| saying such things their supporters go and torch such
| towns while killing the inhabitants), forcibly expelling
| all Palestinians, and calling for a second Nakba though:
|
| 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...
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Hard line right wing Israelis started funding Hamas
| because towards the end of the leadership of Arafat,
| Palestine was much more willing to adopt a two state
| solution, and it would have been awkward for Israel to be
| asked "if these 'terrorists' are willing to compromise,
| why aren't you?"
|
| 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.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| People also like to forget that Likud was itself born
| from a terrorist organization, Irgun, whose leader, a
| proscribed terrorist by several Western countries, was
| elected Prime Minister of Israel.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| The Sons of Liberty were terrorists too. ;p
|
| The important thing to me is those guys don't lead to
| Islamic theocracies.
| cess11 wrote:
| Jewish theocracy with nukes is fine, but islamic
| theocracy without nukes is not?
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Iran probably has nukes, or has the ability to get there.
| cess11 wrote:
| The ability to get there is quite common. Not sure how
| that's relevant?
| cess11 wrote:
| The jewish israeli mainstream hates palestinian israelis,
| regardless of whether they are muslims, christians, jews
| or atheists. Recently israeli troops shot a jewish
| convert israeli palestinian because they found a knife in
| his bag.
|
| 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.
| nsguy wrote:
| I'm pretty sure your first paragraph is not true
| (personal experience- I used to live in Israel). Link to
| surveys? I'm not even sure what you're referring to
| specifically as "Jewish Israeli Mainstream". The Orthodox
| Jews?
|
| 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).
| cess11 wrote:
| A good resource for contemporary israeli discourse is the
| account @ireallyhateyou on Twitter.
|
| 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.
| nsguy wrote:
| Both things can be true at one time, saving from
| persecution and expanding the Jewish population.
|
| 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.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| The number of times people trot out 20% to excuse a very
| long and detailed history of overt and explicit Israeli
| cruelty to the Palestinians makes me think Israel only
| allowed these people to be citizens to blunt any
| criticism.
|
| 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.
| javajosh wrote:
| This speculation reminds me of early speculation about
| Covid-19's lab origin. They are both horrible ideas, but
| there is also too much evidence for both for them to be
| dismissed as mere bad-faith fear-mongering. That's the
| problem with conspiracies: some of them are real.
| wongarsu wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are trying to say? If a theory has
| too much evidence to dismiss it, how can it be a terrible
| idea? Are they terrible because they don't fit your
| ideology, or because of their implications about other
| people, or what is the issue?
| javajosh wrote:
| Horrible in the moral sense. For example, that some
| people really want in their heart of hearts to kill
| entire other groups of people. Or that political or
| military leaders might willingly sacrifice hundreds of
| men, women and children to advance their goals. Horrible
| in the Machiavellian sense of pursuing power without
| moral constraint.
| edanm wrote:
| This is a fairly unrealistic idea. Unfortunately, mistakes
| and incompetence really are the answer, partially brought
| about because Netanyahu has spent years appointing people
| based on loyalty rather than credentials, partly because
| Hamas is smart and "played" Israel, partly because humans
| sometimes make mistakes.
|
| 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.
| lupire wrote:
| Bombing a million people to death gets different
| international response than bombing their infrastructure
| and then opps they starved to death, what a tragedy.
| underdeserver wrote:
| 1200 dead. 250 kidnapped. Every politician and senior
| officer expected to resign after the war ends. No, this was
| incompetence, or at least systematic failure, not malice.
| lupire wrote:
| Why so quick to write off malicious incompetence?
|
| 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
| nsguy wrote:
| This reads like "9/11 was an inside job" or "Trump is still
| president". A conspiracy theory. Something usually not true
| but some people want to be true for various reasons.
|
| 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).
| Animats wrote:
| A violent response was expected. What was not expected was a
| _competent_ violent response.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| Anyone directly familiar with the IDF knows that there is a
| deep hubris engrained in the organization.
