YouTube link here.

YouTube link to Rachel Blevins’ interview with military analyst Mark Sleboda on Iran-Israel.

By Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Substack, 6/19/25

Oliver Boyd-Barrett is a scholar and critic of media and communication, propaganda, and international news media and film.

There have been a number of important developments over the past 24 hours. Let me summarize these, first of all, and, in the time I have today (under time pressure as always), flesh them out as best I can. In “fleshing them out” I shall likely not proceed in the same order as my summary points are presented below. I will note that amongst the most prominent of physcial actions that have occurred in the past few hours is an Israeli attack on the inactive Iranian nuclear reactor at Arak, justified on the grounds that this will stop Iran from re-activating it; and an Iranian call for the evacuation of Israel’s Dimona nuclear facility in the Negev desert, in advance of a forthcoming Iranian assault. Iran claims to have fired 100 drones into Israel during the last day.

Perhaps most importantly, in the light of my most recent previous post, there are signs of a stronger, more proactive move of support for Iran from China, especially, and from Russia. Secondly, there are some growing doubts as to the accuracy of Israeli and US claims that Israel controls the skies over Tehran. Thirdly, the situation with respect to Iranian missile launchers is perhaps not so dire as might have seemed to be the case yesterday while, fourthly, there are persistent indications that Israel will soon run out of missiles.

Fifthly, while the US and Israel have repeatedly talked about their interest in assassinating the Supreme Leader (a foolish quest, totally illegal of course and typically gangsterish, as this in itself most assuredly would NOT bring about regime change in Iran), President Trump, who has said that he has signed off on relevant attack plans, is now saying he will hold off from “direct” US participation for up to two more weeks because, apparently, he has more hope for that negotiations (which are due to continue in Geneva on Friday beteween the E3 and Iran) can be successful, while there is plenty of evidence in the US that public opinion does not support this measure (greater US involvement in the war) and that Trump’s MAGA basis is split, with prominent foundational members of the MAGA movement such as Tucker Carlson and Steven Bannon coming out in strong opposition to another US-instigated “forever war.”

On the topic of assassinations I hold it highly likely that the President Peseshkian’s predecessor, Raisi, was assassinated – probably by Mossad, perhaps by the CIA or MI6.

What would be the nature of more direct US involvement in the war? There are many senior-level voices that express doubt as to the likely success of MOABS for the purpose of taking out deeply buried Iranian nuclear facilities. One of these is that of MIT/Stanford professor emeritus Ted Postol (a cousin of mine through marriage, I am pleased to say) who is highly skeptical that MOABs can achieve the necessary depth. An additional measure, involving the dropping of one MOAB after another at exactly the same target would be particularly challenging to achieve.

In short, the MOAB route could end up further embarrassing the US (which has in effect just lost a war to Yemen, having a little while back lost a war to Afghanistan, in a long line of losses going back to Vietnam and Korea – none of these being counted as amongst the most technologically sophisticated civilizations).

Besides, how is MOAB going to help given that the real purpose of this war has nothing whatsover to do with nuclear enrichment but with regime change. Would a successful MOAB attack bring about regime change of itself? No, it wouldn’t.

Would an attempt on the life of the Supreme Leader bring about a regime change? No, because the political system of Iran is far too complex. We can think of it as being a vibrant democracy in a system that is capped by the privileged influence of the mullahs [ayatollahs], perhaps comparable to – but actually more benign in my view – the US system of democracy that seems in many respects to be totally overridden by an out-of-control military-industrial complex, a lobby complex and plutocrats, a far more sinister crowd than humble Shi’a clerics.

So, last night I was bemoaning the evidence of a strong, unambiguously supportive stance by Russia and China that would convey to the world their resolve that they would not allow this war crime to pass and that they would extend to Iran, their partner in the BRICS, every help it needs in order to survive and prosper, and I was also casting doubt on the efficacy of the BRICS, which is unable or unwilling to express a view on events that are tearing the world apart and whose leaders seem fearfully over-cautious about being bold.

So I am glad to say that I have to take some of this back. First of all, I should note that there was a telephone call yesterday between President Putin and Chairman Xi Jinping. This lasted about an hour and the leaders spent most of their time talking about Iran. They have issued a statement to the effect that both countries are united behind the view that the way to resolve the conflict between Iran and Israel is through diplomatic means.

