The new war machine

ON Jan 17, 1961, Dwight D. Eisenhower sat before a television camera to deliver his farewell address as the president of the United States. Instead of a simple ceremonial goodbye, the former five-star general, who had commanded Allied forces in Europe during World War II and later presided over America’s Cold War security state, issued a warning. America, he said, had built something new: a permanent arms industry closely tied to military power, scientific research, political influence and state spending. His fear was not the production of weapons alone, but the creation of a permanent economy in which war became a source of contracts, influence, research budgets and political power. Eisenhower called it the “military-industrial complex” and warned that its influence could endanger liberty and democratic life. More than six decades later, that warning is beginning to return in a form Eisenhower could not have imagined. The old factories produced aircraft, missiles, tanks and submarines. The new ones look very different: cloud systems, AI models, chips, data centres, satellite networks and battlefield software. Together, they form the computational backbone on which states are beginning to depend for intelligence, prediction and military decision-making. Democratic states may begin to depend on privately owned systems they cannot fully audit, regulate or understand. This is why the Pentagon’s recent declaration that the US military must become an “AI-first” fighting force should not be read as a routine technology announcement. It is a political and historical marker. The US Department of Defence has entered into agreements with leading frontier AI and technology companies, including OpenAI, Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Oracle and SpaceX, to deploy advanced AI capabilities on classified military networks. Its stated purpose is to accelerate the transformation of the US military into an AI-fir...

Original source: Dawn Pakistan