| sequoia wrote:
| I'm a fairly ignorant outside observer, but it seems that
| government disarray and massive internal dissension within
| Israeli society caused by Netanyahu's increasingly extreme
| political moves must have contributed to Israel's defense
| failure on October 7. Netanyahu had so split Israeli society
| that millions were out protesting every weekend for months
| leading up to 10/7 and reservists were even refusing duty in
| protest.
|
| 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.
| cratermoon wrote:
| I was looking for a mention of the Strategic Defense Initiative,
| aka "Star Wars". Among the technical issues the program never
| overcame was the ability to adequately recognize incoming
| missiles and guide anti-missile defenses to the target. Much like
| the Igloo White and Assault Breaker systems mentioned in the
| article, it failed to distinguish decoys from real.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| > Among the technical issues the program never overcame was the
| ability to adequately recognize incoming missiles and guide
| anti-missile defenses to the target.
|
| 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.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| I'm shocked by the amount of taxpayer money gone to waste. So
| many unsuccessful projects, the infamous incompetence of Big Tech
| looks like nothing compared to US military industrial complex's.
|
| 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.
| mandmandam wrote:
| If anything, the numbers in the article _undersell_ the scale
| of waste.
|
| 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.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| To be fair the US is like what 247 years old? Thats a toddler
| in the grand scheme of things. And the founding fathers did not
| have a lot of confidence in this thing lasting.
|
| [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.
| underlipton wrote:
| >Nevertheless, Hamas's devastating attack on October 7 caught
| Shin Bet and the rest of Israel's multibillion-dollar defense
| system entirely by surprise. The intelligence disaster was even
| more striking considering Hamas carried out much of its
| preparations in plain sight, including practice assaults on mock-
| ups of the border fence and Israeli settlements--activities that
| were openly reported. Hamas-led militant groups even posted
| videos of their training online. Israelis living close to the
| border observed and publicized these exercises with mounting
| alarm, but were ignored in favor of intelligence bureaucracies'
| analyses and, by extension, the software that had informed them.
| Israeli conscripts, mostly young women, monitoring developments
| through the ubiquitous surveillance cameras along the Gaza
| border, composed and presented a detailed report on Hamas's
| preparations to breach the fence and take hostages, only to have
| their findings dismissed as "an imaginary scenario." The Israeli
| intelligence apparatus had for more than a year been in
| possession of a Hamas document that detailed the group's plan for
| an attack.
|
| 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.
| Const-me wrote:
| I think the most important lesson, it's borderline impossible to
| design any good system without clear use cases.
|
| 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.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| This was a huge problem for the Nazis too, Hitler loved hugely
| complex and massive "super weapons" and wasted immense amounts
| of money and scientific effort to build them. The allies built
| practical and easy to maintain equipment in great quantities.
| wavemode wrote:
| I mean... the Allies also spent billions developing a
| superweapon. (And used German scientists to do it!)
| spanktheuser wrote:
| And it wasn't even the most expensive. The Norden Bomb
| Sight cost slightly more than the Manhattan Project. B-29
| development and production cost nearly 3x the cost of the
| fission bomb.
| speed_spread wrote:
| Well, if you include the cost of decontaminating the
| Hanford site, amongst others, the numbers grow rapidly.
| Once the B-29 was done, it was done.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| The Norden stands out because it couldn't see through
| clouds, and Europe has very few cloud-free days. So it
| turned out to be largely useless in practice. The US
| didn't get much value for its money with that project.
| resolutebat wrote:
| The Allies would have won without the superweapon though
| (remember, Hitler had already surrended and Japan was
| clearly on the ropes well before Hiroshima), and the jury
| is still out in whether it even sped things up.
| hughesjj wrote:
| I always saw the atomic bomb as more of a defensive
| rather than offensive tactic. We were super worried about
| the Germans getting there first and wanted to ensure we
| could respond in kind of they did
| LtWorf wrote:
| And then germany surrendered and it was still dropped.
| Twice.
|
| Doesn't hold.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Japan was never going to surrender. They were going to
| fight until the end. More lives would have been lost. The
| bomb saved lives.
