The Pentagon's Silicon Valley Problem

To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued the U.S. since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars because no one ever sets out clear achievable goals.

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The place we spent the most time in the 21st century, Afghanistan, somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights.

I think in Afghanistan's case, the goal was clear but it was not achievable. A bombing campaign, some boots on the ground, and killing some leaders could not actually achieve the "objective of destroying Al Qaeda," because it would just re-form afterwards. You'd have to change the society so it wouldn't reform, hence "ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights."

Though I suppose installing and supporting some brutal warlord as a secular dictator (e.g. a Saddam Hussein) would have achieved the objective too, but the US would have gotten so much condemnation for that I'm sure the option was not on the table.

The notable exception was the Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm

I dunno, the NATO-Yugoslavia war is both more recent and produced a much clearer and more stable, positive local outcome than the 1991 Iraq War. (And if you argue “but didn't that restart US-Russian geopolitical rivalry, making it worse than Desert Storm,” I would counter that it didn't, Yeltsin designating Putin with his yearning for a return of the USSR’s Eastern European empire as his successor did that, the aftermath of the NATO-Yugoslavia war is just when the West realized it, plus, Desert Storm—well, actually, Desert Shield, but the two are inseparable—by the same token, was, in fact, the proximate trigger for the formation of al-Qaeda, so...)

The Economist did a great deep dive on why we lost. Short version: a major export of Afghanistan was wheat, which we wouldn’t let them sell to us because of US agricultural interest. With no ready markets, their farmers switched to opium. We wouldn’t prevent it because it would destroy livelihoods, a sure way to spark insurgency. Al Qaeda became drug lords, made a fortune, and bank rolled a resistance and eventual overthrow.

As with Charlie Wilson’s war, it is precisely because we wouldn’t fund health economic and development projects that we lost a war we had already won.

the lack of strategic vision

The vision is that through liberal democracy we can achieve world peace.

Believe it or not, it doesnt matter. That is the core of US foreign policy and there are ~300M americans that believe that. Only leadership can really change that.

Also

Can you imagine the hubris of trying to tell people in some remote village that the way men and women relate to each other has to change through a translator, because some tall buildings in a place they've never heard of got destroyed?

Religion and Military occupation do this, lets not pretend this doesnt work.

I find it interesting, you have some mix of realpolitik but you have a cynicism that takes away your ability to see reality.

I don’t think the language barrier or anything was an issue. We entered Japan and helped rebuild it and now we have some of the best relations in the world.

Re-building Afghanistan was more like building Afghanistan. We weren’t fixing a collapsed patio like in Japan — we had to build a whole housing tract, and at no point did we or anyone in the world have that amount of money.

we keep losing wars because no one sets achievable goals

In Afghanistan, our goals were in fact achievable, but we screwed up the execution.

In 1979, when we used the Mujahideen to kick the Soviets out, we succeeded because we had Pakistan to give us logistical support from the sea, and to do some of our our dirty work. General Zia was a true Islamist, so there was no daylight between him and William Casey in going after the godless communists.

After 9/11, George W. Bush had a blank check from the American public. But he went back to the Pakistan military, and this time their goals were very different from ours.

The generals took our billions and cooperated with us as little as they could to escape sanctions, while continuing to harbor the Taliban. They themselves were thoroughly penetrated by Al Qaeda. [1]

We could never defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as they could just retreat to their sanctuary in Pakistan, get arms and healthcare.

But publicly we kept saying that Pakistan was our ally. No wonder the public are confused about why we lost.

[1] Steve Coll, "Ghost Wars: the CIA's secret wars in Afghanistan",

Go check the annual opium poppy production in Afghanistan in the years leading up to and following the US invasion if you're interested in a more coherent justification.

Thank you, cameldrive, for this perceptive commentary on culture clash in the mideast :-)

https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-border-troops-women-h...

According to Politico, they did indeed ignore the intelligence.

I dunno, that sounds awfully close to saying, "the victim deserved it" rather than the attacker being at fault for attacking because the victim dressed in a certain way or did not cross the street when the victim saw a potential aggressor.

