Despite what the headlines scream, what politicians are doing, what powerful lobbies are scheming, despite all of that, amidst of all of that, our job is to empower and accelerate the most positive material and cultural shifts unfolding before our eyes and within our communities.
A Sweden-based research institute published a report Monday showing that the United States accounted for 40% of the world’s weapons exports in the years 2018-22, selling armaments to more than 100 countries while increasing its dominance of the global arms trade.
The report—entitled Trends in International Arms Transfers, 2022—was published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and listed the United States, Russia, France, China, and Germany as the world’s top five arms exporters from 2018-22. The five nations accounted for 76% of worldwide weapons exports during that period.
The five biggest arms importers over those five years were India, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Australia, and China.
“The United States has much room for improvement.”
The United States saw a 14% increase in arms exports over the previous five-year period analyzed by SIPRI. U.S. arms were delivered to 103 nations from 2018-22, with 41% going to the Middle East.
“Even as arms transfers have declined globally, those to Europe have risen sharply due to the tensions between Russia and most other European states,” Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher at the SIPRI Arms Transfers Program, said in a statement. “Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, European states want to import more arms, faster. Strategic competition also continues elsewhere: Arms imports to East Asia have increased and those to the Middle East remain at a high level.”
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According to the report, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early last year “had only a limited impact on the total volume of arms transfers in 2018–22, but Ukraine did become a major importer of arms in 2022.”
Ukraine was the 14th-largest arms importer from 2018-22 and the third-biggest last year.
Wiliam Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote Monday that “the impacts of the global arms trade aren’t just about the volume of weapons delivered. The question is how those weapons are likely to be used, and the extent to which they promote stability versus fueling conflict or propping up repressive regimes with abysmal human rights records.”
“On this score the United States has much room for improvement,” he continued. “Transfers to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for use at the peak of their brutal war in Yemen, and sales to major human rights violators from the Philippines, Egypt, and Nigeria are a few examples of how U.S. arms deliveries can make the world a more dangerous place.”
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“There are a number of promising steps that Congress can take—as articulated by a new coalition, the Arms Sales Accountability Project—that would mandate closer scrutiny of U.S. sales,” Hartung asserted.
“There is also some useful language in the Biden administration’s new arms transfer policy directive, that, if implemented, would significantly rein in the most egregious sales,” he added. “Only time will tell if U.S. policy can be moved towards one based on arms sales restraint rather than arms sales promotion.”
For nearly a decade in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the newly founded Islamic Republic of Iran waged a merciless war against each other. The fighting saw the return of World War I-style human-wave offensives, trench warfare, and chemical weapons attacks.
Though it dragged on for years, the Iran-Iraq war benefited neither side. In the end, the conflict claimed the lives of over a million people, since, despite the carnage and wishes of ordinary people on both sides to end it, no diplomatic solution proved possible over eight years of fighting.
There is good reason to worry that this ugly history is repeating itself today in Eastern Europe.
Like the Iran-Iraq war, the war in Ukraine was triggered by an expansionist dictator hoping to make quick work of a neighbor whom he had wrongly predicted would prove incapable of defending itself. Now, over a year into the fighting, the conflict, which has already claimed hundreds of thousands of casualties by some estimates, has ground to a bloody stalemate that has transformed once-anonymous Ukrainian towns like Bakhmut and Marinka into killing fields.
A peace treaty that puts a stop to this chaos is attractive for many obvious reasons, and foreign powers like China and India have recently indicated that they would like to encourage one. Yet observers say that all signs point to the war dragging on for years to come, with both sides — like Iranians and Iraqis in the past — committed to the belief that victory is within their grasp and that pressing the war forward is worthwhile.
“I don’t see any prospect of diplomacy. What both sides would accept as an equitable settlement to the war is very far apart,” said Rajan Menon, the author of “Conflict in Ukraine: The Unwinding of the Post-Cold War Order” and a research fellow at Columbia University. Menon pointed to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s declaration that the four Russian-controlled Ukrainian provinces had already been annexed — a position he is extremely unlikely to back away from.
“I don’t see any prospect of diplomacy. What both sides would accept as an equitable settlement to the war is very far apart.”
“On the Ukrainian side,” Menon said, “because their country has been invaded and has witnessed immense destruction and atrocities, there is a coming together of Ukrainian sentiment to fight against Russia. They have no illusions about a quick victory and have already priced in that they will have to endure this for a long time.”
Menon argues that the war is thus likely to continue for many years to come, a prediction that is echoed by many other observers. Some have argued that the conflict will become a permanent part of the international system, only concluding if either Ukraine or Russia collapses, or both cease to exist as states. Even if a negotiated settlement emerges sometime in the future, the amount of destruction that will have likely taken place by that time will be staggering.
