Robert H. Latiff’s Future Peace, a sequel to Future War, specifically brings to attention a subtle, yet potentially destructive effect of technologies such as autonomous systems, advanced weapons, and AI: the provocation to violence. Against the backdrop of the brewing power rivalry between the U.S. and its adversaries, technology aggregates tension and catalyzes violence.

Future Peace touches upon the ethical, security-related, behavioral, and technical aspects of technology and warfare. It consists of four chapters: “A Giant Armed Nervous System” (referring to the military), “Urge to Violence,” “Stumbling into War,” and “Avoiding War.”

Latiff’s book comes as a warning to practice caution when adopting new weapons technology, and aids in understanding human and technical behaviors to attenuate its harms and decrease the chances of war. Not only does technology make war easier and speedier, hence enabling the rush to war, but hinders human reasoning. Such technical changes make the process of sound judgement difficult; for example, thinking and acting in a diplomatic manner. Furthermore, these changes enhance the potential for human error to get out of hand.

Latiff argues that it is vitally important to avoid entering conflict in the first place. He highlights the importance of the cooperative efforts of many segments of society, from the public and technologists to militarists and decision-makers. He implies that it is criminal negligence to leave everything to automation processes or politicians. Therefore, Future Peace also lays out long to short term recommendations to maintain peace and reverse the rush to war.

A

utonomous features are not a matter of the future; they have been used in warfare for years. However, it is quite evident that with the advancement of technology and the weaponization of artificial intelligence, autonomous weapons systems are swiftly adapting and becoming accepted.

As these changes emerge, the question that is often raised by international organizations such as the UN, which set the norms of conduct in an effort to control and regulate the use of autonomous weapons, is “How will human beings maintain control of the use of autonomous weapons?” In their study, Ingvild Bode and Hendrik Huelss flip the script to reveal another perspective of this dynamic.

Bode and Huelss aim to explain how testing, developing, and using weapons systems with autonomous features shapes ethical and legal norms, and how standards manifest and change in practice. The authors also examine the consequences of autonomous weapons for international relations.

Bode and Huelss acknowledge the fear and risks that these developments bring but adopt the approach that autonomous weapon systems may push people away from taking immediate decisions on the use of force as norms adapt to the appropriate use of force.

In short, Autonomous Weapons Systems and International Norms analyses the normative repercussions of weaponizing artificial intelligence by examining them not as tools used by the military but as shaping forces. Chapters include “Autonomous Weapons Systems and International Relations,” “New Technologies of Warfare: Emergence and Regulation,” “International Law, Norms, and Order,” “Norms in International Relations,” and “How Autonomous Weapons Systems Make Norms,” and contain assisting tables and figures.

As the trend and debate of autonomizing weapons systems continues, Autonomous Weapon Systems and International Norms equips the reader with an understanding of the relation of human-machine interaction and the process of integrating new technologies into war.

I

n War Virtually, Roberto J. González takes the reader behind the scenes to expose how scientists, programmers, and engineers developed technologies that automate war, predict conflict, and regulate human thought and behavior. Does this sound utopian? Not so when you factor in the persistent drive to arm for virtual warfare. In this quest, data comes a valuable commodity.

González evaluates autonomous weapons, robotic systems, predictive modeling software, advanced surveillance programs, and psyops techniques. He examines the foundation of the latest version of warfare in order to explain how it has taken its current form through contemporary military operations and their high-tech and cultural underpinnings.

However, War Virtually transcends the design, innovative, and transformative aspects of technology and warfare, and touches upon human engineering. González reveals the relations between U.S. intelligence agencies and Big Tech, and its implications. It is no secret that algorithms construct behavioral models for anticipating or even predicting human behavior, and, therefore, all of us risk having our digital lives become part of the military-industrial economy.

Adopting a critical approach, González examines how the U.S. military is weaponizing technology and data for new kinds of warfare, and questions the notion that technological advancements will lead to more efficient and less destructive warfare. In fact, he implies that such an aspiration comes at a great cost, and argues that in this world, there is little room for hubris.

