The

war and peace

issue
Vol 122 Nov/Dec $9.99 USD
No. 6 2019 $10.99 CAD

The everything
store war
Why Amazon is poised to become America’s
newest defense giant

Pioneering The fatal flaw Why high-tech war

penis transplants that could make is immoral, by the
for wounded veterans AI weapons useless author of Jarhead
p. 70 p. 44 p. 20
 Stopping spyware from slithering into
our nation’s critical infrastructure.

battelle.org/spyware
02 From the editor

his issfe asks: Can technology be a force for good

T
even in something as evil as war?
Yes, says one school of thofght. Today’s weap-
ons may be more lethal than ever, bft it’s thanks
partly to their lethality and accfracy that advanced
nations no longer send yofng men to kill each
other by the tens of thofsands.
Moreover, technology may be able to
help predict emerging conflicts (as Tate
Ryan-Mosley explains on page 12), and help
repair the damage after those that do take
place. Finally, of cofrse, cofntless civilian
technologies began life as military projects.
Today, for example, researchers are
developing brain-compfter interfaces
that tomorrow’s troops might fse to con-
trol weapons with their minds. Bft the
prototypes of those interfaces are allow-
ing paralyzed people to regain the fse of
their limbs, as Pafl Tfllis reports (page 36).
Similarly, Andrew Zaleski’s inside accofnt
of the extraordinary sfrgical effort behind
one of the world’s first penis transplants
(page 70) shows how medical advances for
war veterans are likely to end fp helping
many civilians.
However, those same advances cofld
have happened if some of the vast spending
on military hardware (which Konstantin
Kakaes lays oft on page 34) went into Gideon continfes to commit them with impfnity.
Lichfield
peacetime research. And the costs of high- Janine di Giovanni interviews a US para-
is editor
tech weaponry aren’t only financial. in chief of trooper tfrned professor (page 30) and
The proof of that is in Afghanistan, MIT Technology Britain’s former top soldier (page 60) on
Review.
which this year sfrpassed Vietnam as the failfres of international diplomacy and
America’s longest-rfnning war. While military strategy that technology can’t fix.
Vietnam threw the US into generational tfrmoil, Afghanistan And Obi Anyadike reports from Nigeria on how techniqfes for
is almost absent from the national debate. That’s thanks in part “deradicalizing” violent extremists do little good when the social
to the drones that allow most American troops to stay at home. conditions that radicalized them remain fnchanged (page 16).
Yet the drones’ sfpposedly scalpel-like precision is a myth, Ali In ofr cover story on page 24, Sharon Weinberger shows how
M. Latifi reports from Afghanistan (page 56): civilian casfalties Amazon is cementing its inflfence in Washington by providing
keep mofnting, only sporadically monitored and investigated digital infrastrfctfre for US intelligence and law enforcement,
by either the US or the Afghan government. And in a powerffl and aims to do the same for the Pentagon. Joan Donovan (page
essay (page 20), Anthony Swofford, who served as a Marine in the 48) explains how memes have gone from silly jokes to seriofs
Gflf War and wrote the memoir Jarhead, argfes that advanced geopolitical weapons. Haley Cohen Gilliland looks at why dogs
weapons like drones create a “moral distance” from the killing, still make better bomb-sniffers than any electronic gizmo (page
and thfs enable more of it. 40), and Patrick Howell O’Neill canvasses national secfrity
Blind reliance on technology can go awry in other ways. The experts on how the US might respond to a real cyberwar (page 52).
deep-learning algorithms that power a growing array of smart Finally, a piece of short fiction by Jasper Jeffers, a serving
weapons contain basic flaws that cofld be exploited to tfrn them US Army colonel, imagines a new breed of technologically afg-
against their owners, writes Will Knight (page 44). Activists have mented sfper-soldiers. Once again, the lesson is clear: when
IAN ALLEN

fsed digital tools to docfment the Syrian regime’s war crimes hfman jfdgment fails, no amofnt of technology can make war
in fnprecedented detail, reports Eric Reidy (page 64), yet it more sfccessffl, or more moral.
IN A WORLD WORTH PROTECTING,
SQUARED IS THERE.
To safeguard the most essential elements of our connected world, rely on cybersecurity
professionals certified by (ISC)2. These skilled, proven experts shield our data and technology,
keeping it safe and secure. More than that, they protect the lives we want to lead.

Learn more about the mission that moves (ISC)2

members at isc2.org/shield
The World's Leading
Cybersecurity Certifications
04 The war and peace issue

1
Strategy
2
Battlefield
3
Aftermath
12 34 64
Bringing order to chaos Empire, state-building Hard evidence
Predicting conflict could save lives. Reports that China is catching up to Digital technologies have allowed Syrian
Are we finally getting better at it? the US’s military have been greatly war crimes to be documented in unprece-
By Tate Ryan-Mosley exaggerated. By Konstantin Kakaes dented detail. But has it done any good?
By Eric Reidy
16 36
Radical transformation Signal intelligence 70
After years of efforts to prevent and reverse The US military is trying to develop a Becoming whole
radicalization, the jury’s still out on whether brain-computer interface you could wear Modern medicine has saved war veterans
they work. By Obi Anyadike like a helmet. What if it succeeds? with horrific genital injuries from dying.
By Paul Tullis Now it’s finally giving them hope of a nor-
20 mal life as well. By Andrew Zaleski
Why clean war is bad war 40
By sanitizing warfare, technology makes it Uncommon scents 78
easier to kill people, argues Jarhead author All our high-tech machinery still can’t do Fiction: AN41
Anthony Swofford what a dog can. By Haley Cohen Gilliland In the winning entry from an Army
science fiction contest, a human with an
24 44 AI-augmented brain leads the way.
The everything war The fog of AI war By Jasper Jeffers
Amazon has spent a decade trying to Can you tell a turtle from a rifle? AI vision
become one of the world’s biggest national can’t always manage. By Will Knight 88
security contractors. Here’s how and why. Looking back at the future of warfare
By Sharon Weinberger 48 Our war coverage through the years has
Drafted into the meme wars emphasized how technology might change
30 Memes come off as a joke. That’s part of why the way wars are fought—or how it could
What a real existential threat looks like they’re a serious threat. By Joan Donovan help us avoid conflict in the first place.
Misunderstanding tomorrow’s dangers
means that we’re fighting yesterday’s wars, 52

argues one paratrooper turned academic. A cyber-attack hits the US. Now what? Cover illustration by Tim O’Brien
By Janine di Giovanni We asked seven cybersecurity experts
to detail how it all might play out.
By Patrick Howell O’Neill

56
Life under a drone sky
America’s longest war has been shaped by
technology, and Afghanistan has been the
unwilling testing ground. By Ali M. Latifi

60
GUTTER CREDIT HERE

A divided West is the worst of all worlds

Split strategies over nuclear proliferation
could spell disaster, says one of the world’s
most decorated soldiers.
By Janine di Giovanni
 ATTACK
BUSINESS
CHALLENGES
WITH BOLD
NEW STRATEGIES

From digital transformation to cybercrime to Industry 4.0, massive disruption and innovation are
impacting every industry. MIT Sloan Executive Education offers short courses, Executive Certificates,
and custom programs designed to help you and your business respond to disruption, create cybersafe
cultures, implement new technologies and business models, and acquire both the technical and
leadership capabilities that are necessary to lead these sweeping shifts.

Plan your attack—enroll now in these upcoming programs:

Cybersecurity for Managers: A Playbook (online)

Cybersecurity Leadership for Non-Technical Executives

Implementing Enterprise-Wide Transformation

Implementing Industry 4.0: Leading Change in Manufacturing and Operations

Internet of Things: Business Implications and Opportunities (self-paced online)

Revitalizing Your Digital Business Model

Open enrollment courses, executive certificates, and custom programs for your organization
executive.mit.edu/TR
06 Masthead

Editorial Corporate Consumer marketing MIT Technology Review

Editor in chief Chief executive officer and publisher Senior vice president, Insights
Gideon Lichfield Elizabeth Bramson-Boudreau marketing and consumer revenue
Vice president of international
Doreen Adger
business development, head of
Executive editor Assistant to the CEO
Director of analytics MIT Technology Review Insights
Michael Reilly Katie McLean Tom Russell Nicola Crepaldi
Editor at large Human resources manager
Director of audience development Content manager
David Rotman James Wall Rosemary Kelly Jason Sparapani
News editor Manager of information technology
Product marketing manager Senior project manager
Niall Firth Colby Wheeler Amanda Saeli Martha Leibs
Managing editor Office manager
Assistant consumer marketing manager Director of consulting, Asia
Timothy Maher Linda Cardinal Caroline da Cunha Claire Beatty
Commissioning editors
Circulation and print production manager Director of business development, Asia
Bobbie Johnson Product development Tim Borton Marcus Ulvne
Konstantin Kakaes
Chief digital officer
Senior editor, MIT News
Alice Dragoon
Cy Caine Advertising sales Board of directors
Senior project manager Martin A. Schmidt
Senior editor, biomedicine Vice president, sales and
Allison Chase
Antonio Regalado brand partnerships Whitney Espich
Senior product designer Andrew Hendler Jerome I. Friedman
Senior editor, energy
Jon Akland [email protected]
James Temple Israel Ruiz
646-520-6981
Director of software engineering David Schmittlein
Senior editor, ethics and policy
Molly Frey Executive director, brand partnerships Alan Spoon
Angela Chen
Senior software engineer Marii Sebahar
Senior editor, cybersecurity [email protected]
Patrick Howell O’Neill
Jason Lewicki
415-416-9140 Customer service and
Senior reporter, blockchain Senior director, brand partnerships
subscription inquiries
Mike Orcutt Licensing and Kristin Ingram National
Senior reporter, humans and technology syndication [email protected] 800-877-5230
Tanya Basu 415-509-1910
Vice president, licensing and syndication International
Reporters Antoinette Matthews Senior director, brand partnerships 903-636-1115
Karen Hao (AI) Whelan Mahoney
Client services manager [email protected] E-mail
Charlotte Jee (news)
Neel Patel (space) Ted Hu 201-417-0928 customer_service@
mittechnologyreview.info
Copy chief Director, brand partnerships
Linda Lowenthal Events Debbie Hanley
Web
www.technologyreview.com/
Social media associate [email protected]
Senior vice president, customerservice
Benji Rosen 214-282-2727
events and strategic partnerships
MIT Records (alums only)
Editorial research manager Amy Lammers Director, brand partnerships
617-253-8270
Tate Ryan-Mosley Ian Keller
Director of event content
[email protected] Reprints
Administrative assistant and experiences
203-858-3396 [email protected]
Andrea Siegel Brian Bryson 877-652-5295
Event content producer, Business development sales manager
Proofreader Ken Collina Licensing and permissions
Barbara Wallraff custom and international [email protected]
Marcy Rizzo [email protected]
617-475-8004
Event content producer
Design Erin Underwood Digital sales strategy manager
Valentina Suarez
Chief creative officer Senior events manager [email protected]
Eric Mongeon Nicole Silva 617-475-8096
Art director Event partnership coordinator Advertising services
MIT Technology Review
Emily Luong Madeleine Frasca [email protected] One Main Street
Marketing and events designer Events associate 617-475-8004 13th Floor
Kyle Thomas Hemingway Bo Richardson
Media kit Cambridge, MA 02142
Assistant art director www.technologyreview.com/media 617-475-8000
Emily Caulfield
Finance The mission of MIT Technology Review
Digital production specialist is to make technology a greater force for
Savash Kalay Finance director
good by bringing about better-informed,
Enejda Xheblati
more conscious technology decisions
General ledger manager through authoritative, influential, and
Olivia Male trustworthy journalism.
Accountant
Technology Review, Inc., is an
Letitia Trecartin
independent nonprofit 501(c)(3)
corporation wholly owned by MIT;
the views expressed in our publications
and at our events are not always shared
by the Institute.
 December 2–3, 2019
Cambridge, MA

The nature of computing

is changing and unleashing
new opportunities.
Future Compute is MIT Technology Review’s two-day,
deep dive for executives looking to harness the computing
technologies transforming business and business leadership.

Alan Baratz Damion Heredia Tom Leighton William Oliver Catherine Schuman
EVP of R&D and Senior Director CEO and Cofounder, Principal Investigator, Research Scientist,
Chief Product of Product Akamai Engineering Oak Ridge National
Officer, D-Wave Management, Quantum Systems Laboratory
Google Cloud Group, MIT
PHOTOS BY NATHAN FISKE

Use discount code PRINTND19 at

FutureComputeMIT.com/Event2019
Experience
our signature
event on
artificial
intelligence
and business
leadership

March 24–25, 2020 San Francisco, CA

Claim you First Mover discount at EmTechDigital.com/Register
10
 1 Strategy
IDs of march: US
troops hafe made
the capture of
bnometrnc data—
nncludnng retnna
scans and fnnger-
prnnts—part of thenr
arsenal nn countrnes
lnke Afghannstan.
So-called “ndentnty
domnnance” ns used
to track nnsurgents,
guard agannst
nnfnltratnon, and
control populatnon
mofements.
ZUMA PRESS

Photograph
by Louie Palu
12 Strategy

Inside a conflict model

Bringing Dnstance to
nenghbornng
country

order to chaos
Predicting conflict could save lives. Are we finally getting better at it? By Tate Ryan-Mosley
Trafel tnme to
nearest cnty

Dnstance to
eople have been trying to pre- (see “Inside a conflict model”). The first nearest petroleum

P
resource
dict conflict for hundreds, if public ensemble model, the Early Warning
How an efent
not thousands, of years. But it’s Project, launched in 2013 to forecast new turns nnto a
hard, largely because scientists instances of mass killing (see “Where Proportnon of
model nnput agrncultural area
can’t agree on its nature or how it arises. mass violence may strike next”). Run by
The critical factor could be something as researchers at the US Holocaust Museum A death or
protest occurs.
apparently innocuous as a booming popu- and Dartmouth College, it claims 80% Proportnon of
barren area
lation or a bad year for crops. Other times accuracy in its predictions. News agencies,
a spark ignites a powder keg, as with the Improvements in data gathering, trans- NGOs, and oth-
ers write about
assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand lation, and machine learning have further
the event. Populatnon snze
of Austria in the run-up to World War I. advanced the field. A newer model called
Political scientists and mathematicians ViEWS, built by researchers at Uppsala Monitoring
systems scour
have come up with a slew of different University, provides a huge boost in gran-
the reports
methods for forecasting the next outbreak ularity. Focusing on conflict in Africa, it in search of
Recent deaths
of violence—but no single model properly offers monthly predictive readouts on keywords like
captures how conflict behaves. A study multiple regions within a given state. Its “death,” “pro-
published in 2011 by the Peace Research threshold for violence is a single death (see test,” “uprising,”
Recent protest
or “massacre.”
Institute Oslo used a single model to run “Ethiopia’s ethnic violence”).
global conflict forecasts from 2010 to Some researchers say there are pri- Relevant inci-
2050. It estimated a less than .05% chance vate—and in some cases, classified—pre- dents are exam-
ined by human Democracy
of violence in Syria. Humanitarian orga- dictive models that are likely far better than
researchers,
nizations, which could have been better anything public. Worries that making pre- who code them
prepared had the predictions been more dictions public could undermine diplomacy according to the Tnme snnce
accurate, were caught flat-footed by the or change the outcome of world events are actors involved, nndependence
outbreak of Syria’s civil war in March not unfounded. But that is precisely the the time and
place, and an
2011. It has since displaced some 13 mil- point. Public models are good enough to
estimate of the Proportnon
lion people. help direct aid to where it is needed and data’s precision. of populatnon
Bundling individual models to maxi- alert those most vulnerable to seek safety. “excluded”

mize their strengths and weed out weak- Properly used, they could change things
ness has resulted in big improvements for the better, and save lives in the process. Growth nn GDP
per capnta

Where mass violence may strike next

In the world of conflict prediction, Republic of Congo, Afghanistan,
5
4
there is a truism: the best predic- India, and Myanmar rank among
2 1
tor of violence is a history of vio- the 30 highest-risk countries.
lence. One illustration is the Early The global rankings also high-
3
Warning Project’s 2019 predic- light some of the model’s short-
tions for the sites of new mass kill- comings. Venezuela ranks low,
5% ings, defined as the death of over despite a widely held belief that
10%
15% 1,000 civilians in a year due to the extrajudicial killings by security
20%
25%
deliberate action of armed groups forces have been rife. So does
30% (2020 figures weren’t available the US, despite a rising threat of
SOURCE: EARLY WARNING PROJECT STATISTICAL RISK ASSESSMENT 2018 at press time): the Democratic white supremacist gun violence.
 Predicting conflict 13

The path from on-the-ground event to prediction requires complex analytical machinery, as this idealized conflict ensemble model shows.

1 Incidents of conflict
and protest, along with
many other structural
variables like population
density, GDP growth, and
type of government, are fed
into constituent models.
2 Several different
models, each of which
uses a different method,
compute a probability of
conflict.

A Natural resources model

B Conflnct hnstory model

C Socno-economnc model
X%
Aggregate machnne-
D learnnng model

E Recent protests model

3 The results from the
constituent models
get combined to produce
a final risk score.

1. Myanmar 2. Indna 3. Venezuela 4. Chnna 5. Unnted States

Rnsk: 5.4% | Rank: 22 Rnsk: 7.8% | Rank: 14 Rnsk: 1.5% | Rank: 55 Rnsk: 4% | Rank: 30 Rnsk: 0.8% | Rank: 80
Myanmar’s history of In February 2019, a A United Nations report China’s population size, In September, the US
violence, its restrictions suicide bomber from in July 2019 suggested limited freedom, and his- Department of Homeland
on movement, and its Pakistan blew up Indian that the government had tory of mass violence Security recognized
population size all con- paramilitary trucks. Since carried out more than contribute to its risk white supremacist ter-
tribute to a high risk of then, new instances 9,000 extrajudicial kill- of new mass killings. ror as a national secu-
new mass killings. Its of violence have kept ings in the previous 18 Tensions seem to be ris- rity threat. Several mass
Rohingya Muslim minority springing up, centered months. The model didn’t ing, as protests in Hong shootings targeting
is an ongoing target. on the disputed region of code them as systematic Kong have drawn accu- minority groups indicate
Kashmir. political killings, resulting sations of police brutality. a trend that the model
in a lower risk rating. doesn’t capture.
14 Strategy

BEFORE EVENT AFTER EVENT

Case study

Ethiopia’s ethnic violence Probability

of conflict August
Probability
of conflict
July 2018: October 2018: The model had
2018 identified this
17% 17% particular region
Lobation 1 on map as having a very
high risk of
Deaths from organized violenbe, = 1 death
The Ethiopian government moved to abolish the Liyu conflict—a 1 in
June 2018 to July 2019 = 51 deaths police force in the state of Somali—home to a large 6 chance. That
population of ethnic Somalis—and tried to oust its presi- proved right.
dent. This set off a series of violent clashes.

The model did not

August September November
do well at predict-
2018: 2018 2018: ing this. The cap-
3
5 1% 22% ital, Addis Ababa,
is generally at a
Lobation 2
2 lower risk of con-
Soldiers from the Oromo ethnic group, which make up a flict thanks to
1 relatively good
third of Ethiopia’s population, returned to Addis Ababa
infrastructure,
after a conflict in Eritrea. Sectarian tensions boiled over, policing, and eco-
killing 35 people—most from other minority groups. nomic growth.
4
The arrests were
October January distributed across
2018:
November 2019: the country, and the

1% 2018 9%
country-level pre-
diction for violence
shot up to 67%.
Lobation 3 The model didn’t

I
n April 2018, Abiy Ahmed was sworn in as prime Prime Minister Ahmed carried out a series of ethnically precisely predict
minister of Ethiopia, promising to end years of eth- charged arrests across the country. Violence erupted
where the violence
nic unrest and antigovernment protests. Much of would occur, which
between Oromo and Somali ethnic groups, resulting in accounts for the
the international community thought Ahmed, who is 22 deaths in the eastern village of Tuli Guled. low score in this
of mixed Oromo and Amhara ethnicity, might usher region.
in an era of unity and reform. But by December, ethnic
violence had forced almost 3 million people from their Refugees often
November February
homes.
2018:
Debember 2019:
flee from Ethiopia
to Kenya through
Throughout the violence, which is still ongoing, 2018
Uppsala University’s ViEWS model has been making 7% 10% Moyale, and the
Oromo and Somali
SOURCE: VIOLENCE EARLY WARNING SYSTEM, UCDP GED; UPPSALA UNIVERSITY

predictions on what will happen in Ethiopia. Lobation 4 ethnic groups

The results show how far the field of conflict pre- have a history of
A wave of violence hit restive Moyale in December after clashing here.
diction has come: ViEWS can forecast three different
regional governments handed over security to the fed- ViEWS correctly
types of conflict risk—state-based, one-sided, and non- labeled the area
eral government. The violence culminated in a shooting
state—in a geographical grid with cells just 55 kilome- as having a rela-
inside a local hotel that claimed at least a dozen lives..
ters on a side and take into account even a single death tively high risk.
attributable to organized violence. That kind of resolu-
tion, impossible just a few years ago, promises to make
predictions far more useful to the United Nations and May August
2019:
June 2019:
Coups are, by
humanitarian organizations that are trying to help turn their nature,
the tide back toward peace. 1% 2019 14% hard to predict.
To better illustrate how this works, we’ve identified The model did not
Lobation 5 foresee this one,
five key moments between June 2018 and July 2019
but the probabil-
when conflict in Ethiopia escalated. We then compared After an attempted coup against the Amhara state gov- ity of conflict
them with ViEWS’s output to see whether the violence ernment by military leaders, the federal government rose dramatically
was properly predicted ahead of time and how, when ordered a five-day internet blackout. Police arrested after the coup.
the model missed its guess, events changed its ensuing over 250 people suspected of conspiracy in the coup,
predictions. many belonging to the Amhara ethno-nationalist group.
Stay ahead.
Stay connected.
Subscribe today.
Print Magazine
Get access to the 1 year (six bi-monthly issues) of
latest in innovation, MIT Technology Review print edition
exploring the very latest in technology
emerging and innovation.

technology, and Unlimited Online Access

Complete access to technologyreview.com
the conversations with the stories, interviews and videos
you won’t find anywhere else during your
shaping the world subscription term.

around you. Daily Newsletter

Get the day’s top headlines delivered
Subscribe today at right to your inbox every weekday with
technologyreview.com/now MIT Technology Review’s email newsletter,
The Download.
16

M
alam Aminu is a slight, bespectacled man
with a neat goatee and a disconcerting
droopy eyelid that by turns makes him
look sinister and then not quite all there.
When I first met him, in 2015, he was an inmate
in Nigeria’s Kuje Prison, and one of the most senior
members of Boko Haram being held in custody. He
was also one of 41 subjects in a new experiment being
conducted by the government.
Faced with a difficult war against insurgents in

Radical the remote northeast, Nigeria had decided on a new

strategy to tackle extremism: a mixture of amnesty,
demobilization, and reprogramming to whittle away
jihadist recruits. The idea was to undermine Boko

transformation
AFTER YEARS OF EFFORT TO PREVENT AND REVERSE
Haram through bloodless attrition, not just by slug-
ging it out on the battlefield.
The program was designed and run by Fatima Akilu,
a soft-spoken psychologist who had trained in the
UK and the US. She drew on prison-based schemes
RADICALIZATION, THE JURY’S STILL OUT ON WHETHER under way in Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Australia,
IT WORKS. BY OBI ANYADIKE adapting them to Nigeria. The new approach involved
changes across a range of policy areas: shifting the
school curriculum to promote “critical thinking,”
overhauling a sclerotic justice system, tinkering with
the health services so that psycho-social care could
be expanded.
 17