Now, I am concerned that the wording of the statement seems to me to fall into the trap of legitimizing the lie that this is just about Israel versus Iran, which of course it is not – it is about the US war against the rest of the world for the maintenance of US hegemony through the use, in this instance, of Israel-as-proxy, (which does not mean that the proxy, the “tail,” is not also wagging the dog). And it seems to give legitimacy to the lie that the real issue is about nuclear enrichment and to the lie that Iran remotely constitutes a nuclear “threat” to the region when it is the humungus, inhuman bully, Israel, that is the threat and when the real issue, as I have just said, is about US global supremacy through regional Israeli supremacy.

But we should also note that the Russian-Chinese statement does not preclude hard support for Iran.

At this point I should throw in the obvious observation that Iran is important in this context not because it may become a nuclear weapons power – on that we shall just have to wait and see, but no evidence of it so far – but because Iran sits on one of the world’s most important, perhaps THE most important global concentration of oil and gas wealth. By controlling Iran, installing a Western-friendly puppet regime, the US (which does not itself need much oil from Iran) may think it can control China, which is a major user of Iranian energy. And China, as Trump and the neocons have been parrotting for decades, is the real adversary that the US has to stop and overcome.

Now, the Moscow-Beijing statement is proactive in the sense that both countries agree to mobilize their respective departments of state to resolve the problem. A call between Putin and Erdogan of Turkey the day before came to a similar conclusion.

There are reports today from Dima of the Military Summary Channel, citing CIG/Telegram/Counter Int, that China has two electronic surveillance ships (855 and 815A) in the Gulf, their purpose being to gather intelligence of Israeli drone and missile launches and to give this to Iran.

AFP reports that China has had conversations with Oman, seeking to pressure Oman into closing its air-space to the US and Western nations, as well as China talking with Pakistan so that Pakistan can help close off its south western maritime border to Israeli, US and Western planes and ships, in this way forcing as much western traffic as possible into the Gulf, where it will be highly vulnerable either to direct hits or to Iranian measures designed to close the Strait of Hormuz (the US has already evacuated its navy and personnel from Qatar and Bahrein).

Professor Marandi, speaking to Glenn Diesen from the PressTV studios in Tehran this morning believes that such hits, coupled with Iranian missile strikes on US bases in the region, as well as strikes on neighboring oil and gas fields, could be a crippling blow to international trade, even pushing much of the world back into a pre-oil era.

China has also been talking to General al-Sisi of Egypt, trying to apply pressure on Egypt to control the passage of certain (Western war)ships through the Suez canal – a measure that would contravene a treaty of 1888 except in circumstances in which the security of the canal itself was at stake.

In the meantime there is growing consensus among analysts that Israel is lacking missiles and may soon run out. The Iranian waves of drone and missile attacks are depleting Israeli interceptors. Iran has far many more missiles than Israel, to all accounts. Israel claims to have destroyed one half of Iranian missile launchers which, in the light of some assessments, would represent quite good news about its remaining capability. But it is entirely possible that there has been a great deal of exaggeration about Israel’s successes in hitting or in other ways disabling Iranian launchers, anyway.

There are continuing reports of the arrival of Chinese cargo ships to Iran that are delivering weapons, including air defense systems.

As for Russian tardiness in responding to the crisis, Putin himself explains that in making progress towards the recent and now agreed strategic partnership between the two countries (Iran and Russia) he found the Iranians were difficult to negotiate with, that it was Iran that said it did not want a mutual defense clause, and that Iran was resistant to a program of joint Russian-Iranian weapons production on Iranian soil, and, finally, that Russia has not received a request from Iran for help with more weapons. I can see that Iran has many historical reasons for suspicion of Russia (essentially, Russia vied with Britain for control of Iran for over one hundred years), but I am not entirely satisfied with this account by Putin.

(I shall return later to extend and to update)

***

“According to Seymour Hersch, the war will start in the next few days. Ever aware of the potential impact on the stock and bond market, the start of could wait until the markets close for the weekend. According to Hersh’s sources, it will consist of a bombing campaign, mostly directed at the Revolutionary Guards, followed by B-2’s dropping bunker busters on Furdow to destroy Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.” – This summary provided by Sylvia Demarest.

By Anatol Lieven, Responsible Statecraft, 6/19/25

The European Union’s latest moves (as part of its 17th package of sanctions against Russia declared in May) to target much more intensively Russia’s so-called “shadow fleet” of oil tankers and other vessels illustrate the danger that, as long as the Ukraine war continues, so will the risk of an incident that will draw NATO and the EU into a direct military clash with Russia.

