The Changing Face of War

Podcast: Download

Subscribe: RSS | More

Darrell Castle talks about war today with an emphasis on how artificial intelligence is changing everything we once thought about war and how wars are fought.

Transcription / Notes

THE CHANGING FACE OF WAR

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report. I will be talking about war today with an emphasis on how artificial intelligence is changing everything we once thought about war and how wars are fought. The wars in Ukraine and Gaza, both funded by the taxpayers of the United States, are serving as crucibles for perfecting the new methodologies of modern warfare.

Yes, my beat is war today and that is very appropriate because this coming Monday is Memorial Day when we pause to remember those who died in the nation’s wars. If you have suffered through these Castle Reports with me for a few years you know that I talk about war a lot because war is one of the great tragedies of the human experience. It often comes from the dark recesses of one or maybe two human minds, but it affects millions.

We are currently in the early stages of an epic change in the way wars are fought. You have probably heard many times the statement that generals tend to fight the last war and that is happening today with one variable. Warfare is evolving and changing rapidly in real time while the wars are being fought. Nothing trains a soldier or an army for war like actual combat. I had a law professor who taught evidence and he used the example of a train robbery for the importance of his subject. You can practice train robbery and even rehearse the event, but until you are inside the train with a gun in your hand you don’t know what train robbery Is like.

The first epic change in the evolution of warfare was the discovery of metalwork which allowed the building of new weapons made of metal rather than wood. The second was the discovery of gunpowder which allowed for the building of guns and ended the armored knight era. It took thousands of years to get from the first to the third epic which was artillery and massed artillery fire which evolved over a couple of hundred years so that armies who had the most effective artillery usually won the battle and the war. The fourth epic was airpower and the vital necessity of an army gaining air superiority. The fifth epic was precision guided munitions so that fortified bunkers and layers of concrete and steel were no longer effective and it allowed a 2000 lb. projectile to be sent through a target’s window from miles away.

Americans learned a lot about war from World War ll and that knowledge and manufacturing base has led the world until now. The Germans had better tanks, but the Americans caught up and won the war. The Japanese had better airplanes and pilots, but the Americans killed their pilots, built better airplanes, and won the war. Coming out of the war the Americans had unlimited funds and the arms industry to lead the world, but fighting the last war has finally started to catch up again as it always seems to.

Washington has provided Russia, Ukraine, and Israel with the battleground and even the funds to make great leaps in the epic of war developed and hardened in the cauldron of combat. There are always reasons given for Washington’s wars. Normally, the first reason is that you must stay committed even if the struggle after Washington enters is proven to be pointless and unwinnable. The second reason usually given is what in Vietnam was called the domino effect. If you let your enemy prevail, he will use the victory as a springboard to attack other countries and they will fall like dominos. Neither of the stated reasons have been proven to be true although they have been tested many times.

Ukraine is a war of attrition because that is how Russia has chosen to fight it. That means that just as in World War ll when they had more men and could take more casualties than the Germans, they would ultimately succeed despite the Germans having better and more mobile equipment at least during the first two years. If there’s always been one characteristic of the Russian army it is that that they are not casualty averse. No amount of additional funding or new arms shipments will change the mass number differential. The West can clearly see the Russian tactic of whittling down the Ukrainian forces until now they have few if any replacements, but they continue to tell us Ukraine is winning. The same propaganda was used in Vietnam and Afghanistan to keep the flow of men and weapons and money going down the ratholes.

Russia has been systematically attacking the Ukrainian infrastructure so that more and more Ukrainians are fleeing to Europe to avoid the war. Estimates are that about 7 million have fled the country so far. I have read reports from Ukraine of desperate efforts at conscription so that now the average age of recruits is 43 years old. Young recruits are probably dead or have fled the country. Western sociopathy in discussing Ukrainian casualties is very disturbing. It is cheaper, they say, to let the Ukrainians fight and die in this pointless and unwinnable struggle because it will mean fewer Americans and Europeans will die later. Endless death and destruction paid for with the labor of American citizens has revealed a side of Americans that is shameful and shocking to me.

 NATO has prolonged this destruction of an entire country and I find the concept sociopathic or worse. I suppose young men and women of America are expected to line up to jump into a war with Russia once the last Ukrainian is dead or has left the country. Ukraine is losing or has lost and is on the verge of collapse. Their manpower is exhausted and cannot be mustered to mount even a counteroffensive. My very real fear is that in the minds of the elite, World War lll is now inevitable and acceptable and therefore, they are just prepping us to accept an expanded war with Russia.

That brings me to the sixth epic of war and it is probably the most terrifying of all. The epic change in how war is conducted has been made possible and is being perfected on the killing fields of Ukraine and the rubble of Gaza. The new epic is killer drones powered by artificial intelligence. Completely autonomous weapons with no human involvement are being used in both Ukraine and Gaza right now. In Israel, the kill lists are prepared automatically and apparently with no human decision, using a program code-named Lavender. Israeli officers have been given wide authority to adopt the Lavender kill lists with no requirement that they check why the machine chose those people to kill. This has resulted in many civilian casualties as the killer drones select targets and attack buildings to kill one target if they determine he is inside, but it may also have 40 civilians inside.

