THE US MILITARY’S NEW “CONNECT EVERYTHING TO ...
One activity that is uniquely human is warfare. To be sure, the animal kingdom has its share of fights, but these lack what humanity brings to the table: organization, strategy and tactics, logistics, and always the search for the "technological edge". But Mr. H.B. and Ms. K.M found this article, and its sheer audacity make me question whether the US military leadership has taken leave of its senses. We'll get back to that in a moment in today's high octane speculation. First, the article:
The Future the US Military is Constructing: a Giant, Armed Nervous System
The essence of the military's plan is to "connect everything to everything":
Leaders of the Air Force, Navy, Army and Marines are converging on a vision of the future military: connecting every asset on the global battlefield.
That means everything from F-35 jets overhead to the destroyers on the sea to the armor of the tanks crawling over the land to the multiplying devices in every troops’ pockets. Every weapon, vehicle, and device connected, sharing data, constantly aware of the presence and state of every other node in a truly global network. The effect: an unimaginably large cephapoloidal nervous system armed with the world’s most sophisticated weaponry.
US Air Force Chief of staff General David Goldfein is referenced in the article, by a recent speech he gave in which he uses Elon Musk's Tesla cars as an example of such large scale interconnectivity. But this view is orders of magnitude beyond what has been seen thus far:
The idea borrows from the “network centric warfare” concept that seized the military imagination more than a decade ago. But what leaders are today describing is larger by orders of magnitude. It’s less a strategy for integrating multiple networks into operations more efficiently than a plan to stitch everything, networks within networks, into a single web. The purpose: better coordinated, faster, and more lethal operations in air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace.
The Navy too is on board with this:
Navy leaders, too, are eager to connect every object on the sea, land, air, space and cyberspace. This is no exaggeration. As Adm. John Richardson, Chief of Naval Operations, put it during the Navy’s Future Force Expo in Washington, D.C., in July, “I want to network everything to everything.”
This is necessary to preserve the U.S. Navy’s advantage, even if Richardson gets the larger 355-ship fleet he seeks — hardly a given in today’s industrial and budgetary landscape. Adversaries are building more and better ships and weapons, and even the U.S. superiority in orbital and terrestrial sensing is diminishing. The cost of launching a constellation of spy sats is dropping as the satellites become smaller and launches become cheaper.
This is curious, since the Navy has recently re-emphasized the need for crews to be less reliant on GPD systems and able to navigate the "old fashioned way", by celestial navigation, compasses, charts, sextants, and so on. We'll get back to this point in a moment.
What is intriguing about all this is apparently someone else is doing a bit of high octane speculations about all these developments as well, posing a kind of "Terminator" scenario, where the military - and humanity as a whole - becomes the victim of its own technological fascination:
Certainly, “network everything to everything” sounds a bit like the setup for the Terminator franchise, wherein a fictional defense contractor, Cyberdyne Systems, convinces the Defense Department to link the U.S. arsenal to a single artificially intelligent entity. Skynet, of course, determines that humans are a threat to its existence and uses its ubiquitous command and control powers to launch a war on humankind.
Military leaders hate comparisons between their own tech projects and anything from the Terminator franchise. The reference usually comes up in discussions about individual drones with missiles or “killer robots.” Defense Department watchers are always keen to remind people that official policy is to keep humans at the top of the command-and-control loop, overseeing —or at least retaining veto power — over the decision to take life.
But there's another danger here, and it's much more down-to-earth, and I suspect the reader has already seen it: cyber systems are not secure, only look at the history of recent hacking episodes. Everyone has been hacked in recent years it seems, from Sony to the Securities and Exchange Commission to Equifax and Social Security and on and on the list goes. Viruses and malware prowl the internet constantly. I would even go so far as to say that even quantum communications systems will eventually fall to the human passion to find ways around or through invincible systems. And then there's the Fitzgerald and McCain incidents, and the two incidents with the USS Donald Cook: while the high octane speculative consensus on these incidents appears to be that some kind of jamming occurred, hacking cannot be entirely ruled out.
So now imagine a military universe where everything is connected to everything else: it takes little imagination to see that this could serve to make everything vulnerable.
