Smedley Butler on stopping the war machine…
Tag: military industrial complex
CHINESE MILITARY SAYS IT’S FIGURED OUT HOW TO BUILD LASER WEAPONS THAT CAN FIRE INDEFINITELY
The Chinese military has announced what could be a major breakthrough in energy weapon tech — if it holds up.
As the South China Morning Post reports, representatives from the country’s National University of Defence Technology say they’ve developed a state-of-the-art cooling system that would allow high-energy lasers to remain powered up “infinitely” without getting too hot.
While laser technology has existed for decades, these high-energy beams generate so much excess heat that they often go haywire, hampering previous attempts at similar weapon systems around the world.
The new Chinese cooling system, according to the report, would use gas that blows through the weapon to remove excess heat and allow for weapons to shoot precise laser beams for an indefinite amount of time without losing power or getting distorted.
“High-quality beams can be produced not only in the first second, but also maintained indefinitely,” the team wrote in a new paper on the purported cooling tech, published in the Chinese-language journal Acta Optica Sinica.
America’s top 5 weapons contractors made $196B in 2022
American weapons makers continue to dominate the global arms industry, with four U.S.-based companies in the world’s top five military contractors, according to a new Defense News ranking of the top 100 defense firms.
In 2022, America’s top five weapons contractors made $196 billion in military-related revenue, according to Defense News. Lockheed Martin dominated all other defense-focused companies, with total military revenue of roughly $63 billion last year. RTX, formerly known as Raytheon Technologies, was a distant second, earning roughly $40 billion in revenue in 2022.
The same five American “prime” contractors have long dominated lists of the world’s biggest arms manufacturers. Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, RTX, Boeing and General Dynamics have remained in the top seven of the Defense News ranking since it began in 2000.
Notably, several Chinese firms have expanded their military operations in recent years as tensions have risen between the U.S. and China. Four Chinese companies are now in the top 20, including one — the Aviation Industry Corporation of China — that became the world’s fourth largest military contractor last year.
The top 5 for 2022 are as follows: Lockheed Martin, RTX, Northrop Grumman, Aviation Industry Corporation, and Boeing.
The U.S., for its part, had 10 companies in the top 20. Italy, the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom each had at least one of the world’s 20 biggest military firms last year.
USAF Conducts First-AI Flight With Stealth Drone
The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) completed the first-ever flight of an AFRL-developed stealth drone powered by artificial intelligence software.
On July 25, the machine-learning-trained, artificial intelligence-powered XQ-58A Valkyrie flew a three-hour sortie at Florida’s Eglin Air Force Base.
“The mission proved out a multi-layer safety framework on an AI/ML-flown uncrewed aircraft and demonstrated an AI/ML agent solving a tactically relevant “challenge problem” during airborne operations,” said Col. Tucker Hamilton, chief, of AI Test and Operations, for the Department of the USAF.
Hamilton continued, “This sortie officially enables the ability to develop AI/ML agents that will execute modern air-to-air and air-to-surface skills that are immediately transferrable to other autonomy programs.”
Eglin has become the testing ground for advanced autonomous systems within the USAF. Last November, the service received two Valkyrie stealth drones assigned to the 40th Flight Test Squadron.
In past press releases, AFRL describes the Valkyrie as a “high-speed, long-range, low-cost unmanned platform designed to offer maximum utility at minimum cost.”
Profiteers of Armageddon
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past few months, you’re undoubtedly aware that award-winning director Christopher Nolan has released a new film about Robert Oppenheimer, known as the “father of the atomic bomb” for leading the group of scientists who created that deadly weapon as part of America’s World War II-era Manhattan Project.
The film has earned widespread attention, with large numbers of people participating in what’s already become known as “Barbieheimer” by seeing Greta Gerwig’s film Barbie and Nolan’s three-hour-long Oppenheimer on the same day.
Nolan’s film is a distinctive pop cultural phenomenon because it deals with the American use of nuclear weapons, a genuine rarity since ABC’s 1983 airing of “The Day After” about the consequences of nuclear war. (An earlier exception was Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, his satirical portrayal of the insanity of the Cold War nuclear arms race.)
The film is based on American Prometheus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography of Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin.
Nolan made it in part to break through the shield of antiseptic rhetoric, bloodless philosophizing, and public complacency that has allowed such world-ending weaponry to persist so long after Trinity, the first nuclear bomb test, was conducted in the New Mexico desert 78 years ago this month.
Computer chip with built-in human brain tissue gets military funding
Last year, Monash University scientists created the “DishBrain” – a semi-biological computer chip with some 800,000 human and mouse brain cells lab-grown into its electrodes. Demonstrating something like sentience, it learned to play Pong within five minutes.
The micro-electrode array at the heart of the DishBrain was capable both of reading activity in the brain cells, and stimulating them with electrical signals, so the research team set up a version of Pong where the brain cells were fed a moving electrical stimulus to represent which side of the “screen” the ball was on, and how far away from the paddle it was. They allowed the brain cells to act on the paddle, moving it left and right.
Then they set up a very basic-reward system, using the fact that small clusters of brain cells tend to try to minimize unpredictability in their environment. So if the paddle hit the ball, the cells would receive a nice, predictable stimulus. But if it missed, the cells would get four seconds of totally unpredictable stimulation.
It was the first time lab-grown brain cells had been used this way, being given not only a way to sense the world, but to act on it, and the results were impressive.