War Virtually covers a large array of topics including automated battlefield robotics, social scientists’ involvement in experimental defense research, the blurred line between political consulting and propaganda in the internet era, and the military’s use of big data to craft new counterinsurgency methods based on predicting conflict.

I

n Proto-Algorithmic War, Stefka Hristova offers a unique perspective on the Iraq War and the history of algorithmic and digital logic that came to be a crucial element of today’s warfare. She examines the military policy of the United States going into the Iraq War: the U.S. approached the war with the logic of digital and emerging algorithmic technology alongside the preceding numerical logics of the British Mandate in Iraq. In a sense, the Iraq War became an experiment in the early stages of development and utilization of such technology in warfare, and moreover war culture.

Hristova provides a case study of a comparative historical framework reaching back to the quantification techniques harnessed during the era of Mandatory Iraq (1918-1932) and analyzes the parallels and diversions between the numerical logics in both cases.

The author further evaluates the logic that moved beyond the British mandate for Iraq and reduced culture, society, and the physical body and environment into visual data-driven, sterilized, reproducible warfare, highlighting that it lacked cultural and historical context. Indeed, the actual experience of the Iraq War resulted in massive-scale death and destruction.

Proto-Algorithmic War offers an insight into the digitization and automation of war. Hristova aptly scrutinizes the ways in which the Iraq War attempted and often failed to see and incorporate population and territory as digital and further proto-algorithmic entities.

B

en Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie use fire as an analogy to showcase how AI has a dual nature: destructive and constructive. Just like our distant ancestors learning to operate their newly discovered, full of potential tool, our responsibility is to understand and use AI potential wisely. With AI revolutionizing the world, democracies have a responsibility to harness that power constructively and come out on top. Transformation is on its way—can humanity use AI to light the way? Or will the fire burn wildly and ignite a new type of war?

In The New Fire, Buchanan and Imbrie help us understand AI better by breaking it down into its “sparks,” which are data, algorithms, and computing power. They further explain the tangible and potentially destructive consequences of these sparks such as disinformation campaigns, new hacking tools, and military weapons.

On a larger scale, The New Fire shows the urgency of democracies to adapt to the powerful tool that is AI, as autocrats may use it for domestic centralized control and asymmetric advantages in combat. In that sense, they argue that harnessing the power of AI is crucial for holding democracy in balance in the world. The New Fire also acknowledges that democracies have a harder time adapting to the age of AI given ethical and civil concerns, but that new ways could be forged based on the advantages of democracy.

Drawing on examples from geopolitical competition and its analysis, Buchanan and Imbrie show how AI can work for democracy while respecting civil rights. In the age of AI, this crucial topic may determine the choice of course between war and peace.

Written by Dilara Özer

In January 2020, a military strike by the United States assassinated Qasem Soleimani, the former commander of the elite Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, then deputy head of an Iraqi paramilitary organization known as the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMU).

The assassination increased not only the escalation between the U.S. and Iran-linked Shiite militias, but it also enabled the Iraqi parliament to request then Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul Mahdi to end foreign military presence in Iraq. Correspondingly, Shiite militias carried out a total of nearly 100 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities and bases hosting  U.S.-led coalition troops in Iraq, compelling the U.S. to reconsider its combat mission in Iraq.

At first, the attacks on the U.S. diplomatic facilities and bases forced the U.S. to downsize its military mission in Iraq. Accordingly, the U.S. withdrew approximately half of its 5,000 forces from Iraq in 2020. The majority of the remaining forces serve as advisers to Iraq’s military. The U.S.-led coalition handed over eight bases to the Iraqi military last year and pulled international troops back to larger garrisons such as Camp Taji, Erbil, and Ain al-Asad airbases.

Meanwhile, Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi has been facing pressure from Iraqi Shia factions in the country and militias allied with Iran to implement the Iraqi parliament’s nonbinding decision to end foreign military presence in Iraq. Al-Kadhimi has strived to reduce coalition combat forces, and instead to increase NATO’s role in Iraq, where in 2018 he invited some 500 NATO personnel to raise Iraqi military and security competencies during Iraq’s strategic dialogue with the U.S.

