"Target" might be a loaded word in this context, because sometimes there's a decision-making process even after a bad guy is positively IDed. Several years ago the military was testing AI to find the best available weapon to fire on a target by skipping the traditional "platoon at the front line calls its company HQ for artillery support, company calls the battalion HQ..." process. The front line folks would ID the target, and the AI system would present the appropriate commander with the right available weapon to use in seconds, versus 10s of minutes. But whether it's a legitimate target under the rules of engagement, the best use of available assets, strategically sound, etc., is another decision. The decision maker might choose to not "target" known bad guys at all.

This is easy to say until somebody else is using AI to try to kill you, or you're facing the prospect of losing a war to the kind of country/group that's willing to use AI to kill people in order to get their way. It kind of becomes a choice between being a race for the moral bottom, or losing out to the people who are already at the bottom of the moral ladder. It's a tough call.

You're conflating several things here -- the number of bases, conflicts, DoD audit failures -- and then asking if that's how NIH does research, as if those three things have anything to do with how DoD R&D commands work. Full transparency, I work at one. If you want to complain about how many bases DoD has, look up DoD requests to close bases and why that doesn't happen. The DoD hasn't passed an audit yet, but that doesn't mean the R&D side can't account for where it spends its money. A, they only get a relatively small slice, and B, there's a lot of competition for funding so they track money carefully to see if they can move it to a competing demand. And a lot of what is spent goes to university and other researchers. I could go into how many things military research has paid for, but you can look them up. Lastly, the destabilized world comment is way off base. Think about a world without the U.S. Navy. There'd be a lot more movies about pirates and everything would cost a lot more because Walmart, et al, would have to pay for their own security instead of relying on the fact that the Navy keeps the shipping lanes safe. You have to wonder if it would even be economically feasible to ship goods the way we do if the U.S. and other countries didn't keep the sea safe for commerce. And I could go on. And yeah, the situation in parts of the world sucks. I've spent most of my adult life in one role or another with the military, and I wish none of it had been necessary. But I also served near the Fulda gap, in Berlin when the wall was up, and near the DMZ in Korea. We might be more stable now without the military, but it wouldn't be a good kind of stable.

There are many steps to development, so it's hard to say if they have a case or not. Some of these things go from the most basic research all the way to final engineering. So if you're at the stage where you're trying to get it to "Hello World" and somebody tests your security, you might have a fair complaint. Or if you've got a working prototype as a technology demonstrator so you can try out different components like sensors or smart munitions or propulsion systems to see if they operate in the kinds of conditions the system will have to operate in, or to see which one gives you the best trade-off between weight and performance or whatever, then it seems fair that you wouldn't have the security working right yet because you're still picking out core hardware pieces that you'll have to integrate with everything else.

>while slipshod security has roughly a 1 in 10 chance of showing its head during a manager's actual reign Systems that handle classified information are usually (perhaps always; only got involved in a few) validated by another, 3-letter, government agency outside the service. So if your system sucks, I would think there's a good chance the 3-letter agency would find it.

>It is worse in the military, because communication is inherently unidirectional, and they can go years between real world validations (i.e. wars). This is not as true, if true at all, on the R&D side. I work in one R&D command and we have almost 14,000 people and fewer than 200 military personnel. So you don't see the classic military structure you see in uniform. Also, in the Army, at least, if you're working on an actual system you're probably working for a Program Manager. PMs can have whoever they want do their engineering for them, buy technology from Army labs, Federal labs, industry or international entities. So again, it's not a military structure as the rest of the Army understands it (I'm a retired NCO, so I've been around a pair chunk of the Army). And the Army Futures Command is going to change a lot of these relationships.

The conservatives know demographics are running against them, that's why they're dropping all pretense of playing ball and doing things like this. Gorsuch gives them decades of a reliable conservative vote on the supreme court, which they need because during those decades the power of the old, white conservative party will be fading. Despite the cat-bird seat they find themselves in now, they lost seats in both houses last time and only stomach the guy in the white house so he can do things like bump up the defense budget and nominate guys like Gorsuch. It's been a good strategy. Take state houses, gerrymander, be the ultimate party of obstruction. But it's breaking down because they empowered the wacko right, which is making them unable to govern and they really don't want to deliver what the voters want anyway. So they had some of the people some of the time, but they need to do something new.