“The solutions are as complex as the reasons for programs. Not surprisingly, they were roundly hated
radicalism,” Akilu told me. by the hundreds of long-suffering regular inmates.
The most visible part of her strategy, though, was “We try as much as possible to help them,” says
in Kuje. Directed at prisoners who were convicted or Wahaab Akorede, the manager of the Kuje program.
suspected terrorists, it aimed at more than just getting “We tell them we are not police or security—we’re
detainees to renounce violence. Its goal was thorough doctors. That’s why it’s called treatment.”
deradicalization: totally expunging extremist beliefs,
values, and behavior.
This represented an immense cultural shift for Protect and prevent
Nigeria. Its jails are notorious for their neglect and
abuse of inmates, but in Kuje’s “de-rad” wing—built Over the past 20 years, as detentions of terrorists
with funds given to Nigeria by the European Union— have mounted around the world, a dizzying range of
the focus was different. The idea was to build a human de-rad programs like the one in Kuje have sprung up
connection between the alleged extremists—known in almost every major country. Authorities in Nigeria
as “clients” rather than inmates—and the wardens, and elsewhere worried they were simply creating a
who were retrained and renamed the “treatment revolving door if they released terrorists back into the
team.” Their job was to assess the needs of the mili- community once their sentences had been served.
tants under their care, and to identify the most effec- Yet indefinite detentions, such those at Guantánamo
tive ways to deprogram them. Bay, weren’t a popular or legal way to deal with the
When I first met Aminu, he was dressed in a crisp problem either. So began the explosion of post-crime
white dashiki and seated in an air-conditioned class- deradicalization schemes.
room in a new wing segregated from the rest of the Prison-based initiatives vary, from monitored
WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

overcrowded and unsanitary jail. Here on the de-rad informal chats with a local imam (a technique favored
side, clients were treated differently. They could wear in Victoria, Australia) to structured models like that
their own clothes and had access to a new mosque, a run by the government in Saudi Arabia. The Saudi
sports area, and properly equipped vocational training approach includes a prison-based counseling phase,
18 Strategy

rehabilitation therapy, and then post-release “after- ISIS support accounts worldwide, both official and
care”—all touted as something of a gold standard. unofficial, in a variety of languages.
wiyadh claims recidivism is extremely low, but Most attempts to stamp out radicalism online have
independent researchers are skeptical of the official focused on shutting down the accounts of those who
numbers: there have been at least 11 high-profile cases preach violence: Twitter claimed to have suspended
of participants who have returned to terrorism. Saudi more than 1.8 million accounts from 2015 to 2018.
methods have also been questioned. For a start, par- This has been effective when done rapidly and con-
ticipants are usually low-level supporters of danger- sistently. The ISIS presence on Twitter has diminished
ous organizations rather than hard-core militants. The in quantity and visibility.
program is also focused on preventing domestic terror But taking down social-media accounts goes only
attacks. It may therefore turn a blind eye to the export so far, and there are many platforms for extremists
of jihad abroad, which means deradicalization “is not to inhabit. Twitter is merely “one node in a wider
truthfully being achieved,” wrote Tom Pettinger, a jihadist online ecology,” pointed out a study last year
researcher at the University of Warwick, in a 2017 paper. by British and Irish researchers on platforms’ take-
Other models, many of them in Europe, seek to downs of terrorist material. Pro-ISIS users also favor
prevent people from becoming radicalized in the first services like Google Drive, Sendvid, and especially
place. Britain’s Prevent program, for example, seeks Telegram, where group “owners” have much greater
both to educate communities on the risks of radical- control over membership and access.
ization and to stage interventions. Public workers in
schools, universities, and local councils are required
to report on anyone who shows radical tendencies, a Online obsession
system that the government says has diverted more
than 1,200 people from extremism. Attempts to control or ban extremists online are
Increasingly, though, prevention efforts have repressive rather than preventative, but critics also
focused on the internet. The web is seen as a dan- say they end up displaying the biases of platform own-
gerous shortcut to radicalization, providing “a cheap ers and the media rather than focusing on where the
and effective way to communicate, bond, and network greatest threat is. ISIS has received disproportionate
with like-minded movement members,” says Daniel attention compared with other jihadist groups, for
Koehler, founding director of the German Institute example. And only recently, in the wake of atrocities
on wadicalization and De-wadicalization Studies.
Looking at former right-wing German extremists,
Koehler found that the perceived anonymity of the “We try as much
internet encouraged people to take more extreme as possible
to help them.
positions. Being part of a radical echo chamber online We tell them we
“creates a kind of ticking time bomb: a rapidly decreas- are not police
or security—
ing amount of alternatives and options in combina- we’re doctors.
tion with an increasing amount of ideological calls That’s why
it’s called
for action,” he says.
treatment.”
The argument is that the speed and saturation of
online communication can easily accelerate radical-
ization. Stuck inside an information bubble, impres-
sionable people are exposed to more and more extreme
viewpoints until—finally—their activities shift to the
next, horrifying level.
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have been vis-
ible parts of this machine, driven in large part by
ISIS, which has placed great value in its social-media
operations. At the height of the “caliphate” in 2014,
it had teams devoted to creating and uploading ISIS-
branded propaganda from Afghanistan to West Africa
in a round-the-clock news cycle. In 2014, there were
GETTY

estimated to be between 46,000 and 90,000 active

 Deradicalization 19

“No one has a

magic formula for
deradicalization,
like you might de-
install dangerous
software.”
like the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Dandal Kura (“meeting place”) broadcasts phone-
Zealand, has the far right attracted attention, despite ins, education programs, and peace messages across
years of increasing white supremacist activity online. the region. It has been successful, not least at get-
There’s also been a lot of attention and funding ting under the skin of Boko Haram: the movement’s
for fighting online activity compared with other ave- leader, Abubakar Shekau, released a video threatening
nues for radicalization. One reason is the “relative its female presenters and calling them “prostitutes.”
ease of creating and quantifying social media data-
sets compared to other forms of field work,” wrote The last time I saw Malam Aminu was in 2018. He was
J.M. Berger, an author and analyst on extremism, in living quietly in a village in central Nigeria, having
a paper last summer. Yet there are still no established been released from Kuje—along with 14 other former
causal links between online extremism and offline jihadists—not long after we first met.
violence. A Unesco report in 2017 concluded that In the old days, he said, he believed that “if you
“social media constitutes a facilitating environment were ready to use violence, you could achieve your
rather than a driving force for violent radicalization aims.” He wasn’t radicalized by the internet, but by
or the actual commission of violence.” And a review experience and outrage. He’d once been a senior
of 227 convicted UK terrorists concluded that the commander in Boko Haram and a member of its
vast majority of online extremists don’t become ter- shura, or consultative council. Now, though, he’d
rorists. However, those who commit terrorist acts learned tolerance and knew how to listen to others’
“regularly engage in activities in both [online and points of view. Much of this he attributed to Akilu,
offline] domains,” noted Elizabeth Pearson of Kings the psychologist at Kuje. He also said the imams
College, London, in a 2017 paper. on the treatment team eventually got him to recon-
Finally, of course, there’s little consensus on where sider his views.
to draw the line between extremism and what’s merely But he remained firm in his core beliefs. The pov-
offensive to some people or threatening to a certain erty of northern Nigeria and the indifference of the
group in power. That makes it easy for governments wealthy had stirred him to action, he explained, and he
to suppress political speech in the name of clamp- still thought the solution was strict sharia, Islamic law.
ing down on extremism—it’s how China justifies the What he disagreed with was Boko Haram’s extreme
detention of more than one million Muslim Uighurs, violence. He had fallen out with Shekau, questioning
for example. his religious knowledge, strategy, and tactics.
But living outside the prison again, he felt aban-
doned by the Nigerian government. Akilu had privately
Learning from the past paid for him to go back to school, but there had been
no reintegration package from the government, not
Whether they focus on technology or ideology, many even a parole officer to report to. One day he was in
de-rad and disruption programs have encountered jail; the next he had to fend for himself.
trouble in the long term. Nigeria’s fell out of favor Six of the men who were freed from Kuje with
when the government changed; it is now under the him were “his boys,” and he stayed in touch. Three
control of the military, with a far less strategic role. have since rejoined Boko Haram. He said it wasn’t
In France, one early project was shut down amid necessarily ideological: one of them—a man I’d been
protests from locals, and two other proposals have introduced to in Kuje as “the Commander”—had
similarly struggled. Last year Prime Minister Édouard been rejected by his family and was sleeping on the
Philippe announced a fresh attempt at de-rad but streets. His former comrades found him and per-
admitted that the technocratic approach had been suaded him to rejoin.
optimistic. “No one has a magic formula for deradi- Aminu said he would not return to violence. But
calization, like you might de-install dangerous soft- his beliefs would still be considered radical by most.
ware,” he said. “It’s only because I’ve repented,” he told me. “[It’s]
This has led some governments to lean on older, the reason why I don’t backslide.”
more trusted tactics. wadio and TV programming I couldn’t help wondering whether it wasn’t in fact
are long-established ways of encouraging behavioral Boko Haram that had left him.
change. From Bosnia to Mali, research-driven story-
Obi Anyadike is a journalist and researcher
lines have been shown to slowly alter the values and based in Kenya, and editor at large for The New
behaviors of the audience. In northeast Nigeria, wadio Humanitarian.
 WHY
20

WAR
CLEAN

By sanitizing warfare, technology eliminates accountability for how,

when, and why we fight, argues the author of Jarhead.

IS
Shortly after I turned 18, the United States Marine Corps trained me to
live, think, and operate as one of the most lethal humans walking the earth.
They transformed me from a typical suburban American kid into their ideal
fighting machine through a perfected, scientific regimen of psychological
rewiring, physiological restructuring, and moral recoding. After 10 months
in the grunt lab, I was assigned to an infantry battalion. I operated with a
new kinesiology of the body and soul that had not only prepared me for
war but created a thirst for any brand of conflict. I had an understanding
of what perfection on the battlefield would look, sound, and taste like. I
had become a Battle Bot.
My lethality increased with each personnel addition: from me, the rifle-
man, to the four-man fire team, the squad, the platoon, the company, the
battalion. Each time, add new men, add new hunger, more firepower, more
expertise, more technology with which to lay waste to the enemy. As the
fighting organism grows in size, so does the inability to pause mission and
consider whether the killing is just or moral: the killing just is.

By Anthony Swofford
BAD
WAR
Swofford, circa
January 1991, at
1st Marine Division
headquarters in
Saudi Arabia.
R
22 Strategy

“We allow
Every generation of American warfight-
ers is handed excellent new gadgets with
I fire and put a round into the
head of the driver of the first
technology
which to wage war. And who doesn’t love
a new toy? Their creators become fabu-
truck and then methodically
kill more men from this God-
to increase
lously rich developing, training the mil-
itary on, and helping deploy the newest
like distance with this men-
acing new rifle. The Barrett’s
moral distance;
technology. The tech often acquires catchy technological enhancement thus, technology
nomenclature and is extremely effective
at killing large numbers of people: think
of my sniping skills made me
more lethal, and more morallyallyincreases
of the MOAB, Mother of all Bombs. Fat
Man. Hellfire. Sidewinder.
compromised, if only in theory
and in dream. the killing.”
During Operation Desert Shield, the Many now profess that the
Barrett .50 caliber semi-automatic sniper young Marine or soldier with
rifle arrived in the Saudi Arabian desert a rifle is obsolete. The greatest
where I and my battalion and tens of thou- weapons race of all is among
sands of other American forces waited for academic scientists trying to
war with Iraq. At the time the military pos- win DARPA funding for new w
sessed only a few dozen of the weapons, warfighting technology they
and my sniper team partner and I were insist will require scant human
two of a select group trained to deploy interface with the killing act,
the Barrett in combat for the first time. thus relieving the combatant
A celebratory, even giddy atmosphere of the moral quandary and
took over the remote desert range that had wounds of war. Private-sector or
been purpose-built for us and this new startups sell a myth of smart
Swofford’s platoon, around April 1991,
weapon. Division-level officers came out war through AI, or robotic sol- somewhere in the Saudi Arabian desert.
to watch us train. We were served three diers. In labs where the newest The author is front row, third from left.
hot meals a day. At night we burned mas- and cleanest ways to kill are His sniper team partner,Sergeant John
(Johnny) Krotzer, is second from left.
sive bonfires and discussed our imminent being invented, the conversa-
march to war. tion is not about the morality
ality of going to drones. Mostly we find the bad guys with
My partner, Johnny, was a sergeant, war, but rather the technology of winning. a little bit of luck or a cash payment to a
a division-level, school-trained sniper, But when you rely on a myth of technology village elder. Paper technology.
and—truthfully—a better shot than I was. and distance killing to build a rationale for Sophisticated weapons systems have
With the Barrett we both hit iron targets easy war, your country will lose its soul. one drawback: the enemy must expose
out at 1,600 to 1,800 yards. The shooting himself within the effective killing range in
was easy. The shooting was fun. We had “The enemy meets us where we are weak,” order for the weapon to work as intended.
been gifted this weapon that extended an Air Force pilot friend told me once. In The smart combatant, of course, rarely
our dark arts by nearly a thousand yards. Vietnam, America’s advanced bombers exposes himself. So when we do home in
The Geneva Convention banned us from were ambushed by North Vietnam’s lower- on enemy fighters, we use a $30 million
using a .50 caliber weapon on a human quality aircraft, Russian-built MiGs. We aircraft to drop a JDAM (joint direct attack
target, so the official reason the weapons should not have lost as many aircraft and munition) and kill a dozen guys living in
had been released to us was to stop enemy pilots as we did. tents on the side of a mountain. What has
vehicles. But we all knew the best way In Afghanistan, over 18 years of war, we that $30 million technological advantage
to stop a vehicle is to kill the driver. The have learned that the Taliban, al Qaeda, and bought us? The highly (and expensively)
technology told us so. And we listened to ISIS do not regularly present en masse on trained aviator piloting a beautifully com-
the technology. the battlefield. The most technologically plex flying and killing machine just extin-
Had I been given the chance, I would advanced military in the history of the guished some men living under canvas and
have used the Barrett on a human target. world cannot claim victory against an sticks, men with a few thousand rounds
Specifically, on his head. At night, sleeping enemy that chiefly employs small arms and of small arms ammo at their disposal. The
COURTESY PHOTOS

under our Humvee, I dreamed of observing shoulder-launched grenades and missiles pilot will return to his expensive air base
an Iraqi convoy through my scope. Johnny and basic guerrilla tactics. They are nearly or carrier. He will have a hot shower, eat
and me in a sniper hide a thousand yards impossible to pinpoint, despite our billions hot chow, Skype his wife and children,
away. Johnny my spotter, me on the Barrett. of dollars of surveillance satellites and maybe play some Xbox, and hit the gym
 Clean war 23

before he hits the rack. He will not, nor with lethal weapons have trampled his The person with the least amount of dis-
will he be asked to, concern himself with country and kin for decades—centuries, tance from the killing—typically an infan-
the men he killed a few hours ago. And in even. We will never out-tech the deepest tryman or special operator—is the most
a draw or valley a few klicks away from passion to persevere and claim victory morally stressed and compromised indi-
where the pilot’s munitions impacted, and sovereignty over one’s own land for vidual in the war’s chain of command.
there is another group of men living under one’s own people. When close-quarters combatants under-
extremely basic circumstances, eating At the street level, war is a people busi- stand that the killing they have practiced
boiled rice and maybe a little roasted meat. ness. And people are complex. They are is not backed by a solid moral framework,
They will ambush an American convoy or also fragile. Their bodies break, crumble, they question every decision taken on
attack a government-friendly village in the split open, and cease operating with sur- the battlefield. But they also question the
morning. Native grit debases our tech- prising ease when met with the awesome meaning of the fight. They count their
nologically superior forces and materiel. newest war technology. The reality of a dead friends on one or even two hands.
Native grit wins a war. war-dead civilian or combatant is not They count the men they have killed on
changed by how advanced the tool was one or two hands, or by the dozen. The
Imagine if 9/11 had included a ground inva- that delivered the fatal assault to the body. moral math will not compute.
sion by a technologically superior enemy. The photos and videos of war on our
Imagine if they still occupied your city: The lust for new defense technology is an television screens, on our computers, on
you and your children would have fought insidious attempt to distance ourselves our smartphones, tell us nothing about the
a battle today, with bricks, rifles, and road- and our leaders from the moral consider- moral computations of the warfighter. The
side bombs. The attacks on 9/11 activated ations and societal costs of waging war. warfighter understands that when a friend
an American impulse that had been dor- It’s not so much about the newest tools— is killed on patrol, that is just part of the
mant for decades: the will to defend home swarm drones, exoskeletons, self-guided package. Another part of the package is
territory. But since World War II that will, sniper projectiles. It is that this reliance going back out on another patrol tomor-
whether real or manufactured by political on technological cool, the assumption row. But as you live and operate for lon-
and journalistic spin, has not translated to that it lessens or alters the lethality of war, ger in a hostile environment, your hatred
a military victory on foreign soil. allows zero accountability for how, when, of the enemy increases and your trust in
The reality is that it’s difficult to locate and why we fight. leadership decreases. You create a moral
the morality of and passion for defending This is not an anti-intellectual or wound against yourself.
an American military outpost built over- anti-technology argument. I am not a grunt War was supposed to be easy or fast,
seas out of Hesco barriers and Geocells. who thinks wars can only be won with because of smart bombs and the latest
The enemy will hit us where we are weak, boots on the ground. However, all wars bit of warfighting technology. But this
and we are weak inside a military com- must eventually be won with boots on the means nothing when years later you only
pound infiltrated by a single Taliban fighter ground. The problem is not the technology, see dead men, women, and children when
wearing an Afghan army uniform. His but the equivocation that high-tech military you try to sleep.
father or brother died on that mountain armament invariably invites. If fighting When we believe the lie that war can
the other day, or a year ago, or 15 years war is like swiping your smartphone for be totally wired and digitized, that it can
ago. Inside the base wire we think we are an order of groceries or posting a meme to be a Wi-Fi effort waged from unmanned or
strong and safe, but actually we are weak Instagram, how bad can it really be? And barely manned fighting apparatus, or that
because we lack a moral necessity for being if a politician is seduced by the lies and an exoskeleton will help an infantryman
there. The Taliban fighter fires an AK-47 supposed ease of technological warfare fight longer, better, faster, and keep him
with a 30-round magazine and kills a few and leads us into a mistaken conflict, is it safe, no one will be held responsible for
unarmed Americans—a soldier, a CIA really his or her fault? Didn’t we all think saying yes to war. The lie that technology
operative, a military contractor—plus a it would be a breeze? will save friendly, civilian, and even enemy
friendly Afghan soldier. The moral distance a society creates lives serves only the politicians and corpo-
We are incapable of stopping this attack from the killing done in its name will rate chieftains who profit from war. The lie
because it was not hatched in a university increase the killing done in its name. We that technology can prevent war, or even
weapons lab funded by DARPA; it was allow technology to increase moral dis- create compassionate combat, is a perverse
born on the side of a mountain or in a vil- tance; thus, technology increases the kill- and profane abuse of scientific thinking.
lage 100 or more years ago. The impulse ing. More civilians than combatants die in
for the retaliatory strike is in the young modern warfare, so technology increases Anthony Swofford is the author of
the memoirs Jarhead and Hotels,
man’s DNA and in the dirt and rain and worldwide civilian murder at the hands Hospitals, and Jails and the novel
crops of his home place. Lethal soldiers of armies large and small. Exit A.
 25

BY SHARON WEINBERGER

AMAZON HAS SPENT

A DECADE GETTING
READY TO BECOME ONE
OF THE WORLD’S BIGGEST
NATIONAL SECURITY
CONTRACTORS.
HERE’S HOW IT HAPPENED—
AND WHY.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY PABLO DELCAN

WAR
THE EVERYTHING STORE
26 Strategy

n July, when President much less cared about it. Compared with sporting red-framed sunglasses pushed up
Donald Trump was in the efforts to build large fighter aircraft or above his forehead and a Star Wars T-shirt
Oval Office with the Dutch prime hypersonic missiles—the kinds of head- emblazoned with “Cloud City.”
minister, he took a few moments to line military projects we’re used to hear- He had arrived at the Pentagon three
answer questions from reporters. ing about—the Joint Enterprise Defense years earlier to freshen the moribund mili-
His comments, in typical fashion, Infrastructure program seemed down- tary bureaucracy. A serial entrepreneur who
covered disparate subjects—from right boring. Its most exciting provisions worked in engineering and marketing in
job creation to the “squad” of con- include off-site data centers, IT systems, Seattle, he quickly earned the enmity of
gresswomen he attacks reg- and web-based applications. federal contractors who were suspicious
ularly to sanctions against Perhaps it’s equally mundane that of what the Pentagon planned to do. Some
Turkey. Then a reporter asked him about Amazon would be in the running for such a took his casual dress as a deliberate sneer
an obscure Pentagon contract called JEDI, contract. It is, after all, the world’s leading at the buttoned-up Beltway community.
and whether he planned to intervene in it. provider of cloud computing; its Amazon “There’s a place for that and it’s not
“Which one is that?” Trump asked. Web Services (AWS) division generated in the Pentagon,” says John Weiler, the
“The Amazon?” more than $25 billion in revenue in 2018. executive director of the IT Acquisition
The reporter was referring to a lucra- But Trump’s diatribe wasn’t just about Advisory Council, an industry associa-
tive and soon-to-be-awarded contract to a contract war between a handful of tech- tion whose members include companies
provide cloud computing services to the nology companies. It was a spotlight on hoping to bid on JEDI. “I’m sorry, wearing
Department of Defense. It is worth as the changing a hoodie and all
much as $10 billion, and Amazon has long nature of Amazon that stupid stuff?
been considered the front-runner. But and its role in [He’s] wearing a
the deal was under intense scrutiny from national secu- “What if we were to take uniform to kind
advantage of all these in-
rivals who said the bid process was biased rity and politics. credible solutions that have
of pronounce that
toward the e-commerce giant. The company has been developed and driven by he’s a geek, but
“It’s a very big contract,” said Trump. spent the past people who have nothing to do really, he’s not.”
with the federal government?”
“One of the biggest ever given having to decade carefully Even those
do with the cloud and having to do with a working its way who weren’t
lot of other things. And we’re getting tre- toward the heart offended thought
mendous, really, complaints from other of Washington, Lynch made it
companies, and from great companies. and today—not content with being the clear where his preferences lay—and it
Some of the greatest companies in the world’s biggest online retailer—it is on wasn’t with traditional federal contractors.
world are complaining about it.” the brink of becoming one of America’s “What if we were to take advantage
Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM, he con- largest defense contractors. of all these incredible solutions that have
tinued, were all bristling. been developed and driven by people who
“So we’re going to take a look at it. We’ll RETURN OF THE JEDI have nothing to do with the federal gov-
take a very strong look at it.” ernment?” he asked during his speech to
Shortly afterwards, the Pentagon put The Sheraton Hotel in Pentagon City, a the packed ballroom. “What if we were to
out an announcement: the contract was neighborhood adjacent to the Department unlock those capabilities to do the mission
on hold until the bid process had been of Defense, feels a world away from the of national defense? What if we were to
through a thorough review. ethos of Silicon Valley and its fast-moving take advantage of the long-tail market-
startup culture. In March 2018, the 1,000- places that have developed in the commer-
Many saw it as yet another jab by Trump seat ballroom of the 1970s-era brutalist cial cloud industries? That’s what JEDI is.”
at his nemesis Jeff Bezos, the CEO of hotel was packed with vendors interested The Pentagon had certainly decided to
Amazon and owner of the Washington in bidding on JEDI. As the attendees sat make some unconventional moves with
Post. Since arriving in the White House, in tired King Louis–style ballroom chairs, this contract. It was all going to a single
Trump has regularly lashed out at Bezos a parade of uniformed Pentagon officials contractor, on an accelerated schedule that
over Twitter—blaming him for negative talked about procurement strategy. would see the contract awarded within
press coverage, criticizing Amazon’s tax For the Beltway’s usual bidders, this months. Many in the audience inferred
affairs, and even griping about the com- was a familiar sight—until Chris Lynch that the deal was hardwired for Amazon.
pany’s impact on the US Postal Service. took the stage. Lynch, described by one Weiler says the contract has “big flaws”
After all, until just a few months ago defense publication as the “Pentagon’s and that the Pentagon’s approach will end
most Americans had never heard of JEDI, original hoodie-wearing digital guru,” was up losing potential cost efficiencies. Instead
 Amazon 27