One could say that that's an insane take.

Any sufficiently sign of incompetence and negligence is usually just that - incompetence and negligence, you know, occam's razor and all.

if you replace “they” with “prime minister that is hanging by a thread for quite some time”, you would get my personal conspiracy theory.

But it just isn't true. Israel's neighbors can very credibly pose an existential threat, which only external intervention can thwart.

Imagine for example the very realistic scenario where Iran obtains nuclear weapons. Then, should Iran decide to fund a missile blockade of Israel in the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Israel has zero capability to protect shipping. Since Iran would be a nuclear power, it's very obviously not in Israel's interest to escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, so a threat to do so wouldn't be credible.

The only way Israel could achieve its goals in such a scenario is through external intervention, which the Yemenis have shown even now would be difficult.

Israel does need strategic vision, desperately. It's a tiny country that's existentially depend on the US and Western Europe, and doesn't have the industrial capacity to independently defend itself while it's neighbors increasingly can. This is the first time this ever happened - in the past, Israel and it's neighbors were on an equal footing because while Israel couldn't produce its key weapons on it's own, neither could it's neighbors.

This isn't true anymore. It's a momentous strategic shift in the region. What's worse is that this happens at the same time as the balance of power is tipping away from its main allies. What's even worse is that public opinion, especially in the US, is undergoing an unprecedented shift.

Something else that has not been reported on is that China, which historically was agnostic on the issue, now has an official policy that Palestine has the right to armed resistance. It's a sizeable diplomatic shift because historically neither of the dominant powers openly supported armed Palestinian resistance.

If this grand strategem is to take more than 15 years, and it is, it's extremely risky strategically. It's not true that strategic vision past that is unneeded, it's more important now than it ever was. I imagine that many in the leadership of the IDF realize this but that it's just not something that's politically viable to run with.

It seems quite plausible that another aim of today's war on Gaza is to push the international community into accepting the evacuation of Palestine on humanitarian grounds. Netanyahu might be prepared to accept some Palestinian Arabs in his Israel, but he'd be even happier if they were all gone.

Hamas has, for a very long time, refused to recognize that Israel has any right to exist anywhere in former Mandatory Palestine.

Why is this piece of misinformation so pervasive?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-char...

So Gazans are blamed for voting for Hamas's "from the river to the sea" 15 years ago, but Israelis are blameless and "just want the hostages back" even though they have repeatedly voted for Likud's "from the river to the sea" over and over again ever since Likud's terrorist branch assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and his peace plan 30 years ago.

I mean... the Allies also spent billions developing a superweapon. (And used German scientists to do it!)

The allies also had low tech solutions that helped greatly. One such example is the Ghost Army which used decoys and the like to make it look like there was a large force.

https://www.nationalww2museum.org/visit/exhibits/traveling-e...

Last week, surviving members of the Ghost Army were honored in DC being awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/21/1239871379/ghost-army-congres...

The allies had their own set of "super weapons", like radars and proximity fuses.

The Nazis had the issue that they wanted to field massive superweapons, but were nowhere near as mechanized as the allies, leading to them being unable to actually practically support those superweapons (and probably also why they went with such over-the-top ideas, hoping that they could do the job with a few units only and relying on scaring and demoralizing the allies into submission).

Or, they intentionally ignored the intelligence hoping for a casus belli and an excuse to wipe their hated enemies off the map.

It is also 2024. One would think that reducing the number of civilian noncombatants killed would be in order since then, no?

Why are you attempting to downplay the killing of so many people? You could just not do that and keep moving

22,000 people. 70% of them women and children, was it?

But it’s okay because Hamas exists?

What led you to this conclusion?

Why is this comment being downvoted?

Not news, rumors with no shred of evidence.

I’ve been hanging around some MBA types lately, and I’m coming to realize the product doesn’t actually have to perform to high specs like engineers would demand. Palantir is selling a “story” that their AI system magically decreases casualties and finds good targets, and it’s got firm numbers printed in the console (that could be completely wrong) but that is more convincing to MBA’s than any wishy intuition. So the MBA’s buy into the marketing, and the executors are buying into offloading their conscience.

