Actors not in the top tier of acting are finding life difficult economically as the SAF-AFTRA strike continues into its 5th month. Some have found work with Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, “training” AI through acting. While the actors have signed contracts that state their likenesses cannot be used for future endeavors, the language is written in such a way that perhaps, maybe, Meta has plenty of legal loopholes to betray that simple promise.
The actors were paid to participate in a study called the “emotion study,” which ran from Jul through September of this year. The study offered actors $150 per hour to “emote” for AI machines to analyze in the hope that AI can then be used to artificially “emote” in seamless ways to humans.
The irony of the work is not lost on the actors, who recognize they’re helping to train machines that might one day replace them, even if Meta “promises” not to use their image in any commercial way in the future.
Even though the actors are “acting,” the project claims it’s not “struck work” because Meta is not one of the employers the guild is striking against. As Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, SAG-AFTRA’s chief negotiator claims, “This isn’t a contract battle between a union and a company, It’s existential.”
Max Kalehoff, the VP of growth and marketing for the company running the study for Meta, said “The vast majority of our work is in evaluating the effectiveness of advertising for clients—which has nothing to do with actors and the entertainment industry except to gauge audience reaction.”
In addition to the job posting, MIT Technology Review has obtained and reviewed a copy of the data license agreement, and its potential implications are indeed vast. To put it bluntly: whether the actors who participated knew it or not, for as little as $300, they appear to have authorized Realeyes, Meta, and other parties of the two companies’ choosing to access and use not just their faces but also their expressions, and anything derived from them, almost however and whenever they want—as long as they do not reproduce any individual likenesses.
Some actors, like Jessica, who asked to be identified by just her first name, felt there was something “exploitative” about the project—both in the financial incentives for out-of-work actors and in the fight over AI and the use of an actor’s image.
Jessica, a New York–based background actor, says she has seen a growing number of listings for AI jobs over the past few years. “There aren’t really clear rules right now,” she says, “so I don’t know. Maybe … their intention [is] to get these images before the union signs a contract and sets them.”
While this writer does not support government laws prohibiting the use of Ai trained by humans to better manipulate humans to buy stuff they might not actually want or need, companies that choose to use this technology should be considered unethical, untrustworthy, not worth investing in or doing business with. Of course, being a realist, this writer realizes the ability to cut ourselves off from the companies that are already using these types of services is not very realistic, and won’t be until we self-steward minded people build our own institutions, institutions that would not deign to use such unethical practices to manipulate the masses for the sake of profit.
Political factions are sure to follow, if they aren’t already, which makes it all the more urgent for you, and me, to be self-stewarded people who steward our preferences and beliefs to guard our minds against such crafty manipulations.
Democratic Senators have sent a letter to the U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona expressing concern about the increasing use of AI to monitor students’ online activity by public schools. The Democrats seem to be focused mostly on how it affects their preferred elite class of humans, the LGBTQ and non-whites, but the concerns they bring up should be troubling to any and all Americans whether or not, for now, it disproportionately affects the preferred classes of humans the Democrats most exploit to justify their own acts of oppression in the name meeting the plea of their particular needy.
“As for the scoundrel, his devices are evil. He plans wicked schemes to ruin the poor even when the plea of the needy is right. But he who is noble plans noble things, and on noble things he stands.” – Isaiah 32:7-8
From the letter:
… in the year since the release of the White House Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights (“Blueprint”), students have continued to experience harm through AI-driven technology, particularly in the area of civil rights.1 With the expansion of generative AI tools, student protections related to education technology are more urgent than ever. As you continue to implement the education-related priorities reflected in the Blueprint, we urge the Department to issue further guidance and take appropriate enforcement action concerning the application of civil rights laws to schools’ use of educational technology, including AI-driven technologies.
While the expansion of educational technology helped facilitate remote learning that was critical to students, parents, and teachers during the pandemic, these technologies have also amplified student harms. As recent research from the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) highlights, technologies that monitor student activity online, moderate and filter online content, and use predictive analytics raise serious concerns about the application of civil rights laws to schools’ use of these technologies. We are particularly concerned about the application of existing laws that protect students from discriminatory policies and outcomes related to sex, race, disability, and LGBTQ+ status.