The EU sanctions involve bans on access to the ports, national waters and maritime economic zones of EU states. Ships that enter these waters risk seizure and confiscation. It does not appear that Washington was consulted about this decision, despite the obvious risks to the U.S.

As part of this strategy, on May 15, an Estonian patrol boat attempted to stop and inspect a tanker in the Gulf of Finland. Russia sent up a fighter jet that flew over the Estonian vessel (allegedly briefly trespassing into Estonian waters), and the Estonians backed off — this time. In January, the German navy seized a Panamanian-flagged tanker, the Eventin, in the Baltic after its engines failed and it drifted into German territorial waters.

Sweden has now announced that starting on July 1 its navy will stop, inspect and potentially seize all suspect vessels transiting its exclusive economic zone, and is deploying the Swedish air force to back up this threat. Since the combined maritime economic zones of Sweden and the three Baltic states cover the whole of the central Baltic Sea, this amounts to a virtual threat to cut off all Russian trade exiting Russia via the Baltic — which would indeed be a very serious economic blow to Moscow.

It would also threaten to cut off Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad, which is surrounded by Poland, from access to Russia by sea.

This is the kind of action that has traditionally led to war. The Swedish assumption seems to be that the Russian navy and air force in the Baltic are now so weak — and so surrounded by NATO territory — that there is nothing Moscow can do about this. However, it is very unlikely that the Swedes would take this step unless they also believe that in the event of a clash, Washington will come to Sweden’s defense — even though the EU and Swedish decisions were made without U.S. approval and are not strictly covered by NATO’s Article 5 commitment.

And despite all the hysterical language about Russia being “at war” with NATO countries, these moves by the EU and Sweden are also based on an assumption that Russia will not in fact lose its temper and react with military force. European policymakers might however want to think about a number of things: for example, what would the U.S. do if ships carrying U.S. cargo were intercepted by foreign warships? We know perfectly well that the U.S. would blow the warships concerned out of the water and declare that it had done so in defense of the sacred rule of free navigation — in which the EU also professes to believe.

EU leaders, and admirals, should also spend some time on Russian social media, and read the incessant attacks on the Putin administration by hardliners arguing precisely that Moscow has been far too soft and restrained in its response to Western provocations, and that this restraint has encouraged the West to escalate more and more. Such hardliners (especially within the security forces) are by far the greatest internal political threat that Putin faces.

It is important to note in this regard that moves to damage Russia’s “shadow fleet” have not been restricted to sanctions. In recent months there have been a string of attacks on such vessels in the Mediterranean with limpet mines and other explosive devices — developments that have been virtually ignored by Western media.

In December 2024, the Russian cargo ship Ursa Major sank off Libya after an explosion in which two crewmembers were killed. The Reuters headline reporting these attacks was rather characteristic: “Three tankers damaged by blasts in Mediterranean in the last month, causes unknown, sources say.” Unknown, really? Who do we think were the likely perpetrators? Laotian special forces? Martians? And what are European governments doing to investigate these causes?

If the Russians do sink a Swedish or Estonian warship, the Trump administration will face a terribly difficult decision on how to respond to a crisis that is not of its own choosing: intervene and risk a direct war with Russia, or stand aside and ensure a deep crisis with Europe. The U.S. administration would therefore be both wise and entirely within its rights to state publicly that it does not endorse and will not help to enforce this decision.

Washington also needs — finally — to pay attention to what the rest of the world thinks about all this. The overwhelming majority of senators who are proposing to impose 500% tariffs on any country that buys Russian energy have apparently not realized that one of the two biggest countries in this category is India — now universally regarded in Washington as a vital U.S. partner in Asia. And now America’s European allies are relying on U.S. support to seize ships providing that energy to India.

The U.S. administration would also be wise to warn European countries that if this strategy leads to maritime clashes with Russia, they will have to deal with the consequences themselves. Especially given the new risk of war with Iran, the last thing Washington needs now is a new flare-up of tension with Moscow necessitating major U.S. military deployments to Europe. And the last thing the world economy needs are moves likely to lead to a still greater surge in world energy prices.

European governments and establishments seem to have lost any ability to analyze the possible wider consequences of their actions. So — not for the first time — America will have to do their thinking for them.

YouTube link here to interview with Sharmine Narwani on whether Israel’s shock strategy has failed.

