By Jeffrey Childers, Substack, 6/6/24

Jeff Childers is an attorney and conservative commentator based in Florida.

Until very recently — so recently you will be forgiven lack of notice of the change — it was fashionable among elites to wring their hands over letting robots decide whether to kill people. Countless conferences were devoted to the subject, new UN departments were designed, and new job descriptions were drafted, spawning battalions of specialized military bioethicists.

Zing! What was that? That was bioethics flying out the window. Sorry, chaps, pack it in. All those new ethics experts and professors and opinion influencers just became redundant. They are moot.

Pre-pandemic, so-called autonomous killing machines were de facto no bueno, the stuff of war crimes. Everyone agreed they were bad. Even if a robot lines up the shot and delivers the killing blow, an accountable human, not an unaccountable machine, must make the ultimate decision to take another human life.

The risks could not possibly be more well-known. Hollywood has thoroughly explored the subject to the point of cliché in countless silver screen series, from The Terminator and its innumerable sequels, spinoffs, and television adaptions, to Netflix’s Black Mirror, whose bleak, terrifying, and unforgettable 2017 episode “Metalhead” conclusively settled the argument in 41 minutes of runtime.

On June 4th, 2024 — mark the date — the Washington Post quietly ran an unobtrusive “good news” op-ed headlined, “The Pentagon is learning how to change at the speed of war.” To call it “just an op-ed” would do violence to its malevolent significance. First of all, the author, spy novelist and columnist David Ignatius, is one of WaPo’s most senior writers, and it’s a poorly hidden secret he is inextricably intertwined with the deep security state.

In other words, David and the CIA are besties. He knows what he’s talking about, and probably much more.

David’s op-ed began gently chiding the U.S. military for, with the very best of intentions, its antiquated ‘addiction’ to overly complicated, finicky, insanely expensive, super high-tech, human-directed weapons systems, rather than cheap, practical, reliable, and effective alternatives like the Russians are using to beat the Dickens out of Ukraine.

Ignatius ripped off the band-aid, rebelliously breaking from all conventional wisdom, and authoritatively accused the U.S.’s powerful and influential military-industrial complex of being systematically broken.

David Ignatius — the military-industrial complex’s best friend in media — openly scoffed at U.S. generals’ multi-billion dollar high-tech toys, which he predicted were so vulnerable they would only survive the first few minutes in a war with China:

David described an existential crisis. And you know Obama’s first rule: Never let a good crisis go to waste. The country thus breathlessly awaits an intervention, a Hegelian solution to the problem the MIC created, a savior. What could it be?

Most folks now agree the Russians’ pragmatic, entrepreneurial approach in Ukraine has decisively proven its battlefield superiority over our fancy, high-tech, acronymized weapons that took decades to develop: our top-tier M1 Abrams tanks, our PATRIOT air defense systems, our HIMARS and ATACMS missiles, our JDAMS flying bombs, and our networked cluster munitions.

They all literally or figuratively bogged down in the Ukrainian rasputitsa. In other words, stuck in the mud.

But the bigger problem is that all our defense systems, from the most modest mobile artillery unit to the sky-scraping F35 intelligent fighter jet, are all e-something, or i-something. They are all linked together, connected to the internet, in a networked global battlefield information system (GBIS). They were designed to be centrally controllable from the confines of an op center safely concealed under two hundred feet of granite below the Pentagon in Washington, DC.

Unfortunately, the Russians — those ‘incompetent,’ slipshod, gas-station-with-nukes ice jockeys — somehow overtook us in electronic jamming technology. And then kept going, without looking back. The Russians are jamming all our toys!

Our Borg-like, electronically interconnected technology is dead in the water, or in the mud, if it can’t talk to the other parts of itself. Worse, Russian jamming cuts it all off from its handlers thousands of miles away in America. In other words, it’s damned useless, which is why Ignatius predicted it wouldn’t last five minutes against China.

Ignatius’ description of this perfectly foreseeable development understated the terror and panic on the part of U.S. generals. It all worked so well against Saddam Hussein’s disorganized army! But the generals are slowly and reluctantly coming to terms with the fact our entire arsenal is close to useless against near-peer adversaries like Russia and China.

In desperation, and because Ukraine uber alles, all those ethical concerns over autonomous weapons systems instantly became as obsolete as our trillion-dollar aircraft carriers. The ban on machines that kill on automatic has been swept aside.