The U.S. withdrawal of combat missions from Iraq will not stop drone and rocket attacks by the Shiite militias on U.S. diplomatic facilities and bases hosting the U.S.-led coalition troops in Iraq.

On the one hand, the strategic dialogue meetings have resulted in reducing the U.S.-led combat mission against DAESH in Iraq, the majority of whom are American soldiers, by 60 percent. On the other hand, NATO agreed to expand its military consultation mission in Iraq to roughly 4,000 troops.

Moreover, Josep Borrell, high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy and vice-president of the European Commission, announced that NATO is planning to establish a second base for training missions in Erbil. Thus, the U.S. has shared the responsibility to respond to attacks from Iran-linked Shiite militias with its allies in NATO.

An urgent task is awaiting us: considering the progression of events, we must quickly liberate ourselves from the limits and confines placed on the Afghanistan discourse, which have been imposed by US-centered Western propaganda for over 20 years, and counting. A first step is that we must not allow the future political discourse pertaining to this very subject to remain hostage to American priorities – successes, failures and geostrategic interests.

For this to happen, the language itself must be confronted. This is critical if we are to truly glean valuable lessons from Afghanistan and to avoid a repeat of the previous failure of comprehending the U.S. defeat in Vietnam (1955-1975), the way it should have been understood, not the way Washington wanted Americans – in fact, the whole world – to understand. Vietnam was not merely an American ‘debacle’, and did not only culminate in an American ‘defeat’. It was also a Vietnamese victory and the triumph of the will of the people over the U.S. imperialist war machine.

In U.S. mainstream media and, to a large extent, academia, the Vietnam War history was almost entirely written from an American point of view. Even the anti-Vietnam war version of that history remained American-centric.

Alas, in the case of Afghanistan, many of us, whether in journalism or academia, whether wittingly or otherwise, remain committed to the U.S.-based discourse, partly because the primary sources from which our information is gleaned are either American or pro-American. Al Akhdar al-Ibrahimi, former United Nations Peace Envoy to Afghanistan, from 1997 to 1999, and again from 2001 to 2004, had recently, in an interview with French newspaper, Le Monde, reminded us of the importance of using proper language to describe the unfolding events in Afghanistan.

The Rise and fall of the ‘Terrorists’ Discourse

The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had a massive impact, not only on the geopolitical map of the world but also on relevant global political discourses. As the USSR, its Warsaw Pact and global alliances began to disintegrate, the U.S. quickly moved into action, asserting its dominance from Panama (1989) to Iraq (1991) to elsewhere. The American objective was not merely a violent declaration of its triumph in the Cold War, but a message to the rest of the world that the ‘American century’ had begun and that no form of resistance to U.S. stratagem could be tolerated.

In the Middle East, in particular, the new narrative was in full display, with clear and repeated distinctions between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’, friends and enemies, allies and those marked for ‘regime change’. And, per this new logic, anti-colonial forces that were celebrated as liberation movements for decades fell into the category of the ‘terrorists’. This definition included Palestinian resistance groups, Lebanese and others, though these groups sought liberation from illegal foreign occupation.

Years later, the discourse on terrorism – summed up by George W. Bush’s statement in September, 2001, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” – became the yardstick in which the world, according to Washington, was to be divided: freedom-loving nations and terrorists, extremist regimes. The latter category was eventually expanded to include Iraq, Iran and Syria. On January 29, 2002, North Korea was also added to Washington’s so-called ‘axes of evil’.

Afghanistan, of course, topped the American list of terrorist states, under various pretenses: initially the harboring of Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda and, later, the mistreatment of women, and so on. Eventually, the Taliban became a ‘terrorist’ group, leading an ‘insurgency’ against the ‘democratically-elected’ Afghan government in Kabul. The last 20 years were spent in the construction of this false paradigm.