| dimask wrote:
| It was really aimed at "allies" (soviet union), not
| japan.
| _heimdall wrote:
| We had really, really bad aim if those two nukes were
| aimed at the Soviet Union.
| LtWorf wrote:
| allegedly
| Staple_Diet wrote:
| You either have no knowledge of the topic or have some
| secret source of information that has evaded the world's
| historians, because it is a fairly acknowledged fact
| supported by both Allied and Japanese sources. Japan
| didn't even surrender after the first bomb was dropped.
| kevindamm wrote:
| I think there's nuance here that gets lost in the
| retelling. From what I learned of it in a university
| course dedicated to many aspects of the topic of that
| bomb, there was a demand of /unconditional/ surrender but
| Japan wanted to keep their emperor. The emperor was
| really more of a cultural and spiritual persona than a
| political one, but regardless the US gov't. insisted on
| an unconditional surrender, including dethroning the
| emperor. I think there was an offer of surrender by the
| Japanese if they could keep their emperor. I don't have
| proof handy and I'm not inclined to dive down that
| particular rabbit hole right now so I hope someone can
| support or correct this.
| Skgqie1 wrote:
| I vaguely recall hearing something similar, with the
| reasoning being that there was a fear of future hostility
| enabled by Emperor driven fanaticism. That said, I've
| also heard that there wasn't really enough time given for
| a response after the first bomb, and that it was largely
| a political move to claim they'd offered an initial
| surrender - and that the goal was always to drop two
| bombs, partly because they wanted to test out different
| aspects of their designs.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It clearly sped things up.
|
| "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...
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| im not buying books to understand your point.
|
| summarize those please
| WalterBright wrote:
| The second bomb convinced the Japanese to immediately
| surrender.
| _heimdall wrote:
| The has been a ton of debate since the war over whether
| Japan would have surrendered, and if so how early. The
| concern at the time, and it has always seemed reasonable
| to me, was that the Japanese were committed to fighting
| to the last person and to make them surrender through
| combat on their home turf would have killed many, many
| more than the two nukes did.
|
| 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.
| PolygonSheep wrote:
| I agree, it was totally reasonable and worth it.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Oh I didn't meant to imply that I personally see the
| nukes as having been reasonable or worth it.
|
| 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.
| SteveNuts wrote:
| Sure, that's true. I forgot to mention that most of them
| never saw action except the V2, which was only mildly
| effective (more of a psychological weapon than anything).
| WalterBright wrote:
| The material effect of the V2 was not in the destruction
| the V2 caused. It was in the massive diversion of Allied
| resources trying to stop it.
|
| See "Impact" by Benjamin King
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Impact-History-Germanys-V-weapons-
| Wor...
| jmspring wrote:
| The allies also had low tech solutions that helped greatly.
| One such example is the Ghost Army which used decoys and the
| like to make it look like there was a large force.
|
| 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...
| polishdude20 wrote:
| Reminds me of the time the allies literally dropped half
| sized fake soldiers from planes before Dunkirk or something
| like that.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| The allies had their own set of "super weapons", like radars
| and proximity fuses.
|
| 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).
| rossdavidh wrote:
| That is absolutely the most important lesson. By the way, also
| true of non-military software development.
| wojciii wrote:
| Also .. I think that the Ukrainians are testing the prototypes
| on the battlefield and rejecting designs that don't work quite
| early. I have seen a prototype of a machine gun with auto
| tracking (reminded me of Aliens 2). Also the flying drone
| designs are made my a large number of companies to avoid the
| risk of one company being destroyed by a russian missile
| strike. I would assume that this is also common for other
| products for their military.
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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...
| _heimdall wrote:
| > However, US is at peace.
|
| 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?
