Drone WMDs Don’t Need Any New Technology

Drones are cheap, disposable, and the future of war. Over the past four years, we have seen platforms, missiles, and heavy infantry become increasingly obsolete in the face of $500 drones carrying a pack of explosives—a cost advantage that has let Iranians and Ukrainians alike neuter the conventional capabilities of their great power rivals. Eighty percent of casualties in the bloodiest war since 1945 are from drone strikes, Russia has managed to lose one-third of its fleet to a country without a navy, and the US is spending millions of dollars to intercept five-figure Shaheds flying over the Strait of Hormuz.

All this is the result of a technology that is still immature. The violence inflicted by today’s drones is the handiwork of the scant few that manage to evade countermeasures (a mix of radio jamming, high-power microwave weapons, missiles, automatic cannons, interceptor drones, and nets) before making contact. These defenses exploit the inherent limitations of drones—human guidance, GPS feedback, flight exposure, radio links, range—to take them down en masse. And yet, even though 75% of drones manufactured today never reach their targets, they have nonetheless been strategically decisive in Ukraine and elsewhere.

These limitations will not hold for long. Just like bacteria being overexposed to antibiotics, overexposure to counterdrone tech has created an arms race for ever-more-autonomous drone technologies. In the process of facilitating this arms race, states are likely to incrementally create and deploy an entirely new class of WMD—one that could provide rogue states with the nonnuclear means to threaten superpowers, or hand terrorists the means to selectively assassinate their political targets or civilians en masse.

Unfortunately, drone weapons intended for mass destruction have few barriers remaining to mass deployment. Even well before they reach the level of autonomy needed to surgically take out hardened targets on the battlefield, drones will be capable of employing their existing ability to navigate interiors, find and track human targets, and deploy simple antipersonnel devices to indiscriminately threaten civilians. Below, we discuss the looming arrival of miniature autonomous weapons, the limits of counterdrone technology, and the applications of drones as weapons of mass destruction.

Breaking the Last Barriers to Autonomous Weapons

The ideal drone weapon is a slaughterbot: a small, fully autonomous weapon system that can independently select and hunt its targets. For the most part, the necessary technology for such weapons already exists: airframes the size of a fist and the capability to track human targets are already on the front lines in the form of reconnaissance drones and semiautonomous weapons like the Russian V2U. Even now, these micro drones are agile and autonomous enough to hunt down and kill small moving targets like mosquitos—to say nothing of the advances in drone technology expected in the coming years.

From here, the only barrier to weaponization is integration: improving navigation enough to make drone technology useful for mass homicide in an urban setting, as well as packing the necessary guidance, sensor, and payload technology onto a small and energy-efficient chassis. Regrettably, this seems like less of an engineering problem than one of mission design: so long as the attacker is willing to accept indiscriminate targeting and use simple payloads aimed at civilians, the underlying technology is already—or very nearly—ready for practical use.

by Felix Choussat, AI Frontiers | Read more:
Image: uncredited

We're Headed for a Depression Worse Than 2008; and Military Spending Isn't Helping

[ed. Which sounds like the good news if AI doesn't kill us all first.]

Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai discuss many of the long-operating forces that have been eating away at the foundations of the American economy, from its super-sized military to neoliberalism and financialization, now exhibiting many late-stage pathologies, from asset speculation to extreme wealth concentration. And as bad as those trends have been, Trump has succeeded in making them worse.

  

Michael Hudson and Radhika Desai examine the gap between Trump's promised economic boom and the reality of an economy sustained by asset bubbles rather than production. They show that the stock market's rise reflects cheap credit, buybacks, and speculation rather than profit, a Ponzi-scheme dynamic that cannot survive the oil shock triggered by Trump's war on Iran. His tariffs have not reversed deindustrialization, and his refusal to end that war guarantees the inflation he promised to kill. The result is a starkly K-shaped economy, in which the wealthiest 1% have seen their assets grow from $10 trillion to over $50 trillion in twenty-five years while the bottom half of Americans have gone from nothing to nothing, pushing the US toward a depression as serious as the 1930s and eroding even his own base's faith in him.

00:00 – Highlights 

01:12 – Channel introduction 

02:02 – Iran war escalation and the coming global oil/energy shock 

06:56 – The dollar's shift from treasury-based to stock market speculation (Ponzi bubble) 13:56 – China's stabilizing role vs. the Fed's inflation-vs-interest-rate gap 

25:06 – Inflation, GDP growth, and why "growth" numbers are largely fake (rents, fees) 34:00 – De-industrialization, manufacturing job losses, and shrinking labor force participation 

42:06 – The K-shaped economy: stock market boom vs. wealth inequality, and Trump's collapsing approval ratings  [...]

Radhika Desai:

Today we have decided to talk about the US economy under Trump. Now, of course, Trump is doing everything in his power to suck the oxygen out of the story about the economy. That includes continuing to escalate wars and all sorts of diplomatic and other shenanigans that he is constantly involved in, berating leaders of other countries and generally trying to make a big spectacle of himself... Anyway, all of these shenanigans are designed to distract attention from the biggest story, the condition of the US economy. Notwithstanding his unhinged and genocidal antics, the topic of the US economy simply will not go away. The world is settling down to summer before the midterm elections, and assessments of the US economy are proliferating. That is what we are going to talk about today, because the US voter votes on her economic condition, and her economic condition is not looking good at all. Michael, what are the headlines from your point of view?

Michael Hudson:

Well, the headline is really that the US economy is all about Donald Trump right now. The main thing, as you have just pointed out, is the war with Iran that he is escalating. Instead of rolling things back, he is bombing Iran. Iran has taken a response that is irreversible. It has closed down trade not only in the Strait of Hormuz but also in the Red Sea, with the Yemenis’ support, and it is bombing Bahrain’s port. It is absolutely certain that there is going to be a shutdown in the oil trade, and that is going to affect the entire world economy and push it into what I think is going to be as serious a depression as the 1930s. That is the US economy... It has been a huge expansion of financial wealth without any real expansion in living standards, real wages, or prosperity for most of the population. All of this financial wealth has been based on credit. Companies are not making more profits. The whole leadership of the stock market has been the seven AI companies linked to computers. AI is not making a profit; it is all speculation that we are going to expand and that there is going to be a huge market because everybody is going to use AI. But all of this market is dependent on computer chips that run on energy. We are going to see energy prices go way up, and that means electricity prices are going to go up. I want to briefly explain why the oil war is so important when we talk about the economy. [...]

Michael Hudson:

I want to explain just how that works. My whole premise in Super Imperialism is that after the United States went off the gold standard in 1971, all of this military spending, which is the major cause of the balance of payments deficit, ended up in foreign countries. The recipients took the dollars, turned them over to the central banks, and the central banks bought Treasury bonds and Treasury securities. What has happened in the last few years is that banks have stopped buying Treasury securities. The growth in international reserves has taken the form primarily of buying gold, not Treasury securities, and yet the US dollar remains strong. What has happened is that the private sector that has been receiving these dollars has not been turning them over to the government to recycle to the US as Treasuries, as you and I have been talking about. They have spent them into the US stock market. What has that done? It has inflated prices and ridden on the wave of the Federal Reserve supporting the banking system and creating huge asset price inflation, starting with the zero-interest-rate policy that Obama began. What has been creating all this financial wealth, making trillions of dollars for financial investors, has not been profits. It has been the ability to borrow at a low interest rate, including low interest rates in Japan, to buy US securities, bid up the prices of stocks, and create a huge credit overhead. So it is not a profit bubble; it is a Ponzi-scheme capital-gains bubble. It is a credit-creation bubble.

