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.
> 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.
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_December_20... which Putin doubled down on harder and harder until the invasion finally started. Couple that with all the reports of the military and supply build-up, I found it weird that everybody was so skeptical. It felt more likely to me every day that we got new information about what was happening to the point that I didn't see how it couldn't happen.
> 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.
> 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.
You mean this? Seems legit enough to me to consider a possibility. This just shows that you and others are unable to properly evaluate and analyze the news that you consume.
A CIA office jam packed with SIGINT capabilities and there's zero hard evidence of this microwave weapon. Just a bunch of anecdotal symptoms that sound like a hangover.
My evaluation and analysis capabilities don't include just believing whatever the CIA says.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ukraine was quietly telling everyone to shut up because it was frantically trying to position troops and equipment. Had it been officially acknowledged these trips and equipment would have been trying to smash through an onslaught of refugees fleeing the east, thus helping Russia to face less pushback and effectively ceding the territory as Ukrainians fled and ethnic Russians stayed.
This seems 100% plausible, though its one I haven't seen anything necessarily to corroborate. It makes total sense though and would be a reason for silence.
Edit: rereading this theory, it does read pretty terribly for any civilians living there. Effectively, in that scenario the government decided to mislead the public in order to purposely keep civilians in harm's way rather than allow them to flee (and get in the way). This matches my cynical views of government, but if true it should still piss off a number of people that actually believe governments are there to serve us above all else.
Just to circle back, I'm pretty sure it was Oleksii Arestoyvich who said it. I can't find the video. I think I saw it on Good Times Bad Times youtube channel.
> government decided to mislead the public in order to purposely keep civilians in harm's way
It doesn't look so as Ukrainian government made a huge effort to evacuate the population from the war zone when the conflict started. It's just that they prioritized moving assets to the front (winning the war). Though I agree with you, governments doesn't serve the population but rather themselves.
That sounds about right. It wasn't a massive naval deployment that concerned me at the time, it was a naval movement at all in coordination of the troop deployment. Honestly, a huge naval movement would have looked more like sabre rattling as they really shouldn't have needed a massive naval force to do what they wanted to do (assuming that was a blitz on Kiev).
Anyway, I just happened to be right once among the countless times I have been wrong about similar situations. My main surprise is that anyone considered the idea of an invasion impossible once blood was being delivered to the line.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
The media has swapped into repulsive but predictable propaganda mode over the attack. However, as a result, more facts are coming out. And those facts suggest that nothing significant was shared beyond the travel advisory. From a recent NYTimes article [1]:
---
"Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the director of the F.S.B., emphasized Tuesday in public comments that the information the United States provided was “of a general nature.” “We reacted to this information, of course, and took appropriate measures,” he said, noting that the actions the F.S.B. took to follow up on the tip didn’t confirm it.
The adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow prevented U.S. officials from sharing any information about the plot beyond what was necessary, out of fear Russian authorities might learn their intelligence sources or methods.
In its March 7 public warning, the U.S. embassy said the risk of a concert venue attack in Moscow was acute for the next 48 hours. U.S. officials say it’s possible Russian authorities pushed hard around the 48-hour warning period but later grew more relaxed and distrustful when an attack didn’t occur."
It is unclear whether U.S. intelligence mistook the timing of the attack or the extremists delayed their plan upon seeing heightened security.
---
It's amusing contrasting the very few facts the article provides, buried deep within it, with the framing, implications, and non sequiturs scattered through the first 60% of the article. Irrefutable and undeniable [2], all over again.
Any non-state entity exists at the blessing of one or more state entities with power, money, and help.
The "fact" that this question is never asked by "news" organs is very telling. It is a very hot topic on the other side of the geopolitical fence, this patron of ISIS ..
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
My understanding has always been that language processing, language models, etc. have long been considered a necessary prerequisite to AI and research was often done as part of the AI field but was never itself considered AI in isolation.
Calling LLMs artificial intelligence is either (a) cheapening the meaning if intelligence, (2) embellishment for the sake of fund raising, or (d) subtle acknowledgement of vastly more powerful systems behind the LLM tools than is currently being publicly described.
It's hard to cheapen it more than perceptrons and expert systems. The lay impression of artificial intelligence may be all skynet and c3p0, but AGI isn't really even a goal of most AI research, let alone representative of the current state of the art.
What is your definition of artificial intelligence?
OpenAI has an explicit goal of developing AGI for the "greater good," whatever that means. If LLMs are indeed AI, as many assume, then OpenAI would fall squarely in the space of AI research that is the current state or the art.
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.
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.
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.
”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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
Si vis pacem, para bellum. This long period of global peace wouldn't be possible without the mutually assured destruction of nuclear conflict and the certainty that no other nation-state could challenge the hegemon and it's allies in conventional warfare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
It took 5 days from the 2nd bomb to surrender, and many historians think the Soviet Union's simultaneous declaration of war was a more significant factor.
This theory is debunked by the two books, written by two different historians, which go into it in great detail.
The second bomb made it clear that the first one was not a one-off, and that the US was going to nuke the cities one by one. The Japanese also had intelligence (that turned out to be false) that Tokyo was the next target.
I've read a couple accounts by anti-nuclear activists who held that the USSR was the reason for the surrender, but if you compare those accounts with the ones written by historians, the former are crackpots.
An invasion of Japan would be an absolutely massive operation (see D-Day) and the USSR was in no position to mount one.
For anyone who wants to understand this debate better, the popular and academic Japanese record goes under the title “Japan’s Longest Day”.
There’s a minute-by-minute historical analysis[1], a 1967 film[2] (starring Toshiro Mifune! Gotta find this one…), a 2015 remake[3] of the 1967 film, and apparently a forthcoming graphic novel[4].
Fundamentally, the idea of “Japan” making a decision to surrender the way (say) Truman made the decision to drop the bombs is a misleading framing.
At this time, political, military and—crucially—effective police power in Japan was distributed among individuals and groups, notably the young officer corps, with very different motivations, beliefs, and principles.
The atomic bombs, the Russian invasion, the particulars of the negotiations with the US over terms of surrender… all were “merely” external forces influencing a chaotic, unstable equilibrium.
Ultimately, in some combination those forces tipped the center of that power from one equilibrium: “The war is lost, but if we surrender now internal forces will destroy Japan as a nation even if the Allies don’t.”
…to another: “The Emperor must make an extraordinary intervention to end the war immediately.”
