Ian Welsh

The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Category: Military Page 5 of 11

The Age Of Assassination

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On September 20, 2021

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It’s forgotten now, but the invention of effective pistols created a period with a lot more assassinations.  Effective portable bombs made assassins even more effective. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination started World War I, is the most famous victim, but hardly the only one.

We’re in the start of a golden Age of assassination. It has gone largely unremarked because the victims have been nobodies, and mostly in the developing nations like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and so on, though hardly limited to those war zones.

A large group of assassins have been drones (special forces hit squads are the other group.) Drones are not, as I have noted before, a technology of the rich and strong: a good mechanic can make a drone easily enough in their garage. Hezbollah has its own fleet of drones. Iran has invested in them. Turkey, while certainly a powerful nation is not a technological leader overall, but has become a leader in drones and especially autonomous drones.

Drones will get smaller, more deadly and harder to stop. More and more will become autonomous, so that they can’t be jammed.

Meanwhile, the NYTimes has a story about how Israel assassinated Iran’s top nuclear scientist:

Israel’s Mossad used an AI assisted 1 ton machine gun robot. Its parts were detached, smuggled into Iran and assembled inside Iran. The robot used facial recognition to recognize the target.

All of this tech is going to come back to bite our elites in the ass. As Dan points out, there’s no reason these types of technologies can’t be used to kill Western elites, and they will be. The reaction to then try and then clamp down on the technology will do huge harm to tech development, because the items needed to create a drone or stationary robot are simple, not complicated, and will become simpler and less complicated over time.

Ages of assassination aren’t pretty, and they increase political instability substantially. That isn’t always a bad thing, it depends if what’s on offer is better that the status quo, but it’s always a mess.

Technologies are never neutral and that is nowhere more true than technologies of violence. Firearms put a decisive end to the age of the knight, and allowed for the creation of mass democracy. Knights, when they became predominant did the opposite: they entrenched an age of aristocracy, because Knights were expensive as hell, and training to be a knight almost had to start in childhood.

How a technology starts is also not necessarily how it winds up being used predominantly. Consider the machine gun. For the first decades of its existence the machine gun was an offensive weapon: it was used by the Brits and then other colonial militaries to absolutely butcher native forces that dared to oppose them. It helped expand the British Empire and other colonial regimes.

Then came World War I, and it turned out that machine guns were actually a weapon of defense when both sides had them.

Drones have started as weapon by which elites terrorize the weak, and autonomous robots, especially, seem like a dream come true for the powerful. The great problem of power is always the Praetorian one: you need enforcers, and the more you insist on being far richer and out of touch with the commons, the more you need them, but the less you can trust them: whatever the pretense, they become mercenaries, and people who fight for money or for the right to loot and hurt people are never reliable.

Robots seem like the perfect solution, allowing elites to have a much smaller enforcement class; just the people who create and repair them. The real dream is that eventually loyal AIs will design and repair themselves, and non-elite humans will be completely unneeded. The elites will rule alone, with loyal robotic servants and no Praetorian problem or fears that in a revolution, the troops won’t shoot.

But an age of drone and autonomous robots, some of them as small as insects, but still deadly and operating in swarms, is not an age that seems likely to actually favor elites as much as they think, because, as noted earlier, it isn’t actually a hard tech: it’s hard to pioneer, yes, just as were early gunpowder weapons (which were used by Kings to destroy the power of the feudal nobility, since only they could afford enough cannon, and cannon trumped Medieval castles) but once it is pioneered, it will spread and it will be used against elites.

The only way to avoid that is to crack down, hard, on all the precursors, but since the precursors are so simple and basic to a technological society, doing so will make you backwards, and as with Japan completely controlling firearms, this only works if everyone does it everywhere in the world, otherwise one day the “White Ships” show up and you realize you’re helpless before them.

Simple, cheap, effective autonomous or semi-autonomous killing machines are an epochal military technology which is going to change everything if we can maintain societies capable of fielding them. Even in a semi-collapse, we may be able to do so, because they are, actually, simple.

The results are in the air, to be sure. No one in 1500, even, could predict all the results of firearms and the printing press.

But elite who think this will all to their way may find out, as they bleed out their last, just how wrong they were.

