Trump’s war against “the enemy within” is grounded in lies. Meanwhile, military leaders told to "go along or get out".
by Peter Montgomery
OtherWords
A recent gathering at the Pentagon was extraordinary. Not in a good way.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered hundreds of generals and other officers to leave their posts all over the world. He demanded loyalty to the new “culture” he’s imposing on the armed forces. His message: go along or get out.
Hegseth railed against safeguards that protect service members from abuse and hold people accountable for wrongdoing. He mocked “stupid” and “politically correct” rules of engagement. “You kill people and break things for a living,” he said.
“We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy,” Hegseth said.
These comments became far more alarming when President Donald Trump took the stage and made it clear who he sees as the enemy. Trump told military leaders that he’s sending them to war against “the enemy within.”
OtherWords
U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status, and children have been among those detained in increasingly brazen and aggressive encounters...
So the “punishing violence” that Hegseth demands is to be deployed against people here at home. More specifically, Trump said the military should use American cities as “training grounds,” saying, “That’s a war too. It’s a war from within.” Here’s what that war looked like in Chicago recently: federal agents rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter onto an apartment building in the middle of the night, border patrol agents breaking into apartments and allegedly zip-tying young children (though DHS denies they were zip-tied), detaining American citizens, and leaving people’s apartments and belongings trashed. It wasn’t an isolated incident. The Washington Post reported that “U.S. citizens, immigrants with legal status, and children have been among those detained in increasingly brazen and aggressive encounters which pop up daily across neighborhoods in the city of 2.7 million and its many suburbs.” Trump’s war against “the enemy within” is grounded in lies.
Deployment of the military against American citizens is a frightening abuse of power...
The president and his colleagues have been falsely claiming that Portland, Oregon, is “war-ravaged” and “burning to the ground.” That claim was apparently based on a five-year-old video the president saw on Fox TV. Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden responded by posting a current video of people peacefully enjoying a beautiful fall day in Portland. The Trump team’s lying would be laughable if it weren’t propaganda with a deadly purpose. Fortunately, a federal judge — a Trump appointee — blocked Trump’s plans to federalize National Guard troops and send them into Portland, saying there are no conditions on the ground that could justify it. For defending the rule of law, the judge was savagely criticized by the White House. On top of all of this, Trump has repeatedly violated the foundational military tradition of nonpartisanship. Speaking to cadets at a recent event honoring the Navy’s 250th anniversary, Trump declared, “We have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats.” As one commenter noted, Trump basically told the Navy to view half of the country as the enemy. That’s dangerous. And it’s un-American. People sometimes interpret Trump’s unhinged rhetoric as a strategy to distract people from other stories. It’s worse than that. I’m sure the president would like people to ignore that he shut down the federal government to preserve tax cuts for the richest 1 percent while forcing millions of families to face huge increases for health insurance or lose their coverage completely. But Trump’s “enemy within” is more than a distraction. It is even more than a violent threat against millions of our fellow Americans. It’s promotion for a war the president is already waging — one that’s been denounced by retired generals and veterans. The unjustifiable deployment of the military against American citizens is a frightening abuse of power that should alarm Republicans and independents as well as Democrats. The Constitution can protect all of us only if we defend the Constitution.
Peter Montgomery is a Senior Fellow at People for the American Way. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
Will these weapons challenge our ethics and accountability thresholds? Most likely. But let’s explore a few of the considerations, moral and legal, through the prism of how people will be increasingly removed from battlefield decision-making as conflict unfolds at machine speed.
Militaries define autonomous weapons as "systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further intervention by a human operator."
So-called "intelligentized" systems that longer term will evolve to independently surveil, spot, identify, engage, and precisely target the adversary. And to do that with better ethical outcomes than when people are at the controls.
The core of these weapons’ “brain” is advanced artificial intelligence. The marrying of AI algorithms, deep machine learning, and massive data sets along with sophisticated technology will transform the world’s arsenals. The science and caution over removal of human operational control may zigzag, but the allure of intelligent, nimble, precise, fast and cheaper systems will prove irresistible.
Russia’s president Putin made no bones about this transformation, purportedly saying in a 2017 broadcast that "whoever becomes the leader in [AI] will become the ruler of the world." Hyperbole? Maybe; maybe not. Regardless, the force-multiplying intersection of artificial intelligence and weapons functionality will prove consequential.
Avoiding adversaries acquiring a monopoly on autonomous weapons will lead to the competitive leapfrogging of weapons design with which we’re historically familiar. A technological vaulting across military domains: land, ocean surface, undersea, air, and space. Nations will feel compelled not to cede ground to adversaries.
All the more reason we can’t lose sight of the ethical issues in this arena, where utilitarianism is definable as measures built into the decision loop to avoid or minimize harm to civilians’ lives and property. Yet, some people may view automated weapons as existential.
The question often asked is: Ought we trust machine autonomy to do war-fighting right, upholding our values? Maybe, however, the more pertinent question is this: Ought we continue to trust people to do war-fighting right, given the unpredictability of human decision-making and behavior?
The assumption is that humans are prone to errors exceeding those of a smart autonomous weapon. It’s more likely that a human controller will make assessments and miscues resulting in civilian casualties or attacks against hospitals, schools, homes and buildings of worship. Modern history is replete with such incidents, violating humanitarian law.
Machine precision, processing speed, analytical scope, ability to deconstruct complexity, handling of war’s chaotic nonlinearity, and ability to cut through war’s fog and friction intersect with ‘just-war doctrine’ to govern how to conduct war according to moral and legal principles — all of which matter greatly.
Human agency and accountability will transect decisions around how to design, program and deploy autonomous weapons, rather than visceral decisions by combatants on the battlefield. New grounds and precedents as to who’s responsible for outcomes.
Accountability will also be bound by the Geneva Conventions’ Martens Clause, which says this: “[C]ivilians and combatants remain under the protection and authority of . . . international law derived from established custom, from the principles of humanity and from the dictates of public conscience.”
There are no moral take-backs. Avoiding faulty calls, with unintended harm, is critical in calculating the appeal of replacing hands-on humans with the unbiased automaticity of machines. Autonomous weapons will outperform humans in regards to consistently implementing the ethical and legal imperatives whether conflicts are fought justly.
Such imperatives include discrimination to target only combatants; proportionality in line with the advantage; accountability of participants; and necessity in terms of the least-harmful military means chosen, like choice of weapons, tactics, and amount of force applied.
Treaty bans on systems’ development, deployment and use likely won’t stick, given furtive workarounds and the enticement of geostrategic advantage. Regulations, developed by multidisciplinary groups, to include ethicists along with technologists, policymakers and international institutions, are expected only spottily to slow the advance.
Ethics must be scrupulously factored into these calculations from the start — accounting for "principles of humanity and the dictates of public conscience" — so that nations make policy with their moral charters intact.
