I don’t disagree with any of your assessments, but I don’t know if it’s a bigger mistake than Iraq…yet. That war was a 10 year (longer if you bc point ISIS) debacle that cost trillions.
Let’s wait a few years before saying this mistake is bigger first.
However, one point that I agree with that might lead to this war being worse: the Gulf are showing some serious buyers remorse with sticking in the US orbit. Both the uselessness of America’s strategy and the almost clear prejudice Trump shows towards the Arabs vs Israel in the decision tree of this conflict is unsettling for the Gulf states.
Good write up. Not to mention the other big HR constraints on DoD engineers: they almost always have to be a “US person.”
Anyone who gets a CAC working on a personal computer deals with this all too much. The root certs DoD uses are not part of the public trusted sources that commonly come installed in browsers.
lol I very nearly included a rant about that but decided it was too far off topic. Not being able to smoke weed may be more of an obstacle these days though.
I haven’t touched a Palantir system since 2008 (and I still feel dirty) so I’m not the most read up on this: but Maven is just the harness or workflow tool. It still needs an LLM to evaluate data, and they used Anthropic for the kickoff of this war.
Yes, this has been the gradual evolution of AI context and tooling. Same thing is occurring with some of the use cases of a vector DB and RAG. Once you can have the agent interact with the already existing conventional data store using existing queries, there is no point in introducing that work flow for inference.
They are referring to the current crop of brimstone evangelists that used their pulpit to push their extremism to great political effect. Jerry Falwell was one of the pioneers.
In a similar vein if anyone thinks this is an incorrect viewpoint (it’s not):
For every combat soldier in the Pacific Theater in WWII there were roughly 4.3 support soldiers. I don’t think anyone questions the fact you needed all those people for support and not direct action.
Correct that there was no Iraq generation because there was no draft and numbers were way smaller. Vietnam had over half a million troops at the height of that war. Iraq had under 170k.
But the war was still deeply unpopular. There is a reason America did the extraordinary - to that point - and elect its first black president.
The economic toll will be greater with these wars than Vietnam.
Initially, I was in the weeds quite often with my engineers. Over the years I’ve learned to maintain side projects that directionally follow what my teams are doing. It gives me some dispassionate separation and a unique look at things that my engineers appreciate.
Let’s wait a few years before saying this mistake is bigger first.
However, one point that I agree with that might lead to this war being worse: the Gulf are showing some serious buyers remorse with sticking in the US orbit. Both the uselessness of America’s strategy and the almost clear prejudice Trump shows towards the Arabs vs Israel in the decision tree of this conflict is unsettling for the Gulf states.
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