Iran as Beta Test
And the betas failed
American politicians like Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth spend so much time grandiosely, publicly posing as alpha males, you can only conclude they are betas.
It’s simple logic bolstered by some psychology and countless examples.
The Rule of Opposites.
Donald Trump at the NATO summit in Turkey was the same old Don. Lots of public Onanism, all dutifully reported by generally brain-dead conventional news media, alongside old stories about Trump’s threat to tear up the 1908 border treaty between Canada and the United States. The Wall Street Journal recycled that chestnut inside a new story about how Mark Carney is an international leader reshaping NATO.
Not a Canadian newspaper. Murican. Meanwhile, after the WSJ piece, the Toronto rags were all copying it. Or, as with one Globe scribbler whining that they had told the treaty story almost a decade ago but no one gives a flying frig. Another columnist paraphrased it. The Star told us how the Americans were shut out of a competition for Canadian military trucks when, if they reported factually, all non-Canadian competitors were shut out since Canada has more than enough potential truck makers who could use the contract to make jobs for Canadians.
Canadian media think they are American media, which is why, as in this Carney story, sometimes American media eat their lunch. Same as Newfie media think they are Tranna media and so don’t report Newfoundland and Labrador news to Newfoundlanders and Labradorians but let Mainlanders do it. News on Labrador hydro, frinstance, comes from Quebec, more often than not. If not that then going to some Yank to speculate on the Innu business for the CBC because he doesn’t know anything about the Innu mess. Or the old favourite of some UBC grad currently on the payroll at Generic Canadian U on the Parkway telling the Postmedia Telegram - this time - that while she didn’t know what happened with Andrea Barbour, she could offer some spec and some penetrating insights into the obvious in place of actual insight. Media were happy. Content dutifully assembled in both cases, space filled and no one the wiser for any of it, especially the audiences.
Canadian media report defence spending stories like the truck one as if they are shocked that defence spending is about politics and economics. They should look up the MacAdam shield shovel or the Ross rifle. Their naivety is strange because not only is Canadian defence spending since the Second Great War always about politics and domestic economics, the Americans are exactly the same. Zero to do with actual military capability. All about the pork, patronage, and bureaucracy.
Take the idea of measuring “defence” by telling us how much a country is spending on the military as a share of the value of its whole economy. How much of the GDP a country is spending on something called the military or defence. A whole industry of talking heads in think-tanks, the bureaucracy, and the media talk about whether this country or that is hitting its “NATO target.” Canada is a chronic laggard, they say because it seldom has met the goal set by NATO. All of it is obvious bullshit and yet they talk as if it were real.
There is not a shred of evidence that how much a country spends on defence in relation to the size of its economy directly relates to actual military capability, let alone meets an actual strategic need for military power. None. Not a single word of research anywhere that even questions the idea that dancing about architecture makes sense. They all just jeté and plié and assemble the content regardless.
The United States is the poster child for why this very American idea of defence spending and GDP is nonsense. The US outspends any of the NATO countries by a wide margin both in absolute dollars and as a share of gross domestic product. And that didn’t stop Iran, which spends roughly what Canada does as a share of GDP, from kicking Don and Pete’s ass in a handful of weeks this year and get the betas to come back for more this week. So when anyone thinks Canada is not spending enough, challenge them to explain what Canada needs to spend the money on and why. If they say because the US says so or NATO agreed, you know are speaking to another bullshitter. That simple question is easier at finding one of the pod people than sticking a heated bit of wire in a Petrie dish of their blood to find The Thing.
Some of you are already trying to vent the steam coming from your ears since, even if you are not American, you cannot imagine the reporting you saw could be so utterly wrong and… well, stupid. Well, of course it is wrong and stupid since it was American. US news media uncritically recited all sorts of nonsense about Iran or NATO these past few months, but especially popular was the daily report of how many targets the Americans hit in Iran. Dozens. Hundreds. Then thousands. There were seldom pictures, by the way, but lots of stories about the number of targets hit and then reports of percentages of military capability destroyed without any definitions of that capability. Don Hisself was especially fond of talking about how the Americans had supposed wiped out 90% of the air force or navy or missile launchers and yet missiles and drones flew the whole time and since the ceasefire Iranian air force fighter jets escorted the Pakistanis to meetings.
The story here is not just that the Americans lied, which the Trump gooners do all the time, it’s how they lied. They gave us the modern version of body counts and sorties. Vietnam War staples as indicators of effort and success long ago highlighted as signs of the fundamental problems with the way the American military at the time thought about war and approached war. Right up there with lists of targets which White House staffers and the President picked from each day so they could be sure to bargain with force or whatever other concept the American think tanks had come up with about strategy and fighting a war in the age of nuclear weapons. And all of it completely meaningless as far as actual military capability goes.
