In a perfect world, Israel should have captured each and every Hamas member and brought them to trial, without any its own casualties (civ or mil) and any Palestinian casualties. Everything else is a waste of life and resources. The other extreme is just kill everyone on the enemy side and the problem is gone (40k casualties is nowhere near that extreme). So the question is where Israel draw the line and what is the near future and long future cost of drawing that line. That decisions are made by politicians, but also made every second by the boots on the ground. By 20 year olds, if they are junior officers or sargents. And if those boots on the ground can have better data by using AI, I am all for it.
The author is Yuval Abraham. From his Wikipedia we know him to be very anti-Israeli: in American terms, equivalent to Jane Fonda. His claims are all allegedly based on unidentified sources from inside the Israeli's 8200 unit of Military Intelligence. We know that many of the unit's operatives were involved in the anti-government protests that preceded October 7.
Both of these facts do not prima facie invalidate any factual statements Abraham makes, but is certainly a factor to be considered when reading the article.
The article follows with many evocative statements that imply a massive number of civilian deaths per strike. The problem is that these statements do not match the reality we know. If we accept Hamas casualty figures, then the Israelis are killing 2 non combatants for every combatant, which compares favorably to the 3:1 deaths in Iraq. As an aside, my guess is when the dust settles we will find that the total number of Gazans killed is 20,000, of which 10,000 are non combatants killed by both sides. But we can just look at Abraham's data to see it makes no sense.
Abraham alleges the Israelis attacked suspects' homes killing them with their families. Since fighters are not stupid, we expect that in less than a week, no one goes home anymore they simply go and fight. This implies we should have seen massive civilian casualties in the first week, all identified as family of Hamas fighters, followed by relatively few civilian deaths. Hamas data is that the number of civilian deaths increase monotonously.
Although we can be certain that something like Lavender exists, using ICD-203 we can conclude that Abraham's dramatic claims are very unlikely to be true.
I can't find information about Abraham's age (probably less than 30) or education (maybe art or education), but certainly he is not a military or computer guy so he doesn't know what he is talking about. My guess, he is an unwitting pipeline for Iran intelligence.
Lavender or something like it certainly exists in every law enforcement agency (e.g., FBI, CIA), is no different than how Google's profiling works and might or might not be AI. Simply put, any item of information about a specific person is given a score related to how likely a Hamas fighter would be characterized by that information. For instance, travelling to Lebanon would be a high score, your phone often being in proximity of a Hamas leader would be a middle score, and shopping at Al Sahaba supermarket would not have a score at all.
"How many civilian lives are acceptable" is easily answered by International Law: as long as an attack is proportional to achieve a military aim, any number of dead civilians is acceptable. Further, since Hamas intentionally targets Israeli civilians and wears no identification, they are criminally liable for all civilian deaths on both sides.
The only fortifications we know of that compared to the Hamas fortifications are those at Nangarhar complex used by Afghan insurgents. Realizing there was no easy way to defeat the insurgents (according to Patton "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."), the US MOABd the complex almost exactly 7 years ago.
Using the Nangarhar attack as a reference, International Law would recognize a MOAB attack against Hamas in Gaza as proportional.
In Nangarhar the US minimized civilian deaths by letting civilians flee. In contrast, the main mistake made by the international community in Gaza is the inexplicable decision to prevent Gazan civilians from fleeing the fighting, thereby forcing Gazans to serve as human shields for Hamas.
Also, I assume you were joking about giving Hezbollah and Hamas the Lavender system so they can minimize civilian losses. An express war aim of both Hezbollah and Hamas (as well as many other Middle Eastern forces) is targeting civilians.
Doesn't that 972 website seem like something dreamed up in Tehran or St.Petersburg? It gives the impression of putting one set of filters on reality, then adding imagination in order to achieve the effect desired by he site's management/sponsors.
Acoustic based counter-battery technology has existed since World War I, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_sound_ranging) Wireless technology and computers allow for more flexible and rapid deployment, but the operating principles are exactly the same. The beauty of artillery sound ranging is that it presents no electronic signature on the battlefield for the enemy to detect.
The War in Gaza is turning into a Pyrrhic victory for Israel and the current government. They took unprecedented international and domestic support and turned it into extraordinary vocal criticism, pressure and disapproval. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/27/us-poll-israel-gaza/)
Bibi would have done better to remember that "...war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of other means."
Can the f35 “fire” a missile from a ship or another plane and use that in its battle space? I’ve heard it can but not really sure if I understood it correctly.
This is a deeply disturbing story and I think Ryan has done a very good job both of describing the technical details of this targeting system and showing reasonable questions about the story itself, which claims anonymous sources. The use of anonymous sources is fairly common in mainstream media and since some information here is coming from members of the military, the use of anonymous sources is understandable, and the fact that the story claims multiple sources would give it weight, if the outlet itself were more a main stream and established outlet (which it is not). So he is correct to at least question the veracity of the sources.