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How Techies Can Help Us Avoid the Rise of the Warbots

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On June 21, 2021

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The sad truth of technological progress is that it often leads to worse outcomes, often for long periods of time. The classic example is agriculture, which led to most people living shorter, more unhealthy lives with more dental problems (pain!) and harder births for women. Most of these people also were oppressed by harsh kings, nobles, or big men.

Communications technologies are often heralded, and they have their good sides, but every significant advance in communications from oral memory techniques and writing to the modern internet has been used to increase centralized control and enable closeer control of more and more people. Modern surveillance and immediate communications allow micro-control of individuals which used to require a slave driver right there on the spot. (Hi, Amazon warehouses and delivery drivers!)

Other results have been mixed. For example, gunpowder led to mass conscription armies, and conscription armies have tended to correlate strongly with more democratic and equal societies. (It is VERY robust that those who actually are necessary for fighting get treated well — from Athens and Rome to medieval knights to Swiss Pikemen.)

We’ve moved out of the mass conscription era into a “professional” military period, and this has corresponded with a loss of equality, but we are now moving into an extremely dangerous period: The rise of autonomous fighting machines. Turkey used them in the recent Azerbijan/Armenian war, and almost everyone is working on them.

Warbots mean you only need to keep a small techie class happy, and even they don’t really have a veto on how elites use the warbots. If they want to massacre protestors, there is almost no possibility of refusal.

The narrowing of the base of people necessary, and their removal from the actual fighting puts us in a dangerous place, where .1 percent + a small, well-treated technical group can dominate a society and win wars; they don’t need everyone else beyond the Warbot supply chain.

So what we need is an easy counter. Something like IEDs – a technology any decent techie can create without needing a ton of resources.

Most modern techies spend their entire lives working on questionable techs–how to serve more ads to convince people to buy shit they don’t need — tech that does no good in the world.

If you’re an inventor type, and you want to do good, here’s your chance: Figure out a counter to warbots that ordinary people can use.

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

The Simple Truth About Libya and Syria

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On October 4, 2019

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Whatever one thinks of the pre-war regimes of Assad and Qaddafi, the majority of people in Syria were better off before the wars. This so completely undeniable, that anyone who claims otherwise is delusional or a liar (and hopefully on a payroll).

War should have the highest bar of all because, as was noted at Nuremburg, it includes all other crimes, from rape and murder on down, within it.

“We came, we saw, he died,” said Hilary Clinton. Evil. Beyond evil. Anyone with two brain cells, after seeing Iraq and Afghanistan, could predict that the Western allies couldn’t rebuild Libya and that it would be far worse off afterwards.

While not all of Europe’s refugee crisis is Libya- and Syria-related, a lot of it is, and Europeans (who, remember, pushed hard for regime change–especially the French) and Americans are morally, and should be legally, responsible for those refugees. Rather than refusing them, in a just world, they would be required to house and feed them, having been complicit in destroying their countries.

All of this is so obvious it should be beyond question to anyone remotely sentient.

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Should NATO Exist? Will It?

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On September 20, 2019

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One of Trump’s constant cries is that American allies aren’t spending enough on their militaries and that the US is, thus, carrying them.

While there is a temptation to scorn this argument because it was made by Trump, it has a fair bit of truth to it, as Matt Stoller suggested today:

The American military umbrella is a bad deal for America and a good deal for our “allies.” Japan gets protected channels to Middle Eastern oil, for free. Germany gets protection from Russia, for free. They all export to us at terms unfavorable to our own industries/middle class.

The problem with this is that it is, well, true.

And that Europe “needs” America for defense against Russia is absurd:

Let us be clear, the EU’s population is 508 million. When the UK leaves, it will be 447 million.

Russia’s population is 143 million.

The EU minus Britain has a GDP of 18.1 trillion (purchasing power parity), Russia has an economy of 3.5 trillion (ppp). Germany alone has a GDP (ppp) of four trillion.

If Europe “needs” the US, it’s because it can’t be bothered to raise a proper army. That’s all. It is genuinely free-riding.

Chinese and American flags flying together

But then NATO is a large part of why Russia is a “threat”. The expansion of NATO, which Bush Sr. promised Gorbachev would not happen, is a large part of why Russia has armed up.

