Category Archives: Security

Security

Russia Losing War Because Unable to “Build Airplane in Flight”

1 Comment

Sage analysis can be found in a new Task and Purpose article, which generally (no pun intended) has had some of the best reporting anywhere about the Ukraine War.

“While it is expected that Russian forces will regroup and restart their offensive, it is very important to remember that this is still the same Russian military with low morale, distrust in the ranks, weapons systems and logistics problems, and many other issues that have been widely discussed,” Holynska told Task & Purpose. “These problems cannot be solved quickly. Building the airplane in flight is likely not a task Russia is able to fulfill successfully in the coming weeks or months.”

That’s a modern take on an important footnote of WWII known as “75% of German Army relied on horses“.

One of the great misconceptions about World War II is the notion that the German Army was a marvel of mechanical efficiency…

Indeed. Russia has been likewise showing itself inefficient. Obviously unprepared and incompetent at military operations, is there any pivot for them other than General “butcher” Lee mode of rising death tolls while losing?

Russia has officially started communicating as they seek other “means” for rich white men to violently reject liberal values (e.g. deny freedom, justice and liberty to others).

“The war has changed, and we can only win this war by using means other than those we have been employing up to this point,” Morosov said.

As I’ve written many times here, the US has been overestimating any “learning” and “adaptive” capability of this dictatorship. It has tried to force everyone into being drone-like binary agents who have to be told what to think. That doesn’t leave many other “means” for success, although it does bring to mind covert sabotage operations such as how Germany operated in WWI.

This is why I’ve repeatedly predicted Russia may continue being exceptionally brutal and abusive in their desperate ploy to show power where in reality they are weak, like the Trump family victimizing the most vulnerable as quickly as possible.

…the conflict in Ukraine has become a war without pity. When the Ukrainians liberated the suburb of Bucha, the world was aghast to discover that Russian forces had killed scores of civilians.

The Russians thus continue in so many ways to emerge like the Nazis. It’s become hard not to call the pitiful “Z” just a sad attempt to use a swastika when they run out of paint.

This reminds me of when I’m asked about driverless cars and the trolley problem and I always reply that a truly intelligent car would never have gotten itself into the problem in the first place. If you’ve seen any of my AI presentations, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

Don’t launch a plane unfit to fly, or a rocket that has to be blown up during launch.

Sailing, Security

“Symbol of Russian Naval Power” Moskva Catches Fire and Sinks

Leave a comment

I’ve written before here about the sorry state of the Russian Navy. Today we have yet another example in the sinking of a dirty 1970s “Slava-class” bathtub built in 1983.

…a huge morale and propaganda boost for the Ukrainians not only because the Moskva is the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet, but also because this is the same ship from the famous Snake Island incident, when soldiers were recorded telling the Russian warship to “go f*** itself” before being bombarded. The warship is a “symbol of Russian naval power in the Black Sea,” Michael Petersen of the Russia Maritime Studies Institute told to BBC reporters. “The Moskva has been a thorn in the side of the Ukrainians since the beginning of this conflict. To see it damaged so badly… I think is going to be a real morale boost to the Ukrainians.”

Speaking of propaganda, the Moskva (Moscow) symbolically was repaired and modernized in 2020 after being unwisely renamed in 1996 from its original name Slava (glory).

Now, what a ship was christened, so let her stay, I says. — Long John Silver

Perhaps some of the “glory” was gone from this “pride of the Soviet navy” after it was implicated in the 1989 “Seasick Summit“.

Things were even worse 400 yards away aboard the Soviet cruiser Slava, chosen to co-host the summit because of its space-based communications systems that have made it the pride of the Soviet navy. Gorbachev was forced to abandon several attempts to reach the 11,000-ton cruiser, taking refuge on the Soviet passenger liner Maxim Gorky, which was docked in the harbor.

While carrying the admiral’s flag, one of the most important features of Moskva was its Soviet-era S-300F wide-area radar defense capabilities meant to protect the Black Sea fleet.

Source: The Aviationist

Loss of radar is a huge setback. Russian defense capabilities had been fraught with incompetence already, and now have even less to work with. This potentially shows again Ukrainian defense dominance using light and agile air campaigns to destroy even the largest and most expensive Russian offensive operations.

What we know mainly is that on April 13th a fire broke out with still uncertain causes.

Ukraine naturally suggested it deserved some credit, saying it had diverted the ship using a Bayraktar TB2 drone before hitting it with a modern anti-ship missile (a R-360 Neptune, arguably based on a Soviet Zvezda Kh-35 / AS-20 Kayak).

If true it would be their second successful coastline defense move.

Earlier reports on sinking of the Russian amphibious landing vessel Saratov indicated Ukraine hit it with a Tochka ballistic missile

Notably that Neptune missile was commissioned in 2013 by Ukraine (preceding the 2014 invasion by Russia) specifically to defend its southern coast against Russian ships, and went into service by 2019.

Like a sea bird using “ground effect” as it flies just above the water the Neptune skims the Black Sea surface, meaning targeting during notoriously stormy weather works in its favor in two distinct ways. A water skimming feature makes it even harder to detect in waves and waterline damage in storms is even more likely to cause sinking exactly like what was observed here.

The Pentagon initially had suggested “the ship is able to make its own way, and it is doing that”.

Yet Odessa OVA Maxim Marchenko observed a serious fire was still burning, and the cruiser indeed sank soon after. It sank quickly enough and in rough conditions such that a nearby cutter reported it rescued only about a dozen of the more than 500 on board, taking them to Sevastopol.

LiveUAmap adds that the Russian Defense Ministry reported it only as “sank while being towed in a storm“.