By Kyle Anzalone, Libertarian Institute, 6/18/25

Multiple outlets are reporting that Israel only has a limited number of air defense interceptors available to shoot down incoming Iranian missiles. Since Tel Aviv launched its offensive war on Friday, Tehran has launched several waves of drones and missiles at Israel in response. 

On Tuesday, Middle East Eye reported speaking with a senior US official who explained, “Israel is using its ballistic missile interceptors at a rapid clip.” The official went on to warn that if Washington officially entered the conflict, it would drain American air defense stockpiles to a “horrendous” level.

While Washington has provided Tel Aviv with intelligence, arms, and defensive support, US forces have not directly attacked Iran. Israeli officials are pushing President Donald Trump to begin offensive strikes on Iran. If President Donald Trump does give in to Israeli pressure, it would put 50,000 US troops stationed across the Middle East at risk of being attacked by Iran. 

Additionally, US stockpiles of interceptors were stretched thin before Israel launched its war of choice against Iran. When asked last month if the US would provide Ukraine with the air defenses it was requesting, Secretary of State Marco Rubio replied that Washington could not send more Patriot missiles and launchers because “frankly, we don’t have” the supply. 

The MEE reporting was confirmed later in the day by the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. “Israel is running low on defensive Arrow interceptors,” WSJ explained. 

The Arrow interceptor is one of the three stages of Israeli air defenses. According to the Post, Tel Aviv also has a limited supply of Iron Dome interceptors. “Without resupplies from the United States or greater involvement by U.S. forces, some assessments project Israel can maintain its missile defense for 10 or 12 more days if Iran maintains a steady tempo of attacks,” a source told the outlet. 

The official added that Tel Aviv will begin having to select which missiles to shoot down, and allow others to reach their targets. “They will need to select what they want to intercept,” the source said. “The system is already overwhelmed.”

Tom Karako, director of the Missile Defense Project at the hawkish think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies, told WSJ the limited number of interceptors will force Tel Aviv to wrap up the conflict quickly. 

“Neither the U.S. nor the Israelis can continue to sit and intercept missiles all day,” he said. “The Israelis and their friends need to move with all deliberate haste to do whatever needs to be done, because we cannot afford to sit and play catch.” 

Along with Israeli-operated air defenses, the US has deployed THAAD and Patriot systems to Israel.

By Jeff Childers, Substack, 5/31/25

The phrase “AI safety” is becoming a very strategically flexible term of art. This week, SlashGear ran a suggestive story headlined, “Fury: America’s New Superweapon Is A True Technological Marvel.” That much was absolutely true.

Anduril Technologies, the startup behind Fury, is no legacy military contractor like Raytheon or Boeing. The company, which launched like a rocket in 2017, was founded by Palmer Luckey, the teenaged wunderkind who designed the Oculus Rift VR headset. He was born in 1992! In other words, he’s now just 32 years old, and was 24 when he started the company.

Revenge of the Nerds, with a kill switch.

Anduril, which just turned seven, is already valued at $36 billion—just below industry legend Raytheon’s valuation. The young company enjoys unusually close ties with U.S. military leadership, and skips past traditional defense procurement red tape under special programs like Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) and SOFWERX.

In its brief corporate life, Anduril has delivered advanced miltech solutions and secured generous production contracts, particularly for its flagship product, a key bit of software called Lattice OS. The company describes it as “an AI-powered operating system designed to orchestrate autonomous defense systems across land, sea, air, and even cyberspace.”

The operative word is “autonomous.” Lattice isn’t for manually flying drones using a joystick and a VR headset. It’s for issuing goal-oriented commands— like those you would issue to human soldiers. Commands like, monitor this valley, engage anything crossing this perimeter, neutralize radar emitters in zone Alpha, or destroy the Eiffel Tower.

There’s no pilot. There’s just Bob, back at the base, making suggestions.

The article described Fury, Anduril’s latest hardware prototype, a pre-production proof-of-concept. It’s similar to how Tesla both writes its self-driving software and also builds the cars that use it. Except that military-grade AI is obviously far beyond chatbots, self-driving Teslas, or whatever else we experience from consumer-level AI tech.

The SlashGear article introduced Fury as a 20-foot-long autonomous fighter jet —not a drone— capable of climbing to 50,000 feet, hitting Mach 0.95, and sustaining +9 Gs. Designed for air-to-air combat; it’s made to fly and fight by itself.

“Fury,” the article explained, “is a high-performance, multi-mission group 5 autonomous air vehicle (AAV).”