The problem is what happens when there aren’t the profits to support the stock buyback programs and the dividend payouts that have enabled borrowers to carry the debts they have taken on to bid up the stocks. If the credit begins to be rolled back here, and two weeks ago we talked about how Warsh and Bessent want to roll back the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet, they want to begin selling the Federal Reserve bonds that they have been buying in recent years to help liquefy the economy. The economy is going to be made much less liquid, and all of a sudden it is like a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme requires more and more people buying into it to provide the revenue to pay off investors. If interest rates go up, there is no more recycling of all this money into the stock market to help support things, and there is going to be a huge write-down. When that happens, stocks begin to fall. With higher energy prices, higher food prices, and higher costs of doing business, companies will go out of business. The Financial Times and main business sites have been saying the real problem is private equity. They have borrowed money from the banking system to buy companies, and now some of these companies are going to be running losses and closing down operations because it is not profitable to operate with high oil prices, high energy prices, and high electricity prices. Once they close down operations, they will not be able to pay the debts they have taken on, creating the same snowball effect that people expected in 2008–2009, when Obama decided on a bailout of the banks and decades of asset-price inflation to keep the bubble going and save the banking system. We are talking about the dynamics set in motion by the oil war, the rise in energy prices, and the AI demands for electricity that cannot be met because there is no electricity supply. All of this hopium has evaporated, and the result is going to be the serious depression we have been talking about all along. Yet the stock market idles along as if everything is all right. Our point is that these changes are irreversible. You cannot reverse a debt-inflated economy without wiping out the debts. How does that happen? Companies go bankrupt. There is not going to be a Brady Plan for the American economy. It is going to be companies going broke, and there will be a capital flight out of the dollar, not into the dollar. The whole world balance is being thrown out of kilter in a way that, unlike 2009, there is no monetary solution to a problem of actual physical supply of energy, electricity, oil, and chemicals not being available. This is the grand interruption that we are going to be talking about.

by Radhika Desai with Michael Hudson, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Image: YouTube

[ed. Not to mention the trillion bucks or so we're spending on the military each year, and the insane level of national debt that's accruing each day (nearly $40 trillion and counting (see this real time clock). The military's current arsenal is also severely depleted and will likely require even more big bucks to replenish expensive weapons systems (that are likely to be antiquated as soon as they're delivered as kinetic warfare rapidly shifts to AI controlled drones (NYT); see also: The US is Blowing Billions on the Wrong Weapons (Atlantic). Finally, remember that non-war we're not fighting? Iran War: Brief US Pause Followed by Renewed Strikes as Iran Intensifies Attacks on Bases and Kuwait Desalination; Continued Speculation About US Operation (NC):]

***

From Larry Johnson in The US Faces a Strategic Crisis with Iran…The Rapid Depletion of US Battlefield Missiles: [...]

These are not just the numbers currently in the hands of US CENTCOM (i.e., the US military command in charge of the war against Iran), these are the total numbers available to all of the US military commands. If these missiles are allocated evenly to the other two critical commands — i.e., EUCOM (European Command) and PACOM (Pacific Command) — then you begin to understand the gravity of this deficit.

Let’s take the case of the Tomahawk missile. Let’s assume there are 3,000 left (I believe that is a generous over estimate) and the remaining number are divided evenly among CENTCOM, EUCOM and PACOM… That means each command gets 1,000. Does anyone want to argue that in the event of a hot war with Russia or China that EUCOM and PACOM respectively would be able to sustain combat operations for more than four weeks? Hell, CENTCOM fired 850 of them during the first four weeks of EPIC FURY.

Here’s another major problem: All eight missile systems rely on rare earth elements — there are no exceptions among modern US precision-guided weapons. The dependence is nearly universal because rare earth permanent magnets are irreplaceable for the high-performance actuators, guidance motors, and seeker gimbals that make these weapons accurate. And who controls the supply chain of these rare earth minerals? China!…

The supply chain isn’t just about mining — it’s about processing, separation, and magnet manufacturing, which China controls:

Mining: China ~60% of global rare earth oxide production
Refining/Separation: China ~91%
Sintered NdFeB Magnet Manufacturing: China **~94%**

Regrets, Maybe a Few

How Biden Enabled Israel’s Aggression Toward Gaza—and Iran (New Yorker)
Image: Saher Algohrra/NYT/Redux
[ed. Another blame shifting mea culpa, usually issued after some self-inflicted disaster that everyone warned against and finally can't be denied - "Who could have known?" and "If only we knew then what we know now". Etc. etc. Iraq, Iran, Climate Change, DOGE, Trump...]

Anyone Can Be a Millionaire; Not Everyone Has Enough Testosterone

[ed. Beavis and Butt-Head have opinions.]

In America, Almost Anyone Can Be a Millionaire

This week, I ignited a small controversy on social media by claiming that “the rich are rich because they work, while the poor are poor because they don’t.” My critics were offended that I would, in their eyes, demean the poor this way. But it’s just simple reality: the top 10 percent of Americans income earners work more than 7 hours per week more than earners in the bottom 10 percent. Less-educated Americans are less likely to work at all than those with more education.

Not looking for work or working too little is indeed the main cause of poverty in America. This may seem unkind, but my critics are missing the wonderful upside: in America, anyone can become wealthy if they work full time and save reasonably over their careers.

This is one of the first things that wowed me about America. I still vividly remember the time I visited Florida from Venezuela in the early 2010s and met a Cuban-American cashier at a local Publix. While she was scanning our items, she told us she was taking a vacation with her husband the following week, a cruise to the Caribbean.

I was amazed. How could a cashier afford to go on a cruise vacation? Cashiers live in deep poverty in Venezuela; in America they get to live like the Venezuelan upper class.

That story is not unusual. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled a Costco worker named Tony Barzar from Arizona. Barzar never went to college, only taking some community college classes without finishing. Nonetheless, working his entire life in grocery stores and Costco, he has amassed over $1 million in his 401(k) account. He also owns a home with a pool and has traveled to Europe twice in the last decade—all while making just shy of $33 per hour.

He got there not by some great feat, but by slow and steady saving.

by Daniel Di Martino, City Journal |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. Hope his job is one that gets taken out by AI sooner rather than later.]

******

Hegseth wants a “High-T” military; doctors call it a clinical minefield

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the startling announcement that the US military would begin requiring all active duty and reserve personnel aged 30 and older to undergo mandatory screening for testosterone deficiency. The screenings will take place during yearly health assessments. Those under age 30 can also get screened on request.

In a short video posted on social media, Hegseth explained to the military community that the screenings and possible subsequent treatments are intended to “optimize your performance, your resilience, and your long-term health.” While saying that the initiative wasn’t about “artificial enhancement” and that members could decline treatment, Hegseth claimed that the testing and potential treatment was for “restoring and optimizing” capabilities, protecting “longevity,” and “ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight.”

But will testosterone screening and treatment actually “optimize” our “warfighters”? Will it help most of them live longer? Should everyone else get screened and treated, too?