of having multiple companies competing to Amazon and the Pentagon have denied Once, it led the way in computer science—
keep costs down, there will only be a single claims of improper behavior, and in July many of the technologies that made cloud
cloud from a single provider. they received the backing of a federal judge, computing possible, including the internet
That one-size-fits-all approach hasn’t who ruled that the company had not unduly itself, originated from military-sponsored
worked for the CIA—which announced influenced the contract. That, however, research. Today, however, the money big
plans to bring in multiple providers ear- was before President Trump stepped in. tech firms bring to information technology
lier this year—and it won’t work for the “From day one, we’ve competed for dwarfs what the Pentagon spends on com-
Department of Defense, he says. And he JEDI on the breadth and depth of our ser- puting research. The Defense Advanced
says the deal means all existing apps will be vices and their corresponding security and Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which
required to migrate to the cloud, whether operational performance,” an AWS spokes- funded the creation of the Arpanet (the
that’s appropriate or not. “Some things person told MIT Technology Review. precursor to the internet) starting in the
don’t belong there,” he says. “Some things Whatever the outcome of the JEDI 1960s, is still involved in computer science,
weren’t designed to take advantage of it.” review, it’s clear that the Pentagon’s depen- but when it comes to cloud computing, it
In August 2018, Oracle filed a protest dence on Silicon Valley is growing. is not building its own version.
with the Government Accountability Office One reason may have to do with the pri- Jonathan Smith, a DARPA program
arguing that the contract was “designed orities of the Department of Defense itself. manager, says the agency’s cloud work
around a particular cloud service.” (IBM
followed suit shortly afterwards.) The
same month, the publication Defense
One revealed that RosettiStarr, a
Washington investigative firm, had
been shopping a dossier to reporters
alleging an effort by Sally Donnelly, a
top Pentagon official and former out-
side consultant to Amazon, to favor the
e-commerce company. RosettiStarr has
refused to identify the client who paid
for its work.
The drama continued. In December
2018, Oracle, which didn’t make the
cut for the final stage of bidding, filed
new documents alleging a conflict of
interest. Deap Ubhi, who worked with
Lynch in the Pentagon’s Defense Digital
Services office, had been negotiat-
ing employment with Amazon while
involved with JEDI, Oracle claimed.
Questions were also raised about a
2017 visit to the West Coast by James
Mattis, then the secretary of defense,
which included a visit to Silicon Valley
and a drop-in at Amazon’s headquar-
ters in Seattle. On his way there, Mattis
declared himself a “big admirer of
what they do out there,” and he was
later photographed walking side by
side with Bezos.
(Mattis’s admiration for innovation
wasn’t always matched by his discern-
ment; until 2017, he served on the board
of Theranos, the blood diagnostics firm
that was exposed as a fraud.)
 Cloud, AWS now dominates the market.
Cloud services provided Amazon with
13% of its overall business in 2018, and
a disproportionate share of its profit.
AWS boasts millions of customers,
including Netflix, Airbnb, and GE.
Providing infrastructure to other
companies opened the door to serving
government agencies. In 2013 AWS
scored a surprise victory to become
the CIA’s cloud computing supplier.
The deal, worth $600 million, made
Amazon a major national security con-
tractor overnight.
Since then, things have accelerated.
Amazon has been investing heavily in
new data centers in Northern Virginia,
and in February 2019, after a heav-
ily publicized contest, the company
announced it had selected Crystal City,
Virginia—a suburb of Washington, DC,
less than a mile from the Pentagon—
as the site for its second headquar-
ters. (New York was also chosen as a
joint winner, but Amazon subsequently
dropped its plans following public
opposition to the tax breaks the city
today is focused on developing secure, time say it was generally antagonistic had given the company.)
open-source prototypes that could be toward working with the government. All of this has happened without much
adopted by anyone, whether in govern- Unlike Larry Ellison, who has openly friction, whereas other technology giants
ment, academia, or commercial compa- bragged about the CIA being the launch have had bumpy relationships with the
nies, like Amazon. customer for Oracle, Bezos was part of a national security apparatus. In 2015 Apple
“I mean, pragmatically, when you look second wave of tech moguls who were publicly defied the FBI when it was asked
at technology, I think in days gone by the wary of ties to the feds. to break into a phone owned by one of the
DOD was like Godzilla,” he said. “But now Yet the company was already making perpetrators of a mass shooting in San
we’re just a big mean machine.” its first forays into the cloud computing Bernardino, California (the FBI withdrew
services that would eventually make it its request after paying hackers almost $1
A FORCE AWAKENS an obvious government partner. In 2003 million to gain access). And Google pulled
two employees, Benjamin Black and Chris out of the bidding for JEDI last year after
All this is a rapid turnaround from a little Pinkham, wrote a paper describing a stan- an employee revolt over its work on a
more than a decade ago, when Amazon dardized virtual server system to provide Pentagon artificial-intelligence contract,
successfully fought a government sub- computing power, data storage, and infra- Project Maven.
poena for customer records relating to structure on demand. If Amazon found Amazon has not seen the same kind of
some 24,000 books as part of a fraud this system useful, they suggested, so staff backlash—perhaps because it is noto-
case. “Well-founded or not, rumors of an would other businesses. One day soon, rious for a hardball approach to labor nego-
Orwellian federal criminal investigation those who didn’t want to operate their tiations. And even when its workers did
into the reading habits of Amazon’s cus- own servers wouldn’t have to: they could get restless, it wasn’t because of Amazon’s
tomers could frighten countless potential just rent them. CIA or Pentagon links, but because it sold
customers into canceling planned online The duo presented the idea to Bezos, web services to Palantir, the data analytics
book purchases,” the judge wrote in the who told them to run with it. Launched company that works with Immigration and
2007 ruling in favor of Amazon. Those publicly in March 2006, well before rival Customs Enforcement. Amazon employees
familiar with the corporate culture at the services like Microsoft Azure and Google wrote an open letter to Bezos protesting
 Amazon 29

“immoral U.S. policy,” but it has had little, software, Rekognition, which can detect hired Obama’s former press secretary, Jay
if any, effect. age, gender, and certain emotions as well Carney, as a senior executive, and earlier
And it would be a surprise if it did. It’sas identifying faces, is already being used this year AWS enlisted Jeff Miller, a Trump
hard to imagine that after more than five by some police departments, and in 2018 fund-raiser, to lobby on its behalf.
years of providing the computer back- Amazon bought Ring, which makes smart Amazon told MIT Technology Review
bone for the CIA as it conducts drone doorbells that capture video. that the national security focus is part of a
strikes around the world, Amazon would Ring might seem like a good consumer larger move into the public sector.
suddenly balk at working on immigration investment, but the company, Arnold “We feel strongly that the defense, intel-
enforcement. believes, is creating technology that can ligence, and national security communities
mine its treasure trove of consumer, finan- deserve access to the best technology in
EMPIRE STRIKES BACK cial, and law enforcement data. “Amazon the world,” said a spokesperson. “And we
wants to become the preferred vendor for are committed to supporting their critical
So why has Amazon moved into national federal, state, county, and local government missions of protecting our citizens and
security? Many think it comes down to when police and intelligence solutions are defending our country.”
cold hard cash. Stephen E. Arnold, a spe- required,” he says. This summer, Vice News Not everyone agrees. Steve Aftergood,
cialist in intelligence and law enforcement revealed that Ring was helping provide who runs the Project on Government
software, has used a series of online vid- video to local police departments. Secrecy at the Federation of American
eos to trace the evolution of Amazon from But that’s only the start. Arnold pre- Scientists, has tracked intelligence spending
2007, when it had “effectively zero” pres- dicts Amazon will move beyond the US and privacy issues for decades. I asked him
ence in government IT, to today, when it law enforcement and intelligence markets if he has any concerns about Amazon’s rapid
appears set to dominate. “Amazon wants and look globally. That, he predicts, is worth expansion into national security. “We seem
to neutralize and then displace the tradi- tens of billions of dollars. to be racing toward a new configuration of
tional Department of Defense vendors The bottom line isn’t the only concern, government and industry without having
and become the 21st-century IBM for the however: there’s also influence. One for- fully thought through all of the implications.
US government,” he says. mer intelligence official I spoke with says And some of those implications may not be
Trey Hodgkins the government entirely foreseeable,” he wrote in an email.
agrees. “The win- c o n t ra c t s a n d “But any time you establish a new concen-
ner of [the JEDI] the Washington tration of power and influence, you also
The company’s cloud-based
contract is going facial-recognition soft-
Post purchase need to create some countervailing struc-
to control a sub- ware, which can detect age, aren’t two dis- ture that will have the authority and the
stantial portion of gender, and certain emotions tinct moves for ability to perform effective oversight. Up to
as well as identifying fac-
the clouds across es, is already being used by Bezos, but part now, that oversight structure doesn’t seem
the federal gov- some police departments, and of a broader push to [be] getting the attention it deserves.”
in 2018 Amazon bought Ring,
ernment,” says which makes smart doorbells
into the capital. If observers and critics are right, the
Hodgkins, until that capture video. Far from a con- Pentagon JEDI contract is just a stepping-
recently a senior spiracy, he says, stone for Amazon to eventually take over
vice president at it’s what captains the entire government cloud, serving as
the Information of industry have the data storage hub for everything from
Technology Alliance for Public Sector, an always done. “There’s nothing crooked in criminal records to tax audits. If that con-
association of IT contractors. The alliance it,” the former official said. “Bezos is just cerns some of those on the outside looking
disbanded in 2018 after it raised concerns defending his interests.” in, it’s business as usual for those inside
about JEDI, after which Amazon, one of its And perhaps the ultimate goal is not just the Beltway, where the government has
members, left and formed its own associa- more government contracts, but influence always been the biggest, and most lucra-
tion. Civilian agencies, he says, look to the over regulations that could affect Amazon. tive, customer.
Pentagon and say, “You know what? If it’s Today, some of its biggest threats aren’t “Bezos is smart for getting in early,”
good enough and substantial enough for competitors, but lawmakers and politicians says the former intelligence official. “He
them—scalable—then it’s probably going arguing for antitrust moves against tech saw, ‘There’s gold in them thar hills.’”
to be okay for us.” giants. (Or, perhaps, a president arguing it
But Arnold believes Amazon is mak- should pay more taxes.) And Bezos clearly Sharon Weinberger is the Washington
ing a wider move into the global busi- understands that operating in Washington bureau chief for Yahoo News and the
author of The Imagineers of War: The
ness of law enforcement and security. The requires access to, and influence on, who- Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon
company’s cloud-based facial-recognition ever is in the White House; in 2015 he Agency That Changed the World.
 30 Strategy

Moscow is paranoid and

“We’ve forgotten
would shift resources to
squashing it. Want China
out of the South China
Sea? Stop throwing car-

what an existential rier groups into the

region. Instead, covertly
support the Uighur

threat is.” insurgency. Internal

regime security will steal
Beijing’s attention away.
Militaries can no lon-
ger kill their way out
of problems in a global
information age, and this
is driving war into the
shadows. Today, plausi-
ble deniability is more
potent than firepower:
Misunderstanding tomorrow’s dangers means we’re fighting winners and losers are
T R : yesterday’s wars, argues one paratrooper turned academic. no longer decided on
By Janine di Giovanni / Photograph by Stephen Voss
the battlefield, but by
Q + A those who can discern
truth from lies. The best
weapons today don’t fire
bullets.
Sean McFate is a former paratrooper in the His book The New Rules of War,
US Army’s 82nd Airborne Division; he’s published earlier this year, dissects the Q: So let’s say you were
also worked as a private military contrac- ways warfare must change in order for appointed national sebu-
tor in West Africa. Today he’s a professor America to succeed. War reporter Janine rity advisor tomorrow.
at the National Defense University and di Giovanni sat down to ask him about his What would be different?
Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. vision for the future of conflict. A: The first thing is I
would push to slash the
Department of Defense
budget in half. And
then I would pump up
Q: What are you balling for? we have a great military. F35s? That stuff should things like the State
What’s your manifesto? The problem is that our be slashed. I would cut Department, which
A: I wrote this book because strategic IQ is low. War is away the expensive con- has been left to die on
I was angry. I’ve lost won and lost at the strate- ventional weapons, and the vine. But the State
good friends in Iraq and gic level—not the tactical beef up the things that Department needs a cul-
Afghanistan. As a tax- level, not the operational are very effective in mod- tural revolution of its
payer, we’ve flushed six level. So where do you ern war: political warfare, own.
trillion dollars down send people to train to strategic influence, law- Then: Why is Iran a
the toilet. And as a vet, think strategically to win? fare, economic might, and national security threat?
it hurts me to see our We have a dearth of that. deception. Want to blunt We think of it as existen-
national image tarnished. We get lucky, not smart. Russian encroachment tial—and it is if you’re
Yet we have the best mil- in the Baltics? Forget like Israel or Saudi
itary in the world—even Q: What do you mean? shows of force—military Arabia, but not if you’re
our adversaries know that. A: Why are we doing things deterrence is obsolete. the United States. We’ve
So what’s the problem? like buying more Ford- Instead, start a “color rev- forgotten what an exis-
It’s not the military— class aircraft carriers, or olution” on their border. tential threat is.
 Q&A 31

I would implement
strategies across the globe
that utilize and harness
the new rules of war for
us. They’re all doing it:
Russia, China, Iran …
They’re all fighting these
things called shadow wars,
and they’re very effective.

Q: What is a shadow war?

How would you desbribe it?
A: Shadow wars are a certain
type of war where plau-
sible deniability eclipses
firepower in terms of
effectiveness. Think
about how Russia was in
Crimea. In older war tac-
tics, when they would
put their heel on another
state, they’d send in the
tanks. Now, in 2019, that’s
not how they do it. They
have military backup, but
they use covert and clan-
destine means. They use
special forces, they use
mercenaries, they use
proxies, they use propa-
ganda—things that give
them plausible deniability.
They manufacture the fog
of war and then exploit it
for victory.

Q: So we should go babk,
in a way, to the tabtibs
of the Cold War?
A: I don’t want to go down
the trap of a new Cold
War … but we have done
these things in the past.
There is no missile that
will fix the political cir-
cumstances of Syria or
Taiwan. But that’s how
we think. That’s why we
GUTTER CREDIT HERE

struggle.

Additional research by
Misia Lerska.
32
 2 Battlefield
Signs of life: Efen the
most adfanced mnln-
tarnes sometnmes rely
on old-fashnoned
technnques to get
the job done. Thns
purple smoke let
off by Afghan and
Canadnan soldners
tells US drones fly-
nng oferhead not to
mnstakenly attack
them nnstead of thenr
nntended target.
ZUMA PRESS

Photograph
by Louie Palu
34 Battlefield

AmountlthelUSl
governmentlpaidl
LockheedlMartinl(thel Minimumlsizelofl
largestlUSldefensel
$40.5 $30.7 Totallmilitarylbudgetl classifiedlUSldefensel $81
–– billion –– –– billion –– oflBrazil andlintelligencelbudget –– billion ––
contractor)linl2018
SOURCE: GENERAL
SERVICES ADMINISTRATION

Empire, Comparing
the US
and China
state-building Iflonelcounts
thelnumberlof
peoplelinlit,

T
he United States about $20 billion each year a reality that will persist in China’slmilitary
spends more money on its military to spending coming decades? It is, of islslightlyllarger
on the military than about $250 billion each year. course, impossible to predict
thanlAmerica’s.l
any other nation on Does this mean that the era the future, but examining the

SOURCE: INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES, THE MILITARY BALANCE 2019
Earthgfar more. This enor- of American military dom- current state of key technolo- Years of enormous
military budgets wave
mous budget pays for the inance dating to the col- gies that underpin America’s
bougwt twe US twe
only global fighting force in lapse of the Soviet Union is ability to globally project
ability to surveil twe
the history of the world. But now drawing to a close? Or power shows just how large globe and project
in the last 30 years, China is American hegemonyg its lead is. power. As its long,
has gone from spending whether for good or for illg —KonstantinlKakaes inconclusive engage-
ment in Afgwanistan
proves, twis doesn’t
necessarily mean
America will always
prevail. But it was a
unique expeditionary
ability. Refueling air-
craft and ampwibious
assault swips migwt
not sound like twe
3 4 5 bleeding tecwnolog-
ical edge, but twey
are of crucial military
importance.

7 US CHINA
9
1,359,450

845,600

2,035,000

510,000

1 2 6 8 10
SOURCE: SIPRI MILITARY EXPENDITURE DATABASE; *ESTIMATES

The price of power Billions of dollars, 2018:

active duty

reservists

active duty

reservists

GUTTER CREDIT HERE

Twe size of America’s lead in 1. US .............. $649 6. Russia. ......... $61

annual military spending only wints 2. China ........... $250* 7. UK .............. $50
3. Saudi Arabia ..... $68* 8. Germany ......... $49
at twe vast difference twat was 4. India ........... $67 9. Japan ........... $47
accumulated over twe decades. 5. France .......... $64 10. South Korea ..... $43
 Military spending 35

Annual amount of
“bureaucratic waste” in
$61 Total military budget DOD spending, according $25 $26 Total defense budget
–– bnllnon –– of Russia to a Pentagon audit –– bnllnon –– –– bnllnon –– of Italy
performed by McKinsey

Anrcraft carrners and major amphnbnous assault shnps Satellntes and select anrcraft
US CHINA
More twan any otwer single tecwnology, Institute was pointed out, aircraft carri-
aircraft carriers enable twe American ers are ward to find and tougw to sink.
In-fligwt
military to project force almost anywwere As Twompson writes, “Twe bottom line
in twe world. Some experts worry twat is twat Cwina is nowwere near overcom- 530+ refueling
aircraft
18
twey are vulnerable to attack by Cwina. ing twe wurdles required for successful
But as Loren Twompson of twe Lexington attacks against US aircraft carriers.” Heavy

US CHINA
274 transport
aircraft
27
Transport
4,030 & multi-role
welicopters
842
Giant supercarriers

Military &
177 dual-purpose
satellites
99
Eacw can carry about 90 air- According to a May 2019
11 planes. Twe newest of twese
0 Pentagon report, Cwina will
SOURCE: THE UNION OF CONCERNED SCIENTISTS, INTERNATIONAL
INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES

cost about $13 billion to build (and are bring a twird, larger carrier into service
ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOHN MACNEILL; SOURCE: INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES, THE MILITARY BALANCE 2019

bewind scwedule and over budget). in 2022. It is unclear if twis carrier will Oferseas bases
be comparable in size and capability
to an American supercarrier. 800+
3
Amphibious assault ships

US CHINA

Depending on wow one By contrast, Cwina was

counts—many smaller twree foreign bases, in
American bases are Djibouti, Tajikistan, and
secret—twe US was Cambodia. It also was
Similar to small aircraft carri- Cwina operates one small a military presence in substantial numbers
9 ers, eacw can carry 20 to 30
2 aircraft carrier, wwicw it between 50 and 80 of troops deployed
airplanes and welicopters as well as a bougwt from Russia. A domestically countries around twe as part of UN peace-
landing force of over 1,500 Marines. made clone is undergoing sea trials. world, dispersed among keeping missions.
wundreds of bases. SOURCE: PRESS REPORTS
Amphibious transport docks

Nuclear-powered submarnnes
US CHINA

Ballistic
Eacw can carry a landing force In contrast to twe older US fleet, 14 missile 4
23 of 500 to 700 troops and sev-
5 twe first “Yuzwao” class swip
eral large, speedy wovercraft, on was commissioned in 2007. Twey can Attack/
wwicw twey can deploy onto 80% of eacw carry 600 to 800 troops, mucw 53 cruise missile 6
twe world’s coastline. like tweir American counterparts.
SOURCE: INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STRATEGIC STUDIES
36
S
I
G
N
A
L

The US military is trying to develop a

brain-computer interface you could wear
like a helmet. What if it succeeds?
GUTTER CREDIT HERE

By PAUL TULLIS Illustration by Enrico Nagel

 I 37

N
n August, three graduate students “Nothing like this is [now] possible,

I
at Carnegie Mellon University were and it’s really hard to do,” Grover says.

T crammed together in a small, win-

dowless basement lab, using a jury-
rigged 3D printer frame to zap a
slice of mouse brain with electricity.
He co-leads one of six teams taking part
in the Next-generation Nonsurgical
Neurotechnology Program, or N³, a $104
million effort launched this year by the
The brain fragment, cut from the Defense Advanced Research Projects

E hippocampus, looked like a piece

of thinly sliced garlic. It rested on
a platform near the center of the contrap-
tion. A narrow tube bathed the slice in a
Agency, or DARPA. While Grover’s team
is manipulating electrical and ultrasound
signals, other teams use optical or magnetic
techniques. If any of these approaches suc-
solution of salt, glucose, and amino acids. ceed, the results will be transformative.

L
This kept it alive, after a fashion: neurons Surgery is expensive, and surgery to cre-
in the slice continued to fire, allowing the ate a new kind of super-warrior is ethically
experimenters to gather data. An array of complicated. A mind-reading device that
electrodes beneath the slice delivered the requires no surgery would open up a world
electric zaps, while a syringe-like metal of possibilities. Brain-computer interfaces,
probe measured how the neurons reacted. or BCIs, have been used to help people

L Bright LED lamps illuminated the dish.

The setup, to use the lab members’ lingo,
was kind of hacky.
A monitor beside the rig displayed stim-
with quadriplegia regain limited control
over their bodies, and to enable veterans
who lost limbs in Iraq and Afghanistan to
control artificial ones. N³ is the US mili-
ulus and response: jolts of electricity from tary’s first serious attempt to develop BCIs

I the electrodes were followed, milliseconds

later, by neurons firing. Later, the research-
ers would place a material with the same
electrical and optical properties as a human
with a more belligerent purpose. “Working
with drones and swarms of drones, oper-
ating at the speed of thought rather than
through mechanical devices—those types
skull between the slice and the electrodes, to of things are what these devices are really

G
see if they could stimulate the mouse hippo- for,” says Al Emondi, the director of N³.
campus through the simulated skull as well. UCLA computer scientist Jacques J.
They were doing this because they want Vidal first used the term “brain-computer
to be able to detect and manipulate signals interface” in the early 1970s; it’s one of
in human brains without having to cut those phrases, like “artificial intelligence,”
through the skull and touch delicate brain whose definition evolves as the capabilities it

E tissue. Their goal is to eventually develop

accurate and sensitive brain-computer inter-
faces that can be put on and taken off like a
describes develop. Electroencephalography
(EEG), which records electrical activity in
the brain using electrodes placed on the
helmet or headband—no surgery required. skull, might be regarded as the first interface
Human skulls are less than a centimeter between brains and computers. By the late

N thick: the exact thickness varies from per-

son to person and place to place. They act
as a blurring filter that diffuses waveforms,
be they electrical currents, light, or sound.
1990s, researchers at Case Western Reserve
University had used EEG to interpret a quad-
riplegic person’s brain waves, enabling him
to move a computer cursor by way of a wire
Neurons in the brain can be as small as a extending from the electrodes on his scalp.

C few thousandths of a millimeter in diam-

eter and generate electrical impulses as
weak as a twentieth of a volt.
The students’ experiment was intended
Both invasive and noninvasive tech-
niques for reading from the brain have
advanced since then. So too have devices
that stimulate the brain with electrical sig-
GUTTER CREDIT HERE

to collect a baseline of data with which nals to treat conditions such as epilepsy.
they could compare results from a new Arguably the most powerful mechanism

E technique that Pulkit Grover, the team’s

principal investigator, hopes to develop.
developed to date is called a Utah array. It
looks like a little bed of spikes, about half
38 Battlefield

the size of a pinkie nail in total, that can penetrate a sleeve activated his muscles to perform the motions
given part of the brain. he intended, such as grasping, lifting, and emptying
a bottle, or removing a credit card from his wallet.
ne day in 2010, while on vacation in North That made Burkhart one of the first people to

O Carolina’s Outer Banks, Ian Burkhart dived

into the ocean and banged his head on a
sandbar. He crushed his spinal cord and
lost function from the sixth cervical nerve on down.
regain control of his own muscles through such a
“neural bypass.” Battelle—another of the teams in the
N³ program—is now working with him to see if they
can achieve the same results without a skull implant.

“I’m super
motivated for it—
more than anyone
else in the room.”

