Tag: perpetual war

Pentagon Marches Towards AI Taking The Kill Shot

Dozens of autonomous war machines capable of deadly force conducted a field training exercise south of Seattle last August. The exercise involved no human operators but strictly robots powered with artificial intelligence, seeking mock enemy combatants.

The exercise, organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, a blue-sky research division of the Pentagon, armed the robots with radio transmitters designed to simulate a weapon firing. The drill expanded the Pentagon’s understanding of how automation in military systems on the modern battlefield can work together to eliminate enemy combatants.

“The demonstrations also reflect a subtle shift in the Pentagon’s thinking about autonomous weapons, as it becomes clearer that machines can outperform humans at parsing complex situations or operating at high speed,” according to WIRED. 

It’s undeniable artificial intelligence will be the face of warfare for years to come. Military planners are moving ahead with incorporating autonomous weapons systems on the modern battlefield.

General John Murray of the US Army Futures Command told an audience at the US Military Academy in April that swarms of robots will likely force the military to decide if a human needs to intervene before a robot engages the enemy.

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An Essential Guide To The Truths And Myths Of Chemical Weapons

If you were to ask the average person on the street to tell you about chemical weapons, odds are you’ll hear far more in the way of legend, born out of popular culture, than you will anything resembling fact. For most people, the only information they have on chemical weapons comes from movies like The Rock, episodes of 24, or trashy spy thrillers. Worse still, because that level of background knowledge is so low, even those people who can speak with even a basic level of understanding can often be taken as credible, even as they rattle off incredibly misleading information.

I should know this. Before I started really working in the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) field, I wasn’t much better. When I first joined the U.S. Army as an artillery officer, my sum total of chemical defense training was a short period of instruction as a cadet at Fort Lewis. That very limited instruction reinforced the fact that chemical protective suits are awful to wear more than conveying any real functional knowledge about chemical agents and their effects. 

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Pentagon uses world’s largest ‘secret army’ of 60,000 undercover operatives to carry out ‘domestic & foreign’ operations – media

The US military operates a vast network of soldiers, civilians, and contractors that it uses for clandestine missions both at home and abroad, Newsweek has claimed, adding that the force also manipulates social media.

After a two-year investigation, the outlet reported that the undercover army consists of around 60,000 people, many of whom use fake identities to carry out their assignments. The Pentagon’s agents operate in real life and online, with some even embedded in private businesses and well-known companies. 

The massive program, unofficially known as “signature reduction,” is reportedly 10 times the size of the CIA’s clandestine service, making it the “largest undercover force the world has ever known,” Newsweek claimed. But the true scale and scope of the shadow army remains a closely guarded secret. No one knows the program’s total size, and Congress has never held a hearing on the military’s increasing reliance on signature reduction. There appears to be very little or no transparency regarding the massive clandestine military force, even as its continued development “challenges US laws, the Geneva Conventions, the code of military conduct, and basic accountability,” the outlet said. 

Around half of the signature reduction force is said to consist of special operations personnel who hunt down terrorists in war zones and work in “unacknowledged hot spots” such as North Korea and Iran. Military intelligence specialists reportedly make up the second-largest part of the secret army. 

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Liz Cheney Says Not Increasing Military Spending by 3-5% Is a ‘Red Line’

President Biden requested a $753 billion military budget for the 2022 fiscal year, which would be the highest of all time. But this number is not enough for Republican hawks in Congress. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WI) said not increasing the budget by three to five percent would be a “red line” for Republicans. Biden’s budget request would be about a 1.6 percent increase from 2021.

“In my view, that is a red line, and if the administration is not going to be proposing a budget that meets that requirement, then I think they will need to explain to the American people why they’re unwilling to fund defense at the levels the nation needs,” Cheney said at the McAleese Defense Programs Conference, which was held virtually on Wednesday and Thursday.

“I would clearly oppose budgets that were below that number, and I think we’re going to have a very healthy debate and discussion about the administration’s proposal because it is coming in significantly below that number,” she said.

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