“A big fat ‘Oh, no'”

Screening people widely for medical conditions and then treating those who need it may sound like a huge social positive. But issues around male hypogonadism—the condition in which the body doesn’t produce enough testosterone—can be complex.

That’s why the Endocrine Society—made up of experts in the complex systems that release hormones in the body—posted a statement on the topic in the wake of Hegseth’s announcement. The document notes that “there is insufficient evidence to support a general recommendation to perform population-level screening for hypogonadism in asymptomatic men with measurement of blood testosterone level.”

To find out why, Ars Technica spoke with Professor Bradley Anawalt, chief of medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center. He specializes in endocrinology and men’s health.

“This is a great big fat ‘Oh, no,’” Anawalt said in reaction to Hegseth’s announcement. “We’re turning the clock back on rational healthcare. … I’m worried about the ethics. I’m worried about the health consequences. I’m worried about unnecessary evaluations, incorrect assessments, and incorrect diagnoses that lead to inappropriate prescriptions of testosterone.”

To understand why, let’s start with the basic question: Why might someone have low testosterone?

by Beth Mole, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: Getty|Stefani Reynolds
[ed. Definitely read the Comments Section on this one. It's like a salve for dementia. As one person noted, why does everything from this administration sound like it just came out of The Onion? See also: Bony Soldier Diving On Top Of Grenade Only Makes It Deadlier.]

Thoughts on a Funeral

I've just visited the largest funeral in history, where millions mourned Sayyed Ali Khamenei, the Iranian leader who was assassinated by the US-Israeli coalition along with members of his family. It is practically impossible to understand what this scene is like, or what it means, unless you're here. I've met people from around the world who've come to pay respects, including many from across the West. The crowds pouring in are endless, and grow larger and more intense into the night. 

From Tehran's Mosala, there are indignant calls for vengeance, displays of sorrow and defiance, protest, songs and marathons of poetry. These days of mourning will amount to one of the most resonant moments in the history of anti-imperialist movements. 

Everyone I've spoken to believes war will return to Iran before long, and none trust the MOU with the US. But they are confident their country can deter another assault. They see their own citizens' mobilization as an integral component of Iran's survival. 

If the assassination of Khamenei was designed to spur regime change, his funeral demonstrates how badly it has backfired. And the crime may blow back in ways its historically illiterate authors could have never imagined. 

What we're witnessing in the Mosala consolidates the Islamic Republic and its revolutionary society as a political reality that can not be erased through regime change war or sanctions. This is a turning point in the region that will echo for a generation.

by Max Blumenthal, X |  Read more:

Image: X

Addicted to War

Whether it’s an addiction or an illness I’m not sure, but all too many of us and our leaders, it seems, have war fever (and a distinctly high temperature). And here’s the strangest thing: when you consider our history since World War II or look around this planet any day of the week, it seems as if all too many of our leaders simply can’t help themselves. They just (or do I mean unjust?) have to go to war. And it evidently matters not at all that the major powers on this planet can no longer seem to win any war they start. Not one in recent memory. And yet, explain it as you will -- an addiction, a fever, a grim desire -- at least two crucial leaders at this very moment, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, seem incapable of stopping themselves.

And here’s the OMG news story that shocked me the other day. At the New York Times, a piece by reporter Constant Méheut had this headline: “The War in Ukraine Has Now Gone On Longer Than World War I.” And here’s how his report began: “The war in Ukraine has often been compared to World War I for its brutal infantry assaults and heavy casualties. Yet the idea that it could, by any measure, surpass a conflict so long and bloody that French soldiers hoped it would be ‘the last of the last’ once seemed unthinkable.”

No longer, unfortunately.

And Russia is anything but alone. After all, my country spent three years in bloody strife in Korea, nearly 9 years in Iraq, almost 20 in Vietnam, and almost 20 more in Afghanistan (and, mind you, that’s hardly the full list of its various conflicts) without a victory in sight. Of course, only recently, “my” president launched the latest all-American conflict, this time with Iran and with an utterly predictable lack of success given our history over the last 80 years. That war is now in a strange, distinctly unsettling holding pattern, and who knows what will come next?

In fact, given the history of this country and war since, in September 1945, it emerged victorious from World War II (having dropped atomic bombs on two Japanese cities to end it), it should be considered beyond remarkable that Americans would still be so willing to let staggering amounts of our tax dollars be eternally “invested” in the U.S. military. That’s year after year after year without the slightest bit of protest. The latest figure offered by Donald Trump: a Pentagon budget that’s no longer the usual almost a trillion dollars (itself nothing short of shocking) but an even more eye-opening (or do I mean eye-watering?) $1.5 trillion (yes, trillion!) dollars.

And how strange, don’t you think, that, in a world where we humans already seem to go to war endlessly with other human beings, we’ve also evidently decided to go to war with this very planet itself? Of course, I’m thinking about what’s come to be known as “climate change,” but should undoubtedly have been labeled something more like “our war on the climate” (or “climate war”). And worse yet, war among us humans has proven to be perhaps the most devastating way of all to also make war on this planet itself, since nothing releases fossil fuels into the atmosphere quite the way war does. In fact, according to the Costs of War Project, the U.S. military is now believed to be “the single largest institutional producer of greenhouse gases in the world”!

After all, whatever it doesn’t accomplish, the one thing that war actually does do remarkably successfully (along with killing so many of us and destroying villages, towns, cities, and sometimes whole countries) is pour ever more fossil fuels into our atmosphere and so add immeasurably to the overheating of this planet. Honestly, could we humans be more dystopian?  [...]

It is truly strange, don’t you think? I’m referring to “my” president’s never-ending urge, the second time around, to commit mayhem on this planet. (And yes, I keep putting “my” in quotation marks because I didn’t vote for him and I never wanted him to be president of the United States.) And yes again, every day there’s something, whether it’s the killing of a supposed Latin American gangster-in-chief, the kidnapping of the president of Venezuela and his wife, the blasting of Iran, the increasing threats against Cuba, or... well, I can’t even imagine what truly lies in our future (and, count on it, neither can Donald Trump), but nothing good, that’s for damn sure.

And hey, Pete Hegseth, our secretary of war (which, as a label, is historically one hell of a lot more accurate than secretary of defense), couldn’t have been blunter about our situation back in 2025: “Everything starts and ends with warriors in training and on the battlefield. We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind. And refocusing on lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards and readiness.”

Yes, there is, it seems, nothing worth the bother but war and more war. That, sadly, is indeed our world and it seems like we just can’t help ourselves. War is and always has been a human addiction -- or should we think of it as an illness? War fever, perhaps?

by Tom Englehardt, Substack |  Read more:

Image: A long wall of acceptance. Maya Lin’s Vietnam Memorial, Washington. (David J. Jackson, cc by SA 4.0/ Wikimedia Commons)

Introducing Peace 1.0™

“President Trump said he hoped the war with Iran would soon be in the ‘rearview mirror’ on Tuesday, even as the terms of a cease-fire he signed remained secret and Vice President JD Vance acknowledged that it was ‘a very general document’ with few details.” – New York Times

- - -

After several profitable quarters from our line of War Mongering products, which include blowing up water facilities and a school, as well as temporarily disrupting one-fifth of the world’s oil shipments, we’re excited to announce the rollout of our new product: Peace 1.0™.