Greetings from Ukraine, country at war with Russians, who thought they are genuine descendants of USSR.
Long before Ukrainian war, I've many times talked with Russians about bombs used on Japan.
And now I must say you very important thing - Russians are so crazy anti-humanists, that this really could be reason for fears of Japanese about USSR invasion.
To be honest, I think bombs was enough to intimidate Japanese, but I think, even without bombs, Russians behavior at war, with US Land-lease technical/economical support would be enough to convince Japanese to surrender, may be later, sought.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 $7-10M and 1-1.5 years on a dedicated roadmap for FedRamp and FIPS compliance.
Once you step out of software, procurement becomes paperwork hell. Throw in the paperwork hell from R&D Grantmakers like the DoD and DoE, and you end up with a quasi-Soviet procurement system.
Ironically, most of these compliance and regulatory checks were added for good intentions - primarily to minimize corruption and graft, yet it basically clogged up the entire system, and dissuades startups and innovators from working directly with the Defense community.
Some projects like DIUx and and In-Q-Tel are trying to change that, but it's too little too late, and our defense base is entirely dependent on firms like Microsoft, Cisco, Crowdstrike, Zscaler, etc acquiring promising startups to evangelize their innovations internally.
> Software Procurement by Federal standards is relatively straightforward
> FedRamp and FIPS compliance
It’s odd to see these in the same sentence. FedRAMP is so insanely complex/difficult to achieve in a straightforward way. Even by your own estimate for a series E startup (with lots of capital and the ability to spend >18 months< on compliance) there’s a 3M$ 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.
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.
They aren't a significant portion of the DoD R&D infra.
Most FFRDCs and UARCs are staffed by civilians employed concurrently with a regional University or Industry Vendor, and these labs in turn are PPPs often operated by a private sector firm like Lockheed or a university like UCB.
On top of that, the bulk of the budget goes to funding research done outside of FFRDCs and UARCs via programs like DARPA, grants from the DCTO S&T, SBIR/STTR, etc
This fusion of university research, private sector research, and some limited in-house research is what's called Civil-Military Fusion.
The issue is the private sector portion has increasingly been divorced from the private sector, as up and coming private sector opportunities or promising startups don't have an easy on-ramp into the existing defense procurement or research infrastructure, and grantwriting+compliance overheads plus limited grant funding dissuade most companies aside from your Charles River Analytics types from going thru the hurdles.
That has nothing to do with it. You responded to a comment saying "X makes it hard for the DoD to hire people" by saying "X doesn't affect procurement". If you actually realized they were talking about hiring, what you should have said is "they never have to hire anyone so the difficulty with hiring you are talking about is not relevant".
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.
Most research is in some way shape or form is funded by the military. The era of having some general commanding eggheads is long gone.
Since the 1970s, it's almost all outsourced to the private sector via PPPs because private sector players can deploy capital and execute much quicker than the DoD or DoE who have regulatory requirements and need to have specific line items defined for them within budgets.
Also, I think you underestimate or don't realize how much DoD related work is done in the Valley today. I'd estimate that 30-40% of startups in the Bay Area are in some way funded by the DoD - either via Federal sales or via strategic investments via In-Q-Tel or their private sector counterparts.
On top of that, most STEM research grants at Bay Area universities come from either the DoD, DoE, or DHHS.
This public private partnership model is what China copied, which is unsurprising, as most of their middle level leadership and policymakers attended these programs and benefited from the US-China Science and Technology Agreement which evangelized the American PPP R&D model in China since the 1970s.
The difference is, the Chinese system is much more lax about compliance and graft, which allows for it to be much nimbler. The downside is graft can be MASSIVE, such as the corruption scandals surrounding China's Big Fund and fiascos such as the collapse of Tsinghua Unigroup
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
'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.
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.
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.
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).
>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."
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
No, Israel is not democratic. It's an apartheid state, established through colonial displacement and ethnic cleansing. It is currently engaged in genocidal practices against neighbouring indigenous populations, which I don't believe is compatible with democracy.
I don't think it's a jewish state because I believe zionism and judaism to be fundamentally incompatible, but it's the mainstream zionist position that it is.
You can look at pretty much any survey they've done during al-Aqsa Flood. You can also, you know, just look at israeli television? Listen to some politicians and pundits?
No, even the ICJ has concluded that Israel is plausibly committing genocide. What do you mean by "extreme"? Are you seriously claiming that he is free to voice his opinions, even though he is routinely harassed by the state for trying to do so? To my knowledge the arab parties in the Knesset has been allowed one, maybe two if the managed one in november, demonstrations. Look at photos from the israeli anti-government protests and count the palestinians, you'll find that they are very, very absent.
Or, you know, listen to some popular israeli pop songs, like Shager or Harbu Darbu? Look at some IDF TikTok:s where they say the genocidal stuff out loud while looting some dead or displaced peoples home?
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.
Bombing a million people to death gets different international response than bombing their infrastructure and then opps they starved to death, what a tragedy.
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.
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).
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.
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?
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.
Hamas gained a ton of support for their cause by the tragedy inflicted in the counterattack. I believe they celebrate the deaths of Palestinian innocents as much as they do the Israeli ones so they can extract propaganda wins. This has been part and parcel of their strategy for decades - it’s why they embed their military activity in soft targets like schools and hospitals.
The Israelis know this by now, so the fact that Israel was goaded into a ground war speaks as much to the political situation as anything else, but either way it’s tragic.
I don’t think “goaded” is the right way to look at it. The Israelis simply don’t care about the optics, they are looking to end this back and forth once and for all
> they are looking to end this back and forth once and for all
You can't eradicate ideologies like Hamas through military means.
You do it by turning people against them and robbing them of legitimacy.
Instead of using the hostage situation as an opportunity to change Gazan's mind about Hamas, Israel killed ~30k of them, created a humanitarian disaster and bred an entirely new generation of Hamas supporters.
> Instead of using the hostage situation as an opportunity to change Gazan's mind about Hamas
How would that suppose to happen if the civilians celebrated en masse the great success of killing and harming the Jews?
Civilians in Gaza have zero sympathy for the Jews. Why would they change their minds when every cruelty against any Jew is a cause for applause for them?
Compare this to the reaction of the West towards the terrorist attack in Moscow. Many Europeans expressed compassion. Would you think relationship between Russia and the West was salvageable if the entire Europe cheered on the streets because some Russians died?
I'm not sure what made you think I believe that Jews have any more capacity to change their minds about Palestinians than Palestinians about Jews.