The war has already taken a devastating toll on the Ukrainian population, which has suffered civilian massacres and systematic destruction of infrastructure. Yet it has also proved damaging to Russia. In addition to suffering Western sanctions, which are likely to escalate in the years to come, huge numbers of young Russian men have been killed, wounded, or simply fled the country to escape military enlistment. According to The Economist, this exodus and killing off of young Russians means that there are now 10 million more Russian women than men in the country — a situation that portends a demographic nightmare for an already rapidly aging population.
In a sense, the U.S. has played a role in prolonging the conflict by heavily arming the Ukrainians to resist Russia’s aggression. The position has drawn scrutiny from some sectors of the U.S. political establishment. Noninterventionist foreign policy observers from the realist, right-wing, and left-wing camps have characterized the conflict as overly costly in financial terms, blamed the U.S. for provoking Russia with the prospect of NATO expansion, or suggested that it would be the lesser evil to cease arms shipments to the Ukrainians and let the conflict conclude swiftly, accepting a likely Russian victory.
What these positions fail to account for are the actions of Ukrainians, who, over a year of grueling fighting, have proven themselves very committed to preserving their own nationhood and territorial integrity.
“If you are calling to stop the war right now, and you’re a person on the left, you’re effectively telling Ukrainians to accept the partition of their country, which is the same position as the MAGA right,” Menon said. “Ukraine would have to cease existing as a coherent state and be truncated. But through his actions, Putin has kind of remade Ukrainian nationalism, and they have a commitment to win.”
Despite the unlikelihood of a negotiated outcome to the war coming any time soon, there are signs of longer-term planning for an endgame by the United States.
While U.S. leaders were glad to egg on the Iran-Iraq war for years — including arming both sides and helping facilitate chemical weapons attacks against Iran by Saddam — there seems to be less appetite for the risk of an indefinite conflict involving a nuclear power like Russia.
A recent report by the RAND Corporation laid out the consequences for the U.S. of a very long war in Ukraine, including the small but persistent possibility of nuclear escalation. The report acknowledged that Ukrainian and American interests may well diverge in the future, with Americans coming to prioritize ending the conflict over helping Ukraine regain full control of its occupied territory — a goal ultimately more important to Ukrainians than Americans.
“The U.S. is currently engaged in [a] protracted attempt to punish Russia because they have offended our moral sensibilities. I don’t think that is inherently wrong, but it’s different from saying that it’s a critical national security interest,” said Benjamin Friedman, policy director at the realist foreign policy think tank Defense Priorities and a lecturer at George Washington University. “We have already underlined that invading other countries in this day and age is very costly. Russia has been punished heavily for violating Ukrainian sovereignty, and I don’t think that anyone would look at them after today and say that they are an example to emulate.”
For now, the fighting will continue and may even increase. Ukraine is likely to pursue a counteroffensive against Russia this spring, even as soldiers on both sides continue to die in the grueling battle for the town of Bakhmut.
The U.S., for its part, is reportedly looking at upping its own support by providing F-16s to the Ukrainian military, with pilots now being brought stateside for training. Unlike in the Iran-Iraq war, where the U.S. armed both countries at various times in order to keep the conflict going and kill as many people on both sides as possible, in the Ukraine war, it has clearly picked one side to support to the hilt.
“The war has a low probability of a serious escalation, but the longer you continue to roll those dice, even if the odds are low, the more likely you are to hit on a future disaster.”
Faced with the Russian invasion, heavily arming Ukraine may indeed be the least bad option. Yet despite paying dividends in slain Russian troops, this policy, likely to keep the war going for a long time to come, will keep the risk of far more dangerous escalation alive down the road. Just as the horror of the Iran-Iraq war had unintended long-term consequences for U.S. politics in the Middle East, an endless conflict in Ukraine will likely give shape to an Eastern Europe that is more radicalized and dangerous for Americans in the future.
“A lot of people basically have the view that it’s great that we’re killing Russians and weakening Russia for the future. It will prevent them from invading other countries, and, so long as it’s Ukrainians who are signed up on the front lines, there’s no real issue for the United States,” said Friedman. “But the war going on and on is bad for the United States. The war has a low probability of a serious escalation, but the longer you continue to roll those dice, even if the odds are low, the more likely you are to hit on a future disaster.”
The post The War in Ukraine Is Just Getting Started appeared first on The Intercept.
China sees a partnership with Russia as a way to challenge, and potentially weaken, the United States, a new threat assessment said.
President Biden has not acted to resolve a dispute that pits the Defense Department against other agencies.
U.S. Special Operations Command, responsible for some of the country’s most secretive military endeavors, is gearing up to conduct internet propaganda and deception campaigns online using deepfake videos, according to federal contracting documents reviewed by The Intercept.
