Tag: perpetual war

Pentagon’s Top Spy Agency Turns To AI for Targeting and Operations Planning

The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) is getting ready for the “next battlefield” and counting on the expertise of private concerns, like Booz Allen Hamilton, to implement what it calls Machine-assisted Analytic Rapid-repository System, or MARS for short. MARS is a critical data management system for “military targeting” and operation planning.

MARS is currently the DIA’s top priority, and according to DIA director Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley Jr., the aim is to replicate “the commercial Internet that everybody uses every day,” with the added functionality of providing a “foundational intelligence picture […] at speed and at scale.”

Terry Busch, chief of DIA’s integrated analysis and methodologies division, highlights the difference between the MARS program he manages and the old “stovepipe” data management technologies it is meant to replace: “What comes out of MARS at the end is not data, it’s analysis. It’s finished intelligence.”

Which kind of intelligence, specifically, will be assessed dynamically by the machine’s algorithms in a new kind of database management system using AI functionality. It will revolutionize the way data is received and acted-upon. As it scours and collects vast datasets and volumes of foreign intelligence that support U.S. military operations around the world, MARS will be equipped to handle both large amounts of data, like the storage-intensive images and videos collected by the National Reconnaissance Office and also analyze the information to produce actionable leads in the battlefield.

It is nothing less than the 1983 sci-fi classic “WarGames” come to life. A ‘machine’ that decides when to go to war based on the information it is fed. In the movie, a military drill of a surprise nuclear attack on the United States accidentally goes live after a hacker, played by Matthew Broderick, “unwittingly” puts the world on the brink of nuclear war.

MARS program manager Terry Busch doesn’t discount the possibility. “On the machine side,” Busch stated, “we have experienced confirmation bias in big data,” adding that it was a “real concern” given that they’ve had “the machine retrain itself to error”.

COVID-19, however, has given the top military intelligence department the opportunity to “prove [its] ability to deliver the capabilities of MARS”, as DIA chief of Staff, John Sawyer, said at a National Security Summit that concluded Friday. The “assumptions about the nature of our work,” he claims were challenged during the pandemic, were especially fruitful in regards to the MARS program, which can now benefit from a new modality of military intelligence propagation that will be “the future of how we are going to understand fighting”.

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House passes Ben McAdams’ ban on nuclear weapons testing

The House on Monday moved to prohibit the resumption of nuclear weapons testing by passing Rep. Ben McAdams’s amendment to a bill funding the Department of Defense.

The amendment, which bars the use of any funding to test nuclear weapons, passed nearly along partisan lines 227-179, with one Republican and one independent supporting the amendment.

Utah GOP Reps. Rob Bishop, John Curtis and Chris Stewart opposed the effort to halt nuclear tests.

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In Just 3 Years, Trump Dropped 72,000 Bombs—Following In His Predecessors’ Footsteps

Since just 2015, the US war machine has dropped over 133,000 bombs on people living in the desert on the other side of the planet. Of those 133,000 bombs, Trump dropped 72,000 in just the last three years.

Dropping bombs on brown people in the desert is non-partisan — Bush dropped tens of thousands of bombs, Obama dropped tens of thousands of bombs and Trump is now dropping tens of thousands of bombs. Tragically, despite arguing over the day’s irrelevant and highly divisive talking points, most politicians in D.C. agree that dropping bombs makes America great — including the ostensible “small government Republicans.” Well, Republicans, dropping a bomb on the other side of the planet every 21 minutes, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year is not small government. 

The idea that these people claim to be against socialism while literally socializing wars for profit is hypocritical at best and utterly evil at worst. The money spent on war is inconceivably high. As TFTP reported earlier this year, just 3% of what the US spends on war in a year, could end hunger on the entire planet. 

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