But if we decide to credit the story as largely accurate, it raises profound questions about the Gaza war as executed by Israel and the idea of future conflicts in which the ratio of civilian casualties is determined by a digital slider. It is my own bias that the Israeli’s, through a combination of their own history of conflict with the Arabs and rage over the October 7th atrocities, see no basic difference between Palestinian civilians and Hamas fighters, and this story suggests that the AI targeting allows them to decide that entire families or entire apartment buildings full of civilians are worth destroying in order to kill one Hamas operative, even low level ones. The attack on the international aid workers (including an American) is only the most recent strike on non-combatants including aid workers, medical workers and journalists by the IDF.
I am not now and have never been a member of the military and I am not qualified to second guess decisions made under fire. But the scope of the casualties and the very high number of women and children killed in this conflict are unusual to most qualified observers. And this story suggests the chilling and willing removal of human oversight to mass killings by the IDF.
Determining how many civilians it is worth killing in order to kill one enemy soldier is essentially an ethical question, or should be. The strategic bombing campaigns of World War Two killed many, many hundreds of thousands of civilians but did not have the intended impact on the enemy war effort, we now know. The Israeli’s are hardly the first to show indifference to the suffering of enemy civilians, but because we are arming and supplying the IDF, all American tax payers are complicit in these tragedies to one degree or another and nobody is asking the American people where to put the digital slider on the kill ratio.
I think Ryan is suggesting that, like it or not, this AI system will probably continue to be developed and implemented in future conflicts and so discussing its implications is important. Thanks, Ryan.
I was wondering about why they were setting the maximum to the values they described in the document. I my head the cost / value equation is being set at pretty high values given modern sensibilities. I realize that an existential threat merits accepting potentially extreme colleterial casualties (think Dresden or the Tokyo fire raids). I find it interesting to think about what the acceptable stated casualty levels says about Israel's perceived threat level. I also think general distribution of the information in that article, if believed, could cause a significant change in policy within the US and other governments.
With 37,000 targets, and a tolerance of civilian deaths-to-target of 15-to-1 on the very low end, my grade school math gives me 555,000 marked for death---on the low end. A system built to kill 518,000 civilians at the very least, out of a population of 2.3 million. How can we argue that this is moral? Even that target list of 37,000---everyone who works for local civic society in Gaza is probably on it, which means the postal carriers and the road workers.
Ryan, The linked source document was disturbing in many ways. What is your assessment of the truth of some of the major claims specifically the level of tolerance of colleterial casualties?
In a perfect world, Israel should have captured each and every Hamas member and brought them to trial, without any its own casualties (civ or mil) and any Palestinian casualties. Everything else is a waste of life and resources. The other extreme is just kill everyone on the enemy side and the problem is gone (40k casualties is nowhere near that extreme). So the question is where Israel draw the line and what is the near future and long future cost of drawing that line. That decisions are made by politicians, but also made every second by the boots on the ground. By 20 year olds, if they are junior officers or sargents. And if those boots on the ground can have better data by using AI, I am all for it.
I read the +972 article and have a few comments.
The author is Yuval Abraham. From his Wikipedia we know him to be very anti-Israeli: in American terms, equivalent to Jane Fonda. His claims are all allegedly based on unidentified sources from inside the Israeli's 8200 unit of Military Intelligence. We know that many of the unit's operatives were involved in the anti-government protests that preceded October 7.
Both of these facts do not prima facie invalidate any factual statements Abraham makes, but is certainly a factor to be considered when reading the article.
The article follows with many evocative statements that imply a massive number of civilian deaths per strike. The problem is that these statements do not match the reality we know. If we accept Hamas casualty figures, then the Israelis are killing 2 non combatants for every combatant, which compares favorably to the 3:1 deaths in Iraq. As an aside, my guess is when the dust settles we will find that the total number of Gazans killed is 20,000, of which 10,000 are non combatants killed by both sides. But we can just look at Abraham's data to see it makes no sense.
Abraham alleges the Israelis attacked suspects' homes killing them with their families. Since fighters are not stupid, we expect that in less than a week, no one goes home anymore they simply go and fight. This implies we should have seen massive civilian casualties in the first week, all identified as family of Hamas fighters, followed by relatively few civilian deaths. Hamas data is that the number of civilian deaths increase monotonously.
Although we can be certain that something like Lavender exists, using ICD-203 we can conclude that Abraham's dramatic claims are very unlikely to be true.
I can't find information about Abraham's age (probably less than 30) or education (maybe art or education), but certainly he is not a military or computer guy so he doesn't know what he is talking about. My guess, he is an unwitting pipeline for Iran intelligence.
Lavender or something like it certainly exists in every law enforcement agency (e.g., FBI, CIA), is no different than how Google's profiling works and might or might not be AI. Simply put, any item of information about a specific person is given a score related to how likely a Hamas fighter would be characterized by that information. For instance, travelling to Lebanon would be a high score, your phone often being in proximity of a Hamas leader would be a middle score, and shopping at Al Sahaba supermarket would not have a score at all.
