12 ms·

Since the article talks about the failure of AI in the context of the 10/7 I think it’s worth discussing the situation directly. Everything points to the Israel

Since the article talks about the failure of AI in the context of the 10/7 I think it’s worth discussing the situation directly. Everything points to the Israelis not having taken their security seriously beyond the tactical level. I’m certain they thwarted other attacks, but it was an inevitability that a major attack was successful at some point. Such an attack would necessitate a military response. However the Israelis have no strategic vision. They lacked serious plans for such an eventuality and still lack a serious goal for their invasion of Gaza. They haven’t articulated anything that indicates a vision to meaningfully change the situation from the 10/6 state to something more sustainable. Therefore, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable takeaway to say AI failed.

nkozyra 3y ago
> Therefore, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable takeaway to say AI failed. There are a lot of reasons - from quite intuitive to conspiratorial - to not take the idea that AI caused or meaningfully contributed to this failure at face value. Or that it was a failure of intelligence in the first place.
cameldrv 3y ago
To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued the U.S. since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars because no one ever sets out clear achievable goals. The notable exception was the Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm. For that one, the goal was to kick Iraq out of Kuwait and restore the Kuwaiti monarchy, which was achieved. If you look especially at Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, there is this magical thinking that if we destroy the Evil Dictator and run an election, that everyone will naturally vote to ally with the U.S. and completely change their social organization to be in accordance with western values. The place we spent the most time in the 21st century, Afghanistan, somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights. That sort of societal transformation is not possible even with 100,000 troops when they don't even speak the local language. Can you imagine the hubris of trying to tell people in some remote village that the way men and women relate to each other has to change through a translator, because some tall buildings in a place they've never heard of got destroyed? The obvious result was total failure and the Taliban picking up right where they left off in 2001.
- treflop 3y ago
  I don’t think the language barrier or anything was an issue. We entered Japan and helped rebuild it and now we have some of the best relations in the world. Re-building Afghanistan was more like building Afghanistan. We weren’t fixing a collapsed patio like in Japan — we had to build a whole housing tract, and at no point did we or anyone in the world have that amount of money.
  - cameldrv 3y ago
    Yes. We did not try to radically transform Japanese society down to the level of the family. Same in Germany. Both of those countries also had a fairly cohesive sense of nationhood without massive ethnic divisions. We just had to deprogram the hyper-aggressive militarism, but the rest we could pretty much leave alone. Your point about rebuilding Afghanistan really being building Afghanistan is very true. I remember hearing a soldier in Afghanistan talking about how surprised he was at the number of people he met in Afghanistan that had never even heard of Afghanistan.
  - sudosysgen 3y ago
    This isn't true. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, there was an Afghan state that was able to motivate enough of the population to believe in it and fight for it in order to largely defeat the Mujahideen. Were it not for external support for the Mujahideen, it is almost certain that an Afghan state would have succeeded in achieving some form of monopoly on violence. The idea that nation-states were something alien to Afghanistan that we had to force on them just isn't true.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > The notable exception was the Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm I dunno, the NATO-Yugoslavia war is both more recent and produced a much clearer and more stable, positive local outcome than the 1991 Iraq War. (And if you argue “but didn't that restart US-Russian geopolitical rivalry, making it worse than Desert Storm,” I would counter that it didn't, Yeltsin designating Putin with his yearning for a return of the USSR’s Eastern European empire as his successor did that, the aftermath of the NATO-Yugoslavia war is just when the West realized it, plus, Desert Storm—well, actually, Desert Shield, but the two are inseparable—by the same token, was, in fact, the proximate trigger for the formation of al-Qaeda, so...)