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > but useless in practice.
|
| 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.
| kromem wrote:
| I'm getting really tired of writers crapping on 'AI' as if a
| static self-sufficient offering.
|
| 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.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| The issue is, that many non-tech (and I'm starting to think
| also some tech) people believe that "AI" is an accurate label,
| and therefore that they can expect these algorithms to be able
| to think intelligently. The reason that it's called "AI"
| instead of, say, "large language models" (or whatever algorithm
| is being used), is precisely to create this impression of that
| capability, so as to sell the product.
|
| "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".
| Eisenstein wrote:
| > The issue is, that many non-tech (and I'm starting to think
| also some tech) people believe that "AI" is an accurate
| label, and therefore that they can expect these algorithms to
| be able to think intelligently.
|
| 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.
| agomez314 wrote:
| "no one appears to have noticed that Project Maven fit into the
| grand tradition of many other high-tech weapons projects:
| ecstatic claims of prowess coupled with a disregard for real-
| world experience"
| j16sdiz wrote:
| I don't understand why this have anything do with silicone valley
| or AI / AGI.
|
| It is just a classical confirmation bias.
| OhMeadhbh wrote:
| Finally. someone talking sense about AI.
| est wrote:
| Looks like op staff were overwelmed by oncall duty false alarms.
|
| 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.
| UberFly wrote:
| That's the truth. In the case of October 7 (and 9/11 for that
| matter) lots of useful info was coming in, and regardless of
| the source, it was actively ignored. Human error at it's best.
| AI analysis is just another tool but ultimately we need
| competent or empowered people involved in the chain.
| causal wrote:
| Yes, in any data product scenario it is extremely easy to find
| a signal and extremely difficult to validate that it's the most
| important one.
| dosinga wrote:
| The examples in the article are rather cherry-picked. Failures in
| Vietnam can hardly be blamed on an IBM 360 only. The Hamas attack
| might have surprised Israel but the Iron Dome has been tech
| working well in recent years. The US warned anybody who wanted to
| listen (not many) that Russia was about to attack Ukraine. And it
| was a bunch of rather theoretical physicists who built the atomic
| bomb.
| kurthr wrote:
| Lots of failures are just human and political. Sure technology
| can obscure the obvious or highlight the unlikely, but it's
| just not that commonly influential (at least not yet, the day
| will come).
|
| 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-...
| somenameforme wrote:
| The warning was quite broad, claiming that some group was
| planning some attack on some large gathering, including
| concerts, in Moscow, of which there are many. And it warned
| Americans to avoid large gatherings for the next 48 hours.
| That was on March 7th. The actual attack would only take
| place on March 24th.
|
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Is there evidence of the last claim?
| foolfoolz wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2P02R/
| semerda wrote:
| https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/boston-bombing-
| anniversary...
| omnibrain wrote:
| > The warning was quite broad, claiming that some group was
| planning some attack on some large gathering, including
| concerts, in Moscow, of which there are many. And it warned
| Americans to avoid large gatherings for the next 48 hours.
|
| 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
| temporarely wrote:
| The little remarked fact is that all these paramilitary
| groups are "proxies". No one ever mentions "whose proxy" is
| ISIS in the hn pages.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Well then, mention it. Whose proxy are they?
| temporarely wrote:
| Why, we can all count fingers on one hand, can't we? We
| know whose proxy they ain't and after that it is process
| of what is not eliminated. Some say they are the original
| counter-counter-proxy (cause the others also liked the
| idea of this genre and made counter-proxies) and with the
| first proxies (in that genre) being the Mujahidin in
| Afghanistan hitting USSR troops, unless you want to go
| all the way back to Lawrence of Arabia and Ottomans ..
|
| 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.
| imwillofficial wrote:
| The CIAs.
| t888 wrote:
| Maybe it's little remarked because it's not a fact?
| quotemstr wrote:
| Organizations commonly fail by deluding themselves. One form of
| self-delusion is confusing motion for progress. The author's
| point is that the Pentagon _thinks_ it is funding technology
| but isn 't getting value for its money. It's failing to do so
| because it lacks the will or ability to unite expertise,
| authority, and responsibility in a single brain. When
| organizations diffuse responsibility or grant authority to
| people unequipped to distinguish motion from progress, the
| result is always waste and stagnation.