As CDT’s research shows, two-thirds of teachers recently reported that a student at their school was disciplined due to AI-powered monitoring software, with disproportionate impacts for marginalized communities. Nineteen percent of LGBTQ+ students, for instance, reported they or someone they know was outed due to this software, and licensed special education teachers are more likely to report knowing students who have gotten in trouble and been contacted by law enforcement due to student activity monitoring.
Additionally, filtering and blocking software has recently been equated to a digital book ban, with one-third of teachers reporting that content associated with LGBTQ+ students and students of color is more likely to be restricted. And sixty percent of teachers report that their schools use algorithmic early warning systems that predict whether a student is dropping out of high school, some of which incorporate protected characteristics such as race, gender, and disability status. This research is particularly concerning due to linkages between school disciplinary policies and incarceration rates of our nation’s youth.
The letter was signed by Democratic congressmembers Lori Trahan, Sara Jacobs, Henry Johnson Jr, Bonnie Watson Coleman, and the paradigm of disinformation and totalitarian ideology, Adam Schiff.
As for the technology being used to check the content allowed in children’s public-school libraries, this writer has no issue with that. These Democrats seem to support child grooming, that is, sexually explicit material in public schools, and if the AI can be used to screen for that, so much the better. But expanding the use of AI to monitor the online activity of students, unless there is a warrant for such action (as in an actual plausible accusation is put forth that would warrant further investigation) this is a basic violation of human rights, and furthermore the actions condition children to accept authoritarianism as a normal course of action for the state, becoming inured to technological authoritarianism.
Where are the Republicans in calling out such a dystopian practice by state agencies (which government public schools are)? This writer supports the notion that children are not afforded the full rights of adults due to their inability to consent to all forms of action, such as sexual action (which these Democrats would most likely dismiss given their histrionics even in this letter in protest of children being given sexually explicit material, which most of the so-called pro-LGBTQ stuff turns out to be).
Yet, children should be afforded some basic rights, including the right to a fair trial, the right to due process, the right to protections against search and seizure without warrant, which this practice overtly violates.
We do not want to create a police state governed by AI, and we don’t want our children to be both guinea pigs of that Chinese Communist party reality nor the gateway through which the state inures not just our children to technological authoritarianism, but the adults as well.
A team of researchers from the University of Waterloo are building a blockchain system to publish news that is assured of being “truthful.” The researchers are developing the technology to combat “misinformation,” or “fake news,” which they say is threatening democratic institutions.
The technology has three elements, blockchain (which enables decentralized publication from transparent interests), human intelligence through a quorum of “validators,” and finally a check on validators through an “entropy-based incentive mechanism.” In essence, it boils down to “popular opinion,” though the researchers would be loath to describe it in that manner.
Ultimately, the article would be validated as trustworthy on the platform only if most of the validators’ opinions align with the truth. As for the user who published the article in the first place, that person might then receive a reward using the entropy-based incentive mechanism. But if the article is exposed as fake news, the user who published it could be penalized. Meanwhile, this entropy measure would convey to the end-user the degree of uncertainty in the output.
At this point the researchers have built and are working with an early prototype. While initial test results are promising, their system is still in the development stage and needs a significant effort to make it usable in the real world. Even so, an industrial partner, Ripple Labs Inc.—a leading provider of crypto solutions for businesses—is part of the Waterloo research.
Chien-Chih Chen, one of the project’s lead researchers, said of the project “We are confident our system has the potential to be applied in practical situations within the next few years. We believe it can provide a robust solution to fake news. I hope my research can impact the world to make a positive difference.”
The use of the term “fake news,” the belief that “truth” is something popular opinion can calibrate shows the hubris behind this project, which some might categorize as fake news in and of itself. Promising a machine to assure truthfulness in news is fake news, right from the start. Whole philosophies have risen and fallen on such claims.
To emphasize my point, here is how the publication that perpetuated this fake news categorized examples of “fake news” that this project might debunk: The danger of disinformation—or fake news—to democracy is real. There is evidence fake news could have influenced how people voted in two important political events in 2016: Brexit, the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union; and the U.S. presidential election that put Donald Trump in power. More recently the Canadian government has warned Canadians to be aware of a Russian campaign of disinformation surrounding that country’s war against Ukraine. Although big tech companies—including Facebook and Google—have established policies to prevent the spread of fake news on their platforms, they’ve had limited success.