If you look at government reports of this you'll usually see the word "declared" in there. He gave up his "declared" chemical weapons stockpiles, which the Army demilitarized aboard a Navy ship at sea.

Spoken like someone who has never spent time around tanks.

I don't see how you can say we're crying about terrorists when obviously we're killing them all the time. In fact, the real problem is we're killing too many people around them. We take over other countries at will, level them, build them back up and then level them again. The only problem we have is we don't know how to quit and go home. You've got to learn to understand the difference between people who are saying things and making noise for a reason -- to get a vote or a donation -- and reality.

I've lived in and visited a lot of places in the world, and we're as safe and free as any major country. You give up some freedom to get orderliness and predictability so you can call the police when somebody tries to make a might vs right argument with you, and trust that your doctor has been to a school that teaches doctoring, etc. They might be freer in some parts of Somalia or something, but they pay a high price for that freedom. Despite all the BS on the internet things haven't changed for people on the ground unless you're an immigrant or you share a few habits that criminals are known to have.

I won't get into whether the government neutered the second amendment, because even if you're right there, your next statement is wrong. The U.S. has, for a lot of various and obvious historical reasons, decided that it had to outpace the rest of the world with military technology. It spends billions on R&D every year and tens of billions on acquiring equipment. The result is weaponry that civilians couldn't hope to own even if it were legal to do so, and equipment that demands highly trained crews and highly trained repair and other support personnel to operate successfully even once in a while, much less keep running and keep current -- which adds up to tens or hundreds of billions more. In other words, in order to keep ahead of -- name your adversary of choice -- the U.S. built a military that no civilian or group of civilians could keep up with no matter what happened with the second amendment. And if you look at the history of how technological advancement is connected to war and military spending, you might come to the conclusion that it was inevitable that it would eventually turn out that way.

And if it hadn't happened that way the most likely result is that we'd be a second- or third-rate power getting pushed around by the Soviet Union or China or whoever, and our lives would be a lot worse and you'd be bitching about how our politicians didn't keep us ahead of our adversaries so we could stay safe and free and so on.

That's the killer question, all right. In Germany they pay just under half. They get health care and pension at 55, iirc. And they bitch about taxes and how expensive everything is just like we do in the U.S. But they basically have no homeless people and have seemingly solved a few other problems I see every day on the way to work (their highways are excellent, for example). And yet they still turn our BMWs and Mercedes that do well in a capitalist marketplace. So, I don't know if 46% or 47% is the number, but I know it's possible to be doing a lot better than we are if you just act like an adult, tally up the shit you really want and then pay for it.

There are only three line items over $500B a year: pensions (including SS), health care (including Medicaid and Medicare) and defense. Your "half a trillion" is a fairy tale. I didn't watch your video, because there's always a conspiracy theory to back up any contention. If we were spending almost as much on welfare for immigrants as we spend on Defense everyone would know it, not just the people who watch certain YouTube videos.

First, you are the government's master, or can be if you want to be. Pay attention when public opinion really swings against something. They jump through their asses like their anuses are on fire. Second, you owe an amount that covers how you benefit. And there's the rub. People want a one-to-one direct correlation they can follow, like a lunch bill. They don't consider what they don't see or don't see directly connected. But, for example, the state department and the defense department make the world safe for American business. They -- and their counterparts in other countries -- make global corporations possible. So the people who benefit more from what the government provides should pay more taxes. People like to look at a person getting $12K or $24K in entitlements and say they're making more from government. Meanwhile, Wal Mart can only sell cheap Chinese goods as inexpensively as they can because the Navy and the Coast Guard make sure the shipping lanes are open and free of pirates. Imagine how costs would soar if our ports looked like the coast off Somalia and the corporations had to pay for their own security, didn't have the State department making treaties and solving problems so they could do business overseas as easily as they can, etc. Wal Mart would go under about three months after their current stock ran out. So the Walton family should pay not only more taxes, but a higher percentage of taxes.

They have to work the public relations side just like those who want less taxes did when some of their economic peers weren't asking for a tax cut. Why invent a new standard now? While most people see any tax cut as an unalloyed good, there are always those who point out that something will have to go away for this to happen. If you pay attention or check the history tax cuts that don't come right after a war are followed fee hikes and new/higher taxes in other areas, as well as budget cuts and decay that happens too slowly to notice. It's expensive to run a modern country.