It’s not clear that NATO should even exist. Its purpose was to resist the Warsaw Pact and the USSR, neither of which exist. Russia has a lot of nukes, and is relatively strong militarily, but it is no USSR and has no grand alliance facing NATO. It is not a threat unless terribly mismanaged. (Which, I suppose, it has been.)

Disband NATO. Let the Europeans take care of their own defense, or lay prostate before the Russians as they choose.

Japan is a trickier proposition. What American military presence there does is simple enough: It prevents Japan from needing its own nuclear weapons. The same is true of American bases in South Korea. Leave and those two countries have to nuclearize or become Chinese satrapies (and Japan will need a much larger navy).

It’s also worth noting that the US didn’t start protecting “Japan’s oil.” The US needed foreign oil too; it is only recently, under Obama, that the US has again reached petrocarbon self-sufficiency and is able to say, “We’re protecting other people’s oil.”

WWII was won by the powers who had access to more oil. Generals and admirals at the time understood the war was, to a large extent, about oil.

America may not need foreign oil now, but it did for decades and that is why it protected maritime oil trade.

In general, however, a US withdrawal from its forward bases will be a good thing. A rebalancing of trade will also be a good thing, though it will hurt as it happens (Trump is not doing it well). Deliberately offshoring and outsourcing the US (and Britain’s) industrial base led, more or less directly, to Trump and other social ills. It created a group of people who have lost for 40 to 50 years. Their parents had better lives. They had better lives. They know it. You cannot lie to them with BS statistics and pretend otherwise.

So they are willing to vote for and support anyone who seems like they will wreck a system which doesn’t serve them. Maybe what happens will be worse, but what’s happening right now is shit.

This is not contradicted by Trump’s support from red-state elites. They are also scared, because they also know their situation is precarious and that power and wealth has flowed away from them. And they rule over Hell. It isn’t always better to reign in Hell.

So the world is changing. It was changing before Trump: The Trans-Pacific Partnership was intended to be a trade bloc AGAINST China.

Note carefully Stoller’s hostility to China. It is constant. The American elite is finally reorienting. They don’t see Russia as a primary threat. They’re moving away from caring about the Middle East as they now have enough oil of their own and see a post-oil future coming. They know the rising great/super power is China.

They want to reorient their alliances against China. The price of keeping NATO will be keeping China OUT. When Germany said they wanted to do more business with China, Stoller was angry and said it was an argument against NATO. No Huawei, no China.

The world is very likely to divide into trade blocs–probably two, maybe three.

China rises. The US moves to protect its position.

Great power politics continue, as they ever have.

There is no end to history, save an end to humans. Only fools ever thought so.

The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.

How Important Is the Drone Attack on the Saudi Oil Field?

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On September 16, 2019

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As you’d expect from the title, both more and less than it seems.

The impact on oil prices is not that big a deal, despite the screaming. If they were to, say, wind up at $75/barrel for a few months, well the last time we had prices that high was…less than a year ago. It’s possible this will push us into a long-delayed recession, but if it does, that recession was going to happen anyway.

If Trump acts like an idiot and attacks Iran, of course, this will turn out to be a big deal. Otherwise, it isn’t a big deal, in and of itself.

Nor should anyone be crying for the Saudis. Assume it is true the attack was launched by Yemeni Houthis with some Iranian support. Remember that Saudi Arabia has been bombing and deliberately starving Yemen for years. They’re at war, and if the Houthis have a bit of support from Iran, what of it? Saudi Arabia itself has supported many organizations which have attacked other nations, possibly including Al-Qaeda and 9/11.

If you bomb the shit out of a country, and they manage to get in one hit against you? Boo-hoo.

Nor should the US care, as Saudi Arabia is a terrible ally who has done more harm to American interests than any other “ally” in the world, with the only possible exception of Israel.

This isn’t a US problem–and it shouldn’t be their war, and they should stop helping Saudi Arabia hit Yemen. But I guess the Sauds have always been good to the House of Trump, so perhaps there will be a war, on behalf of Trump hotels.

That aside, as I have written a number of times, drones are, and were always going to be, a weapon of the weak, and it is becoming harder and harder to defend against them. The US military was incredibly stupid to develop them, because ultimately they remove part of the monopoly of force from powerful countries. A world in which air strikes require jets that only a few countries can build, and which are expensive, large, and easy-to-find is a world which is much more favorable to great powers.