In the absence of any strong voices in the media demanding an American withdrawal and defending the Afghan people’s right to resist foreign occupation, there was a near-complete absence of an alternative political discourse that even attempted to raise the possibility that the Taliban, despite all of their questionable strategies and practices, may, in fact, be a national liberation movement.

The reason we were discouraged from considering such a possibility is the same reason why U.S.-Western-Israeli propaganda insisted on removing any distinction between ISIS, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Houthis and many other such groups. On the one hand, discussing the particularities of each movement requires real knowledge of the history and formation of these groups separately, and the political circumstances through which they continue to operate. This kind of knowledge is simply non-existent in the cliche, soundbite-driven mainstream media.

On the other hand, such understanding is inconvenient, as it complicates the deception and half-truths necessary for the U.S., Israel and others, to depict their military occupations, unlawful military interventions and repeated wars as fundamental to some imagined global ‘war on terror’ and, as some European intellectual circles prefer to dub it, a war on ‘radical Islam’.

However, unlike al-Qaeda and ISIS, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Taliban are not trans-border militant groups fighting a global agenda, but national liberation movements which, despite their emphasis on religious discourses, are political actors with specific political objectives confined largely within the borders of their own countries – Palestine, Lebanon and Afghanistan, respectively.

Regarding Hamas, London-based author, Daud Abdullah wrote in his just-released volume, ‘Engaging the World: The Making of Hamas Foreign Policy’ that “Hamas sees foreign relations as an integral and important part of its political ideology and liberation strategy. Soon after the Movement emerged, foreign policies were developed to help its leaders and members navigate this tension between idealism and realism. This pragmatism is evident in the fact that Hamas was able to establish relations with the regimes of Muammar Gaddhafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, both of whom were fiercely opposed to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Consequently, it was also Abdullah who became one of the first to draw the parallels between Palestine and Afghanistan as soon as the Taliban declared victory in Kabul. In a recent article in the Middle East Monitor, Abdullah wrote, “Palestine and Afghanistan are salient examples. Throughout history, their peoples have witnessed numerous invasions and occupations. After two decades the U.S. has finally run out of stamina. Similarly, they will eventually realize the futility of supporting the Zionist occupation of Palestine.”

Jonah Goldberg and Michael Ledeen have much in common. They are both writers and also cheerleaders for military interventions and, often, for frivolous wars. Writing in the conservative rag, The National Review, months before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Goldberg paraphrased a statement which he attributed to Ledeen with reference to the interventionist U.S. foreign policy.

“Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business,” Goldberg wrote, quoting Ledeen.

Those like Ledeen, the neoconservative intellectual henchman type, often get away with this kind of provocative rhetoric for various reasons. American intelligentsias, especially those who are close to the center of power in Washington D.C., perceive war and military intervention as the foundation and baseline of their foreign policy analysis.

The utterances of such statements are usually conveyed within friendly media and intellectual platforms, where equally hawkish, belligerent audiences cheer and laugh at the war-mongering muses. In the case of Ledeen, the receptive audience was the hardline, neoconservative, pro-Israel American Enterprise Institute (AEI).

Predictably, AEI was one of the loudest voices urging for a war and invasion of Iraq prior to that calamitous decision by the George W. Bush Administration, which was enacted in March 2003.

Neoconservatism, unlike what the etymology of the name may suggest, was not necessarily confined to conservative political circles. Think tanks, newspapers and media networks that purport – or are perceived – to express liberal and even progressive thought today, like The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN, have dedicated much time and space to promoting an American invasion of Iraq as the first step of a complete U.S. geostrategic military hegemony in the Middle East.

Like the National Review, these media networks also provided unhindered space to so-called neoconservative intellectuals who molded American foreign policy based on some strange mix between their twisted take on ethics and morality and the need for the U.S. to ensure its global dominance throughout the 21st century. Of course, the neocons’ love affair with Israel has served as the common denominator among all individuals affiliated with this intellectual cult.

The main – and inconsequential – difference between Ledeen, for example, and those like Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, is that the former is brazen and blunt, while the latter is delusional and manipulative. For his part, Friedman also supported the Iraq war, but only to bring ‘democracy’ to the Middle East and to fight ‘terrorism’.