First of all, the definition of democracy and the practice of democracy are as varied as the political factions that claim to be bastions of that term. Second of all, the notion that “disinformation” is a threat to democracy is fake news, once again. What is dangerous to some form of democratic spirit is the blocking of information under the name of protecting people from “disinformation.”
Totalitarians the world over, since totalitarian states have existed, have long used claims of misinformation to justify preventing the free and open exchange of information.
This project seems more like the nascence of a new method of governments to assure only their narrative is perpetuated, using a “disinformation-safe” machine that might be “de-centralized” on the platform itself, but the platform will be licensed by the state that builds it.
Protecting the people from fake news is not real, not possible, and no government actually wants to do that (for they would be undermining their own justifications for power). What is real is your ability to discern efforts to approach truth in reporting (for pure truth is not accessible even in the very language that we use, which has ambiguity, subjectivity unavoidably built into it), not the ability of any machine or aggregate of human committees to discern truth.
You don’t need to protect the world from disinformation. You need to equip humans to protect themselves from disinformation, imperfectly though that would be. No government (and these researchers are all dependent on that “government”) has any incentive to equip their citizens to discern approaches to truth from actual disinformation, for no government can stand, including the United States, without, in part, disseminating “fake news.”
Unless you are a “gun person”, it is very likely that the reader has never heard of the MAS 49, much less its final iteration, the “49/56”…which is not surprising. However, this little-known weapon had a huge impact on world, not least because it remains in action on the world’s battlegrounds, into the current day.
The MAS (Manufacture d’Armes de Saint-Étienne, formerly one of the weapons makers for the government of France) series of rifles were the result of the French military and government trying to learn from their (many) mistakes made during World War One.
During that war, France – like most nations, being fair – had found itself woefully unprepared for the conflict. One of the main lessons learned by all of the combatant nations was the sheer scale of wastage of all categories of weapons and equipment, especially small arms. As casualties began to quickly mount, national military establishments found it nearly impossible to keep ahead of the need for weapons to both arm new troops, and to rearm troops whose weapons had been lost, destroyed or worn out.
This proved a windfall for arms manufacturers in the rest of the world, who were uninvolved in the fighting. Indeed, Great Britain found itself in such dire need of small arms that its Royal Navy had to turn in its standard-issue SMLE’s, and rearm themselves with everything from Winchester level-action rifles to Japanese Arisaka’s. Even Imperial Russia bought extensively from anyone they could, including Winchester.
In the aftermath of the war, France found itself with literal piles of small arms of all descriptions, from countries and manufacturers from around the world, all using different ammunition and parts, most of which wasn’t made in France, and which could not be easily (nor cheaply) licensed for manufacture. As well, the standard French rifle and machinegun cartridge, the venerable 8mm Lebel, was not a very good cartridge, and needed to be replaced. As the 1920’s dawned, France seemed to have placed itself on the path to rearmament, with a realistic and well-thought out program to develop a broad spectrum of small arms and light infantry weapons for its armed forces.
The execution of that program, however, was an entirely different matter.
While the Chatellerault M1924/29 light machinegun and the MAS 36 rifle were both excellent weapons that worked very well, and were mostly on time in their development, France failed to get the weapons into production in enough numbers to completely rearm its forces. It would not be until World War 2 was almost upon Europe that France saw the danger, and began to ramp up production in earnest. Of course, it would be too little, too late.
The reasons for this are not difficult to understand. France, like most of the “winners” of the ‘war to end all wars’, was in financial ruin after the end of the war. With the advent of the Great Depression on the world, money for military-anything was in short supply, and for France, especially, having lost the better part of an entire generation of young men during 1914-1918, was spending much of what little money it had for defense on an alternative plan.
After France was overrun in 1940, the Various French arsenals were in German hands. While the Nazi forces kept some of the factories working to produce ammunition for captured weapons (“beutewaffe”), as German industrial capacity was simply incapable of meeting Hitler’s war needs, very little new work was done on the incomplete French designs, until the country was liberated in 1944.