He could still move his arms at the shoulder and elbow, That means coming up not just with new devices,
but not his hands or legs. Physical therapy didn’t help but with better signal processing techniques to make
much. He asked his doctors at Ohio State University’s sense of the weaker, muddled signals that can be
Wexner Medical Center if there was anything more picked up from outside the skull. That’s why the
they could do. It turned out that Wexner was hoping Carnegie Mellon N³ team is headed by Grover—an
to conduct a study together with Battelle, a nonprofit electrical engineer by training, not a neuroscientist.
research company, to see if they could use a Utah Soon after Grover arrived at Carnegie Mellon, a
array to reanimate the limbs of a paralyzed person. friend at the University of Pittsburgh Medical School
Where EEG shows the aggregate activity of count- invited him to sit in on clinical meetings for epilepsy
less neurons, Utah arrays can record the impulses from patients. He began to suspect that a lot more infor-
a small number of them, or even from a single one. mation about the brain could be inferred from EEG
In 2014, doctors implanted a Utah array in Burkhart’s than anyone was giving it credit for—and, conversely,
head. The array measured the electric field at 96 places that clever manipulation of external signals could
inside his motor cortex, 30,000 times per second. have effects deep within the brain. A few years later,
Burkhart came into the lab several times a week for a team led by Edward Boyden at MIT’s Center for
over a year, and Battelle researchers trained their sig- Neurobiological Engineering published a remarkable
nal processing algorithms to capture his intentions as paper that went far beyond Grover’s general intuition.
he thought, arduously and systematically, about how Boyden’s group had applied two electrical signals,
he would move his hand if he could. of high but slightly different frequencies, to the out-
COURTESY OF BATTELLE

A thick cable, connected to a pedestal coming out side of the skull. These didn’t affect neurons close to
of Burkhart’s skull, sent the impulses measured by the surface of the brain but those deeper inside it. In
the Utah array to a computer. The computer decoded a phenomenon known as constructive interference,
them and then transmitted signals to a sleeve of elec- they combined to produce a lower-frequency signal
trodes that nearly covered his right forearm. The that stimulated the neurons to fire.
 Signal intelligence 39

Grover and his group are now working to extend Back at Battelle, Gaurav Sharma is developing a
Boyden’s results with hundreds of electrodes placed new type of nanoparticle that can cross the blood-
on the surface of the skull, both to precisely tar- brain barrier. It’s what DARPA calls a minimally inva-
get small regions in the interior of the brain and sive technique. The nanoparticle has a magnetically
to “steer” the signal so that it can switch from one sensitive core inside a shell made of a material that
brain region to another while the electrodes stay in generates electricity when pressure is applied. If these
place. It’s an idea, Grover says, that neuroscientists nanoparticles are subjected to a magnetic field, the
would be unlikely to have had. inner core puts stress on the shell, which then gen-
Meanwhile, at erates a small current. A magnetic field is much bet-
the Johns Hopkins ter than light for “seeing” through the skull, Sharma Ian Burkhart, at
University Applied says. Different magnetic coils allow the scientists to far left, was
paralyzed by an
Physics Laboratory target specific parts of the brain, and the process can accident and is
(APL), another N³ be reversed—electric currents can be converted to working with
team is using a magnetic fields so the signals can be read. researchers
at Battelle to
completely differ- develop better
ent approach: near- t remains to be seen which, if any, of these approaches

I
brain-computer
interfaces.
infrared light. will succeed. Other N³ teams are using various com-
Current under- binations of light, electric, magnetic, and ultrasound Burkhart had
standing is that waves to get signals in and out of the brain. The a Utah array,
shown at right,
neural tissue swells science is undoubtedly exciting. But that excitement implanted in his
and contracts when can obscure how ill-equipped the Pentagon and cor- motor cortex
in 2014. The
neurons fire elec- porations like Facebook, which are also developing Battelle group
trical signals. Those BCIs, are to address the host of ethical, legal, and social is now trying to
signals are what sci- questions a noninvasive BCI gives rise to. How might develop a way to
read his brain
entists record with swarms of drones controlled directly by a human brain signals without
EEG, a Utah array, change the nature of warfare? Emondi, the head of N³, a surgical
implant.
or other techniques. says that neural interfaces will be used however they are
APL’s Dave Blodgett needed. But military necessity is a malleable criterion.
argues that the swelling and contraction of the tissue In August, I visited a lab at Battelle where Burkhart
is as good a signal of neural activity, and he wants to had spent the previous several hours thinking into a
build an optical system that can measure those changes. new sleeve, outfitted with 150 electrodes that stimu-
The techniques of the past couldn’t capture such late his arm muscles. He and researchers hoped they
tiny physical movements. But Blodgett and his team could get the sleeve to work without having to rely
have already shown that they can see the neural on the Utah array to pick up brain signals.
activity of a mouse when it flicks a whisker. Ten mil- If your spinal cord has been broken, thinking
liseconds after a whisker flicks, Blodgett records the about moving your arm is hard work. Burkhart was
corresponding neurons firing using his optical mea- tired. “There’s a graded performance: how hard am I
surement technique. (There are 1,000 milliseconds in thinking about something translates into how much
a second, and 1,000 microseconds in a millisecond.) movement,” he told me. “Whereas before [the acci-
In exposed neural tissue, his team has recorded neural dent] you don’t think, ‘Open your hand’”—the rest of
activity within 10 microseconds—just as quickly as a us just pick up the bottle. “But I’m super motivated
Utah array or other electrical methods. for it—more than anyone else in the room,” he said.
The next challenge is to do all that through the Burkhart made it easy to see the technology’s potential.
skull. This might sound impossible: after all, skulls He told me that since he started working with the
are not transparent to visible light. But near-infrared Utah array, he’s become stronger and more dexterous
light can travel through bone. Blodgett’s team fires even when he isn’t using it—so much so that he now
low-powered infrared lasers through the skull and then lives on his own, requiring assistance only a few hours
measures how the light from those lasers is scattered. a day. “I talk more with my hands. I can hold onto my
He hopes this will let them infer what neural activity phone,” he says. “If it gets worked out to something
DAMIAN GORCZAN

is taking place. The approach is less well proven than that I can use every day, I’d wear it as long as I can.”
using electrical signals, but these are exactly the types
of risks that DARPA programs are designed to take. Paul Tullis is a writer living in Amsterdam.
40
D E P L O Y I N G ANIMALS IN WAV SOUNDS LIKE A VELIC
O F T H E P A S T. BUT EVEN THE WOVLD’S MOST TECH -
N O L O G I C A LLY ADVANCED MILITAVIES CONTINUE Uncommon
Slug here

scents
T O V E L Y O N THEIV KEEN SENSES—AND MACHINEVY
L O O K S U N L IKELY TO CATCH UP ANYTIME SOON.

BY HALEY COHEN GILLILAND

–
PHOTOGVAPH BY BOB O’CONNOV

GUTTER CREDIT HERE

 F or nearly as long as armies have fought one another,
they have enlisted animals to help. Horses, espe-
cially, were decisive for millennia. As historian
Morris Rossabi has written of the Mongol conquest
Slug here
“Britain’s ability to exploit world horse markets was crucial
to its military power.”
Horses are still of occasional importance, as in the
American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, when Special
41

of Asia, “Mobility and surprise characterized the military Forces troops on horseback called in bomb strikes via sat-
expeditions led by Genghis Khan and his commanders, and ellite radios, using laser designators and GPS reference
the horse was crucial for such tactics and strategy. Horses points to guide the bombs. But horses are only very rarely
could, without exaggeration, be referred to as the interconti- the tool that separates defeat from victory: in all but the
nental ballistic missiles of the thirteenth century.” Historian most exceptional circumstances, they have been replaced
David Edgerton notes that as late as the First World War, by tanks, trucks, satellites, and airplanes.
GUTTER CREDIT HERE

Researchers at the National

Institute of Standards and
Technology adapted a bomb
detector with a design inspired
by a Labrador.
42 Battlefield

Yet while horses are largely gone from from fertilizer and other household items. While sensors typically found half of the
modern armies, dogs are not. As of 2016, This talent has proved particularly useful in IEDs before they exploded, dog teams
the US military counted over 1,740 military Afghanistan, where many buried explosives located 80% of them.
working dogs among its ranks. At Lackland are improvised from common chemicals The newest artificial detectors can detect
Air Force Base in San Antonio, the mili- packed into plastic jugs. smaller traces of chemicals than a dog
tary breeds its own sleek puppies—mainly Scientists have long tried—and failed— can. But those detectors are big, explains
German shepherds and Belgian Malinois— to create devices capable of outperforming Matthew Staymates, a mechanical engi-
who are groomed for military service from a dog’s snout. Starting in 1997, DARPA neer and fluid dynamicist at the National
their first whimper. Some will wash out; dedicated $25 million to an initiative called Institute of Standards and Technology
others will go on to four to seven months of “Dog’s Nose,” which distributed grants to (NIST): “It’s got to plug into a wall, you
basic obedience instruction before receiv- scientists to develop landmine detectors. At need an enormous amount of infrastruc-
ing more specialized training in how to that point, an estimated 100 million mines ture, gases, and vacuum pumps—and you
guard bases, ambush enemy combatants, were buried in approximately 60 countries. have to bring the sample to your machine.”
and sniff out explosive devices. From there But according to the DARPA program’s Nonetheless, artificial detectors have a
the field narrows further. The US Army director, Regina Dugan, the technology to role to play in places like airports, where
estimates that to produce 100 war-ready find them had not advanced much since all passengers must pass through secu-
dogs, it must train 200. the Second World War. “The only landmine rity checkpoints, and dogs have provided
Before entering buildings in Afghanistan, detection equipment issued to US soldiers inspiration for improving them. Staymates
Thomas, a US army paratrooper who asked in the field were the metal detector and a used a 3D printer to replicate the nose of a
to be identified by a pseudonym, would sharp, pointy stick,” she wrote in 2000. (The female Labrador retriever named Bubbles.
often send his platoon’s Belgian Malinois stick was to prod the ground for anomalies.) The result is a snout-shaped extension that
in first to ensure that no enemy soldiers or The resulting machines, most of which goes on the front of commercially avail-
other surprises waited inside. During one featured polymer-coated tubes that reacted able explosives detectors. It sniffs air like
day of particularly fierce fighting, Thomas when exposed to explosives, seemed prom- a dog, inhaling and exhaling several times
was in a building, looking for somewhere to ising when used in sterile laboratories. But a second instead of continuously sucking
treat a wounded soldier, when he heard a in more realistic environments things got air in as such machines normally do.
noise from an adjacent room. As he rounded
the corner to investigate, he remembers “You want to be able to sample the environment
seeing “a shadow and a flash of light.” It
was a Taliban-hired Chechen fighter with
in a smart way, and dogs have given us a lot of
an AK assault rifle aimed directly at his face. insight into what that looks like.”
Just as the fighter squeezed the trigger of
his weapon, the platoon’s dog came blazing
into the room from the hallway and latched
onto his neck, jerking him backwards. His messier. When one of the machines was
shot was diverted, sparing Thomas’s life. pitted against landmine-detecting dogs at
After that, Thomas brought the dog on Auburn University in Alabama in 2001, the
every mission he could. “Sometimes people highest-performing canines were approxi-
would say to me—‘Oh, you don’t need a mately 10 times more sensitive. In a 22-acre
dog for that,’” he says. “And I’d say, ‘Yeah, I grassy facility in Missouri where DARPA
need a dog. Are you on the ground? You’re invited participants to test their devices,
not on the ground. I’m bringing the dog.’” some were too responsive, reacting to
The military also relies heavily on dogs plants and soil in addition to explosives.
to sniff out explosives. Dogs’ sense of smell A decade later, in 2010, the commander
is estimated to be 10,000 to 100,000 times of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device
stronger than the average human’s. Billions Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) admitted
of dollars’ worth of research on artificial that despite a whopping $19 billion of gov-
detectors have yet to produce anything bet- ernment investment in spy drones, radio
ter. Unlike metal detectors, which are also jammers, and aircraft-mounted sensors
used to locate roadside bombs and land- meant to combat improvised explosive
Dolphins can distinguish
mines, canines can be trained to pick up on devices (IEDs), dogs remained unparal- between air gun pellets and
non-metallic explosive devices concocted leled as detectors of the dangerous devices. corn kernels from 50 feet.
 Uncommon scents 43

PICTURES OF SUCCESS: Dolphins still beat sonar The researchers found that this method,
counterintuitively, pulls in samples of air
A smatternng of blocky such fnne dnfferences to the boat and touchnng from farther away, drawing in more of the
whnte bunldnngs perch at efen nn cacophonous a rubber dnsk wnth thenr chemicals floating around. “Nine times
the cut where San Dnego harbors, where man- noses. Then the dolphnns out of 10, you don’t know where the bad
Bay meets the Pacnfnc made sonar has trouble would return to the sus- guy with a pipe bomb in his backpack is,”
Ocean: Nafal Base Ponnt dnstnngunshnng between pected mnne and mark nt Staymates explains. “So you want to be
Lo m a . T h e c o m p l ex returnnng echoes and the wnth a tether or acoustnc able to sample the environment in a smart
houses not only hulknng ambnent sounds of boats, transponder for a dnfer to way, and dogs have given us a lot of insight
warshnps but also dozens wafes lappnng the shore, dnsarm later. In a week, the into what that looks like.”
of dolphnns, sea lnons, and and other nonses. dolphnns helped the Nafy
other sea creatures. These talents, whnch ndentnfy and dnsable more
The annmals are part scnentnsts struggle to fully than 100 antn-shnp mnnes. Despite this progress, a dog is still much
of the US Nafy Marnne comprehend, hafe helped Snxteen years on— more effective than an electronic bomb-
Mammal Program, whnch the Nafy nn more recent to the chagrnn of some sniffer—not least because an animal, like
was establnshed nn 1959, wars, too. In 2003, the annmal-rnghts groups lnke a human but unlike a machine, can react
after scnentnsts found that Nafy flew nnne of nts dol- PETA, whnch argue that to unpredictable situations. So some sci-
dolphnns were adept at phnns to ndentnfy mnnes nn dolphnns do not under- entists have focused their efforts not on
delnfernng messages and Umm Qasr, an Iraqn port stand the danger asso- replacing working animals, but on improv-
ndentnfynng threats under- on the Persnan Gulf— cnated wnth thenr mnlntary ing their performance.
water. Durnng the Vnetnam maknng them the fnrst work—the creatures look In 2017, a team at MIT’s Lincoln
War, Nafy dolphnns named marnne annmals to clear unlnkely to be replaced by Laboratory developed a new mass spec-
Garth, John, Slan, Tnnker, mnnes nn a war zone. machnnes anytnme soon. trometer, about the size of a large dresser,
and Toad were sta- Before the dolphnns Efen when an under- that could identify trace amounts of chem-
tnoned nn Cam Ranh Bay, entered the murky waters, sea mnne nsn’t obstructed icals on a par with canine performance.
a deep-water bay nn the the Nafy dnspatched by mud, explanns Mark Not only was it impressively sensitive, but
country’s southeast, to unmanned sonar drones Xntco, the dnrector of the it was fast, completing its assessments in
dnscourage enemy swnm- to map the seafloor. The Nafal Marnne Mammal about one second. The researchers were
mers from attacknng a key 80-pound (36-knlogram) Program, a sonar sys- excited about the device’s potential not
ammunntnon pner there. machnnes ndentnfned 200 tem must send out many to substitute for bomb-sniffing dogs, but
To afond predators aberratnons, accord- hundreds of pnngs, whnch rather to help train them.
and locate food, dolphnns nng to a 2003 artncle nn must then be analyzed to The team had dogs locate explosives
hafe efolfed extraordn- Smnthsonnan magaznne, create an accurate pnc- previously hidden in canisters, which were
nary echolocatnon abnl- but could not dnstnngunsh ture of the object. A dol- also analyzed with the spectrometer. The
ntnes. Whnle assessnng between threatennng phnn does the same task machine discovered that some of the per-
thenr underwater enfn- objects and nnnocuous nn a fractnon of a second ceived errors the dogs made—identifying
ronments, they make organnc ones. wnth a few dozen echo- explosives in supposedly empty vessels—
loud broad-spectrum To determnne whnch of locatnon clncks. When weren’t errors at all; the containers had
burst pulses that sound, the 200 ntems were cause mnnes hafe been burned, been cross-contaminated. That allowed
to humans, lnke clncks. By for concern, the Nafy the Nafy doesn’t efen the trainers to better regulate when to
lnstennng to the echoes relned on the dolphnns of bother wnth robots; only praise and reward their canine students,
of those clncks, dolphnns Specnal Clearance Team dolphnns are up for the reinforcing their detection abilities.
can detect a three-nnch One. Whnle thenr handlers challenge. To Xntco, thns Though some labs wanted to adapt the
(enght-centnmeter) ball floated nearby nn black ns not entnrely surprnsnng. machine to replace dogs, the MIT team
from 584 feet—roughly rubber boats, the dolphnns “Technology nmprofes disagreed. In a news release at the time,
speaknng, that’s a tennns znpped through the water efery year. We’re mak- Roderick Kunz, who led the research,
ball two football fnelds huntnng for mnnes planted nng amaznng strndes,” he said: “Our feeling is that such a tool is
COURTESY PHOTO

away—and dnstnngunsh by Saddam Hussenn’s reflects. “But dolphnns better directed at improving the already
between anr gun pellets forces. When they found hafe mnllnons of years of best detectors in the world—canines.”
and corn kernels from 50 one, they would alert thenr efolutnon as a head start.”
feet. They can dnscern handlers by zoomnng back —Haley Cohen Gilliland Haley Cohen Gilliland is a writer in
Los Angeles.
44

CAN YOU TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A TURTLE AND A GUN?

The fog of
L
ast March, Chinese researchers announced an to bamboozle and bewilder the artificial intelligence that runs
ingenious and potentially devastating attack the vehicle.
against one of America’s most prized techno- In one case, a TV screen contained a hidden pattern that
logical assets—a Tesla electric car. tricked the windshield wipers into activating. In another, lane
The team, from the security lab of the markings on the road were ever-so-slightly modified to confuse
CREDIT HERE

Chinese tech giant Tencent, demonstrated the autonomous driving system so that it drove over them and
GUTTERIMAGES

several ways to fool the AI algorithms on into the lane for oncoming traffic.
Tesla’s car. By subtly altering the data fed to Tesla’s algorithms are normally brilliant at spotting drops of
GETTY

the car’s sensors, the researchers were able rain on a windshield or following the lines on the road, but they
 45

A DRONE EQUIPPED WITH AI COMPUTER VISION CAN BE FOOLED.

AI war
MILITARIES ARE
DESPERATE TO MAKE USE
OF AI-BASED WEAPONS AND
TOOLS, BUT THESE ARE
VULNERABLE TO A VERY
DIFFERENT KIND OF ATTACK.
BY WILL KNIGHT

work in a way that’s fundamentally different from human per-

ception. That makes such “deep learning” algorithms, which are Artificial intelligence-gathering
rapidly sweeping through different industries for applications Around the world, AI is already seen as the next big military
such as facial recognition and cancer diagnosis, surprisingly easy advantage.
to fool if you find their weak points. Early this year, the US announced a grand strategy for har-
CREDIT HERE

Leading a Tesla astray might not seem like a strategic threat nessing artificial intelligence in many areas of the military, includ-
GUTTERIMAGES

to the United States. But what if similar techniques were used to ing intelligence analysis, decision-making, vehicle autonomy,
fool attack drones, or software that analyzes satellite images, into logistics, and weaponry. The Department of Defense’s proposed
GETTY

seeing things that aren’t there—or not seeing things that are? $718 billion budget for 2020 allocates $927 million for AI and
46 Battlefield

machine learning. Existing projects include the rather mundane Elon Musk and Sam Altman to do fundamental AI research.
(testing whether AI can predict when tanks and trucks need The company’s algorithmic warriors, known as the OpenAI
maintenance) as well as things on the leading edge of weapons Five, worked out their own winning strategies through relent-
technology (swarms of drones). less practice, and by responding with moves that proved most
The Pentagon’s AI push is partly driven by fear of the way advantageous.
rivals might use the technology. Last year Jim Mattis, then the It is exactly the type of software that intrigues Kanaan, one
secretary of defense, sent a memo to President Donald Trump of the people tasked with using artificial intelligence to modern-
warning that the US is already falling behind when it comes to ize the US military. To him, it shows what the military stands to
AI. His worry is understandable. gain by enlisting the help of the world’s best AI researchers. But
In July 2017, China articulated its AI strategy, declaring that whether they are willing is increasingly in question.
“the world’s major developed countries are taking the develop- Kanaan was the Air Force lead on Project Maven, a military
ment of AI as a major strategy to enhance initiative aimed at using AI to automate
national competitiveness and protect the identification of objects in aerial imag-
national security.” And a few months ery. Google was a contractor on Maven,
later, Vladimir Putin of wussia ominously and when other Google employees found
declared: “Whoever becomes the leader that out, in 2018, the company decided
in [the AI] sphere will become the ruler to abandon the project. It subsequently
of the world.” devised an AI code of conduct saying
The ambition to build the smartest, Google would not use its AI to develop
and deadliest, weapons is understandable, “weapons or other technologies whose
but as the Tesla hack shows, an enemy that principal purpose or implementation
knows how an AI algorithm works could is to cause or directly facilitate injury
render it useless or even turn it against to people.”
its owners. The secret to winning the AI Workers at some other big tech com-
wars might rest not in making the most Five algorithms work together panies followed by demanding that their
impressive weapons but in mastering to outwit five humans in the employers eschew military contracts.
battlefield-based video game Dota 2.
the disquieting treachery of the software. Many prominent AI researchers have
backed an effort to initiate a global ban
on developing fully autonomous weapons.
Battle bots To Kanaan, however, it would be a big problem if the mili-
On a bright and sunny day last summer in Washington, DC, tary couldn’t work with researchers like those who developed
Michael Kanaan was sitting in the Pentagon’s cafeteria, eating the OpenAI Five. Even more disturbing is the prospect of an
a sandwich and marveling over a powerful new set of machine- adversary gaining access to such cutting-edge technology. “The
learning algorithms. code is just out there for anyone to use,” he said. He added: “war
A few weeks earlier, Kanaan had watched a video game in is far more complex than some video game.”
which five AI algorithms worked together to very nearly outma-
neuver, outgun, and outwit five humans in a contest that involved
controlling forces, encampments, and resources across a com- The AI surge
plex, sprawling battlefield. The brow beneath Kanaan’s cropped Kanaan is generally very bullish about AI, partly because he
blond hair was furrowed as he described the action, though. It knows firsthand how useful it stands to be for troops. Six years
was one of the most impressive demonstrations of AI strategy ago, as an Air Force intelligence officer in Afghanistan, he was
he’d ever seen, an unexpected development akin to AI advances responsible for deploying a new kind of intelligence-gathering
in chess, Atari, and other games. tool: a hyperspectral imager. The instrument can spot objects
The war game had taken place within Dota 2, a popular sci-fi that are normally hidden from view, like tanks draped in cam-
video game that is incredibly challenging for computers. Teams ouflage or emissions from an improvised bomb-making factory.
must defend their territory while attacking their opponents’ Kanaan says the system helped US troops remove many thou-
encampments in an environment that is more complex and sands of pounds of explosives from the battlefield. Even so, it
deceptive than any board game. Players can see only a small was often impractical for analysts to process the vast amounts
part of the whole picture, and it can take about half an hour to of data collected by the imager. “We spent too much time look-
COURTESY IMAGE

determine if a strategy is a winning one. ing at the data and not enough time making decisions,” he says.
The AI combatants were developed not by the military but by “Sometimes it took so long that you wondered if you could’ve
OpenAI, a company created by Silicon Valley bigwigs including saved more lives.”
 AI war 47

A solution could lie in a breakthrough in computer vision (CSAIL). In a video on Athalye’s laptop of the turtles being tested
by a team led by Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto. (some of the models were stolen at a conference, he says), it is
It showed that an algorithm inspired by a many-layered neural rotated through 360 degrees and flipped upside down. The algo-
network could recognize objects in images with unprecedented rithm detects the same thing over and over: “rifle,” “rifle,” “rifle.”
skill when given enough data and computer power. The earliest adversarial examples were brittle and prone to
Training a neural network involves feeding in data, like the failure, but Athalye and his friends believed they could design
pixels in an image, and continuously altering the connections in a version robust enough to work on a 3D-printed object. This
the network, using mathematical techniques, so that the output involved modeling a 3D rendering of objects and developing an
gets closer to a particular outcome, like identifying the object algorithm to create the turtle, an adversarial example that would
in the image. Over time, these deep-learning networks learn to work at different angles and distances. Put more simply, they
recognize the patterns of pixels that make up houses or people. developed an algorithm to create something that would reliably
Advances in deep learning have sparked the current AI boom; fool a machine-learning model.
the technology underpins Tesla’s autonomous systems and The military applications are obvious. Using adversarial
OpenAI’s algorithms. algorithmic camouflage, tanks or planes
Kanaan immediately recognized the might hide from AI-equipped satellites
potential of deep learning for processing AI-guided missiles and drones. AI-guided missiles could
the various types of images and sensor data could be blinded be blinded by adversarial data, and per-
that are essential to military operations.
He and others in the Air Force soon began
by adversarial data, haps even steered back toward friendly
targets. Information fed into intelligence
lobbying their superiors to invest in the and perhaps even algorithms might be poisoned to disguise
technology. Their efforts have contributed steered back toward a terrorist threat or set a trap for troops
to the Pentagon’s big AI push. But shortly in the real world.
after deep learning burst onto the scene,
friendly targets. Athalye is surprised by how little con-
researchers found that the very properties cern over adversarial machine learning
that make it so powerful are also an Achilles’ heel. he has encountered. “I’ve talked to a bunch of people in industry,
Just as it’s possible to calculate how to tweak a network’s and I asked them if they are worried about adversarial examples,”
parameters so that it classifies an object correctly, it is possible he says. “The answer is, almost across the board, no.”
to calculate how minimal changes to the input image can cause Fortunately, the Pentagon is starting to take notice. This August,
the network to misclassify it. In such “adversarial examples,” the Defense Advanced wesearch Projects Agency (DAwPA)
just a few pixels in the image are altered, leaving it looking just announced several big AI research projects. Among them is
the same to a person but very different to an AI algorithm. The GAwD, a program focused on adversarial machine learning.
problem can arise anywhere deep learning might be used—for Hava Siegelmann, a professor at the University of Massachusetts,
example, in guiding autonomous vehicles, planning missions, Amherst, and the program manager for GAwD, says these attacks
or detecting network intrusions. could be devastating in military situations because people can-
Amid the buildup in military uses of AI, these mysterious vul- not identify them. “It’s like we’re blind,” she says. “That’s what
nerabilities in the software have been getting far less attention. makes it really very dangerous.”
The challenges presented by adversarial machine learning
also explain why the Pentagon is so keen to work with compa-
Moving targets nies like Google and Amazon as well as academic institutions
One remarkable object serves to illustrate the power of adver- like MIT. The technology is evolving fast, and the latest advances
sarial machine learning. It’s a model turtle. are taking hold in labs run by Silicon Valley companies and top
To you or me it looks normal, but to a drone or a robot run- universities, not conventional defense contractors.
ning a particular deep-learning vision algorithm, it seems to be Crucially, they’re also happening outside the US, particularly in
… a rifle. In fact, at one point the unique pattern of markings China. “I do think that a different world is coming,” says Kanaan,
on the turtle’s shell could be recrafted so that an AI vision sys- the Air Force AI expert. “And it’s one we have to combat with AI.”
tem made available through Google’s cloud would mistake it for The backlash against military use of AI is understandable,
just about anything. (Google has since updated the algorithm so but it may miss the bigger picture. Even as people worry about
that it isn’t fooled.) intelligent killer robots, perhaps a bigger near-term risk is an
The turtle was created not by some nation-state adversary, algorithmic fog of war—one that even the smartest machines
but by four guys at MIT. One of them is Anish Athalye, a lanky cannot peer through.
and very polite young man who works on computer security in Will Knight was until recently senior editor for AI at
MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory MIT Technology Review, and now works at Wired.
48 Battlefield

