Rapid drop of the recruitment rates may accelerate hyper-automation and privatization of the US army

globinfo freexchange

Younger generations have been 'trained' by the dominant culture to act in more 'pragmatic' terms in the arena of a brutal economic cynicism. As the fight for a place in this system becomes harder and harder, more and more people are being left out of the game. More and more of the them struggle to survive.

Despite these perfect conditions for the US empire components to exploit the growing numbers of the 'brigades of the poor’, not everything went well for the empire.

After 9/11 disaster, the Internet, the WikiLeaks, the alternative sources of information, the whistleblowers and the powerful combination of all these, brought some unprecedented changes. They managed to destroy the deceptive facade of the US deep state narratives, propagated through the corporate media.

With all the big lies, war crimes, war propaganda exposed to great extent, millennials and new generations are not easy targets for "war on terror"-type narratives.

As a consequence, it appears that the US army increasingly struggles to recruit new personnel to satisfy the ongoing hunger of the deep state for more imperialist wars.

This situation may accelerate the process of the US army hyper-automation and full-scale privatization.

We may see autonomous robots in the battlefield much sooner than we thought. The developments in the AI sector are already quite impressive. The Pentagon, or big private investments, may direct tons of money to the related companies in order to build robots capable to replace human soldiers, even in the decision-making field.

Yet, privatized, fully-automated armies could become a real nightmare and the situation may get easily out of control. According to the Daily Star:

           Criminal gangs and terrorists could get their hands on murderous artificial intelligence to hunt down enemy targets. And by being controlled at length, they could make it impossible for the culprits to be traced. Computer engineer Dr Subhash Kak warned the parts needed to assemble killer robots will prove "not difficult" to buy on the black market. And before long he said the robots themselves will available to buy, ready to carry out mass murder upon instruction. The Oklahoma University lecturer told Daily Star Online: "The technology for human assisted killer robots is already here.”

As mentioned already, we see a rise of private armies that act in various battlefields, like in Ukraine, exactly because in the absence of the nation-states and the national armies, someone has to protect the natural resources and the new means of production for the dominant elite.

But when the arms industry will fully automate the new weapons, private armies will only serve as assistance to fully automated war machines. We already see the test fields of the weapons of future˙ the drones in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

It's not accidental that the arms industries demonstrate new weapons designed to be used inside urban areas for suppression of potential riots. There will be no "outside enemy" in the future. The threat for the dominant system will come from the interior, the big urban centers. Soldier-robots will protect worker-robots and resources.

In the whole story, very few bother to examine a fundamental problem: where will all these robots find the necessary amount of energy to satisfy their functional needs? In the prospect of fully autonomous robots, capable of making their own decisions, the answer to this question may be proved even more terrifying.