Source: LiveUAmap

Given Ukraine mentioned their drone in the operation, and other ships nearby, it is at least plausible that there will someday be footage available to confirm whether a Neptune was involved.

Even more to the point perhaps, given how out in the open cyber warfare (intelligence operations) have been during this war, Jeffery Carr provocatively suggests Ukraine hacked Russian communication channels over two months ago enabling them to seek and destroy the Moskva. He offers evidence of the hack, such as this Russian diagram, for a fee.

Source: Inside Cyber Warfare
Security

Integrity Gaps of Conflict Early Warning/Early Action (EWEA) Technology

Leave a comment

A new report called “Can Emerging Technologies Lead a Revival of Conflict Early Warning/Early Action? Lessons from the Field” seems to have this buried lede:

It is worth noting that dealing with misinformation and disinformation in the EWEA field is labor intensive and relies on human interpreters. So far, we have found no models that use automated methods to screen out some of the bad information in order to lighten the workload of human reviewers. This is an area for potential future growth

No automated methods in any models?

Humans (e.g. journalists) are required to filter signal from noise?

Those points suggest the field believes no technology exists for safely automating data integrity checks, despite being absolutely essential to scaling EWEA technology.

It’s a very different message from security advocates (included in some of my presentations) purporting to do exactly this kind of work, such as the “AI” pandemic watch systems that completely missed Ebola because they couldn’t understand non-English communication. Or the Facebook CSO who from an ivory tower in Silicon Valley infamously claimed to understand the problems with monitoring for genocide signals better than people in the field reporting about it.

This report thus casts a shadow on companies that have long argued they were somehow capable of processing global misinformation centrally at massive scale (e.g. instead they have likely been facilitating atrocity crimes).

Very important to note field models aren’t yet accepting emerging technology even when it is being developed to solve their exact problem. That’s a finding that needs to be called out prominently because it’s a huge opportunity for emerging technology, especially humanitarians working in the security profession, to think more seriously about.

History, Security

Let’s Be Honest, Nice Means Ignorant

Leave a comment

Saying “be nice” is nothing like saying “be kind”. The two phrases are worlds apart.

First, consider how a British man living in Holland says the Dutch seem “rude” (to him the opposite of nice) because of what he deems an egalitarian approach (data sharing) to risk management.

The constant need to defend against flooding also had a profound impact: with one person’s land at risk if another failed to maintain their dikes, it was essential that decisions be made collectively.

That’s not really accurate. Armies have constant need to defend, yet decisions do not need to be made collectively. It wasn’t a need to defend against water that led to a Dutch “directness” against lying and cheating, also known as holding people accountable.

Others have tried to put a humorous spin on the real reasoning, related to a sense of justice and equality:

Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of the country is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers.

A freedom to speak the truth or even just detect and document what is happening was a method to resist attempts at denial (non-repudiation), which were early integrity controls related to Dutch distaste for Spanish religion-based rule 1556 to 1581.

Calvinist religion had a large impact on national identity because the Dutch associated Catholicism with Spanish oppression. From that moment on, “Calvinism dictated the individual responsibility for moral salvage from the sinful world through introspection, total honesty, soberness, rejection of ‘pleasure’ as well as the ‘enjoyment’ of wealth,” writes Breukel in an article on Dutch business culture published on her website.

Everyone speaking their mind (a methodology of truth-seeking as offensive measures) enabled popular resistance to a form of top-down management where an autocrat could never be wrong (never be brought to justice by lawyers) because even the laws were autocratically controlled.

This is the philosophical split between a set of inherited rights versus controlled rights, an ancient ethics distinction which I often refer to in my talks about why artificial intelligence can be so unsafe.

The real product today of the Beeldenstorm of 1566 (Iconoclasm) is that the Dutch aren’t very religious.

Depiction of the Beeldenstorm. Source: RP-P-OB-77.720 at www.rijksmuseum.nl

The British by comparison tend to lean on the concept of being “rude” as a social enforcement mechanism.

Everyone in England is supposed to be trying to pull together on a collective goal (e.g. winning against adversaries, staying in a queue during WWI or WWII) as a different form of resistance to imposed authority. There’s actually less divergence between the two cultures than implied just because Holland dealt with Spanish inquisition while England… dealt with its own set of threats.

Second, while being “nice” is an act of self-erasure supposedly in the interest of others — whether society or a single authority — it’s the opposite of what’s being discussed above in terms of risk and information sharing. It’s literally a form of ignorance.

Nice didn’t always mean what it means today. “Nice” comes from the Latin nescius, which literally means, “not-knowing” (from ne, “not,” and scire, “to know.”) Even centuries later, when the word found its way into Middle English, that meaning more-or-less remained the same: “nice” still connoted ignorance. If you were “nice,” that meant you were simple, foolish, daft—an idiot.

This all begs the question whether people think of others in terms of an actual greater good (e.g. lowland flooding) or simply erasing themselves at the behest of random request to not have independent thoughts. Holland is the former and Texas is a great example of the latter (e.g. it’s not “nice” to talk about real history such as a racist state founded to perpetuate and expand slavery alone). Did you know in 1836 that America used an official “Gag rule” to deny Americans the right to speak the truth about slavery?

In fact, Texas and Florida history clearly shows they are states with a total lack of accountability and an idealized model of business profit and ascent to power. They are doing statewide what has been celebrated in popular American spectator events that reward niceness (lying) like NASCAR and Football. Being nice in America may mean peddling catchy “know nothing” ignorance as a means of privileged profit by doing harm to others, which also explains why the unkindness of “tipping” is still a thing.

In other words, if you desire to prevent power shifting to liars and cheats try to practice integrity (honesty) and be kind, even when it’s not nice (rude).