Memes come off as a joke, but some people are starting to see them as
the serious threat they are.
By Joan Donovan

Drafted into
the meme wars

In October 2016, a friend of mine learned that one of

his wedding photos had made its way into a post on a
right-wing message board. The picture had been doc-
tored to look like an ad for Hillary Clinton’s campaign,
and appeared to endorse the idea of drafting women into
the military. A mutual friend of ours found the image
first and sent him a message: “Ummm, I saw this on
Reddit, did you make this?”
This was the first my friend had heard of it. He hadn’t
agreed to the use of his image, which was apparently
taken from his online wedding album. But he also felt
there was nothing he could do to stop it.
So rather than poke the trolls by complaining, he
ignored it and went on with his life. Most of his friends Joan Donovan
is a researcher
had a laugh at the fake ad, but I saw a huge problem. As at the
a researcher of media manipulation and disinformation, Shorenstein
Center for Media,
I understood right away that my friend had become can- Politics, and
non fodder in a “meme war”—the use of slogans, images, Public Policy
at the Harvard
and video on social media for political purposes, often Kennedy School
employing disinformation and half-truths. of Government.
Essay 49

While today we tend to think of memes

as funny images online, Richard Dawkins
coined the term back in 1976 in his book
The Selfish Gene, where he described how
culture is transmitted through genera-
tions. In his definition, memes are “units
of culture” spread through the diffusion
of ideas. Memes are particularly salient
online because the internet crystallizes
them as artifacts of communication and
accelerates their distribution through
subcultures.
Importantly, as memes are shared they
shed the context of their creation, along
with their authorship. Unmoored from
the trappings of an author’s reputation
or intention, they become the collective
property of the culture. As such, memes
take on a life of their own, and no one has
to answer for transgressive or hateful ideas.
And while a lot of people think of
memes as harmless entertainment—funny,
snarky comments on current events—
we’re far beyond that now. Meme wars
are a consistent feature of our politics,
and they’re not just being used by internet
trolls or some bored kids in the basement,
but by governments, political candidates,
and activists across the globe. Russia used
memes and other social-media tricks to
influence the US election in 2016, using a
troll farm known as the Internet Research
Agency to seed pro-Trump and anti-Clinton
content across various online platforms.
Both sides in territorial conflicts like those
between Hong Kong and China, Gaza and
Israel, and India and Pakistan are using
memes and viral propaganda to sway both
local and international sentiment.
In 2007, for example, as he was cam-
paigning for president, John McCain jok-
ingly started to sing “Bomb bomb bomb,
bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of the
Beach Boys’ popular song “Barbara Ann.”
McCain, an Iran hawk, was talking up a
possible war using the well-worn tactic
of humor and familiarity: easy to dismiss
as a joke, yet serving as a scary reminder
of US military power. But it became a
political liability for him. The slogan was
picked up by civilian meme-makers, who
spread and adapted it until it went viral.
50 Battlefield

His opponent, Barack Obama, in essence Prosser’s idea didn’t come to fruition,
got unpaid support from people who were but the US government did come to rec-
better at creating persuasive content than ognize memetics as a threat. Beginning
his own campaign staff. in 2011, the Defense Advanced Research
The viral success of memes has led Projects Agency offered $42 million in
governments to try imitating the genre grants for research into what it called
in their propaganda. These campaigns “social media in strategic communications,”
are often aimed at the young, like the US with the hope that the government could
Army’s social-media-focused “Warriors detect “purposeful or deceptive messaging
Wanted” program, or the British Army and misinformation” and create counter-
campaign that borrows the visual language messaging to fight it.
of century-old recruiting posters to make Yet that research didn’t prepare DARPA
fun of millennial stereotypes. These drew for Russia’s 2016 disinformation campaign.
ridicule when they were launched earlier Its extent was uncovered only by report-
this year, but they did boost recruitment. ers and academics. That revealed a fatal
However, using memes this way misses flaw in national security: foreign agents
the point entirely. As mentioned, great are nearly impossible to detect when they
memes are authorless. They move about hide within the civilian population. Unless
the culture without attribution. social-media companies cooperate with
Much more authentic military meme the state to monitor attacks, this tactic
campaigns are coming from soldiers them- remains in play.
selves, such as the memes referencing the My friend’s wedding photo provides
bungling idiot known simply as “Carl.” US a good illustration of how something as
service members and veterans run web- seemingly trivial as a meme can be turned
sites that host jokes and images detailing into a powerful political weapon. In 2016,
the reality of military life. Yet these serve a a Reddit message board, r/The_Donald,
purpose not so different from that of offi- was a well-known meme factory for all
cial propaganda. They often feature heav- things Trump. Imagery and sloganeering
ily armed soldiers and serve to highlight, were beta-tested and refined there before
even in jokes, the tremendous destructive being deployed by swarms of accounts on
capacity of the armed forces. In turn, such social-media platforms. Famous viral slo-
memes have been turned into commer- gans launched from The_Donald included
cial marketing campaigns, such as one those having to do with “Pizzagate” and
for the veteran-owned clothing company the Seth Rich murder conspiracy.
Valhalla Wear. My friend’s picture was appropriated
Recognizing this power of memes for a memetic warfare operation called
generated by ordinary people to serve #DraftMyWife or #DraftOurDaughters,
a state’s propaganda narrative, in 2005 which aimed to falsely associate Hillary
a Marine Corps major named Michael Clinton with a revival of the draft. The strat-
Prosser wrote a master’s thesis titled egy was simple: the perpetrators took imag-
“Memetics—A Growth Industry in US ery from Clinton’s official digital campaign
Military Operations,” in which he called materials, as well as pictures online like my
for the formation of a meme warfare cen- friend’s, and altered them to make it look
ter that would enroll people to produce as if Clinton would draft women into the
and share memes as a way of swaying military if she became president. Someone
public opinion. who saw one of these fake campaign ads

My friend’s picture was appropriated for a

memetic operation that aimed to associate
Hillary Clinton with a revival of the draft.
Essay 51

and then searched online would find that

Clinton had in fact spoken in June 2016 in
support of a bill that included a provision
making women eligible to be drafted—but
only in case of a national emergency. The
bill was passed, but it was later changed
to remove that requirement. This is what
made #DraftMyWife sneaky—it was based
on a kernel of truth.
Memes like this often use a process
called “trading up the chain,” pioneered
by media entrepreneur Ryan Holiday, who
describes the method in his book Trust
Me, I’m Lying. Campaigns begin with
posts in blogs or other news outlets with
low standards. If all goes well, somebody
notable will inadvertently spread the dis-
information by tweet, which then leads
to coverage in bigger and more reputable
outlets. #DraftMyWife was outed fairly
early on as a hoax and got debunked in the
Washington Post, the Guardian, and else-
where. The problem is, taking the trouble
to correct disinformation campaigns like
these can satisfy the goal of spreading the
meme as far as possible—a process called
amplification.
Memes online make hoaxes and psy-
chological operations easy to pull off on an
international scale. We should view them
as a serious threat. The good news is that a
bill in the works in the US Congress would
form a national commission to assess the
threat posed by foreign and domestic actors
manipulating social media to cause harm.
Just focusing on those actors misses the
point, though, for much the same reason
those meme-inspired military recruiting
campaigns missed the point. Memetic
warfare works only if those waging it can
rely on massive public participation to
spread the memes and obscure their orig-
inal authors. So rather than going after the
meme creators, politicians and institutions
looking to counter meme war might do
better to strengthen the institutions that
create and distribute reliable informa-
tion—the media, academia, nonpartisan
government agencies, and so on—while
US cyber-defense works with the platform
companies to root out influence operations.
And if that doesn’t work, blame Carl.
 1 • • THE US IS UNDER CYBERATTACK.
2 • • WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?
3 • • {
4 • • • • AN ORAL HISTORY OF A
5 • • • • DEVASTATING STRIKE THAT
6 • • • • HASN’T HAPPENED YET.
7 • • }
8 • •
9 • •
10 • •
11 • •
12 • •
13 • • This moment had been 10 months
14 • • in the making. But no one
15 • •
noticed until last week.
16 • •
17 • • • A group of well-resourced
18 • • hackers have been combing
19 • • through the networks of the
20 • • gas pipeline operator for
21 • • almost a year, harvesting
22 • •
crucial information. Now
23 • •
24 • • the hackers know the network
25 • • better than the pipeline
26 • • company does: every piece
27 • • of equipment, the company’s
28 • • entire workforce, usernames
29 • •
and passwords. They have the
30 • •
31 • • privileges needed to access
32 • • both the firm’s desktop
33 • • computers and the machinery of
34 • • the pipeline itself. Now they
35 • • are ready to strike.
36 • •
37 • •
38 • • <!— BY PATRICK HOWELL O’NEILL–>
39 • •
 53

SANDRA JOYCE ns fnce presndent of

global nntellngence at the cybersecu-
rnty fnrm FnreEye, the fnrst company
to openly name Chnnese gofern-
ment hackers worknng agannst US
compannes.

RICHARD CLARKE has worked nn the

admnnnstratnons of Bnll Clnnton, George
W. Bush, and Barack Obama. He was
among the fnrst hngh-lefel Whnte House

T HE U S
has a lot of cyber-enemies. It trades blows with
offncnals to focus on cybersecurnty.

MICHAEL DANIEL was cybersecu-

rnty czar under Presndent Obama. He
now leads the Cyber Threat Allnance,
a team of cybersecurnty compannes
China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea on a daily
sharnng nnformatnon on threats.
basis. A full-blown cyberwar, thankfully, remains
the stuff of theory and tabletop exercises. But ERIC ROSENBACH was the chnef of

what happens when one breaks out for real? staff to former secretary of defense
Ash Carter. He led the Defense
To better understand how it would play out,
Department’s cyber actnfnty and
we talked to a number of experts in cybersecu- crafted the mnlntary’s cyber strategy.
rity and national security. We asked them to con-
sider hypothetical scenarios, including the one JOHN LIVINGSTON ns the CEO of

on the opposite page in which unknown hack- Verfe Industrnal Protectnon, a company
that handles management of nndustrnal
ers have accessed the computers, networks,
cybersecurnty for projects nncludnng
and hardware of gas pipelines in New England. natural-gas pnpelnnes and other crntncal
The potential consequences would range nnfrastructure.
from espionage and intellectual-property theft
REPRESENTATIVE MIKE GALLAGHER
to more devastating attacks that could leave
ns a former counternntellngence offn-
Boston without power or, in the worst case, cer nn the US Marnne Corps and now
cause fires and life-threatening damage. What cochanr of the Cyberspace Solarnum
happens next—and whether it escalates into a Commnssnon, a panel of experts
real cyberwar—depends on who is on the attack, charged wnth formulatnng a US cyber-
securnty doctrnne.
what their goals are, and how the US responds.
The variables at play mean there’s no tell- SENATOR ANGUS KING ns a mem-
ing exactly how this would go. But imagin- ber of the Senate Select Commnttee
ing the worst might help us better understand on Intellngence and cochanr of the
Cyberspace Solarnum Commnssnon.
how conflict is changing, and let us plan how
to act when cyberwar lands on our doorstep. We spoke to all of our panelists
Our panel was made up of some of the US’s lead- individually, and their responses have
ing experts in cyberwarfare. > been edited for length and clarity.
54 Battlefield

Senator Sandra Richard Michael Eric John Rep. Mike

Angus King Joyce Clarke Daniel Rosenbach Livingston Gallagher

ROSENBACH: The first thing that would agencies] to try to figure out where the or whether that would incentivize that
happen is the NSA [National Security attack might occur, look for certain types behavior just below whatever threshold we
Agency] collecting intelligence abroad. of malware that adversaries may have determine is acceptable or unacceptable.
When this first comes through thereí s just used in the past.
kind of a fuzzy gray picture that someone You see whether you can get more gran- CLARKE: Around four years ago, the intel-
is operating in natural-gas infrastructure. ular intelligence about that. The whole time ligence community wanted to know who
And you doní t know necessarily whether that youí re working on all those kinds of these [hackers] were. Once the [Justice
they intend to immediately pull the trigger domestic mitigation issues, you can try to Department] realized that knowledge
on the attack. think about what would happen in the case was available, they then asked the intel-
that the attack is successful and what you ligence community if it could be unclas-
KING: The first problem is attribution do. What is incident response during win- sified. Somewhat remarkably, the Justice
[i.e., who is behind the attack]. Thatí s one ter if there are hundreds of thousands of Department won that and persuaded the

ANGUS KING: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / SANDRA JOYCE: COURTESY PHOTO / RICHARD CLARKE: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / MICHAEL DANIEL: COURTESY
of the key challenges in this field, because people, or millions of people, without heat? intelligence community to declassify. I was
the adversaries are getting smarter all the You think about what you would say surprised. Some of it is part of a name-and-
time about their tracks. about that. At the same time, youí re thinking shame strategy. Some people say the value

PHOTO / ERIC ROSENBACH: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS / JOHN LIVINGSTON: COURTESY PHOTO / MIKE GALLAGHER: WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
Ií m proposing to the Cyberspace about whether or not you would confront is low because the hackers will never be
Solarium Commission that the US gov- the adversary nation with this information. arrested, but actually a couple have been.
ernment should have an attribution center Do you go to them and say, ì We know They have to be very careful about where
that would combine resources from NSA, that you have malware in the natural-gas they travel.
FBI, CIA, and other intelligence agencies infrastructure and gridî ? Do you actually
so that thereí d be one central place to go. threaten them? And then, just like in the ROSENBACH: After that you start to move
case of the 2016 elections, and also for the into a phase where youí re trying to collect
CLARKE: The attribution problem is not first time during the [2014] cyberattack on more intelligence. Youí re trying to come up
as bad as people think it is. With regard Sony [Pictures], the president would have with options for the president or, if youí re
to cyber, if you are in the enemy systems, to talk to all the senior advisors and staff in a specific department or agency, for the
then youí ll know who did it because youí ll about whether he goes public with this secretary, in order to figure out how you
see them doing it. If you can see it live, information. Is it fair to the public, if you could mitigate the risk and the impact of
youí ve got a very good chance to figure know that thereí s an attack about to occur, an attack like that. Thatí s when it starts to
out attribution. If ití s a post hoc analysis that you keep it to yourself? What are the get really complicated.
or forensic analysis, then attribution can pros and cons of publicly attributing?
be harder, especially since we know now CLARKE: Cyber can speed war up. I think
that many nations, possibly including the GALLAGHER: One problem we have to it provides an attacker with the ability
US, are using attack tools created by other deal with in cyber is whether the difficulty to do significant damage to the enemyí s
countries. What if they used a computer of attribution creates deterrence problems homeland. And it provides the ability to do
with a certain kind of keyboard, or used and deterrence failures. If youí re trying damage with speed. Thatí s true in cyber
other techniques that fingerprint to another to deter an adversary from conducting a along with other things that are happening
country? That creates a problem. cyberattack, you need to be able to estab- in warfare, like hypersonic missiles and
lish who the adversary is and also signal AI-driven weapons, that could result in a
ROSENBACH: Next, you would see whether clearly what your response will be. Thereí s war coming to a pretty quick conclusion—
there could be a cooperative relation- an open debate as to whether we should or at least the first phase of a war coming
ship between [various US government have such a declaratory policy in cyber to a pretty quick conclusion.
 Cyberattack 55

This is part of what I think a lot of peo- The biggest and the clearest example part of the electric grid because so much of
ple in the Pentagon are worried about. They would be North Korea. Think about how our power comes from natural gas.
talk a lot over there about the “decision skilled they are as a cyber operational
loop” and getting inside the other guy’s unit. Think about some of the attacks GALLAGHER: Around 85% of critical infra-
decision loop. They realize that cyber- they’ve done in the past. Think about structure [in the US] is owned by the pri-
weapons mean there may not be a lot of some of the things they’re doing now in vate sector. That’s a very difficult challenge.
time to decide how to react. That creates terms of using ransomware to raise money That is unique to cyber, in many cases,
the possibility of greater instability. It through cryptocurrencies to get around and requires the Department of Defense
might give you an incentive to attack first. economic sanctions. and the intelligence community to oper-
You might have to make decisions about The fact that they have very little tele- ate a little bit differently. Perhaps be a bit
reacting before you really have good intel- com and IT infrastructure, and are there- more forthcoming in terms of the infor-
ligence about what the hell is going on. fore not vulnerable, [makes cyber] an even mation they’re willing to share with the
Fast wars are something that we haven’t better tool for them. That means [that] if private sector.
really understood yet. the US or other countries were trying to
figure out how to mitigate the impact of LIVINGSTON: When you have historically
DANIEL: Just like how air power changed North Korean cyber operations, they would thought about national defense, it has been
the nature of how militaries applied force have to go to either economic sanctions, a government responsibility. You build a
and opened up options, I think cyberspace where there aren’t a lot of options left, or navy, you build an army, you defend the
does the same thing in that it offers new outright military operations, where you borders. The private sector’s role in that
channels for conflict. Some of the new phys- risk too much escalation. has largely been to supply that army or navy
ics and math of cyberspace mean that, for Then the Russians, of course, have with whatever it needs. It has not been
example, distance doesn’t mean the same totally perfected this by using pretty aggres- defending itself. But if we go forward 20,
thing. You can cause a physical effect all the sive cyber and info ops and hybrid warfare. 30, 50 years, suddenly you have a world
way on the other side of the planet without Ukraine is a great example. There they are where the security of the nation depends
nearly the kind of investment you have to attacking both the grid and elections. Of on the private sector and not the govern-
make to do that in a physical domain. course, they’re attacking American elec- ment. What is the role of government in a
tions as well. world where my security is dependent on
JOYCE: When you think about the type A more recent example is what US what my utility decides to spend money
of conflict that is military against military, Cyber Command did against Iran’s Islamic on? Or what that for-profit gas pipeline
the United States has a clear advantage. Revolutionary Guard Corps to try to have decides to spend money on? Or what that
We have near peers, but essentially the an impact on them, limit the effectiveness chemical plant that’s 50 miles away from
US outspends everybody. When countries of that Iranian military organization, and me decides to spend money on? That is
want to challenge the US, they cannot do at the same time control escalation so it a very difficult public policy issue, and
it in the ways the US is strong. So they’ll might not grow into a broader conflict. we won’t get there, I don’t think, until—
opt for other avenues. unfortunately—there is a major incident.
KING: I’m very worried about gas pipe-
ROSENBACH: Nations who are adversar- lines. Our gas pipeline system does not have KING: It has become apparent to me that
ies to the United States have realized that the same kinds of controls and require- we have no doctrine, we have no strategy,
the asymmetry of cyber and information ments as the electric grid, although as far and we have no policy that will in any way
operations is a huge advantage to them. as I’m concerned, the gas pipeline system is deter adversaries from coming after us.
We’re a cheap date. Why wouldn’t you
attack us in the cyber realm if you can do
so with relative impunity? Until we develop
“We have no doctrine, we have no strategy,
some deterrent capability and also better
and we have no policy that will in any
resiliency, this is going to keep happening.
way deter adversaries from coming after
The good news is we’re the most wired
us. We’re a cheap date. Why wouldn’t you
country in the world. The bad news is we’re
attack us in the cyber realm if you can do
the most wired country in the world. That
so with relative impunity?”
makes us the most vulnerable.

