Prominent artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI recently appointed newly retired U.S. Army General and former National Security Agency (NSA) director Paul M. Nakasone to its board of directors.
Nakasone will join the Board’s newly announced Safety and Security Committee, slated to advise OpenAI’s Board on critical safety- and security-related matters and decisions.
Established following an exodus of OpenAI higher-ups concerned about the company’s perceived de-prioritization of safety-related matters, the new Safety and Security Committee is OpenAI’s apparent effort to reestablish a safety-forward reputation with an increasingly wary public.
AI safety concerns are of the utmost importance, but OpenAI should not use them to ram through an appointment that appears poised to normalize AI’s militarization while spinning theever-revolving door between defense and intelligence agencies and Big Tech.
The ‘revolving door’ strikes again
Following his 38-year military career, including over five years headingU.S. Army Cyber Command, Nakasone’s post-retirement OpenAI appointment and shift to the corporate sector mimics the military-industrial complex’s ever-“revolving door” between senior defense or intelligence agency officials and private industry.
The phenomenon manifests itself in rampant conflicts of interest and massive military contracts alike: according to an April 2024 Costs of War report, U.S. military and intelligence contracts awarded to major tech firms had ceilings “worth at least $53 billion combined” between 2019 and 2022.
Quietly lifting language barring the military application of its tech from its website earlier this year, OpenAI apparently wants in on the cash. The company is currently collaborating with the Pentagon on cybersecurity-related tools to prevent veteran suicide.
A slippery slope
OpenAI remains adamant its tech cannot be used to develop or use weapons despite recent policy changes. But AI’s rapid wartime proliferation in Gaza and Ukraine highlights other industry players’ lack of restraint; failing to keep up could mean losing out on lucrative military contracts in a competitive and unpredictable industry.
Similarly, OpenAI’s current usage policies affirm that the company’s products cannot be used to “compromise the privacy of others,” especially in the forms of “[f]acilitating spyware, communications surveillance, or unauthorized monitoring of individuals.” But Nakasone’s previous role as director of the NSA, an organization infamous for illegally spying on Americans, suggests such policies may not hold water.
In NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s words: “There is only one reason for appointing an[NSA] Director to your board. This is a willful, calculated betrayal of the rights of every person on Earth.”
All things considered, Nakasone’s OpenAI appointment signals that a treacherous, more militarized road for OpenAI, as well as AI as a whole, likely lies ahead.
Stavroula Pabst is a writer, comedian, and media PhD student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Athens, Greece. Her writing has appeared in publications including the Grayzone, Reductress, and the Harvard Business Review.
Director, General Paul Nakasone, National Security Agency, appears before a Senate Committee on Intelligence hearing to examine worldwide threats, in the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC, USA, Wednesday, March 8, 2023. Photo by Rod Lamkey/CNP/ABACAPRESS.COM via REUTERS
The last few weeks have looked like a fast-forward version of the Biden administration’s broader approach to its support for Ukraine. At the war’s outset, Washington insisted that it was not at war with Russia and that American troops would not be deployed to defend Ukraine.
The administration laid out a series of guidelines that it hoped would allow them to support Ukraine without provoking Russia to the point that Moscow felt compelled to escalate. Little by little, however, the U.S. began loosening its policies, notably on the supply of certain weapons, greenlighting the transfer of long-range missile systems, Abrams tanks, cluster munitions, and more.
At each step, the Biden administration would wait and gauge the Russian response before making more escalatory decisions. In recent weeks, perhaps motivated by Ukraine’s deteriorating battlefield position, this process has accelerated.
In late May, Washington reversed course and gave Kyiv permission to conduct limited strikes in Russian territory using U.S. weapons. Then, on June 10, the State Department lifted a years-long ban on the neo-Nazi-linked Azov brigade’s access to American weapons. The following week, the Biden administration said that attacks using U.S. arms need not be limited to the region near the northeastern city Kharkiv, but that they could hit Russian targets “anywhere” across the border.