Peace 1.0™ is a revolutionary conflict-reduction platform that leverages diplomacy, reduced bombing, and reopened shipping lanes to create value for shareholders, with potential benefits for people living throughout the region.

We’re starting with a regional rollout in Iran, but early testing suggests that customers respond positively to features like the absence of active warfare, longer lifespans, and a fragile sense of security.

FAQ

What is included in Peace 1.0™?
Peace 1.0™ includes a one-page memorandum, several unresolved technical questions, and a loose promise to figure out what the agreement actually means at a later date.

How is Peace 1.0™different from previous versions of peace?
Unlike legacy peace, Peace 1.0™ improves on the original by providing many of the same benefits while adding exciting new features, including higher oil prices, increased regional instability, damaged infrastructure, and a sense that war might break out again at any moment.

Is Peace 1.0™ a fully developed product?
Following startup best practices and to get our product to market faster, we’re releasing a minimum viable product that removes nearly all of the details customers typically associate with a peace agreement.

Why are the contents of Peace 1.0™ a secret?
New products always have a few technical glitches, like a lack of specifics on how the product actually works, and we don’t want customers to delay adoption until Peace 2.0.

What metrics will determine whether Peace 1.0™ is a success?
We’ll be tracking key performance indicators such as the number of missile launches (single digits are ideal), lower insurance premiums for cargo ships, and whether peace feels slightly less certain than it did before.

Are you planning on rolling out Peace 1.0™ to other parts of the world?
Our War Mongering division is working tirelessly to identify potential growth markets. Until then, we’ll be holding off on a global launch.

Are you discontinuing your War Mongering line of products?
Absolutely not. War Mongering products, combined with Peace 1.0™, work symbiotically to drive fast-growing revenue. In fact, every successful rollout of Peace creates exciting new opportunities for future wars, while every war creates additional demand for Peace. We’re so confident in this business model that our long-term goal is to become the world’s leading provider of both.

by Kate Chrisman, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. See also: The Art of the Nuclear Deal (McSweeny's).]

Trump Does Not Understand the War He Lost

Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran. Instead of merely repeating the outlines of what looks to be a terrible peace deal, however, Trump made a series of statements so bizarre, even by his usual standards, that they raise the question of whether the president still understands the words that come out of his own mouth.

The president began with a classic Trumpian move, daring his listeners to forget today what they knew yesterday. Just this winter, Trump had promised the Iranian people that the tyrants who ruled them would be gone. But now? “I never cared about regime change,” he told reporters, waving away his failure to achieve a primary strategic goal by denying that it had ever been a goal at all.

Things got a little weirder, however, when he described the Iranians who have stepped in to replace the regime leaders killed in U.S. strikes: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.”

“They were strong people, smart people,” he added. And then he dropped this remarkable claim: “They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

This definitely not-radicalized group that Trump seems to like includes the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei (whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. strikes), and the still-standing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, all of whom have shown no compunction about lashing out in any direction during Trump’s “cease-fire,” the make-believe pause in the war during which no one actually ceased firing.

Trump’s description of the current regime in Tehran as a bunch of swell guys was brewed in a heavy-duty vat of wishful thinking. It’s an extreme version of Trump’s tendency, when he’s been outplayed by powerful enemies, to describe his opponents as basically reasonable people. (He has done the same over the years with dictators and autocrats in North Korea, Russia, and China, among other countries.) This is his way of assuring the public that he did not get taken to the cleaners—because, of course, his affable partners would never do that.

Trump fared no better talking about the Iranian nuclear program. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium exists largely because Trump unilaterally called off U.S. participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that was meant to prevent Iran from enriching uranium beyond minimal levels for civilian uses. After the U.S. and Israeli attacks last year, and yet more pounding during Operation Epic Fury, that uranium remains underground, either hidden in storage or buried beneath tons of rubble; some of it can likely be recovered and enriched for military uses. Trump has said, repeatedly, that Iran must hand it over.

Until today.

“I call it the nuclear dust, their enriched material, right?” Trump said. (Why he calls it this remains a mystery.) Does America still insist on its removal from Iran? Well, maybe.

“The whole mountain has collapsed on top. We have cameras on it,” Trump said. “You could make the case ‘Why are you even bothering?’ ’cause it’s not really valuable. It’s, you know, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth. It’s not very valuable stuff, but I think psychologically we wanna get it.”

The United States and Israel ostensibly went to war with Iran last summer over the prospect of the Tehran regime developing a bomb, and that same threat has supposedly been at the center of America’s largest military operation in decades—but now the highly enriched uranium isn’t very valuable? The president wants it for “psychological” reasons? (This is reminiscent of his comment that America should seize Greenland because it was “psychologically” important to him.) Does the commander in chief understand what he’s saying? More important, will Iran keep tons of highly enriched uranium under this new deal or not?

“The biggest thing,” Trump said today, is that “Iran will not have a nuclear weapon.” That’s fine, except that it didn’t have one before, either, and now it has an even greater incentive to get one. But nuclear issues are very complex and technical, so let’s move on to Trump’s comments about something less complicated: Middle Eastern politics.

Once again, the president seemed unable to comprehend either the situation or his own words. No one outside of the Trump administration has yet seen the final memorandum of understanding that Trump and the Iranians have signed, least of all, according to some reports, the Israelis. If the outlines of the deal are in line with the administration’s own talking points, it’s bound to cause serious agita in Jerusalem: The terms reportedly require a cessation of Israeli hostilities with Hezbollah in Lebanon, a tricky condition considering that Israel was not a party to the negotiations. This is probably why Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced yesterday that Israel would maintain its presence in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria for “as long as necessary.”

Trump, in other words, is trying to deal away Israel’s right to defend itself, treating it less as a sovereign country and more as a kind of 51st U.S. state run by an annoying governor who needs to get with the program. But what if Iran’s proxy Hezbollah attacks Israel? According to the president, the Israelis need to calm down, and he minimized Hezbollah as “a little pinprick out there that constantly rears its head.” [...]

Trump has never shown very much concern about the conduct of Israeli military operations anywhere (including the war in Gaza, which he viewed primarily as a public-relations problem). But now that he needs to rein in Jerusalem at Tehran’s behest, he has taken the position that the Israelis are causing too much damage in Lebanon. And in a stunning reminder that alliances for Trump are only expedients, he pivoted to praising al-Sharaa and criticizing Israel, saying that if Israel “can’t do the job without killing everyone else, he’ll do the job.”

This kind of flip-flop illustrates Trump’s view of global politics: States are just a bunch of playing cards that he can rearrange at will, which makes watching him talk about foreign policy this way like watching someone cheating at solitaire. Even now, after many years as president, he is constantly frustrated to find out how little leverage he has when other nations refuse to abandon their own interests and do as he commands.

Trump’s comments about the Middle East may not make any sense, but one thing that has emerged in 4K clarity is that the only world leader who got pantsed worse than Trump in all of this was Netanyahu. No one should pity Israel’s prime minister: He brought this situation upon himself and his nation. Netanyahu, along with the Iran-war hawks in the United States, somehow thought that he could be smart or flattering or persuasive enough to avoid the inevitable burn that comes from trusting Donald Trump. Netanyahu refused to see that Trump, when it comes to self-interest, is as predictable as a sunrise: When something he’s involved with goes bad, he walks away and lets others suffer the chaos he’s created. [...]

