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Commander Shingo Nashinoki, 50, and soldiers of the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Force's Amphibious Rapid Deployment Brigade (ARDB), Japan's first marine unit since World War Two, take part in a military drill as U.S. Marines observe, on the uninhabited Irisuna island close to Okinawa, Japan, November 15, 2023.
Japanese troops in the Philippines?
Before an historic trilateral meeting on April 12 between US President Joe Biden, Japan’s Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, and Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr, the Philippine ambassador to the US has said Tokyo and Manila are negotiating a “reciprocal access agreement” that would allow the Japanese and Philippine militaries to train and conduct joint exercises on each other’s territory. Given the ugly World War II history between the two countries, that would be a startling development.
Japan’s foreign ministry has cast doubt on the specifics of this plan. It’s true, said a spokesperson, that the “implementation of this agreement will enhance the interoperability of the Japanese and Philippine] troops, but it is not true that we are discussing deploying the Self-Defense Forces in the Philippines,” he added.
It’s not clear, however, whether a temporary placement of Japanese troops in the Philippines to take part in joint exercises with US forces stationed there would create the same controversy inside Japan, where pacifism remains a potent political force, as a more permanent rotation of Japanese forces there.
But it is clear that the US, Japan, and the Philippines want Beijing to recognize their concerns over assertive Chinese actions in the South China Sea.
Paramilitary soldiers stand guard along a road, ahead of the general elections in Karachi, Pakistan February 7, 2024.
Pakistanis vote but don’t decide who’s in charge
On Thursday, Pakistan is holding what should be one of the largest elections this year – but with the country’s most popular leader locked up, the military tilting the scales, and over two dozen killed this week in terrorist bombings, can it be called “democracy?”
The background: Since independence from Britain in 1947, no Pakistani prime minister has completed a full term. “The Establishment,” aka the military, quietly holds all the cards and has seized direct power four times. Civilian politics since the 1980s, has – broadly speaking – been dominated by the Bhutto clan and their archrivals, the Sharif family, with the military playing each side against the other.
But these two political dynasties broke the system in 2008, when they banded together to oust Pervez Musharraf, who had seized power in a coup nine years earlier. Their defiance led to the military backing Pakistan’s former World Cup-winning cricket captain Imran Khan and his newly formed Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, which went on to win the 2018 elections.
But that relationship quickly soured, leading to Khan’s 2022 ouster in a vote of no confidence, which Khan attributes to collusion between the military, traditional parties, and Washington (which denies involvement).
The vote: The election was delayed twice as the incumbent government maneuvered to exclude Khan from contention and suppress his party. Last summer, Khan was drawing a 60% approval rating, nearly twice that of his closest rivals. The government successfully detained Khan in May and has since sentenced him to decades in prison, banning him from holding office on charges his supporters call bogus.
Khan has tried to keep fighting. He held a virtual rally where an AI-generated avatar delivered his speech and created an app to guide his voters as his party’s candidates are forced to run as independents. But with the deck stacked so heavily against him, these efforts look doomed to fail.
Instead, three-time former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif – who recently returned from exile in a deal forged by the military and was cleared by Pakistan’s supreme court to run – is favored to win over main rival Bilawal Bhutto Zardari (recognize those names?).
We’ll be watching voter turnout as a sign of how many Pakistani are protesting Khan's exclusion, and for the possibility of more violence from extremist groups after nearly 1,000 Pakistanis were killed in terrorist attacks last year.Graphic Truth: Military might, Canada vs. US
It will come as no surprise that there's a massive gap between the military assets and capabilities of the US and Canada. After all, no country in the world spends more on defense than the US. But Canada has been getting flak from NATO for falling short of the alliance’s 2% of GDP defense spending guideline. The most recent numbers show Canada’s military expenditures at 1.38% of its GDP. And amid myriad global crises and conflicts, Canada’s Defense Department has been targeted with budget cuts. Is the Canadian government doing enough to strengthen its military?
What country will win the AI race?
Art: Courtesy of Midjourney
Savvy startups, tech giants, and research labs woo the best engineers and financing to fuel technological breakthroughs. But the battle for AI supremacy is much bigger than the industry itself – it's a global contest, pitting nations against each other.
Many of the world’s most powerful governments are flexing their muscles to build a competitive edge by cultivating robust domestic AI sectors. Don’t be fooled into thinking that recent efforts to legislatively rein in AI models and the companies behind them are signs of governments hitting the brakes – it’s quite the opposite.
