WAR 04-13-2024-to-04-19-2024__****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

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(340) 03-23-2024-to-03-29-2024__****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****​

(341) 03-30-2024-to-04-05-2024__****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****​

(342) 04-06-2024-to-04-12-2024__****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****​

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ALERT - Regional middleast war thread Israel and Iran at war

It looks like a lot of incoming is getting through. No doubt about it, this is all out war now. View: https://twitter.com/shadi_qh/status/1779292872770023821 Don’t believe it without a lot more evidence

www.timebomb2000.com

ALERT - RUSSIA INVADES UKRAINE - Consolidated Thread

April 12, 2024 Russia Expects 'Unconditional Capitulation' Of Kiev Regime During yesterday's UN Security Council meeting Vasily Nebenzya, the Permanent Representative of Russia to the United Nations, said: "This is how it will go down in history - as an inhuman and hateful regime of...

www.timebomb2000.com

INTL - Rocket Attack by Iranian-Backed Militias reported against the U.S. Bases at the Conoco Gas Fields and Al-Omar Oil Fields in Eastern Syria.

Israeli Air Force Gears for Ultimate Test: Strikes in Iran Israel Radar Israeli fighter jet (Archive: Eden Briand, IDF/CC) The IDF is holding intensive training for strike missions in Iran, as Tehran and Jerusalem edge closer to a direct clash. The Air Force reportedly held an...

www.timebomb2000.com

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MDA launches missile defense battle management upgrade with $847M order to Lockheed Martin - Breaking Defense

With a max value of $4.1 billion over five to 10 years, the C2BMC-Next contract will upgrade the global missile defense system to tap new satellite feeds, track hypersonic and cruise missiles, and employ AI — all potential building blocks of a future CJADC2 meta-network.

breakingdefense.com

• ALL DOMAIN, NETWORKS / CYBER

MDA launches missile defense battle management upgrade with $847M order to Lockheed Martin​

With a max value of $4.1 billion over five to 10 years, the C2BMC-Next contract will upgrade the global missile defense system to tap new satellite feeds, track hypersonic and cruise missiles, and employ AI — all potential building blocks of a future CJADC2 meta-network.​

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. on April 12, 2024 at 4:10 PM

WASHINGTON — The Missile Defense Agency began its next round of battle network upgrades with a bang, issuing three task orders worth a total of over $846.6 million to Lockheed Martin for services, software, and other aspects of what the company is calling C2BMC-Next.

The effort aims to improve MDA’s long-standing Command, Control, Battle Management, & Communications (C2BMC) network, which first went operational in 2004, by adding new satellite feeds and other sensors, streamlined interservice data-sharing and even AI algorithms.

The long-expected IDIQ contract, first announced last year and awarded Thursday, could be worth up to $4.1 billion over 10 years if MDA exercises all available options.

Lockheed’s been a lock for the sole-source contract since the start. “No other source has access to the required technical data and resident expertise to perform the described effort,” MDA said last year. The aerospace titan is the long-established incumbent on C2BMC.

C2BMC’s very longevity and complexity makes it a model for the Pentagon’s nascent CJADC2 initiative, a Combined Joint All-Domain Command & Control system intended to link, not just missile defenses, but all “sensors and shooters” from satellites to stealth fighters to submarines. That’s because the Pentagon decided years ago that replacing all its existing networks with one ring to rule them all was a technological and bureaucratic impossibility.

RELATED: First version of all-service battle network is ‘real and ready now’: Hicks

Instead the military would build up C2JADC2 as a kind of feudal confederation, an inter-service overlay to connect pre-existing and previously incompatible service-specific systems. The biggest such confederation already in service is C2BMC — whose version now under contract may well evolve into the Missile Defense Agency’s contribution to CJADC2, alongside the Army’s Project Convergence, the Navy’s Project Overmatch, and the Air Force’s ABMS.

“The Ballistic Missile Defense System, as a major defense acquisition program, is not actually ‘a’ system — it is a collection of systems, each with their own fire control loops,” explained Tom Karako, director of missile defense studies at the thinktank CSIS. “It’s not replacing every fire control system everywhere — it’s creating commonality, common data formats, so everyone can talk to each other better.”

The C2BMC battle network sits atop three major missile defense systems built by multiple contractors for three different parts of the military: the Army’s THAAD and accompanying AN/TPY-2 radar, the Ashore version of the Navy’s Aegis shipboard air & missile defense, and MDA’s own GMD (Ground-based Midcourse Defense).

RELATED: Next Generation Interceptor selection coming this month, MDA chief says

Each of these systems has its own missiles, command system, and links to radar, so it’s capable of functioning independently. But C2MBC allows them to share data with each other, with satellites and earth-based radars, and with commanders at 33 sites around the world. That, in turn, enables coordinated planning and defense against missile threats capable of crossing the globe in minutes, which no single sensor can track from launch to impact.

Under its C2BMC-Next initiative, Lockheed Martin aims to upgrade that network in multiple ways. That includes improved tracking of cruise missiles and hypersonic missiles, which both fly slower but more unpredictable courses than ballistic missiles. It also aims to add artificial intelligence/machine learning algorithms “to detect, track, target, engage and assess emerging threats” and even calculate defensive responses with “maximum coverage” to protect as many lives as possible.

“It’s a continuation of the current program that incorporates new elements that are being added in, such as NGI [Next Generation Interceptor], LRDR [Long Range Discrimination Radar], the forthcoming space sensor constellations, and so on.” Karako said. “Every time they add some new component, some new element, you’ve also got to work on the C2BMC piece so it can talk with everything else and support the larger system of systems.”

 

[Housecarl]

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Operationalizing a Doctrine for U.S. Economic Statecraft - War on the Rocks

The opening salvos of the U.S. response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine came from an unlikely place. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky

warontherocks.com

OPERATIONALIZING A DOCTRINE FOR U.S. ECONOMIC STATECRAFT​

ALEX ZERDEN AND LELAND SMITH
APRIL 12, 2024
COMMENTARY

The opening salvos of the U.S. response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine came from an unlikely place. As Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky pleaded for ammunition, Commerce and Treasury Department officials rapidly deployed extensive and novel economic weapons against Russia. In Washington, these measures represent the elements of economic statecraft, an important but largely undefined concept. Since at least 2011, senior government officials have used the concept of economic statecraft to explain the tools of U.S. economic power for foreign policy and national security purposes. These include economic sanctions, inbound and outbound investment review, export controls, economic diplomacy, and direct and indirect financial assistance. Expanded use of tariffs and export controls under the Trump administration demonstrated the toolkit available to policymakers that created a nascent bipartisan consensus during the Biden administration.