None of this makes any sense, except as desperate rationalizations from a man who cannot face facts and admit defeat. Trump has always had a tenuous relationship with the truth, but evidence is mounting that on the most important questions of war and peace, the president of the United States seems to be losing his grip on reality itself.

by Tom Nichols, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. No coherent foreign policy other than flaunting American military power and trying to make Trump appear 'strong' (even if it's just taking out a few fishing boats). It really is that simple (minded). See also: Introducing Peace 1.0™ (McSweeny's).]

Mosquito Drones

[ed. Predictable. I remember Neal Stephenson describing drone swarms in his book The Diamond Age: A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. There may be some issues with outdoors applications but a swarm released into a building could be deadly (especially if payloads include a small shot of neurotoxin.]

Qian Xuesen: "Father of Chinese Rocketry"; Deported Illegal Immigrant

Qian Xuesen (Chinese: 钱学森; December 11, 1911 – October 31, 2009; also spelled as Tsien Hsue-shen) was a Chinese aerospace engineer and cyberneticist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics. He achieved recognition as one of America's leading experts in rockets and high-speed flight theory prior to his deportation to China in 1955.

Qian received his undergraduate education in mechanical engineering at National Chiao Tung University in Shanghai in 1934. He traveled to the United States in 1935 and attained a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Afterward, he joined Theodore von Kármán's group at the California Institute of Technology in 1936, received a doctorate in aeronautics and mathematics there in 1939, and became an associate professor at Caltech in 1943. While at Caltech, he co-founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was recruited by the United States Department of Defense and the Department of War to serve in various positions, including as an expert consultant with a rank of colonel in 1945. He became an associate professor at MIT in 1946, a full professor at MIT in 1947, and a full professor at Caltech in 1949.

During the Second Red Scare in the 1950s, the United States federal government accused him of communist sympathies. In 1950, despite protests by his colleagues and without any evidence of the allegations, he was stripped of his security clearance. He was given a deferred deportation order by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and for the following five years, he and his family were subjected to partial house arrest and government surveillance in an effort to gradually make his technical knowledge obsolete. After spending five years under house arrest, he was released in 1955 in exchange for the repatriation of American pilots who had been captured during the Korean War. He left the United States in September 1955 on the American President Lines passenger liner SS President Cleveland, arriving in mainland China via Hong Kong.

Upon his return, he helped lead development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile and the Chinese space program. He also played a significant part in the construction and development of China's defense industry, higher education and research system, rocket force, and a key technology university. For his contributions, he became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry" and was nicknamed the "King of Rocketry". He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of Two Bombs, One Satellite.

In 1957, Qian was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He served as a Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference from 1987 to 1998.

He was the cousin of engineer Hsue-Chu Tsien, who was involved in the aerospace industries of both China and the United States. He is a cousin of the father of Roger Y. Tsien, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. [...]

Outside of rocketry, Qian had a presence in numerous areas of study. He was among the creators of systematics, and made contributions to science and technology systems, somatic science, engineering science, military science, social science, the natural sciences, geography, philosophy, literature and art, and education. His advancements in the concepts, theories, and methods of the system science field include studying the open complex giant system. Additionally, he helped establish the Chinese school of complexity science. His research advanced the discipline of engineering cybernetics, which emphasized the importance of design principles in practical engineering.

via: Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: unknown

[ed. Prelude to the post that follows (re: Gov. vs. Anthropic's Fable).]

American Government Takes Down Claude Fable

No good policy gets announced shortly after 5pm eastern on a Friday.

Here we go again.

The Once And Future Fable

The United States Department of Commerce, as per a letter from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, apparently in response to a narrow jailbreak identified by Amazon, has classified Fable 5 and Mythos 5 as being subject to US export controls. That explicitly means cutting off access to all ‘foreign nationals,’ even within the United States, even if they are Anthropic employees.

Given Anthropic has no means to verify citizenship at this time, that meant complete shutdown of the model, at least for the time being.

Anthropic: The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees. The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance. Access to all other Anthropic models will not be affected.

Dean W. Ball: I can’t tell if this is lawfare against Anthropic in particular or extreme national-security hawkery. Regardless, it is simply cartoonish.

The justification for this appears to be rather flimsy, at best, and based on lack of understanding of what even is a jailbreak or how defense in depth works.

Anthropic: We received the directive from the government today at 5:21pm (ET). The letter did not provide specific details of its national security concern. Our understanding is that the government believes it has become aware of a method of bypassing, or “jailbreaking” Fable 5.

We reviewed a demonstration of this specific technique being used to identify a small number of previously known, minor vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities all appear relatively simple, and we have found that other publicly-available models are able to discover them as well without requiring a bypass.

As we have stated publicly, we believe the government should have the ability to block unsafe deployments, as part of a statutory process that is transparent, fair, clear, and grounded in technical facts. This action does not adhere to those principles.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

That left Anthropic with no options but to entirely withdraw it from the market, at least for the time being, since they have no way to verify who is and is not a United States citizen. [...]

This Action And Its Implementation Are Absurdly Stupid

If you take the action at face value, rather than as an attempt to lash out at Anthropic, there is no way to pretend this is not deeply, deeply stupid.

Dean W. Ball: If this is true, it is just baffling. An administration whose posture is that we *should* export advanced AI chips to China, which also wants to ban… Britain (and every other non-American on Earth)… from using our best models? I have no words.

zooko ⓩ: Judging from [the announcement], I imagine that some senior government official was shown a jailbreak—something they had never seen before and didn’t know about—and this was their kneejerk reaction.

Dean W. Ball: If implemented as this reporting suggests, Anthropic’s latest models would be subject to export controls to all *non-Americans,* including non-American nationals based in the US. This means you should expect to have to prove your citizenship to use Anthropic models. [...]

What Happens Now?

It is a regular thing for the Executive Branch of the United States Government, these days, to issue declarations of policy that are, to use the technical term, absolutely bonkers and stunningly destructive with no reasonable way to implement them, often without stopping to realize what they are doing.

It is also a regular thing for them to then quietly walk those policies largely or entirely back, once the consequences become clear, leaving only relatively minor total devastation in their wake.

Alas, it is also a regular thing for them to leave at least a substantial portion of the new stupid and destructive policy in place indefinitely, and sometimes we keep all of it, or they even keep going further.

Or Anthropic could give the White House what it wants, no matter who is right about whether doing so makes any sense.

We are not short on examples of any of this.

One thing that must now be considered is that many employees of OpenAI, Google and Anthropic, and other AI labs, are not United States persons.

Yo Shavit (OpenAI): Unless this changes, OpenAI researchers on visas need to plan for the fact they’ll probably lose access to internal models, and therefore their ability to do their jobs moving forward, sometime in the next couple months.

I hope the company acts to prevent that.

dave kasten: Uhhh so incidentally, does anyone have a plan to prevent all the non-US citizen AI scientists from going to join foreign labs after they get bored of playing Wordle at work for a month, or are we just sort of planning on having the greatest counterproliferation failure since we deported Qian Xuesen in 1955 and gave Mao a rocket program?

If we drive all foreign talent out of our AI labs, and otherwise actually go down the current road, that is one of the few things that could put China and other competitors back in the game in earnest, both slowing us down and speeding them up.

