School of War Reader: Just Say No to AI
A warning to the young: just say no to AI
Aaron MacLean, Engelsberg Ideas
My keynote address to the Hudson Institute’s Political Studies Program on the threat artificial intelligence presents to young people:
An old professor of mine, in my freshman year, once said something wise and important to a seminar I was in when one of my classmates observed that ‘I know what I think, I just can’t get the words down on the page.’ My teacher responded: ‘Well, you don’t actually know what you think, then. The act of writing the thing is the same thing as the thinking of it. If you can’t write it, you haven’t actually thought it.’ Which is to say that writing and reasoning are effectively identical activities – and for many years now, writing has been the way we have taught young people how to reason. To be clear, we are already in a Bronze Age on how we go about such education. If you want to see what the Gold or Silver ages looked like, go look up class syllabi for high schools from a century or two centuries ago. You can do it on your phone. The substitution of AI for the level of instruction remaining threatens to take us from a Bronze Age right through Tin and then on, quick smart, into the abyss. Perhaps our best hope will be that, ultimately, AI will suffer model collapse because, as no one will be producing anything intelligent anymore, AI will have only other AI products to read, and the whole thing will get even dumber until it falls apart. (This concern, model collapse, is a real thing, and the engineers trying to sell you these products are very concerned about it.) I do worry about what it will do to human nature in the interim, though.
A New Palestinian offer for Peace with Israel
Eliot Kaufman, The Wall Street Journal
An unusual twist in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
The idea of a two-state solution for Israel and the Palestinians has never seemed more futile than in the months since Oct. 7, 2023. But maybe that opens the door to a new way of achieving peace. “We want cooperation with Israel,” says Sheikh Wadee’ al-Jaabari, also known as Abu Sanad, from his ceremonial tent in Hebron, the West Bank’s largest city located south of Jerusalem. “We want coexistence.” The leader of Hebron’s most influential clan has said such things before, as did his father. But this time is different. Sheikh Jaabari and four other leading Hebron sheikhs have signed a letter pledging peace and full recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Their plan is for Hebron to break out of the Palestinian Authority, establish an emirate of its own, and join the Abraham Accords. The letter is addressed to Israeli Economy Minister Nir Barkat, a former mayor of Jerusalem, who has brought Mr. Jaabari and other sheikhs to his home and met with them more than a dozen times since February. They ask him to present it to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and await his reply. “The Emirate of Hebron shall recognize the State of Israel as the nation state of the Jewish people,” the sheikhs write, “and the State of Israel shall recognize the Emirate of Hebron as the Representative of the Arab residents in the Hebron District.” Accepting Israel as a Jewish state goes further than the Palestinian Authority ever has, and sweeps aside decades of rejectionism.
The importance of strategic depth
Nadia Schadlow, Engelsberg Ideas
Schadlow discusses strategic depth’s expansion beyond geography:
Strategic depth has always been a critical factor in war. Historically, the term mostly applied to geography. It captured the idea that the further your enemy had to physically travel to get to your government centre or vital resources – what Clausewitz often referred to as a country’s ‘centre of gravity’ – the more time and space you had to adapt, recover, and counterattack. For the United States, its oceans provided strategic depth; Russia and China relied on their vast landmasses. Today, however, we can no longer measure strategic depth by miles alone. A squadron of Ukrainian drones has managed to achieve what Napoleon could not: deliver a strategic blow against a military target deep within Russian territory, and thereby disrupt one of the tenets of classical warfare. Digital networks, satellites, global supply chains, and geopolitical influence allow adversaries to degrade our defences and to strengthen their ability to manoeuvre in ways that bypass traditional borders altogether. Strategic depth, either naturally occurring or proactively shaped, affords a government and citizens more time to make decisions, and more operational flexibility to organise responses, protect power centres, and take steps to ensure national survival in the event of external aggression. If the United States wants to maintain its military edge and deter future wars, it should consider how to expand and apply the concept of strategic depth.
The Importance of the Battle of Cannae
Bret C. Devereaux, War on the Rocks
Devereaux catalogues Hannibal’s tactical success at Cannae – and its cost to Carthage’s strategic objectives during the Second Punic War:
The Battle of Cannae, fought on Aug. 2, 216 BCE, the crowning success of Hannibal Barca over the Romans, sits comfortably in the pantheon of great military victories. It is one of the most spectacular examples of adroit tactics enabling a smaller, less heavily equipped army to defeat a larger, heavier opposing force in an open, pitched battle. However, though Cannae is frequently described as a “decisive victory,” it was, of course, nothing of the sort: The battle took place two years into the 17-year-long Second Punic War, which Hannibal lost. The failure of even the greatest of tactical victories to alter the overall strategic situation is every bit as much of the legacy of Cannae as Hannibal’s dazzling double-envelopment tactics.