Major changes occurred under Biden as well. The administration prioritized U.S. industrial policy and other forms of domestic investments to complement mostly extraterritorial, national security-focused actions. Policy pronouncements like National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan’s April 2023 Brookings Institution speech on renewing American economic leadership provided an important high-level framing for international economic policy. More recently before returning to the Biden administration, Deputy National Security Advisor Daleep Singh articulated a “positive vision” of economic statecraft that lays down “principles, rules, and a code of conduct” to anchor elements of what may become an administration doctrine.

However, more work is required to implement these concepts and focus on economic tools deployed for national security (as opposed to economic) purposes. U.S. agencies currently lack the resources, staffing, and organizational design to accomplish this mandate. For fiscal year 2024, the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence requested $244 million and the Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security requested $222 million. Despite the greater emphasis placed on strategic competition and technological advancement in recent National Security Strategies and National Defense Strategies, these two agencies’ requests were less than 0.06 percent of the Department of Defense’s request of $842 billion. For the cost of about six V-22 Osprey aircraft (that the department grounded last year) or less than the cost of Strategic Command’s recently announced cost overrun, the relevant Treasury and Commerce offices could double in size.

Right now, Washington expects too much from its civilian economic statecraft workforce without sufficiently resourcing them. They receive a fraction of the Department of Defense’s appropriations yet the Treasury, Commerce, and State Departments are expected to perform as co-equal departments. With more resources, economic statecraft practitioners can import Department of Defense best practices around doctrine, planning, joint force structure, and training, but these first require more resources.

We propose a permanent architectural change for economic statecraft. The shift in national security priorities should be durable and bipartisan. To achieve this goal, policymakers should pursue the following three lines of effort. First, identify who should coordinate across agencies, monitor the threat environment, and inform National Security Council objectives with respect to economic statecraft, with a special focus on the tools available across the Treasury and Commerce departments. Second, allocate the resources necessary to define, refine, and communicate a doctrine covering the circumstances for their use, particularly those involving sanctions, export controls, and investment review, as well as a positive economic incentives toolkit. And third, establish the workforce, processes, and metrics to manage the tools’ integrated use and evaluate their efficacy.

Congressional Resources for Economic Statecraft

To sustain an economic statecraft doctrine capability, Congress should authorize and appropriate additional resources for the executive branch. Chronic staffing shortages, expanded but unfunded mandates like increased reporting and staffing requirements, and uncompetitive compensation for high-skilled bureaucrats typify the challenges facing the departments and agencies tasked with executing elements of U.S. economic power. For example, two years after passage of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN, the U.S. financial intelligence unit) reported that they had not established key international liaison positions. Unlike their counterparts at other civil regulatory agencies, the Treasury Department’s FinCEN and Office of Foreign Assets Control enforcement offices do not have lawyer billets. Yet policymakers increasingly rely on civilian agencies like the Commerce and Treasury Departments to act as co-equal components for national security and foreign policy decision-making and execution.

Substantially increasing budget and billets for critical national security positions involving economic statecraft will deliver several direct benefits. More personnel will provide the bandwidth to address issues involving doctrine and contingency planning. These functions could include strategic (medium- and long-term) planning functions, net assessment capabilities for bespoke research and expert assessments, and training. Congressional funding for direct hiring authorities to bring in private sector expertise would enhance responses to exigent circumstances and technological advances.

Congress could also develop authorities to create a reserve corps of economic statecraft experts, including former government officials, to train and prepare for limited or extended mobilization as various crises develop. Over the past two years, the Afghanistan withdrawal, the expanded Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Hamas attacks against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 taxed the U.S. economic statecraft bureaucracy’s ability to manage crisis issues like economic sanctions and countering the financing of terrorism. Being able to surge economic statecraft expert resources in Washington, deploy personnel to forward locations, and/or place experts within military or intelligence bureaucracies could dramatically improve government capabilities on technical matters like sanctions and export controls. Implementers would need to mitigate bureaucratic concerns about establishing a new, potentially cumbersome personnel function given the challenges described about limited resources. One possible approach could be to modify the military’s reserve “drill weekend” model to integrate these reserve experts into non-crisis workflows such as the net assessment functions while allowing them to receive and provide periodic briefings across the economic statecraft bureaucracy, participate in ongoing exercises, and maintain active security clearances.

Congress could consider adapting some of the critical, if often overlooked provisions of the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act of 1986. This part of the act created mechanisms to implement the “joint” concept for better integrating elements of the military into a unified fighting force. The act included a requirement for military officers to serve on a joint duty assignment to another military branch, also called a detail or secondment in the civilian context, as a requirement for promotion. Fostering similar joint requirements across the civilian workforce would improve understanding across the economic security bureaucracies, create new formal and informal information channels, and benchmark standard practices and capabilities.

Continued.......

 

[Housecarl]

Continued.......

One area for Congress to prioritize would be to create and fund a Treasury Foreign Financial Service, thereby formalizing and adequately resourcing the Treasury Department’s existing Financial Attaché program. The program remains limited to about a dozen officers serving in U.S. embassies in a mix of advanced and problematic economies around the world. This change would dramatically improve the reach of U.S. economic statecraft globally with relatively little cost (potentially just tens of millions of dollars) and human capital (a fraction of the State Department’s 9,156 Foreign Service employees). Bringing the Treasury Department’s financial diplomats up to the same standards and organizational structure as the Foreign Service (State Department), Foreign Commercial Service (Commerce Department), and even the Foreign Agricultural Service (Agriculture Department) would improve the Treasury Department’s ability to implement economic statecraft goals overseas involving the department’s key national security responsibilities. Important Treasury functions include economic sanctions administered by its Office of Foreign Assets Control, combating illicit finance such as terrorism financing, money laundering, proliferation finance, and supporting inbound and outbound investment review processes.