The plans, which also describe hacking internet-connected devices to eavesdrop in order to assess foreign populations’ susceptibility to propaganda, come at a time of intense global debate over technologically sophisticated “disinformation” campaigns, their effectiveness, and the ethics of their use.
While the U.S. government routinely warns against the risk of deepfakes and is openly working to build tools to counter them, the document from Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, represents a nearly unprecedented instance of the American government — or any government — openly signaling its desire to use the highly controversial technology offensively.
SOCOM’s next generation propaganda aspirations are outlined in a procurement document that lists capabilities it’s seeking for the near future and soliciting pitches from outside parties that believe they’re able to build them.
“When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire,” Chris Meserole, head of the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative, told The Intercept. “At a time when digital propaganda is on the rise globally, the U.S. should be doing everything it can to strengthen democracy by building support for shared notions of truth and reality. Deepfakes do the opposite. By casting doubt on the credibility of all content and information, whether real or synthetic, they ultimately erode the foundation of democracy itself.”
“When it comes to disinformation, the Pentagon should not be fighting fire with fire.”
Meserole added, “If deepfakes are going to be leveraged for targeted military and intelligence operations, then their use needs to be subject to review and oversight.”
The pitch document, first published by SOCOM’s Directorate of Science and Technology in 2020, established a wish list of next-generation toys for the 21st century special forces commando, a litany of gadgets and futuristic tools that will help the country’s most elite soldiers more effectively hunt and kill their targets using lasers, robots, holographs, and other sophisticated hardware.
Last October, SOCOM quietly released an updated version of its wish list with a new section: “Advanced technologies for use in Military Information Support Operations (MISO),” a Pentagon euphemism for its global propaganda and deception efforts.
The added paragraph spells out SOCOM’s desire to obtain new and improved means of carrying out “influence operations, digital deception, communication disruption, and disinformation campaigns at the tactical edge and operational levels.” SOCOM is seeking “a next generation capability to collect disparate data through public and open source information streams such as social media, local media, etc. to enable MISO to craft and direct influence operations.”
SOCOM typically fights in the shadows, but its public reputation and global footprint loom large. Comprised of the elite units from the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, and Air Force, SOCOM leads the most sensitive military operations of the world’s most lethal nation.
While American special forces are widely known for splashy exploits like the Navy SEALs’ killing of Osama bin Laden, their history is one of secret missions, subterfuge, sabotage, and disruption campaigns. SOCOM’s “next generation” disinformation ambitions are only part of a long, vast history of deception efforts on the part of the U.S. military and intelligence apparatuses.
Special Operations Command, which is accepting proposals on these capabilities through 2025, did not respond to a request for comment.
Though Special Operations Command has for years coordinated foreign “influence operations,” these deception campaigns have come under renewed scrutiny. In December, The Intercept reported that SOCOM had convinced Twitter, in violation of its internal policies, to permit a network of sham accounts that spread phony news items of dubious accuracy, including a claim that the Iranian government was stealing the organs of Afghan civilians. Though the Twitter-based propaganda offensive didn’t use of deepfakes, researchers found that Pentagon contractors employed machine learning-generated avatars to lend the fake accounts a degree of realism.
Provocatively, the updated capability document reveals that SOCOM wants to boost these internet deception efforts with the use of “next generation” deepfake videos, an increasingly effective method of generating lifelike digital video forgeries using machine learning. Special forces would use this faked footage to “generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels,” the document adds.
While deepfakes have largely remained fodder for entertainment and pornography, the potential for more dire applications is real. At the onset of Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, a shoddy deepfake of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy ordering troops to surrender began circulating on social media channels. Ethical considerations aside, the legality of militarized deepfakes in a conflict, which remains an open question, is not addressed in the SOCOM document.
As with foreign governmental “disinformation” campaigns, the U.S. has spent the past several years warning against the potent national security threat represented by deepfakes. The use of deepfakes to deliberately deceive, government authorities warn regularly, could have a deeply destabilizing effect on civilian populations exposed to them.
At the federal level, however, the conversation has revolved exclusively around the menace foreign-made deepfakes might pose to the U.S., not the other way around. Previously reported contracting documents show SOCOM has sought technologies to detect deepfake-augmented internet campaigns, a tactic it now wants to unleash on its own.
Perhaps as provocative as the mention of deepfakes is the section that follows, which notes SOCOM wishes to finely tune its offensive propaganda seemingly by spying on the intended audience through their internet-connected devices.
Described as a “next generation capability to ‘takeover’ Internet of Things (loT) devices for collect [sic] data and information from local populaces to enable breakdown of what messaging might be popular and accepted through sifting of data once received,” the document says that the ability to eavesdrop on propaganda targets “would enable MISO to craft and promote messages that may be more readily received by local populace.” In 2017, WikiLeaks published pilfered CIA files that revealed a roughly similar capability to hijack into household devices.
