By John Pickard
A 1977 science fiction short story, later turned into a full-length novel, depicted teenagers being trained for warfare by playing video games. Later on, although they were not told, their ‘games’ became real-time space battles with an alien fleet. Training someone to kill by playing games might have a dubious morality to it, but it is peanuts compared to the modern use of AI in targetting and killing thousands over the past three years in Gaza, and more recently in Iran.
Flight simulators have been used to train pilots for decades. But in the past, once trained, military pilots would at least have flown over a combat zone and had some connection, albeit not close, to those they were killing on the ground. Increasingly, however, technology is creating a huge physical gulf between those making decisions about killing and those being killed.
The United States military and even more so Israel, (the latter able to field test their methods in Gaza and the West Bank) are the world leaders in the use of Artificial Intelligence in warfare. Together, they have an unsurpassed ability to‘fix’ – via satellite and a variety of electronic evesdropping methods – the exact position to within metres of millions of would-be targets.
Tracking systems and weapons targetting are knitted together in a deadly matrix that calculate the most vulnerable targets at any one time and the availability of the weaponry. The totality of such a system is referred to as Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR).
The power and accuracy of the Israeli ISR system is the reason why so many top- and middle-ranking Iranian Revolutionary Guard leaders and political figure-heads have been killed in the last few weeks. It is why the Iranian regime planned in advance – after the blows it received in the bombing campaign of June last year – to devolve as much decision-making in the current war down to regional and local commanders.
What is being used in the war against Iran has been perfected by Israel in the occupied territories of Palestine from long before the October 7 attack by Hamas on Israel in 2023. The Israeli authorities have had a database with the names of every occupant in every house in the Palestinian areas and they have had this for years.
They have the phone numbers and they use mass messages to terrorise the occupants – when they do get warnings, which is not always the case – to get out when their house is going to be bombed. They are using the same technique today in Lebanon, forcing civilians to flee north and to get the occupants of Beirut properties to evacuate.
Israel’s “first AI war” against Hamas – two years before October 7
This is not new. In July 2021, the Jerusalem Post reported on Israel’s “first AI war” two months earlier – directed then also against Hamas in Gaza. “In May, The Jerusalem Post reported, “the IDF called ‘Operation Guardian of the Walls’ the first AI war, having relied heavily on machine learning to gather targets belonging to Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad and strike them”.
We should have no illusions about the morality of wars…any war. They are all brutal, dirty and bloody. But there is something particularly immoral and utterly de-humanising about using artificial intelligence for killing people, especially when those being killed are non-combatants – women and children – and where the targetting is done in a comfortable and safe IT facility, potentially hundreds of miles from the spilled blood and guts.
Georgetown University, USA, recently published a paper on the Israeli use of ISR. The Dehumanization of ISR: Israel’s Use of Artificial Intelligence In Warfare. Even the opening paragraph of the paper is revealing:
“At 5 am, [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had marked,” B said, an anonymous IDF soldier. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them one by one—we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of [the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed him and his house.” (emphasis added).
The use of AI and a variety of algorithms to take decisions, with the inevitable possiblity of grave errors, emphasises, if it were necessary, that there is no real ‘legality’ in war. The Geneva Convention was always ‘optional’ to a war criminal like Netanyahu, but it becomes even more meaningless, when life and death decisions are taken by a computer.
“Honed and effective kill chains”
The Georgetown University paper explains how new algorithms have been developed over the years, supposedly to become more effective. “‘Gospel,’ ‘Where’s Daddy?,’ and ‘Lavender’ are three algorithms that have had significant use in the war in Gaza to support targeting and decision-making.
“These algorithms work together to create a honed and effective kill chain. They simultaneously analyze data from all ISR sources, satellite imagery, drone footage, signals intelligence (SIGINT), and information gathered from monitoring individuals and groups. This information is then synthesized to identify potential targets for the IDF”.
One of the algorithms, the paper notes, identified as many as 37,000 targets at one time and it is often unable to distinguish between a ‘civilian’ target and a member of the Hamas military wing, because several different people might have the same patterns of movement or communication. This creates a whole new morality – or better described as amorality – of warfare. IDF soldiers have often become simply ‘rubber stamps’, authorising strikes, because they trust the calculations and estimations of their ISR system.