Now, this week, reports indicate that the president is “leaning toward” rescinding a “de facto ban” against deploying American contractors to Ukraine.
Like the earlier moves, Washington will likely wait to see how Mocow reacts, but it does make the prospect of a dangerous escalation more likely. “It is too soon to tell whether such a move, if enacted, would bring the United States closer to having its own troops participate in the war effort more directly, at least in some fashion,” the Quincy Institute’s Zachary Paikin wrote in RS on Wednesday. “Undoubtedly, the Kremlin would view a full-fledged contingent of Western troops on Ukrainian soil as intolerable, and it is difficult to assess the precise threshold at which Moscow will consider one of its red lines to be crossed.”
As Paikin notes, this kind of escalation is inevitable given that the Biden administration has defined the war as a battle for the future of democracy and the international order. Without a change in the broader U.S. strategy, policy changes are likely to continue down this path if conditions in Ukraine become increasingly desperate.
Washington is already dealing with the fallout from one of these decisions. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke with his Russian counterpart for the first time in 15 months on Tuesday, after the Kremlin blamed the U.S. for a Ukrainian attack in Crimea that killed four and injured more than 150, according to Russian media. The attack was carried out using American-provided ATACMs.
“Of course, the involvement of the United States of America in hostilities, direct involvement in hostilities that result in the death of Russian civilians, this, of course, cannot but have consequences," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in response to the strike. "What exactly — time will tell.”
In other diplomatic news related to the war in Ukraine:
— Two former staffers on Donald Trump’s national security council released a plan on how they would bring an end to the war in Ukraine. The America First Policy Institute published Retired Lieutenant General Keith Kellogg and Fred Fleitz’s report, titled “America First, Russia, & Ukraine.”
"We tell the Ukrainians, 'You've got to come to the table, and if you don't come to the table, support from the United States will dry up,'" Kellogg toldReuters. "And you tell Putin, 'He's got to come to the table and if you don't come to the table, then we'll give Ukrainians everything they need to kill you in the field.'"
Fleitz said that they had shown the proposal to the former president, who responded favorably, according to Fleitz’s account. “"I'm not claiming he agreed with it or agreed with every word of it, but we were pleased to get the feedback we did," he said.
Kyiv, however, is reportedly not taking the proposal very seriously. “We believe it’s just the race of folks who want to make it look like they are setting new Trump’s foreign policy agenda and reminding [people] about themselves,” a source close to Zelensy’s office toldPolitico. “The perception is that nobody actually knows what Trump’s approach will be. Kyiv is quite calm with that.”
— The European Union on Monday approved the first tranche of aid for Ukraine that will be paid for with seized Russian assets. “The money won't be used for reimbursements, as is normally the case with the [Ukraine Assistance Fund], but for direct purchases of kit like ammunition and aerial defense systems. A quarter of the amount will be used for purchases from Ukrainian industries,” according toPolitico.
— NATO appointed outgoing Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte as its next secretary-general on Wednesday. Rutte won support from Hungary after agreeing that Budapest would not be forced to provide personnel or funds to NATO’s new Ukraine aid proposal.
“While he was Dutch prime minister, Rutte was a strong supporter of Ukraine and its right to defend itself after Russia’s 2022 invasion,” according toThe Washington Post. “Under his leadership, the Netherlands pledged military hardware to Kyiv including Leopard tanks and F-16 fighter jets.”
— Zelensky suggested on Thursday that Ukraine would be looking to put a plan to end the war at the next peace summit, according to The Kyiv Independent. "We don't have much time. We have a lot of injured, killed, both military and civilian,” he said. “So we do not want this war to last for years. Therefore, we have to prepare this plan and put it on the table at the second peace summit." So far, Zelensky’s conception of a settlement has been his “peace formula,” which is a non-starter for Moscow, and the first peace summit was aimed at shoring up global support for this vision.
U.S. State Department news:
In a Tuesday press briefing, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that Washington supports International Criminal Court investigations into Russian war crimes. This week, the ICC issued arrest warrants for former Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and the Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov.