The technology behind deepfake videos first arrived in 2017, spurred by a combination of cheap, powerful computer hardware and research breakthroughs in machine learning. Deepfake videos are typically made by feeding images of an individual to a computer and using the resultant computerized analysis to essentially paste a highly lifelike simulacrum of that face onto another.
“The capacity for societal harm is certainly there.”
Once the software has been sufficiently trained, its user can crank out realistic fabricated footage of a target saying or doing virtually anything. The technology’s ease of use and increasing accuracy has prompted fears of an era in which the global public can no longer believe what it sees with its own eyes.
Though major social platforms like Facebook have rules against deepfakes, given the inherently fluid and interconnected nature of the internet, Pentagon-disseminated deepfakes might also risk flowing back to the American homeland.
“If it’s a nontraditional media environment, I could imagine the form of manipulation getting pretty far before getting stopped or rebuked by some sort of local authority,” Max Rizzuto, a deepfakes researcher with the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, told The Intercept. “The capacity for societal harm is certainly there.”
SOCOM’s interest in deploying deepfake disinformation campaigns follows recent years of international anxiety about forged videos and digital deception from international adversaries. Though there’s scant evidence Russia’s efforts to digitally sway the 2016 election had any meaningful effect, the Pentagon has expressed an interest in redoubling its digital propaganda capabilities, lest it fall behind, with SOCOM taking on a crucial role.
At an April 2018 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. Kenneth Tovo of the Army Special Operations Command assured the assembled senators that American special forces were working to close the propaganda gap.
“We have invested fairly heavily in our psy-op operators,” he said, “developing new capabilities, particularly to deal in the digital space, social media analysis and a variety of different tools that have been fielded by SOCOM that allow us to evaluate the social media space, evaluate the cyber domain, see trend analysis, where opinion is moving, and then how to potentially influence that environment with our own products.”
While military propaganda is as old as war itself, deepfakes have frequently been discussed as a sui generis technological danger, the existence of which poses a civilizational threat.
At a 2018 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing discussing the nomination of William Evanina to run the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said of deepfakes, “I believe this is the next wave of attacks against America and Western democracies.” Evanina, in response, reassured Rubio that the U.S. intelligence community was working to counter the threat of deepfakes.
The Pentagon is also reportedly hard at work countering the foreign deepfake threat. According to a 2018 news report, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the military’s tech research division, has spent tens of millions of dollars developing methods to detect deepfaked imagery. Similar efforts are underway throughout the Department of Defense.
In 2019, Rubio and Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., wrote 11 American internet companies urging them to draft policies to detect and remove deepfake videos. “If the public can no longer trust recorded events or images,” read the letter, “it will have a corrosive impact on our democracy.”
Nestled within the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2021 was a directive instructing the Pentagon to complete an “intelligence assessment of the threat posed by foreign government and non-state actors creating or using machine-manipulated media (commonly referred to as ‘deep fakes’),” including “how such media has been used or might be used to conduct information warfare.”
Just a couple years later, American special forces seem to be gearing up to conduct the very same.
“It’s a dangerous technology,” said Rizzuto, the Atlantic Council researcher.
“You can’t moderate this tech the way we approach other sorts of content on the internet,” he said. “Deepfakes as a technology have more in common with conversations around nuclear nonproliferation.”
The post U.S. Special Forces Want to Use Deepfakes for Psy-ops appeared first on The Intercept.
Most Christians probably think of Jesus as the “Prince of Peace,” foretold in Isaiah 9:6, so the idea of “Jesus the military leader” might seem a bit odd—but not for Christian nationalists, particularly those involved in parachurch organizations that prey on the military.
One such individual in one such organization, Cadence International, has just been blocked from attempting to convert 112 subordinates via a mandatory military training titled, “Leadership Lessons of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Swift action by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) put an end to the attempt. But the mere fact that such a clear violation occurred is a troubling reflection of deep-seated problems which the Biden administration has done little, if anything to correct, MRFF President and CEO Mikey Weinstein told Crooks and Liars.
“We’re just not seeing the Biden dividend,” Weinstein said, despite the fact that “Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austen said he wanted to be—these aren’t my words—he wanted to be the lodestar for racial and religious diversity in DoD.” Of course, “It’s overall far better than we when we had the narcissistic, egotistical, cowardly, idiot racist as president, in Trump,” he said. “But clarity of separation of church and state, which everyone swears an oath to when they join the military? We’re not seeing it.”
“If we don’t get rid of the machines, we’re going to lose our country to the world,” Lindell told crowds, referring to voting machines which he previously claimed resulted in voting errors and a ‘stolen’ election.
CEO of MyPillow Mike Lindell is now due to address CPAC. Stay tuned as we bring you the latest updates.
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