I also don't know why you think we should be destroying ideology of some Israelis (which would require killing them). I don't think we should be destroying ideology of Palestinians which would require killing them too.
However their ideologies are in confrontation and one has behind it a local superpower with plenty of conventional forces and even some nuclear and the other has rockets made from repurposed water pipes, aviation that consists of paragliders, human shields that lives neither side respects or values and zero allies, even willing to do as little as accepting civilian refugees.
It's clear which ideology will get broken or eradicated, along with the people subscribing to it, if they are stubborn enough.
You seem to make some arguments about morality and symmetry. There's no symmetry because force vastly differs and morality is an afterthough. Where morality solidifies it is history. And the history is written by the victors.
I am making those arguments because your response to a comment saying "You cannot destroy the ideology of Hamas through military means" was not "Yes you can, force vastly differs in this conflict and morality is an afterthought". Your response was instead about how cruel Palestinian civilians are and how much they celebrate the deaths of Israelis.
Anyone who read your original response would think you are saying "Gazans don't deserve to have their minds changed becasue they are evil in a way other enemies are not evil to each other" (you even included European reactions to the Moscow attack, cleverly forgetting Russia has not besieged and wholly blockaded any Europeans for multiple generations). So I also made that assumption
You misread my response. My response was "You can't destroy ideology of Hamas by non-military means". I wasn't making a point about cruelty of Palestinians and I especially wasn't making the point of unique cruelty of Palestinians. I was making a point that their minds are beyond change by arguments other than overwhelming lethal force.
I wasn't making a moral argument about who deserves to get what. I was making a consequentialist (?) argument about who will get what given where they are now.
Please read my earlier comment with that in mind and you'll see how much you have read into them beyond the words I have written.
If you define “goaded” as “put into a situation in which a different response wouldn’t have been possible”, then it’s the correct word. The Israelis could have decided to "end the back and forth once and for all" five years ago or five years from now, but they didn’t— they decided to do it now.
> What is the goal here? How can we "win" in Gaza?
People make this a philosophical question. It's not. Israel's goal is to eliminate Hamas. Not the "idea", the actual people and military material of the fighting force of Hamas.
That is Israel's goal.
Also, it's looking increasingly likely that there will be something of a re-occupation of Gaza, at least for the immediate future until some alternative governing entity will be found.
Note: I'm stating the goal without getting into whether it's a good idea or not, or even achievable or not.
But worth saying that Israel's government thinks it can achieve the goal of destroying Hamas, and even if not, it is possible that when the war was launched, it did think it could be achieved (and e.g. underestimated Hamas).
Also, we use "achievable" here as if it's one dimensional, but it's not - the question is actually "achievable at what cost", where the cost is in Palestinian civilian lives lost and the population displaced, in IDF soldier's lives, and in disruption of the Israeli economy.
Seems the plan is to invade Rafah and force all remaining Palestinians to flee into the Sinai desert/Egypt. Then there'll be no Palestine, and eventually the world will forget about what happened.
It would be nice if the children on both sides weren't involved or they were allowed to get out and the world could have cut off both countries completely like a Bug's Bunny cartoon with a saw.
No money from the US or Iran would flow in until this thousand year religious war was figured out so we could all stop caring about a tiny piece of land that only matters because of religious text.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims have been fighting over this and the surrounding area since before they wrote all their books to convince everyone they are in the right.
If that is your way of saying, that there was never peace in that region among the 3 Abrahamic faiths, then you are highly mistaken. Seems history loves to be forgotten and rewritten.
For Hamas the cause is more important than the people. They were slowly losing support, now after the attack and Israel's counter attack Hamas support is stronger than ever in Gaza, the West bank, the wider Arab world, and even the West.
After all this is over the lost foot soldiers will be easily replaced by eager recruits, and they will have plenty of funding from actors who like seeing Israels international reputation damaged like this.
I think Hamas in its curent form is finished. It may appear it is receiving international support but it’s probably a reaction towards Israel’s indiscriminate harm to civilian Gazans. Lots of children dead, lots and lots. An act of terrorism met with a tenfold response in terrorism and violence is needless and cannot be condoned. Not that Israel doesn’t have a right to defent itself, it surely does but the current right wing leadership doesn’t shy away from seizing as much land and kicking out palestinians away from their lands, many times simply in a retaliatory fashion. No amount of excuses justify that. If the Palestinians stop defending themselves with terrorism would Israel play nice? I’d love to see that scenario. If something changes with Palestinians something must also change with Israelis too.
> If the Palestinians stop defending themselves with terrorism would Israel play nice? I’d love to see that scenario.
That's easy -- just take a look at the West Bank. The response to Palestinian "pacifism" (or whatever we can call what is happening in the West Bank) is apartheid, continuous seizure of land and colonization, nightly raids, military law for civilians and children for everything and anything, constant terrorist attacks by extremist settlers protected by IDF, etc.
Its a thorny issue so I will point out that this is the exact line of argument of Israel for their behaviour.
In 2005 they left their settlements in Gaza, it was met with the death of democracy, the establishment of a terror group as the local goverment and 18 years of endless escalations of violence.
In the 90s Israel voted for a socialist leader who offered so much to Israel that 80% of Israel thought he had offered too much. Palestine denied the 2 state solution. The Israeli leader was killed by local far right terrorists. And after Palestine stepped out of the talks they launched the 2nd intifada which was the largest amount of violence since 1967 war.
Israel 20 year decline into far right goverments comes on the back of what seemed to them genuine efforts for peace, genuine offers (some over gracious, despite Palestinians feeling it wasnt enough) and the removal from the palestinian side to come to the table.
Since the Camp David accords Israel has had 3 peace offers, Palestine did not even come to the table for 2 of them.
As appaling as the current state of settlements in the west bank is, and the far right members of goverment. Israel had 5 elections 2 years ago and the far right only won by a marginal difference. The worst Israeli goverment ever is an unsustainable allience after 5 elections of deadlock. The political will in Israel has always been peace.
> The Israeli leader was killed by local far right terrorists.
Incited in large part by Netanyahu, who was determined to sabotage Oslo and who openly denied the possibility of a 2-state solution.
[1]
> On October 5, the day the Knesset had endorsed Oslo II by a majority of one, thousands of demonstrators gathered in Zion Square in Jerusalem. The leaders of the opposition were on the grandstand while the demonstrators displayed an effigy of Rabin in an SS uniform. Netanyahu set the tone with an inflammatory speech. "Today the surrender agreement called Oslo II was placed before the Knesset," he said. "The Jewish majority of the State of Israel did not approve this agreement. We shall fight it and we shall bring down the government."
