From the electronic battlefield in Vietnam to network centric warfare that was developed in the late 1990s and used in Iraq and Afghanistan, every new generation and every new war brings with it the promise of a new kind of technology that will change the nature of warfare forever.
In most cases, these technologies fail.
Today, the weapons industry is selling the American people on the Replicator Initiative as the way for Washington to gain a military edge against China.
“Replicator will begin with all-domain, ‘attritable’ autonomy to help overcome China's advantage in mass: more ships, more missiles, more forces," according to the Pentagon. These capabilities “can help a determined defender stop a larger aggressor from achieving its objectives, put fewer people in the line of fire, and be made, fielded, and upgraded at the speed warfighters need without long maintenance tails," says Kathleen Hicks, the Deputy Secretary of Defense.
If history is any guide, there is good reason to believe that these suggested technological advancements could fail, or worse.
“If we look at how AI is being used so far, it’s a very, very bad sign,” William Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, says in a new video produced by Khody Akhavi and Steve McMaster. “Either they’re going to sell us a bill of goods. It’s all going to fail. We’re going to waste a lot of money and create a lot of tension. Or they’ll integrate it into the war machine and then we’ll have disastrous results. The time to worry about that is now.”
Khody Akhavi is Senior Video Producer at the Quincy Institute. Previously he was Head of Video for Al-Monitor and covered the White House for Al Jazeera English, as well as produced films for the network’s flagship investigative unit.
Blaise Malley is a former reporter for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a former associate editor at The National Interest and reporter-researcher at The New Republic. His writing has appeared in The New Republic, The American Prospect, The American Conservative, and elsewhere.
Top image credit: FILE PHOTO: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defense minister Yoav Gallant during a press conference in the Kirya military base in Tel Aviv , Israel , 28 October 2023. ABIR SULTAN POOL/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo
On Thursday the International Court of Justice (ICC) issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, as well as a member of Hamas leadership.
The warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant were for charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The court unanimously agreed that the prime minister and former defense minister “each bear criminal responsibility for the following crimes as co-perpetrators for committing the acts jointly with others: the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.”
“The Chamber considered that there are reasonable grounds to believe that both individuals intentionally and knowingly deprived the civilian population in Gaza of objects indispensable to their survival, including food, water, and medicine and medical supplies, as well as fuel and electricity, from at least 8 October 2023 to 20 May 2024,” the court detailed in its allegations.
The ICC also charged Hamas leader Ibrahim Al-Masri for mass killings during the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, including rape and hostage taking.
A plan suggested by former IDF general, Giora Eiland, called for the explicit emptying out of northern Gaza and the labeling of all remaining civilians as military targets, as well as the purposeful blockage of humanitarian aid. Netanyahu reportedly did not agree to the plan, but evidence points to aspects of the plan being enacted.
“The ICC decision shows once more how out of sync Biden's Gaza policy is with both American and international law,” says the Quincy Institute’s Executive Vice President Trita Parsi. “Biden has sacrificed America's international standing to arm and protect leaders who the international courts have deemed to be war criminals.”
The ICC’s move comes just one day after unprecedented votes in the U.S. Senate to end the sale of certain offensive weapons to Israel. The measures ultimately failed, with the White House telling senators that they would be supporting Iran and Hamas should they vote to curb weapons sales to Israel.
Because of the ICC warrants, Netanyahu or Gallant could be arrested upon entering a nation that has recognized the ICC and its rulings. However, Israel is among dozens of other countries, including the United States, that do not recognize the court’s jurisdiction.
After warrants were requested in October, Israel reacted by challenging the jurisdiction of the ICC in the matter, but that challenge has been rejected. “Israel's reaction — that no other democracy has been treated this way by the ICC — is indicative of how perverted certain approaches to international law have become,” said Parsi. “Israel essentially argues that because it defines itself as a democracy, it should be above the law. That war-crimes, apartheid, and genocide are ok as long as the perpetrator identifies as democratic. This approach — creating different sets of laws and standards for different countries — is a recipe for global instability and a threat to American security.”