Instead, we have the cost of a somewhat-effective air force and assassination force dropping through the floor. Soon, these things will be routinely used by very small governments and non-state actors to kill their enemies; specific, named enemies, just as the US has been doing for a couple decades now.

This is going to get ugly.

It’s not all bad, taken from a longer point of view. Ages where elites can easily be killed tend to concentrate elite minds. In some places, that will lead to even worse police states, but the other way to solve the issue is to make people’s lives pretty good. People with pretty good lives tend to have better things to do than engage in political violence.

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Is Turkey Going to Exit NATO?

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On July 23, 2019

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Turkey has NATO’s second largest army.

Turkey recently bought Russian s-400 air and missile defense systems. The US had warned that if Turkey did so, it would not be able to have F-35 fighters. Of course, part of this is that Turkish companies producing parts also lost those contracts. The companies will be compensated by helping produce the s-400.

No big deal. The F-35, if not the biggest, errrr, turkey in US defense appropriation history, is certainly part of the pantheon. I wish Canada hadn’t bought them. It’s just a pork operation, and a lot of arm-twisting and bribes were required to make anyone buy them.

But as Buchanan points out:

Under U.S. law, the administration is also required to impose sanctions on Turkey for buying Russian weaponry…

..US hawks are already calling for the expulsion of Turkey from NATO. And the withdrawal of American forces and nuclear weapons from the Incirlik air base in Turkey in retaliation is not out of the question.

I cannot imagine Erdogan’s response to US sanctions–that alone would stand a good chance of ending Turkey’s NATO membership.

But context is important here. Turkey has increasingly been swinging into the anti-Saudi alliance, with Iran and Qatar. Turkey made sure to get Qatar supplies, and Qatar and Iran also became close.

Meanwhile, there is the China factor: An important chunk of China’s Belt and Road Initiative needs to go through Turkey.

More context. For decades, the Turks, under the old secular government, effectively on their knees, begged the Europeans to let them join the EU. The Europeans dragged their feet, and dragged their feet, and dragged their feet.

The secular Turks saw themselves as part of Europe. Europe didn’t want them. Eventually, the Young Turks, having failed because Europe made them fail, turned to a populist Islamist government.

Membership in NATO was part of Turkey saying: “We are one of you.”

Now that Turkey knows it isn’t part of Europe, and knows that Europe would never let it be part of Europe (the same lesson Russia learned after Communism’s collapse, and, oh, did they want to be Westerners, and oh, did we fuck them over), it is moving to a different world with different economic and military ties.

You can only spurn someone for so long.

If the West wanted a secular Turkey which was a solid ally, it needed to make the economy part of the equation work for Turkey, and it needed to let Turkey in. Instead, over and over, it made it clear that Turks weren’t really Westerners.

Erdogan, and now this turn to the East, are the results of Western policy and prejudice. The Turks gave us many many decades to welcome them to the family.

Having failed to do so, we can hardly complain now.

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Inequality Is Unnatural

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On July 19, 2019

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I’ve been reading UltraSociety, by Peter Turchin. Turchin’s a biologist who turned to mathematical models of human society, and he’s done interesting work, not all of which I agree with (or agree is quite as radical as he claims).

But one of the points he makes in UltraSociety, a point which has also been made by many archeologists and anthropologists, is that for most human existence we were radically egalitarian.

One of the great curses on understanding ourselves has been a tendency to compare ourselves to other primates, in particular chimpanzees, with whom we share most of our DNA.

But we aren’t chimps, and we don’t act like them. Chimps have terrible, terrible lives, ruled by fear, in despotic dominance hierarchies.

For most of our existence, we simply did not. One anthropologist, whose name I forget, once wrote that if aliens had observed humans 10,000 years ago, they would have assumed we were hopelessly egalitarian and wouldn’t be able to form a hierarchy even if we wanted to.

In normal human society (a.k.a., not what we have now, what we had during most of our existence), if someone started to put themselves above others they were first mocked, then ostracized and if that didn’t work, they were killed.