At Anthropic, Amanda Askell and Andrej Karpathy are examples of employees who suddenly are unable to work with Claude Mythos 5, even after Anthropic sorts out a new access control system.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAtV |  Read more:

[ed. Who knows what axe is being grinded here, the stupidity appears to transcend logical analysis. See also: The Once And Future Fable #2 (Update):]

***

On Friday evening the United States Government has forced Anthropic to take down all access to Fable and Mythos.

It’s been a rough weekend. [...]

1. More details have come to light. There remains some fog of war, but we now have a rather good idea why Claude Fable and Mythos were, deeply stupidly, taken down.

2. A narrow jailbreak was discovered, of the type Anthropic warned in advance obviously existed. All demonstrated outputs are things GPT-5.5 can not only produce, but produce without any sort of jailbreak or bypass.

3. The White House demanded Anthropic take down Fable to ‘fix’ the situation, and did not listen when Dario tried to explain that there was no situation to fix.

When Anthropic did not do so, the White House hit them with an export restriction that they knew would force Fable and Mythos down for everyone.

A lot of nihilists are justifying this decision, and blaming Anthropic, all of whom are very much confirming that they adhere to Dean Ball’s portrait of the United States Government as a dying NPC hospice patient we have to properly placate with the proper vibes and genuflection so they don’t lash out at us. Except they equate this with strength and righteousness, because might makes right, power and vibes.

This is a fast developing story with a large speed premium, so I apologize for any errors, and for the structure likely not being ideal. We do the best we can.

What we do not know is:

1. What was motivating the government to make these decisions.

2. How deeply they were confused about how any of this works.

3. Whether they demanded and are demanding a narrow fix or a global fix. Narrow fix is probably easy. Global fix is probably impossible.

4. What they intend to do next and what they are trying to accomplish.

The good outcome would be that this is a terrible misunderstanding, a reflection of a panic reaction, which can be sorted out quickly, after which we can restore access. Or where they otherwise face enough pressure they quickly realize they made a mistake, or Anthropic can do something to quickly assuage their concerns even if it is dumb. There will still be a terrible precedent set, which comes with a lot of permanent damage to trust in American AI, to our business climate, to our ability to employ vital foreign AI talent, to America’s relationships to its allies, to the progress of Project Glasswing and our cyber security, and to the rule of law.

***

[ed. In addition, see: Seductive Salience (the inevitable politization of AI regulation).]

Trump’s Endgame Is Surrender

The outlines of President Trump’s endgame in the Iran war are now emerging. In a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday, Trump reportedly explained that the United States was negotiating a “letter of intent” with Iran that would “formally end the war and launch a 30-day period of negotiations” on Iran’s nuclear program and the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz. The purpose and effect of such an agreement should be clear: The United States is walking away from the crisis. Trump may launch another limited strike to look tough and satisfy the demands of the war’s supporters, but it would be a performative gesture. Endgame in this case is a euphemism for “surrender.”

Trump has blinked many times in the confrontation with Iran—ever since March 18, when Israel attacked the Pars gas field and Iran retaliated with a strike against Qatar’s most important natural-gas-production facility. Trump then called for a halt on U.S. and Israeli targeting of Iran’s energy infrastructure, and the war effectively ended.

Trump’s repeated threats to resume attacks since then have proved to be bluffs. The leaders in Tehran have been calculating for two months that Trump would not launch another attack, and for this reason they have made no concessions despite the damage they suffered from 37 days of relentless strikes. On the contrary, their terms for a settlement are those of a victor: They demand war reparations, no limits on uranium enrichment, recognized control of the strait, and an end to sanctions.

For Trump to respond to this defiance by now calling for another 30 days of cease-fire and talks is a tacit admission of defeat. If he does launch a performative attack in the next few days, the Iranians will understand it for what it is. No one believes that he is going to resume a full-scale war a month from now. Among other reasons, with 30 more days to heal, rearm, and fill its coffers with tolls, Iran will be a more formidable adversary.

In 30 days, moreover, the new Iranian strait regime may already be firmly in place. As the Institute for the Study of War reports, Iran has been using the cease-fire period to “normalize” its control over the strait by “compelling oil-importing countries” to establish transit agreements with Tehran and charging fees on vessels from nations without such deals. According to Iranian officials, the new strait regime will give Iran’s strategic partners, such as Russia and China, priority and allow nations friendly to Iran, such as India and Pakistan, to negotiate their own transit agreements. Vessels associated with nations that Iran regards as an adversary will be denied access to the strait entirely.

Several nations, including South Korea, Turkey, and Iraq, are reportedly already negotiating at least temporary transit agreements. Now that Trump has made clear he has no intention of fighting to reopen the strait, the stampede to get good terms with Tehran will begin. All nations heavily dependent on energy from the Persian Gulf will want to cut their deal quickly to get the oil and gas and other commodities flowing and rescue their battered economy. Those nations currently allied with the United States and friendly to Israel will feel pressure to distance themselves and make their peace with Iran. The international sanctions against Iran will collapse, and even more money will pour into the country’s accounts as its newly central role in the global economy becomes normalized. By the end of 30 days, most of the world will have a stake in the new arrangement and will oppose any resumption of hostilities, even in the unlikely event that Trump wanted to go back to war.

Trump no doubt hopes that he can slip away without Americans noticing the magnitude of this defeat. The financial markets may stabilize if it is clear that oil will eventually start flowing again through a reopened strait, even if under the new Iran-controlled system. A major strategic setback for the United States need not affect Wall Street. The president may also hope that he can change the subject by launching another military operation, this time against the government in Cuba. And the news media have indeed begun writing more about Cuba than about the unfolding disaster in Iran.

According to one U.S. official, Netanyahu’s “hair was on fire” after the call with Trump—for good reason. The Iran war may end up as the single most devastating blow to Israel’s security in its brief history. On the present trajectory, Iran will emerge from the conflict many times stronger and more influential than it was before the war. It will exercise leverage with dozens of the richest nations in the world, all of which will have an acute interest in keeping Iran happy. They will be unlikely to take Israel’s side in any conflict that it has with Tehran or with its proxies in Lebanon and Gaza, because Iran will have the means to punish them if they do. Israel will emerge more isolated than it has been at any time in its history—and not least from its only reliable protector, the United States. When Trump turns his back on Israel, as he must do to implement this policy, MAGA will gladly follow. The bipartisan anti-Israel consensus in the United States will grow and harden.

Will Israel go gentle into this good night? That is the wild card that may disrupt the financial markets’ dreams of a new stability in the Gulf. A stronger, richer, more influential Iran will mean new life for Hamas and Hezbollah. It will mean the end of the Abraham Accords, as the Gulf States will have to make their own peace with Tehran so that their economies can survive. Trump says that Netanyahu “will do whatever I want him to do.” But can Israel stand by while Iran replaces the United States as the arbiter of power in the region?

by Robert Kagan, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

How American Camouflage Conquered the World

At the Brooklyn Navy Yard—once famous for building aircraft carriers, now better known for creative studios—a company called Crye Precision is one of the biggest tenants. Its footprint in the building is 100,000 square feet. Inside its gigantic warehouse space, rows of whirring sewing machines are stitching together garments made out of the most popular, renowned, and confusing textile of our time: MultiCam.