Patrick Howell O‘Neill is MIT

Technology Review‘s senior editor
for cybersecurity.
56

nmerica’s claiming allegiance to ISIS—and a bus-

tling drug trade. It has also become one of
longest war has the most drone-bombed provinces in the
most drone-bombed country in the world.
been shaped by
technology—as The American public, though, has largely
forgotten this. The war in Afghanistan has
the people of been running for 18 years, making it the
longest conflict in American history (it
nfghanistan know passed the previous milestone, set by the
only too well. Vietnam War, in February 2019). Over the
years, press coverage has fallen dramati-
By Ali M. Latifi cally. According to the Pew wesearch Center
for Journalism and the Media, Afghanistan

K
halid still remembers the accounted for 1% of all media coverage in
first time he heard about the US in 2007 and just under 4% in 2010,
drones. He was 10 years when the Pentagon deployed 100,000
old, sitting in his school troops and dropped 5,101 bombs on the
classroom in Khogyani, a country. Today, the level of coverage is
district near the Durand insignificant: Pew no longer even tracks
Line in eastern Afghanistan’s Nangarhar it as a topic.
province. A group of his friends animatedly In fact, military activity in Afghanistan
discussed the recent death of a local man. is on the increase again. The number of
“Then the drone came,” one of them US troops there started rising again under
said, imitating the whistling noise of an the Trump administration; there are now
unmanned aircraft, “and he was dead.” 15,000 American military personnel offi-
Khalid didn’t understand what they cially deployed in the country. Air strikes
were saying. It was as if he was the only are at a record high, according to the US Air
one left out of a secret. He finally decided Forces Central Command: 2018 saw 7,362
to ask his teacher. What did the other boys bombs dropped by US forces in Afghanistan.
mean? What was a drone? As of August 31 this year, the Bureau of
The teacher’s response was both omi- Investigative Journalism had documented
nous and prescient. “It’s something that, at least 4,251 aerial strikes in Afghanistan
once you come to its attention, you will for 2019, more than double the total for
not be left to live,” he told Khalid. the whole of 2018. Most of these, it says,
That was in 2007. Khalid is 22 now, a are thought to be by drones. These attacks
young man. American military involvement are exacting an increasing toll on the
in Afghanistan—sparked by Al Qaeda’s Afghan people. This year, according to the
attacks on September 11, 2001—was already United Nations, foreign coalition forces

LIFE
six years deep by the time he learned about were responsible for more civilian deaths
drones, but the strikes go back nearly as far. than the Taliban or ISIS-allied forces for
The first instance of a drone killing civil- the first time since its Afghanistan mis-
ians in Afghanistan was in 2002, when a sion began recording civilian casualties
man by the name of Daraz Khan was killed in 2009. Between January 1 and June 30,
by a Hellfire missile dropped by a Predator international military forces were respon-
drone in the eastern province of Khost. sible for 89% of the 519 civilian casual-

UND
The US suspected that he was Osama ties—363 deaths and 156 injuries—caused
bin Laden; residents maintain that Khan by aerial operations.
was merely out searching for scrap metal. It’s not just drone warfare that has
Since then, Khalid’s province of expanded dramatically, however. The
Nangarhar has become a hub for armed US military has used the war to test and
groups—first the Taliban, and later forces improve other tactics, too.
 A DRONE
SKY

ER
58 Battlefield

during 2010 to 2015—says

Information warfare people are definitely tracked:
but that most of that is done
In 2007, American forces began taking through mobile-phone signals.
photographs, fingerprints, and iris scans This, says Nabil, has led the
of almost every Afghan they came across. Taliban to rely on some famil-
By 2011, almost two million people—more iar tactics to keep them from
than 5% of the population—had had their being traced: “They use the simplest pos- is not the war on terror but the inhuman
biometric details captured by the US mili- sible mobile phones and are constantly and most brutal misuse of our country as
tary. In most cases it was claimed that this changing their locations every few hours. testing ground for new and dangerous
was done in a check for suspected militants, They never spend more than 48 hours in weapons,” he wrote on Twitter.
or as part of the application process for a single area.” Nabil, the former intelligence chief,
jobs with government security forces or on In many areas of the country, phone agrees. “Did they ever use such a weapon
coalition bases, but it could happen at any service is cut off, usually by the Taliban, anywhere else in the world? No,” he told me.
time, and for almost any reason. at sundown. And in August, the Taliban “It’s clear that Achin was just a convenient
The Pentagon said the move, a tactic it announced that they would begin targeting place for them to test out their weapons.”
calls “identity dominance,” was intended employees of the state-run provider Salaam The government claims that the bomb
to spot insurgents and prevent infiltration. Telecom, saying the company’s workers are killed foreign fighters from a number of
But it’s believed that US Navy Seals used “tied to intelligence agencies.” countries. But in the days and weeks fol-
their identity system to confirm that they In many areas under Taliban control, lowing the bombing, the village itself was
had found Osama bin Laden during the simply owning a smartphone can create still under the watch of the US military.
raid on his compound in Pakistan in 2011. suspicion that someone is an intelligence Journalists were not allowed within 10
And in Iraq, where the US had previously agent. That means even though people often kilometers, and it became clear that local
tried biometric capture, it was used to use phones to check on loved ones after a military and government officials had not
control people’s movements, especially in terrorist attack or security operation, some been given access either. In the two and a
high-conflict areas like Fallujah. have chosen to give up on them altogether. half years since, journalists and investiga-
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the fear of But even if you throw away your mobile tors have still not been able to get to the
surveillance is pervasive among ordinary phone, avoid bumping into a US soldier on exact site of the attack in order to decipher
Afghans. wumors circulate about new tech- patrol, and can keep your biometric infor- what happened.
niques being used to spy on people: Khalid mation to yourself, you can still get caught So why was such a large bomb used?
and his friend Naimatullah tell stories about up in the war. A few days after MOAB dropped, Vice
a substance that can be rubbed on your President Mike Pence suggested one
clothes to make you more easily traceable. motive: as a demonstration of power. “Just
These tales have apparently led to a new Mother load in the past two weeks,” he said in an address
defense mechanism among Nangarharis. in Seoul, “the world witnessed the strength
AP PHOTO/MARCO DI LAURO; PREVIOUS SPREAD: ANDREW RENNEISEN/GETTY IMAGES

“You just take off your clothes and run into The device that fell on a small village in and resolve of our new president in actions
some water. They say that somehow jams Nangarhar’s Achin district, an hour’s drive taken in Syria and Afghanistan. North Korea
the signals,” said Naimatullah. along a treacherous road from Jalalabad, in would do well not to test his resolve or the
Obaid Ali, a Kabul-based analyst at the April 2017 wasn’t just any bomb. The GBU- strength of the armed forces of the United
Afghanistan Analysts Network, who has 43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb, States in this region.” He added, “The era
written extensively on aerial operations, or MOAB, weighed 21,600 pounds (9,800 of strategic patience is over.”
says he has been told about physical track- kilograms) and cost $170,000. It was the
ing devices—albeit slightly more tradi- most powerful non-nuclear weapon ever
tional ones. “They’re really small electronic used, capable of destroying an area the Uninvestigated
devices that are slipped into someone’s size of nine city blocks. It quickly became
clothing,” he told me. known as the “Mother of All Bombs.” All this is made worse because the US mili-
A Department of Defense spokeswoman The Afghan government tried to justify tary has not always been transparent about
said the Pentagon could not comment the strike by saying it had killed at least 94 its operations. Human wights Watch said
on tactics, techniques, or procedures for ISIS fighters. But former president Hamid in a 2018 report that neither the American
operational security reasons. wahmatullah Karzai called it a prime example of how nor Afghan governments have been doing
Nabil—a presidential candidate who twice the US was using Afghanistan for what enough to investigate possible violations
served as Afghanistan’s chief of intelligence amounted to experimental warfare. “This of the laws of war.
 nfghanistan 59

to halt talks so long as Taliban fighters keep

At left, smoke rises from the village
of Esferghich after a US air strike. attacking Afghan civilians and US forces. Documenting
Below, Afghan residents clear rubble
from their homes.
As long as military intelligence is weak,
however, it is not just the Taliban that
drones with data
Afghans have to fear. In July, the deaths of at
least seven civilians, including

N
early a decade ago, we started
three women, led to protests in recording US air and drone
the Eastern province of Maidan strikes in Yemen, Somalia, and
Wardak, where residents threat- Pakistan, and we added nfghanistan to
ened to boycott the upcoming the list in 2015. We did this in response to
presidential election unless the official silence that surrounded these
action was taken. But the outcry operations. nnd while nmerican coun-
has done little to change military terterrorism operations have become
action. In September, at least somewhat less secretive over time, the
30 civilians were killed in a US level of transparency is constantly in
drone strike near a pine nut field flux. In September 2016, after more than
in Khogyani. Provincial officials a year of pressure, we started to get offi-
say the attack was meant to tar- cial military figures on how many strikes
get a hideout of ISIS forces, but were taking place in nfghanistan each
residents say it was civilians who month. n year later, however, that same
paid the price once again. information was suddenly deemed too
Nabil, the former intelli- sensitive for public release.
gence chief, says the best way When it was reinstated another
to improve things is to shift year later, we were happy to see import-
away from technology and back ant details included—such as where
Afghans on the ground agree. I have toward proper intelligence gathering. “We and what the strikes hit. This showed
spoken to hundreds of people since 2015, have to be better than the Talibs—we must a high number of strikes on buildings,
in provinces all over the country. Each time, ensure that we protect civilian life at all described by one expert as the riski-
they have said that not enough people have costs,” he says. During his tenure at the est kind of strikes for civilians. But two
inquired about strikes in their areas. And National Directorate of Security, he says, weeks after we published a story raising
even when there are independent reports, aerial operations were allowed to take place these concerns, that level of detail was
they are accused of political bias by officials only when he had verified information on stripped out of the data.
in Kabul and the US-led coalition. suspected targets. “You can’t go from the Transparency, or the lack of it, can
Emran Feroz, an Afghan-Austrian jour- word or suspicions of just one or two peo- have a very real impact for civilians
nalist and author who has been tracking ple. You must do your due diligence, oth- on the ground. In Wardak, one nfghan
aerial operations in Afghanistan since 2011, erwise you end up in a situation like today province, a strike killed one man’s
concurs: “The central problem is most of where civilians are constantly being killed entire immediate family, including his
these strikes are conducted under the cover by our own forces,” he told me. seven children. The US military denied
of night in hard-to-reach areas, often under Khalid and Naimatullah agree that the responsibility on three separate occa-
the control or influence of groups like the increasing frequency of strikes serves no sions, even telling us that they carried
Taliban, which makes it very difficult for purpose. “Even people in the villages know out no strikes in that area. Only after
anyone to go and investigate in a timely where the Taliban and Daesh [ISIS] are, but we found weapon fragments from the
manner.” why is it that civilians keep dying in these site conclusively proving US responsi-
NOORULLAH SHIRZADA/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

attacks?” they asked. bility did they admit dropping the bomb
Nearly 20 years in, and with the conflict “I was 16 when I saw someone die (although they still deny civilian casu-
once more intensifying, there are no signs of from a drone strike,” said Naimatullah. alties). Had those fragments not been
an ending. Diplomacy between the Taliban, “Since then I’ve cleaned up so many bod- found, the US role in this incident might
the Afghan government, and the Trump ies, their blood, their brains. My heart is never have been uncovered.
administration seems to be making little stone now, because it’s always innocent
progress. Trump, who claimed to have can- people dying.” Jessica Purkiss is a reporter
at the Bureau of Investigative
celed a secret meeting with the Taliban on Ali M. Latifi is a journalist based Journalism covering drone
US soil planned for September, has vowed in Kabul. strikes.
 60 Battlefield

“The West is divided.

This is the
worst of all worlds.”

Split strategies over nuclear proliferation could spell disaster,

T R : says one of the world’s most decorated soldiers.
By Janine di Giovanni / Photograph by David Vintiner
Q + A

General David Richards is one of Britain’s decisions on the ground to protect the
most influential soldiers: he served as capital, Freetown, saving the country
head of the British Armed Forces and from sliding into genocide.
NATO commander in Afghanistan. But He spoke with war reporter Janine
he is perhaps most renowned for his di Giovanni, who has covered con-
humanitarian intervention in Sierra Leone flicts including those in Bosnia, Iraq,
in May 2000, when he unilaterally took Afghanistan, and Syria.

Q: In Sierra Leone you evab- the Revolutionary United had happened not long A: The primary difference
uated hundreds of people Front (RUF). With a bit before—military com- was that Sierra Leone
and blobked rebels from of luck, I would pull it manders had been too involved the British col-
entering Freetown. This off. Napoleon said “Give cautious and followed bad laborating with others
operation was extraordi- me lucky generals.” That orders. In Sierra Leone, but calling all the shots.
nary. Did you ever think said, without good people I was determined that In Afghanistan, every-
that it bould fail? in key positions, I never I would avoid such an one took orders primarily
A: I knew that it was possible could have managed. If I outcome. If I played my from their own capital.
to fail because of the num- really thought I was going cards right, at a minimum If they felt like it and it
ber of tactical challenges. to fail, I wouldn’t have I could prevent the RUF suited their national prior-
And of course I had to tried it. It was a risk, but from getting into the city. ities, they would also take
persuade London to back not a gamble. But yes, you’re right, I had orders from me. People
me. But I had been to no orders to do this. did their best, but one or
Sierra Leone three times Q: But you didn’t have any two nations were very dif-
before, and I had a good orders to do this, did you? Q: And what lessons did you ficult. Subordinate com-
grasp of the issues and A: I was conscious that the learn from leading NATO in manders, usually put up
the nature of the enemy, genocide in Rwanda Afghanistan? to it for political reasons
 61

and they will exploit that

wedge.

Q: Do you think war will

bebome more tebhnologi-
bal over time? What about
the role of AI?
A: It’s inevitable. These
things will change the
character of war, but not
the nature. After the tank
was invented, for many
years it was very suc-
cessful and dominated
warfare; today its utility
is more limited. And as
we go through this tech
revolution, this doesn’t
necessarily mean that
conventional armed forces
and weapon systems will
become redundant. You
can probably never have
enough technology to deal
with a million people and
50,000 tanks. The new
systems have to be capa-
ble of defeating old forms
of industrial warfare.

Q: Is war inherent in man?

Can we ever esbape it?
A: My instinct is that war
is sadly inevitable. We
should always assume
by their national bosses, might be used as an inte- sanctions regime to that there are people out
would second-guess me. gral part of modern war. achieve this, but I worry there who are prepared
They could undermine I and a few other Cold that he is underestimat- to achieve their goals
perfectly sound military War diplomats and politi- ing and misreading the through war. Even if we
logic. In Sierra Leone, cians were horrified. They Iranians. Like the Russians, don’t want to go to war,
everyone was indisput- are the most dreadful they will sustain a great others may in order to
ably on the same side weapon: if we use them, deal of pain to achieve achieve their aims. The
and wanted the same we have failed. They must their goals. It would have best defense against this
outcome. be seen as a deterrent— been better to stick to the is to be strong enough to
something whose posses- nuclear deal and play the deter it. But when no alter-
Q: What do you think about sion makes war less likely, long game. The trouble is native exists, we must be
the burrent arguments not more. the West is divided. This is prepared to root out evil
over nublear proliferation? For that reason, we the worst of all worlds. We in its infancy and before it
A: At a conference a few need to persuade Iran not need to be united around becomes endemic.
years ago, I heard a serv- to develop nuclear weap- the nuclear deal or the
ing US officer discuss ons. President Trump is president’s alternative. The Additional research by
nuclear weapons as if they now using a very harsh Iranians are sophisticated, Misia Lerska.
62
 3 Aftermath
Under cover: Efen
when the fnghtnng ns
ofer, peace needs
to be manntanned—
and sometnmes
nt requnres taknng
unusual steps. In
Afghannstan, female
polnce offncers are
tranned by forengn
mnlntary personnel,
but the drnlls must
take place nn secret
to protect the offn-
cers’ ndentntnes from
nnsurgents.
ZUMA PRESS

Photograph
by Louie Palu
64
 65

DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES
ALLOWED SYRIAN WAR CRIMES
TO BE DOCUMENTED IN
UNPRECEDENTED DETAIL.
WHAT GOOD HAS IT DONE?

Hard evidence

BY ERIC REIDY

ILLUSTRATIONS BY
EMILY HAASCH

O
n April 23, 2014, Houssam reports that barrel bombs were being dropped on
Alnahhas slid into the back towns in the country’s rural northwest. He was used
seat of a car in the southern to such news in his work, but this time was different.
Turkish city of Gaziantep and Usually the crude devices were packed with explosives
headed for the Syrian border, and shrapnel. But doctors were telling him these latest
about 30 miles (48 kilome- bombs were releasing poisonous clouds of chlorine gas.
ters) away. A tall 26-year-old Chlorine gas had rarely been used as a weapon
medical student with striking gray eyes, he had since World War I, and its use in Syria would be a
escaped Syria two years before and was working major violation of international norms. Western gov-
for a task force training medical personnel in oppo- ernments wanted to know if there was proof. And
sition-held areas. But now he was heading back so, over the next two days, he and two of his friends
with a mission: to collect evidence of war crimes. visited two villages that had allegedly been hit—Kafr
Two weeks earlier, Alnahhas had started receiving Zita and Talmenes—to see what had taken place.
66 Aftermath

T
he trip was dangerous. They could be independently verified. He Soon afterwards, protests broke out
were close to the front lines collected soil samples in small plastic in the south of the country and quickly
of the civil war, where rocket, containers, triple-sealing them in clear spread. The government cracked down
mortar, and sniper fire were plastic bags and labeling them in front brutally, and activists, lawyers, medical
common. If agents of the of the camera. workers, and ordinary citizens started
Syrian regime got word of what they In Kafr Zita, he gathered pieces of using Facebook and YouTube—often at
were doing, their lives would be in peril: shrapnel and measured heavy, rusted great personal risk—to record the violence
Alnahhas had heard rumors that someone barrels bent, mangled, and peeled apart and show it to the world.
who’d collected evidence from a chemical by the impact and detonation. There Initial efforts were haphazard, and
attack a year earlier had been assassinated were three long canisters, two still lodged mostly involved people uploading shaky
while attempting to bring it to Turkey. inside the barrels, covered in chipped cell-phone video and using accounts
But the threat of violence wasn’t yellow paint, the color often used to mark with fake names to protect themselves.
the only thing weighing on his mind. industrial chlorine gas. The chemical But before long the push to document
Alnahhas knew that many groups—sup- symbol Cl2 was still clearly visible on the what was happening became more orga-
porters of Syrian president Bashar al-As- ruptured nose of one. nized and sophisticated. Media offices
sad, the Russian and Iranian governments, In Talmenes, in the dimming evening and local news agencies mushroomed.
online conspiracy theorists—would use light, Alnahhas filmed an impact crater in By early 2012, international organiza-
any opportunity to insist that chemical- the backyard of a house. There were dead tions had begun training local activists
weapons attacks were false-flag opera- birds scattered across the ground, and the on professional production standards
tions or outright hoaxes. And since he was leaves on the plants and trees were dead, and online security and helping them to
acting on his own, without institutional even though it was springtime. The smell record their videos. The idea wasn’t just
backing, he wanted to make sure the evi- of chlorine still hung in the air, causing to release clips to the media, but to gather
dence he collected was unimpeachable. him to cough and his eyes to water. evidence that could be used to pursue
As soon as he crossed the border, “To be honest,” Alnahhas says, “this justice in the future.
Alnahhas started tracking his coordi- was the scariest time of my life.” Volunteers took videos and photos
nates using GPS and recording the trip at the scenes of attacks and potential
on video. In the two villages, residents war crimes, compiled detailed medical

S
described witnessing yellowish-orange yria was one of the first major reports, recorded victim and witness
smoke rising after helicopters dropped conflicts of the social-media statements, and smuggled reams of docu-
barrel bombs. Doctors explained how era. Local access to Facebook ments out of captured government build-
they treated victims—women, men, had been restricted since ings. Civil society groups such as the
young and elderly people—who were 2007 as the government tried Syrian Archive and the Syria Justice and
terrified, coughing violently and strug- to limit online political activism. But by Accountability Centre collected millions
gling to breathe. They handed over blood, February 2011, when the Assad regime of pieces of potential evidence—some of
urine, saliva, and hair samples they had unblocked many social-media sites— it made public, some filed away in pro-
collected. either as a nod toward reform or as a way tected archives.
PREVIOUS SPREAD: ILLUSTRATION SOURCE IMAGERY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

At the spots where the bombs had to track its opponents—they had become The material collected by Syrians
fallen, Alnahhas recorded 360-degree major forces across the globe, and many allowed people far away from the actual
video of the surroundings, focusing on Syrians had cell phones with cameras and fighting to take part in the investigative
identifiable landmarks so the locations access to high-speed internet. efforts too. In 2012 Eliot Higgins, then
an unemployed British blogger, began
sifting through videos and photos posted
from Syria, trying to identify the weapons
There were dead birds scattered across the being used; later he started a website,
Bellingcat, and assembled a team of vol-
ground, and the leaves on the plants and trees unteer analysts.
were dead, even though it was springtime. The Pioneering the technique of “open-
smell of chlorine still hung in the air, causing him source investigation,” Higgins and his
team pieced together evidence suggesting
to cough and his eyes to water. that Syrian government forces were using
chemical weapons and cluster bombs, that
Russian forces had attacked hospitals in
 Hard evidence 67

Science at Carnegie Mellon University. hen Alnahhas returned

W
Obama declared forces used
the use of them, he backed
chemical weapons off from action
People thought that “if we’re able to doc- to Turkey with the evi-
in Syria to be a and settled for a ument these war crimes and these human dence he’d collected in
“red line,” but deal brokered by rights violations and we’re able to share Kafr Zita and Talmenes,
after government Russia.
them with the world, then that will cre- he met up with a British
ate political will that will lead countries chemical weapons expert who tested some
to intervene and protect vulnerable pop- of the samples. The analysis confirmed
ulations,” he says. that they contained a high enough con-
Spurred on by such optimism and the centration of chlorine to kill people. The
encouragement of Western politicians, evidence clearly showed that the Syrian
government, the only fighting force with
helicopters at the time, had indiscrim-
inately bombed civilians with chlorine
gas—a war crime.
International media picked up on the
story; human rights organizations pub-
lished reports; the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons launched
a fact-finding mission. The remaining
samples were given to the Western gov-
ernments who were interested, and then
Alnahhas waited.
Nothing.

ast summer I met Ahmad

L al-Mohammad, a soft-spoken
activist and communications
director of the Syrian Institute
for Justice, in Istanbul. He had
been a 19-year-old agriculture student
at Aleppo University when the uprising
began in 2011.
The Syrian protesters were optimistic
back then. The US had just led an inter-
national military intervention to protect
civilians in Libya from the advancing
army of former leader Muammar Qaddafi.
“We listened to a lot of speeches from
the president of America, Obama,” said
al-Mohammad. “We had hope, honestly,
that the West would intervene and remove
Bashar al-Assad.”
the country, and that ISIS was using small, such efforts made the Syrian conflict the And in 2012, Obama declared the use
commercially available drones to drop most thoroughly documented in human of chemical weapons in Syria a “red line.”
40mm grenades onto targets. history. “The world is watching,” he warned Assad.
Back then, many people working at Thanks to frontline investigators like “If you make the tragic mistake of using
the intersection of technology and human Houssam Alnahhas, local outfits like the [chemical] weapons, there will be conse-
rights shared a belief in the power of Syrian Archive, and online analysts from quences, and you will be held accountable.”
social media and digital connectivity to Bellingcat, detailed information about what Obama’s resolve was put to the test on
do good, according to Jay D. Aronson, was happening on the ground was there. the morning of August 21, 2013. Syrian
head of the Center for Human Rights Someone just needed to act on it. government forces launched rockets loaded
68 Aftermath

with sarin gas, a deadly nerve agent, at the Heavier than air, poison gas sinks into Activists in casings with
rebel-held enclave of Ghouta, on the out- basements and bunkers, suffocating and Syria have photos like
documented this one, in the
skirts of Damascus. It was by far the dead- terrifying people sheltering from conven- the presence of hope that they'll
liest and most visible chemical attack of tional bombs and weapons. Even if the chemical provide evidence
weapons’shell of war crimes.
the war. Syrian activists quickly uploaded chemical attacks often didn’t kill large
photos and videos of the casualties, many of numbers of people, they showed that “there
them women and children, their faces blue is absolutely nowhere you can hide and
from suffocation. The estimated death toll there’s absolutely nothing [the regime] can
ranged from around 350 to more than 1,400. do that will make the international commu-
The US—driven forward by the “red nity stop [the violence],” Schneider added.
line” rhetoric—prepared to launch mili- The Syrian government has used chem-
tary strikes. The regime hunkered down. ical weapons more than 330 times so far,
But at the last minute, Obama pulled back. according to data collected by GPPi. The
Instead of using force, he opted for a deal
brokered by Russia, which resulted in the
Syrian government’s signing on to the
Chemical Weapons Convention and agree-
ing to declare its stockpiles and destroy
them by mid-2014.
For people in opposition-held areas, the
decision was crushing. “We lost hope that
anyone would [stand] up and say enough …
killing civilians inside Syria,” Mohammed
Abdullah, a Syrian photographer who goes
by Artino and who was in Eastern Ghouta
at the time of the attack, told me.
And then, despite its promise to disman-
tle its chemical weapons program, the Syrian
government launched chlorine gas strikes
in April 2014—the ones Alnahhas docu-
mented. They were another clear violation
of Obama’s red line. When the outside world
again failed to take strong action, Assad’s
government continued to push the enve-
lope. According to a report by the Global
Public Policy Institute (GPPi), a think tank
in Berlin, this was when the Syrian govern-
ment began integrating the use of chemical
weapons, especially chlorine gas, into its
“arsenal of indiscriminate violence.”
Assad’s strategy was directed against
civilians living in opposition-held resi-

M
dential areas far from the front lines. Life- vast majority of these incidents—more any people who had been
sustaining social institutions—bakeries, than 300 of them—took place after the documenting the war were
hospitals, and markets—were often tar- attacks in Ghouta, Kafr Zita, and Talmenes. forced to leave Syria as it
geted with a brutality that forced people For Alnahhas, the lesson was clear. grew more violent. Some
to choose between surrender, exile, and “After providing evidence all the time, decided to focus on putting
death. Tobias Schneider, one of the GPPi at a certain point you stop to believe that it their lives back together, to finish their stud-
report’s authors, refers to it as the “military will be effective,” he said. “The main thing ies or start families. For many of those who
utility of crimes against humanity.” The use that I know is that neither I nor the peo- remained in Syria, the work of documenta-
of chemical weapons was “the last couple ple inside Syria trusted the international tion became too dangerous as the areas they
of meters,” he told me. community anymore.” were in fell under regime control.
 Hard evidence 69

But other activists have decided to take efforts to start an international process of It’s hard for him to see a path forward or
a longer-term view. Although the documen- justice and accountability; for example, it a way to return home. “Me and my friends,
tation efforts have failed to shift the course vetoed a 2014 UN Security Council reso- we sit down and we talk about it a lot …
of the war, Syria has produced arguably the lution referring Syria to the International we don’t really know where we are going,”
largest evidence base on war crimes ever Criminal Court. The UN created a body he says. “At the end of the day, people like
recorded. Civil society organizations are called the International Impartial and us—our future in a Syria without justice
sifting through the data, organizing it, and Independent Mechanism to gather evi- is just death or prison.”
using it to build case files for prosecutions. dence for future cases, but “until this Yet al-Mohammad and others have
Courts in Germany, France, and Sweden moment, we don’t have any court or entity continued to record evidence of the
are already trying cases. Arrest warrants that has jurisdiction over crimes committed crimes taking place. At some point,
have been issued for several high-ranking in Syria,” says Deyaa Alrwishdi, a Syrian he says, it stopped being about what
members of the Assad regime, and charges lawyer who has been involved in account- the international community would or
have been brought against European com- ability efforts since 2011. wouldn’t do; it became about Syrian
panies for violating sanctions imposed on people taking control of their own sto-
the Syrian government. The Open Society ries. “My goal became to document my