Why, you ask? Because it’s a boon for any country to attract top talent and spur economic activity, says Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Artificial Intelligence and Emerging Technology Initiative. Hosting top AI companies also “inevitably catapults host countries to the forefront of conversations around standards and governance, both domestically and internationally.”
Beyond that, a thriving AI sector can do wonders for national security. That’s true not only for military and intelligence applications or research-and-development, but also for ensuring that standards of development “do not pose an inherent risk and are developed with a certain set of values in mind,” Wirtschafter says.
Since Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI call America home, Washington has the ultimate power play. It can better control these tech giants and set the vibe for worldwide AI regulation.
Such control sets governments an inch closer to technological sovereignty, says Nick Reiners, a senior analyst for geotechnology at Eurasia Group: “Having these companies in your country means you’re not dependent on another country.”
Governments can boost their AI sectors in numerous ways — through subsidies, research funding, infrastructure investment, and government contracts.
“Defense spending and government R&D has always been a big stimulus for civilian and commercial research and product development,” says Scott Wallsten, president and senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank. “You can be sure the DOD is working on these tools for their own purposes because they’re in an arms race with potential adversaries.”
Who’s ahead? The US and China are way out in front. “While in the US, these advances have been primarily driven by the private sector, in China they have been shaped more by government support,” says Wirtschafter. But she notes that the US CHIPS Act is a sign that America is trying to boost its strategic advantage.
Stanford University’s annual AI Index report found the US and China leading in many different ways, including private investment and newly funded AI firms. (The UK, EU, Israel, India, and Canada also rank highly in many of the report’s metrics.)
While it’s unlikely that anyone will challenge the US and China, and the US is ahead, Wirtschafter notes that China is powerful on facial recognition technology.
Could governments get possessive? Yep, this is a high-stakes game, and Washington and Beijing, among others, could increasingly opt for protectionist measures to keep powerful AI models in their grasp.
The US is already doing this with chips, the underlying technology for AI. Washington exerts strict export controls over any semiconductor-related equipment, lest it get into enemy hands – meaning China. It has also blocked corporate takeovers that could shift the balance of power with chips, including a 2018 deal involving US chipmaker Qualcomm (keeping it from a Singapore-based company’s grasp). And a new report indicates the Biden administration forced a Saudi firm to divest from a US chipmaker linked to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
If the US and other governments determine that protecting powerful AI models is key to their national security, they could take similarly drastic measures to keep them domestic — or at least in the hands of allies. Just last week, Bloomberg reported that the London-based AI startup Stability AI, known for its Stable Diffusion image generator, is exploring a sale amid internal turmoil. The company reportedly reached out to two startups — the Canadian company Cohere and the US-based Jasper — to gauge their interest in a sale. There’s no indication yet that regulators are worried, but the potential corporate shakeup comes as British politicians have been desperately trying to make the UK a friendly place for AI firms.
The last thing the UK wants is to get burned again – like it did with DeepMind and Arm, two promising British AI companies that were acquired by US and Japanese firms in 2014 and 2016, respectively. In a recent interview with the BBC, Ian Hogarth, who is leading the UK’s AI taskforce, spoke of the need to boost European technology companies instead of allowing them to be sold. “We've had some great tech companies and some of them got bought early, you know – Skype got bought by eBay, DeepMind got bought by Google,” Hogarth said. “I think really our ecosystem needs to rise to the next level of the challenge.”
British lawmakers passed the National Security and Investment Act in 2022, granting the government new national-security powers to intervene in the foreign acquisition of domestic companies. “The pace of change has been really significant since that period,” Wirtschafter said of the DeepMind acquisition, “and the desire to maintain a competitive national position in this space would be central to any potential sale.” The UK’s National AI Strategy, published in 2021, says that the government will “protect national security” and protect against “potentially hostile foreign investment.”
But ministers are now considering rolling back those new rules to appear more business-friendly. And that’s the central tension that all AI-hungry countries face: They need to appear AI-friendly while trying to be forceful with regulation. The battle for AI supremacy is on the line.An AI-generated image of swarming drones.
Robots are coming to a battlefield near you
Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing everything – from education, health care, and banking, to how we wage war. By simplifying military tasks, improving intelligence-gathering, and fine-tuning weapons accuracy — all of which could make wars less deadly – AI is redefining our concept of modern military might.
At its most basic level, militaries around the world are harnessing AI to train algorithms that can make their work faster and more effective. Today, it is used for image recognition, cyber warfare, strategic planning, logistics, bomb disposal, command and control, and more.