The warning was quite broad, claiming that some group was planning some attack on some large gathering, including concerts, in Moscow, of which there are many. And it warned Americans to avoid large gatherings for the next 48 hours. That was on March 7th. The actual attack would only take place on March 24th.

Incidentally, there is speculation that the attack may have been planned for March 9th. One of the terrorists was photographed at Crocus on the 7th, and on the 9th there was a large concert by Shaman - a patriotic Russian singer who's regularly made songs glorifying the war in Ukraine, performed for soldiers in Russia's claimed territories, and so on. This would also have coincided with just before the Russian elections, which happened on the 15th. But security was extremely high during that concert - very possibly in response to the US warning.

By contrast when Russia warned the US about the Boston Bomber, the warning was precise to the point of even naming him.

And yet, many people in Ukraine did not believe it until after the invasion began, because they had had numerous false alarms in the years after the Crimea seizure.

Everybody I talked to online and offline, all the discussions I saw, dismissed the idea of Russia actually invading as impossible, since "Putin would never do something this stupid, it's just posturing like every other time". Meanwhile, it seemed inevitable to me once Putin started making ultimatums that would never be fulfilled and gave him no way to back down without a significant loss in reputation and standing.

Stuff like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin%27s_December_20... which Putin doubled down on harder and harder until the invasion finally started. Couple that with all the reports of the military and supply build-up, I found it weird that everybody was so skeptical. It felt more likely to me every day that we got new information about what was happening to the point that I didn't see how it couldn't happen.

I thought that Putin was bluffing, based on the low number of the soldiers around the borders alone. 200 000 simply aren't enough to take a country the size of Ukraine. During the wars of the 20th century, the Ukrainian theatre was regularly contested by millions of soldiers at the same time, and basic control of population still requires about 1 soldier to approx. 30 civilians or so, even if the only resistance is guerilla-like. It is much worse with the regular army fighting back.

As we saw, 200 000 definitely weren't enough to take Ukraine, but possibly Putin believed that the country was going to collapse immediately instead of fighting back.

There's a lot of grey here. What does "hanging out" mean? If my weird uncle is (unknown to me) in ISIS does spending thanksgiving with him count as "hanging out"? ISIS is at least pretty specific, but what counts as a White Nationalist Militia? Both of these can be redefined to capture more and more of the population if desired.

I'm pretty sure that's where the line begins

Based on what?

From my perspective, the easiest way to design such a system would be to create entries for every 'actor' in the system, feed in as much data as you can get your hands on, and then let the weights sort themselves out. So for example, if you're hanging out with ISIS members obviously your weights would be higher, but even if you're a server at Applebees you'd still be in the system somewhere.

Doing it the other way necessitates some kind of bright-line division, and any such boundary, once defined, becomes susceptible to exploitation. e.g. I won't hang out with the White Nationalist Militia because that puts me "into the system", but I can hang out with insert radical right-wing group where I can talk to 80% of the same people without being flagged. In practice, I imagine that the gradient of extremism is rather gradual and with blurred boundaries.

Maybe that's where the line starts, but does it stay there? As an example, look at how the US's anti-communist fervor led to things like COINTELPRO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Especially today, I think we have to look at every power we might give to government and ask, "What happens if the worst people get access to this?" Because they're certainly going to try.

You've heard of guilt by association, well guilt by co-location isn't that far off. Along the same lines, the rationale is going to be, "We need to track everyone so we can be sure to see all relationships and connections, and connections to connections, and so on.

Try to draw the line wherever you want, but they're going to step over it, and never look back.

If you don't know, who they are and just happen to serve a 'bad guy' ( hate that term ) a burger, should you be in the crosshairs? Because this is where this is heading. If you think I am overselling it, remember that police in US can ask for all users from specific location.

To your point, if there is indeed a line, it need to be clearly articulated so that the rules of the game clear.

I think they're just saying it's a slippery slope. It starts out with good intentions we all agree on, but then continues to slide and more and more of our freedoms erode as they crank up the boiling pot ever so slowly.

