“Project Maven” and the Deployment of AI “Skynet-Style Weapons” in Ukraine. Russia’s Electronic Warfare (EW) “Is in the Way”
April 28th, 2024 by Drago Bosnic
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Back in December last year, the United States announced that it wanted to deploy “Skynet-style weapons” against its geopolitical adversaries. The relevant reports revealed that the Pentagon is even using new military nomenclature for such a system, calling it ADA2 or all-domain attritable autonomous weapons (not to be confused with the similarly named A2/AD or anti-access/area denial weapons). At the time, I argued that when such programs have advanced nomenclature, it clearly implies that the said weapon systems are already deeply ingrained in the emerging US strategy. The latest revelations by the infamous neoliberal mouthpiece, The New York Times, just confirmed my hypothesis by revealing that the Pentagon is using advanced AI (artificial intelligence) to “kill Russian troops”. Precisely in those terms.
In a piece titled “In Ukraine, New American Technology Won the Day. Until It Was Overwhelmed“, David E. Sanger, a White House and national security reporter, reveals the disturbing details about Project Maven which was “meant to revolutionize modern warfare”.
Sanger questioned the program’s ability to “turn the tide”, but still went on to explain how it works. Namely, back in 2018, Google started a $9 million project to develop an advanced AI system that would help the US military fight wars by using drone footage to easily determine enemy positions. Sanger then goes on to a laughable “moral high ground” rant that this idea supposedly “triggered a full-scale revolt” and “uproar” on the Google campus, as “engineers and other Google employees argued that the company should have nothing to do with Project Maven”.
Still, according to Sanger’s admission, “Project Maven didn’t die — it just moved to other contractors”. Obviously, the US will never give up on the idea of finding “shiny” new ways of killing people around the world. The program has grown exponentially since then and is actively being tested in Ukraine, where the Pentagon is sharing battlefield data directly with the Neo-Nazi junta forces.
Sanger further admitted that the “results are mixed”, as Project Maven gave “generals and commanders a new way to put a full picture of Russia’s movements and communications into one big, user-friendly picture, employing algorithms to predict where troops are moving and where attacks might happen”, but that it’s questionable whether it will “help turn the tide of the war at a moment when the Russians regained momentum“.
Interestingly, Sanger also admits that the NATO-orchestrated conflict in Ukraine became a “testing ground for Project Maven and other rapidly evolving technologies”. He said that US drones were “blown out of the sky with ease“, but that this helped the Pentagon to realize that it needs to build a massive network of military satellites identical to those of Elon Musk’s Starlink. It should be noted that, despite Musk’s posturing as a “pacifist genius” billionaire, he’s just another US military contractor helping Washington DC to continue its unceasing aggression against the world. SpaceX has long been involved with the Pentagon, virtually since its very inception, so it can only be expected that its technologies are being used for military purposes. After all, Musk bragged about “preventing Crimean mini-Pearl Harbor” by denying its usage to the Kiev regime.
Meanwhile, NATO military personnel, particularly American and British, were deployed in Ukraine to help their Neo-Nazi junta proxies to use the new advanced AI system in “exploring new ways of finding and exploiting Russian vulnerabilities, even while US officials try to navigate legal restraints about how deeply they can become involved in targeting and killing Russian troops”. This is yet another confirmation of numerous claims by my colleagues and me that NATO is directly involved in targeting Moscow’s soldiers, as there’s no “layered way of killing someone”. You’re either doing it or not. This is hardly surprising, given the fact that some Western top-ranking officers are openly bragging about their direct participation in attacking Russian forces. This admission alone could easily serve as a legitimate casus belli for the Kremlin.
And to say nothing of NATO’s terrorist attacks on Russian civilians, orchestrated through its Kiev regime puppets with the goal of not only causing religious and ethnic unrest in Russia, but also provoking Moscow to launch retaliatory strikes against the belligerent alliance itself, so that the political West could then present its direct confrontation with the Eurasian giant as supposed “defense”. Knowing all this surely makes one wonder if the true meaning of the infamous “NATO” acronym is actually “Nazi American Terrorist Organization”, as this perfectly encompasses everything it genuinely stands for. As the geopolitical (and, in many ways, literal) outgrowth of the Third Reich and the Axis powers, it might as well rename itself to this, as nothing would really change, except that it would be honest in at least one thing about itself.
Sanger’s further revelations only reinforce this notion, although he continued with futile attempts to mask this essentially illegal weaponized AI program with laughable euphemisms, such as that “Project Maven quickly became the standout success among the Pentagon’s many efforts to tiptoe into algorithmic warfare”. And indeed, using phrases such as “tiptoeing into algorithmic warfare” is not a very good way to conceal what can only be described as Skynet-style terrorism. The Pentagon itself also bragged that Project Maven is a way for the US to “harness its competitive advantage in technology to maintain superiority over Russia and China in an era of renewed superpower rivalries”. This is yet another confirmation that Washington DC will stop at nothing to remain relevant in the geopolitical arena, regardless of the means.