"How many civilian lives are acceptable" is easily answered by International Law: as long as an attack is proportional to achieve a military aim, any number of dead civilians is acceptable. Further, since Hamas intentionally targets Israeli civilians and wears no identification, they are criminally liable for all civilian deaths on both sides.
The only fortifications we know of that compared to the Hamas fortifications are those at Nangarhar complex used by Afghan insurgents. Realizing there was no easy way to defeat the insurgents (according to Patton "The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."), the US MOABd the complex almost exactly 7 years ago.
Using the Nangarhar attack as a reference, International Law would recognize a MOAB attack against Hamas in Gaza as proportional.
In Nangarhar the US minimized civilian deaths by letting civilians flee. In contrast, the main mistake made by the international community in Gaza is the inexplicable decision to prevent Gazan civilians from fleeing the fighting, thereby forcing Gazans to serve as human shields for Hamas.
Also, I assume you were joking about giving Hezbollah and Hamas the Lavender system so they can minimize civilian losses. An express war aim of both Hezbollah and Hamas (as well as many other Middle Eastern forces) is targeting civilians.
Doesn't that 972 website seem like something dreamed up in Tehran or St.Petersburg? It gives the impression of putting one set of filters on reality, then adding imagination in order to achieve the effect desired by he site's management/sponsors.
Acoustic based counter-battery technology has existed since World War I, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artillery_sound_ranging) Wireless technology and computers allow for more flexible and rapid deployment, but the operating principles are exactly the same. The beauty of artillery sound ranging is that it presents no electronic signature on the battlefield for the enemy to detect.
The War in Gaza is turning into a Pyrrhic victory for Israel and the current government. They took unprecedented international and domestic support and turned it into extraordinary vocal criticism, pressure and disapproval. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/03/27/us-poll-israel-gaza/)
Bibi would have done better to remember that "...war is nothing but a continuation of political intercourse, with a mixture of other means."
Can the f35 “fire” a missile from a ship or another plane and use that in its battle space? I’ve heard it can but not really sure if I understood it correctly.
This is a deeply disturbing story and I think Ryan has done a very good job both of describing the technical details of this targeting system and showing reasonable questions about the story itself, which claims anonymous sources. The use of anonymous sources is fairly common in mainstream media and since some information here is coming from members of the military, the use of anonymous sources is understandable, and the fact that the story claims multiple sources would give it weight, if the outlet itself were more a main stream and established outlet (which it is not). So he is correct to at least question the veracity of the sources.
But if we decide to credit the story as largely accurate, it raises profound questions about the Gaza war as executed by Israel and the idea of future conflicts in which the ratio of civilian casualties is determined by a digital slider. It is my own bias that the Israeli’s, through a combination of their own history of conflict with the Arabs and rage over the October 7th atrocities, see no basic difference between Palestinian civilians and Hamas fighters, and this story suggests that the AI targeting allows them to decide that entire families or entire apartment buildings full of civilians are worth destroying in order to kill one Hamas operative, even low level ones. The attack on the international aid workers (including an American) is only the most recent strike on non-combatants including aid workers, medical workers and journalists by the IDF.
I am not now and have never been a member of the military and I am not qualified to second guess decisions made under fire. But the scope of the casualties and the very high number of women and children killed in this conflict are unusual to most qualified observers. And this story suggests the chilling and willing removal of human oversight to mass killings by the IDF.
Determining how many civilians it is worth killing in order to kill one enemy soldier is essentially an ethical question, or should be. The strategic bombing campaigns of World War Two killed many, many hundreds of thousands of civilians but did not have the intended impact on the enemy war effort, we now know. The Israeli’s are hardly the first to show indifference to the suffering of enemy civilians, but because we are arming and supplying the IDF, all American tax payers are complicit in these tragedies to one degree or another and nobody is asking the American people where to put the digital slider on the kill ratio.
I think Ryan is suggesting that, like it or not, this AI system will probably continue to be developed and implemented in future conflicts and so discussing its implications is important. Thanks, Ryan.
I was wondering about why they were setting the maximum to the values they described in the document. I my head the cost / value equation is being set at pretty high values given modern sensibilities. I realize that an existential threat merits accepting potentially extreme colleterial casualties (think Dresden or the Tokyo fire raids). I find it interesting to think about what the acceptable stated casualty levels says about Israel's perceived threat level. I also think general distribution of the information in that article, if believed, could cause a significant change in policy within the US and other governments.
With 37,000 targets, and a tolerance of civilian deaths-to-target of 15-to-1 on the very low end, my grade school math gives me 555,000 marked for death---on the low end. A system built to kill 518,000 civilians at the very least, out of a population of 2.3 million. How can we argue that this is moral? Even that target list of 37,000---everyone who works for local civic society in Gaza is probably on it, which means the postal carriers and the road workers.
Ryan, The linked source document was disturbing in many ways. What is your assessment of the truth of some of the major claims specifically the level of tolerance of colleterial casualties?
Marcy