I think one of the things that scares me most about API-accessed LLMs is how powerful they are as data collection tools in their own right. OpenAI, for example, recently updated their terms of use to be more vague about how they work with the gov and I have no doubts that giving the NSA access to conversational feeds is absolutely a requirement to their continued operation as an entity, a la lavabit.

In fact, part of me thinks that the Sam/Ilya drama and sam's god complex are at least partially rooted in this, alleged, collaboration.

Imagine the questions you could pose to a GPT trained on all the conversations had with users that's been enriched with their biographical data. These conversations are often intimate and curiosity driven in a way that seeking the truth could easily be framed as self-radicalization.

The thing is, and like I mentioned in a post awhile back: technically competent actors, the ones bound to cause the most harm, would absolutely be using a bespoke method of covert communication. There's really little value, IMO, to the countrywide dragnet outside of sentiment analysis and control.

Agreed. And yet their persistence to surveil continue to expand. They're not trying to watch those who are sure to be hiding. They're watching the rest under the guise of "We gotta get those terrorists."

It makes me laugh how it’s always described as aid.

If someone gave their friend a gun, would anyone ever call it aid?

It is not too much if you think Israel is covering US military mistakes and cybersecurity (e.g. Iran).

That sounds like an imaginary problem.

Often, no. This is serious work being carried out by adults that need to come together. There is no replacement for the water cooler yet. I made the decision to explicitly seek out in-office, on-location defense work. The seridiputous conversations and relationship building was not happening in remote work. I'm someone who has always worked from home and I still do every week but my career and life were going no where typing at people through Slack and building meaningless web apps--despite making enough money to be reticent to tell most people my earnings level.

Now I'm building software, involved intimately with designing and interfacing with specialized hardware, and travelling to interesting places doing interesting things with interesting people-- occasionally toppling off of combat machines. I took a 30% pay cut to do it. No regrets whatsoever, living life.

Some offer hybrid work arrangements, but if you're doing classified work or dealing with hardware then there's no practical way to do that remotely.

hybrid is likely the best case scenario, and very unlikely if you’re in an individual contributor role with a higher level clearance.

One way to “get around” this is work it as a 1099, charge a high bill rate, and then just work less overall.

But, if you’re trying to move outside of a major contracting area like DC, youre probably better off just getting a remote private sector job.

I think they're talking about hiring, not purchasing.

Software Procurement by Federal standards is relatively straightforward

FedRamp and FIPS compliance

It’s odd to see these in the same sentence. FedRAMP is so insanely complex/difficult to achieve in a straightforward way. Even by your own estimate for a series E startup (with lots of capital and the ability to spend >18 months< on compliance) there’s a 3M$ variation in cost.

That rules out every startup or SME in software and that’s why you have Palantir, half baked tech that rarely delivers/is somehow more universally hated in USG than ServiceNow. Yet able to seize the space and hike prices endlessly due to compliance being so difficult to achieve — they realize/accept this as their edge as well and it’s why they so aggressively pursued IL6.

The good news is that this is going away and USG is strongly reconsidering its approach here. CMMC, imo, is a huge step in the right direction.

That hasn't been my experience.

For example, Naval Undersea Warfare Centers, Division Newport, had a job fair a few weeks ago. IIUC a number of attendees were given offers very soon after.

But NUWC is a DoD DEMO organization, so maybe it's easier for them than some other parts of the DoD.

And salary definitely is an issue. Even with the Boston pay scale, I think they have a hard salary cap for most software positions at about $150k + very small annual bonuses.

or were largely unaware of what they were actually building (a la Manhattan Project)

Scientists were unaware they were building an atomic bomb to use in WW2? Oppenheimer certainly was aware.

a la Manhattan Project

I imagine approximately every single person that worked on this project wouldn't be there if the Nazis and Japan weren't actively trying to kill... well whatever share of the world's population they desired to kill. (I'm pretty sure the union would be close to 100%)

There's also the general government red-tape issue, which cascades down into bureaucratic projects with two year long waterfall designs, etc.