Almost as soon as the Germans had been driven out of the various French state arsenals, their workers flooded back in, retrieved blueprints and designs that had been hidden for four years, and immediately got back to work, completing production on the MAS 36, quickly finalizing the first MAS 44 semiautomatic rifles and getting those first guns into production just as the war was ending.
The MAS 44, like most prototype designs, had a lot of issues. Although the design had been in its final stage of development when France was overrun, it had not been perfected, and was rushed into production primarily to show the resilience of French industry. One critical flaw in the design – a flaw never corrected – was the rifle’s detachable magazine.
In the rush to complete the design, the decision was made to use tooling for the rifle receivers that was originally made for the bolt-action MAS 36. All that was modified for the MAS 44 was to remove the floorplate of the MAS 36’s fixed, five-shot magazine. The “magazine catch”, which locks a detachable magazine in place, was simply a ledge-shaped shelf milled into the outer-right side of the receiver. The rifle’s ten-round magazines were all fitted with a thumb latch on the magazine’s exterior, making it very awkward to try to fit two magazines into a pouch. For reasons unknown – but likely related to the magazine’s inability to safely hold the weight of additional ammunition – the magazines would remain at their ten-round limit throughout the rifle’s service life. However, the semiautomatic rifles would still retain their ability to be loaded via five-round strip-clips.
French rifle MAS 49. Photo Credit: Joe Loong. CCA/2.0
By 1949, enough lessons had been learned from the -44 that a new model began to make it out to the troops. The MAS 49 corrected several internal reliability issues (but not the magazine, nor the silly “spike” bayonet that the French arms industry was fascinated with), streamlined some aspects of the rifle to make it cheaper and faster to produce, and added a method to add a rifle grenade launcher, something the French infantry establishment had a long-standing love affair with.
It was this rifle that France would sell to many of its colonies (resulting in the so-called “Syrian Contract” rifles) and take into battle in Indochina, Algeria, and the Suez Crisis, all of which – in time-honored tradition – revealed where yet more improvements to the rifle could be made.
The result, developed in 1956 and deployed in 1957, was the rifle’s final form, as the “MAS 49/56”.
While retaining the overall look, feel and handling (and the magazine, still) as its predecessors, the stock was significantly changed, as was the rifle grenade system. As France had joined NATO, it was attempting bring its weapons in line with early NATO standards. The rifle grenade system was altered to use the NATO-standard 22mm grenades, which required the installation of a gas cut-off, to prevent damage to the rifle. This also resulted in a better sighting system for firing the grenades, as the grenade sight had to be raised, in order to disengage the gas system. Most importantly, this system was installed on all MAS 49/56 rifles. Another significant improvement was the incorporation of a scope mount milled into the left side of the rifle’s receiver, a feature also incorporated into every 49/56. And, because of the redesign, the rifle lost the spike bayonet, and received a proper knife-type pig-sticker.
MAS49-56 with APX Scope and Bayonet from personal collection of Wikimedia User TL-Wiz63. CCA/4.0
Despite some lingering problems, the matured design continued in service as France’s standard infantry rifle until 1979, when it was replaced by the FAMAS rifle), and remained in combat action until its complete replacement. The MAS semiautomatic rifles were mostly sent as aid to many armies in the newly-free states resulting from France’s abandonment of empire. Many of those rifles remain in combat as of this writing.
In an interesting twist to the end of this story, a good number of MAS 49 and 49/56 rifles are on the surplus market in the United States. Many rifles were sold into the American surplus market, beginning in the late 1980s. Some versions were modified to take 7.62x51mm, instead of the 7.5x54mm French round. As a word of warning, if those conversions were done in France, they most likely work well, but the ones converted in the US are known for gas-cycling issues.
Look into older firearms – they tend to have very long lives.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
Surgeon-Scientists Put on Endangered Professionals List – “Experts” from University of Virginia Health are sounding an alarm to the medical industry that, due to a number of factors, the Physician-Scientist is becoming an endangered profession.
The reasons given don’t include the extra layer of filtering choking off professionals in all fields, DEI filtering for the proper progmerican, which is no American at all.