Two important events have summoned up these thoughts: U.S. President Joe Biden’s ‘historic’ trip to Cornwall, U.K., in June, to attend the 47th G7 summit and, two weeks later, the death of Donald Rumsfeld, who is widely depicted as “the architect of the Iraq war”. The tone struck by Biden throughout his G7 meetings is that ‘America is back’, another American coinage similar to the earlier phrase, the ‘great reset’ – meaning that Washington is ready to reclaim its global role that had been betrayed by the chaotic policies of former President Donald Trump.

The newest phrase – ‘America is back’ – appears to suggest that the decision to restore the U.S.’ uncontested global leadership is an exclusively American decision.

The newest phrase – ‘America is back’ – appears to suggest that the decision to restore the U.S.’ uncontested global leadership is, more or less, an exclusively American decision. Moreover, the term is not entirely new. In his first speech to a global audience at the Munich Security Conference on February 19, Biden repeated the phrase several times with obvious emphasis.

“America is back. I speak today as President of the United States, at the very start of my administration and I am sending a clear message to the world: America is back,” Biden said, adding that “the transatlantic alliance is back and we are not looking backward, we are looking forward together.”

Platitudes and wishful thinking aside, the U.S. cannot possibly return to a previous geopolitical standing, simply because Biden has made an executive decision to ‘reset’ his country’s traditional relationships with Europe – or anywhere else, either. Biden’s actual mission is to merely whitewash and restore his country’s tarnished reputation, marred not only by Trump, but also by years of fruitless wars, a crisis of democracy at home and abroad and an impending financial crisis resulting from the U.S.’ mishandling of the COVID19 pandemic.

Unfortunately for Washington, while it hopes to ‘look forward’ to the future, other countries have already staked claims to parts of the world where the U.S. has been forced to retreat, following two decades of a rudderless strategy that is fueled by the belief that firepower alone is sufficient to keep America aloft forever.

Though Biden was received warmly by his European hosts, Europe is likely to proceed cautiously. The continent’s geostrategic interests do not fall entirely in the American camp, as was once the case. Other new factors and power players have emerged in recent years. China is now the European bloc’s largest trade partner and Biden’s scare tactics warning of Chinese global dominance have not, seemingly, impressed the Europeans as the Americans had hoped.

Following Britain’s unceremonious exit from the EU bloc, the latter urgently needs to keep its share of the global economy as large as possible. The limping U.S. economy will hardly make the substantial deficit felt in Europe. Namely, the China-EU relationship is here to stay – and grow.

There is something else that makes the Europeans wary of whatever murky political doctrine Biden is promoting: dangerous American military adventurism.

The U.S. and Europe are the foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) which, since its inception in 1949, was almost exclusively used by the U.S. to assert its global dominance, first in the Korean Peninsula in 1950, then everywhere else.

Following the September 11 attacks, Washington used its hegemony over NATO to invoke Article 5 of its Charter, that of collective defense. The consequences were dire, as NATO members, along with the U.S., were embroiled in their longest wars ever, military conflicts that had no consistent strategy, let alone measurable goals. Now, as the U.S. licks its wounds as it leaves Afghanistan, NATO members, too, are leaving the devastated country without a single achievement worth celebrating. Similar scenarios are transpiring in Iraq and Syria, too.

Rumsfeld’s death on June 29, at the age of 88, should serve as a wake-up call to American allies if they truly wish to avoid the pitfalls and recklessness of the past. While much of the U.S. corporate media commemorated the death of a brutish war criminal with amiable non-committal language, some blamed him almost entirely for the Iraq fiasco. It is as if a single man had bent the will of the West-dominated international community to invade, pillage, torture and destroy entire countries. If so, then Rumsfeld’s death should usher in an exciting new dawn of collective peace, prosperity and security. This is not the case.

During an hour-long webinar, the U.S. government representatives Karen Thornton, professional staff member on the House of Armed Services Committee and Phil Rogers, a representative from the Department of Defense (DoD), joined in shortly as listeners during a webinar on the reorganization of the U.S. defense acquisition.