Impressive enough that the research – undertaken in partnership with Melbourne startup Cortical Labs – has now attracted a US$407,000 grant from Australia’s National Intelligence and Security Discovery Research Grants program.
These programmable chips, fusing biological computing with artificial intelligence, “in future may eventually surpass the performance of existing, purely silicon-based hardware,” says project lead, Associate Professor Adeel Razi.
“The outcomes of such research would have significant implications across multiple fields such as, but not limited to, planning, robotics, advanced automation, brain-machine interfaces, and drug discovery, giving Australia a significant strategic advantage,” he said.
Scary story…
Lockheed Martin Predicts Strong Profits as Global Instability Rises
Lockheed Martin believes global instability is driving demand and sees an increase in annual profits. Washington’s proxy war in Ukraine has caused an increase in arms spending among NATO members, boosting weapons makers’ stock prices.
On Tuesday, Lockheed raised its annual profit and sales outlook on strong demand for military equipment. After making the announcement, the company’s stock price increased by one percent. Reuters reports, “[Lockheed] expects full-year net sales to be between $66.25 billion and $66.75 billion, up from its earlier forecast of $65 billion to $66 billion.”
The billions in profit are driven by sales of big-ticket systems like the F-35. However, Lockheed has struggled to produce F-35s that can perform its promised abilities. In May, the government found the planes’ engines have a serious problem dealing with heat. “The F-35’s engine lacks the ability to properly manage the heat generated by the aircraft’s systems,” POGO reported. “That increases the engine’s wear, and auditors now estimate the extra maintenance will add $38 billion to the program’s life-cycle costs.”
The arms maker has additionally experienced a boost in demand for smaller systems, like the Javelin anti-tank missile. The White House has shipped thousands of Javelin systems to Kiev since Joe Biden took office.
The Military Dangers of AI Are Not Hallucinations
A world in which machines governed by artificial intelligence (AI) systematically replace human beings in most business, industrial, and professional functions is horrifying to imagine. After all, as prominent computer scientists have been warning us, AI-governed systems are prone to critical errors and inexplicable “hallucinations,” resulting in potentially catastrophic outcomes. But there’s an even more dangerous scenario imaginable from the proliferation of super-intelligent machines: the possibility that those nonhuman entities could end up fighting one another, obliterating all human life in the process.
The notion that super-intelligent computers might run amok and slaughter humans has, of course, long been a staple of popular culture. In the prophetic 1983 film WarGames, a supercomputer known as WOPR (for War Operation Plan Response and, not surprisingly, pronounced “whopper”) nearly provokes a catastrophic nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union before being disabled by a teenage hacker (played by Matthew Broderick). The Terminator movie franchise, beginning with the original 1984 film, similarly envisioned a self-aware supercomputer called “Skynet” that, like WOPR, was designed to control U.S. nuclear weapons but chooses instead to wipe out humanity, viewing us as a threat to its existence.
Though once confined to the realm of science fiction, the concept of supercomputers killing humans has now become a distinct possibility in the very real world of the near future. In addition to developing a wide variety of “autonomous,” or robotic combat devices, the major military powers are also rushing to create automated battlefield decision-making systems, or what might be called “robot generals.” In wars in the not-too-distant future, such AI-powered systems could be deployed to deliver combat orders to American soldiers, dictating where, when, and how they kill enemy troops or take fire from their opponents. In some scenarios, robot decision-makers could even end up exercising control over America’s atomic weapons, potentially allowing them to ignite a nuclear war resulting in humanity’s demise.
U.S. Committee Examines Role of AI in Warfare
Richard Moore, chief of the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service (SIS), claimed in a rare public speech on Wednesday that “artificial intelligence [AI] will change the world of espionage, but it won’t replace the need for human spies,” while admitting that British spies are already using AI to disrupt the supply of weapons to Russia.
According to AP News, in his speech Moore painted AI as a “potential asset and major threat” and called China the “single most important strategic focus” for SIS, commonly known as MI6. He added, “We will increasingly be tasked with obtaining intelligence on how hostile states are using AI in damaging, reckless and unethical ways.”
Moore shared that “’the unique characteristics of human agents in the right places will become still more significant,’ highlighting spies’ ability to ‘influence decisions inside a government or terrorist group.’”
While speaking to an audience at the British ambassador’s residence in Prague, Moore urged Russians who oppose the invasion of Ukraine to spy for Britain. “I invite them to do what others have already done this past 18 months and join hands with us,” he said, assuring prospective defectors that “their secrets will always be safe with us” and that “our door is always open.”
While the MI6 chief spent more time talking about the Russia-Ukraine conflict, it was his comments on the West potentially “falling behind rivals in the AI race” that stood out. Moore declared that, “Together with our allies, [SIS] intends to win the race to master the ethical and safe use of AI.”
Being quite aware of AI and how it is being used by hostile states, the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation heard testimony from AI experts at Tuesday’s hearing, “Man and Machine: Artificial Intelligence on the Battlefield.”
The subcommittee’s goal was to discuss “the barriers that prevent the Department of Defense [DOD] from adopting and deploying artificial intelligence (AI) effectively and safely, the Department’s role in AI adoption, and the risks to the Department from adversarial AI.”
Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of Scale AI, testified that during an investor trip to China, he witnessed first-hand the “progress that China was making toward developing computer vision technology and other forms of AI.” Wang was troubled at the time, “because this technology was also being used for domestic repression, such as persecuting the Uyghur population.”
Hellbound and Down 
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