Creating an Economic Statecraft Doctrine with the Executive Branch

What’s needed to create and maintain an economic statecraft doctrine? No central resource for techniques, procedures, standards, and lessons learned presently exists for economic statecraft. Congress and the Biden administration can do much more to institutionalize economic statecraft efforts across the executive branch. Sullivan’s 2023 Brookings Institution speech on U.S. economic leadership addressed both incentives and coercive activities but focused heavily on investment and trade. The speech did not mention economic sanctions and only mentioned export controls once. While China will be the central focus of any strategic engagement on economic statecraft, national security and foreign policy crises over the past several years demonstrate that the relevant agencies ought to have a wide range of tools and capabilities to address unexpected global events, as well the need to better develop positive economic statecraft incentives rather than just disincentives. This is equally true for an industrialized Russia as it is for economically ancillary and isolated places like Afghanistan and Gaza.

With adequate resources, executive agencies can begin to build doctrinal texts and training to codify best practices and incorporate each of these considerations within the context of an interagency approach to economic statecraft. Before returning to government, Singh outlined the principles, contents, and method for operationalizing such a doctrine in a recent article that builds on 2023 Senate testimony discussed in more detail below. Such doctrine would enable agencies like Treasury and Commerce to ensure consistency and scale operations that employ key principles to take action in support of the National Security Strategy across economic and intelligence domains. Rather than saddling a small group of people with designing policy guidance, strategic objectives, and tactics, well-resourced and staffed agencies with an informed doctrinal framework will be better positioned to safeguard the U.S. strength and stability.

Critics opposed to articulating an economic statecraft doctrine may argue that publicly communicating a strategy would unnecessarily restrict U.S. policy options while telegraphing capabilities to adversaries. However, adversaries already dedicate significant resources to scrutinizing policymakers’ objectives and seeking to evade economic sanctions and export controls. An economic statecraft doctrine would improve intra-agency and interagency communication, planning, and coordination capabilities, as well as engagement with the private sector, allies, and partners. Further, the increased transparency could incentivize adversaries to alter their behavior earlier in the process before the U.S. government takes concrete actions. Such efforts could both reassure allies and place adversaries on notice.

Baselining Analytical Capabilities and Establishing Infrastructure

Along with developing doctrine, policymakers should expand, and in some places create, the “analytical infrastructure” to measure and assess economic statecraft initiatives. One key element of Singh’s congressional testimony addressed the need to “create an analytical infrastructure that incorporates economic statecraft.” The Treasury Department’s launch of a sanctions analysis unit represents the first of hopefully other offices with such a direct and holistic responsibility. As highlighted by a 2022 Center for Strategic and International Studies report, sufficiently resourcing a similar analytic function in the Bureau of Industry and Security for export controls would also support economic statecraft goals and work in tandem with a fully capable Commerce Department intelligence community function.

More ambitiously, Congress should expand the Department of Commerce’s intelligence function. A formalized and adequately resourced intelligence function in the department would augment existing intelligence capabilities to address the priorities of technological competition, export controls, and investment security. More analytical infrastructure would also enable the types of products envisioned in an economic statecraft doctrine that includes “stress test[ing] and warg[aming] the tools of economic statecraft” and “build[ing] surveillance practices that inform the design of economic statecraft.” At the very least, the Commerce Department should have greater tasking authority for collection by other intelligence community members.

To baseline capabilities, the executive branch should conduct coordinated reviews of specific economic statecraft tools across agencies. Policymakers can look to the 2021 Treasury sanctions policy review as a model for a deliberative process to evaluate specific economic statecraft tools and develop forward-looking guidance. However, this review was limited to Treasury Department sanctions authorities. The executive branch should have an integrated vision to include other Treasury Department capabilities such as inbound and outbound investment review, and the role of multilateral development banks. The Commerce Department can evaluate export control authorities, while the State Department, International Development Finance Corporation, and the U.S. Agency for International Development can look at economic tools under their authorities. Federal regulators such as the Federal Reserve System, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission should assess their role as elements of U.S. economic statecraft. While respecting their independence, Congress can consider amending their mandates to account for foreign policy and national security.

Forward-looking analytical and planning capabilities would enhance the economic statecraft function. Congress should provide the Treasury Department resources to build out net assessment and policy planning functions for medium-term planning and to expand upon Commerce Department capabilities for policy planning. The Defense Department established its net assessment office in 1973, allowing it to contribute decades worth of experience to accelerate the development of civilian economic agency counterparts. Similarly, the State Department’s Office of Policy Planning has an even longer pedigree going back to George Kennan’s creation of the office in 1947. Such a team (or teams) with net assessment and policy planning functions would conduct studies across economic sectors and adversaries’ financial markets to identify coverage gaps, threat patterns, risks, and opportunities.

An economic net assessment capability would draw on existing tools in the private sector and national security apparatus. Conducting medium and long term macroeconomic, financial market, commodity market, and supply chain risk analyses would identify potential shocks and vulnerabilities for which the U.S. government could prepare. Blockades to limit commodity exports or imports like cotton in the U.S. Civil War, coal in world war one, and, more recently, grain in Ukraine have played a major strategic role in each conflict. Weakness in financial markets can leave countries unable to meet defense and critical budgetary needs, and disrupt the lives of everyday citizens. Anticipating potential risks years in advance under a cohesive framework would enable swifter coordinated action and resilience.

These actions should also consider the increasing role of technology, which introduces further risks to the financial markets that can cause panic and exacerbate geopolitical tensions. A recent RAND study found a litany of technology-related risks to the U.S. financial system including attacks on AI-based financial models, selling off bond positions, and the use of technology to engineer behavior or financial decision-making. These changes may occur in a slow insidious manner rather than as a shock, which will be more difficult to address. In March 2024, the Treasury Department also released a report on AI-specific cybersecurity and fraud risks that could inform further medium- and long-term planning. An economic net assessment tool would consider the wide range of potential threats over time and across technologies to better arm policymakers.

Developing a Positive Economic Toolkit

To fully realize an economic statecraft doctrine, policymakers should also integrate a framework around positive economic tools that incentivize desired economic behaviors to achieve foreign policy outcomes. Before rejoining the Biden administration, Singh also recognized the need for more positive economic tools to “balance the pain caused by sanctions with a holistic approach to statecraft that causes mutual economic gain (infrastructure finance, supply chain partnerships, technology alliances, debt relief, revitalizing the World Bank).” Sullivan also discussed some of these positive tools in his April 2023 speech. Outside experts, including at the Atlantic Council, have begun to make the case for “positive economic statecraft.” By coordinating capital mobilization for infrastructure investment alongside the deployment of novel financial tools like debt-for-nature swaps to reduce sovereign debt burdens, economic statecraft can enhance economic growth for American partners as well.