Israeli officers admit that the machine looks for targets in their homes because it is easier to attack a family home than a military installation. I was told in the material I read that the officers are supposed to verify that the targets are male but often they have only about 20 seconds to do so. The machine finds huge numbers of targets to kill, usually many times more than flesh and blood soldiers could kill. The officers said they developed more trust in the machine kill lists than they had in their own soldiers especially if the soldier had a buddy killed a day before because that made them emotionally erratic.

So, imagine that you and/or a man residing in your home is marked for death by a line of code. It is admitted that Lavender made errors about 10% of the time and the target could not be connected to any militant group. There are many people in Washington and Tel Aviv who want to see more AI on the battlefield because they believe it will do a better job of target acquisition than soldiers sorting through intelligence reports from satellites or eyes on the ground. Israel calls its unit, thought to be using the AI kill lists, Unit 8200. It has a reputation as the best and foremost such unit in the world but Israel will neither confirm nor deny its existence as is their custom.

Israel is not the only country using AI powered killer drones as they are in wide use in Ukraine by both sides. Data is the key to warfare and AI Can find data and use it faster than any human. Armies of the future will be powered and staffed by machine solders it appears. Soldiers without pity, mercy, or emotion, but instead they are literally killing machines. This is not science fiction folks it is happening right now and the Israelis, Russians and Ukrainians are using it widely. One reason I believe this is the sixth epic is because mass hardware is rapidly becoming obsolete. Someone can go into a store and buy a $500 drone and rewire it to carry high tech explosives and send it to destroy a $2million tank. There are videos available of the steps Russians and Ukrainians are having to take literally at the moment, on the battlefield, to defend million-dollar tanks against relatively cheap drone killers.

Swarms of high-speed drones are carrying explosives against armor for both sides in Ukraine. I’ve seen video reports of the countermeasures being developed but so far you should bet on drones. Remember the massive attack by hundreds of drones Iran launched against Israel. They were all reported to cost less than $500,000 collectively but it cost $1billion to shoot them down. A $25,000 drone can now destroy a $2million tank and they are doing so.

OK, folks here’s where it gets weird and terrifying and where the world, we live in will never be the same. Right now, those killer drones are being linked to all the cameras and facial recognition software worldwide to send the drone on a search for the target which it is apparently a lot better at finding than mere police officers or detectives or soldiers. You might be thinking that technology will be used against criminals, but I am thinking political dissidents. So, you are sitting in your office on the 75^th floor of a building in downtown Manhattan, and a drone the size of a honeybee finds you.

So far, to the best of my knowledge, that technology, those killer drones with artificial intelligence, are only being used and perfected in the wars of Ukraine and the Middle East at least that’s the story we are expected to believe. It seems obvious that if available, and it is, they will be used here soon. The other point of all this is that Washington concentrates on heavy hardware, or what guys in the military refer to as big iron. They take pride in having the biggest, fastest, and most heavily armed tanks with the biggest and best guns. They want the best fighter jet with both stealth and short take-off and landing capability even if they cost $100 million each and can be shot down by a $50,000 drone. So again, we think in terms of what was needed in the last war which was in the Middle East where we could rely on superior technology and firepower, but the world is catching up, and third world armies are finding cheap soldiers and weapons with Artificial Intelligence.

Now, what is the good news; there isn’t any. It’s hard for me to find good news or even a good side in either Gaza, or Ukraine. At my best, I might be able to find sides that seem to be less bad than the other. One side thinks the Palestinians, and I guess that includes Hamas, at least according to the students, is fighting for its freedom. The other side thinks Netanyahu and the Israeli government is defending Israel and has done nothing wrong. Between the Hamas terrorists, rapists and child murderers, and the builders and bombers or the teeming refugee camps in Gaza its hard to pick a side maybe a pox on both is the best attitude, but I must say the video recently released by Hamas is a game changer. If you want to fill your enemy with a burning rage just release a video of bloody children and rape them on camera, but that is Hamas and that is what terrorists with no conscience do.

In Ukraine, one side thinks the Russian invaders have launched an unprovoked attack against a completely innocent land that was going about its business not bothering anyone. The other side thinks the Russians were responding to threats against the Russian homeland consisting of an enemy alliance on its border and an alliance which instigated a coup to overthrow the duly elected government of that country which happened to be friendly to Russia. Who are the good guys in a struggle which kills at least one half million and displaces to other countries, millions of refugees. Many blood-soaked years have now gone by in the eternal struggle in the Middle East and the wars fought on the plains of Ukraine. Hamas ignores and apparently cares nothing for Palestinian lives, or any other lives for that matter. The Ukrainians, led by Zelensky, refuse to hold elections, and apparently care nothing for the millions of Ukrainian lives being forfeited.

Finally, folks, as usual, it seems that our weapons are more intelligent than we are. We are all prisoners of our biases to some degree. It’s best if we can cling to a foundational principle based on morality but machines can’t do that can they.

At least that’s the way I see it,

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle,

Thanks for listening.