“We have made clear that there have been atrocities committed by Russian forces in their illegal invasion of Ukraine and that there ought to be accountability for those atrocities,” Miller said. “We support a range of international investigations into Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine, including the one conducted by the ICC.”
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Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II Aircraft: Robert Sullivan/Public Domain
Twenty young Americans have died in a series of V-22 Osprey crashes over the past two years. Since the revolutionary tilt-rotor aircraft began flying in 1989, 57 Ospreys have suffered significant accidents killing a total of 62 service members and injuring another 93.
The House Oversight Committee (notably not the Armed Services Committee) held a hearing on June 12 to listen to testimony about the program’s safety concerns. Members were told the Osprey would continue to fly for short trips in spite of a known faulty part while engineers try to devise a permanent fix.
It is easy to fixate on Osprey crashes when they happen because, as a transport aircraft, they can kill a lot of people in a single instant. What has been overlooked is what the Osprey represents in a larger pattern of DoD acquisition failures.
In many respects, the Osprey led the way in a trend towards ever-increasing complex weapons programs. Instead of iterating on the tried-and-true CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter program it was meant to replace, Marine Corps leaders fully invested themselves on an untested and underdeveloped program based on entirely new and more complex technology.
The Osprey’s mission is straightforward. It is supposed to move people and things from one place to another. The Marine Corps had been doing that successfully with helicopters for decades. Rather than building another helicopter, service leaders decided to build a revolutionary aircraft that can take off and land like a helicopter but fly like a fixed-wing airplane. That may look good on paper, but the concept has come with a steep cost.
The Osprey is much more expensive than a comparable helicopter. Adjusted for inflation, the cost of a CH-46 helicopter is approximately $17 million compared to the $84 million for the Osprey that replaced it. That is a heavy premium for an aircraft that today is only allowed to fly no more than 30 minutes from a suitable airfield.
This has had a significant follow-on effect. Navy leaders had plans to retire the last 15 C2 Greyhound fixed-wing transport aircraft, but those plans have been put on hold due to the Osprey program’s flight restrictions. The Navy had to press them back into service to resupply ships again because the Ospreys couldn’t do the job. In the end we built a more costly and complex system that is not ready or even able to do the jobs of the cheaper and more reliable aircraft it was meant to replace.
Following the trail blazed by the Osprey, the other services have repeated the same fundamental mistake repeatedly with their own excessively complex programs. Navy leaders hobbled the fleet by spending nearly two decades trying to get the Littoral Combat Ship program to work. Rather than operating a fleet of 55 highly capable futuristic small surface combatant ships, the Navy ended up with a fleet of 35 ships that were faulty, undergunned and mostly unable to leave their home ports, and several of those have already been mothballed.
The Navy had an even bigger failure with the Zumwalt-class destroyer. Leaders planned on a fleet of 32 ships designed to bombard targets on shore with a specialized cannon to support amphibious landings. The design included a vast array of new technologies including new radar, sonar, and an all-electric propulsion system. Developing the new technologies took longer than expected, which increased the total cost of the program. To offset the budget overruns, leaders cut the planned fleet size down to three ships. This ultimately led to the failure of the revolutionary gun program, the whole purpose of the ship itself being scrapped, as the cost for manufacturing specialized rounds for the ships at scale skyrocketed for a fleet of three versus a fleet of 32.
The Army spent at least $8 billion between 2003 and 2009 to develop a family of armored vehicles in a program called the Future Combat Systems. Rather than pursuing individual replacements for vehicles like the Abrams tank and the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, Army leaders decided to pursue a single, highly networked family of specialized combat and support vehicles on a common chassis. It was an ambitious project that the RAND Corporation later criticized for its “overreliance on assumptions” that the defense industry would be able to develop all the envisioned revolutionary technologies.