|
| 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.
| EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote:
| >> The danger could only be warded off by adopting ... aerial
| and naval unmanned systems ...
|
| That was actually spot on, as recent events show.
| _heimdall wrote:
| > The US warned anybody who wanted to listen (not many) that
| Russia was about to attack Ukraine
|
| 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.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| And yet, many people in Ukraine did not believe it until
| after the invasion began, because they had had numerous false
| alarms in the years after the Crimea seizure.
| _heimdall wrote:
| I can't speak to anyone in Ukraine as I don't know what was
| being reported there, but from the basic media reports I
| saw in western Europe it was clear.
|
| 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.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| French intelligence was asserting the US was essentially
| fearmongering and that Russia would not invade right up
| until the moment they did.
| _heimdall wrote:
| Well unfortunately that says something about the French
| intelligence.
|
| 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.
| Sakos wrote:
| Everybody I talked to online and offline, all the discussions
| I saw, dismissed the idea of Russia actually invading as
| impossible, since "Putin would never do something this
| stupid, it's just posturing like every other time".
| Meanwhile, it seemed inevitable to me once Putin started
| making ultimatums that would never be fulfilled and gave him
| no way to back down without a significant loss in reputation
| and standing.
|
| Stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin%27s_D
| ecember_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.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > _Everybody I talked to online and offline, all the
| discussions I saw, dismissed the idea of Russia actually
| invading as impossible, since "Putin would never do
| something this stupid, it's just posturing like every other
| time"._
|
| 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.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> Everybody I talked to online and offline, all the
| discussions I saw, dismissed the idea of Russia actually
| invading as impossible, since "Putin would never do
| something this stupid, it's just posturing like every other
| time"._
|
| 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.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I thought that Putin was bluffing, based on the low number of
| the soldiers around the borders alone. 200 000 simply aren't
| enough to take a country the size of Ukraine. During the wars
| of the 20th century, the Ukrainian theatre was regularly
| contested by _millions_ of soldiers at the same time, and
| basic control of population still requires about 1 soldier to
| approx. 30 civilians or so, even if the only resistance is
| guerilla-like. It is much worse with the regular army
| fighting back.
|
| 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.
| _heimdall wrote:
| The number of troops was absolutely low. My read at the
| time was that 100,000 troops (the early build-up) was
| concerning but could easily be a bluff or a test. The naval
| movement was the tip off to me, with the blood reserves
| setting a very short clock on how soon it would start.
|
| 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.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| > The Hamas attack might have surprised Israel
|
| What? They were warned multiple times of an attack and chose to
| do nothing.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| > The US warned anybody who wanted to listen (not many) that
| Russia was about to attack Ukraine.
|
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| The subtitle is rather telling, when combined with the title:
|
| 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.
| quantum_state wrote:
| It seems difficult to escape from the eternal truth of measure
| and countermeasure ... a fool with a tool is still a fool ...
| Barrin92 wrote:
| It's just the usual technology obsession of military industrial
| and political types that's been around for decades. The reality
| is that the most important factor in combat is the human one and
| every fancy gadget you use just introduces more liability and
| weak points.
|
| 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.
| gorgoiler wrote:
| _"The AI system knows everything about Hamas: what they said,
| what they published [...] it analyzes behavior, predicts risks,
| and raises alerts."_
|
| _"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.
| lupusreal wrote:
| (That was from the sequel, The Dark Forest.)
| surfingdino wrote:
| Any sufficiently advanced technology can be defeated with sticks
| and stones.
| musha68k wrote:
| What aspects of modern warfare didn't Hideo Kojima foresee?
|
| >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.
| darkerside wrote:
| This is horrible news. Blurring the lines of accountability
| between people and software in the industry of war is a recipe
| for Armageddon. It's not only genocide laundering, which is
| atrocious enough. Unchecked, it will lead to a "stand your
| ground" type of situation where countries may strike first in
| anticipation of other actions. I fear for the future.
| magic_hamster wrote:
| Not news, rumors with no shred of evidence.