vkou 3y ago
Their strategic vision seems to be using attacks against them as a pretense for more land grabs, which in the future, promotes more attacks against them, which provides a fig leaf for more land grabs. The end game, as Likud's party manifesto makes very clear, and their PM helpfully pointed out two weeks ago is a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, with no Palestinian sovereignty. They'll likely accomplish this goal in a generation or two (And no, it won't happen by enfranchising the natives. Israel's government is looking for lebensraum, not building a partnership with its subjects.) It doesn't really need any strategic vision past that. It's a nuclear power, none of its neighbors can credibly threaten it, its main enemies are the people trying to live within its occupation zones.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  But it just isn't true. Israel's neighbors can very credibly pose an existential threat, which only external intervention can thwart. Imagine for example the very realistic scenario where Iran obtains nuclear weapons. Then, should Iran decide to fund a missile blockade of Israel in the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Israel has zero capability to protect shipping. Since Iran would be a nuclear power, it's very obviously not in Israel's interest to escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, so a threat to do so wouldn't be credible. The only way Israel could achieve its goals in such a scenario is through external intervention, which the Yemenis have shown even now would be difficult. Israel does need strategic vision, desperately. It's a tiny country that's existentially depend on the US and Western Europe, and doesn't have the industrial capacity to independently defend itself while it's neighbors increasingly can. This is the first time this ever happened - in the past, Israel and it's neighbors were on an equal footing because while Israel couldn't produce its key weapons on it's own, neither could it's neighbors. This isn't true anymore. It's a momentous strategic shift in the region. What's worse is that this happens at the same time as the balance of power is tipping away from its main allies. What's even worse is that public opinion, especially in the US, is undergoing an unprecedented shift. Something else that has not been reported on is that China, which historically was agnostic on the issue, now has an official policy that Palestine has the right to armed resistance. It's a sizeable diplomatic shift because historically neither of the dominant powers openly supported armed Palestinian resistance. If this grand strategem is to take more than 15 years, and it is, it's extremely risky strategically. It's not true that strategic vision past that is unneeded, it's more important now than it ever was. I imagine that many in the leadership of the IDF realize this but that it's just not something that's politically viable to run with.
r00fus 3y ago
One could say they almost wanted to the security to fail - so they could respond with disproportionate and indiscriminate force to achieve their actual goals. Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
- falserum 3y ago
  if you replace “they” with “prime minister that is hanging by a thread for quite some time”, you would get my personal conspiracy theory.
- eastbound 3y ago
  [flagged]
  - BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    Intent aside, there's certainly a striking difference in the actual outcomes for civilians.
  - akira2501 3y ago
    > This is why the international community does not stop Israel The international community has been trying to stop Israel since October. It's just that the UN allows certain "member states" to completely veto resolutions ans Israel enjoys nearly complete and total support for it's genocide from the US. They just recently passed ANOTHER resolution on this immoral war. The US, again, stepped in to make sure it was "non binding." This idea that the world watches Israel with pity and total scorn for the Palestinians is outrageous.