The original conclusion of this column was that the American military used the Iran conflict to beta test a new computer program to sort a list of target according to a set of qualities and objectives and then assign aircraft, missiles, and rockets to hit them. It’s basically a jumped-up version of what the Americans and anyone else with a military have been doing for centuries. The Americans in particular have been doing the job with and without computers since long before the creation of the first Single Integrated Operations Plan or SIOP in the late 1950s and early 1960s for nuclear weapons and attacks on the Soviet Union, China, and eventually anywhere else the American might want to hit with nukes.
SIOP was a bureaucratic response - figuring out a way to manage the number of places or things to be hit with the ever-growing number of things to hit them - to a problem that was itself the result of bureaucracy. The number of nuclear weapons the Untied States built and the number of bureaucracies - army, navy, and air force - within the American military with them were both a function not of rational military calculation but of grasping personal and political ambition and the grease that makes all bureaucracies run: pork.
This latest bureaucratic boondoggle, what was being beta tested in Iran, often gets called AI and, inevitably, there are a couple of companies duking it out for the endless and very large Pentagon contracts that come with the latest hot marketing gimmick. It’s still just a brute force sorting and searching engine that is, like every program since the first, subject to the GIGO principle. Garbage In. Garbage Out. And from the looks of things, there was a lot of GIGO in the American military work in Iran.
The really funny thing for some of us is not that this latest AI racket fits an old pattern in Murican military politics but that it actually started life in the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, the Ultimate Bureaucrats of the Ultimate Bureaucracy called the Soviet military it on the idea that modern technology - computers, drones, and intelligence gathering - would allow the topmost command to control every aspect of military action pretty close to when it happened and no matter where it happened. They could find a target, figure how important it was, and assign something to hit it without being anywhere near the actual fighting. They could do it for many targets at the same time, figure out if the attack worked and then repeat the whole cycle again with new targets and old targets needing a second or third hit.
The biggest weakness of this centrally controlled fighting is that it is extremely fragile. It doesn’t take much to shag it up or, even when it works properly, as in Iran, for it to do nothing useful at all. That’s because - like all bureaucratic bastard-babies - it is easily corrupted to have nothing to do with anything but meeting a bureaucratic need. Think NLHS and health care or NALCOR and delivering lowest cost electricity consistent with reliable service and not bankrupting every household in the province. The system gave the flyboys and missileers something to aim their little reticles at, there was a nice boom and pictures of it for the planners and the software to chew over, but nothing actually stopped the Iranians from fighting. In fact, lots of Iranian military stuff never got touched at all, as it turns out, and what did disappear from the planet didn’t convince the Iranians to give up.
In fact, the American military operation has been so spectacularly unsuccessful that not only did it fail in every respect the first time, it has now started up to fail some more. But wait. It gets better. By all indications, Iran stopped its nuclear weapons program some time ago. Donald Trump claimed he wants to stop Iran from having nuclear weapons, but since he has been so duplicitous, the Iranians are now building both nuclear weapons and the missiles to fire them in order to deter the Americans from coming back.
If there wasn’t an Iranian nuclear weapons program before now, they have quickly figured out that the reckless untrustworthy Americans will likely only leave them alone if Iran can find the way of threatening the United States with nuclear devastation. That is next level clusterfuckery but folks, behold the United States military and political leadership, the people who claim they have the greatest armed force in the history of the planet, which tells you right away they don’t. Might have at one time but sure as shootin’ they don’t right now.
The other mother of this AI targeting thing is Skynet. That fictional future created in Terminator in the 1980s was rooted in the same observation Soviet military planners made. If you take this computer thing out to a logical conclusion you get an integrated, automated magic fighting machine. Normal people like you and the rest of us came out of theatres horrified at the thought. Others, like the future Pentagon types, came out with massive mental erections.
Same thing happened when some people hit on the idea of nuclear winter, believing that if they figured out exactly how horrible nuclear war would be, then people might stop making them and planning how to use them. Others understood - and said so at the time - that giving planners a firm line only meant they could actually plan how to use nukes first without triggering the horror of a nuclear winter.
Not only were the nuclear winter people wrong in their assumptions, they were so badly wrong that they made it all the more likely that had the Soviet Union and NATO look seriously at fighting, one of them would shoot nukes first - but just shy of the nuclear winter threshold - to gain the advantage of cutting the other off from the retaliation that perversely helped keep the peace for so long. Uncertainty kept things sensible. Certainty bred insensibility.
And all of it is rooted in the same warning, the same caution against hubris Mary Shelley put in her story of a scientist who sought to create life out of a few scraps of human flesh and electricity.
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Same old, same old 😐 The Americans learned the wrong lesson from Vietnam: that controlling the public narrative is EVERYTHING to maintaining public support; and that little else matters when facing the public and politicians.
On a lighter tone ... "scribblers" 😂 That's one of my own expressions for Pabulum Media Journalists. For your consideration, the other is "typists". Do feel free to use it.
All I ask in return is permission to use "bureaucratic bastard babies". 😁