AI warfare update; A proposed federal land management policy shift

The Register reports that DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) has successfully completed tests with a modified, artificial intelligence-driven F-16 fighter jet going against a human pilot in a standard F-16 jet:

US Air Force says AI-controlled F-16 fighter jet 

has been dogfighting with humans

Robo-plane was made to restrain itself so as not to harm pilot or airframe

The claims rest on the USAF and DARPA implementing machine learning in an X-62A VISTA, a plane built as a testbed as it can mimic the performance of other aircraft, and recognition of their work as one of four finalists for the National Aeronautic Association's 2023 Robert J. Collier Trophy, an annual award for exceptional feats of aeronautics or astronautics in America.

"The potential for autonomous air-to-air combat has been imaginable for decades, but the reality has remained a distant dream up until now," said Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. "In 2023, the X-62A broke one of the most significant barriers in combat aviation. This is a transformational moment, all made possible by breakthrough accomplishments."

DARPA has been testing AI agent software for piloting simulated planes for several years. Its Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program dates back to 2020, when AlphaDogfight trials pitted human pilots in a flight simulator against an AI opponent.

The AI software won that competition but had an edge – it was allowed to fly at speeds that would have overstressed a real aircraft and generated g-forces that would harm a human pilot.

The integration of AI into modern

warfare is scary but apparently inevitable

AI is taught not to break the airplane because it can do so. But, if AI completely replaces humans, aircraft design would no longer have to take into account human limits. Aircraft design would be unleashed from human considerations. 

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Federal lands

The federal government owns and administers a huge swath of land in the “West” sometimes defined to be some lands west of the 100th meridian to the east side of the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges in California, Oregon and Washington. These public lands consist of (i) the heavily touristed National Parks, which cover less than 50 million acres (78,125 sq mi), and (ii) roughly 450 million acres (7,031,250 sq mi) of grassland, steppe, desert and forest managed in trust for the American people by the Unites States Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and Unites States Forest Service.

100th meridian running 

through ND, DS, NE, KS, OK and TX

As discussed in Nov. 2023 posts here, and here, the federal lands of the West mostly were, as author Chris Ketcham in his 2019 book quoting historian Bernard DeVoto described it: 

“a plundered province,” a resource colony for corporations and absentee landlords who practiced an “economy of liquidation.” He was broad in his attacks on the liquidators. He went after the timbermen, the mining companies, the stockmen, the cattle barons, the oilmen and gasmen, the overgrazers, the deforesters, the denuders, the profiteers of gold rushes and grass rushes. He named the bankers and congressmen who abetted the plundering. The Western hogs, he called them.

In short, federal lands were not managed in trust for the American people. They were exploited by brutal special interests for special interest profit. That has been the law. Until now. The WaPo reports (not paywalled) about a major proposed federal land management policy shift that puts conservation and recreation on equal footing with resource extraction by Western Hogs and sanctimonious government hating ideologue zealots:

For decades, the federal government has prioritized oil and gas drilling, hardrock mining and livestock grazing on public lands across the country. That could soon change under a far-reaching Interior Department rule that puts conservation, recreation and renewable energy development on equal footing with resource extraction.

The final rule released Thursday represents a seismic shift in the management of roughly 245 million acres of public property — about one-tenth of the nation’s land mass. It is expected to draw praise from conservationists and legal challenges from fossil fuel industry groups and Republican officials, some of whom have lambasted the move as a “land grab.”

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, known as the nation’s largest landlord, has long offered leases to oil and gas companies, mining firms and ranchers. Now, for the first time, the nearly 80-year-old agency will auction off “restoration leases” and “mitigation leases” to entities with plans to restore or conserve public lands.

“Today’s final rule helps restore balance to our public lands as we continue using the best-available science to restore habitats, guide strategic and responsible development, and sustain our public lands for generations to come,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said in a statement.

If Trump is re-elected in 2024 I guarantee it or your money back, that if this this new policy is in place, it will be soon reversed to hand power back to special interest Western Hogs, while taking it away from the public interest. We all know where the sympathies of the morally rotted Republican Party lie, i.e., with Western Hogs, and against the public interest.

This machine is called a Bull Hog

Bull Hogs shred bushes and trees

to clear land for resource extraction  

This is how Ketcham described the operation of Bull Hogs in his 2019 book:

Here’s what’s happening to our land: it is May 2018, in the Egan Range of Nevada, south of Ely, and a machine called a Bull Hog is approaching. .... It runs on treads like a bulldozer, and affixed at it’s front is a spinning bladed cylinder. It has one use and one use only -- the destruction of the forest in which I stand, a forest of pinyon and juniper that the BLM manages on our behalf. .... The pinyon-juniper forest is the great survivor in the aridlands, drought resistant, adapted to heat, and is deliciously sweet-smelling -- these two species, after the sagebrush, are the perfuming flora of the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau. But they have no value for logging or wood products, no value that can be measured in money. Therefore, they must be wiped out for other enterprises -- for cattlemen I later learn, so that the land in the Egan Range will be “productive” for cows and not wasted.

The Bull Hog, operated and funded by the Department of the Interior -- at our expense, with our tax dollars -- charges through the forest as I stand in a kind of fugue, incredulous at the pace of its destruction. The beautiful old gnarled trees are devoured in the mouth of the mobile muncher, knocked down and chewed up, defecated out its ass-end in fragments. .... The howl and whine of the engine and the spinning blades, the tortuous toppling of the trees, the crackling and crushing of trunks and limbs, the shattered spitting of being alive seconds before -- it is almost too much to bear.

.... May is prime nesting season for birds in the pinyon-juniper biome. Kestrels and hawks, mountain chickadees and house wrens, black throated gray warblers, flickers, gray flycatchers, scrub jays and pinyon jays live here, and in the soil between the trees nest the poorwills -- all that are caught and ground to red mist by the servo-mechanism, for no reason other than to expedite commerce.

This point bears repeating: If Trump is re-elected in 2024 and if this new policy is in place, it will be soon reversed to hand power back to special interest Western Hogs.