But the "Terminator" scenario cannot be ruled out either. Consider again the last statement in the above quotation: the military would ensure that humans remain in control "at the top." I cannot help but think of old field marshal Von Moltke at the very beginning of World War One: then, too, new technological wonders gave commanding generals unique access to the picture of the whole battlefield: the problem was, the reports coming in by telephone, telegraph, and radio were too slow: events moved faster then the ability to report them and for Von Moltke to keep up with them. It might be argued that connecting everything to everything will allow commanders to see the "whole picture" in real time... maybe so, but will they be able to react "fast enough"? Probably not, for the ineluctable logic of reliance on this type of technologies ultimately means that humans are replaced by high frequency reacting algorithms. We've already seen it take place in the securities and commodities markets, with the result that the markets look less and less reflective of real human realities. A similar logic might compel the good intentions of leaving humans in control to abandon those good intentions, in the name of military superiority and national security, of course.
And if the whole system is somehow "taken down" by hacking or other electronic warfare?
Then it's back to one-time key pads and carrier pigeons...
See you on the flip side...
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test comment as requested by Daniel
before the matrix there was 1966 book
Collosus: The Forbin Project by Denis Feltham Jones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
a collagen fibre in human cartilage is 70nm.
After reading the non fiction book, Killer Robots, I saw this coming like an autonomous freight train. Even the finance field exemplifies it. Usually the military is ahead of the power curve as what’s coming down the silly villains pipeline. Conclusion: any chain’s weakest link is human[military kill chain led the way].
A recent fiction book does justice to the current[or near technological/electronic battle field in-action: The Las Good Man by Linda Nagata. I mean it’s sci-fi, live-in-action NOW! Swarms led by sophisticated eyes in the sky drones. The soldier on the ground release command to the autonomous analogues to do their thing, and it’s light out for the enemy[all kinds of nasties, from nano insect swarms to EMPs. You imagine the horrendous, they got it]: Human, the weakest link in the kill chain.
Just look around at the jobs being lost as the technologies eat up the human workers; following straight up the employment food chain – right to and including the CEOs.
There was the first Borg episode on “Star Trek TNG” where Data was able to access the Borg-network’s lower-protected “Sleep” command and put the whole Borg crew to sleep. A perfect example of the dangers of ‘connect everything’ (and also transhumanism).
I look to Nature as to how much ‘connectivity’ there should be. Think of the human body: Why are we not constructed as a super-large, single cell? Why are there semi-autonomous organs (heart, liver, lungs, etc) at all?
My thought is that – in the real world – there must be a limit to networking. One virus or bacteria species could take-down an entire body that is a single cell. Individuation provides protection: Biological ‘firewalls’ between organs different-enough that an anti-lung virus or bacteria will not take-down the heart or liver. Of course, wholly-individuated organs would be fatal (or at least wildly inefficient) for the body as a whole. Think cancer.
So, Nature has settled for SOME networking, but not TOO MUCH networking. I suspect that the military will learn this the hard way, à la “Battlestar Galactica”, Mark II…
Directed Energy Weapons Over California with Elana Freeland
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsncMgyJpB0
Eleana Freeland discusses some creepy aspects of Full Spectrum Dominance of Planet Earth —”
SPACE FENCE: COUNTDOWN TO ACTIVATION
In this exciting Part 2 episode, Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt interviews Chemtrails HAARP Author Elena Freeland on her upcoming book, Under an Ionized Sky: Chemtrails & Space Fence Lockdown. Elana’s research into the true purpose of the obscure and controversial project that was ostensibly set up to collect ‘Space Debris’ has now led her to see it as part of a massive effort to remake the Earth’s atmosphere in order to launch the most ambitious Global Surveillance Project that will even make Human DNA searchable.
DEVELOPING AN IONIZED SKY
When the Soviet Union Fell in 1991, it was widely assumed that the Reagan Bush era SDI Star Wars program was abandoned at that point. Instead, all of the research around Star Wars was reintegrated into a Black Budget Project for building a Space Fence that would serve as a Major Global Surveillance and Control Grid. What was missing two decades ago to realize this vision, came along later with the development HAARP and the successful efforts to Ionize the Atmosphere. With this being achieved over the last twenty years, the conditions are perfect for the full deployment of The Space Fence and all of its terrifying implications of Solar System control over communications and a new paradigm of Space being Weaponized.
D-WAVE & CERN
According to Elana’s research, two major steps in the deployment of the Space Fence have been achieved with the activation of the Hadron Particle Collider at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland and the development of the Quantum Computing chip called D-Wave which in theory can now act as a full Artificial Intelligence Hub making hundreds of decisions in nano-seconds. Some experts see the CERN Hadron Collider as a danger to the environment and cite detrimental changes to the magnetosphere of the Earth when the experimental machine is turned on. Elana goes even further suggesting that CERN, the Space Fence and the D-Wave chip form a complete ring for total domination of the Earth’s atmosphere and in fact will eventually make each individual a resonant, electric particle tower for global surveillance!