Also for all of Rabin's positives, he still insisted on expanding West Bank settlements during the Oslo interim period.
> after Palestine stepped out of the talks they launched the 2nd intifada
Ariel Sharon is responsible for the Second Intifada, his fascist march on the Temple Mount was a deliberate provocation.
> The political will in Israel has always been peace.
When have hey ever accepted a two state solution? They have denied everyone since 1947, in Oslo they agreed that resolution 338 (the 1967 borders) should be the basis for negotiation but Arafat walked out of Camp David despite what many Palestinians considered favorable terms and what most Israeli's considered an over generous offer.
> Incited in large part by Netanyahu, who was determined to sabotage Oslo and who openly denied the possibility of a 2-state solution.
His rise to power happened 2 years after though, after an entire year of Hamas suicide bombings. He was not ahead in the polls until the security situation went completely tits up.
If a crazy person kills the president (like in Japan 2 years ago, or in America with JFK) there is no sudden far right take over. If a country is attacked by its neighbour, people who promise security tend to do well in the polls.
> Also for all of Rabin's positives, he still insisted on expanding West Bank settlements during the Oslo interim period.
The settlements are a complicated subject. There are some legitimate reasons for some of them, and the reality of the two state solution is that land swaps will happen.
The 1967 war ended in 6 days and ended with incredibly awkward borders. It is not unnatural that Israel and Palestine wrestle for borders that make more sense geographically. (Belgium and Germany did this post ww2 and now most of their border is forest or rivers, mountains. The usual suspects for national borders).
There are however also religious settlements, formed by crazy people based on ridiculous readings of the torah. All of those should be burned to the ground with every person on them jailed, and the leader of the movement who I shall not named probably put in a cross due to her devotion to religious literature.
Talking about settlements as a whole makes the conversation too broad and unfocused, and I doubt all military outposts that exist will be dismantled when peace is achieved.
> Ariel Sharon is responsible for the Second Intifada, his fascist march on the Temple Mount was a deliberate provocation.
Its pretty cool how people have no agency. Lets ignore that the temple mount is more holy to the jews than to muslims. And lets act like a far right agitator is purposefully going to somewhere holy.
Imagine Trump goes to the vaticam. Do you think that the pope would use a loud speaker to tell people to attack him Abu Qteish did?
Or that Italians would suicide bomb around american civilians for the next 3 years?
Like even if we take Ariel visit as provacation, even if we hold him repsonsible for the horrible mismanagement of the police during his interior minister time, we hold him responsible for every death occured in every over trigger happy incident. Why fall for the bait? Why kill innocent people who are not responsible for his actions?
Also if we are gonna use the word fascist, I think its important to note the different countries and structures between Israel and lets say Gaza. Fascism purges "the other", there are no minorities in Gaza. Israel has 20% arab population and 7% other (mostly chrristians). Fascism promotes youth and violence as means of authority. Gaza has the youngest population in the world, and a military dictatorship as a goverment. A big part of fascism is social hierarchy, in the case of Gaza a strong men over women duplicity is seen across all civilian and political life. And finally an important aspect of fascism is the idea of forming an empire. This tracks with two biggest groups in Gaza having ideas about a pan arabic caliphate.
> Liar. [1] Shlaim - The Iron Wall
To begin with "the political will" usually refers to the people
here is some of the data from 03 - 12 during a series of escalations of violence the Israeli opinion was still very much in favour of a two state solution. This has been the case since 1947.
Now in response to the book. I will say that I love the work the new Historians are doing but Shlaim is with Benny Morris one of the modern historians where its very easy to see their ideology through their work.
and here is Benny Morris (who despite being racist towards arabs recently has written and opened most of the secrets about the formation of Israel) talking about the blind spots of the Iron Wall.
Another thing to point out is that Shailm tends to ignore things that are inconvinient. For example in that interview he emphasises the push from Egypt to normalise relationships with Israel in the 50s. He somehow forgets that the Egyptian push for the 1947 was crazy. Azzam Pasha leader of the arab league said " it will be a war of elimination and it will be a dangerous massacre which history will record similarly to the Mongol massacre or the wars of the Crusades". With the King Farrouk later repeating the sentiment saying "the jews will be expelled from Palestine". So that same state "reaching out" less than 5 years later is pretty throny and it seems irresponsible to call that Israel rejecting peace, when at the time the Suez Crisis was bubbling and Egypt had tons of troops in Gaza.
> It's quite strange to write off fully half the population of Israel
I am not trying to, the decline towards right wing politics has been slow but never ending since the early 2000s. But its important to note that 20% of the Israeli population is arab israeli and their voices also matter. The 50% is usually the 50% of Israeli jews not of all Israelis.
> including an assassination coup
If you meant the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, I did mention it in my comment
> directly funding Hamas asa weapon again Fatah/ the West Bank
I would not give intentions to actions taken by political actors in Israel. I was just pointing out that the narrative of "if Palestine does not fight back they get settlements" is the same as "if the IDF is not strong then Palestine will vote for hamas and more oct 7th's".
The blockade of money going to gaza was criticised as well before the money was allowed to reach Hamas. Building a narrative against Israel is fairly easy regardless of which actions they take, so I understand why the "they arm hamas to destabilise Fatah" took hold, but the main source for it is an unsourced quote that netanyahu was claimed to have said at a private Likuud meeting. It is entirely possible he did say it, and it would fit with some of the intentions of some of the more aggresive members of his cabinet. But there is no proof this was not just them caving to the international pressure they suffered post 2011 blockade which Obama heavily criticised as well as europe as being excessive etc.
> as being not responsible for their own actions.
I am pointing out narratives, nothing else. In the same way pointing out West Bank settlements is not justifying oct 7th, pointing out the fact that the removal of them in Gaza was met with the voting in of Hamas does not justify any of the aggresive policies in the west bank and east jerusalem.
Since 1947 both countries have created 2 narratives, now both are so divorced from each other that most of the time they talk past each other. In most conflicts there is 1 narrative, in some there is 2 for a bit and then a winner gets to write their side. In this conflict for the past 70 years the two stories have grown in a myriad of complicated ways
> An act of terrorism met with a tenfold response in terrorism and violence is needless and cannot be condoned.
