Pentagon Plans Vast AI Fleet To Counter China Threat – Slashdot

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Until someone issues order 66
And not just Star Wars, but also Star Trek! Haven’t any of them watched Picard season 3? Remember “Fleet Formation”?!
what side do you want?
1. U.S.A
2. U.S.S.R / Russia
3. China
4. U.K
5. France
6. India
7. Pakistan
8. Israel
Israel, without question.
Where does the funding for iron dome come from?
Would anyone fund that if they were not getting access to the technology?
Israel will be a glowing parking lot within seconds if things really crack off in their neighborhood.
China needs no bases around the US to be a threat. All it takes is some well placed social media posts that create dissent and drives the people to question simply everything, to the point where they start supporting the enemy of the US simply out of spite to “stick it to da man”.
That’s possible in the US.
China has it much easier, they just round up everyone who thinks that Winnie the Poop is a problem. So turnabout isn’t fair game.
Let’s ask Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines if they consider China a threat and if they would prefer the US pull out all their bases and stop the Navy from patrolling their trade routes.
It would be preferable if we lived in a true multipolar world with no hegemons but fact is we don’t and a power vacuum in the Asian region will be promptly filled by China.
If China want’s to be legitimate in that role they need the other countries in the region to support them in that, but they don’t and greatly prefer the USA keeping the region and their economies stable. If anything the Japan/Korea agreement recently signed paved the way for a NATO-style pacific organization because, well, just like the NATO members that American shield of security is desirable.

I find the idea that China is a ‘threat’ to be very 1984’ish.
How many Chinese bases are emplaced around the U.S.?
How many U.S. bases are emplaced around China?
Frankly, much of the world is prevented from threats precisely because of the U.S. bases.
During the cold war the US wanted allies against the soviet bloc, so we made the following deal: your country can have trade with any other country, essentially for free. You won’t need to have a navy protecting your shipping, the US will patrol the seas and prevent piracy. In return, you’ll be on our side if there’s ever a war between the US and the soviets, and (for certain countries) we get to put a military base in your area.
For small countries, this was an excellent deal. One country might have resources to sell, another wants to buy, but neither country has a big enough economy to field a blue-water navy to protect shipping. Free (from piracy) shipping is what drives the world economy.
It was pointed out that during the colonial period, the British were bitterly hated for their colonization policies. In modern times, the US is disliked for *its* colonization policies and we have certainly done some bad things in our time, but by and large we let our allies manage their own affairs and encourage them to be strong. Having strong allies is better for us all around.
(As for example when Haiti was hit with an earthquake we sent a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, helped them get back on their feet, and left. It’s the “and left” portion that I find admirable.)

Thankfully nations around the world are starting to band together against this insanity that has thoroughly corrupted the U.S. political establishment.
And take a look at those nations banding together: BRICS is Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa.
China, Russia, and South Africa are the humanitarian hell-holes of the modern age. Of course they want to band together against the West, they are facing the extinction of their failed authoritarian culture.
Peter Zeihan notes that both Russia and China will no longer exist within the next 10 years, for several good reasons including population collapse. Population collapse alone is unstoppable – at this point the majority of the Chinese population has aged out of their childbearing years, short of mass cloning there’s no way to recover.
The US has a lot of problems and tends to throw its weight around on the world forum, but in the final analysis it’s effect has been a net positive for just about everyone on the planet.
And if we can hold on for about a decade, it’s looking like the world will become even better.
Right. Bay of Pigs. Allende. Arbenz. Argentina 1976. Noriega. Mossadeq. Contras. Need I continue?
Correct, all shit things to do.
Really says something that even with all of that nearly every nation in China’s region prefers the US as an ally and global hegemon. Their handling of Hong Kong and the Uyghurs certainly sent a message to the region.
Sure but outside of maybe Cuba (who I want relations opened up more with) and North Korea where are these non-capitalist countries? Look at Vietnam, we lost that war, the “communist” side won and what do they do but enact capital reforms and have become a strong US ally and global trading partner.
We live in a capitalist world and globalism took care of that, with or without the US interventions. It’s not ideal but it’s better than what Soviet or Maoist hegemony would have looked like (I would not consider