But there’s also plenty of debate over whether this could lead to killer robots and an apocalyptic endgame. Science fiction offers plenty of images of this – from Isaac Asimov’s rogue robots, the “Terminator” and Skynet, to Matthew Broderick racing to stop a supercomputer from unleashing nukes in “War Games.” Can we have less deadly wars without robots taking over the world?
Much of the concern about the future centers on lethal autonomous weapons, aka LAWs or killer robots, which are military tools that can target and engage in combat without human intervention. The weapons can be programmed to seek and destroy without a human steering them. LAWs could eventually become commonplace in war, and while critics have long campaigned to ban them and halt their development, militaries around the globe are exploring and testing this technology.
The US military, for example, is reportedly using an AI-powered quadcopter in operations, and early this year, the Air Force gave AI the controls of an F-16 for 17 hours.
During the first AUKUS AI and autonomy trial this spring, the UK tested a collaborative swarm of drones, which were able to detect and track military targets. And the US has reportedly developed a “pilotless” XQ-58A Valkyrie drone it hopes will “become a potent supplement to its fleet of traditional fighter jets, giving human pilots a swarm of highly capable robot wingmen to deploy in battle.” While the AI will help identify the targets, humans will still need to sign off before they shoot – at least for now.
Samuel Bresnick, a research fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, says the potential uses of AI permeate all aspects of the military. AI can help the military “sift through huge amounts of information and pick out patterns,” he says, and this is already happening across the military’s intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems.
AI can also be used for advanced image recognition to aid military targeting. “For example, if the US has millions of hours of drone footage from the wars in the Middle East,” he says, “[they] can use that as training data for AI algorithms.”
AI can also help militaries plan hypersonic or ballistic missile trajectories — China reportedly used AI to develop a defensive system to detect such missiles.
There are innumerable other uses too, such as advancing cyber-espionage efforts and simplifying command-and-control decision-making, but the way militaries use AI is already garnering pushback and concern. Just last week, a group of 200 people working in AI signed an open letter condemning Israel’s use of “AI-driven technologies for warmaking, in which the aim is to make the loss of human life more efficient.”
World leaders like US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping are likewise concerned about the global adoption of AI-infused military tech, but that’s not slowing down their own efforts to gear up and gain a strategic advantage over one another.
•••
As the US ramps up its military capabilities, it is doing so as part of an AI arms race with China.
Last week, Biden and Xi met at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, where they talked about artificial intelligence (among other things). The two world leaders “agreed to a dialogue to keep the [AI] from being deployed in ways that could destabilize global security.”
As AI becomes increasingly intertwined with their countries’ military ambitions and capabilities, Biden and Xi appear interested in keeping one another in check but are not in any rush to sign agreements that would prevent themselves from gaining a technological advantage over the other. “Both of these militaries want desperately to develop these technologies because they think it’s going to be the next revolution in military affairs,” Bresnick said. “Neither one is going to want to tie their hands.”
Justin Sherman, a senior fellow at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy and founder of Global Cyber Strategies, said he is concerned that AI could become the center of an arms race with no known endpoint.
“Thinking of it as a race …could potentially lead the US more toward an approach where AI systems are being built that really, as a democracy, it should not be building — or should be more cautious about building — but [they] are being built out of this fear that a foreign state might do what we do not,” Sherman said.
But with AI being a large suite of technologies, and one that’s evolving incredibly quickly, there’s no way to know where the race actually ends.
As AI plays an increasing role in the military destinies of both countries, Sherman says, there’s a risk of “the US and China constantly trying to one-up each other in the latest and greatest, and the most lethal technology just becomes more and more dangerous over time.”
File Photo: U.S. soldiers stand next to a Patriot anti-missile battery (not seen) west of Jerusalem, during "Austere Challenge 2012", a joint Israeli-hosted exercise October 23, 2012.
Hard Numbers: US prepares troops to support Israel, heartbreak for gay Indians, a massive missing statue, Mexico’s end-run around Panama, Algeria steps up for Palestinian soccer
2,000: The US military has ordered 2,000 soldiers to prepare to be deployed to Israel, where they may provide medical and advisory support to Israeli forces. This potential deployment is in addition to the 2,000-strong force of sailors and Marines the Pentagon said was sailing toward the Eastern Mediterranean on Monday.
