Comment by Riaz Haq on July 9, 2023 at 7:29am

The future of war: A special report


https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2023-07-08

Big wars are tragedies for the people and countries that fight them. They also transform how the world prepares for conflict, with momentous consequences for global security. Britain, France and Germany sent observers to the American civil war to study battles like Gettysburg. The tank duels of the Yom Kippur war in 1973 accelerated the shift of America’s army from the force that lost in Vietnam to the one that thumped Iraq in 1991. That campaign, in turn, led China’s leaders to rebuild the People’s Liberation Army into the formidable force it is today.

The war in Ukraine is the largest in Europe since 1945. It will shape the understanding of combat for decades to come. It has shattered any illusions that modern conflict might be limited to counterinsurgency campaigns or evolve towards low-casualty struggles in cyberspace. Instead it points to a new kind of high-intensity war that combines cutting-edge tech with industrial-scale killing and munitions consumption, even as it draws in civilians, allies and private firms. You can be sure that autocratic regimes are studying how to get an edge in any coming conflict. Rather than recoiling from the death and destruction, liberal societies must recognise that wars between industrialised economies are an all-too-real prospect—and start to prepare.



As our special report explains, Ukraine’s killing fields hold three big lessons. The first is that the battlefield is becoming transparent. Forget binoculars or maps; think of all-seeing sensors on satellites and fleets of drones. Cheap and ubiquitous, they yield data for processing by ever-improving algorithms that can pick out needles from haystacks: the mobile signal of a Russian general, say, or the outline of a camouflaged tank. This information can then be relayed by satellites to the lowliest soldier at the front, or used to aim artillery and rockets with unprecedented precision and range.

This quality of hyper-transparency means that future wars will hinge on reconnaissance. The priorities will be to detect the enemy first, before they spot you; to blind their sensors, whether drones or satellites; and to disrupt their means of sending data across the battlefield, whether through cyber-attacks, electronic warfare or old-fashioned explosives. Troops will have to develop new ways of fighting, relying on mobility, dispersal, concealment and deception. Big armies that fail to invest in new technologies or to develop new doctrines will be overwhelmed by smaller ones that do.

Even in the age of artificial intelligence, the second lesson is that war may still involve an immense physical mass of hundreds of thousands of humans, and millions of machines and munitions. Casualties in Ukraine have been severe: the ability to see targets and hit them precisely sends the body-count soaring. To adapt, troops have shifted mountains of mud to dig trenches worthy of Verdun or Passchendaele. The consumption of munitions and equipment is staggering: Russia has fired 10m shells in a year. Ukraine loses 10,000 drones per month. It is asking its allies for old-school cluster munitions to help its counter-offensive.



Eventually, technology may change how this requirement for physical “mass” is met and maintained. On June 30th General Mark Milley, America’s most senior soldier, predicted that a third of advanced armed forces would be robotic in 10-15 years’ time: think of pilotless air forces and crewless tanks. Yet armies need to be able to fight in this decade as well as the next one. That means replenishing stockpiles to prepare for high attrition rates, creating the industrial capacity to manufacture hardware at far greater scale and ensuring that armies have reserves of manpower. A nato summit on July 11th and 12th will be a test of whether Western countries can continue to reinvigorate their alliance to these ends.

Comment by Riaz Haq on July 9, 2023 at 7:30am

The future of war: A special report


https://www.economist.com/weeklyedition/2023-07-08


The third lesson—one that also applied for much of the 20th century—is that the boundary of a big war is wide and indistinct. The West’s conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were fought by small professional armies and imposed a light burden on civilians at home (but often lots of misery on local people). In Ukraine civilians have been sucked into the war as victims—over 9,000 have died—but also participants: a provincial grandmother can help guide artillery fire through a smartphone app. And beyond the old defence-industrial complex, a new cohort of private firms has proved crucial. Ukraine’s battlefield software is hosted on big tech’s cloud servers abroad; Finnish firms provide targeting data and American ones satellite comms. A network of allies, with different levels of commitment, has helped supply Ukraine and enforce sanctions and an embargo on Russian trade.

New boundaries create fresh problems. The growing participation of civilians raises legal and ethical questions. Private companies located outside the physical conflict zone may be subject to virtual or armed attack. As new firms become involved, governments need to ensure that no company is a single point of failure.

No two wars are the same. A fight between India and China may take place on the rooftop of the world. A Sino-American clash over Taiwan would feature more air and naval power, long-range missiles and disruptions to trade. The mutual threat of nuclear use has probably acted to limit escalation in Ukraine: nato has not directly engaged a nuclear-armed enemy and Russia’s threats have been bluster so far. But in a fight over Taiwan, America and China would be tempted to attack each other in space, which could lead to nuclear escalation, especially if early-warning and command-and-control satellites were disabled.