A combined economic statecraft doctrine with adequate resources will prepare the national security bureaucracy for current and emerging threats. America has unrivaled economic tools at its disposal. It should be able to wield them forcefully and nimbly in pursuit of its foreign policy objectives.


Alex Zerden is the founder of Capitol Peak, a risk-advisory firm, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, and a senior advisor to WestExec Advisors. Previously, he worked in the U.S. Treasury Department, including as a Financial Attaché, the White House National Economic Council, and Congress.

Leland Smith is an international financial markets lawyer and policy advisor who recently returned from the private sector to the U.S. Treasury Department in International Affairs. Previously he worked in the office of a Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner, on the trading floor of a major energy company, and served in the U.S. Army as a platoon leader and executive officer conducting ground operations in Iraq. Views expressed are his own and not those of the Treasury.

 

[Housecarl]

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US Air Force issues $409 million award for long-sought Pacific airfield

The project on Tinian, part of a U.S. territory north of Guam, is among projects military leaders hope will make American forces harder to target.

www.defensenews.com

Asia Pacific​

US Air Force issues $409 million award for long-sought Pacific airfield​

By Noah Robertson
Wednesday, Apr 10

U.S. Air Force officials on April 4, 2024, meet airmen from an engineering and repair squadron who have been working to revitalize the airfield on the island of Tinian. (Airman 1st Class Audree Campbell/U.S. Air Force)
The U.S. Air Force has awarded a contract for an airfield on Tinian, a Pacific island military leaders consider crucial to their plans in the region.

Fluor, an engineering and construction company based in Irving, Texas, will receive about $409 million to finish the project within five years, the company announced April 10.

Tinian is part of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, an American territory north of Guam and about 1,500 miles east of the Philippines. The Air Force launched bomber raids against Japan from Tinian during World War II. Since then, the island’s jungle has grown over the finished runways.

For years, U.S. Indo-Pacific Command — the military organization responsible for the region — has wanted to rebuild them. Its goal is part of what the Air Force calls Agile Combat Employment — divvying U.S. forces into smaller groups around the region. More, smaller groups would make American positions harder to target, the argument goes.

The top military and civilian leaders in the Air Force visited the island earlier this month to survey work on the airfield. Since January, airmen have started to clear hundreds of acres of jungle so that construction work can begin.

Indo-Pacific Command sends lawmakers an annual wish list of projects it deems necessary to deter a conflict in the region. This year’s list included $4.8 billion for infrastructure, though about a fifth of these construction projects show up in the Pentagon’s budget request for fiscal 2025.

Pentagon and military leaders in the Pacific sometimes disagree on where to spend money in the region and what work is even possible in the short term. That’s particularly true when it comes to construction. Materials and workers are much more expensive on Pacific islands than in the continental United States, and projects require bureaucratic rigmarole to start.

The result is often a path paved by delays, a Republican congressional aide told Defense News in January.
“The money takes very long to show up,” the aide said. “Then simultaneously you’re dealing with horrific bureaucratic problems.”

As a U.S. territory with existing sites to build on and mostly flat land, Tinian should be one of the easier places for the Defense Department to work, the aide said.

“It’s not a complicated project.”

About Noah Robertson

Noah Robertson is the Pentagon reporter at Defense News. He previously covered national security for the Christian Science Monitor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in English and government from the College of William & Mary in his hometown of Williamsburg, Virginia.

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[Housecarl]

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Denying Russia’s only strategy for success - Asia Times

If the West mobilizes its resources to resist the Kremlin,Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West – and will likely lose. The West’s existing and latent

asiatimes.com

ANALYSIS

Denying Russia’s only strategy for success​

The notion that the war’s unwinnable is a Russian information operation that exposes the Kremlin’s real strategy
By NATALIYA BUGAYOVA AND FREDERICK W. KAGAN APRIL 13, 2024

If the West mobilizes its resources to resist the Kremlin,Russia cannot defeat Ukraine or the West – and will likely lose.

The West’s existing and latent capability dwarfs that of Russia. The combined gross domestic product (GDP) of NATO countries, non-NATO European Union states and the United States’ Asian allies is over $63 trillion.

The Russian GDP is on the order of $1.9 trillion. Iran and North Korea add little in terms of materiel support. China is enabling Russia, but it has not mobilized on behalf of Russia and is unlikely to do so. If we lean in and surge, Russia loses.

The notion that the war is unwinnable because of Russia’s dominance is a Russian information operation, which gives us a glimpse of the Kremlin’s real strategy and only real hope of success. The Kremlin must get the United States to the sidelines, allowing Russia to fight Ukraine in isolation and then proceed to Moscow’s next targets, which Russia will also seek to isolate.

The Kremlin needs the United States to choose inaction and embrace the false inevitability that Russia will prevail in Ukraine. Vladimir Putin’s center of gravity is his ability to shape the will and decisions of the West, Ukraine, and Russia itself.

The Russian strategy that matters most, therefore, is not Moscow’s warfighting strategy but, rather, the Kremlin’s strategy to cause us to see the world as it wishes us to see it and make decisions in that Kremlin-generated alternative reality that will allow Russia to win in the real world.

Those whose perspective aligns with the Kremlin’s are not ipso facto Russian dupes. The Kremlin links genuine sentiment and even some legitimate arguments to Russia’s interests in public debate. The Kremlin is also an equal opportunity manipulator. It targets the full spectrum of those making or informing decisions.

It partially succeeds on every side of the political spectrum. Perception manipulation is one of the Kremlin’s core capabilities — now unleashed with full force onto the Western public as the Kremlin’s only strategy for winning in Ukraine. That is not a challenge most societies are equipped to contend with.

The United States has the power to deny Russia its only strategy for success, nevertheless. The US has allowed Russia to play an outsized role in shaping American decision-making, but the United States has also made many sound choices regarding Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The key successes achieved by Ukraine and its partners in this war have resulted from strategic clarity. Lost opportunities on the battlefield, on the other hand, have resulted from the West’s failure to connect ground truths to our interests quickly enough to act.

Fortunately, the United States faces an easier task in overcoming the Kremlin’s manipulations than Russia does in closing the massive gap between Russia’s war aims and its capabilities.

The United States must surge its support to Ukraine, and it must do so in time. Delays come at the cost of Ukrainian lives, increased risk of failure in Ukraine, and the erosion of the US advantage over Russia, granting the Kremlin time to rebuild and develop capabilities that it intends to use against the West — likely on a shorter timeline than the West assesses.

The United States must defeat Russia’s efforts to alter American will and decision-making for reasons that transcend Ukraine. For the United States to deter, win or help win any future war, US decisions must be timely, connected to our interests, values and ground truth – but, above all, these decisions must be ours.

The US national security community theorizes a lot about the importance of US decision advantage over our adversaries, including timeliness. Russia presents an urgent and real-world requirement for America to do so in practice.

The Kremlin’s strategy ​

The Kremlin’s principal effort is to force the United States to accept and reason from Russian premises to decisions that advance Russia’s interests, not ours. The Kremlin is not arguing with us. It is trying to enforce assertions about Russia’s manufactured portrayal of reality as the basis for our own discussions, and then allow us to reason to conclusions pre-determined by the Kremlin.

Accepting Russia’s premises and reasoning from them may proceed in a formally logical way but is certainly not rational, since it is divorced from actual reality and from our interests. Soviet mathematician Vladimir Lefebvre defined this process as “reflexive control”– a way of transmitting bases for decision making to an opponent so that the opponent freely comes to a pre-determined decision.

A key example: Putin takes the false assertion that discussions of Ukraine’s NATO accession posed a clear and imminent danger to Russia along with the false assertion that Ukraine is not a real country and builds them into a false conclusion that he was justified in launching a war of conquest.

Another assertion: Russia has the right to a self-defined sphere of influence, and, therefore, a right to do whatever it wants to those within this sphere – including invading, killing, raping, and ethnic cleansing – with no repercussions.

The degree to which Western discourse includes serious consideration of these falsehoods marks the success of long-running Russian information operations.

Some sincerely accept the Kremlin’s false predicates and resulting conclusions. Others may accept the predicates but stop short of leaping to conclusions that any of these arguments justify the Kremlin’s invasion and atrocities. Many can see past the Kremlin’s manipulations and recognize that Russia’s war is an unprovoked war of conquest, however.

The Kremlin then targets this last category on a different level of reasoning – the predicates that inform our will to do something about Russia’s war and the lengths to which we are willing to go. The Kremlin targets our perceptions of costs, priorities, risks, upsides, alignment with our values and effects of our own actions.

Two main categories of false assertions that the Kremlin is trying to enforce in this respect are that:

• (a) Ukraine cannot win this war, supporting Ukraine is a distraction from “real” US problems, Ukraine will be forced to settle, the United States is at risk of being stuck in another “forever” war and
• (b) the risks in helping Ukraine defend itself, let alone win, are higher than the risks of failure in Ukraine for the United States – it is too costly, too risky, and Ukraine is not worth it.

The Institute for the Study of War and many others have thoroughly debunked these assertions, yet they remain pervasive in US discussions about opposing Russia. The Russian goal is to have us freely reason to a conclusion that Russia’s prevailing in Ukraine is inevitable and that we must stay on the sidelines – and Moscow is succeeding far too well in this effort.

It is important to emphasize that by no means all who oppose continuing or expanding support for Ukraine are doing so as the result of Russian reflexive control measures.

The point, however, is that Americans must recognize the enormous effort the Kremlin is putting into these and other assertions in order to create a picture of reality that, taken in its totality, is false.

Russia had no right to invade Ukraine, has no rights to control Ukraine, was not provoked into such an invasion, will not inevitably win and will not inevitably escalate to fighting a full-scale war against NATO – and helping Ukraine liberate its strategic territories as the only viable path to a durable peace remains the most prudent course of action to secure US interests.

The Kremlin is also flooding Western discourse with false and irrelevant narratives, forcing us to expend energy, time and decision bandwidth on irrelevancies rather than solutions.

It is not an accident that the Western debate often becomes impaled on arguing about basic well-established facts about this war. This phenomenon is not merely a function of Western knowledge gaps or short memory. It is also a result of the Kremlin’s effort to saturate the Western debate with its assertions.

A key example is a myth about Russia protecting Russian speakers in Ukraine. Russia has obliterated predominantly Russian-speaking cities in Ukraine, killing, torturing, forcefully deporting, and forcing to flee many Russian-speaking Ukrainians. Russia harmed the very people in the name of whom it waged the war.

Despite this well-documented reality, discussions about letting Putin keep “Russian-speaking provinces” to stop the war persist in Western debate. These discussions proceed from a false premise that Russia’s war aimed to protect Russian speakers to a false conclusion that ceding portions of Ukraine that have Russian speakers can resolve the war and is, furthermore, reasonable or justifiable.

Many other basic facts are in question daily as the Kremlin floods the Western debate with its narratives. Putin deliberately chose to focus his interview with American media personality Tucker Carlson on historical justifications for the war.

Putin is retroactively creating casus belli by twisting a historic narrative on the record. The history of Kievan Rus is as irrelevant to the current war as the history of the Roman Empire was to World War II. Every country in the world has a historical basis to claim rights to some or all of the territory of its neighbors.

The world avoids a Hobbesian war of all against all by rejecting the validity of such arguments. Yet the Kremlin’s constant driving of them continues to divert Western discussions about what to do now into these historical irrelevancies.

The Kremlin also forces the West to dedicate energy to an equally irrelevant discussion about whether Ukraine has the “right” to be a state or a nation.

No country with a seat in the United Nations and recognized by the overwhelming majority of states in the world has an obligation to prove its right to exist no matter how small or ethnically like another state it might be. This principle is central to the current world order, and its destruction would open the floodgates of war around the world as predators used such reasoning to justify attacks on would-be prey.

But the flood of false Russian narratives forces us to engage in such irrelevancies rather than focusing on war-winning strategies and our interests.

Continued......

 

[Housecarl]

Continued........

Russia is hijacking and substituting key concepts of Western debate about this war, such as notions of peace and defense, contributing to Western category errors about both.