The questions are how much resistance is there in the labor force, and how does that impact the ability to recruit talent?

Easy: Give potential employees similar salaries to MAMAA companies, and a similar amount of freedom and independence (at least in the ways in which it is possible at a defense company) as it existed in the early days of Google and Facebook, and I think a lot of potential employees (though of course not all, but this is not necessary) will "forget" their initial moral objections and go for the money. :-)

But grand claims made by technologists are nothing new. Certainly I don’t know, Ive never been in the military, but aren’t people always trying to sell The Next Big Thing to the military? Is it not the responsibility of those in charge to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of new systems being integrated into their forces? If someone said “we dont need the rigor we used to have anymore, we have AI” I see that as a failure of the org, not an indictment of the claims being put forth by boosters.

Corporate Decision Maker #2, sure, theyll get hoodwinked. They and their company may have only 50 years of experience and institutional memory to draw on. But State Militaries? What excuse do they have? War changes, but the armed forces have a long memory, and their poor decisions cost lives. Maybe Im off base, but I would expect each mistake to be an opportunity to learn for that industry. The industry has had plenty of lessons learned over the past 100 years. Why is the latest hype cycle to blame, and not those whose job it is to ensure they maintain capabilities and extensively game out scenarios and responses?

Bad bets on tech happen even in institutions with lifetimes of history to draw on, but I see that as a failure of the institution, not on the completely mundane hype cycles which occur naturally.

Obviously mistakes happen, and maybe thats what the article is getting at. But if we’re going to point fingers (not saying you are) then lets not let decision makers off the hook whose job is to prevent that hot new thing getting their people killed.

Doing so in all seriousness would collectively wipe trillions off the valuations of companies and reduce peoples net worths.

Are you unaware that the field has been called AI for decades?

what are the words and behaviors used to avoid fundamental change

in my experience it's one of two things.

1. it's declared the process is what was wrong and so immediately everyone is off the hook. Then a year is spent refining or adjusting the process but it's still the same people making bad decisions and underperforming and then, eventually, leadership changes and the "well, what we have seems to be working" will start. The process changes fade into the sunset.

2. someone will leave, retire, resign, or be fired. Then all the blame leaves with them and any additional discovery of what went wrong will also somehow be their fault. It's assumed all the problems left with this person and so no change is needed.

I sound pretty jaded and cynical but i'm actually not, it's just that's the way i've seen it go down before.

More succinctly: hope is not a strategy.

What more do you expect from a project from Peter Thiel, which is named after the most evil guy's magic all seeing orb from LoTR, which is explicitly made for governments to target whatever they want to call "bad guys" by slurping up as much data as possible from people who shouldn't be collecting it in the first place?

Dude has a dictator complex. Of course he fully the embraces the "just fucking lie and make money" ethos

Critical support to Palantir in their quest to steal CIA valor.

If you want to give a Silicon Valley company kudos for Bin Laden, give it to Cisco, VMWare, and Equinix.

Palantir's whole "CIA" marketing schitck appeared to be a ploy to build a strong reputation to help hiring.

At the end of the day, they're just another Datalake company that makes money off professional services, except Databricks and Snowflake can actually execute.

TIL 'put manners on'

(in combination, it would appear that whatever 'manners' may be, they are located distal of the cranium)

The issue is, that many non-tech (and I'm starting to think also some tech) people believe that "AI" is an accurate label, and therefore that they can expect these algorithms to be able to think intelligently.

Until we can define it, I think we should stop using the term 'intelligent' at all. It misleads people precisely because it means different things in different contexts.

If something can comprehend language, solve word problems, get a really high score on the SATs and LSATs and translate perfectly from any language to any other, we could definitely say it is 'intelligent' in all of those contexts. Is it 'intelligent' in other contexts?

Applying a technology that is really good at many things to things which it is not good at and selling that as a panacea is not a new idea. If we want it to change in this instance, we should start at least defining the terms we use so that we can determine the scope of its relevance to any area. Otherwise people make assumptions to their detriment and we can't agree even on what we are arguing about.