MultiCam is so ubiquitous that you can buy a camping chair or baby carrier in the camouflage pattern. Arc’teryx and Outdoor Research make jackets in MultiCam. Perhaps most importantly, you may see this iteration of camo on police officers, SWAT teams, ICE agents, or your average January 6 rioter.

For its influence, the pattern has earned a place in MoMA’s permanent collection, a thrill to the Cooper Union art students who created it. “They gave us a lifetime membership, which is cool,” says Gregg Thompson, who was still in graduate school in 1999 when a Cooper Union alumnus, Caleb Crye, reached out to him about a collaboration. “We always had an interest in all things military,” says Thompson. “It’s boy stuff—monster trucks and that kind of thing.”

In 2001, Crye Precision (then known as Crye Associates) got its first military assignment: to make a prototype of a new kind of helmet. While the company was making it, 9/11 happened. With the announcement of the so-called War on Terror, Crye Precision took on a new challenge: camouflage. In all their exploratory research conversations with soldiers, Crye and Thompson learned that the US camouflage situation didn’t work. Soldiers were frequently wearing mismatched camo, which made them stand out on the battlefield as opposed to blending in. “When guys deploy, they’re wearing desert uniforms with woodland body armor,” Thompson explains. What if, they thought, there was one camouflage pattern that could work almost anywhere? It could be a “75 percent solution to environments in general,” Thompson says.

There are a few ways to make a camouflage pattern work in multiple environments. One is to make sure it has the right number of colors. “Three would not be enough; 12 would be too many, because they would just get lost,” Thompson says. He thinks seven is the sweet spot. These colors—greens and browns and beiges—all need to have warm overtones. “Most things in nature have some level of warmth in them,” he says. “Even a building—it came from stone and likely grew a little bit of green stuff on it. Very few things remain cold.” Also very important for a camo pattern is that it should have a lot of highlights, lowlights, gradients, and fades; no two outfits should be identical. As Thompson notes: “If you have all of your guys kind of looking the same, then as soon as you spot one guy, you can very easily pick out the rest, right?”

The design students didn’t start out in the field or on a hunting range. “You start in your Adobe suite, right?” Thompson says. “ Go right in digitally, create it, print it, make uniforms out of it. Tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak.” It was a lot of guesswork. There wasn’t really a reliable measurement for testing the effectiveness of camo. “ The human eye and the user and the guy in the field know what’s good or bad, but to make that be a test that you could replicate across different forces would be very, very hard,” Thompson says.

And yet, Crye Precision was pretty sure it had found something special. In the early 2000s, they presented their concept for multi-environment camo to the United States military. Crye made it clear that they intended to patent this pattern, an early design of which was called Scorpion. In 2004 they did, and christened it MultiCam. Around that same time, when the military had an open call for submissions for a new Army camo, Crye proposed MultiCam. It was rejected.

Instead, the US Army announced that it had designed its own version of an all-purpose camouflage pattern that could blend in with most environments. It was called Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP)—a digital, pixelated pattern that looked as if someone had uploaded an image of camouflage in really low resolution. When UCP was widely adopted throughout the Army in 2005, it became, in the words of costume historian and journalist Charles McFarlane, “one of the most dunked-on camo patterns of all time.” Kit Parker, a Harvard professor and Army reservist who served in Afghanistan in 2009, was wearing UCP. “We were getting shot at by these Chechen snipers from a long way away,” he told journalist Ilya Marritz. “It was like I had a road flare duct-taped on my forehead.”

The only soldiers who could essentially opt out of wearing UCP were members of the US Special Operations Forces. Elite teams like Delta Force, SEAL Team Six, and the Green Berets get a little more wiggle room when it comes to their clothing. “Every unit, whether conventional or special, has what’s called a tactical standard operating procedure, or blue book,” a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne tells me. The blue book will outline the “third-party items you’re allowed to wear.” For Special Forces, “they’re usually pretty lenient.” He says he has a buddy in special ops who wears sneakers, and he has heard of someone who wears Vans high-tops.

As such, Special Forces were the perfect audience for MultiCam. This cutting-edge camo started being worn by some of the most elite soldiers in the United States military, many of whom had met Thompson and Crye during the duo’s many trips to Fort Benning. “Those are the people who have the ability to make their own decisions,” says Thompson, “and are also maybe a little more open to some of the crazy stuff.” Crye started to produce runs of their camo, selling their own MultiCam products in the early days of e-commerce and also licensing the pattern.

Around this time, the culture of the Special Forces started to change. Before the War on Terror, elite teams were small and secretive; very few members of the military knew what they were doing. “Look at photos of the first Special Forces units going into Afghanistan in 2001,” says McFarlane. “They look like a suburban dad on a fishing trip.” As the number of special operators grew, the whole Army could see them fast-roping down from helicopters, breaking down doors, storming houses of suspected terrorists—often in MultiCam. Same with the popular video game Call of Duty and movies like Zero Dark 30, American Sniper, and Act of Valor (which featured active-duty Navy SEALs). In a confusing and unpopular war, stories of Special Operators offered rare victories the United States military could claim.

Special Forces started to develop a new image in the popular imagination, says McFarlane: “Dudes with huge beards and long hair and just totally ripped and just wearing lots of technical gear.” Because Special Forces were so admired and idolized, regular infantry soldiers would buy MultiCam backpacks or accessories to emulate them. Everyone wanted to wear MultiCam—not only to cosplay but also to get away from the ugly digital UCP pattern. Including, eventually, the US Army itself.

Although UCP was deployed to American troops all over the world, it became increasingly associated with Iraq: a hated, unsuccessful pattern for a hated, unsuccessful war. In 2010, when the Obama administration was trying to distance itself from Iraq, the military was instructed to get rid of the UCP pattern. And so, to quickly supply a troop surge in Afghanistan, it turned to the most readily available replacement camo: MultiCam.

Even though the US military called its pattern OEFCP (Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern), it was MultiCam from Crye Precision, bought in bulk when roughly 100,000 members of the conventional forces were deployed to Afghanistan. Then, in 2014, the Army announced that its in-house camo team had finally developed a new pattern: Operational Camouflage Pattern, or OCP. As McFarlane believes: OCP is “basically MultiCam without the branding.” If you view two swaths side by side, you can see that OCP is ever so slightly more brown. There’s a reason they look so similar: Both are inspired by Scorpion, the original pattern that Crye presented to the US government.

In a few niche corners of the internet, debate still simmers over whether Crye had the right to trademark MultiCam or whether the Army had the right to make its own version. Truly, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that, because of this whole saga, some version of MultiCam or OCP or Scorpion is everywhere. The militaries of Australia, Georgia, Denmark, Belgium, Portugal, Argentina, Chile, Malta, and France all wear variants of MultiCam uniforms—some specifically customized by Crye Precision. Soldiers fighting for both Russia and Ukraine do, too; they don colored armbands to tell who is on what side. Even the Taliban wear MultiCam. In January 2026, the Minnesota National Guard wore bright yellow vests over their camouflage in part “to help distinguish them from other agencies in similar uniforms.”