The webinar was held by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a U.S.-based think-tank on February 19, 2021, where experts such as Moshe Schwartz; President of Etherton and Associates, Inc., Andrew Hunter; Senior Fellow and Director, Samantha Clark; Special Counsel at Covington & Burling, spoke.

The U.S. National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) specifies annual budget and expenditures of the U.S. Department of Defense, which is a governmental body providing national security with military forces. Experts have long expressed their frustration for Title 10 of the U.S. Code, and how it has gotten bigger over time with notes and provisions of legislation texts, and eventually this has slowed down the efficiency of defense system.

“We’re doing this in reaction to the inclusion of Title 18 of the Fiscal Year 2021 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which created a new statutory framework for Defense Acquisition statutes” said Andrew Philip Hunter, from the Centre for Strategic and International Studies’ (CSIS) and the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group Director, who also participated in the webinar talking about the Reorganization of Defense Acquisition statutes in Title 10. of U.S. Code.

US Congress

On January 1, 2021, the Congress enabled a one-year phase for collecting comments, feedbacks from experts, stakeholders, and the general public on the reorganization of Defense Acquisition statues in Title 10. of U.S. Code. The webinar took the opportunity to address the call where acquisition experts shared their inputs and comments. The comment collecting on reorganization of the defense acquisition will last for a year and will go into effect in 2022.

“It is a complex body of law that’s difficult to interpret understand and we hope that this reorganization does make the world a better place,” said Phil Rogers, a representative from the DoD.

The importance of reorganization of the technical aspects of Title 10. of the U.S. Code. No 10  were discussed by the experts, who noted that policy changes or moving notes in the legislation should be handled at this phase, adding that a pure technical cleaning-up can eventually open a space to make acquisition statutes user-friendly and well-organized. Moreover, no tactical changes on a language level should be addressed either. It is more of a process than a one-time task, therefore an act of reorganizing can give a sight to the Congress as to what should be done with the notes which follow the provisions.

Answering the question “What are the mechanisms that those outside of government can utilize best to coordinate with the teams that are putting in new language into the NDAA and then implementing the policy inside the Pentagon?” Hunter said: “A legislative proposal from DoD is the way to start looking out for those mechanisms.” On the other hand, Samantha Clark pointed out that, different industries share different viewpoint on interpretation of statues, therefore it is helpful to share with their viewpoints as feedback.”

“What effect this will have on small businesses, new entrants’ ability to access the defense marketplace over time and what will be the overarching effects on supply chain?” was another question posed by the audience.

“It is important to think of the pressures that the Code has on the industrial base. The reorganization will help to make it much clearer, …in many cases statute is a huge barrier to entry, and it keeps people out”, said Hunter.

“It will be helpful to the government in addition to industry because the government wants people to comply. They want trusted secure partners and industry wants to comply because they don’t want any of their systems or supply chain to be compromised”, said Samantha Clark

Answering a question posed by the audience, namely, “what is the possibility of substantive change in meaning of a provision, where might be the risk and how can the writers mitigate that risk?” Samantha Clark highlighted that the risk lies on where Congress were to decide to eliminate those notes. She is in opinion that they can be clarified easily through transparency and messaging.

“…reorganization of the defense acquisition would be the transfer and re-designate method before removing any notes that are in the respective legislative texts and the fact that there is a year-long time phase for this to happen is a great opportunity to allow anyone who is interested in the issue to comment”, said Moshe Schwartz

“…this effort is a technical one, but it will support and enable policy related changes down the road”, concluded Hunter.

For those who follow the U.S. Code closely, this webinar can be rated as substantial.

The experts who attended the panel are very in close cooperation with the U.S. government and non-governmental entities. Therefore, their expertise and feedback worth to be taken in account.

The experts explored how the Title 10 of U.S. Code has become a bureaucratic body despite many reform initiatives, and till today disables the defense acquisition systems with its ‘messiness.’