Warfare Technology News Articles
The DoD has ambitious plans for full spectrum dominance, seeking control over all potential battlespaces: land, ocean, air, outerspace, and cyberspace. Artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies are being used to further these agendas, reshaping the military and geopolitical landscape in unprecedented ways.
In our news archive below, we examine how emerging warfare technology undermines national security, fuels terrorism, and causes devastating civilian casualties.
Related: Weapons of Mass Destruction, Biotech Dangers, Non-Lethal Weapons
U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan have killed far more people than the United States has acknowledged, have traumatized innocent residents and largely been ineffective, according to a new study released [on September 25]. The study by Stanford Law School and New York University's School of Law calls for a re-evaluation of the practice, saying the number of "high-level" targets killed as a percentage of total casualties is extremely low -- about 2%. In contrast to more conservative U.S. statements, the Stanford/NYU report -- titled "Living Under Drones" -- offers starker figures published by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, an independent organization based at City University in London. Based on interviews with witnesses, victims and experts, the report accuses the CIA of "double-striking" a target, moments after the initial hit, thereby killing first responders. It also highlights harm "beyond death and physical injury," publishing accounts of psychological trauma experienced by people living in Pakistan's tribal northwest region, who it says hear drones hover 24 hours a day. "Before this we were all very happy," the report quotes an anonymous resident as saying. "But after these drones attacks a lot of people are victims and have lost members of their family. A lot of them, they have mental illnesses." People have to live with the fear that a strike could come down on them at any moment of the day or night, leaving behind dead whose "bodies are shattered to pieces," and survivors who must be desperately sped to a hospital.
Note: Visit the Living Under Drones website here. For a Democracy Now! report on the results of this study click here. For more analysis click here and here.
2,500 US service members from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit [tested] a leading AI tool the Pentagon has been funding. The generative AI tools they used were built by the defense-tech company Vannevar Labs, which in November was granted a production contract worth up to $99 million by the Pentagon’s startup-oriented Defense Innovation Unit. The company, founded in 2019 by veterans of the CIA and US intelligence community, joins the likes of Palantir, Anduril, and Scale AI as a major beneficiary of the US military’s embrace of artificial intelligence. In December, the Pentagon said it will spend $100 million in the next two years on pilots specifically for generative AI applications. In addition to Vannevar, it’s also turning to Microsoft and Palantir, which are working together on AI models that would make use of classified data. People outside the Pentagon are warning about the potential risks of this plan, including Heidy Khlaaf ... at the AI Now Institute. She says this rush to incorporate generative AI into military decision-making ignores more foundational flaws of the technology: “We’re already aware of how LLMs are highly inaccurate, especially in the context of safety-critical applications that require precision.” Khlaaf adds that even if humans are “double-checking” the work of AI, there's little reason to think they're capable of catching every mistake. “‘Human-in-the-loop’ is not always a meaningful mitigation,” she says.
Note: For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on warfare technology and Big Tech.
In September 2017, Aileen Black wrote an email to her colleagues at Google. Black, who led sales to the U.S. government, worried that details of the companys work to help the military guide lethal drones would become public through the Freedom of Information Act. We will call tomorrow to reinforce the need to keep Google under the radar," Black wrote. According to a Pentagon memo signed last year, however, no one at Google needed worry: All 5,000 pages of documents about Googles work on the drone effort, known as Project Maven, are barred from public disclosure, because they constitute critical infrastructure security information." The memo is part of a recent wave of federal decisions that keep sensitive documents secret on that same basis - thus allowing agencies to quickly deny document requests. In response to a Freedom of Information Act request I filed more than a year ago, seeking documents related to Project Mavens use of Google technology, the Defense Department said that it had discovered 5,000 pages of relevant material - and that every single page was exempt from disclosure. Some of the pages included trade secrets, sensitive internal deliberations, and private personal information about some individuals, the department said. Such information can be withheld under the act. But it said all of the material could be kept private under Exemption 3" of the act, which allows the government to withhold records under a grab bag of other federal statutes.
Note: Read more about Project Maven. Google employees strongly opposed working on war technology, and circulated a petition to stop the project. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the corporate world.
Thousands of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the companys involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes. The letter, which is circulating inside Google and has garnered more than 3,100 signatures, reflects a culture clash ... that is likely to intensify as cutting-edge artificial intelligence is increasingly employed for military purposes. We believe that Google should not be in the business of war, says the letter, addressed to Sundar Pichai, the companys chief executive. It asks that Google pull out of Project Maven, a Pentagon pilot program, and announce a policy that it will not ever build warfare technology. That kind of idealistic stance ... is distinctly foreign to Washingtons massive defense industry and certainly to the Pentagon, where the defense secretary, Jim Mattis, has often said a central goal is to increase the lethality of the United States military. Some of Googles top executives have significant Pentagon connections. Eric Schmidt, former executive chairman of Google and still a member of the executive board of Alphabet, Googles parent company, serves on a Pentagon advisory body, the Defense Innovation Board, as does a Google vice president, Milo Medin. Project Maven ... began last year as a pilot program to find ways to speed up the military application of the latest A.I. technology.