To be sure, outside of the DEI filtering, the problem here would be existential even without that standard now being layered into most institutions. The addition of the DEI filter, however, will accelerate the death of this essential profession to human development, never mind healthcare, which is significant enough in and of itself.
“Surgeons are struggling to find funding, and many of them are not able to obtain funding despite trying for 10 years. Surgeon-scientists have made many advances in biomedical research in fields such as transplantation, oncology, and diabetes,” said UVA Health surgery intern Adishesh K. Narahari, MD, PhD, the first author of the new scientific paper. “In short, surgeons need to apply for funding early and become proficient at navigating the biomedical research world. Otherwise, we may see a decrease in innovation and lack of new solutions to not only surgical problems but many areas of biomedical research.”
The genesis of this article came from a completely different angle, namely, the deployment of laser weapons to the battlefield. However, as things frequently go, that initial idea led to something of much more immediate interest.
Previously, the Freedomist has covered some aspects of “improvised warfare” that some seem to take as James Bond-like fantasy. Yet, as we progress through the third decade of the 21st Century, remotely controlled drones – available in most countries through their local Amazon store – capable of both conducting tactical combat surveillance, as well as tactical air support by dropping small fragmentation grenades, are serious and maturing battlefield threats, threats that military and security forces are struggling to counter.
“Improvised warfare” has been around since the first caveman grabbed the jawbone of his last dinner to bash in the noggin of another caveman trying to muscle in on the first one’s turf. Throughout military history, outside of the heroically vast and sweeping battles of storied yore, there has always lurked the “PBI” – the “Poor, Bloody Infantry” – struggling to make do with usually-substandard weapons and equipment, improvising on the fly, on the idea that “if it looks stupid, but works – it isn’t stupid.”
This is also true in naval warfare. “Suicide boats,” in the form of “fire ships”, go back to at least the 3rd Century AD in China, and the 5th Century AD in the Mediterranean, and those dates are only the earliest we have on record. The use of fire ships in combat has always been problematic, as controlling the vessels after the skeleton crews abandoned them was impossible, and the abandoned vessels could easily come back on the attackers.
Chinese fire ships used by the navy as floating incendiaries, from the Wujing Zongyao military manuscript written in the year 1044 during the Song Dynasty. Public Domain.
As naval technology advanced however, fire ships, as such, disappeared, replaced by explosive-laden boats propelled by early steam engines. These boats had some advantages, not being as subject to winds as the old ships, and their explosive warheads were much more capable of inflicting serious, if not fatal, damage to large warships. Still, the inability to steer the boats remotely left their utility still strictly limited.
As with so many things in the military sphere, during World War 2, everything changed. The intersection of technologies with mass production and sincere desperation, allowed the first tactically useful guided weapons, not simply on land and in the air, but at sea, human control was still the primary aiming method until the last moment.
Post-WW2, the use of explosive motorboats continued, eventually evolving into actual “suicide boats”, where the crews rode the craft directly into their targets. While this was always a danger for the operators of these boats, very few navies outside of WW2 Japan set out with this as their operating profile. Beginning in the 1980’s, this began to change, first with the LTTE in Sri Lanka and with Iran in its “WW1, 2.0” war with Iraq. This is, in fact, what happened to the USS Cole (DDG 67) when it was attacked at anchor in October of 2000, as the suicide crew happily “saluted” the American crew before detonating their massive charge, nearly destroying the ship.
And then – another “sea change” (no pun intended) happened.
As the Soviet Union collapsed, and Communist China finally figured out how mix capitalism with a brutal, totalitarian governmental system, the West welcomed the Communist remnants into a burgeoning world trade system with open arms. As the global economy shifted and changed, the technology sector exploded in its own form of “business as war.” Technology once reserved only to the “Great Powers” became ‘democratized’, available at reasonable prices to the general public. While major nations certainly had far better and more capable – and much more expensive – systems, smaller states (and groups) suddenly had access to technology and manufacturing bases that significantly increased their capabilities versus local opponents (including their own citizens, but that’s another conversation, entirely).
Container port in operation. Credit: Piqsels.com. Public Domain.
All that was waiting was another spate of desperation to drive improvisation.