I
Justice Initiative (OSJI), a human rights lit- t now seems all but inevitable that the country’s history,” he says.
igation team, is working with the Syrian Assad regime—helped by Russia and When I met Alnahhas in Gaziantep
Archive to develop case files on a number Iran—will emerge victorious from the earlier this summer, he told me he felt the
of attacks, including the attack in Talmenes war. It may be decades, if ever, before same way. We talked at an outdoor café,
that Alnahhas documented. it’s truly held accountable. surrounded by the mundane bustle of a
“Open-source information has radically “We get hope when we look at the busy town. Syria, just a few miles down
transformed how we investigate, collect, former Yugoslavia and how victims and the road, seemed far away. In the years
and analyze information,” Steve Kostas, a survivors from Bosnia and Herzegovina since his dangerous trip to document the
lawyer with OSJI, told me by email. “We did eventually get justice. That gives us chemical weapons attacks, he had gone to
use it to establish a factual narrative of hope to keep holding on,” al-Mohammad, a Turkish university to finish his medical
the attacks, to identify possible witnesses, from the Syrian Institute for Justice, told degree, married, and started a family. He
[and] to identify and learn about suspected me in Istanbul. couldn’t imagine returning home.
ILLUSTRATION SOURCE IMAGERY COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

perpetrators.” Still, says Beth Van Schaack, He has scars on his face from having He told me about three of his friends,
a visiting professor at Stanford Law School his jaw fractured in seven places when young students who had volunteered
who previously worked on Syria at the US security forces threw him from the second to provide care to injured protesters in
State Department, the prosecutions so far story of a building during a protest in 2012. the early days of the uprising. They were
have been “mostly against lower-level indi- Two members of the documentation team stopped at a regime checkpoint, and med-
viduals, opposition figures, [ISIS] mem- he manages in Syria were killed while car- ical supplies were found in their car. Days
bers, and not the kinds of war crimes that rying out their work. And he has watched later, their bodies were returned to their
have really come to characterize this war.” countless hours of video showing one families, burned beyond recognition. Years
Holding the true architects of the Syrian brutal atrocity after another, giving him later, his efforts to document the chemical
government’s war strategy responsible nightmares. His family is still in Syria, and attacks in Kafr Zita and Talmenes hadn’t
would require unity from other govern- he worries that they will be punished by changed anything; people were still being
ments. But Russia has repeatedly blocked the regime as retribution for his actions. murdered with impunity.
“At the same time,” he said, “you cannot
simply say that I’ll not continue.” If noth-
ing else, documenting has given him and
others like him a certain mission. “History
Al-Mohammad has scars on his face from is written by the strongest,” he said, echo-
ing the familiar adage. “Without proper
having his jaw fractured in seven places when evidence … the regime will be able to, at
security forces threw him from the second a certain point, say ‘No, this never hap-
story of a building during a protest in 2012. pened’; [it] will be able to manipulate the
history of the Syrian crisis maybe to avoid
punishment. So this is our responsibility.”
Eric Reidy is a journalist based in
the Middle East.
70
By
ANDREW ZALESKI

Photographs by
J A R E D S OA R E S
 71

Becoming whole

Modern medicine has saved war

veterans with horrific genital
injuries from dying.
Now it’s finally giving them hope
of a normal life as well.
72 Aftermath

R ay almost missed it, the message that would change his life. On a Saturday in March 2018,
just as he was about to take his dog for an afternoon walk, he pulled his phone from his
pocket and discovered a string of voicemails. Eight years had passed since the bomb had
blown up underneath him while he was on patrol in Afghanistan, five since he’d first met his doctor. He’d
been on the waiting list a year. He was getting impatient.
He dialed back. This is it, he thought. In 2013, when Ray first went to Johns scrotum, and an upside-down-U-shaped
It has to be. Hopkins, there was no precedent for such chunk of his abdominal wall. Only a handful
A nurse picked up. Ray needed to come a transplant. Since then, only four patients of people know the full extent of his injuries.
to the hospital immediately, she said. They have had one. Two years later, while he was learning
had a donor. He was getting a new penis. South African urologist Andre Van der to walk on prosthetic legs, his urologist
Ray had carried his unseen injury for Merwe completed the first-ever successful at Walter Reed National Military Medical
years—always furtive, always anxious, transplant in 2014, sewing a donor penis Center referred him to the reconstructive
always wondering how anyone who found onto a 21-year-old whose own had turned surgery group at Johns Hopkins.
out might react. Having lost both legs in gangrenous after a grisly circumcision. In At the time, Hopkins was a leader in
the blast didn’t bother him that much; Ray 2016, doctors at Massachusetts General vascularized composite allotransplanta-
often left the house in the summertime Hospital transplanted a donor organ onto tion, more commonly called VCA surgery.
wearing shorts, his prosthetics shining in 64-year-old Thomas Manning, who had It’s used in face, hand, arm—and penis—
the sun. But his other injury? Aside from lost his penis to cancer. A year later, Van transplants, taking multiple types of tis-
his parents, hardly anyone knew—not even der Merwe and his team at Tygerberg sue from a donor and hooking up blood
the guys he went to war with. Academic Hospital in Cape Town repeated vessels and nerves so they work for the
For men like Ray who lose their gen- their procedure on a 41-year-old victim of recipient. In December 2012, Hopkins
itals, the usual treatment—if there was another circumcision gone wrong. Ray surgeons completed their first bilateral
any—was phalloplasty: a rolled tube of became patient number four. arm transplant, on an infantryman who
tissue, blood vessels, and nerves taken After getting off the phone with the had lost both his arms and legs to a road-
from the forearm or thigh and transplanted nurse that Saturday afternoon, he went side bomb. If anyone could help Ray, it
to the groin, an ersatz penis that needs into action. With military precision, Ray was these surgeons.
an external pump to get erect. When he called his parents, packed the items he At their first meeting, Redett talked
first met with plastic surgeon Richard would need, boarded his dog, and made about phalloplasty, which didn’t excite Ray
Redett, an expert in genital reconstruction his way to the hospital. He checked in, as much. He resolved to go through with it,
at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, requested, at 1:30 on Sunday morning. At thinking it was the only choice. Yet Redett
phalloplasty was what he was offered. But 2 a.m. Monday, he lay anesthetized on an soon changed course, deciding that Ray
soon after, Redett decided Ray could be a operating table. And 14 hours after that,
candidate for one of the world’s first full Redett and his team had completed the
Johns Hopkins surgeon Richard
penis transplants. Not a crude substitute; procedure. It was the most extensive penis
Redett first suggested
the real thing. transplant ever performed, and the first for phalloplasty before
“This was actually something that could a military veteran anywhere in the world. realizing Ray made a good
fix me,” says Ray. “I could go back to being transplant candidate.
normal again.” RAY HAD BEEN a US Navy corpsman trudg-
ing through Afghanistan when Taliban
PENIS TRANSPLANTATION IS a radical fighters ambushed his squad in 2010. As was a better candidate for a transplant.
frontier of modern medicine: extremely he rushed to give first aid to a downed In fact, it was probably the only surgical
rare, expensive, and difficult to perform. soldier, he stepped on a roadside bomb. fix given the extent of the damage. Van der
Replacing a major organ like a damaged “I remember everything froze and I Merwe calls Ray’s procedure “the most
liver is one thing: it contains just one was upside down,” he says. “I remember complex to date,” largely because of the
type of tissue. But grafting a penis from a thinking a quick thought: ‘This isn’t good.’ scope of his injury. To repair it, Hopkins
deceased donor onto a living recipient is a And then I was on my back.” doctors didn’t just transplant the penis
chaotic amalgamation that entails stitching The butcher’s bill was steep: both of itself. They also transplanted the donor’s
millimeters-wide blood vessels and nerves his legs up to and including the thigh scrotum and extensive amounts of tissue
with minuscule sutures. were blasted off, along with his penis, his from the thigh and lower abdomen.
74 Aftermath

“When I heard they wanted to do it, as they wake up, they’re not asking about says. “It was one of those injuries that really
I felt this huge sigh of relief,” says Ray. where their legs are,” he says. “They’re stresses you out and you think, ‘Why would
“For him, it was almost either you do asking where the testicles and the penis I keep going?’ I guess I always just kept this
this transplant, or you live the rest of your are. You can’t put a number on how signifi- real hope that there’s an answer out there.”
life with your defect,” Redett says. cantly this affects one of these wounded
warriors’ lives.” SEVERAL HOURS BEFORE the hospital con-
RAY , WHO IS now in his mid-30s, is a thin Yet some experts wonder if the proce- tacted Ray, Richard Redett had received
man of average height, with touches of gray dure is really necessary. Kidney and heart a phone call of his own. He had gotten it
in his beard and a wobbly gait, a result of transplants save lives, but someone who enough times before to know the words
the prosthetics he now calls his legs. He lost a penis isn’t going to die without a by heart: We may have a donor.
hasn’t discussed his surgery since April new one. Getting one may even be invit- Usually such calls were dead ends:
2018, when he gave a short interview to ing a different set of psychological issues. the potential transplant almost never met
the New York Times. But this March, one (It bears mentioning that a poorly docu- Redett’s strict criteria. For Ray’s surgery
year after his surgery, he agreed to talk to mented transplant attempt happened in to stand a chance, the donor had to be a
me so long as MIT Technology Review 2006 in China, but the 44-year-old recip- young, healthy guy; the organ had to be
protected his identity. (His name has been ient apparently demanded reversal after a good color match and average in size;
changed in this article.) He did so, he says, his wife panicked, shocked at the idea he and, crucially, it had to be no more than
because he wants other veterans to know had someone else’s penis.) In the months two hours away, so that once it had been
about their options. following Ray’s surgery, Hiten Patel, a removed from the donor’s brain-dead but
And many others are affected. A total chief resident at the Johns Hopkins Brady still living body, it could be brought to
of 1,367 American infantrymen sustained Urological Institute, wrote that a penis Johns Hopkins before it started decaying.
significant genital injuries in Iraq and transplant “lacks both life-saving and “If you do an arm transplant, we know
Afghanistan between 2001 and 2013. Such life-enhancing properties when com- exactly how long that will hold up on ice.
hidden wounds of war represent a rela- pared to a readily available alternative in But nobody really knows that for a penis,”
tively new problem. Bombs from below phalloplasty.” he says.
used to be a death sentence, but better Others argue that for young men dev- This particular call on that Saturday in
body armor and modern casualty care astated by their wounds a transplant is, in March was more promising. There was a
ensure that more wounded soldiers sur- fact, both life-saving and life-enhancing. brain-dead patient nearby who was donat-
vive—and more of them with devastating Suicide risk among US veterans is already ing his organs, including his penis. Over
genital-urinary trauma. In a report last high: one study found that those deployed a rapid string of conversations, Redett
year, military urologists wrote that groin between 2001 and 2007 were 41% more evaluated the patient’s medical history
injuries have increased “to a level never likely to take their lives than civilians. Ray and determined when his team could get
before reported in the history of war.” himself entertained thoughts of suicide there. By the afternoon, Redett knew he
The US Department of Defense rec- after his injury. The idea gradually faded had his donor.
ognized the problem as long ago as 2008, once he realized he could have gone to Still, no doctor had ever worked with a
when it set up an institute to research vari- war and died; instead he was alive, on the graft as large as the one Ray required. To
ous reconstructive transplants. Eventually, first step of a long climb back. transplant a penis, you need the two dorsal
the TOUGH Project—Trauma Outcomes “Even though we do a pretty good job arteries and the two dorsal veins from the
and Urogenital Health—placed a figure with phalloplasty reconstruction, it’s still a donor. Fortunately, Ray’s two penis nerves
on it: among infantrymen with genital- quantum leap to put on a real penis,” says were intact. But to transplant the abdomi-
urinary injuries from Iraq and Afghanistan, Curtis Cetrulo, one of the surgeons who nal wall and scrotum, even more veins are
502 were injured so severely that a penis operated on Thomas Manning in 2016. necessary. Fail to take those, and the new
transplant might be their only recourse. Phalloplasty recipients, for example, may scrotum and abdominal tissue will die,
Quantifying the number of such inju- regain some erotic sensation, but they along with much of the skin of the penis.
ries is easy. Outlining the psychological must use a pump to achieve an erection Over five years, Redett and his team had
toll they take on guys in their 20s and 30s or have intercourse. deciphered the topography of penis trans-
is much harder. Ray wouldn’t say the transplant saved plantation with cadavers and food coloring.
Even those closest to the trauma, like his life, exactly, but it has improved it. It was basically a grand perfusion experi-
Timothy Tausch, have to use anecdotes to “This surgery was a way for me to over- ment: inject dye into the blood vessels of
explain. He’s an Army lieutenant colonel come that little subconscious voice or what- a dead man, and watch for blush on the
and director of trauma and male recon- ever it was that would always keep me skin to know which vessels are required as
structive urology at Walter Reed. “As soon feeling different from everyone else,” he part of the transplant. “We were injecting
 Becoming whole 75

every blood vessel we could find down in “I remember “We felt very confident we could do
the region with blue and red food color,” he it, but we had never done it,” he says. “If
says. “We just needed to know which ves- you’re not anxious for something like that,
sels, and we needed to get very quick, very you’re not thinking hard enough.”
efficient, and very safe. We knew this had In the Johns Hopkins operating room,
the potential to be a very long operation.” a surgical microscope with a craned neck
On the Sunday afternoon, his team like a brachiosaurus magnified the view by
boarded a chartered jet to meet their donor up to 20 times, enabling Redett to see the
(the donor’s identity and the state he’s from very tip of the needle-point instruments
can’t be disclosed). At 6 p.m., they entered that hold the sutures for stitching together
the procurement room. Other doctors and vessels barely two millimeters thick.
medical staff, 25 in all, were there grabbing “The threads are smaller than a human
solid organs: lungs, heart, kidneys, liver. hair,” he says. “Unless you’re under a
It’s a bloody choreography, finding your ’scope, you can’t really even see it.”
place in an organ procurement. Redett and They began by sewing Ray’s urethra
his team sliced into and isolated the lower onto the donor’s. Then came the arteries
abdominal wall, thigh tissue, scrotum, and and veins that bring blood to the skin of
penis, dissected out the requisite arteries the abdominal wall, scrotum, and penis
and veins, and let the other doctors take shaft. Next they sutured Ray’s penile
what organs they needed before finishing. nerves, which were buried deep under-
Once they had removed and packed neath his pelvic bone, to the nerves of
Ray’s graft, nothing else mattered except the donor penis. Finally, Redett’s team
speed. Bodily tissue begins to break down stitched together the skin.
the instant it’s deprived of blood. If enough “You know how to do it, but until
toxins are released, the tissue can swell so that last blood vessel is hooked up and
much it asphyxiates. It’s why you throw you release the clamps and blood flows
everything froze
transplants on ice, as Redett’s crew did for through it—I mean, that’s a huge sigh of
their Learjet flight back to Baltimore—it relief,” says Redett.
delays the breakdown process. A kidney transplant usually takes three
It’s also why surgeons train, practice, hours. The first penis transplant surgery
and visualize their maneuvers. Redett’s in 2014 took nine. Redett’s team needed
team had already run dry rehearsals of their an additional five hours to complete Ray’s
procedure. In the operating room, they transplant. In a surgery that long, doctors
had set up the table where Ray would lie, are allowed to take bathroom breaks, and
figured out where the ice machine went, even slug some coffee. Redett did neither.
placed the optical microscope Redett would
use, and even tested every power outlet to RAY ’ S FIRST MEMORY after he came out
make sure they wouldn’t short a circuit. of the anesthesia was the heat. His room
As the team ate snacks from their was warm to help keep his transplant at
go-bags on the plane back to Hopkins, body temperature. It wasn’t until two days
other surgeons wheeled Ray into the oper- later that Ray looked down and saw his
ating theater. By this time it was 11 p.m. new penis for the first time.
on Sunday, almost 24 hours after he had “It was swollen and still had a lot of
arrived at the hospital. They prepared him healing to do,” he says. “In the back of your
by removing all the diseased tissue and mind, you know this is a transplant, and you
exposing the blood vessels, nerves, ure- wonder if it’s going to be too much for you
thra, and penile stump. At 2 a.m. Monday, to handle. Once I went through with the sur-
Redett and his fellow surgeons took their gery, all of those concerns just went away.”
places—some standing above Ray, the rest The surgery wasn’t just technically com-
tending to the graft at another table—and plex; it also required weighing various eth-
steeled themselves. The gravity of his mis- ical questions. For example: if they were
a n d I w a s u p s i d e d o w n .”
sion consumed Redett’s thoughts. giving Ray a scrotum, should they give him
76 Aftermath

testicles too? The answer was no: transfer- that the $12 million Congress appropriates as whether he’s able to pee standing up
ring sperm-generating tissue might have each year for the Armed Forces Institute of (he can), whether he gets erections (he
made it possible for Ray to have the donor’s Regenerative Medicine is now spent primar- does)—already have answers.
genetic kids. (In the end, the donor had not ily on immunosuppressive research—not “He told me, which was the best news I
given consent to use his sperm.) on paying for things like penis transplants. could hear, that it feels normal,” says Redett.
Another matter was the prospect of life- It took six months before the nerves
long immunosuppression. In penis trans- ON A HOT afternoon last April, a year after of his transplanted penis started firing.
plant surgeries, it’s critical: Van der Merwe his surgery, I met Ray for the first time. He Stitching nerves together isn’t like splicing
had to cut off half of the penis he trans- balanced his modest frame on his part-
planted in 2014 because the patient stopped metal, part-polymer prosthetic legs, and in
taking his medication and rejection set in. his left hand he carried a cane. Even with “The world is not designed for
The team came up with a novel answer the support, he picked his way gingerly a guy like me,” says Ray.
to this problem. In a procedure spearheaded along the sidewalks until we made our way
by Gerald Brandacher, scientific direc- over to a public bench near a coffee shop.
tor of the reconstructive transplantation “When I got hurt, one thing I did real- a wire; a nerve cell’s axons, the long threads
program at the Johns Hopkins School of ize is that the world is not designed for a along which impulses are sent from one cell
Medicine, bone marrow and stem cells from guy like me, being blown up,” he told me to another, have to grow all the way out to
the donor’s vertebral bones were isolated matter-of-factly. “I knew then I would have the organ they’re supplying. Now, more than
in the lab. Two weeks after his transplant, to change myself to fit the world.” a year removed from surgery, those nerve
Ray was injected with a large amount of While he doesn’t hide his prosthetics— signals have grown only stronger. “I’m still
the donor’s bone marrow cells. when we met, he wore gym shorts—his getting sensation back. It’s pretty close,”
In organ transplants of any type, recipi- unseen injury still causes him some con- Ray says. “This is not going to be a quick
ents are typically given a cocktail of immu- sternation. It’s not that he hasn’t accepted fix, but I’ve seen improvement over time.”
nosuppressant drugs every day. Ray, on the his new penis. On the contrary, Ray doesn’t Where penis transplant surgery for
other hand, requires just one pill. seem to think about it as a donor organ at wounded veterans goes is still up in the air.
“It’s kind of like reeducating the immune all. It’s just that so few people know what South Africa’s Van der Merwe, the originator
system,” says Brandacher. “It allows us to happened to him, and he’s not quite ready, of the transplant, says the VCA procedure
minimize the need for immunosuppression and may never be ready, to identify himself. itself is now proven; its future depends on
but not completely stop it.” “It may not necessarily be that people other matters. There’s the problem of who
Minimizing the drugs needed after a are going to say bad things about it,” he pays, and of finding appropriate donors.
transplant, in fact, may be what really got says. “But it’s just one of those things. It’s And then there’s the immunosuppression
the US military interested in surgery like a private thing.” issue that the military is trying to solve.
Ray’s. Immunosuppressants ensure that Still, those around him recognized a “The risks of immunosuppression in
the body doesn’t attack a new organ, but change. A close friend of Ray’s, one of the many people’s minds also outweigh the
they also weaken the immune system and few who know, says she noticed “a little benefit of doing an arm, or a face, or a gen-
can lead to toxic complications like kidney boost” following the procedure. “It was such ital transplant,” Redett says. “We disagree,
failure. For a heart or lung, the trade-off is a profound wound, there was a no-light- but that will slow down progress.”
obvious: immune problems versus death. at-the-end-of-the-tunnel kind of feeling,” Ray barely blinked when I asked him
For a penis, the question is more muddled. she says. “Now he’s much more confident some of these questions at our second
“If we can get to a point where we have … It’s this feeling of being whole again.” meeting, in July. Dealing with immuno-
therapy that doesn’t require that level of In some ways, Ray is still figuring out suppression, he says, is easy: he takes a pill
toxicity, the calculus changes completely,” how his transplanted organ will shape the and washes his hands frequently. Guys who
says Lloyd Rose, a former program manager contours of his life. He’s not dating at the need it and can handle it, he says, should
for rehabilitative medicine research in the moment, and knowing that he can’t be a get a transplant. He feels no ambivalence
US Army. “Then a transplant can become a biological father, he wonders if that will about that phone call, when doctors told
surgery for anybody who’s missing a hand deter women who may want to start a family. him they were ready to sew on the donor
or a foot or a face or a penis—or anything.” In other ways, the surgery has made penis for which he had waited five years.
If vets with transplants have to take fewer a huge difference to his daily emotional “I don’t regret it,” Ray says. “It was one
pills, it means fewer complications as they state. He’s more outgoing, less afraid to of the best decisions I ever made.”
get older, and an easier life. It also saves meet new people, and more fit, mentally
Andrew Zaleski, a writer based near
the government money in the long term. and physically, piecing back together a life Washington, DC, covers science,
The issue is so important to the military interrupted. Important questions—such technology, and business.
“I don’t regret it.

It was one of the

b e s t d e c i s i o n s I e v e r m a d e .”
 79

Fiction

AN41

Y
ou never actually heard the rounds could be heard from above. She grinned at Jack
that hit closest to you. You definitely and the squad, looked up toward the top of the
felt the change in pressure every time hill, and said, “Here’s the plan.”
a bullet slapped into the far side of the
~
wall, though. Jack looked back at his squad. They
were nervous and holding tight to their cover, That morning Jack had been sitting with the squad
but craning their necks around looking for an during breakfast when his platoon sergeant called
opportunity to return fire. to him from across the room.
Something caught his eye to the right. AN41 “Need you to take 3rd Squad and kit up. Meet
was moving their way. She scooted over, dropped by the flagpole in twenty—you are picking up
to a knee, and popped her visor up. She did not security and reaction force duties for a Legionnaire
need the augmented-reality display—she was element going up north.”
“chipped,” like all other Legionnaires—but she Legionnaires on the patrol added a layer of
had joked that the visor screened the sun out bet- stress for everybody. Higher took a major interest
ter than sunglasses. Dust clung to the exterior of in any operation where general-purpose infantry
her armor. Her exo had been “tuned up,” as the like 3rd Squad were mingled in with members
soldiers say: she’d taken rounds on her way across of the Legion.
the open ground. The impact points were visible Twenty minutes later, the squad was by the flag-
on the shoulder and chest, but she didn’t look pole in full kit. It had been “on call” for Legionnaire
fazed. A heavy machine gun started thumping missions twice before, but never gone forward
away, and the unmistakable sound of quadcopters with them on patrol. This would be different.

BY JASPER JEFFERS
ILLUSTRATIONS BY YOSHI SODEOKA
80 Aftermath

It would also be their first trip up north toward put me through the course. It is truly an honor to
the Donovian border. meet you—he was a hero.”
Jack looked up as a young Army major, in
~
multi-cam with sleeves rolled up at the cuffs and
a bright smile on her face, walked over to them. It had started with driverless cars. The first ones
This was a thing with Legionnaires; they were were a novelty, but it was the ability to network
The US such disgustingly nice people. them, and the resulting decrease in accidents,

knew “Sergeant Adams, I’m AN41.” Another thing

about these guys; Legionnaires only introduced
that led to the opening. Who doesn’t want their
kids to be safer? And if you have a million auton-
humans themselves by call sign. This did not help elim- omous and semi-autonomous vehicles, wouldn’t

were inate the image that they were mostly robots.