Shocking, enlightening, informative and groundbreaking, don’t miss this exciting Dark Journalist episode! This is part 2, please see part 1 http://www.darkjournalist.com/s-freeland5.php
How’s AI driving trading working out?
The reason why this is logical, reasonable and perhaps inevitable is that, in the face of an existential threat to our humanity and to our planet, a threat must be identified (or munufactured) and nothing other than world-wide interconnectedness as part of a response can be taken as “appropriate”. Wehrhoheit as the corollary to Werner von Braun’s warning to Dr. Rosin. ?
Could it be that an unspoken primary driver of this apparent madness of a strategy is the perception by the planners of the extraplanetary threat ?
Creating a planetary platform which could be joined later by other nations’ assets could be an operating approach to deployment of planetary defense.
The insanity isn’t limited to the Universally Surveilled States of Amerika:
http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2115094/china-build-giant-facial-recognition-database-identify-any
Along with their “one road to rule them all”, they also want their “eye of Sauron” to watch and identify them all and in almost real time.
Methinks the globalists are attempting to put “their” global command and control infrastructure in place for “their” end game. The only problem with all of this is the shear amount of data that will have to be processed in order for it all to work. It has already failed miserably with the alphabet agencies here. What makes them think it will work on a planet wide scale? Just like any other “net” or sieve, it will be mostly holes.
I agree this is a terrible idea from the POV of the flexibility and security of the military.
They call it networking, i.e., sharing, but when has the military mind ever shared anything? It’s all about hierarchy, dominance and control, and I don’t see this initiative as being any different. So in practice, the networking of everything is simply a means for total centralized control. Of course centralized control is great if you are doing the controlling, but it creates massive vulnerabilities (think of all those pesky Davids against the Pentagram Goliath) and destroys any flexibility and adaptation to changing circumstances. Also, the “network” must be secure; good luck with that! It’s only as strong as its weakest link, and if everything is connected, then you’ve multiplied the links into a vast, leaking sieve.
And let’s not forget treason from within; just look at what Hillary did at State, taking the highest actionable intelligence, SAPs, which are kept on paper in guarded clean rooms, and posting them to the highest bidder on her home server in a laundry room in Chappequa, not even protected by a password.
It’s the triumph of stupid, of hubris, and will just not work.
Here comes the Borg. The only thing missing is a few implanted microchips and I am sure somewhere in the armed forces complex people already have those.
Perhaps Star Trek’s preprogramming was getting us ready to support the Borg (and not the Enterprise)?
NO ROBOT EVER ANYWHERE SHOULD HAVE THE ABILITY TO KILL A HUMLAN BEING, other than by accidently falling over and crushing him..
No Robot should have, at its disposal.. armed weapon systems that can kill people.
Interesting article and blog, though wasn’t the F-35 project fraught with flaws, for instance its’ ability to only release four missiles instead of I don’t know how many? What a major blunder!
Hysteria. Nervous breakdown and straitjacket. Checkmate. Game over.
while logically it is a good idea interconnect every aspect of a system a similar situation occurred in Canada c.1968 with the amalgamation of the various branches of services of our military into what was known as ‘the Canadian armed forces’. no more royal Canadian navy, army or air force. from its very inception there was controversy over this. I tend to think it was more squabbling over turf or claiming of jurisdiction-read who can get the most funding or neatest war toys to play in the sandbox with. America has a few more branches of military [competing corporations in the killing and bringing democracy to a country with an unpronounceable name that you cant find on a map-unless it has oil] and historically the turf wars have been very pronounced. to use the standard metric of expression of the usa-the squabbles between the branches have been the size of 2 football fields when it comes to who gets funding for a missile system or gun battery. each one must keep the other dog from piddling on their hydrant. it seems to me that the best experiment to test the potential success of a plan like this is to get people together to order a pizza. I suspect you know the gig-not one large-several small ones and the question is ‘what do you want on your half?’ a few years back the Canadian armed forces was sort of divided up into branches of service again-the ostensible purpose was to return ‘the esprit de corps’ that interservice rivalry was supposed to make the killing corporation more effective. [perhaps it was only a divide and conquer move on another level for the globalists?] I suspect that integration of the American forces will be pushed-and pushed back once the big dogs start to see the height of the piddle on the hydrants in in that sinkhole on the Potomac.