I don't think this is an accurate description. It wasn't "an act of terrorism". It was an invasion and jointly, a rocket attack, by a neighboring semi-state with a military, that has stated it will invade over and over again. And of course, the capture of 250 hostages.
This isn't a kind of one-off terror attack that was met with revenge for the sake of it. For the months after the initial invasion, Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel, essentially shutting down the country for a few weeks, until they were forced to stop. Hamas militants were literally running around inside of Israel for two days.
No nation on Earth could afford to effectively cease functioning as rockets rained down on it, and as other parties like Hezbollah were threatening to widen the conflict to a far more serious attack as well.
> If the Palestinians stop defending themselves with terrorism would Israel play nice?
I can't answer that, but it's worth noting that during the 1990s there was a sizeable Israeli left that was pushing for peace, there were talks, there were accords that gave the Palestinians self-governance in the West Bank, etc. This was met with terrorism, with the express purpose of stopping the peace process.
It's also worth noting that Israel completely left Gaza in 2005, removing all its settlements there and the soldiers there. Gaza then elected Hamas, which immediately started shooting rockets at Israel.
So while I highly dislike Israel's right-wing government and extremism, and highly dislike the settlements, I don't think it's accurate to say that the terrorism is helping protect against anything. It comes from a worldview in which Israel will eventually be completely destroyed and the Palestinian will take over all the land.
Look, it's a complicated issue. There is some validity to it being "their land", but... even if you don't think the historical connection of Jews to the land means anything, my father was born in Israel. I was born here. My kids were born here. Do we not have any connection to the land at this point? If Hamas's goal of "going back home" (as you put it) is met, what should happen to us?
Figure out a way to live together and not shoot at each other for 80+ years. Since I have been a baby it has been a conflict and blame throwing around, please don't kill anymore people, any people on any side!
The only way to achieve that is a two-state solution, where each populace has its own state. The root problem is that there has never been a Palestinian leadership willing or capable of agreeing to a deal (despite multiple efforts), or at least not at the same time as an Israeli leadership existed that could make it possible. And given the failures and continued violence (and demographics!), the Israeli left has lost almost all power, and Israel's right-wing has ruled for most of the last 15 years, and is at best, not contributing to peace. (And I'd say much worse - very actively preventing peace!)
Approximately zero Israelis have a connection to Israel that wasn't created by immigration, invasion, and conquer in the last 100 years, vs centuries of continuous inhabitation by Palestinians.
A great question, but not very relevant anymore. Let's set aside for a minute whether Israel should have been founded in that land in 1948 - it was founded there, and it's been 75 years. There are 9 million Israelis (or 7 million Jews if you want to break it down that way) that live there now. I was born here, my father was born here, my son was born here. Do I have less connection to the land, right now, than the million Gazans who are under the age of 18 and have never lived here? More importantly, what do you propose? That all 7 million Jews in Israel be relocated somewhere else? Where? Who would pay for moving an entire country elsewhere?
As for the question itself of why the Israeli state should be in Palestine, like I said, while I think it's relevant, it is a good question. Personally, I would've chosen to locate it elsewhere, but then I don't really care about religion or sentimentality "for the land" or anything like that. Practically, I don't think Jews really had another place to go - remember, most of the Jews of Israel were either fleeing Europe before the Holocaust, or were the survivors of the Holocaust, or were ethnically cleansed from surrounding Arab countries. It's not like they had anywhere else to go.
That said, I do question your premise:
> Approximately zero Israelis have a connection to Israel that wasn't created by immigration, invasion, and conquer in the last 100 years.
This is very wrong. For one thing, you're ignoring the 20% of Israelis that are Arabs/Palestinians, but I'll assume you meant the Jewish ones. There has been continuous Jewish habitation of Palestine for literally 2,000, since the Jews were forced out. If you look at the demographic history of Palestine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Palesti...), you can see that roughly 100 years ago, 10% of the inhabitants of Palestine were Jewish. And IIRC, all of them got there by completely legal immigration, not "invasion" or "conquest".
> Practically, I don't think Jews really had another place to go - remember, most of the Jews of Israel were either fleeing Europe before the Holocaust, or were the survivors of the Holocaust, or were ethnically cleansed from surrounding Arab countries. It's not like they had anywhere else to go.
Not true. One proposal was the Kimberly plan, which received strong push back from proponents of Zionism that simply refused to settle for anything less than Palestine. Theresa very real case to be made that had there been stronger support from Jewish community as a whole that this may well have actually ended up being the outcome.
> This is very wrong. For one thing, you're ignoring the 20% of Israelis that are Arabs/Palestinians, but I'll assume you meant the Jewish ones. There has been continuous Jewish habitation of Palestine for literally 2,000, since the Jews were forced out
Not the person you're responding to, but personally I'd say that's largely irrelevant. Any perceived connection to a land that anyone has is something learnt from cultural context. There's nothing that empirically literary connects people to an arbitrarily divided portion of land. Countries are an abstractional fiction. Religions and cultures build stories upon these abstractions with varying levels of historic accuracy. Through exposure to these stories people develop a perceived connection with essentially no direct physical basis in reality. More succinctly - a person's perceived connection to the land depends almost entirely upon their exposure to certain cultural stories.
A small portion of the perceived connection to an area is obviously related to literal experience and exposure to said area. The fact that the is often mentally tied to back to an abstraction like a "country" implies that these experiences are secondary to the broader cultural stories.
In terms of immediate (non-cultural) connection, it seems pretty accurate to say that immigration and conflict is going to be a significant factor for everyone currently in Israel. Be they the descendants of immigrants, direct immigrants, or the descendants of people historically living in that area (having ancestors that lived there doesn't historically doesn't preclude them or their parents from being impacted by the creation of modern day Israel)
> Theresa very real case to be made that had there been stronger support from Jewish community as a whole that this may well have actually ended up being the outcome.
Maybe. I honestly don't know enough to say one way or the other, though I do know enough to say that most countries closed their doors to Jews during the Holocaust specifically, and I'd be rather astounded to discover a country that was willing to absorb millions of new people. E.g. I don't know anything about the Kimberly
plan except reading Wikipedia just now, but it seems like it was vetoed by the Australian government? Ironically, there are signs from European countries in the 1930s telling the Jews to "go back to Palestine".
> Through exposure to these stories people develop a perceived connection with essentially no direct physical basis in reality. More succinctly - a person's perceived connection to the land depends almost entirely upon their exposure to certain cultural stories.