Peace = surrender​

The West naturally and understandably gravitates toward peace. Our default instinct is to seize the first opportunity in any conflict to “stop the fighting.” The Kremlin has mastered using the Western predisposition to peace as a lifeline for Russia’s wars – from Syria to Ukraine.

The Kremlin has not once supported its euphemism of “peace” with action in the context of Ukraine. The Kremlin has had continuous opportunities to choose peace, including a choice not to invade Ukraine – a country that Putin considered to be so militarily unthreatening that Putin assessed he could conquer it in a matter of days.

Allowing Russia to keep its gains in Ukraine in 2015 and having a peace framework in place for seven years did nothing to stop the Kremlin’s reinvasion in 2022. Every single version of the Kremlin’s euphemisms of “peace” since 2022 has included a demand that amounted to the destruction of Ukraine’s sovereignty.

Russian Security Council Deputy Chairperson Dmitry Medvedev’s recent “peace formula” explicitly called for the elimination of the Ukrainian state and its absorption into Russia. The Kremlin’s use of the term “peace” has been incompatible with its actions, including Russia’s campaign to eradicate Ukrainian identity in the occupied territories.

The Kremlin’s exploitation of the Western argument for “stopping the bloodshed” conceals another critical nuance. Stopping the fighting does not stop the killing when it comes to Russia. The killing continues in Russian torture chambers on territory that Russia occupies – a process that is less visible to Western audiences and in a place where victims are stripped of the means to defend themselves.

The Kremlin dangles the concept of “peace” to steer the West toward Ukraine’s surrender – the outcome that Russia seeks but cannot accomplish militarily on its own. When the Kremlin “signals peace,” it actually signals a demand for Ukrainian and Western surrender.

Western debate continues, nevertheless, to indulge the Kremlin’s false overtures for “peace,” despite the total lack of evidence to support any reasonable assessment that letting the Kremlin freeze the lines in Ukraine can lead to peace rather than more war.

Resisting Russian aggression = escalation​

No one should be confused about verbs when it comes to Ukraine’s actions. Russia imposed its war on Ukraine. Ukraine chose to defend itself. Ukraine’s action is resisting death, occupation, and atrocities at the hands of Russian forces. Yet, the Western debate periodically accuses Ukraine (or the West itself) of “escalating” or “prolonging the war.”

The Kremlin has greatly invested in framing Ukraine – and anyone who dares to resist the Kremlin – as an aggressor (and Russia as a victim). The West’s legitimization of Russia, a belligerent in Ukraine since 2014, as a mediator in the Minsk agreements also gave the Kremlin eight years to falsely frame any Ukrainian self-defense action or unwillingness to bend to the Kremlin’s will as Ukrainian aggression.

No one should be confused about verbs when it comes to Western actions regarding Russia. The West has been non-escalatory toward Russia for years to the point of self-deterrence and ceding its own interests. The West has consistently chosen a path of negotiations, resets, and concessions with Russia.

The United States, while focused on counterterrorism, did not prioritize Russia, largely until 2016 when the Kremlin openly interfered in US politics.

NATO has been self-deterring for years, discussions about Ukraine’s NATO accession have stalled, and Putin expected the Western response to his invasion of Ukraine to be so weak that he could conquer Ukraine in a matter of days.

Russia has been a self-declared adversary of the US and NATO, but neither the US nor NATO took meaningful steps to defend against Russia, let alone attack it, until after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

The West nevertheless periodically views its actions regarding Russia as by default escalatory, conceding the Kremlin’s reasoning. This includes Western actions to defend itself or its partners against unprovoked Russian aggression or measures to limit Russia’s access to Western technologies and markets – neither of which Russia is entitled to and certainly not when it uses both to sustain its unjust war.

The Kremlin’s framing that any Western action to resist Russia is aggression does not make those actions aggression. But the Kremlin has conditioned the West to think that way, forcing us yet again to reason from the Kremlin’s assertions, not ones based in reality. The West also indulged Putin’s grievances and grudges and reasoned to a false conclusion that we are somehow responsible for the Russian crimes that the Kremlin voluntarily committed against other states and its own people.

These Russian efforts benefit from and strengthen trends already strong in Western discourse, such as the belief on both sides of the political spectrum that US or Western interventions are the source of all or most problems in the world. People, again, are entitled to their own views on these matters – but all should be aware of the degree to which the Kremlin seeks to weaponize our own internal discussions and disagreements to advance the Kremlin’s own aggressions and protect itself from the consequences of its atrocities.

One can in principle condemn US or NATO policies and actions in the past and also condemn Russian aggression – but not in the Kremlin’s world, and not in the false reality the Kremlin seeks to impose on our internal discourse.

The Kremlin’s focus on degrading US decision making is not opportunistic, new or limited to Ukraine. Perception manipulation is a key element of Putin’s offset strategy – a way to achieve goals beyond the limits of Russia’s power.

In 2020 the Institute for the Study of War assessed that Putin’s center of gravity was increasingly his ability to shape perceptions of others and project the image of a powerful Russia based on limited real power. We wrote:

The Kremlin often generates gains based on perception without changing Russia’s capabilities. These gains emerge at the nexus of the Kremlin’s efforts to manipulate perceptions and the West’s inherent blind spots about Russia’s intent and capabilities. Minimizing the West’s perception of its own leverage over Russia is a core component of this effort.

The Kremlin depends on this strategy in Ukraine. Russia does not have sufficient military capability to achieve its maximalist objectives if Ukraine’s will to fight persists alongside Western support. Degrading US decision-making is one of the few ways, possibly the only way, to narrow the gap between Russia’s goals and means in Ukraine.

Russia uses perception manipulation to advance its interests globally. Information operations have been a key part of the Kremlin’s toolkit for decades. Russia’s national security paradigm shifted heavily toward the information space after 2014, however, as a recognition of the increasingly vital requirement to shape global perceptions to advance Russia’s goals.

The Kremlin has been working to create an environment that would simply accept Russian premises. If the world accepts that Russia can do whatever it wants within its self-declared sphere of influence, Russia will need fewer sticks and carrots to impose its will on its neighbors. Or, for example, if the Kremlin succeeds in creating conditions in which NATO is forced to abandon its principles, such as Article 5 or the Open Door Policy, Putin would have succeeded at his goal of breaking NATO.