    - overstay8930 3y ago
      The UN can’t and won’t do anything, because it’s not designed to, nobody should care about what’s going on in the UN. It’s basically a “we won WWII” club. Any one of the large economies in the world could write up sanctions that could devastate the Israeli economy, it is not hard to disrupt supply chains. They just know the actual war is Israel vs Iran and Iran is just using the Palestinian resistance as their puppet. Do you honestly think Russia, North Korea, and China are suddenly the champions of human rights in the world or something? If you are pro Palestine you should be grateful someone is finally destroying Hamas (Iran). Just like the US firebombing Tokyo was a humanitarian disaster, do you honestly think the US should have signed a ceasefire with the Empire of Japan? Because I don’t think it’s very controversial to say the civilians in Tokyo didn’t deserve to suffer because of their government’s actions.
persolb 3y ago
Do you think the 1 km wide DMZ isn’t meaningfully changing the situation? (I obviously don’t like the idea… but from my view there have been multiple attempts to have Gaza develop, and they generally fail out of apparent spite. If the adjacent country is a failed state run by a terrorist group… I’m not sure what better ‘meaningful change’ can be reached.)
lenerdenator 3y ago
> However the Israelis have no strategic vision. They lacked serious plans for such an eventuality and still lack a serious goal for their invasion of Gaza. They have competing strategic visions. The current ruling coalition under Bibi Netanyahu, which is far more conservative, wants Israeli control of the entirety of what used to be Mandatory Palestine between the West Bank of the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Palestinian Arabs would have some presence in such a society but it would be as a minority, and only if said minority plays nice with the majority. There would be a single state with a Jewish ethnic majority and government acting under Jewish jurisprudence as opposed to secular, Christian, or Islamic. The goal for the invasion of Gaza for this coalition is simple: break the will of the Gazans. The coalition points to the fact that the Gazans elected Hamas over the more secular Fatah in 2006, and that Hamas has, for a very long time, refused to recognize that Israel has any right to exist anywhere in former Mandatory Palestine. The coalition under Netanyahu sees them as a thorn in their side and will commit total war on Gaza, seeing that as a way to convince the Gazans that there will be no success in raising a military challenge to Israel. They've shown themselves to be right while committing a whole host of actions that probably deserve ICJ review. While Hamas still holds Jewish hostages, they have virtually no control over the current war. The Israelis conduct military operations at will in the territory and Hamas has no real way to prevent that. The other vision is that of a significant portion of the Israeli population and most of the rest of the international community, which at this point just want the hostages back. Some believe in a two-state solution. There's probably no way to achieve that with Hamas in charge of Gaza, but that will come later: the hostages are the main priority. This part of the population sees Netanyahu's government as incompetent for failing to stop the massacres on October 7th and for not having gotten the hostages back.
- downWidOutaFite 3y ago
  So Gazans are blamed for voting for Hamas's "from the river to the sea" 15 years ago, but Israelis are blameless and "just want the hostages back" even though they have repeatedly voted for Likud's "from the river to the sea" over and over again ever since Likud's terrorist branch assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and his peace plan 30 years ago.
- lazyasciiart 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
bushbaba 3y ago
More sustainable is what exactly? The Gazans dont want peace, don’t want their own state while the Israeli state exists,…etc. if you have a solution that can be done by Israel alone without changing how ruling parties of Gaza and West Bank operate, please share.

