Page 136 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

A month later, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work admitted before the Atlantic Council
that the Aegis combat system commanding missile warships is already being run by an AI:

“Machines [are] taking over from humans key decisions of when to launch both offensive and defensive missiles. . .In
the next decade it’s going to become clear when and where we will delegate authority to machines. We will delegate
[some] authority to machines,” Work explained. 31

Lockheed Martin’s “semiautonomous” Long Range Anti-Ship Missile is already up and
running. “Semiautonomous” means that a human operator can select the target, but the missile
will then fly hundreds of miles out of contact with its human controller and attack the target,
whatever the human operator’s second thoughts. 32
The 2016 report “Autonomous Weapons and Operational Risk” by Paul Scharre of the
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Center for a New American Security (CNAS) warns against letting AIs make killing decisions,
pushing instead for “centaur warfighting,” integrated decision-making between humans and
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computers. Some military brass go so far as to insist that “real” intelligence is what humans
can do that machines cannot, while others view AI as a “Third Offset”—computer-based high-
tech that will offset a smaller military and “create a new class of ‘Iron Man’-style fighters.” 35

NETWORK-CENTRIC WARFARE AND JADE 2

Each human being is an emitter of radio waves, a living broadcasting station of exceedingly low
power. The stomach will send out not only infrared heat waves, but the entire spectrum of light,
ultraviolet rays, x-rays, radio waves and so on. Of course all these radiations are fantastically
weak and the radio waves are among the weakest. But the fifty-foot aerial of the Naval Research
Laboratory in Washington, D.C., the most accurately constructed aerial in existence, could pick
up radio signals coming from your stomach more than four miles away.
— John Pfeiffer, The Changing Universe, 1956

The military doctrine of full spectrum dominance supporting C4 (command, control,
communications, and cyberwarfare) has recast the whole of earthly life into a digitalized
“battlespace” even as supercomputers, quantum computers, AI systems, and network-centric
warfare (NCW) come online. A perpetually ionized antenna atmosphere has opened the
floodgates to a network-centric cyberwarfare that makes the entire biosphere and near-earth into
a 24/7-ready battlespace. In fact, U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) is now its own
agency and no longer under U.S. Strategic Command. NSA Director Admiral Michael S. Rogers
is also commander of USCYBERCOM and chief of Central Security Service (cryptology).
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In his 2009 article “Network-Centric Warfare,” Tom Burghardt stresses that the Revolution
in Military Affairs (RMA) is really about electronic full spectrum dominance warfare—what Air
Force Magazine calls “compressing the kill chain.” In the 2009 version of NCW, highly
classified nano-sized sensors included:

• ​Tagging tracking and locating gear (TTL), homing beacons to guide drone strikes

• ​Dynamic optical tags (DOTs), small active retro-reflecting optical tags for two-way
data exchange