| DragonStrength wrote:
| The point remains: software is continually used as the
| scapegoat when things go wrong to shield human actors.
| Practitioners in our, admittedly young, field have shown
| very little appetite for taking any sort of responsibility
| expected of engineering professionals who inflict harm.
| afthonos wrote:
| Best suggestion I ever saw for regulating autonomous
| software: make software usage in decision-making an
| _aggravating_ factor in mistakes.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| > 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
|
| 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.
| literallycancer wrote:
| Have you read the report?
| imwillofficial wrote:
| He doesn't need to. We cited a well respected journalist
| in a well known publication.
| darkerside wrote:
| https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-
| cal...
|
| Here is the original report. Why are you so confident that
| there is no evidence? Not the curiosity we generally expect
| at HN.
| l3mure wrote:
| The IDF openly touts their use of AI, moron.
|
| https://www.idf.il/%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%A8%D7%99-%D7%99%D7%97%D7
| %...
| lupire wrote:
| Absolutely ridiculous comparison.
|
| 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.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Why are you attempting to downplay the killing of so many
| people? You could just not do that and keep moving
| skyyler wrote:
| 22,000 people. 70% of them women and children, was it?
|
| But it's okay because Hamas exists?
|
| What led you to this conclusion?
| saagarjha wrote:
| It is also 2024. One would think that reducing the number of
| civilian noncombatants killed would be in order since then,
| no?
| FourHand451 wrote:
| That would be great, but why would one think that?
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| It is also in the Middle East, where the only democracy
| there is surrounded on all sides and has no options left.
| saagarjha wrote:
| This is an extreme position that is factually incorrect
| from almost every viewpoint it is read from.
| bart_spoon wrote:
| Why would that be the case. If anything, the last 20 years
| have reinforced the idea that if enemy combatants simply
| embed themselves in civilian populations, they are
| virtually impossible to target without mass collateral
| damage.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Assuming you are unwilling to put in effort to identify
| enemy combatants or risk anything to do so, sure.
| Jensson wrote:
| If the enemy is in a group of civilians then the only way
| to take him out is to fire into the group of civilians,
| there is no getting around that.
| ZoomerCretin wrote:
| Assuming you are only willing to use aerial bombs, yes. A
| ground war would have been far more discriminate.
| maskil wrote:
| Why is this comment being downvoted?
| scotty79 wrote:
| > Gospel
|
| 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.
| TheJoeMan wrote:
| I've been hanging around some MBA types lately, and I'm
| coming to realize the product doesn't actually have to
| perform to high specs like engineers would demand. Palantir
| is selling a "story" that their AI system magically decreases
| casualties and finds good targets, and it's got firm numbers
| printed in the console (that could be completely wrong) but
| that is more convincing to MBA's than any wishy intuition. So
| the MBA's buy into the marketing, and the executors are
| buying into offloading their conscience.
| vasilipupkin wrote:
| please. the last people that would buy into any kind of
| marketing are MBAs because they actually study marketing
| among other things during their 2 years of obtaining an
| MBA.
|
| 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
| joloooo wrote:
| You're right. MBA's are immune from marketing or sales
| tactics. Don't tell Mckinsey.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Psychological research shows that bulshitters are easiest
| to bullshit.
| sequoia wrote:
| > at least twenty-two thousand people, some 70 percent of them
| women and children.
|
| 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.
| thyrsus wrote:
| At the end of the article, Cockburn complains that asking ChatGPT
| about Palantir work with the IDF gets a hallucination in
| response. I just queried duckduckgo.com with "IDF Palantir", and
| receved links to several news articles from relatively mainstream
| news sources. If the point is that LLMs are currently unreliable,
| then sure. If the point is that we can't know whether Palantir is
| working with the IDF, then there is available evidence
| bitwize wrote:
| > Nevertheless, Hamas's devastating attack on October 7 caught
| Shin Bet and the rest of Israel's multibillion-dollar defense
| system entirely by surprise.
|
| 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."
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyFB2p1yrQI
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