nkozyra 3y ago

> Therefore, it doesn’t seem like a reasonable takeaway to say AI failed. There are a lot of reasons - from quite intuitive to conspiratorial - to not take the idea that AI caused or meaningfully contributed to this failure at face value. Or that it was a failure of intelligence in the first place.

cameldrv 3y ago

To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued the U.S. since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars because no one ever sets out clear achievable goals. The notable exception was the Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm. For that one, the goal was to kick Iraq out of Kuwait and restore the Kuwaiti monarchy, which was achieved. If you look especially at Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria, there is this magical thinking that if we destroy the Evil Dictator and run an election, that everyone will naturally vote to ally with the U.S. and completely change their social organization to be in accordance with western values. The place we spent the most time in the 21st century, Afghanistan, somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights. That sort of societal transformation is not possible even with 100,000 troops when they don't even speak the local language. Can you imagine the hubris of trying to tell people in some remote village that the way men and women relate to each other has to change through a translator, because some tall buildings in a place they've never heard of got destroyed? The obvious result was total failure and the Taliban picking up right where they left off in 2001.

treflop 3y ago
I don’t think the language barrier or anything was an issue. We entered Japan and helped rebuild it and now we have some of the best relations in the world. Re-building Afghanistan was more like building Afghanistan. We weren’t fixing a collapsed patio like in Japan — we had to build a whole housing tract, and at no point did we or anyone in the world have that amount of money.
- cameldrv 3y ago
  Yes. We did not try to radically transform Japanese society down to the level of the family. Same in Germany. Both of those countries also had a fairly cohesive sense of nationhood without massive ethnic divisions. We just had to deprogram the hyper-aggressive militarism, but the rest we could pretty much leave alone. Your point about rebuilding Afghanistan really being building Afghanistan is very true. I remember hearing a soldier in Afghanistan talking about how surprised he was at the number of people he met in Afghanistan that had never even heard of Afghanistan.
- sudosysgen 3y ago
  This isn't true. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, there was an Afghan state that was able to motivate enough of the population to believe in it and fight for it in order to largely defeat the Mujahideen. Were it not for external support for the Mujahideen, it is almost certain that an Afghan state would have succeeded in achieving some form of monopoly on violence. The idea that nation-states were something alien to Afghanistan that we had to force on them just isn't true.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> The notable exception was the Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm I dunno, the NATO-Yugoslavia war is both more recent and produced a much clearer and more stable, positive local outcome than the 1991 Iraq War. (And if you argue “but didn't that restart US-Russian geopolitical rivalry, making it worse than Desert Storm,” I would counter that it didn't, Yeltsin designating Putin with his yearning for a return of the USSR’s Eastern European empire as his successor did that, the aftermath of the NATO-Yugoslavia war is just when the West realized it, plus, Desert Storm—well, actually, Desert Shield, but the two are inseparable—by the same token, was, in fact, the proximate trigger for the formation of al-Qaeda, so...)

vkou 3y ago

Their strategic vision seems to be using attacks against them as a pretense for more land grabs, which in the future, promotes more attacks against them, which provides a fig leaf for more land grabs. The end game, as Likud's party manifesto makes very clear, and their PM helpfully pointed out two weeks ago is a single state between the Mediterranean and the Jordan river, with no Palestinian sovereignty. They'll likely accomplish this goal in a generation or two (And no, it won't happen by enfranchising the natives. Israel's government is looking for lebensraum, not building a partnership with its subjects.) It doesn't really need any strategic vision past that. It's a nuclear power, none of its neighbors can credibly threaten it, its main enemies are the people trying to live within its occupation zones.

sudosysgen 3y ago
But it just isn't true. Israel's neighbors can very credibly pose an existential threat, which only external intervention can thwart. Imagine for example the very realistic scenario where Iran obtains nuclear weapons. Then, should Iran decide to fund a missile blockade of Israel in the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Israel has zero capability to protect shipping. Since Iran would be a nuclear power, it's very obviously not in Israel's interest to escalate to the use of nuclear weapons, so a threat to do so wouldn't be credible. The only way Israel could achieve its goals in such a scenario is through external intervention, which the Yemenis have shown even now would be difficult. Israel does need strategic vision, desperately. It's a tiny country that's existentially depend on the US and Western Europe, and doesn't have the industrial capacity to independently defend itself while it's neighbors increasingly can. This is the first time this ever happened - in the past, Israel and it's neighbors were on an equal footing because while Israel couldn't produce its key weapons on it's own, neither could it's neighbors. This isn't true anymore. It's a momentous strategic shift in the region. What's worse is that this happens at the same time as the balance of power is tipping away from its main allies. What's even worse is that public opinion, especially in the US, is undergoing an unprecedented shift. Something else that has not been reported on is that China, which historically was agnostic on the issue, now has an official policy that Palestine has the right to armed resistance. It's a sizeable diplomatic shift because historically neither of the dominant powers openly supported armed Palestinian resistance. If this grand strategem is to take more than 15 years, and it is, it's extremely risky strategically. It's not true that strategic vision past that is unneeded, it's more important now than it ever was. I imagine that many in the leadership of the IDF realize this but that it's just not something that's politically viable to run with.