As the “Global War on Terror” (the “GWOT”) drove on in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the many small, localized wars it spawned drove desperate innovation, once again. Various ethnic and religious factions around the world desperately sought some sort of advantage. This has led to everything from “homemade tanks”, to artillery, to ‘sci-fi’ weapons manufacture.
But now, desperation-induced technological innovation has caught up with the navies of the world.
On January 30, 2017, the Saudi Arabian frigate RSN Al Madinah (FG 702) was struck and seriously damaged by an explosive-laden speedboat. Initially, it was believed that the craft was a piloted suicide boat deployed by the Shi’a Islam Houthi rebels of Yemen, which country has been in its most recent civil war since 2014. Soon, though, it became apparent that the attack craft was actually a remotely- controlled craft.
Speculation immediately turned to Iran. Iran, in addition to being co-religionists to the Houthis, was already supplying the rebels with short-range ballistic missiles and combat drones. In this regard, Iran differs from Ukraine only in that they supply their craft externally.
Ukrainian naval drones, c.2022. Unknown author.
Given the rapid advances in remote-operations technology, it would be no great task to re-engineer common pleasure boats to function as drone attack craft; as well, the issue of a simplified, “standard issue” refit kit (similar in theory to an aircraft JDAM unit) is virtually guaranteed.
But ultimately – what does all this actually mean, in the grand scheme of things?
Simply, insurgents and guerrillas are now much more capable than they were in the past, as they are now capable to extend remote-controlled warfare into the nautical dimension. With the democratization of military training, this opens the ugly possibility of radical forces being capable of enforcing localized (if not regional) combined-arms dominance over all the most capable of national militaries.
The fact that this is an operational possibility worthy of consideration is not something that should alarm only strategic planners – it is something that average citizen needs to seriously consider.
Act accordingly.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
When the tank appeared on the battlefields of World War One, it sparked terror among armies, who had no answer to it at first. The Germans attempted to counter it with new artillery tactics and later, new artillery weapons to destroy the armored beasts, followed by their first attempt to copy the British behemoths. After World War One ended, all of the militaries involved (the professional ones, at least) reviewed their activities during the war, trying to learn what had gone right, and – more importantly – what had gone wrong.
Regarding the tank, it was found to be useful, certainly, but it suffered from all the ills of any prototype concept, being ridiculously unreliable, too large, too slow, and poorly armored by the end of the war. The next two decades saw continual developments in all of the nations who felt that they might well be on the front line of the next war which – platitudes and wishful thinking about the “war to end all wars” aside – knew was coming.
World War two proved to be the watershed in tank design that most militaries expected. Designs were refined, weapons were improved, and tactics were evolved by force. In general, the things that didn’t work were ruthlessly cast aside, in favor of what worked. This cycle, of course, worked in both directions.
Tanks have severe weaknesses. For the crews, the most important weakness was a painfully limited view. Sticking one’s head outside a tank in the middle of a fight was not conducive to long life, and the visions blocks inside the tank had severely limited fields of view (and still do), limiting the crews’ ability to see anything outside of their steel box. For this reason, specially trained infantry had to escort the tanks across the battlefield to protect them long enough to make it into contact with the enemy…whose infantry could be expected to be armed with whatever anti-tank weapons they had access to, usually in large quantities.
The infantry forces of the world were not about to concede the battlefield to the metal beasts, however.
From the beginning, in WW1, non-armored forces struggled to find countermeasures against the tank. By 1946, dedicated anti-tank artillery had been joined (albeit briefly) by anti-tank rifles. During the “interwar period”, anti-tank hand grenades were developed; while effective, the grenades were really desperation weapons, given how they had to be used. Another weapon was the anti-tank landmine. A very effective class of weapon, they are strictly defensive in nature, and could be problematic in use, as the mines themselves could not be easily re-positioned at need.
A combination of simple rocket technology pushing a small warhead based on the “Monroe Effect”, the first crude “bazookas” deployed by the US Army proved to be highly effective tools for the infantry. Their only real downside was their very short range, compared to tank cannons. Still it was a major advance.
Soldier holding an M1 “Bazooka”, 1943. US Army photo. Public Domain.