5: A five-judge panel of the Indian Supreme Court unanimously declined to legalize same-sex marriage in the world’s largest democracy on Tuesday, referring the issue to Parliament instead. The ruling conservative Bharatiya Janata Party opposes same-sex marriage, and the government’s solicitor Tushar Mehta said such a union is “far removed from the social ethos” of India.
3.5 million: A plaster cast by master sculptor Auguste Rodin worth approximately 3.5 million euros ($3.7 million) has gone missing — or to use the archival euphemism, it’s been “unlocated” — from the collection of the Glasgow Museum in Scotland. If you were holding your breath to see it … well, you are probably dead because the last time it was on display was 1949, and some archivists believe it may have broken while in storage.
2.8 billion: The Mexican government launched a $2.8 billion project to revive a rail corridor along the Isthmus of Tehuantepec that could bring cargo from the Atlantic to the Pacific, bypassing the Panama Canal. The canal is struggling to operate amid drought conditions, with low-water levels leaving container ships waiting for weeks. But experts say it will take years for Mexico to build the infrastructure needed to seriously rival Panama.
3: The Palestinian soccer team could play at least three home matches to qualify for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in Algeria, after the Algerian Football Federation offered to host the team’s “home” games and pay associated costs in an act of solidarity. The Algerians also said they would foot the bill for the “Lions of Canaan” to travel to their away qualifiers and to the Asian Cup in Qatar in January.File Photo: The South Korea and U.S. alliance fired eight combined surface-to-surface missiles ATACMS into the East Sea in response to North Korea multiple ballistic missile (SRBM) provocation from around 4:45 p.m on June 6, 2022.
Did the Ukrainians just use ATACMS?
Ukrainian officials have pleaded with Washington for months to provide its military with so-called Army Tactical Missile Systems, widely known as ATACMS, to hit important Russian targets deep behind enemy lines. It appears the US has now sent a small number of these missiles – and Ukraine claims that it used them on the battlefield on Tuesday to big effect. Its Special Operations Forces say they destroyed nine Russian helicopters, an air defense launcher, and an ammunition depot, with multiple Russian casualties.
Were the weapons they used the sought-after ATACMS? Ukraine isn’t saying, though President Volodymyr Zelensky dropped some not-so-subtle hints following the strike. “I thank those who are destroying at scale the logistics and bases of the occupiers of our land. We have results,” Zelensky said Tuesday. “I thank certain partners of ours: effective weapons, just as we agreed.”
Zelensky has every reason to talk up Ukrainian successes. The counteroffensive has so far fallen well short of the hopes and expectations of allies. The crisis in Israel has distracted the US and Europe and may require military resources that might have gone to Ukraine. Some hard-right Republicans in the US have called for a halt to US help for Kyiv.
It’s also likely that the missiles used in this case were an older version of ATACMS that lack the range of the more modern weapons Ukraine is still hoping for. Most targets inside Crimea, for example, remain out of reach for now.
But this attack reminds us that Washington remains Ukraine’s ally, Ukraine’s military remains a potent fighting force, and much still happens behind the scenes that we become aware of only when something large explodes.
General of the Polish Army, Chief of the General Staff of the Polish Army - Rajmund Andrzejczak seen during the 84th anniversary of the outbreak of World War II in Westerplatte. He and Tomasz Piotrowski resigned from command Tuesday.
PiS takes hit from military resignations ahead of election
Just five days before a parliamentary election that will determine the trajectory of Polish politics, two top military commanders and 10 officers have resigned in a scandal that could undermine the national security platform of the ruling Law and Justice party, aka PiS.
The resignations, which were confirmed on Tuesday, have raised questions about the state of Poland’s military as the Russian-Ukraine war rages next door. The president has already found their replacements, citing the need to limit military disruptions due to the “exceptional circumstances” on their border.
The commanders reportedly quit over the government’s politicization of the armed forces on the campaign trail, but tensions between top brass and the government have been building for months. The defense minister criticized the army’s underreaction when a stray Russian missile crashed into a Polish forest late last year. And the final straw came when the commanders were kept out of decisions surrounding the evacuation of Poles from Israel after this weekend’s attack.
The resignations could damage the PiS’s reelection campaign as it positions itself as the only party that can keep Poland secure. Opposition candidates say the resignations are a symbolic condemnation of the ruling party’s national security platform, but it is unclear whether the scandal will change voters’ minds before Sunday’s vote. Polling suggests that the election will be extremely close, with the outcome determining whether Poland veers further toward the populist right.