The ability to control perceptions inside of Russia has been an existential requirement for Putin. In 2020 the Institute for the Study of War wrote that Putin’s rule depends on his ability to maintain the perception that an alternative to him in Russia is either worse or too costly to fight for.

The Kremlin has succeeded in instilling inaction as a default instinct within the Russian population through physical and informational means. Submission takes time to achieve but the self-deterrence it generates pays off. The submission of the Russian population is the reason Putin can afford to rule with a suppression apparatus short of Putin’s likely suppression needs – if his regime were ever to be tested again (with Wagner Group financier Yevgeny Prigozhin providing a glimpse of such a test during his June 2023 mutiny).

Herein lies Putin’s core problem with Ukraine. Ukraine has demonstrated the capability to defy Putin’s center of gravity – his ability to shape the will and decisions of others. Ukraine is not immune to the Kremlin’s reflexive control, but it achieved strategic clarity in pivotal moments.

In 2014, barely-equipped Ukrainian volunteers saw past the Kremlin’s hybrid cover and rushed to the frontline to combat Russian aggression – even in the absence of Ukraine’s conventional military and Western willingness to counter Russia.

Ukraine did not fall prey to the Kremlin’s campaign in 2019 to force Kyiv into political concessions that would have compromised Ukraine’s sovereignty. Ukraine resisted Russia’s unprovoked full-scale invasion in 2022.

Growing antibodies to Russian manipulations within Ukraine’s civil society are among the key reasons Ukraine continues to exist as a state. The Ukrainian instinct to run to the sound of the guns whenever Russians invade to “protect” Ukrainians from themselves should be a clear indicator of the falsehood of many Kremlin premises for its aggression. The fact that those premises continue to persist in the Western discourse despite these obvious contradictions is a testament to Russia’s successful reflexive control techniques.

This article, with its extensive footnotes removed, is the first half of the original report by the Institute for the Study of War, republished with kind permission. Read the full article, including footnoted sourcing citations, here.

 

[Housecarl]

TECH Chinese Hackers Preparing to Launch Massive Attack on U.S. Infrastructure - Have Already Infiltrated Several Critical Companies

• Macgyver
• Today at 6:00 PM

Posted for fair use......

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/chinese-government-poses-bold-and-unrelenting-threat-to-u-s-critical-infrastructure-fbi-director-says

April 18, 2024

Chinese Government Poses 'Bold and Unrelenting' Threat to U.S. Critical Infrastructure, FBI Director Says​

Partnerships, joint operations, and private sector vigilance can help us fight back

FBI Director Christopher Wray on April 18 warned national security and intelligence experts, as well as students, that risks the government of China poses to U.S. national and economic security are “upon us now”—and that U.S. critical infrastructure is a prime target.

“The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist,” he said in remarks at the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats in Nashville.

But he suggested that partnerships with both the private sector and academia can be powerful tools in the quest to neutralize this threat.

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Understanding the Threat​

The overall threat from the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a hybrid one that involves crime, counterintelligence, and cybersecurity—and which the FBI is countering with resources from all three missional spheres, Wray said.

The threat is partially “driven by the CCP’s aspirations to wealth and power,” Wray said, adding that China wants to “seize economic development in the areas most critical to tomorrow’s economy,” even if doing so requires theft. The Chinese government has tried to pilfer “intellectual property, technology, and research” from nearly every industry in the U.S. economy, he noted.

But the CCP also wants to prevent the United States from being able to get in the way of a potential future “crisis between China and Taiwan by 2027,” he said. Americans are starting to feel the effects of this sprint, he said, pointing to “cyber intrusions and criminal activity” as early deterrence efforts by the CCP.

Budgets currently being crafted will determine what resources the U.S. government will have available to fight back three years from now. “In the private sector and academia, too, the investments, partnerships, security, and capabilities you’re building today will dictate how those sectors are prepared—or not—three short years from now,” he added.

Protecting Critical Infrastructure​

The FBI worries what this sprint means for our country's critical infrastructure, since “these vital sectors—everything from water treatment facilities and energy grids to transportation and information technology—form the backbone of our society.”

“The fact is, the PRC’s targeting of our critical infrastructure is both broad and unrelenting,” he said. And, he added, the immense size—and expanding nature—of the CCP’s hacking program isn’t just aimed at stealing American intellectual property. “It’s using that mass, those numbers, to give itself the ability to physically wreak havoc on our critical infrastructure at a time of its choosing,” he said.

This risk isn’t new, he said. CCP-sponsored cyber actors "prepositioned” themselves to potentially mount cyber offenses against American energy companies in 2011—targeting 23 different pipeline operators.

But, Wray explained, their behavior gave us hints about their motivations.

“When one victim company set up a honeypot—essentially, a trap designed to look like a legitimate part of a computer network with decoy documents—it took the hackers all of 15 minutes to steal data related to the control and monitoring systems, while ignoring financial and business-related information, which suggests their goals were even more sinister than stealing a leg up economically,” he said.

Similarly, he said, during the FBI’s recent Volt Typhoon investigation, the Bureau found that the Chinese government had gained illicit access to networks within America’s “critical telecommunications, energy, water, and other infrastructure sectors.” But, he noted, the CCP has also targeted critical infrastructure organizations through more “scattershot, indiscriminate cyber campaigns” that also impact other victims—such as their Microsoft Exchange hack in 2021, which "targeted networks across a wide range of sectors.”

"The PRC [People’s Republic of China] has made it clear that it considers every sector that makes our society run as fair game in its bid to dominate on the world stage, and that its plan is to land low blows against civilian infrastructure to try to induce panic and break America’s will to resist."​

FBI Director Christopher Wray​

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How We’re Fighting Back​

The FBI’s ability to both collect and act on intelligence is crucial to our fight against the China threat. On the cyber front, this includes sharing lessons learned with the private sector and outreach to potential victims, using our technical prowess to halt cyber intrusions and safeguard victims, and taking additional “law enforcement actions” to disrupt and deter cyber incidents.

The FBI fights back against China through Bureau-led “joint, sequenced operations” alongside our partners. “As part of those operations, we’re often sharing targeting and other information with partners like U.S. Cyber Command, foreign law enforcement agencies, the CIA, and others, and then acting as one,” he said.

Wray used the FBI’s responses to the aforementioned cyber compromises to illustrate what these collaborative operations can look like in practice.

