Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the rollout of GenAI.mil today in a video posted to X. To hear Hegseth tell it, the website is “the future of American warfare.” In practice, based on what we know so far from press releases and Hegseth’s posturing, GenAI.mil appears to be a custom chatbot interface for Google Gemini that can handle some forms of sensitive—but not classified—data.
Hegseth’s announcement was full of bold pronouncements about the future of killing people. These kinds of pronouncements are typical of the second Trump administration which has said it believes the rush to “win” AI is an existential threat on par with the invention of nuclear weapons during World War II.
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Hey now, don’t forget how much of the German wartime economy was functionally subsidized by American capital investment. War profiteering was at the heart of both World Wars, not to mention the fifty years of Cold War (and assorted hot conflicts) that followed.
Also worth noting that fascism, as a social institution, was rampaging through France and the UK and Spain and the Americas and North Africa and East Asia. Nazism wasn’t a uniquely German characteristic. The German Blitz was the result of an effort to effectively re-colonize Europe through private sponsorship of an industrial war machine. All the dipshittery that followed was as prevalent outside Germany as inside of it. If you ever reach “Catch-22”, a lot of the gags in that book had parallels to IRL fuckups performed by the US during their counter-invasion.
The real flaw in the German (and Japanese) war effort was their limited access to petroleum. These countries quite literally ran out of gas by the mid-40s.
Incidentally, the next 50 years of Cold War heavily revolved around which Superpowers had uncontested access to Middle Eastern petroleum reserves.