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Top image credit: A sapper of the 24th mechanized brigade named after King Danylo installs an anti-tank landmine, amid Russia's attack on Ukraine, on the outskirts of the town of Chasiv Yar in the Donetsk region, Ukraine October 30, 2024. Oleg Petrasiuk/Press Service of the 24th King Danylo Separate Mechanized Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces/Handout via REUTERS
The Biden administration announced today that it will provide Ukraine with antipersonnel landmines for use inside the country, a reversal of its own efforts to revive President Obama’s ban on America’s use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of the indiscriminate weapons anywhere except the Korean peninsula.
The intent of this reversal, one U.S. official told the Washington Post, is to “contribute to a more effective defense.” The landmines — use of which is banned in 160 countries by an international treaty — are expected to be deployed primarily in the country’s eastern territories, where Ukrainian forces are struggling to defend against steady advances by the Russian military.
But much like the Biden administration’s controversial decision to supply Ukraine with cluster bombs — another indiscriminate weapon system whose unexploded ordinance can maim and kill civilians, especially children, for decades after their use — this move may offer limited military upside, but it comes with massive risk to Ukrainian civilians, and it will not turn the tide of the war in Ukraine’s favor.
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the policy shift to reporters this morning during a trip to Laos, a nation which the U.S. helped turn into the world’s most bombed country per capita. Either blind or indifferent to the irony of making this announcement from a country where 30% of the territory remains contaminated by unexploded ordinance thanks to the U.S. military, Austin prebutted humanitarian concerns with the weapons transfer by arguing that the land mines are “not persistent,” so “we can control when they would self-activate, self-detonate and that makes it far more safer eventually.”
But as arms experts at the Friends Committee on National Legislation have pointed out, drawing a distinction between persistent and non-persistent landmines is “dangerously misleading” because of the well-documented failures of the self-destruct and self-deactivation features that supposedly make these weapons “safer” for the civilians who stumble across them years after a war has ended. In fact, the “smart mines” the U.S. deployed in the Gulf War failed at a rate 150 times higher than the Department of Defense claimed.
The reality is that, no matter the mechanisms meant to make these weapons more humane, non-persistent landmines are still packed full of explosive materials — and so their lethality, indiscriminate nature, and ability to harm civilians persist.
In fact, when President Trump first reversed the Obama-era landmine restrictions in 2020, Joe Biden himself recognized the move for what it was — “another reckless act” that would “put more civilians at risk of being injured by unexploded mines.” Biden lived up to his campaign pledge to “promptly roll back” Trump’s move on landmines in 2022 — only to reverse his own position on the way out of the White House doors.
Coming on the heels of Biden’s decision to allow Ukraine to use U.S. long-range missiles to strike Russian territory, this move is presumably aimed at proving Biden’s willingness to do “whatever it takes” to help Ukraine prevail over Russia. But as a battered Ukraine prepares to enter its fourth year since Russia’s invasion, and Ukrainian support for a war-ending diplomacy continues to grow, the question remains: when will U.S. leaders stop searching for a silver bullet weapon that enables Ukraine to win an unwinnable war, and actually pair U.S. military aid to Ukraine with an all-out push to get Russia and Ukraine to the negotiating table and broker an end to this bloodshed?
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Top image credit: Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva attends task force meeting of the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, July 24, 2024. REUTERS/Tita Barros
The city of Rio de Janeiro provided a stunningly beautiful backdrop to Brazil’s big moment as host of the G20 summit this week.
Despite last minute challenges, Brazil pulled off a strong joint statement (Leaders’ Declaration) that put some of President Lula’s priorities on human welfare at the heart of the grouping’s agenda, while also crafting impressively tough language on Middle East conflicts and a pragmatic paragraph on Ukraine.