Being stronger didn’t matter, because as Turchin and others have pointed out, what makes humanity unique as a hunter and killer is the use of thrown and missile weapons. Even thrown rocks are deadly. Sharp, thrown objects like spears and javelins are deadlier; bows deadlier still.

Get out of place, don’t accept social correction, get dead.

It was that simple, and that’s how we lived for most of our existence.

So what’s going on now is unusual, and it takes a great deal of coercion to have it happen.

The fundamentals are only two: First, you must have an ideology which legitimates radical inequality (CEOs earning 1,000 times what normal people earn; politicians who send people to war and don’t go themsleves); second, you must have violence specialists who are better at violence than random people who get tired of being unequal.

This is also why periods with good weapons of assassination tend to be more equal (the pistol or even the concealed dagger). It is why Nixon, who ruled in a period of relative equality, went to visit protesters with only one aide, while modern Presidents live in fortresses and federal buildings are armored up. As a young man, I remember being able to walk through the first floor of the Department of Defense in Ottawa. You can’t do that any more. You can’t do it in most buildings. In the 80s, you could.

So, as inequality increases, so too must defenses against violence. This is true for domestic inequality and it is true for international inequality, now that it is possible for those who feel aggrieved thousands of miles from our countries can see that our country is responsible, travel to it, and inflict harm.

Turchin makes another important point, which cuts against Pinker’s “violence just keeps decreasing.”

Violence actually appears to have the form of an A. Before agriculture it was relatively low, after agriculture it increased until peaking around the time of the Axial sages, whose teachings tried to reduce it, and when those teachings were applied by various rulers, did. Thus, a long decline in the odds of dying by violence. (This claim comes with sharp local exceptions in time and place–exceptions which may prove, in the end, larger than the generalized decline. The story isn’t over yet.)

In the meantime, inequality isn’t natural to humans. It’s bad for us in every way possible (it shows up on every metric from health, to happiness, to stress, to how long we live), including to those at the top.

And maintaining it requires an ideology which pretends it is justified, and a cadre of violent men (and a very few women) who keep those who insist on being unequal from the normal, human, consequences of their actions.

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Why Elites Are Creating Surveillance States

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On June 3, 2019

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It’s commonplace now to note that China is a surveillance state.

But most other countries–including the UK and the US–are on their way. Cameras proliferate everywhere, virtually everyone carries a phone which is tracked constantly (and 5G networks will be so precise they can tell which room of a building you are in), and audio surveillance is increasingly being added. (That much of this surveillance is private, rather than government, changes little.)

AI + various recognition algos (face, gait, etc…) and cheap long term storage means that, increasingly, it is possible to know where people were, when, and store that information for years. Cameras and phones and other devices which listen in, plus access to all chat, phone, email, and other messaging means we know what they were doing and saying.

1984 was nothing on this. Big Brother couldn’t store information (no video tape even) and someone had to actually be watching the camera and listening in when you did something The Powers That Be didn’t like. If no one was watching, you got away with it.

The endgame, as I’ve been pointing out for years, is a society in which where you are and what you’re doing, and have done is, always known, or at least knowable. And that information is known forever, so the moment someone with power wants to take you out, they can go back through your life in minute detail. If laws or norms change so that what was okay ten or 30 years ago isn’t okay now, well, they can get you on that.

Surveillance societies are sterile societies. Everyone does what they’re supposed to do all the time, and because we become what we do, it affects our personalities. It particularly affects our creativity, and is a large part of why Communist surveillance societies were less creative than the West, particularly as their police states ramped up.

Surveillance societies also just suck to live in: paranoia, fear, little freedom.

So why create them? I mean in one sense the answer is obvious: Surveillance is control, and powerful people always want small people under their thumb, and small people can be sold on arguments like, “This stops crime!” and “Oh, think of the children!”

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But there are three specific reasons for this upsurge in the surveillance state beyond, “We can, so why not?”

The first is that elites have become very aware that modern military technology is mostly not in their favour. Iraqis fought the US to a standstill. The US military had to pay militias to let it leave. You don’t do that if you won. The Taliban is straight up winning in Afghanistan. The biggest and arguably the most expensive military in the world has lost to opponents who don’t have one percent of its budget. Israel lost to Hezbollah the last time it invaded Lebanon, and even lost the e-lint war.