Silicon Valley and the Somme
For liberal societies the temptation is to step back from the horrors of Ukraine, and from the vast cost and effort of modernising their armed forces. Yet they cannot assume that such a conflict, between large industrialised economies, will be a one-off event. An autocratic and unstable Russia may pose a threat to the West for decades to come. China’s rising military clout is a destabilising factor in Asia, and a global resurgence of autocracy could make conflicts more likely. Armies that do not learn the lessons of the new kind of industrial war on display in Ukraine risk losing to those that do. ■

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 5, 2023 at 4:43pm

A new Huawei phone has defeated US chip sanctions against China


https://qz.com/a-new-huawei-phone-has-defeated-us-chip-sanctions-ag...

The new Kirin 9000s chip in Huawei’s latest phone uses an advanced 7-nanometer processor fabricated in China by the country’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), according to a teardown of the phone that TechInsights conducted for Bloomberg.

Huawei’s latest smartphone, the Mate 60 Pro, offers proof that China’s homegrown semiconductor industry is advancing despite the US ban on chips and chipmaking technology.


The new Kirin 9000s chip in Huawei’s latest phone uses an advanced 7-nanometer processor fabricated in China by the country’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. (SMIC), according to a teardown of the phone that TechInsightsconducted for Bloomberg

A brief recent timeline of US chip sanctions against China
August 2022: The US Congress passes the CHIPS and Science Act, a law that approves subsidies and tax breaks to help jumpstart the production of advanced semiconductors on American soil.



September 2022: The Biden administration bans federally funded US tech firms from building advanced facilities in China for a decade.

October 2022: The US commerce department bars companies from supplying advanced chips and chipmaking equipment to China, calling it an effort to curb China’s ability to produce cutting-edge chips for weapons and other defense technology, rather than a bid to cripple the country’s consumer electronics industry.



November 2022: The US bans the approval of communications equipment from Chinese companies like Huawei Technologies and ZTE, claiming that they pose “an unacceptable risk” to the country’s national security.

May 2023: Beijing bans its “operators of critical information infrastructure” from doing business with Micron Tech, an Idaho-based chipmaker.



“In the AI garden, the seeds are the AI software frameworks—which China already has access to. The plants in the garden are the AI models in use, which again are already available to Chinese AI companies. Nvidia provides the best shovels and pruning shears to tend the garden, but not the only means to tend it. So it doesn’t make sense to try to build a high wall around it...[T]o over-regulate these chips creates the risk that the US could fumble away its technology leadership. Would you rather have Chinese AI customers continue to fuel Nvidia’s growth and success? Or would you rather they spend their yuan to fuel the growth and success of Chinese suppliers?”

—Patrick Moorhead, a tech analyst, writing in Forbes in July 2023

One big number: China’s hoard of Nvidia chips
$5 billion: The value of orders that China’s tech giants have placed with Nvidia for its A800 and A100 chips, to be delivered this year, according to an August report by the Financial Times. The biggest internet giants—Baidu, ByteDance, Tencent, and Alibaba—have placed orders totalling $1 billion to buy around 100,000 A800 processors. Given that the US is mulling new export controls, Chinese companies are rushing to hoard the best chips on the market to train their AI models and run their data centers.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 3, 2023 at 10:29am

Arnaud Bertrand
@RnaudBertrand
Incredible, Gina Raimondo implores US industry to respect her sanctions because: "America leads the world in AI… America leads the world in advanced semiconductor design. That’s because of our private sector. No way are we going to let [China] catch up."
https://scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/3243657/us...

This is an incredible admission because the Biden administration's messaging - or shall I say propaganda - on their semiconductors sanctions has so far always been that it isn't to gain or maintain a competitive advantage over China, but solely to prevent China's military from accessing to certain technologies. See for instance what Janet Yellen said on exactly this: "[the sanctions are] tailored toward the specific national security objective of preventing the advancement of highly sensitive technologies that are critical to the next generation of military innovation and [are] not designed for us to gain a competitive economic advantage over any other country." (Src: https://washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/06/china-relationship-g... )

Our Anthony Blinken: "One of the important things for me to do on this trip [to China] was to disabuse our Chinese hosts of the notion that we are seeking to economically contain them... However, what is clearly in our interest is making sure that certain specific technologies that China may be using to, for example: advance its very opaque nuclear weapons program, to build hypersonic missiles, to use technology that may have repressive purposes – it’s not in our interest to provide that technology to China. And I also made that very clear. So, the actions that we’re taking, that we’ve already taken, and as necessary that we’ll continue to take are narrowly focused, carefully tailored to advance and protect our national security. And I think that’s a very important distinction." (src: https://china.usembassy-china.org.cn/secretary-of-state-antony-j-bl... )

Pretty much everyone knew this was 100% bullshit and all done for the purpose of America maintaining a competitive advantage in the technologies of the future, like AI. But now we have the Secretary of Commerce, who implemented these sanctions, say exactly that.

https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1731126664661459367?s=20

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