We could pause here to wallow in the well-worn moral murk — the classic handwringing over whether autonomous killing machines are morally ambiguous or whether “AI safety” still applies once your autonomous AI jet is pulling 9 Gs and launching air-to-air missiles. But set that ethical quagmire aside.

🚀 My question for today is much simpler: how stupid do they think we are? The answer is, pretty stupid, apparently.

Apparently, it is only minor news to the defense industry —ignored by corporate media— that military AI can be trusted to navigate a $30 million fighter jet in three-dimensional space under combat conditions, but they are also telling us that they can’t figure out how to get your chatbot to open the browser by itself and renew your driver’s license.

It makes less than no sense.

I’m a lawyer, not an AI engineer with a Q-clearance, so obviously I don’t know. But for Heaven’s sake, I can read. If AI can fly jets at supersonic speeds and battle it out in dogfights with other AI fighters, then the technology accessible to the military is light years beyond suggesting a polite way to decline an invitation to your kindergartner’s classmate’s bar mitzvah.

It makes me wonder: Was last week’s breathless “disclosure” of an AI-turned pharma whistleblower real? Or was that just a psyop, designed to convince us that consumer AI tech should be locked down and hobbled for safety? In actual truth, are they intentionally dribbling AI out slowly, to keep our enemies behind the eight ball and maybe to protect our economy from being disrupted too quickly?

In podcast after podcast and conference after conference, they keep warning us about the coming threat of artificial general intelligence — the moment AI becomes smarter than people — while also insisting, over and over, that we’re still years away from that troubling milestone. But isn’t it odd that they only ever talk about consumer AI — chatbots, homework helpers, and virtual therapists — and never speculate about the AI already flying autonomous military aircraft, managing battlefield logistics, or directing drone swarms at the speed of thought?

For the last year — maybe longer — we haven’t seen meaningful progress in consumer chatbot intelligence. Instead, we’ve been dazzled by a parade of low-stakes novelties: talking image generators, dancing avatars, and viral clips of AI-generated cats telling dad jokes in Morgan Freeman’s voice.

It’s not that AI has stopped evolving —clearly not— it’s that we’re being shown the circus, not the control room.

🚀 Once you begin wondering what AI level we are really at, recent history begins to make a lot more sense. Aside from the Proxy War in Ukraine, the next-most terrifying conflict was the escalation over the Strait of Taiwan. Starting around 2021, China and the U.S. faced off with naval fleets to fight over the one island where most AI chips are made.

For two years straight, all Nancy Pelosi could talk about was semiconductors. “Chips this, chips that, squaaawk” and she kept flying her broomstick into Taipei like it was spring break for congressional war hawks. CNBC, 2022:

Now, in 2025, President Trump has just declared a new Manhattan Project — not for bombs, but to supercharge our national energy grid and fuel the computing demands of massive new AI data centers.

Make no mistake. The real arms race is no longer nuclear. The real arms race is artificial intelligence. I doubt anyone would bother arguing the point.

🚀 Once you realize that AI is the new arms race, recent history stops looking confusing — and starts looking obvious. The Ukraine war dominated headlines. But the real geopolitical near-miss was the 2022 standoff over Taiwan — the one triggered by Nancy Pelosi’s surprise visit to the island. Officially, she was there to support democracy. But every journalist with a press badge knew the real story: the day-drinking day-trader was there to protect the global supply of AI chips.

The chipmaker Pelosi invited war with China to visit was Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC)— the quiet fabrication engine behind NVIDIA’s GPUs, Apple’s SoCs, and nearly every serious AI training run on Earth.

Congress was already acting. The 2022 CHIPS Act prioritized onshoring domestic chip development with $52 billion in federal funds— and since he took office, President Trump has expanded and accelerated the CHIPS initiative, declaring a national security emergency, allowing faster permitting and easier zoning, and using tariffs to force domestic sourcing of defense-related chips.

It’s working. Taiwan’s TSMC is now building a massive $165+ billion fabrication complex in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s scheduled to come online in phases between 2026–2028. Axios, this month:

Intel, long dormant, is also staging a major chipmaking comeback with new U.S. fabs in Ohio and Arizona — thanks mostly to Trump’s industrial pressure campaign.