Key financial issues such as reform of multilateral development banks (MDBs) also continued to make progress.
An organization of 19 states and two regional organizations (the European Union and African Union), the G20 is the high table of global economic governance, which came into its own with annual leaders’ summits in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. It inevitably tackles the most prominent issues of security during these summits as well.
In a world racked by two major regional conflicts and several other crises, and with the tectonic power shift underway in Washington, this year’s G20 was shaping up to be a challenge. Although the United States was represented by President Joe Biden, the election of Donald Trump cast a long shadow over the proceedings. This was also the third G20 summit hosted by a Global South state (and South Africa will be the fourth next year), which has led to a concentrated push on “Southern issues” in these summits.
Early in the summit, Argentina indicated it may not sign on to taxing the ultra-wealthy, a cause President Lula had prioritized (though this would require domestic legislation within states to be implemented). Argentinian president Javier Milei’s prior meeting with Trump at Mar-a-Lago (the first foreign leader the president-elect has met since his reelection) triggered speculation that Argentina was potentially playing a spoiler. But cooler heads prevailed, and Argentina ultimately signed on to the joint statement. Along with another 81 nations, Buenos Aires also joined the Global Alliance against Hunger and Poverty inaugurated at Rio.
The G20 has historically focused on the more macroeconomic aspects of global economic governance. By placing hunger and poverty squarely within the grouping’s agenda, Brazil has introduced a more clearly human dimension to the elite body that can only help it gain more credibility across the world, especially across the Global South.
The summit’s achievement of consensus on the horror unfolding in the Middle East was also impressive. There has been a wide divide between the Global West and most of the Global South on Israel’s war on Palestine and Lebanon.
But the joint statement demanded “the lifting of all barriers to the provision of humanitarian assistance at scale,” strongly backed the “Palestinian right to self-determination,” a two-state solution, and a comprehensive ceasefire in Gaza “in line with UN Security Council Resolution 2735.” On Lebanon, the statement, while not mentioning UNSC resolution 1701 (that has been prioritized by the United States), called for a ceasefire that enabled “citizens to return safely to their homes on both sides of the Blue Line.”
The Russia-Ukraine war was a major point of contention at the 2023 New Delhi G20 summit and nearly torpedoed the 2022 Bali summit. But the delegates at Rio, perhaps chastened by serious obstacles now evident to maximalist positions on both sides of the war, agreed to a modest paragraph on the conflict.
It mainly cited the UN charter and various dimensions of “human suffering.” Preserving sovereignty and territorial integrity, a consistent point of international consensus on Ukraine, was only mentioned in a separate paragraph that addressed all global conflicts.
Despite Brazil’s current prioritization of the issue in international diplomacy, climate change was one area where the Rio summit could have shown greater muscle. For instance, there was no call to “transition away from fossil fuels,” a major commitment from last year’s COP. Sources in Rio told me that the overlapping dates with the ongoing COP29 at Baku added to the complications, as key climate negotiators of the various nations were holed up many time zones away.
But the challenge also symbolizes an overall weakening of international climate action and an increasing paralysis of the UNFCCC process.
On reforming international institutions, the New Delhi G20 summit provided a substantive push on MDB reform, an issue the Global South has been pushing vigorously. The Rio process took the next step by producing a comprehensive roadmap on the question. The joint statement also pushed for greater Global South inclusion in the UN Security Council by inclusion of “underrepresented and unrepresented regions and groups (in) Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America and the Caribbean”
Brazil’s success at Rio demonstrated that, in a world in which the forces of fragmentation are ascendant, the G20 remains the one forum that can still bring the world’s key states together in one room and engage with each other. That may sound like a low bar, but it is, in fact, an achievement.
As I wrote recently, even America Firsters in the United States will likely find the grouping useful due to its informality, lack of a permanent bureaucracy, and the ample opportunity for bilateral meetings with strong global leaders.
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