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.
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The bigger stumbling block is procurement.
Software Procurement by Federal standards is relatively straightforward so a Series E+ startup can make it if they spend around $7-10M and 1-1.5 years on a dedicated roadmap for FedRamp and FIPS compliance.
Once you step out of software, procurement becomes paperwork hell. Throw in the paperwork hell from Grantmakers like the DoD and DoE, and you end up with a quasi-Soviet procurement system.
Ironically, most of these compliance and regulatory checks were added for good intentions - primarily to minimize corruption and graft, yet it basically clogged up the entire system, and dissuades startups and innovators from working directly with the Defense community.
Some projects like DIUx and and In-Q-Tel are trying to change that, but it's too little too late, and our defense base is entirely dependent on firms like Microsoft, Cisco, Crowdstrike, Zscaler, etc acquiring promising startups to evangelize their innovations internally.
Fundamentally, this is why I dislike the New America/Khan/Chopra vision of anti-trust. It doesn't actually help innovation from a federal standpoint, as small companies and startups have no reason to work with the Fed given the amount of red tape that exists.
If the same effort was put to harmonizing and simplifying procurement across the Federal Government, you could directly make demands on competition.
This is what China does, and is a major reason their MIC was able to grow leaps and bounds in just 20 years.
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
>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.