As it turned out, the defense industry failed to deliver and the program was shelved with very little to show for the effort and considerable expense. Evidence of just how poorly conceived the Future Combat Systems effort was can be found in the estimated total costs for the program. Army leaders initially claimed the Future Combat Systems would cost $91.4 billion. Within three years, that figure had increased to $163.7 billion.
And then there’s the heavy-weight champion of poorly conceived futuristic weapons: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The F-35 was billed as a multi-role aircraft designed to meet the needs of three different services and those of multiple partner nations. But the idea of a one-size-fits-all aircraft has been tried in the past with poor results. The Pentagon tried it with the F-111 in the 1960s and then had to scramble to build the F-14, F-15, F-16, and A-10 to make up for the capability shortfalls. Pentagon leaders compounded the multi-role difficulties by trying to incorporate every conceivable technology into the F-35 design. This created a level of complexity that has prevented the F-35 from being an effective part of the fleet, let alone in any of its promised specialized roles.
As you can see, this is not a new problem, and space here does not permit a full listing of all the Pentagon’s acquisition failures over the past three decades. But there are very real consequences to poorly conceived weapon programs. The Navy is retiring ships faster than they can be replaced. The Air Force has less than half the number of fighter aircraft today than it did in 1990.
While the services have been shedding force structure, the American people have watched as more and more of their money goes to the Pentagon every year. The proposed defense budget for 2025 will be nearly 50% higher than what it was in 2000. What’s even worse is that even though most of these big-ticket weapons and vehicles are vastly more expensive and delivered on average three years late, they don’t work like they are supposed to. Many have abysmal readiness rates. The F-35 fleet has a full mission capable rate of only 30%. That means that the world’s most expensive weapons system is only ready to do its job less than a third of the time.
In many ways the Osprey program ushered in the era of excessively complex novelty weapons. As long as this trend continues, the services will continue to demand more money to pay for acquisition boondoggles that won’t work properly and gradually degrade the effectiveness of the U.S. military.
For more than two years, the West has been stoking Ukraine’s hopes — with funding, military advice, and more and more advanced weapons — that it could push Russia out to its pre-2014 borders. This is an imaginary outcome that words of fiction will do nothing to achieve.
Equally misguided is the contention by Western leaders that if Putin is not defeated in Ukraine, he will gobble up more and more of Europe, beginning with Poland and the Baltics. Not only is there no evidence to support this assertion, but also the notion that a Russia that can barely defeat Ukraine would go to war against NATO simply defies logic.
These developments do, however, push Washington into spending more on “defense,” which enriches the arms manufacturers. Earlier this month, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg trumpeted an 18 percent increase in military spending across Europe and Canada in 2024, “the biggest increase in decades,” two-thirds of which goes to U.S. manufacturers.
Meanwhile, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons announced that global spending on nuclear weapons rose 13 percent in 2023, with the U.S. again leading the way. This is happening even though the U.S. already spends almost five times as much as China, its nearest competitor. U.S. nuclear weapons spending over the past five years has increased by 45 percent, trailed by the U.K.’s 43 percent.
The spending announcements coincide with news about the planet sweltering and little is being done to combat global warming. Clearly, we’re too busy fighting each other and spending money on ways to end humanity far faster than global warming will.
As NATO leaders realize that throwing more money into Ukraine alone is not enough to change an increasingly desperate battlefield equation, they have been finding other, more dangerous ways, to escalate in recent weeks. They have not only permitted Ukraine to attack sites within Russia with advanced NATO weapons, they have also assisted in those attacks and have openly discussed sending NATO troops, trainers, and targeters on the ground. The recent attacks on two Russian nuclear warning radar facilities have been particularly irresponsible, bringing us closer not only to full out war, but to nuclear war. And if that is not enough, Stoltenberg recently told the Telegraph that NATO is debating taking additional nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby to prepare for all contingencies.
Russia has responded to these escalations with a series of explicit warnings about the imminence of a broader war and by carrying out provocative tactical nuclear war exercises on its territory bordering Ukraine, with Belarussian participation. The Foreign Ministry said the exercises would send a “sobering signal” that would “cool the hot heads in Western capitals,” making them understand “the potential catastrophic consequences of the strategic risks they are generating.”