It’s an emergency, dummy.

Then, Ignatius described the easy fix to the problem. The simple correction is truly autonomous weapons, weapons that can’t be jammed, weapons that don’t have to talk to each other, weapons that push the pesky humans right out of the picture. In the same way the military is now quietly moving aside the humans, David also glided right over the pesky ethical issues, which earned not a single syllable in his column.

Ignatius said the only answer is machines that can think for themselves:

The military is way ahead of us. It’s almost too late to even hold a debate over whether saving Ukraine is worth a Metalhead future. Two years ago, the Deep State’s influential Council for Foreign Relations openly argued to cut off debate, in its article “Stop the “Stop the Killer Robot” Debate: Why We Need Artificial Intelligence in Future Battlefields.”

Read it for yourself. The CFR waved off arguments about risks the robots will run amok and kill civilians. Humans make mistakes too! Soldiers kill civilians all the time! Robots might be even more accurate deciders of who to kill, and when. Who knows?

But the CFR never grappled with the accountability problem. Who’s responsible when the robot goes rogue and wipes out a village, or a wedding, or a whole city? Who’s tried for the war crimes?

Nobody, that’s who. You can’t expect technology to be perfect, dummy.

You can’t put a robot on trial. Come on, be serious.

The government knows full well that public outcry will only slow down the killer robot train. The military is now moving with mind-blowing, demonic, uncharacteristic speed toward building its dystopian, robot-armed future. The first fully autonomous killing machines have already been designed, built, and delivered to Ukraine.

To our chagrin, we learned during the pandemic that government can move unimaginably fast when it wants to. Ignatious heard it directly from Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks:

Autonomous killer drones are nothing more than autonomous killer robot dogs with wings.

Ignatius also assured us that the Air Force is, right now, building robotic fighter jets labeled with the grim euphemism “uncrewed.” The robots can keep on fighting, long after the human crews are gone.

Similarly, last month, the Navy formed a new squadron of hundreds of fully autonomous, uncrewed boats, a water swarm with the unwieldy name, “Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft.” GARC doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but maybe it echoes the last thing dying sailors say.

Instead of applying that awkward acronym, the Navy has nicknamed its new robot squadron the “Hell Hounds.” Coincidentally, Hell Hound also aptly describes the shiny robot dogs prowling Metalhead’s bleak, apocalyptic landscape, where they will forever be roaming in metallic packs, slowly herding the shrinking remnants of the human race into extinction.

It’s easy to blame Congress for failing to pull the plug, slow things down, or at least hold a public debate. But remember: attractive, well-spoken military analysts constantly deliver confidential, top-secret briefings to Congressmen, direly warning them China will win in five minutes unless we do something.

What can I say? It’s 2024. Here come the terminators, and nothing can stop it. We all knew this day was coming; we just didn’t think it would come from us.

Somebody track down that scrappy Sarah Connor and tell her it’s time to report for duty.

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 7/1/24

The US military has raised its alert level at bases in Europe amid soaring tensions with Russia that are the result of the US increasing its support for Ukrainian attacks on Russian territory.

US and Western officials told The New York Times that the alert levels were raised in response to “vague threats” from Russian officials. Russia warned last week that it would retaliate against the US in response to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea using a cluster bomb variant of US-provided ATACM missiles that killed five civilians, including two children, on the beach near Sevastopol.

Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in May that there would be “major consequences” for any NATO country that allows Ukraine to use its weapons to strike targets inside the Russian mainland. Putin made the warning before President Biden gave Ukraine the green light to use US-provided missiles on targets across the border.

US military bases are currently at the alert level “Charlie,” which is the second-highest level. According to the Times, it’s the highest level that could be sustained over a long period of time.

US officials said there was no specific intelligence about a potential Russian attack on US bases in Europe. They also accused Russian intelligence of being behind sabotage attacks in Europe, including a fire at an IKEA furniture store, but offered no evidence to back up the claim.

US bases in Europe support the proxy war in Ukraine by training Ukrainian troops, providing intelligence, and serving as hubs for weapons shipments. The US and NATO’s increasing support for Ukrainian strikes in Russia and other escalations risk provoking a Russian response since Moscow has made clear it views the Western nations as direct participants in the war.

