Let Them Eat Drones

Some of the most frightening shit I’ve ever read is written in the most mundane language possible using insider acronyms, oblique abbreviations and words that don’t make much sense to the average person in the order they are written.

Let me give you an example:

“From the outset, the company’s core vision centered on creating innovative, high-performance Electro-Optical and Infrared (EO/IR) sensor payloads and solutions across multiple domains. Over the decades, Controp became a world-class provider of integrated EO/IR systems, seamlessly merging advanced optics, precision line-of-sight stabilization, sophisticated image processing, and AI-driven analytics. Today, the company leverages this experience beyond sensor payloads, defining unique operational solutions through superb VISINT by integrating multiple sensor types, data processing, and analytics into a complete solution.”

This is a paragraph marketing an unmanned, AI-powered military spy drone that the maker, Controp, markets as ‘battle-tested.’ Controp is an Israeli company, and the battle they are referring to is the genocide in Gaza. These drones provide crystal clear images of people up to 70 kilometres away (this is the VISINT part—visual intelligence) and automatically assign someone as a target for elimination based on the data they are being fed.

Controp markets their ‘integrated system’ as a ‘complete solution.’ Every solution needs a problem, and in this case the problem, which they don’t specify, is human aliveness. The complete solution therefore boils down to a more efficient way to murder.

The mundanity of the marketing speak is purposeful.

This killing machine, among many others, was on display last week in Abu Dhabi at the International Defence Exhibition, known as IDEX, where 350 companies from 65 countries around the world hawked their horrifying and dystopian weaponry with smiles, selfies and sushi.

This exhibition was just one of the many that occur throughout the year, the Controp drone just one among the many hundreds vying to find a government willing to put in an order so it can access a slice of the world’s biggest and most lucrative pie.

I spent some time looking at obscure defence and military websites, cataloguing tweets and posts that get next to zero engagement, and came to the conclusion that governments are as much planning to fight internal enemies as they are external ones.

That they are planning to fight us.

The development of AI is massive in this effort. Data will be central to the coming massacres. Gaza hasn’t been talked enough about in this respect. The Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank have long been used as experimental subjects for new western military technology. A whole book has been written on it. But for the first time, AI was used to track, trace and murder people at the population level. Data the IDF had gathered over the previous years on 2 million people was fed into military systems to automate mass killing on a scale unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

“A major advantage is the analytics embedded into our systems. We use our analytics and AI-driven processing near the sensor. The result is faster, more accurate threat identification, and reduced latency in delivering data to the user,” in the words of Controp’s CEO, Hagay Azani.

Reduced latency. A quicker way to kill. Truly the banality of evil.

Most people were morally outraged and disgusted at the genocide. But for people like Azani, what happened in Gaza was an exciting development. It crossed the rubicon in a good way. A government used big data to automate mass ‘target acquisition’ and killing. It proved what could be done. The first large-scale effort of the 21st century. No doubt the lessons are being learned as we speak, the processes refined, the bones of a genocide technocratically unpicked by military advisers and weapons contractors to optimise for the next time.

And we should be in no doubt that there will be a next time.

These weapons are made to be used, and in the world of next generation weaponry, nothing is more exciting to the merchants of death than AI partnered with what they call loitering munitions.

Loitering munitions is just a fancy way of saying suicide drones. These flying weapons, also known as quadcopters, dive into a person or vehicle to destroy it after hanging around in the air above it for a bit while the data on the target gets processed. These things used to be big. But they are getting smaller and smaller. The next generation models are being made for urban warfare and are referred to by the acronym PSIO—precision strike indoor and outdoor drones.

Indoor.

And in December, for the first time, the US government bought a load of them. Where did they buy them from? No prizes for guessing. They signed a contract with another Israeli weapons maker, Xtend. Production on these AI-powered drones began, in the US, at some point in the first three months of this year, according to Xtend. Why did the US buy them? Once again, because, as CEO Aviv Shapira, said, ‘they have already demonstrated operational excellence in conflict.’

In other words, they’ve been used in Gaza. In hospitals. In schools. In apartment blocks. There are testimonials on the Xtend website from IDF goons who used the drones in Gaza. Shapira boasted about their use in Gaza in a Forbes interview last year.

Now they’re coming to the US, where Shapira has touted their potential use for public and private security forces.

To reiterate: the US government saw what these drones did in Gaza, said, ‘wow, we like what you guys did there!’ and bought a load of them.

They call it the Scorpio 500, and there’s a cheery YouTube video proselytising about it.

The normalisation of such dystopian technology, and the brazenness with which it is talked about is breath-taking. As is the total invisibility of these stories in the mainstream. A corporate media captured by the security state means these sorts of stories, which are deeply in the public interest, remain buried in dark corners of the internet.

Kamikaze drones are all the rage.

Another Israeli suicide drone maker, Israel Aerospace Industries, has signed deals worth $250 million in recent years to manufacture drones for unspecified Asian and other countries. Greece just bought nearly 600 ‘switchblade’ suicide drones from the US.

In America the company vying for AI drone supremacy is Anduril, a weapons maker funded by Peter Thiel and founded by Palmer Luckey, a thirty-something billionaire who designed the virtual reality headset the Oculus Rift. A huge Trump and Israel supporter, Luckey and Anduril have a $22 billion contract with the US army to use AI and virtual reality headsets to turn soldiers into ‘invincible technomancers.’ Luckey’s actual words.

In the meantime, Luckey is developing drones that automatically mark a target as hostile if an operator does not override a timer that begins counting down when a target has been selected by the AI. The drone then generates a mission to destroy the target. There are flashy videos demonstrating all of this. We are in the realms of the most outlandish and far-fetched dystopias ever conceived.

And as Musk slashes the federal government and kills funding for a wide range of initiatives, you can be sure that for Trump acolytes such as Luckey, Thiel and Musk himself, the tap will not be turned off. Contracts for all three will come flooding out in the name of national security over the next four years.

On the topic of austerity for the people and the tap being turned on for weapons manufacturers, in Britain the government of Keir Starmer is planning cuts of up to 11% across a wide range of departments in order to fund a huge increase in so-called defence spending.

Starmer says this is ‘just the reality.’

War, for a country that hasn’t been invaded since 1797, and is not going to be invaded, by Russia or anyone else, is, apparently, just the reality. The same of course goes for the US, which is also not going to be invaded by anyone, probably ever.

We live in a world where technology allied with a rigged system has enabled megalomaniacs with more money than god to live out their techno-fascist dreams and get wildly rich in the process. A world where, despite poverty, hunger and a collapsing biosphere, every year more money is funnelled to arms companies and billionaires to devise creatively modern new ways to kill. The most recent figure for arms spending is a ridiculous $2.46 trillion. A world run by death eaters and psychopaths, where weapons come to exist just because they can exist, the logic of the military-industrial complex fully realised.

And where weapons exist, they will be used.

On immigrants, on activists, on internal enemies that dare to resist.

Billionaires can’t afford otherwise.