The issue is that a big military like America’s can’t be defeated on the battlefield by rabble, but technologies of area denial (most notably IEDs) mean that large parts of any sizeable country can be made into no go zones. The state can’t rule them and neither can the militias really (because air power can be used to devastate them).

Meanwhile technologies like drones, and, I suspect, in the longer run, weaponized robots, are actually technologies that will be more useful to the weak than the strong. Bombers that cost a billion bucks and can only be made by huge firms or government organizations, and then require teams of specialists to run and maintain? Those are weapons of the strong.

But drones and weaponized robots and IEDs are or will be technologies that any competent mechanic/engineer will be able to make.

What is even scarier is that, as Bush and Obama made clear, drones are weapons of assassination. Like daggers and pistols in earlier eras, they make it possible to kill important people and are really hard to stop.

That will remain true as they disperse out to non-state actors, which is already happening.

They are also excellent weapons of sabotage. A few drones shut down Heathrow Airport, Britain’s most important airport, for days, without having to do anything beyond buzz about.

So, the technological soup to which we are coming makes assassination, sabotage, and area denial easy (as does cyber warfare). A single ransomware attack can shut down an entire bureaucracy, private or public.

The only way our elites can see to stop this is to know what everyone is doing all the time. Oh, there is one other way, but they are ideologically opposed to it.

The Rise of Inequality

The other way to stop people from sabotage, assassination, and insurgency is to make life good. People who are happy, expect the future to be better than the past, and have great social ties (love/friendship) don’t commit violence except when it is socially acceptable violence.

But this requires actually letting ordinary people have stuff: money and good futures. It means not treating them badly at work. It means sharing power (because there is no shared wealth without shared power over time). It also means, in an increasingly small world, actually giving developing country inhabitants decent lives–equality within and between societies.

If you are the richest rich in the history of the world, you sure don’t want to do that. Moreover, you are aware that you have so much, and that other people want it, and you are scared. Especially because you know serious disruptions to the social order will occur as climate change and ecological collapse worsen.

So, to keep your position, and save your lives when things go bad, you need a surveillance state. People have good reason to hate you, the smarter among you realize that, and know that only real, credible fear will stop them.

Remember, the surveillance state, combined with the technologies we’ve discussed, already means the state can easily kill and capture you. If they know where you are, who all your friends are, and everything you’ve done or do, it’s just a matter of visiting some violence on you, and they have plenty of violent capability. Finding you is the important part. The rest is easy.

A Grand Experiment in Cost

Traditional surveillance societies were expensive. The East German Stasi reputedly had one-third of its population spying on the other two-thirds. That’s ludicrous. It guts productivity, making the state poor. Combined with the creativity effects of surveillance societies, you will eventually lose to healthy, non-surveillance societies.

But what if you only had to pay a few percentage points of people to spy on the others, and, if necessary, kill or capture, the rest of the population. What if most of the work was done by AI, algos, and robots? Even better, this gets rid of the need to keep a large number of internal police and spies loyal, so you need a much smaller class of people to keep your surveillance state running.

But wait! It gets better! (Worse.) What if these new technologies mean that you don’t actually need peons? What if you can do the manufacturing, delivery, and service jobs all with combinations of AI and robots. Who needs workers? Just give the peons a guaranteed annual income large enough for them to buy your shitty goods and services, stick them in sub-par housing, and run the society mostly without them!

Oh sure, the same technology could be used to create a utopia (luxury-automated communism) but why do that? That would mean you wouldn’t be the richest, most powerful elite the world has ever known.

As members of the powerful elite, the problem of peons and minions revolting has always been the thorn in your bowl of cherries.

Finally, finally, technology offers a solution. A possibility of a permanent state where you never can, or will, lose your power.

Give it a little longer and make sure that you get access to the new gene-editing technologies (and the peons don’t), and you can even give yourself another permanent advantage by making yourself and your children actually, biologically superior to the hoi polloi.

The possibilities! The possibilities! If you can just hang on and get all of this into place, this could be the greatest age of aristocracy and autocracy the world has ever seen, and one that has no reason to ever end.

Ahhhhh.

It’s always good to be rich and powerful, but potentially this is the best era ever to be rich and powerful, with the best yet to come!

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