I don’t think that’s so telling. The grandparent said, “we let our allies manage their own affairs,” the parent pointed out that this only applies to allies, and of course allies are capitalist countries who tow the line, and now you are pointing out that after many decades of cold war and multiple hot wars in Asia, most Asian countries are currently allies. Economic allies if not military ones. Good, capitalist countries who tow the line.
This is just the logical consequence of historical events.
The Asian countries don’t love the US. To some extent, they resent the US for military bases and cultural imperialism, but those are relatively minor things. What pushes most (east) Asian countries toward the US are (1) the wish to continue with the relative regional stability that is necessary for their continued economic prosperity and (2) fear and distrust of China.
Canada, all the EU countries in NATO, Australia and the other 3 Eyes, Philippines, a few nations in Africa, Pakistan (although the U.S. should jettison those religious nutjobs), S. Arabia (see Pakistan), Israel, the Kurds (while not technically a country, they are a people and rabidly pro-U.S. before the former alleged president fucked them and allowed Turkey to walk on them), Turkey (see S. Arabia). S. Korea, Japan. Need I continue?
It isn’t that they cannot find anyone. It is that the qualified ones are all working for industry at very high wages.
Yes.
Stop watching T.V. Bad for you, make you think unreal things are real.
Science fiction is interesting because of plausibility. At its best it is based on what is known.
Erase the time travel BS and what’s left is conceivable. Not inevitable, but worth worrying about.
Not really. It will open the doors to much smaller companies because the systems won’t be very large.
Invasion of the continent?
“Economists deploy threats to impoverish China if they harm trade interests in the South China Sea”, or
“Trade partners remind China that they cannot feed themselves” strike me as credible threats.
Answering drones with drones is like answering nukes with nukes: they’re entirely offensive weapons. If they can slip little drones under your radar to damage infrastructure or kill people, your drones can’t stop them, only reply in kind.
There was no point in inventing more threats aft
That’s how I think of it. They’re cheap missiles.
But cheap is a significant advantage. Quantity has a quality all its own they say. If Russia had millions of cruise missiles instead of thousands, the war would have ended a long time ago.
The slow part is important though, missiles are way way faster and can carry larger payloads. Is a drone going to be more difficult to shoot down than say a Tomahawk coming in at 200ft off the ground at 550mph? Different tools for different jobs.
Maybe but you still have to build them, arm them (you don’t have unlimited explosive manufacturing capacity, do you risk all that in a 1000 swarm drone raid versus sending a dozen traditional cruise missiles?) and then in a war with modern army on both sides have to contend with things like Phalanx and all the other anti-drone tech the US military is already cooking up and deploying. [military.com]
Sure you can make the drones faster, more maneuverable and outfit them with EW equipment but at a certain point you are just
The future of war is autonomous drones – land, sea, and air – that will loiter until they have a target, then put a big hole in it.
Deploy billions of them, and only someone who can deploy billions of drone-hunting drones can resist you.

In which case, it will be back to halberds and war clubs for all concerned.
You can operate factories on mechanical diesel power. Firearms aren’t going away, even putting aside stockpiles.
It looks, from a distance, like asymmetrical warfare. Your $25,000 drone could disable the $4Bn carrier communications array, cheaply. Your $2Bn bomber is distracted by the $400 reflective floater and crashes into a mountainside. Your $1Bn stealth fighter cannot tell the cloud of $1,500 drones from the opposing $150M previous-generation fighter with a cannon,
The technological and airborne equivalent of guerilla tactics. And all this ignores the truly electronic battlefield, where your commanders are ‘shout
Where can the U.S. get enough manufacturing power to build a “vast AI fleet” ? China? Better not have any Huawei components in them!
Despite the memes the US actually still does quite a bit of manufacturing, about $2.3T annually worth and it’s all trending upward:
https://www.nist.gov/el/applie… [nist.gov]

Where can the U.S. get enough manufacturing power to build a “vast AI fleet” ? China? Better not have any Huawei components in them!
I don’t want to make you sound dumb, but the US Air Force is three times the size of the second largest air force in the world.
US Navy Fleets are by no means small.
Then there’s all the other things that go pew pew pew boom. … where do we make those?
Just because it has rules built in does not make this thing AI. Just because you thought about a brain while building it does not make this Artificial Intelligence.

Just because it has rules built in does not make this thing AI. Just because you thought about a brain while building it does not make this Artificial Intelligence.
You’re confusing AI with AGI. The term “AI” has been thoroughly co-opted to mean all sorts of far-less-than-AGI things, including things as simple and stupid as the algorithmic opposition in video games. If you think of drone AI like you think of video game AI, you’ll be about on the right level.
I suspect this decision got pushed forward a few years from watching the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Considering the huge impact of commercial quad-copters and simple military drones made by Ukraine, Iran, Turkey, and Russia it’s obvious that drones will play a major role on future battlefields.
For the Americans who are happy to let Putin conquer whatever he wants, funding this war still serves your selfish interests. Seeing how your current hardware performs is helping your military avoid wasting a giant p
Yep. A bunch of those drones used in and by Ukraine are COTS. China may or may not dwarf the US when it comes to manufacturing overall but they have a clear edge in making consumer goods like toys – and these little drones are toy technology. They can field thousands of them for the cost of one cruise missile. They don’t need to make a big boom – just setting their own battery on fire after landing in the right place could be enough to present a serious problem.
You can build a drone that can carry a grenade for under $500 from off the shelf hobby components, including the battery. $1000 is generous… But why not be generous here?
Didn’t we have an article on this a few weeks ago? Haven’t had time to hunt for the story but pretty sure we did.
Which side can produce more hardware faster?

The U.S. is seeking to keep pace …
The Cuban Missile Crisis taught President Kennedy that a giant pissing-contest using nuclear missiles was a bad idea. Still, the USSR could make more missiles than the USA, forcing trigger-happy President Reagan to negotiate.
I see the start of another pissing contest, one that is unlikely to have an ‘uh-oh’ moment before the world descends into war. Globalization means a modern war will have massive consequences to trade and national security, but that might not be enough reason to prevent war. Remembe
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