The changing face of war and killing...

Editor's note: ...are an inextricable part of human existence on Earth and there is nothing that will change this fact. People can protest and demonstrate against war all they want but there is no force on Earth that will stop war as it continuously evolves into ever more sophisticated technology-driven weapons with increasingly efficient clinically detached lethality. In this predator and prey ecosphere we are born into that most barely understand, violence and killing are second nature to this species. Violence, war and killing are hard wired into our DNA. The terrifying sound of drones flying over Ukraine's battlefields are an example of the changing technology of killing. A Russian drone operator can fly a FPV drone through a window of a demolished house in Kursk, and after viewing Ukrainian soldiers inside sheltering detonate the munition connected to the drone. War and killing are how this species advances technology. All one has to do is to see how Israel has deployed AI-developed weaponry to target and kill Palestinians in Gaza. We have entered a new technocratic era of war and killing demonstrating again how life here requires "blood sacrifice" in order to "advance life on Earth."

Peter Thiel and other technocrats surrounding Donald Trump
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The New Age Militarists

March 20, 2025 | By Consortium News

The high-tech oligarchs surrounding Trump are set on using artificial intelligence and new technologies for the sake of uniting us around perpetual war, says William Hartung.

By William Hartung

Alex Karp, the CEO of the controversial military tech firm Palantir, is the coauthor of a new book, The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West.

In it, he calls for a renewed sense of national purpose and even greater cooperation between government and the tech sector. His book is, in fact, not just an account of how to spur technological innovation, but a distinctly ideological tract.

As a start, Karp roundly criticizes Silicon Valley's focus on consumer-oriented products and events like video-sharing apps, online shopping and social media platforms, which he dismisses as "the narrow and the trivial."

His focus instead is on what he likes to think of as innovative big-tech projects of greater social and political consequence.

He argues, in fact, that Americans face "a moment of reckoning" in which we must decide "what is this country, and for what do we stand?"

And in the process, he makes it all too clear just where he stands — in strong support of what can only be considered a new global technological arms race, fueled by close collaboration between government and industry and designed to preserve America's "fragile geopolitical advantage over our adversaries."

Karp believes that applying American technological expertise to building next-generation weapons systems is the genuine path to national salvation and he advocates a revival of the concept of "the West" as foundational for future freedom and collective identity.

As Sophie Hurwitz of Mother Jones noted recently, Karp summarized this view in a letter to Palantir shareholders in which he claimed that the rise of the West wasn't due to "the superiority of its ideas or values or religion… but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence."

Count on one thing: Karp's approach, if adopted, will yield billions of taxpayer dollars for Palantir and its militarized Silicon Valley cohorts in their search for AI weaponry that they see as the modern equivalent of nuclear weapons and the key to beating China, America's current great power rival.

Militarism as a Unifying Force in a New Manhattan Project

Karp may be right that this country desperately needs a new national purpose, but his proposed solution is, to put it politely, dangerously misguided.

Ominously enough, one of his primary examples of a unifying initiative worth emulating is World War II's Manhattan Project, which produced the first atomic bombs. He sees the building of those bombs as both a supreme technological achievement and a deep source of national pride, while conveniently ignoring their world-ending potential. And he proposes embarking on a comparable effort in the realm of emerging military technologies:

"The United States and its allies abroad should without delay commit to launching a new Manhattan Project in order to retain exclusive control of the most sophisticated forms of AI for the battlefield — the targeting systems and swarms of drones and robots that will become the most powerful weapons of the century."

And here's a question he simply skips: How exactly will the United States and its allies "retain exclusive control" of whatever sophisticated new military technologies they develop?

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