Reprinted from TomDispatch. Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers – Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego – to build prototype...
Can Trump Trump China (or Vice Versa)?
Gaza, Haiti, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Russia, Syria, Ukraine, and Venezuela: President-elect Donald Trump will face no shortage of foreign-policy challenges when he assumes office in January. None, however, comes close to China in scope, scale, or complexity. No other...
Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, and the Armageddon Agenda
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. The next president of the United States, whether Kamala Harris or Donald Trump, will face many contentious domestic issues that have long divided this country, including abortion rights, immigration, racial discord, and economic...
Early Signs of the Failure of American Global Power
Originally appeared at TomDispatch. In his years in power, Joe Biden and his top foreign policy officials have come up with a distinctly more aggressive and militarized approach to a rising China and, in particular, its claims to areas of the South China Sea or the...
‘Emergent’ AI Behavior and Human Destiny
Reprinted from TomDispatch: Make no mistake, artificial Intelligence (AI) has already gone into battle in a big-time way. The Israeli military is using it in Gaza on a scale previously unknown in wartime. They’ve reportedly been employing an AI target-selection...
The US and China at Year’s End
This hasn’t exactly been a year of good news when it comes to our war-torn, beleaguered planet, but on November 15th, U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping took one small step back from the precipice. Until they talked in a mansion near San...
Drone Warfare in the Nuclear Age
Originally posted at TomDispatch. When it comes to war, increasingly autonomous drones are now, it seems, the name of the game. Only the other day, in its stunning surprise attack on Israel, Hamas claimed to have launched 35 explosive-laden al-Zawari “kamikaze”...
The Military Dangers of AI Are Not Hallucinations
Originally posted at TomDispatch. I give myself credit for being significantly ahead of my time. I first came across artificial intelligence (AI) in 1968 when I was just 24 years old and, from the beginning, I sensed its deep dangers. Imagine that. Much as I’d...
Creating a Hypersonic Pentagon Budget
Originally posted at TomDispatch. In our present social media world, who even remembers that the Internet’s first “mothership,” as Ben Tarnoff put it at the Guardian years ago, was the U.S. military, thanks to a Cold War era urge to link computer...
Is a Chinese Invasion of Taiwan Imminent?
Originally posted at TomDispatch. News flash! Ten thousand Marines and other U.S. troops recently invaded southern California and captured Twentynine Palms in the Mojave Desert — 1,200 square miles of desert seized! Oh, wait, my mistake! Those were just a series...