Note: The use of artificial intelligence technology for drone strike targeting is one of many ways warfare is being automated. Strong warnings against combining artificial intelligence with war have recently been issued by America's second-highest ranking military officer, tech mogul Elon Musk, and many of the world's most recognizable scientists. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.
Drone pilots have been quitting the U.S. Air Force in record numbers. They cite a combination of low-class status in the military, overwork and psychological trauma. But a widely publicized new memoir about Americas covert drone war fails to mention the outflow increases, as one internal Air Force memo calls it. Drone Warrior: An Elite Soldiers Inside Account of the Hunt for Americas Most Dangerous Enemies chronicles the nearly 10 years that Brett Velicovich, a former special operations member, spent using drones to help special forces find and track terrorists. Conveniently, it also puts a hard sell on a program whose ranks the military is struggling to keep full. The book is, at best, a tale of hyper-masculine bravado and, at worst, a piece of military propaganda designed to ease doubts about the drone program and increase recruitment. Velicovich exaggerates the accuracy of the technology, neglecting to mention how often it fails or that such failures have killed an untold number of civilians. For instance, the CIA killed 76 children and 29 adults in its attempts to take out Ayman al Zawahiri, the leader of Al Qaeda, who reportedly is still alive. The film rights to Drone Warrior were bought over a year ago, with much fanfare, by Paramount Pictures. This development is predictable. The U.S. military and Hollywood have long enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. But there is something particularly unseemly about Hollywoods enthusiasm for bringing Velicovichs version of drone warfare to the big screen.
Note: Documents obtained by a crowdfunded investigative journalism project show that US military and intelligence agencies have influenced over 1,800 movies and television shows. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption and the manipulation of mass media.
As the United States and its allies continue their bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, many more noncombatants are perishing than they seem prepared to admit. Airwars, the organization I lead, at present estimates that at least 1,500 civilians have been killed by the United States-led coalition. Similar or higher tallies are reported by other monitoring groups, like Iraq Body Count and the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. But coalition officials have publicly admitted just 55 deaths. It may just be a matter of looking. Our policy is not to go out and seek allegations of civilian casualties, a senior official from United States Central Command, or Centcom, which oversees the bombing campaign, told me recently when I asked about the discrepancy between reports of noncombatant deaths and official investigations. It took about 15 months into the war for any admission of civilian deaths in Iraq - despite thousands of airstrikes and more than 130 reported incidents. An average of 173 days still passes between a civilian casualty in Iraq or Syria and any public admission of responsibility. The Pentagon is not alone in its accounting failures. Russia still denies the more than 2,000 deaths it has most likely caused in Syria, while all 12 of the United States coalition partners insist they have killed only bad guys. This then is a systemic problem, one that suggests militaries are at present unfit - or unwilling - to count the dead accurately from above.
Note: The above was written by Chris Woods, author of Sudden Justice: Americas Secret Drone Wars. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing war news articles from reliable major media sources.
About once a month, staff members of the congressional intelligence committees drive across the Potomac River to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., and watch ... footage of drone strikes. The screenings have provided a veneer of congressional oversight. The C.I.A.s killing missions are ... unlikely to change significantly despite President Obamas announcement on Thursday that a drone strike accidentally killed two innocent hostages, an American and an Italian. Michael DAndrea ... was chief of operations during the birth of the agencys detention and interrogation program and then, as head of the C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center, became an architect of the targeted killing program. He presided over the growth of C.I.A. drone operations and hundreds of strikes. Mr. DAndrea was a forceful advocate for the drone program. He was particularly effective in winning the support of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who was chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee until January. The confidence Ms. Feinstein and other Democrats express about the drone program ... stands in sharp contrast to the criticism among lawmakers of the now defunct C.I.A. program to capture and interrogate Qaeda suspects in secret prisons. When Ms. Feinstein was asked in a meeting with reporters in 2013 why she was so sure she was getting the truth about the drone program while she accused the C.I.A. of lying to her about torture, she seemed surprised. Thats a good question, actually.
Note: The CIA has been aware that drone strikes are ineffective since at least 2009. If drones help terrorists, almost always miss their intended targets, and may be used to target people in the US in the future, what are the real reasons for the US government's drone program?
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