Again, I'm probably not the best person to ask, but I couldn't care less about this specific land itself. I wouldn't have minded Israel being located somewhere else.
I do live here though, that's my connection to the land, as well as the connection that 9m other Israelis have to the land. We're not going anywhere.
(And neither are the Palestinians! If both sides just accepted the obvious reality that neither side is going to disappear, we could just divide up the land and sign a peace treaty already.)
> Be they the descendants of immigrants, direct immigrants, or the descendants of people historically living in that area
But, if I'm understanding you correctly... that's true of literally everyone everywhere. Everyone is a descendent of someone who at some point came to that land, and in many cases that's even fairly recent. Including many (though not all) Palestinians.
> The only way to achieve that is a two-state solution, where each populace has its own state.
Or the Tel Aviv regime could just follow the steps of South Africa and end apartheid. The regime can't claim in good faith support for a two-state solution while pumping the palestinian territories in the west bank full of settlers, over 700 thousand of them, so far. There's even a video of Netanyahu boasting on how he sabotaged the Oslo Accords and the prospects for a two-state solution. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvqCWvi-nFo
Well I completely agree with you about the fact that Israel hasn't been doing anything to work towards a two-state solution for many years, and has been doing plenty to work against peace.
That said...
> Or the Tel Aviv regime could just follow the steps of South Africa and end apartheid.
I'm not sure what you mean here. I don't agree with the characterization of what's happening as apartheid, but semantics aside, how is that different from me saying I think we need a two-state solution? Do you think Israel needs to unilaterally go for a two-state solution? How, by removing all its forces and all settlements from the West Bank?
Cause that's what Israel did in Gaza, and we see how well that went. Everyone in Israel assumes, probably correctly, that if we ever did that in the West Bank, we would be viciously attacked in a manner that's 100 times worse than October 7th within years.
> If they couldn't stop the settlements, there was no self-governance.
Forgot absolute terms for a minute. The Oslo accords gave Palestinians more self governance than they had before. It was a step in the right direction.
The PA does have a form of self government over the Palestinians. It's not a full state, and I hope that we reach an agreement in which the Palestinians do get statehood, but we're not gong to get there by insisting that steps in the right direction are meaningless, and certainly not by increasing the amount of terror attacks to prevent the peace process.
> Whereas Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir were just peace loving dudes right?
No, of course not. They were terrible terrorists. In the case of Yigal Amir, he's sitting in jail where he belongs (Baruch Goldstein was beaten to death in the place he was attacking). Luckily Goldstein didn't derail the peace process, though Amir probably did.
> The PA does have a form of self government over the Palestinians. It's not a full state
Yes, it is, and it is recognized by much of the world as such (its a state that has spent its entire existence at war with and partially occupied by Israel, but saying it isn't a full state is like saying Ukraine isn't because of the war and Russian occupation.)
What are you referring to? It's nowhere even close to the same scale.
Although if you consider the assassination of Rabin, which was carried out by an Israeli settler extremist, then yes, that was something that caused a terrible impact. It's possible that if that had not happened, Rabin would have managed to get us to an actual peace agreement. (Still his murder didn't stop the peace process - it continued. What really stopped it was the refusal of Arafat to agree to a deal, and the second intifiada.)
It's a chronological distortion to say that the peace process was stopped by the second Intifada. It did not start until after the breakdown of the peace process.
Well I think that really depends on what exact "peace process" you're referring to. Hamas started terror attacks during the Oslo process IIRC, and intensified terror attacks before the elections after Rabin's assassination, probably helping get Netanyahu elected. And there were peace proposals in 2000, but also in 2007.
But really what I meant wasn't that any specific peace process was ended, more that the Israeli pro-peace left lost a lot of political power and a lot of legitimacy because of the continued terror attacks. When the left pushes for disengaging from the West Bank, the right points to the disengagement from Gaza as a case study, and it's kind of hard to argue against.
> Hamas started terror attacks during the Oslo process IIRC, and intensified terror attacks before the elections after Rabin's assassination,
Portraying Hamas as a unilateral spoiler is completely disingenuous.
[1]
> In early January 1996 Peres faced another difficult decision. The Israeli General Security Service--Shabak--asked him for permission to assassinate Yahya Ayyash, the so-called "Engineer," who had personally masterminded several Hamas suicide atacks, which killed 50 and wounded 340 Israelis. The Israeli media presented him as public enemy number one, greatly exaggerating his status within Hamas and omitting to mention that the attacks he organized came as a response to the massacre perpetrated by Dr. Baruch Goldstein in Hebron in February 1994. In mid-1995 Ayyash went into hiding in Gaza, and the Palestinian preventive security service told the Shabak that he would not organize any more attacks on Israelis. But the head of the Shabak, who was about to be removed from his post for his failure to protect Rabin, badly wanted to be remembered for one last spectacular success. Peres gave the green light, thinking that apart from dealing out rough justice, the operation would boost the morale of the nation and of the security services. On 5 January, Ayyash was killed in Gaza by means of a booby-trapped cellular phone. The decision to kill Ayyash turned out to be the greatest mistake of Peres's political career.
This is what spurred Hamas attacks prior to Netanyahu's election, not opposition to Oslo.
If they did it for financial gain that sounds like a predictable action, not an irrational one. There’s too much faith in your comment that the Netanyahu government wants to actually stop hamas.
Without hamas, what is the appeal of Netanyahu? He presents as tough on terror. If there’s no terror, you’d vote for the guy who’s good at the economy or something, not the tough on terror guy.
Your comment was exactly the sort of conspiracy theory that I’d expect on Reddit, with a big claim and no evidence. There are some problems with things being flagged but I’d find a higher-value comment to use as an example.
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 ).
> ...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...
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%)
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?
> 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. :-)
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?
> 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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
"respond to guidance commands with sufficient precision" is just restating the same problem.
"if you put the same package on a normal rocket motor it (demonstrably) worked just fine." Except that the interceptor wouldn't be able to reach the target traveling at hypersonic speeds.
In other words, the guidance didn't work. Either the interceptor missed because it was off target or it missed because it was too slow. Dressing it up in technicalities doesn't negate the failure for the purposes of SDI.
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
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.
> 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."
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.
I'm not sure why they discussed Israel at all - except for bullshit accusation in racism which seems to come automatically nowdays. Israeli intelligence failure had zero to do with any technology and everything to do with political and ideological delusion. They had fake data, they had real data, they had all the data. They had tons of opinions and options. They had to choose which concept to believe and which conclusion to make. This is not something that depends on technology, and it can't be, that depends on the person or persons making the decision, and it is as unsolved problem now as if was millenia ago.