Civilian casualties are not ‘accidental’ collatoral deaths of ‘normal’ warfare. The morality of the IDF lies somewhere between the gutter and the sewer, insofar as they expect and accept many non-combatants being killed when they target a single person. IDF spokespersons talk about ‘targetted’ strikes, knowing full well that there are non-combatants present.
As the author of the Georgetown paper says, “Israeli algorithms generally deem 15 to 20 civilian casualties in case of a planned strike on a low-ranking militant, and up to one hundred for a senior commander, as perfectly acceptable…” (emphasis added) This is how tens of thousands have been killed in Gaza and twenty thousand children blown to pieces, while the politicians of the west look on.
Training IDF or US solders to operate their ISR systems, is much like playing a video game. Learning to operate a lethat drone carrying a large number of deadly missiles will involved little more than pressing buttons and watching a screen…and absolutely no contact with real life.
It is likely that the ultimate decision to fire a US Tomahawk missile into a girls’ primary school in Tehran on the first day of the current war was taken in a command and control post hundreds of miles away. The operative may even have been in the Pentagon, thousands of miles away. In any event, they will have not seen, heard or smelled the carnage and devastation for which they were responsible. Their entire ‘world’ was a screen, a mouse and a keyboard, just like in a game.
Sponge Bob Square Pants goes to war for the USA
In the sci-fi novel mentioned, Enders Game by Orson Scott Card, the game-trained teenagers all but wiped out an alien civilisation, but at least the main perpetrator was filled with remorse afterwards, and he tried to atone for what he had done. There is no remorse in the US military currently bombing Iran to bits, and nor was there within the IDF, bombing Gaza into a moonscape. Their politicians no doubt go to Church or Synagogue and thank God for their success.
In the war against Iran, the Financial Times noted this week, Trump’s public relations machine seem to have taken the trivialisation of death and destruction one step further. “The White House has found a new recruit to sell the US war on Iran to an increasingly sceptical American public: SpongeBob SquarePants”.
That a children’s cartoon character is thought necessary to con the US public into supporting the war – although an IPSOS poll this month showed 43% of Americans opposed the war and 29% supported it – says a lot about the mentality of Trump and his MAGA followers. But Sponge Bob is only one of several cartoon and pop icons being used in short, slick videos.
“This is a memification and a gamification of war,” Nick Cull, a historian of propaganda at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, told the Financial Times. “It’s an appalling way to represent conflict.”
One of the worst videos put out by the White House is based on Nintendo characters and in this a series of targets are aimed at, with each one, when it is hit, switching to become a real-time film of a target in Iran being hit by a bomb or missile.
Another commentator, Roger Stahl, a professor of communications studies at the University of Georgia, suggested to the FT that the videos weren’t necessarily aimed to win anyone over. “It’s to galvanise the Maga base with a kind of thrilling, easy-to-digest version of that conflict that appeals to the base instincts of gamers and people who think that war is just a series of one-liners from Hollywood…But to probably 70 per cent of the population, a good majority at least, it’s just shocking.”
You never see the aftermath, you don’t feel the grief
Peter Loge, director of the School of Media and Public Affairs at George Washington University told the FT, “They’re like ads for a knock-off Tom Cruise movie…It hides the gruesome realities of conflict and war…You don’t feel the grief, you never see the aftermath of the conflict or the violence.”
The director and and actor Ben Stiller, discovered that his film Tropic Thunder was featured in one of the montages put out by the White House and he demanded remove the clip. “We never gave you permission and have no interest in being a part of your propaganda machine,” he wrote on X. “War is not a movie.”
We should no longer be surprised at the staggering hypocrisy and double-standards of the political right. Trump and the people around him preach about moral rectitude, the ‘sanctity’ of life, and a whole lot of other markers of ‘righteousness’. Then they treat the blowing up of civilians, including primary schoolgirls, as a game.
Nothing better illustrates the utter moral vaccum and the ethical bankruptcy of the most powerful representative of world capitalism. One day historians might ask how such people ever became so powerful and why it took so long before they were overthrown.