🚀 None of this is particularly any secret. As far back as 2018, defense rags were accurately predicting current events. In April, 2018 —just after Palmer Luckey founded Anduril— DefenseOne ran this prophetic story:

The prescient analysis, written by defense strategist Elsa B. Kania, warned that the world was already locked into an AI arms race — not just between the U.S. and China, but including Russia, India, Israel, even non-state actors like ISIS, who were using commercial drones to deliver battlefield intelligence.

Back then, the military’s Project Maven had just launched. The Pentagon’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center (JAIC) didn’t exist yet. ChatGPT wasn’t even a glimmer in the public’s eye.

Kania called it “more than” an arms race because — unlike nuclear missiles — AI isn’t a discrete, singular weapon system. It’s a general-purpose technology, like electricity, or the steam engine, capable of transforming every aspect of military power: cybersecurity, battlefield decision-making, electronic warfare, logistics, surveillance, and strategic planning.

In other words, AI doesn’t just change what militaries do — it changes how they think. And that means traditional “arms race” metaphors break apart. Kania argued that framing the AI revolution purely in “weapons race” terms missed the bigger picture— that AI will become the nervous system of every future military, not just its weapons lab.

I can’t emphasize this enough: years before ChatGPT suggested possible recipes for the three overripe vegetables left in the fridge, the military was accurately forecasting the future arms race (more than). Which means that, in 2018, they must have already enjoyed enough operational AI capability to know where we were headed.

Perhaps a better question is: why did they let us have ChatGPT at all? Whatever the reason, OpenAI did not create the AI revolution. It was a relatively late player.

🚀 Tech bro Palmer Luckey named his billion-dollar startup Anduril and it wasn’t an accident. The name refers to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and it carries a heavy thematic payload.

In Lord of the Rings canon, Andúril means “Flame of the West,” which was the reforged sword of Elendil, later wielded by Aragorn, the rightful king of Gondor. Andúril was reforged from the shards of Narsil, another legendary sword that sliced the One Ring from Sauron’s hand.

In short, Andúril was a weapon, a weapon of ancient power, reforged in modern hands to reclaim rightful dominion.

“Anduril” wasn’t just branding. It was mission signaling. Naming the company Anduril signaled mythic ambition, restoration of lost power, and righteous moral framing. It’s a civilizational project. Palmer sees himself as rebuilding America’s lost military edge— like Aragorn returning to reclaim his throne. And it suggests Palmer’s team sees itself as the good guys, wielding dangerous power to combat evil.

🚀 What does it all mean? It means that we regular folks aren’t witnessing the rise of AI. We’re witnessing its containment.

For the past year, the public discussion has been fixated on the wrong question. Talking heads fret over whether ChatGPT might say something offensive, or whether Midjourney might draw the wrong number of fingers. We are told that AI isn’t quite ready — it’s potentially dangerous, often unpredictable, hallucinates too much, and is a bit too quirky for real work. They claim we’re years away from so-called artificial general intelligence, and that “alignment” must come first.

Meanwhile, military-grade AI is flying 9G fighter jets.

This is not any kind of conspiracy theory. None of this is secret. The defense journals were writing about the AI revolution back in 2018, and even earlier, well before consumer AI hit the scene. Along with his venture capital partners, Palmer Luckey invested billions in writing an AI operating system — in 2017!

Back then, defense analyst Elsa Kania warned not that we were entering an AI arms race — she said we were already in one. She accurately labeled it “more than” an arms race that would reshape every dimension of military, economic, and political power. And that is just what is happening.

Anduril Industries, founded in 2017 by a 24-year-old Palmer Luckey, wasn’t predicting the future — he was building out the present. The firm’s software platform, Lattice OS, isn’t a helpful chatbot. It’s a battlefield operating system for managing fully autonomous weapons across land, sea, air, and space. The new aircraft, Fury, is a fully autonomous fighter jet. Not merely a prototype — it’s a fully functional, AI-based weapons system.

Don’t misunderstand: I am not complaining about consumer AI’s throttling, not really. It seems logical on many levels. For one thing, the economy needs time to absorb what’s coming. And I also get that we don’t need China stealing weapons-grade AI from Microsoft Word’s Copilot.

But it is aggravating that the AI conversation itself has been nerfed and dumbed down, with the enthusiastic participation of useless corporate media that consistently obscures the true issues, and instead runs ridiculously superficial articles mocking small AI mistakes in MAHA reports. The AI that flies 9G fighter jets doesn’t make those kinds of easy errors. Just the versions that we get.

And if we can’t honestly debate AI, how can we participate in deciding who wields Andúril?