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.
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.
I’m a combat vet from the infantry. I was a lowly enlisted, not an officer. I attended college after wards and now work in tech out west.
I am amazed how confused, historically ignorant, but intelligent my coworkers are. It’s like they’ve never even heard of NATO, world war 1 or 2, and almost each one when they’ve asked what I did has then had the follow up question “what’s the infantry”. This used to seem cute, but lately I’ve wondered if it’s something to be concerned with.
If the people who are being paid all this money and building all these products are incredibly intelligent but have zero wisdom, what does that look like when war comes? Do they just step aside, point at a stock price, and tell me I’m barbaric and living in a past century? I wonder about it almost daily now as the conflict looks more and more likely to spread and I see an electorate more and more isolationist and looking to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Hmmm, not even sure my point. I guess it’s that I find many Americans insanely smart and intelligent, but they lack any wisdom but act as though they are all Martin Luther king jr when they pronounce a name correctly, or some such morally insignificant thing compared to life and death.
Something is totally fucked with how people are valuing things. What I’m not sure, but when a US Republican senator named JD Vance (a fucking veteran!) starts going around literally spouting Kremlin propaganda lines about Ukraine, and conservatives agree and repeat it, I just feel sad about my society.
Also, obviously some people do know these things, I’m being loose with language here. But a huge majority of the people have asked me those questions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
--
Türkiye is a member of NATO, with antisemitic leader. Is Türkiye a friendly country? It used to be, but now it's a gray area.
[Trans-]Jordan's royal family is on life support from Israel, but it still openly acts like an enemy.
Egypt is the most obviously an enemy, even though there is "peace" on paper. Instead of asking me, ask an average Egyptian or [Trans-]Jordanian if they see Israel as an enemy.
Just b/c US pays them extortion or "protection" fees, doesn't make them any less of an enemy. It only delays the coming inevitable military conflict with them.
--
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Hamas was elected if memory serves, and while getting them to renounce violence would seem ideal, how could they? Israel wasn’t going to. They have behaved terribly and until someone starts behaving better, it’s going to carry on as it has for so long.
Peace with Egypt has been maintained and relations with Egypt seem to be improving and are ok - what am I missing? There seems very little chance of war.
Sinai was supposed to be a demilitarized zone, slowly it was filled with the Egyptian army. Egypt built multiple tunnels under the Suetz canal.
Yet our governments and military still trying to appease them, in the same way as they did to Hamas.
And how do you think all these advanced weapons (RPGs, anti-tank missiles, thermal bombs, etc.) got into 'azza[1]? How did their terrorists go to train in Iran?
Why do you think Egypt opposes an Israeli presence on the border in Raphiakh[2]?
---
[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.
> 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.
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).
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.
> 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.
The thing to do when you feel like a commenter is "beyond reason" is to flag the comment. Writing a long response to what you feel is an unreasonable or bad-faith comment is just feeding the toxicity. The abyss is commenting back into you, so to speak.
You can see the effect here: in trying to compose a reply to the parent comment, you managed to violate a variety of HN guidelines yourself.
Ah OK. I didn't realize I was violating guidelines. I'll try flagging in the future.
I thought there was some utility to analyzing the comment because it's characteristic of much of the rhetoric on this topic and it seemed like a good "teachable moment." But point taken.
I’d like to note that it is not Hamas which is reporting the official death count, it is the Gaza Health Ministry. While the ministry is under the control of Hamas, the actual reporting is done by actual public health professionals, doctors, etc. who may be Hamas members simply as means of occupation. So Hamas is not under reporting anything.
Second, the methodology of the reporting is a lower bound. They compile a list of names who health-care workers (doctors, nurses, etc.) confirm dead. This list is very credible, as you can cross reference the names with the Israeli controlled Gaza population registry, you can find real people behind those names, with social media profiles, obituaries, etc. This methodology has been proven to be accurate in previous wars. This is still a lower bound, because there are still around 7000 people missing and presumed dead. This number is harder to estimate because this may actually include double counting, and false positives (e.g. successfully fled over the border). It may also be an under count as there are cases of entire families being bombed at the same time with nobody left to report them missing. Your parent’s 100 000 is not realistic, but around 40 000 is not an unrealistic estimate (the 100 000 is used to described the sum of dead + missing + injured, so perhaps this was a simple mistake by your parent).
And finally the statistical methodology of the article you cited earlier is—to but it bluntly—pseudostatistical crap. The your parent was correct in pointing out that the assumptions based in that article are never sufficiently justified to proof an abnormality. This is actually from the playbook of Trump election denialism, where the distribution of votes was somehow proof of tampering. Here the distribution of reported death is not proof of any abnormality. This article you cited has actually been submitted and flagged, submitted and flagged repeatedly here on HN. The HN community has weighted that article and deemed it unfitting. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39684474)
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.
No no no no no no no, please no. Under no circumstances is that OK.
If the enemy is in a group of civilians, you use the police, arrest them, put them for a trial and send to prison.
If the enemy is in a group of civilians, and your immediate action is to bomb them along with the civilians, then you don’t value the lives of those civilians. At best you don’t care whether those civilians are alive or dead, and at worst you actually want those civilians dead. In the former case, you are doing a war crime, a crime against humanity, in the latter case you are doing a genocide and using the enemy as an excuse or justification.
In any case, there are plenty of ways to get around that. Unless the mass casualty is the point.
How many places in a densely populated city can you precisely drop a bomb with no risk to civilians? Yes, technology has improved, but my point is that better tech doesn't just automatically make war less awful.
I don't believe the people operating the weapons are different in ways that make civilian casualties obsolete. In WW2 it was a decision to bomb population centers, not an accident. That decision can be made today too.
Even 100% accurate precision weapons are only as good as the target information supplied to them. Bad Intel and misidentified targets are very real factors that can cause a precision weapon to strike something they shouldn't.
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.
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.
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
McKinsey hires top of the class people at top schools and pays them top dollar. If all they needed was marketing or sales, they could go to University of Nowhere and hire good looking tall people to do sales.
It's not hard because of cognitive ability required.
It's hard because it's expensive fluff bs for jobs that have it as requirement. Useless without a position where you can exploit having MBA diploma.
There's a case in Poland that one "university" was giving MBAs like candies to party officers so they can have some higher education to occupy well paid leadership positions in publicly owned companies.
