<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/mar/15/ai-defense-warfare-companies>
"There is an Israeli military strategy called the “fog procedure”. First used
during the second intifada, it’s an unofficial rule that requires soldiers
guarding military posts in conditions of low visibility to shoot bursts of
gunfire into the darkness, on the theory that an invisible threat might be
lurking.
It’s violence licensed by blindness. Shoot into the darkness and call it
deterrence. With the dawn of AI warfare, that same logic of chosen blindness
has been refined, systematized, and handed off to a machine.
Israel’s recent war in Gaza has been described as the first major “AI war” –
the first war in which AI systems have played a central role in generating
Israel’s list of purported Hamas and Islamic jihad militants to target. Systems
that processed billions of data points to rank the probability that any given
person in the territory was a combatant.
The darkness in the watchtower was a condition of the terrain. The darkness
inside the algorithm is a condition of the design. In both cases, the blindness
was chosen. It was chosen because blindness is useful: it creates deniability,
it makes the violence feel inevitable, it moves the question of who decided
from a person to a procedure. The fog did not lift. It was given a probability
score and called intelligence.
It may have been chosen blindness that led, at the start of the US-Israeli Iran
war, to the strike at the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, in
southern Iran. At least 168 people were killed, most of them children, girls
aged seven to 12.
The weapons were precise. Munitions experts described the targeting as
“incredibly accurate”, each building individually struck, nothing missed. The
problem was not the execution. The problem was intelligence. The school had
been separated from an adjacent Revolutionary Guard base by a fence and
repurposed for civilian use nearly a decade ago. Somewhere in the targeting
cycle, it seems that fact was never updated.
The exact role of AI in the strike on Minab has not been officially confirmed.
What is known is that the targeting infrastructure in which those systems
operate has no reliable mechanism for flagging when the underlying intelligence
is a decade out of date.
Whether or not an algorithm selected this school, it was selected by a system
that algorithmic targeting built. To strike 1,000 targets in the first 24 hours
of the campaign in Iran, the US military relied on AI systems to generate,
prioritize, and rank the target list at a speed no human team could replicate.
Gaza was the laboratory. Minab is the market. The result is a world in which
the most consequential targeting decisions in modern warfare are made by
systems that cannot explain themselves, supplied by companies that answer to no
one, in conflicts that generate no accountability and no reckoning. That is not
a failure of the system. That is the system."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