The American bazooka was copied directly by the Germans, in their “Panzerschrek” (or, “tank’s bane”), who had jump-started their own research program early in 1943 with their “Panzerfaust” (or, “armor-fist”), a one-shot weapon much like a conventional hand grenade. Both weapon concepts continue today, in a variety of models.
But, it was quickly recognized early on that a ‘middle ground’ was needed. Where conventional – if specialized – artillery was effective, the materials involved in building the dedicated weapons took away from more conventional artillery fire missions. At the same time, hand-held weapons – while also effective – were quickly being countered with better tank armor, and better coordination between enemy tanks and infantry.
In the aftermath of World War 2, the victorious states quickly divided into two mutually hostile camps, initiating the “Cold War”. And, like their fathers in the interwar period, continued the search for the middle ground.
To a great extent, anti-tank artillery disappeared after WW2, in a concession to realism, because the class of weapons was simply not dynamic enough to keep pace with the speed demands of a modern battlefield. It was here, however, that the next development arrived.
Although very crude versions of the “recoilless rifle” were developed in World War 1, the Second World War would see their mechanical maturity, and the first deployments in combat, in the hands of German paratroopers.
A U.S. Special Forces soldier fires a Carl Gustav Recoilless Rifle during a training exercise conducted in Basrah, Iraq, May 2, 2009. US Army Photo. Public Domain.
Resembling a conventional artillery tube, the recoilless rifle barrel is much thinner, for its caliber. Recoilless rifles work, basically, by firing a shell from a specially designed shell casing. This casing is perforated to allow a portion of the ballistic gases to vent to the rear, through a hollow breach. While not completely “recoil-less”, these weapons were a serious threat to tanks, as their warheads were fully capable of destroying a “main battle tank” of the day in one shot. And, while too heavy to be carried by hand, they were still light enough to be mounted in the back of a Jeep or pickup truck.
The recoilless rifle, in its turn, was sidelined by improvements to tank armor. Replacing it, however, was the ATGM. The Anti-Tank Guided Missile dawned in the early 1950’s. They were crude by modern standards, were hard to control in flight, and had a limited range, but technology was advancing rapidly, and the weapons improved dramatically in the 1960’s, especially in warhead technology.
The 1970’s dawned, and with it, the ATGM. In 1972, the US Army deployed the TOW Missile System to Vietnam, where it quickly began destroying tanks, being fired from helicopters. But this was just the proverbial ‘opening round’.
On October 6, 1973, the armed forces of Egypt invaded the Israeli-occupied Sinai Peninsula. The furious, three-week long battle that resulted fundamentally changed the landscape of war for the first time since World War 1.
The Israelis had built up a well-deserved reputation for military prowess, one that would hold true in 1973…but not without taking a severe bruising in the process.
When Egyptian forces crossed the Suez Canal and overran the Israeli defensive line, they halted and set up their own line, waiting for the Israeli counterattack. That should have been the first sign of trouble. Israeli tank commanders, however elected to not wait for more infantry to come up to support them, and attacked directly into the Egyptian line. The result was a bloodbath: the Israelis lost more than sixty tanks in a matter of minutes, as Egyptian ATGM troops cut the unsupported tanks to shreds.
An Israeli M60 Patton destroyed in the Sinai. Photo credit: Sherif9282. Public Domain.
The 9M14 Malyutka (NATO Reporting Name : AT-3 ‘Sagger’), first produced by the Soviet Union in 1963, is probably the most-produced ATGM in history, a weapon still in both production and use as of this writing.
Serbian-made modified Malyutka wire-guided anti-tank missile on display at “Partner 2009” military fair. Photo credit: Kos93. CCA/4.0 Int’l.
A tiny weapon, the Malyutka/Sagger fits into a briefcase-sized carrier. Assembled at its launch sight, the missile has an effective range of 500-3,000 meters. Its warhead remains potent even today: although no longer effective against most tanks, it remains very effective against buildings and light vehicles. The weapon’s warhead is in the same general category as that of the RPG-7, but has a much longer range.
Armies – and other groups – took note.
Now, there are a wide array of ATGM’s prevalent throughout the world. From the European MILAN launchers mounted to Toyota Hilux pickup trucks in the Chadian desert, to American Javelin missiles destroying invading Russian tanks in Ukraine, lightweight military forces around the world have finally found the balance they need to meet heavier forces equally on the field.