r00fus 3y ago

One could say they almost wanted to the security to fail - so they could respond with disproportionate and indiscriminate force to achieve their actual goals. Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

falserum 3y ago
if you replace “they” with “prime minister that is hanging by a thread for quite some time”, you would get my personal conspiracy theory.
eastbound 3y ago
[flagged]
- BriggyDwiggs42 3y ago
  [flagged]
- nerdponx 3y ago
  Intent aside, there's certainly a striking difference in the actual outcomes for civilians.
- akira2501 3y ago
  > This is why the international community does not stop Israel The international community has been trying to stop Israel since October. It's just that the UN allows certain "member states" to completely veto resolutions ans Israel enjoys nearly complete and total support for it's genocide from the US. They just recently passed ANOTHER resolution on this immoral war. The US, again, stepped in to make sure it was "non binding." This idea that the world watches Israel with pity and total scorn for the Palestinians is outrageous.
  - overstay8930 3y ago
    The UN can’t and won’t do anything, because it’s not designed to, nobody should care about what’s going on in the UN. It’s basically a “we won WWII” club. Any one of the large economies in the world could write up sanctions that could devastate the Israeli economy, it is not hard to disrupt supply chains. They just know the actual war is Israel vs Iran and Iran is just using the Palestinian resistance as their puppet. Do you honestly think Russia, North Korea, and China are suddenly the champions of human rights in the world or something? If you are pro Palestine you should be grateful someone is finally destroying Hamas (Iran). Just like the US firebombing Tokyo was a humanitarian disaster, do you honestly think the US should have signed a ceasefire with the Empire of Japan? Because I don’t think it’s very controversial to say the civilians in Tokyo didn’t deserve to suffer because of their government’s actions.

persolb 3y ago

Do you think the 1 km wide DMZ isn’t meaningfully changing the situation? (I obviously don’t like the idea… but from my view there have been multiple attempts to have Gaza develop, and they generally fail out of apparent spite. If the adjacent country is a failed state run by a terrorist group… I’m not sure what better ‘meaningful change’ can be reached.)

lenerdenator 3y ago

> However the Israelis have no strategic vision. They lacked serious plans for such an eventuality and still lack a serious goal for their invasion of Gaza. They have competing strategic visions. The current ruling coalition under Bibi Netanyahu, which is far more conservative, wants Israeli control of the entirety of what used to be Mandatory Palestine between the West Bank of the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. Palestinian Arabs would have some presence in such a society but it would be as a minority, and only if said minority plays nice with the majority. There would be a single state with a Jewish ethnic majority and government acting under Jewish jurisprudence as opposed to secular, Christian, or Islamic. The goal for the invasion of Gaza for this coalition is simple: break the will of the Gazans. The coalition points to the fact that the Gazans elected Hamas over the more secular Fatah in 2006, and that Hamas has, for a very long time, refused to recognize that Israel has any right to exist anywhere in former Mandatory Palestine. The coalition under Netanyahu sees them as a thorn in their side and will commit total war on Gaza, seeing that as a way to convince the Gazans that there will be no success in raising a military challenge to Israel. They've shown themselves to be right while committing a whole host of actions that probably deserve ICJ review. While Hamas still holds Jewish hostages, they have virtually no control over the current war. The Israelis conduct military operations at will in the territory and Hamas has no real way to prevent that. The other vision is that of a significant portion of the Israeli population and most of the rest of the international community, which at this point just want the hostages back. Some believe in a two-state solution. There's probably no way to achieve that with Hamas in charge of Gaza, but that will come later: the hostages are the main priority. This part of the population sees Netanyahu's government as incompetent for failing to stop the massacres on October 7th and for not having gotten the hostages back.

downWidOutaFite 3y ago
So Gazans are blamed for voting for Hamas's "from the river to the sea" 15 years ago, but Israelis are blameless and "just want the hostages back" even though they have repeatedly voted for Likud's "from the river to the sea" over and over again ever since Likud's terrorist branch assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and his peace plan 30 years ago.
lazyasciiart 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

bushbaba 3y ago

More sustainable is what exactly? The Gazans dont want peace, don’t want their own state while the Israeli state exists,…etc. if you have a solution that can be done by Israel alone without changing how ruling parties of Gaza and West Bank operate, please share.