Russia then sent warships, including a nuclear-powered submarine, to Cuba, which Western commentators dismissed as a “bluff,” though the U.S. and Canada promptly sent warships into the region. Next, Putin visited Pyongyang and signed a “mutual security” pact with North Korea, committing both nuclear-armed nations to come to each other’s defense if attacked.
These developments heighten the urgency of finding a political settlement for the Ukraine war.
In a recent book titled “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” author Annie Jacobsen details the 72 minutes that unfold after the U.S. detects a North Korea launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile heading for Washington, DC, until the end of the world as we know it. The hypothesized North Korean attack quickly turns into a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia, a possibility made even more likely by the Putin-Kim Jong Un agreement. In Jacobsen’s book, the two countries proceed to use a thousand or more warheads to level the other, a prospect that terrified millions of people throughout the Cold War, but which had more recently faded from the public’s consciousness.
Nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia today would bear little resemblance to the American atomic bomb attacks on Japan. Rather than killing a couple hundred thousand people, as Fat Man and Little Boy did in 1945, today’s weapons could kill and injure millions of people, and possibly hundreds of millions. Add to this count the billions around who would starve to death as a result of nuclear winter and subsequent crop failures and you have a recipe for the end of human civilization as we know it.
The concern that Russia could decide to use nuclear weapons if threatened with defeat in the Donbas or Crimea or in a direct war with NATO should not be dismissed lightly. While the U.S. would be less likely to initiate nuclear war given NATO’s conventional superiority, it may respond in kind to Russian use of tactical nuclear weapons. Alternatively, a conventional war between Russia and NATO could turn nuclear.
Arguably, an even more likely scenario than a deliberate start of a nuclear war is a blunder into oblivion, an accidental or miscalculated strike as either side wrongly assumes that it is already or will imminently be under a nuclear attack. This can easily arise due to the “launch on warning” policy that both countries have. Moreover, neither the United States nor Russia has a “no-first-use policy” that would abjure first using nuclear weapons in a crisis, making the miscalculation more likely.
MIT Professor Ted Postol, a former scientific adviser to the chief of naval operations, has warned that Russia’s missile detection capabilities are not as advanced as the ones that the United States has, which he described as a “terrible and dangerous technology shortfall.” Especially, he warns, if nuclear radar facilities are under attack, as they were recently, Russia could falsely assume it is being targeted by nuclear weapons and could unleash the full power of its 5,500+ warhead arsenal. Make that partial, it’s still enough to not only destroy the United States, but the whole world.
Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan jointly stated in 1985 that “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Despite leaders of the five original nuclear weapon states explicitly reaffirming this in January 2022 prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, many of those same leaders seem to have forgotten these wise words and have recklessly pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war.
As former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev poignantly stated in the aftermath of the greatest previous nuclear crisis, “Peace is the most important goal in the world. If we don’t have peace and the nuclear bombs start to fall, what difference will it make whether we are Communists or Catholic or capitalists or Chinese or Russians or Americans? Who could tell us apart? Who will be left to tell us apart?”
It’s time to change policy on Ukraine and to stop the escalation escalator before it is too late. A Swiss peace conference without Russia or China has done nothing to advance that goal. Nor have the recent G7 meetings in Italy, the NATO pronouncements, or, for that matter, the grandiose war games being conducted by both sides in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
Brazil and China recently issued a joint statement, declaring that “dialogue and negotiation are the only viable solution to the Ukraine crisis.” Their proposal includes a six-point plan for peace, with “no expansion of the battlefield, no escalation of fighting, and no further provocation.” China says that the proposal has now received backing from at least 45 countries.
This is a good place to start, as would be an emergency meeting of world leaders that the U.N. General Secretary Antonio Guterres could call for. Continuing to play nuclear roulette is not an acceptable path forward.