After the Ukrainian strike on the beach in Crimea, the Russian Defense Ministry said, “The responsibility for the deliberate missile strike against civilians in Sevastopol lies primarily in Washington, which supplied these weapons to Ukraine.”

Odysee link to video here.

“In Donetsk’s Kievsky district on May 27, I interviewed Dmitry Astrakhan, a war correspondent and journalist who has covered Ukraine’s brutal war on the civilians of the Donbass since its inception one decade ago.

He details Ukraine’s war crimes, attacking Donbass civilians since 2014, along with the complicity of the OSCE in enabling these atrocities. He covered the liberation of Mariupol, and countless other Donbass regions, and saw Ukrainian forces using civilians as human shields, a well-established fact by now, keeping civilians on one or two floors, and putting Ukrainian forces above them who then fired on Russian forces.

“You could see white flags on one level, and machine gun firing from another.”

He took testimonies regarding Ukrainian snipers shooting at civilians, Ukrainian forces exploding buildings knowing there were civilians inside, in Artyomovsk (Bakhmut).

Dmitry spoke of too many Ukrainian war crimes to detail here. Instead, listen to the first-hand experiences of this courageous Donbass journalist.” – Eva Bartlett

Follow Dmitry at:

https://t.me/astrahandm

By Andrew Korybko, Substack, 6/26/24

President Putin proved once again that he’s mature enough of a leader to make tough decisions that disregard public opinion following his government’s tepid response to Ukraine’s US-backed bombing of beachgoers in Sevastopol over the weekend. It was predicted that “Russia Probably Won’t Impose A No-Fly Zone Over The Black Sea After The Sevastopol Attack”, which explained why it was unlikely to capitulate to the public’s demand due to worries about accidentally sparking World War III.

Instead of shooting down or otherwise neutralizing American reconnaissance drones over international waters in the Black Sea, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reaffirmed that President Putin’s ceasefire proposal still stands. Shortly afterwards, Peskov also expressed Russia’s continued openness to talks with France after Emmanuel Macron publicly said that he’s interested in them the other day while also walking back his earlier rhetoric about wanting to conventionally intervene in Ukraine.

These two developments were then followed by new Defense Minister Andrey Belousov talking to his American counterpart in a call where “they exchanged views about the situation around Ukraine”. He also warned him about “the dangers of further escalation in terms of the continuing deliveries of American weapons to the Ukrainian Armed Forces.” Taken together, it’s clearly the case that Russia’s response was once again conciliatory and not escalatory, exactly as the earlier cited analysis predicted.

Interestingly, these developments were interspersed with the viral fake news claim that Russia had already supposedly downed an American drone over the Black Sea in revenge, which was introduced into the information ecosystem here but was then quickly walked back by its originator here. Nevertheless, this claim wildly proliferated across social media because it conformed to many wishful thinking observers’ expectations, most of whom never came across the follow-up post walking it back.

The reason why it’s so important to clarify exactly what Russia’s response to last weekend’s provocation was, namely to continue its conciliatory approach for de-escalation purposes as opposed to risking World War III by miscalculation if it reacted as the public demanded, is to prevent false expectations. Those who get their hopes unrealistically high will inevitably experience deep disappointment, after which some might become susceptible to hostile narratives that Russia “sold out” or whatever.

Whether one agrees with the merits of its saintly restraint or not, the fact of the matter is that this is indeed the policy that President Putin has decided to promulgate for the reasons that were explained. While it’s possible that he might order a symbolic show of force by authorizing the shooting down or neutralization of an American drone in the coming future, his tepid response thus far suggests that he’s disinclined to do so, or that it would solely be a one-off in the unlikely event that it happens.

President Putin isn’t a “madman”, “monster”, or “mastermind” like many imagine that he is, but is a consummate pragmatist at least as how he sees himself and is therefore unlikely to ever do anything that could be spun as emotional or radical. He always takes a long time before making major decisions, with the proof being how long it took for him to commence Russia’s aerial intervention in Syria and the ongoing special operation, usually waiting till the last possible moment.

Likewise, if Russia does indeed decide to seriously escalate against the West, then the track record suggests that it would be a seemingly abrupt game-changer but preceded by clear statements of intent that could be seen in hindsight as “ultimatums” (despite being described differently by its diplomats). Some might interpret a few of its recent signals as hinting at that scenario, but the substance of its response thus far as was explained dispels that notion and suggests that the current policy will continue.

YouTube link here.