Military Science Fiction, Science Fact

The summer Based Book Sale just started. Either there’s something important that I don’t understand, which is possible in the context of freelance book publishing, or a “Based Author” is somebody who recognizes AmazonCorp as evil yet continues to submit even when he isn’t trying to make a profit.

Over 95% of the sale’s offerings are via Amazon. Again. Vox Day has his own outfit, of course, and one series used a third-party, but every other author insisted on using Amazon with their industry-killing digital rights management and soul-killing employee working conditions.

What’s a dissident guy gotta do to get his war-porn fix?

I’ve already threatened to self-publish and don’t make idle threats, so I dusted off a short story I had lying around… needs some cleanup work, be less preachy… lesser men worship Jesus but me, I write fan fiction about Jesus… but as I reworked it for posting as a free-use protest against the Bezos’ Based Books sale, I noticed its plot, a soldier in powered armor discovering that the AI in his suit is deceiving him via “augmented” reality, is now a real-life headline.

Army Launches Detachment 201: Executive Innovation Corps to Drive Tech Transformation

h ttps://www.army.mil/article/286317/army_launches_detachment_201_executive_innovation_corps_to_drive_tech_transformation

By U.S. Army Public Affairs, 13 June 2025

Event 201 was the staging for the Covid Plandemic. I don’t know why they’re calling this Detachment 201, but I doubt it’s a harmless coincidence.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Army is establishing Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps, a new initiative designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation. On June 13, 2025, the Army will officially swear in four tech leaders.

Det. 201 is an effort to recruit senior tech executives to serve part-time in the Army Reserve as senior advisors. In this role they will work on targeted projects to help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems. By bringing private-sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts like the Army Transformation Initiative, which aims to make the force leaner, smarter, and more lethal.

The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI.

Lieutenant-Colonel Sam Altman? O-5? Most technical advisors recruited like this, such as dentists, are given ranks of O-3 or O-4, and are in the military org chart mainly because they’re expected to deploy downrange. At least, that’s my non-veteran understanding, also officer status is an easy benefit to offer. Nobody finishes med school hoping the Army will declare him an honorary Corporal.

Why is a tech CEO being given military rank at all, let alone a higher rank? Billionaire chief technology officers with existing employment don’t have time to play Army, and they themselves don’t have the tech skills the Army is wanting. Their minions do.

Private armies much?

The Army Transformation Initiative is one of several not-odd-at-all changes Trump is imposing on the military. Like the Vatican, most of the Pentagon’s internal correspondence is so loaded with buzzwords that an outsider’s first task is figuring out if anything is actually being said. The ATI is mostly noise about upgrading obsolete equipment… new org charts… blah, blah… “campaign of learning from the Ukrainian Army’s successes”, heh, somebody is polishing brass with his tongue…

All I need to know is that the four tech companies being brought in to modernize this new Derp 201, are industry leaders in AI, AI, AI and social media/AI.

But how does AI help a soldier? It’s a language model. It doesn’t select or track targets. It doesn’t pattern-match. It doesn’t do sensors or night vision. The only special thing an AI does is talk, and in the context of combat, talking means giving orders or spying on people.

The suit AI in my unpublished story altered the soldier’s audio & video feeds in realtime, telling him the (fake) crimes of the people he was killing and twisting their pleas into threats. How close are we to that in real life?

h ttps://www.combattech.net/the-armys-integrated-visual-augmentation-system-ivas/

February 2025?

For decades, the U.S. Army has been on a mission to revolutionize how soldiers see the battlefield. Clear vision, real-time updates, and augmented reality overlays have long been the stuff of science fiction, but the IVAS program is making this a reality…

The Integrated Visual Augmentation System was conceived as a soldier-worn device, melding cutting-edge technology—augmented reality, thermal imaging, and wireless networking—into a single, helmet-mounted HUD (Heads-Up Display). The Army wants to give its close combat soldiers a comprehensive tool to detect, identify, and engage threats more effectively across various environments, from urban landscapes to dense forests and arid deserts. Key to this vision is the integration of multiple features:

See-Through Display: The HUD provides real-time overlays of navigational data, friendly and enemy positions, and environmental cues.

Useful, but a HUD compass is not something one needs an AI for. A compass is not something one needs a HUD for, but I digress.

Thermal and Low-Light Sensors: Soldiers gain greater visibility at night or in darkened spaces.

We already have that.

Augmented Reality for Situational Awareness: With the [Android] Tactical Assault Kit software, squads see digital markers for objectives, allies, and potential hazards.

Again, useful, but transponders are not AI. Tracking targets requires image recognition at most.

Intra-Soldier Wireless: This ultra-wide-band network links the IVAS HUD with the soldier’s weapon sight, enabling passive targeting (i.e., a soldier can see the weapon’s viewpoint without shouldering it).

We nerds already have that. No AI.

Seriously, I’ve already done the “camera on a gun to shoot around corners” thing and let me tell you, it only works with handguns. Rifles are very awkward to shoot sideways. You get no cheek weld OR shoulder rest when you shoot around corners, camera or no, and handguns are easier to wave around indoors with cables attached.

You can use it just to see if around the corner is safe, okay, but you can do that with a mirror on a stick. No AI. And I doubt your battle-buddy needs to share that picture-in-picture feed. He’ll just let you go first.

Body-Worn Computer…Conformal Batteries…

Not AI.

Key improvements in IVAS 1.2 include… blah blah…

Robust Network Architecture: Strengthened capability for data exchange within a company and potential support for robotic autonomous systems.

A soldier operating a drone by voice would be a legit use of AI. I’m still not impressed. Here’s the thing with all these helmet-mounted gadgets: every moment the soldier is using them, is a moment he’s not paying attention to his surroundings. I know just from video games that simple automaps in a screen corner can be distracting or accidentally ignored. A soldier guiding a drone while scanning for threats while listening to the radio while walking, is a distracted soldier.

After piecing together several articles, “robust network architecture” means Elon Musk’s Earthlink and cloud computing.

At least the Army is addressing its fatal procurement problems… oops, the IVAS has been discontinued. Welcome to Internet Time, Pentagon procurement!

h ttps://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2025/05/30/meta-and-anduril-work-on-mixed-reality-devices-for-the-us-military/

May 2025

On Thursday, Anduril and Meta announced news that feels like a fairy tale ending for Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey. The two companies are working together to build extended reality (XR) devices for the U.S. military, Anduril announced in a blog post.

IVAS was a massive military contract, with a total $22 billion budget, originally awarded to Microsoft in 2018 intended to develop HoloLens-like AR glasses for soldiers.

But after endless problems, in February the Army stripped management of the program from Microsoft and awarded it to Anduril, with Microsoft staying on as a cloud provider.

No military is going to manage procurement fast enough for Internet Time. Any computer system deployed army-wide will inevitably be obsolete, so it’s a very questionable decision to make the “future soldier” as dependent on computer tech as possible. Not to mention the heroes of Ukraine successfully learning, against all odds, that just one smartphone is enough of a digital signature to attract artillery.

Seriously, this “future soldier” stuff is as stupid as self-driving cars, and for the same reasons. Humans don’t work like that. The attention span is finite. Cramming more data down my optic nerve does nothing to improve my ability to process it. Automating a job, for example detecting enemies or pedestrians, so I have nothing to do but intervene a half-second before crisis, is not an improvement over me doing the job myself, especially if the boss decides I can not-do two or three jobs at once.

The [new, EagleEye] devices will be based on tech out of Meta’s AR/VR research center Reality Labs, the post says. They’ll use Meta’s Llama AI model, and they will tap into Anduril’s command and control software known as Lattice. The idea is to provide soldiers with a heads-up display of battlefield intelligence in real time.

They still haven’t explained what the AI will be used for, so I am left to guess that it’ll be the established use of spying on the end-users themselves. Badthinks about Greatest Ally, for example, or voiced concerns about newly acquired chest pains.

The tyrant is always most afraid of his own troops, not enemy troops.

So no, elaborate false-reality schemes are unlikely to happen in real life. Just the panopticon surveillance state that we civilians are already being subjected to by Anduril and Palantir.

Instead of posting my fiction, then, I’ll post this real-life equivalent.

US Colonel Sacked by DoD for Echoing America’s Discontent Over US-Israel Backing

h ttps://21stcenturywire.com/2025/06/18/us-colonel-sacked-by-dod-for-echoing-americas-discontent-over-us-israel-backing/

18 June 2025

Colonel Nathan McCormack, a Pentagon official, was dismissed from his role at the Joint Chiefs of Staff due to social media posts in which he labeled Israel a “death cult,” and described Netanyahu and his administration as “Judeo-supremacist cronies,” and raised doubts about whether the United States is genuinely acting as a proxy for Israel. At the time of his removal, McCormack held the position of chief of the Levant and Egypt branch within the J5 planning directorate of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Since joining the J5 in June 2024, McCormack had been active on social media, particularly following the Hamas attack on October 7. Operating under the alias “Nate,” he frequently referenced his military background and even posted a picture of his Meritorious Service Medal certificate. In April, McCormack expressed concerns about the priorities of U.S. foreign policy and posted on his X account.

That account was barely anonymous. He should have known better, like those “Based” book authors still submitting to Amazon gatekeeping, but I can’t be too hard on him. Careful privacy with VPN probably would not have helped against the Mossad…

The move came shortly after the Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) reported Tuesday on a semi-anonymous X account allegedly linked to McCormack, which included remarks describing Israel as “our worst ‘ally’.”

…and because he talked, I know the existence of a new ally. Hopefully we can chat someday, without an AI wired between our helmet microphones and radios, because I like his style:

“The Western states go to great lengths to avoid criticism of Israel, much out of Holocaust guilt.”

“I have recently been considering whether we might be a representative of Israel and have not realised it.”

“Our worst ‘ally.’ We get literally nothing out of the ‘partnership’ other than the enmity of millions of people in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.”

“Netanyahu and his Judeo-supremacist cronies are determined to prolong the conflict for their own goals: either to remain in power or to annex the land.”

It sounds like a journey of discovery similar to my own, but on Internet Time in the halls of power. Welcome to the big-time, Nathan! You haven’t arrived as a dissident until you’ve been Canceled at least once… and yours made headlines!

I bet he’ll write a book about it.