In the case of the Microsoft Exchange hack, he said, the FBI “leaned on our private sector partnerships, identified the vulnerable machines, and learned the hackers had implanted webshells—malicious code that created a back door and gave them continued remote access to the victims’ networks.”

From there, he said, we co-authored and distributed a joint cybersecurity advisory with our partners at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to arm “network defenders” with “the technical information they needed to disrupt the threat and eliminate those backdoors.”

And when some victims had trouble removing the dangerous code on their own, the FBI worked with Microsoft to execute “a first-of-its-kind surgical, court-authorized operation, copying and removing the harmful code from hundreds of vulnerable computers ,” he explained. This, in turn, removed the hackers’ access to victims’ networks.

And in the case of Volt Typhoon, the FBI leveraged partnerships to share threat intelligence and to combat the actors responsible for the hack. After the Bureau learned that the malware was targeting U.S. critical infrastructure, we co-authored similar advisories that characterized the threat, called out the perpetuators, and provided victims with guidance for protecting themselves.

Then, we collaborated with private sector partners “to identify the threat vector and conduct a court-authorized operation—in coordination with others—to not only remove Volt Typhoon’s malware from the routers it had infected throughout the U.S., but also to sever their connection to that network of routers and prevent their reinfection.”

How Partners Can Join the Fight​

Wray said that private sector organizations and academia, alike, can partner with the FBI to protect the nation’s “most essential networks” and to conduct “joint, sequenced operations.”

Since private companies own most of our nation’s critical infrastructure, they can help the FBI by defending against Chinese attacks and sharing "vital information about what adversaries are doing—or preparing to do—against us,” he said.

Vigilance, he said, is vital to this effort. “That includes resiliency planning—things like developing an incident response plan, actually testing and exercising that plan, and fortifying networks and devices to make the attack surface as inhospitable as possible,” he added. These plans should indicate when a company will contact the Bureau for assistance in the event of a cyber intrusion, he noted.

Likewise, he encouraged private sector organizations to keep an eye on their “hardware and supply chains” to avoid potential compromise, such as the Solar Winds hack that used “innocuous-looking software updates” as a vector.

“Vetting your vendors, their security practices, and knowing who’s building the hardware and software you’re granting access to your network is crucial, so push for transparency into what vendors and suppliers are doing with your data and how they will maintain it,” he said.

Wray said partnerships are critical to countering the risk posed by China, and that it’s vital for cyberattack victims to promptly notify the FBI. That way, we can gather threat intelligence that can help us both assist victims and mitigate risk to other organizations and sectors.

“We’ve seen the best outcomes in situations where a company made a habit of reaching out to their local FBI field office even before there was any indication of a problem, because that put everyone on the same page and contributed to the company’s readiness,” he said.

The FBI has also been long-dedicated to cultivating bonds within academia, he said, noting that partnerships between the FBI and academic institutions can give the Bureau a better understanding of the issues these institutions face when interacting with the Chinese government. They can also benefit academia by giving institutions “a better understanding of national security threats and make informed decisions about how to deal with them,” he added.
Resources:

• Director Wray's Remarks at the Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats
• Inside the FBI Podcast: Technology & Espionage

 

[jward]

First known test dogfight between AI and human pilot carried out, US military says
3–4 minutes

The world's first known combat between a human pilot and a fighter jet controlled by AI has been carried out in California, the US military has said.

In a drill over Edwards Air Force Base, the pair of F-16 fighter jets flew at speeds of up to 1,200mph and got as close as 600 metres during aerial combat, also known as dogfighting.

One was manned, while the other jet was a modified version of the F-16, called the X-62A, or VISTA (variable in-flight simulator test aircraft).

The AI-run plane in action. Pic: Kyle Brasier/USAF
Image: The AI-run plane in action. Pic: Kyle Brasier/USAF

While in flight, the AI algorithm relies on analysing historical data to make decisions for present and future situations, according to the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which carried out the test.

This process is called "machine learning", and has for years been tested in simulators on the ground, said DARPA, a research and development agency of the US Department of Defense.

In 2020, so-called "AI agents" defeated human pilots in simulations in all five of their match-ups - but the technology needed to be run for real in the air.

Pilots were on board the X-62A in case of emergency, but they didn't need to revert controls at any point during the test dogfight, which took place in September last year and was announced this week.

The result represents a "transformational moment in aerospace history", DARPA said in a statement.

It did not reveal which aircraft won the dogfight.

The two planes near each other during the drill. Pic: DARPA/YouTube
Image: The two planes near each other during the drill. Pic: DARPA/YouTube

"The potential for autonomous air-to-air combat has been imaginable for decades, but the reality has remained a distant dream up until now, said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall.

"In 2023, the X-62A broke one of the most significant barriers in combat aviation. This is a transformational moment, all made possible by breakthrough accomplishments of the X-62A ACE team."

Read more:
Are we heading for World War Three?
The new tech bringing loved ones back to life through AI
Follow Sky News on WhatsApp



Colonel James Valpiani, a commandant at the US Air Force test pilot school. said: "Dogfighting is a perfect case for the application - machine learning.

"Dogfighting is extremely dangerous. So, if machine learning can operate effectively in an environment as dangerous as air-to-air combat, it has great potential to earn the trust of humans as we look to applications that are less dangerous but equally complex."

He added: "The X-62A is an incredible platform, not just for research and advancing the state of tests, but also for preparing the next generation of test leaders.

"When ensuring the capability in front of them is safe, efficient, effective and responsible, industry can look to the results of what the X-62A ACE team has done as a paradigm shift.

"We've fundamentally changed the conversation by showing this can be executed safely and responsibly."

First known test dogfight between AI and human pilot carried out, US military says

An AI-run fighter jet went up against another controlled by a human pilot in a drill, the US has said. The aircraft flew at up to speeds of 1,200mph during combat that's often referred to as a dogfight.

news.sky.com

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Mario Nawfal
@MarioNawfal

PENTAGON: FIRST-EVER AI VS. HUMAN AIR BATTLE

Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects has conducted a training air battle between an AI-operated X-62A robotic fighter jet and a human-piloted F-16.

During the initial simulations, the AI won.

Will future wars just be AI battles?

Source: US Dept of Defense, @nexta_tv

rt<2m

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1781416752829583362

View: https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal/status/1781416752829583362