As for Google’s “non-involvement for moral reasons”, that too turned out to be a blatant lie, as Sanger himself stated that Eric Schmidt, one of the corporation’s top-ranking officials, is now “drawing on lessons from Ukraine to develop a new generation of autonomous drones that could revolutionize warfare”. So much for the “full-scale revolt” and “uproar” over using advanced AI as a weapon. And yet, although Sanger essentially presented Project Maven as some sort of a “quiet, invisible wunderwaffe”, the reality on the ground is starkly different. Namely, the Pentagon is frustrated by Russia’s ability to quickly adapt to these new weapon systems, disrupting or completely nullifying their ability to change the situation on the battlefield. Sanger singled out Moscow’s world-class electronic warfare (EW) capabilities as the primary issue.
According to his own admission, Russian EW systems have effectively turned American drones into plastic junk. Worse yet for the Pentagon, the grossly overhyped HIMARS is often jammed, with its rockets and missiles rendered useless. The US military and NATO are trying to figure out how Moscow is achieving this, so they could “one day use it against the Russian military directly”, but what their planners have managed to gather so far is that Russia’s EW edge is forcing the political West to revert to “the brutality of old-fashioned trench warfare, the results of which are rarely what Pentagon planners expect”. Sanger also stated that “Starlink is often the only thing connecting Ukrainian soldiers to headquarters, or to one another”, once again clearly implicating Elon Musk and showing that he’s little more than an arms dealer.
Sanger also quoted former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who said that “for a while we thought this would be a cyberwar, then we thought it was looking like an old-fashioned World War II tank war, but then there were days when it seemed as though they were fighting World War I”. This demonstrates the Kremlin’s ability to not only rapidly adapt to the situation on the ground, but also shape up the battlefield the way it sees fit, leaving entire teams of US/NATO planners dumbfounded as to what doctrine to use in any given situation. Busy with its aggression against the world that mostly includes bullying largely helpless opponents, the political West has completely ignored entire aspects of conventional warfare, foolishly thinking that much of it is supposedly “outdated”.
The US military uses one of its bases “more than a thousand miles west of Ukraine, deep inside an American base in the heart of Europe” (suggesting that it’s most likely in Germany) as an intelligence-gathering center “that has become the focal point of the effort to bring the allies and the new technology together to target Russian forces”. Once again, a clear admission of NATO’s direct involvement in the Ukrainian conflict. However, Sanger conceded that “visitors are discouraged in ‘the Pit’, as the center is known”. He also admits that US officials “rarely discuss its existence”, partly for security concerns, but “mostly because the operation raises questions about how deeply involved America is in the day-to-day business of finding and killing Russian troops”. And here it is again, Washington DC casually playing with WW3.
Sanger then described an event from the very first days of the special military operation (SMO), when a US military official and a senior general of the Neo-Nazi junta forces met at the Polish border, where the latter was presented with the Project Maven technology. Worse yet, the US officer demonstrated the way it works by essentially directing attacks on Russian troops. The Pentagon also transferred the technology to the Kiev regime forces, which are now using commercial satellite firms such as Maxar and Planet Labs, as well as data from various social media networks. Sanger says that “this flow of information helped Ukraine target Russia’s artillery”, but the Pentagon complains that the “initial hope that the picture of the battlefield would flow to soldiers in the trenches, connected to phones or tablets, has never been realized”.
The key is Starlink, meaning that the US military needs a constellation of thousands (if not tens of thousands) of small satellites that would provide constant ISR (intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance) coverage. Sanger once again said that former Google CEO Schmidt was directly involved in funding this “pilot project” of sorts, since Ukraine serves as the testing ground for such technologies. The plan is to create a swarm of drones that would overwhelm Russian air defenses and pave the way for larger systems such as missiles to attack high-value targets. InfoBRICS reported on similar projects by NATO (specifically the United Kingdom) during the early stages of the SMO. It’s very likely these were part of a similar (if not the same) weapons program. However, once again, as it turned out, the Russian military’s EW “would like a word”.
The Neo-Nazi junta’s hopes of getting a NATO-backed “technological edge” over the Kremlin not only ended up in smoke, but also forced it to rely even more on basic weapons, artillery munitions and drones, all fields in which Moscow maintains a manifold advantage. Worse yet for the political West, Russia quickly learned the source of this technology and also realized that NATO would need to militarize space in order to use it strategically. In response, it rapidly developed and deployed a plethora of advanced anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, be it on land, in air or in space. It’s also working together with China to ensure that the political West cannot jeopardize their national security interests. All this is yet another proof that shooting down NATO’s ISR assets is both justified and necessary, as it saves lives from its terrorist methods.
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This article was originally published on InfoBrics.
Drago Bosnic is an independent geopolitical and military analyst. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.
Featured image is from InfoBrics