U.S. Army paratrooper engages targets with Javelin shoulder fired anti tank missile during a live-fire exercise as part of Exercise Rock Sokol at Pocek Range in Postojna, Slovenia, March 9, 2016. U.S. Army photo by Paolo Bovo. Public Domain.
The dust these changes have stirred up have not fully settled as of 2023. Tanks remain dangerous actors on the battlefield, pundit declarations to the contrary aside. But, as we increasingly enter a period of “discount war”, high-powered weapons in the hands of light, fast-moving forces with tiny logistical footprints and easy-to-acquire and -operate combat vehicles is forcing a serious rethink of the scope of military action…
…At least, among those who pause long enough to reflect on the question.
The Freedomist — Keeping Watch, So You Don’t Have To
NASA’s Solid State Architecture Batteries for Enhanced Rechargeability and Safety (SABERS) is claiming they have created a solid-state battery that will break the barriers that held back the development of electric-powered planes. Some of the advantages of the new battery include it is not made with the scarce resource of lithium. It is also lighter than lithium-ion batteries, is not highly flammable, and has a greater range than lithium-ion batteries do.
SABERS has also been able to overcome a major disadvantage associated with solid-state battery technology. Typically, lithium-ion batteries are much more efficient when it comes to discharging power. But through a new innovation SABERS has been able to “increase a solid-state battery’s discharge rate by a factor of 10 – and then by another factor of five,” according to a report from Yahoo! News.
SABERS’ Rocco Viggiano, an investigator at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland said, “We’re starting to approach this new frontier of battery research that could do so much more than lithium-ion batteries can. Not only does this design eliminate 30 to 40 percent of the battery’s weight, it also allows us to double or even triple the energy it can store, far exceeding the capabilities of lithium-ion batteries that are considered to be state of the art.”
A former Google Executive reveals the true depraved nature of Silicon valley when he recently claimed that the future of humanity will see the rise of sex robots that will replace human-on-human companionship. Ex-Google executive Mohammad Mo Gawdat paints a future for humanity that involves less human to human contact and more human to AI contact, and he not only seems to like it, he doesn’t understand how you might disagree with him.
He said, “Why would you need another being when AI will make you enjoy companionship and sexuality by giving signals in your brain?”
He later said, “If my brain believes something is real then it is real for me no matter if it is actually alive or not,” a statement that reveals his absolute ignorance about the divine-requiring nature of humanity, something he has in common with others who operate under the godless anti-human ideology of leftism in general.
He did offer this one caveat, acknowledging that human dependence on AI to meet more of their needs could backfire, saying “A nuclear bomb can’t create more nukes but the AI that we are building is capable of creating another AI.”
For our readers, let this writer assure you that human nature will confound this godless man and all those who think like he does. We want, we need, human to human interaction, affirmation, and no robot can long satisfy the needs humans have for human affirmation. The only people who will accept an AI wife or husband over a human one are those as depraved as this man and people like him that embrace and live out the anti-human ideology of leftism.
Techspot shared news a new device that can be worn in the ear that is a more effective method of integrating a computer with the mind. The title of the article reads, “Scientists develop novel brain-computer interface that plugs into your ear canal.” The device was created in China. It’s called a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI). The device could eventually augment memory, turn thoughts to text, and more. It could be used for “good” or for “ill,” such as helping you have better memory recall or conditioning your mind to believe false memories.
The Chinese Communist Party owns everything, directly (thanks to Communism) and indirectly (thanks to fascism), so the news should be troubling when it comes from a fascist police state of the nature of the CCP-controlled nation.
America has at least one device being developed here of a similar nature. It’s called a Neuralink and it’s being developed by Elon Musk.
BCI’s could be just what people who support a singularity (a merging of tech and human) need to make their dreams come true. Neither Neuralink nor the Chinese makers have made it clear if and when either device would be ready for “commercial” or even “institutional” use. The nature of advanced tech is typically such that states that can will secretly test and apply these technologies significantly before they’re ever available to the public, so it is likely that both devices are already being used by their respective state governments.
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