Nobody said MBAs buying Palantir or whatever came from "top" MBA programs. In Poland they would come from this "university".
Regardless, I don't think you can make a reasonable case that MBAs in general are such low IQ people that they are buying Palantir software for no reason other than marketing or sales. It's much more likely that Palantir software actually works at least somewhat well. Palantir has a 50 billion dollar market cap. You don't get to that level on marketing alone
Overselling supposedly magic software is not a kind of fraud?
I said that "I'm sure" that Palantir has a bit more than Bernie because they actually produced some software, I believe.
"Not by much" was my guess given my experience of living 45 years on this planet through AI winter and spring (multiple?), working with software and computers. Experiencing how much of marketing is straight up lies. Seeing firsthand how government spends money on future predicting software that doesn't actually accurately predict anything, just presents results of some modelling.
But that's just my guess. Maybe it is magic this time. After all my expectations were contradicted once already with ChatGPT. Not strongly, but somewhat.
"Overselling supposedly magic software is not a kind of fraud?". I suggest googling what fraud means. Marketing is most definitely not fraud and has nothing to do with fraud. You are making circular arguments. Palantir is a 50 bln dollar company and you provided exactly zero evidence that they are "overselling supposedly magic software"
in other words you have no idea what you are talking about specifically with respect to Palantir. I never understand why people do this. Why make these strong claims if it turns out you just don't know ?
Sorry, were you expecting to obtain unassailable secret evidence against 50bln dollar scheme from a random commenter on the internet? Apologies for not measuring up to your expectations. Please notify me once you obtain unassailable evidence that this scheme is in fact not a (colloquially) fraud i.e. it's worth what was spent on it.
I wonder if they were a part of decision making process that caused Isreal to methodically bomb Central World Kitchen aid convoy manned with foreign volunteers. We'll never know because if they were this information won't be publicized because of relationships between Isreal, US and business.
When you read up on Palantir budiness in Israel there are question being raised why money is funneled back to a US corporation instead of developing local Isreali competence in processing intel.
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.
> 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.
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.
No one is allowed to attack other users like that, regardless of how right they are or feel they are.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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...
> 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.
> Also, the US occupation of Afghanistan did last for decades so, again, I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
There's a world of difference between 'Occupation security forces sometimes kind of control some of the major towns', which accomplished nothing[1], compared to the decades of incredible political repression in the USSR/China, that actually moved the cultural needle and destroyed organized internal opposition within those societies.
[1] The country reverted back to its previous state before the occupation even ended.
Look into it yourself if you care so much. I don't care to get so far off topic.
> [1] The country reverted back to its previous state before the occupation even ended.
Ok, so, you would agree then that ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights is an important part of the plan when the objective is to destroy Al Qaeda?
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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",
My question then is, what was the achievable goal? What is the end state for the country, do any U.S. troops need to be there permanently, and how does the society work such that the U.S. goals are achieved?
> 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...)
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.
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]
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.
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).
> 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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The fact that they stopped multiple breach attempts throughout the years is a pretty clear evidence that it doesn't fit their track record at all.
Now whether they decided to use this as a good excuse after the fact to perform ethnic cleansing or they are driven by revenge or some misguided attempt to achieve a sense of security is a different story - but the events of October 7th are 100% clear incompetence and negligence.
> This is why the international community does not stop Israel
The international community has been trying to stop Israel since October. It's just that the UN allows certain "member states" to completely veto resolutions ans Israel enjoys nearly complete and total support for it's genocide from the US.
They just recently passed ANOTHER resolution on this immoral war. The US, again, stepped in to make sure it was "non binding."
This idea that the world watches Israel with pity and total scorn for the Palestinians is outrageous.
The UN can’t and won’t do anything, because it’s not designed to, nobody should care about what’s going on in the UN. It’s basically a “we won WWII” club.
Any one of the large economies in the world could write up sanctions that could devastate the Israeli economy, it is not hard to disrupt supply chains.
They just know the actual war is Israel vs Iran and Iran is just using the Palestinian resistance as their puppet.
Do you honestly think Russia, North Korea, and China are suddenly the champions of human rights in the world or something?
If you are pro Palestine you should be grateful someone is finally destroying Hamas (Iran). Just like the US firebombing Tokyo was a humanitarian disaster, do you honestly think the US should have signed a ceasefire with the Empire of Japan? Because I don’t think it’s very controversial to say the civilians in Tokyo didn’t deserve to suffer because of their government’s actions.
> The US, again, stepped in to make sure it was "non binding."
The US did not step in to make it "non binding". It's a binding measure, without any teeth. The US is not making any effort to enforce or support the measure, which is effectively the same as being non-binding because no other power dares do anything to enforce it any other way.
Since when are Israeli citizens classed as civilians? They are settler colonialist larping as legitimate citizens, and ultimately a hostile occupying force. That's simple. Hamas has every right to use force as it was used upon them, to get their land back from this occupying force. Israelis can move and stop occupying other peoples land and then they wouldn't need to worry about these "indiscriminate rocket attacks". Israelis are really all about that I want my cake and to eat it to (and your cake also). A pretty pathetic people tbh.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
What do you mean, "ineffective"? They kill civilians, or paramilitary leaders in civilian areas, to remind everyone in the region that their civilians are on the line if they transgress too heavily against US policy.
What do you mean by Assad "complete victory"? Syria is devastated, something like ten million people are food insecure, the country is occupied by both other countries and militias.
What do you mean by "proxy"? Does your definition imply that the ukrainian army is a "proxy"?
What do you mean by "Houthi missile strikes"? It's the de facto government of Yemen engaged in a blockade against Israel, which is composed by more groups than the Ansar Allah. It is also quite popular due to its position against the genocidal colonial governments of the US, UK, Israel and so on.
Edit: I now realise that "and so on" could be interpreted to include the UAE which is occupying part of Yemen together with Israel, which is not the case. At the moment Yemen is not directly engaged against the UAE, presumably because its leadership considers a future arab peace more important and the US-israeli influence a driving factor in the UAE transgressing against Yemen.
> 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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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].
> 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."
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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".
> 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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
“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”
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.
I mean you’ve seen how the people subscribed to that conflict talk about each other, they need a therapist
The view is that nobody are civilians, anyone counting deaths is a liar at any count, and surrendering hostages get mistaken for palestinian civilians which means militants
Nobody can beat our hostage rescue high score right now so we can just ignore them