MultiCam has trickled down from Special Forces to all kinds of law enforcement: American SWAT teams, municipal police, teams within the FBI, US Marshals, Drug Enforcement, and Border Patrol all dress like Bradley Cooper in American Sniper. ICE also wears a mixture of civilian clothes and MultiCam, and in January, Crye Precision was awarded a nearly $40,000 contract to provide cold-weather gear for Border Patrol in Maine. Although there have been a number of camo companies attempting to rival MultiCam’s ubiquity (notably the impressionist looking A-Tacs and the animalistic Kryptek), none of them seem to hold a candle. “ I think the fact of the matter is, there’s been no other pattern that’s proven,” Thompson says proudly. [...]

It’s easy to lampoon these trend followers, who it’s assumed (perhaps falsely) have never gone hunting and don't even know a member of the armed forces. What right do they have to MultiCam? The truth is, they might have the most authentic claim: It was made in Brooklyn by art school grads, after all.

by Avery Trufelman, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Kyle Berger

[ed. Operation Enduring Freedom Camouflage Pattern. Seriously. Lol.]

V.I.P. Snorkel

When Kash Patel visited Hawa‘ii last summer, the FBI took pains to note the director was not on vacation, highlighting his walking tour of the bureau’s Honolulu field office and meetings with local law enforcement.

Left out of the FBI’s news releases was an exclusive excursion that Patel took days later when he participated in what government officials described as a “VIP snorkel” around the USS Arizona in an outing coordinated by the military. The sunken battleship entombs more than 900 sailors and Marines at Pearl Harbor.

The swim, revealed in government emails obtained by The Associated Press, comes to light amid criticism of Patel’s use of the FBI plane and his global travel, which have blurred professional responsibilities with leisure activities. The FBI did not disclose the snorkeling session or that Patel had returned to Hawai‘i for two days after his initial stopover on the island.

“It fits a pattern of Director Patel getting tangled up in unseemly distractions — this time at a site commemorating the second deadliest attack in U.S. history — instead of staying laser-focused on keeping Americans safe,” said Stacey Young, who founded Justice Connection, a network of former federal prosecutors and agents who advocate for the Department of Justice’s independence.

With few exceptions, snorkeling and diving are off-limits around the USS Arizona. The battleship, now a military cemetery reachable only by boat, has stood as one of the nation’s most hallowed sites since Japan bombed and sank it in 1941. Marine archaeologists and crews from the National Park Service make occasional dives at the memorial to survey the condition of the wreck. Other dives have been conducted to inter the remains of Arizona survivors who wanted to rest eternally with their former shipmates. [...]

Patel’s excursion was in August as he spent two days in Hawai‘i on his return to the United States from official visits to Australia and New Zealand. On his way to those countries, he stopped in Hawai‘i to visit the Honolulu field office. An FBI spokesman did not answer questions about the snorkeling session.

The FBI said in a statement that top regional commanders hosted Patel at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam “as they commonly do with US government officials on official travel.” The Pearl Harbor visit, the spokesman said, “was part of the Director’s public national security engagements last August with counterparts in New Zealand, Australia, our Honolulu Field Office, and the Department of War.” [...]

Beyond the snorkeling excursion, it is not clear what else Patel did during his second stop in Hawai‘i.

Flight tracking data for the Gulfstream G550 typically used by the FBI director show the jet remained on the island two nights during that stay before flying on to Las Vegas, Patel’s adopted hometown. The jet has a published range of about 7,700 miles (12,391 kilometers), meaning the plane would have needed to refuel somewhere between New Zealand and Washington.

The snorkeling session happened one day after Patel stopped in Wellington to open the FBI’s first standalone office in New Zealand. The visit sparked controversy after the AP revealed that Patel had gifted that country’s police and spy bosses inoperable 3D-printed replica pistols that were illegal to possess under local gun laws.

by Jim Mustian, Eric Tucker and Michael Biesecker, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: AP Photo/Mengshin Lin/2024
[ed. Another Ka$h sighting, which seem to occur just about everywhere except at FBI headquarters. More bad tourist behavior (see below). He's lucky someone didn't throw a rock at his head.]

920 Pounds of Leverage

An F-35 fighter contains 920 pounds of rare earth minerals. A Virginia-class submarine needs 9,200. An Arleigh Burke destroyer requires 5,200. Strip those magnets, actuators, and critical inputs out of the supply chain, and the most advanced military on earth grinds to a halt. The country that processes nearly all of them is China.

That uncomfortable fact sits behind almost every headline coming out of the Iran war and the conflict over critical resources. According to Jim Puplava, who has been arguing since 2020 that we are living through another commodity supercycle, the conflict in the Middle East is not an isolated flare-up, but part of a broader contest over the chokepoints that determine who can build, fuel, and arm the modern economy.

The War Beneath the War

Puplava points to a striking asymmetry exposed by the fighting: Tehran can produce roughly 100 ballistic missiles a month, while the United States manufactures only six interceptors in the same period. Each Tomahawk, THAAD, and Patriot fired costs millions of dollars and depends on materials refined almost exclusively in China.

That math has not been lost on Beijing. Some analysts now suspect China is content to watch the Iran conflict drag on, since every interceptor launched over Tel Aviv is one fewer available for a future contest over Taiwan. “In a kinetic conflict, the side that controls the magnets controls the missiles,” Puplava says. Replenishing the stockpile, by most estimates, will take years.

The Periodic Table as Statecraft

China’s grip did not happen by accident. While the West chased software and asset-light business models, Beijing built the gritty back end of the modern economy: mines, smelters, refineries, magnet factories.

Puplava argues that Western elites suffer from what he calls “physical illiteracy,” the conceit that we have built a weightless digital civilization. In reality, a green grid requires 400 percent more copper and 2,000 percent more lithium than the fossil fuel system it would replace. Semiconductors, electric vehicles, AI servers, data centers, and precision weapons all run on the same short list of elements.

Beijing has begun pulling the lever. In 2024 and 2025, China placed export restrictions on gallium, germanium, antimony, tungsten, and high-grade magnets, citing military end-use concerns. Gallium and germanium feed high-speed semiconductors and night vision optics. The magnets show up in F-35s, Columbia-class submarines, drones, and sonar arrays.

“We’ve traded energy dependence on the Middle East for a more rigid mineral dependence on the People’s Republic of China,” Puplava says. Even mines reopened on American soil, such as Mountain Pass in California, still ship their concentrates to China for processing. [...]

The New Great Game

Rudyard Kipling called the nineteenth-century rivalry between Britain and Russia the Great Game. Its twenty-first-century version is being played out in the Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Chile, and Bolivia, the cobalt corridors of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the long highways of China’s Belt and Road. Beijing offers infrastructure in exchange for exclusive commodity agreements. American counteroffers, freighted with labor and environmental conditions, often lose the bidding.

Iran fits the same map. The Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s most important energy chokepoint, yet the conflict is accelerating the very transition that favors China. Disruption in oil markets pushes buyers toward EVs and batteries, sectors where Chinese firms make some of the cheapest and best products on the planet. Beijing has even managed to pose as a responsible mediator while Washington escalates militarily. As Puplava puts it: “In the twentieth century, it was about blue-water navies protecting oil lanes. The twenty-first century looks to be about deep-earth diplomacy.”

by Financial Sense |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Possibly true, but this feels like it was written by an AI. Who's Jim Puplava (who's most notable credentials seem to be that he's "been arguing since 2020 that we are living through another commodity supercycle")?]