The Civil War started with spectators cheering on a Napoleonic battle at Bull Run. It ended with trenches, concentration camps, and Sherman’s March to the Sea.
World War I began with cavalry and balloons. It ended with tanks, poison gas, and bombers.
The Ukraine War has lasted almost as long as these other wars. It started with miniature drones you can buy at Amazon. It will end with armies of drones carrying hundred-pound payloads, fueled by radio intelligence to strike hundreds of miles from the front lines.
Ukraine is an Artificial Intelligence war, in the sense of SpaceX landing a booster back on its pad. It demonstrates that AI is real but that its best use-cases lie in math-heavy applications run by trained and autonomous operators.
I suspect Pentagon military planners are missing this point. Tanks are obsolete. Bombers are obsolete. Big ships are obsolete. Enormous armies are obsolete. Even big bombs are obsolete. The future lies with precision munitions, with radios, adjustable algorithms and gamified promotions. Killing civilians is less important than hitting industrial parks and infrastructure. Intelligence, both human and machine, can trump everything.
When this conflict is over, Ukraine will be the Arsenal of Democracy, not the United States. If the United States chose to go to war against Ukraine in five years I wouldn’t like our odds.
America’s military has too many people. We have too many bases. We have too many obsolete weapons systems. The Pentagon is as top heavy as the Russian military, and as ignorant of the future as World War I commanders waiting for a cavalry charge.
The Information War
Back home, we face an Information War among ourselves. Republicans control nearly all media. There are no newspapers. The TV is all Trumpist propaganda. Yet they’re being hammered.
How is this possible? It’s because this Internet medium is too big to be caged. You can control 99% of the Information Space but if the Rebel Alliance has a message that resonates with facts on the ground it doesn’t matter.
The problem with LLMs is the same one faced by propagandists. Anything that’s slick or looks contrived rings false. Winning is easy but governing is harder. If you only deliver cruelty or rank incompetence no amount of deflection is going to save you. You can’t fix stupid with software.
Campaigns of all sorts, whether for toothpaste or politicians, are about telling stories. The stories made by software are as iterative as Marvel movies. They can only be based on the data at hand. Winning requires imaginative leaps. An LLM can write A Tale of Two Cities II. It can’t write Severance. It can write songs like those that exist but it’s not Taylor Swift, nor will it ever be Zohran Mamdani.
Both the AI skeptics and the AI optimists are right to a point. AI is an incredibly useful tool, which can magnify productivity a hundred-fold. But it can’t replace that operator behind a screen at the Ukrainian’s secret base, changing plans in real time, countering radio and drone attacks.
The most important message of the AI War is that wars won’t be won by generals and information wars won’t be won by consultants. Wars will be won by sergeants and information wars will be won by voters.