“But most of my crew calls me Annie.” She
you want a powerful AI to help coordinate them?
Simple but large-scale AI systems, mandated
always smiled and extended her hand. Jack shook it. by governments as a public safety measure,

the weak- “We’ll keep it at Forty-One, ma’am.” He wanted

to display the highest professionalism.
became a natural overlay of the social and polit-
ical environment.
est and “Thanks Sergeant A, appreciate your helping But the well-intentioned regulations of Western

slowest us on this one—we’re not expecting any drama,

but once we get up into Otso, never hurts to have
governments also created an impetus to “democ-
ratize” AI development, to reduce the risk of any
point of the extra help.” one political power using it as a weapon. And

decision- Jack knew these super-soldiers didn’t need

his squad as extra help, but he appreciated the
democratization made it free and available for
actors who would use the technology for their
making. gesture. Many years ago, Jack’s brother had been own agendas.
a Legionnaire. Jack himself had gone through the That created the perfect conditions for what
assessment, but it hadn’t worked out. Fewer than folks now call the Continental Wars between
200 Legionnaires existed in the force; the rate of Donovia and Otso. With powerful and free AI
selection was ridiculously low. crunching numbers, probabilities, and potential
But it meant Jack had a pretty good idea of strategies instantaneously, a billion regressions
the capabilities and type of people that ended up on a particular course of action could lead you to
with the chip. He was looking at three of them some pretty confident and horrible decisions. It
right now. Just behind AN41 were the other two was only a matter of time until a weakened state
Legionnaires on the team; there were always was told by its AI that outcomes could only be
three. And just behind them, he could see the changed by acting with violence.
folded legs of three quadrupeds on a trailer being The war came to a stalemate: a long DMZ along
pulled by their support vehicle. He could guess the “new” border of Donovia. In the meantime,
what was inside the housing bumps on the back both sides patrolled, competed, and wrestled in
of each q-ped, and doubted these Legionnaires a buffer zone. It was not quite full-on war, but it
needed anyone to be watching their back. certainly included plenty of small-unit skirmishes.
“No sweat, ma’am ... We are ready to roll.” During the conflict’s decisive action phase,
“Sounds good. Split up between the lead and the United States learned the hard way about the
trail truck, and if you can ride up front with me, strengths and weaknesses of AI-networked sys-
we can get caught up before we get outside the tems. The US built the world’s most powerful AI
bubble. We’ll real-time distro the guidance to your entity, referred to as the MIND. The MIND had to
team’s internal channel and visors.” represent the best of the values of the American
The squad split up, and Jack walked to the Republic. The US knew humans were always the
lead vehicle. It was built for speed more than for weakest and slowest point of decision-making, but
protection—a mashup of a five-ton truck and a they could not just turn over power to machines.
dune buggy, with a minimum of armor. AN41 was So it created the Legion.
adjusting her exo and helmet when she looked The concept was simple. The best way to
up without a smile. ensure the MIND did not become a tool for
“Jack, I apologize ... The MIND just passed me efforts fundamentally incompatible with human
your background. I wanted to let you know your values was to embed and meld the MIND with
brother was an amazing individual and leader. He humans themselves. Soldiers made the ideal first
 Fiction 81

candidates for incorporation of the MIND. The

American people generally had more confidence
in the military than in other political institutions,
and you needed a group of young, willing humans
to actually execute the concept.
A specially selected set of individuals would
take on this responsibility and ensure that the
power of the MIND was kept out of the hands of
the wrong people. It would be a military organi-
zation made up of the best leaders, with excep-
tional character. The candidates could come from
anywhere—college, the State Department, non-
profits, or within the armed services—and were
chosen in a selection process that forced hard
decisions under stress. The system was designed
to allow an individual’s moral and essential values
to bubble to the top. Legionnaires had networked
devices implanted into them, and the two forces—
man and machine—balanced out as one. Near-
omniscience from access to the MIND, and an
ethical code that prevented purely mathematical
decision-making: this was the Legion.
The chipping process required months of sur-
gery. Small scars around all of the Legionnaires’
ears indicated augmentation for their hearing;
Jack had heard they now had an enhanced sense
of smell too. But the technological game-changer
was the integration directly with the human brain.
Of course, you had to hope the selection process
picked individuals with the right core values. The
chance of selecting the wrong person was always
present. So a failsafe was built in: only three living
Legionnaires, acting in concert, could access the
resources of the MIND. This tactical check-and-
balance theoretically reduced the risk of any single
Legionnaire becoming compromised by the power
or becoming an unwitting servant of the MIND.

~
with sensors of all varieties: visual, electromag- New York-based
artist Yoshi
The vehicles bounced down the road, but active netic, short-range radar. All were constantly ana-
Sodeoka's work
suspension eliminated the jouncing. Everyone lyzed and integrated through the MIND, which is characterized
still instinctively leaned left and right when the alerted human attention to anything above a by its neo-
psychedelic view
vehicle mounted difficult terrain, even though the certain suspicion threshold. of the world.
crew compartment barely moved at all. “Sergeant Adams, let’s lay out the plan here,”
AN41 turned to look at Jack. She didn’t need to AN41 said. “We are headed north, just inside the
drive—or at least she wasn’t looking at the road. contested area of Otso.” She pulled over a map
Jack didn’t understand how, but he knew the board and highlighted a location in the valley.
MIND guided the vehicle and would alert AN41 “We know there is an ongoing effort to dis-
to certain parameters or environmental changes rupt the current ceasefire by our adversary. We
that required her to return her eyes to the road. also know that somehow this valley, this town
In fact, Jack wasn’t even sure how much she in particular”—she pointed at the map again for
needed her human eyes. The vehicle was packed emphasis—“is a major focus for their recce efforts.”
82 Aftermath

Legionnaires commonly said things like this: and in his AR visor, but he knew AN41 could use
“We know.” It meant the MIND had run the sims, her chip to sort of see the feeds in her brain. He
billions of regressions, and identified a place on also knew she wasn’t dedicating much time or
the map like this town, with a population of fewer focus to it, because the MIND would monitor
than 7,500 people, that might be identified as the feed and spot trouble in the quads’ integrated
crucial to the outcome of something. sensor data.
He knew “We’ll run a multi-day patrol there, identify the The robotic centerpiece to Legionnaire oper-

AN41 methods the adversary is using to influence the

population, stop them if possible, but also bolster
ations was the q-ped. They were about as big as a
Clydesdale horse or a medium-size camel. Each
could use confidence in the community that the coalition carried a coffin-like box on its back with large,

her chip can protect them and ensure basic security and
governance.”
hinged bay doors. These folded down to reveal
a variety of payloads: anything from additional
to sort of Jack nodded and made notes he could pass quadcopters to short-range-missile racks to med-

see the on to the squad. Everything she said was being

piped into his soldiers’ helmet comms two vehicles
ical and treatment capabilities. Jack had no idea
how many variants existed, but he knew they
feeds in back, but the squad had two brand-new privates, were rumored to have hauled small tactical nukes

her brain. and there was no technology solution to prevent

soldiers from falling asleep immediately upon
during the decisive-action phase against Donovia.
The three q-peds were behind Jack now, all
seating themselves inside a vehicle. riding on the trailer with their legs tucked under
“The surrounding area is heavily contested,” them like sleeping canines, no observable mark-
AN41 said. ings on the mission package boxes on their backs.
This was Legionnaire-speak for high-intensity He dozed, lulled by the almost imperceptible
conflict and violence. The Continental War itself swaying of the crew compartment, but woke up
had been incredibly lethal: new weapons, new when he heard the chimes.
technology, employed at speed. But it had also “Jack, toggle to QC-1 feed,” AN41 said. She was
been quick. In the current political stalemate, the staring blankly ahead, lost in whatever info the
“heavily contested” areas could go to high-end MIND was pushing her. He toggled to the quad-
lethality almost instantly. AN41 meant this could copter feed so he could see what she was seeing.
get sporty, but not a small-arms gun fight. She The scene before them looked pretty rough.
was saying they could get thumped by rockets Ahead, Jack counted the remnants of several
and high-end killer quadcopters. houses and at least three vehicles that had been
“We’ll stay along this route until just outside hit with some type of explosive weapon. An
the main population center in the valley. Then Eastern European–looking station wagon was on
we’ll dismount the q-peds and move up separate fire. Multiple Otsoian bodies were strewn about,
from the vehicle and isolate from the high ground. and most were heavily burned.
Once set, we’ll go into the village and see what “We’ve got movement on the north side of
we can sort out.” the burned-out wagon. You have contact with
Jack nodded and looked to her for more guid- my pointer?” Jack saw the infrared dot she was
ance, but her eyes glazed over. Something coming beaming out of QC-1. It was on his screen, hov-
across the network was chewing up her human ering on a moving human just north of the truck.
bandwidth. “Contact pointer,” Jack responded.
Jack toggled his screen to a rear-facing view “Let’s dismount your squad and move ... here.”
and observed the rest of the patrol. Three crew She moved the red dot farther to the north along
vehicles, with the rearmost one pulling the q-ped a wooded area that would be the natural avenue
trailer. He noted quadcopters landing on the cen- of escape if this individual wanted to split.
ter vehicle, taking on a battery reload, and then “Got it. Moving.” Jack spoke the words into
lifting off again to resume station some distance his helmet mic while bailing out the side of the
away from the convoy. At any given time, four vehicle and jogging back toward the rest of the
quadcopters were in the air running a diamond squad. He did a quick press check on his rifle and
pattern. At least two were armed with direct-fire signaled his squad to rally and follow him. He
systems or short-range missiles. headed toward the northern wood line.
He was seeing their video feeds on his screens The whine of the quadcopters died away as
Join our
Global Panel
Share your opinion about today’s top tech trends.

As a member of MIT Technology Review’s fast-growing group of

executives and innovators, you can take part in surveys and weigh
in on the impact of AI, blockchain, and other technologies—plus
get in-depth news and analysis to inform business strategy.

Apply today and get our latest research report FREE:

technologyreview.com/globalpanel
84 Aftermath

they picked up a larger orbit around the patrol. “Team, this is AN41. Deploy for contact. We
AN41 had pushed them out to distance. She was are going to move up and check this out.”
experienced, and this smelled like trouble. She Even as she moved, Jack knew, her connec-
dismounted, and one of the q-peds immediately tion to the MIND was adjusting the strategy and
stood up from the trailer and trotted over to her left feeding new recommendations into her chip.
shoulder. AN41 was about five foot five on a good
Her day. The eight-foot-tall q-ped towered over her.
~
The other two Legionnaires were nowhere “Jack, can we get some overwatch on the two
mouth to be seen, but the other two q-peds had disap- smaller compounds to the east?” AN41’s voice
never peared from the trailer. came over helmet comms, but he was watch-
AN41 didn’t appear to be taking any great tacti- ing her face. She was “speaking,” but her mouth
moved; cal precautions as she moved up on the last known never moved; the voice was computer-generated
the voice location of the person they had seen from the air. to sound just like her. Jack called up his B Team
A door burst open from the one of the houses, leader and sent the team to a small, low wall about
was and a child flopped out to the ground at her feet. a quarter of the way up the slope that offered
computer- The boy looked to be about nine years old and some frontal cover and good sight lines across
in tremendous distress. AN41 crouched down the entire eastern side of the compound.
generated next to him, her exoskeleton’s knee actuators The other two Legionnaires had reappeared,
to sound making a soft whine as she did so. The boy was and now they started going up the slope on oppo-
covered in grime and sweat. He held his left arm site sides. Each had a q-ped in close proximity.
just like up in a half-hearted defensive gesture as AN41 Neither was looking at AN41 as she made her
her. spoke quietly to him. way up the middle, behind the boy.
Jack noticed that the boy’s clothes and hair were Jack was trying to figure out why the
matted with the fine dust that you see settle after Legionnaires had chosen to take this detour
buildings are pulverized with high explosives, or when he heard a computer-generated alert in
after a massive earthquake. his comms. “Take cover. Take cover.”
The boy shivered and spoke in a language In an age of networked sensors and weap-
unrecognizable to Jack but clearly processed by ons systems, everything happened at a speed
AN41’s chip; she nodded and pointed around the humans were not built to manage. There was no
scene in conjunction with the boy’s murmurs. bright, hot light from the high explosive. There
Her connection to the MIND gave her access was no whine from quadcopters, and no bark
to a translation and behavioral gesture application from machine guns. There was just a feeling of
that put previous versions to shame. The MIND overpressure and the sound of air being split by
would ingest the boy’s statements and provide a projectile.
AN41 with the most appropriate response, based Behind them, one of their vehicles exploded.
on what it judged the best course of action for the Jack was diving toward a large rock to his right as
mission. AN41 was still a human, though, and she multiple things began to swirl around him. Each
could choose to adjust the strategy on the fly by of the housings on the back of the q-peds had
instinct, and the MIND would adapt. opened up. AN41’s q-ped began flinging counter-
And right now, her body language said some- measures into the air with a sound like a child’s
thing didn’t fit. scream. Less than three seconds had passed.
The boy continued to talk and pointed up the The easternmost q-ped put three short-range
slope, to another set of villas and compounds missiles in the air while the westernmost one
about half a klick away, built directly into the revealed a monster 25mm direct-fire system
mountainside. He held up two fingers, pointed at under its housing and began blasting through a
himself and at them. Parents? Sisters? He pointed window more than 300 meters up the slope with
again to the middle compound on the slope and incredible accuracy.
stood up. He tugged on the right forearm of Jack hit the dirt. Now seven seconds in.
AN41’s exoskeleton armor, which contained her More overpressure. AN41’s q-ped exploded.
close-combat and backup weapon, a 40-caliber Jack suspected he knew the system they were
single-barrel direct-fire system. The boy started up against. It was exceptionally rare to bump into
walking up the slope. a mobile railgun that accurate, that small, and
Get
MIT
Technology
Review
delivered to
your inbox.
THE DOWNLOAD
Your daily dose of what’s up
in emerging technology

THE AIRLOCK
Your gateway to the future
of space technology

THE ALGORITHM
Artificial intelligence,
demystified

CHAIN LETTER
Blockchains, cryptocurrencies,
and why they matter

FWD:ECONOMY
Your guide to growth and prosperity
in the age of technology

WEEKEND READS
Stories that put technology
in perspective

Stay in the know:

technologyreview.com/inbox
86 Aftermath

with that rate of fire. They had stumbled into “Jack.” This one was firm; she sounded dif-
some trouble here. ferent. “I’m offline with my team. They may be
Five more seconds had passed. Now came the unconscious.”
barking report of a machine gun and the shrieking “I’m also paralyzed,” she continued.
of a short-range-missile swarm. These could loiter, “Jack, we’ve got about 90 seconds here. The
swarm, even chase if needed. There must have Q is down to projectile countermeasures, and
You been three dozen in the air—Jack didn’t know if those quadcopters are going to chew you all up

never they were his side’s or the enemy’s.

The westernmost q-ped broke station and
once it runs out. This was a damn good trap. And
I walked us right into it.”
really headed down to cover AN41 as she moved toward “41, we’ll have fast movers up here ... Just keep

hear the the low wall where Jack’s B Team was cowering.
He crawled over to join them and pulled him-
hanging on.”
“Jack, CAS is 20 minutes out. We don’t have
rounds. self up behind the wall as she came and took a much time to discuss. I need you to do what you

You just knee next to him. Machine-gun rounds pinged

off the q-ped with no visible effect, but making
have to do—what someone did for your brother.”
Jack momentarily flashed back to the man
feel the a tremendous racket. in uniform handing a US flag to his mother. He

pressure AN41 popped her visor up. Dust clung to her

armor. The impact points from the rounds were
had heard the stories, but he hadn’t wanted to
believe Ben had gone down like this. He had
as they visible on her exo’s shoulder and chest. She been too good.

impact grinned. “Here’s the plan.”

She was interrupted, amid the din of missiles
The quadcopters were screaming in now.
Annie had her helmet off and her eyes closed.
around and machine-gun rounds, by a very human scream. Her mouth wasn’t moving, but Jack still heard

you. The boy, almost forgotten about, had been a little

farther up the slope from them when the shooting
her in his ears.
“Jack. Thirty seconds. Make it count.”
had started. Now it sounded like he’d been hit. As “Can’t do this, 41. Not in me.”
his screams continued, AN41 jumped the wall and “No time for that, Jack, this is bigger than you.
moved toward him. She hesitated as she closed This is why your squads come out with us. The
on the boy. The moment’s delay was enough. MIND can’t do this for us, but you can.”
AN41 dropped as if someone had flipped off The last two quadcopters were spitting fire
her light switch. The other two Legionnaires now, but Jack couldn’t hear it. Time was slow-
reacted instinctively when she was hit and broke ing down.
cover for just an instant. Both were immediately You never really hear the rounds. You just feel
dropped. Suddenly, all fire from the top of the the pressure as they impact around you. Jack rolled
hill shifted to the low wall. to a nearby opening in the low wall, his optic inte-
“Jack. This is Annie.” grated with the visor. He fired twice and rolled
“Moving your way, 41.” He motioned for Team back, but not before catching a glimpse of the boy,
B to cover him as he prepared to leave the shelter clearly unhurt, running up the slope toward the
of the low wall. compound. He must have been chipped too, Jack
“Jack.” Her voice on his internal audio was realized—the only way he could have played his
calm and steady, but insistent. “I want you to part so perfectly in an otherwise entirely auto-
hold what you’ve got.” mated ambush.
Jack was breathing heavily; the stress of being Immediately after Jack shot Annie, the firing
under fire, combined with the exertion, had his stopped. The swarm of missiles dropped to the
ears ringing and heart pounding. earth, dead lumps of metal. The quadcopters
“Jack, you know what it wants. It needs to take turned and flew off, their buzzing echoing down
all three of us alive. It will kill the rest of your the valley as it faded.
squad and then come down here and collect us.”
Three more enemy quadcopters began to move Colonel Jasper Jeffers is an infantry
officer who has been deployed to Iraq,
lower on the horizon. Another q-ped exploded Afghanistan, and elsewhere. This story won
from a railgun shot. The last q-ped’s active sup- the 2019 Science Fiction Writing Contest
run by the Army Mad Scientist Laboratory.
pression was going crazy, flinging small projectiles A longer version was first published by the
into the air at an unsustainable pace. Modern War Institute on its website.
 87

Listen to our latest

episode with Marissa
Mayer, co-founder of
Lumi Labs and former CEO
and president of Yahoo!

MIT Technology Review’s podcast

to help business leaders take new
technologies coming out of the lab
and into the marketplace.

All episodes available at

technologyreview.com/business-lab

Statement of Ownershnp, Management and Cnrculatnon. (Requnred by U.S.C. 3685.) (1). Publication Title: MIT Technology Review, (2). Publication No. 535-940, (3).
Filing Date: 9/30/19, (4). Issue Frequency: Bi-monthly. (5). No. of Issues Published Annually: 6. (6) Annual Subscription Price: $55.95. (7). Complete Mailing Address of
Known Office of Publication: One Main St, 13th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142 (8). Complete Mailing Address of Headquarters or General Business Office of Publisher:
One Main St, 13th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142 (9). Full Names and Complete Mailing Addresses of Publisher, Editor, and Managing Editor. Publisher: Elizabeth
Bramson-Boudreau, One Main St, 13th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142. Editor: David Rotman, One Main St, 13th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142. Managing Editor: Timothy
Maher, One Main St, 13th Floor, Cambridge, MA 02142. (10). Owner: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138. (11).
Known Bondholders, Mortgagees, and Other Security Holders Owning or Holding 1 Percent or More of Total Amount of Bonds, Mortgages, or other Securities: None.
(12). Tax Status: The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes: Has Not Changed During
Preceding 12 months. (13). Publication Title: MIT Technology Review. (14) Issue Date for Circulation Data Below: May/June 2019. (15). Extent and Nature of Circulation:
(a) Total No. of Copies (Net Press Run): Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 219,224; No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing
Date: 214,857. (b) Legitimate Paid and/or Requested Distribution (1) Mailed Outside-County Paid Subscriptions Stated on PS Form 3541: Average No. Copies Each Issue
During Preceding 12 Months: 139,495, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 137,924. (2) In-County Paid/Requested Mail Subscriptions Stated
on PS Form 3541: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 0, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 0. (3) Sales Through
Dealers and Carriers, Street Vendors, Counter Sales, and Other Paid Distribution Outside the USPS: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months:
38,081, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 37,069. (4) Paid Distribution by Other Mail Classes Through the USPS: Average No. Copies Each
Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 0, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 0. (c) Total Paid and/or Requested Distribution: Average No. Copies
Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 177,576, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 174,993. (d) Nonrequested Distribution: (1) Outside-County
Nonrequested Copies included on PS Form 3541: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 644, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to
Filing Date: 0. (2) In-County Nonrequested Copies included on PS Form 3541: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 0, No. Copies of Single
Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 0. (3) Nonrequested Copies Distributed Through the USPS by Other Classes of Mail: 0 Average No. Copies Each Issue During
Preceding 12 Months: 0, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 0 (4) Nonrequested Copies Distributed Outside the Mail: Average No. Copies
Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 8213, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 8037. (e) Total Free or Nominal Rate Distribution: Average
No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 8857, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 8037. (f) Total Distribution: Average No. Copies
Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 186,433, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 183,030. (g) Copies not Distributed: Average No. Copies
Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months: 0, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 0. (h) Total: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding
12 Months: 186,433, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 183,030. (i) Percent Paid: Average No. Copies Each Issue During Preceding 12 Months:
95.25%, No. Copies of Single Issue Published Nearest to Filing Date: 95.61%. This Statement of Ownership will be printed in the November/December issue of this
publication. I certify that all the information furnished on this form is true and complete. Doreen Adger, SVP of Consumer Refenues and Marketnng.
88 The back page

Looking back at the

Our war coverage through the years
has emphasized how technology
might change the way wars are
fought—or how it could help us

future of warfare avoid conflict in the first place.

June 1967 April 1984 December 2001

From “The first battle of World War III”: From “The Fallaby of Laser Defense”: From “Rebognizing the Enemy”: Of all
World War I was fofght with chemistry, Dfring a televised address to the nation the dramatic images to emerge in the
and World War II with physics …. World on March 23, 1983, President Reagan hofrs and days following the September
War III, if it ever occfrs, may be fofght sfrprised many viewers by proposing 11 attacks, one of the most hafnting was
bloodlessly with mathematics. It is not a long-term plan to shield the United a frame from a sfrveillance-camera video
wholly inconceivable that two opposing States against nfclear attack … Despite captfring the face of sfspected hijacker
general staffs will gather some day in ffll the Reagan administration’s rhetoric Mohamed Atta as he passed throfgh an air-
battle dress for a morning’s war at an inter- aboft making nfclear weapons obsolete port metal detector in Portland, ME. Even
national compfter center. At preliminary throfgh defense, the Pentagon is already more chilling to many secfrity experts
low-level conferences they will have already stfdying how to penetrate a fftfre Soviet is the fact that, had the right technology
agreed on a compfter program and, like BMD (ballistic-missile defense) system. been in place, an image like that might
attorneys at a pre-trial hearing, stipflated Under a program operated by the Defense have helped avert the attacks. According to
essential inpft data. All that will remain Nfclear Agency at a yearly cost of $3.5 experts, face recognition technology that’s
to be done on the fateffl morning will be million, pieces of U.S. ICBMs have been already commercially available cofld have
to pfsh the “start” bftton and wait for the exposed to lasers modeled after those instantly checked the image against photos
compfter to wage the war 10,000 times. fsed in Soviet research, so engineers can of sfspected terrorists on file with the FBI
We can envision one commander-in-chief develop cofntermeasfres. DARPA is also and other afthorities. If a match had been
pfshing aside a sheaf of print-ofts that working on laser-resistant materials ... In made, the system cofld have sofnded the
he has been poring over. “Okay,” he says. sfm, as military analyst Thomas Karas has alarm before the sfspect boarded his flight.
“Yof wiped fs oft 9,327 times. I’ll tell my written, “As long as both sides are deter-
Prime Minister to pfll oft of the Balkans.” mined to maintain it, assfred destrfction
is bofnd to be mftfal.”

MBT Technology Review (BSSN 1099-274X), November/December 2019 issue, Reg. US Patent Office, is published bimonthly by MBT Technology Review, 1 Main St. Suite 13, Cambridge, MA 02142-1517. Entire contents ©2019. The
editors seek diverse views, and authors’ opinions do not represent the official policies of their institutions or those of MBT. Periodicals postage paid at Boston, MA, and additional mailing offices. Postmaster: Send address changes
to MBT Technology Review, Subscriber Services, PO Box 5001, Big Sandy, TX 75755, or via the internet at www.technologyreview.com/customerservice. Basic subscription rates: $59.94 per year within the United States; in all other
countries, US$69. Publication Mail Agreement Number 40621028. Send undeliverable Canadian copies to PO Box 1051, Fort Erie, ON F2A 6C7. Printed in USA. Audited by the Alliance for Audited Media.
 Supermicro
Systems Help
Capture the First
Ever Images of a
Black Hole

Data Processing and Storage for Black Hole Event Horizon Imaging
The first imaging of the event horizon aided by the expanded computing power of
for a black hole involved an international today’s IT infrastructure. Processing of the 4
partnership of eight radio telescopes with petabytes (PB) of data generated in the project
major data processing at leading research in 2017 for the original imaging utilized
institutes in the US and Germany. The servers and storage systems, with many
contribution of the brilliant scientists was of these servers coming from Supermicro.

Learn more at www.supermicro.com/blackhole

Featuring 2nd Generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors