Within minutes of Donald Trump announcing in the early hours of Saturday morning that US troops had capturedVenezuelan president Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, disinformation about the operation flooded social media.
Some people shared old videos across social platforms, falsely claiming that they showed the attacks on the Venezuelan capital Caracas. On TikTok, Instagram, and X, people shared AI-generated images and videos that claimed to show US Drug Enforcement Administration agents and various law enforcement personnel arresting Maduro.
In recent years, major global incidents have triggered huge amounts of disinformation on social media as tech companies have pulled back efforts to moderate their platforms. Many accounts have sought to take advantage of these lax rules to boost engagement and gain followers.
“The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post in the early hours of Saturday morning.
Hours later, US attorney general Pam Bondi announced that Maduro and his wife had been indicted in the Southern District of New York and charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices.
“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Bondi wrote on X.
Within minutes of the news of Maduro’s arrest breaking, an image claiming to show two DEA agents flanking the Venezuelan president spread widely on multiple platforms.
However, using SynthID, a technology developed by Google DeepMind that claims to identify AI-generated images, WIRED was able to confirm it was likely fake.
“Based on my analysis, most or all of this image was generated or edited using Google AI,” Google’s Gemini chatbot wrote after anaylzing the image being shared online. “I detected a SynthID watermark, which is an invisible digital signal embedded by Google’s AI tools during the creation or editing process. This technology is designed to remain detectable even when images are modified, such as through cropping or compression.” The fake image was first reported by fact checker David Puente.
While X’s AI chatbot Grok also confirmed that the image was fake when asked by several X users, it falsely claimed that the image was an altered version of the arrest of Mexican drug boss Dámaso López Núñez in 2017.
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When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth brought hundreds of generals, admirals, and senior enlisted troops together at Marine Corps Base Quantico in September, his message was simple: get fit or get out.
“It’s tiring to look out at combat formations — or really any formation — and see fat troops,” he said. “Likewise, it’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon… It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are.”
Much of what Hegseth proposed are things the military branches already are doing. Troops already must take fitness tests and meet body composition rules. But his overhaul would harden those expectations by requiring daily workouts and adding more tests. For combat jobs, it would scrap male and female minimums in favor of one standard based on today’s male requirements.
For Sarah Rondinone, a dietitian who served in both the Navy and Army, Hegseth’s strong rhetoric raises concerns. She agrees troops need to be functionally fit, but worries that scolding and shaming them will worsen a longstanding issue in the military: fad dieting and disordered eating.
“It’s known that when height and weight [measurement] comes around, everybody doesn’t eat for three days,” she said. “The culture surrounding it is just not what it should be.”
Rondinone has also seen service members engage in other forms of disordered eating that don’t meet the criteria for a medical diagnosis – such as subsisting on chicken broth for days before a measurement. Other troops apply hemorrhoid cream and wrap their waists in plastic wrap to sweat out water weight.
“People will consume laxatives to completely get everything out of their system. Then, oppositely, I have seen people with anorexia nervosa put rocks in their uniform to make weight, because the weight standards go both ways,” she said.
Rondinone now works with SEA WAVES, a nonprofit organization focused on military eating disorder support and mental health. She says Hegseth’s message ignores a range of medical and personal factors that can put service members outside weight standards, such as medications, surgery, or postpartum recovery. She also points out that the standards often rely largely on body mass index, a measure developed in the 19th century that does not account for muscle, genetics, or individual health history.
“You have people that compete in body builder competitions who have 6 percent body fat that are failing these standards because they’re overweight technically,” she said. “But body mass and body composition are not the same for everybody.”
Some experts point to tools like Bod Pods, which use air displacement to measure body fat and lean mass, as more accurate alternatives, though the military has not widely adopted them. Others say fitness and body composition standards should be aligned with a service member’s specific job.
“The military does need to have standards,” said Leah Stiles, founder and CEO of SEA WAVES. “But we need to be concerned with how we’re meeting and reaching those standards. It shouldn’t just be pass or fail, green check mark or red X.”
She said that binary mindset, along with limited prevention and support programs for eating disorders, can push service members toward unhealthy behaviors, which in turn hurt readiness. For instance, she said troops who restrict their calorie intake and increase exercise can reduce their bodies’ available energy.
“The consequences that come from getting into the state of low energy availability are things like brain fog, delayed decision making, delayed recovery after injury, and the list goes on,” she said. “Those aren’t the people that we want beside us on the battlefield or in tense military operations.”
Samantha Krolikowski / U.S. Air Force
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U.S. Air Force
2nd Lieutenant DeAndre Hughes completes a push press during a physical fitness assessment at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada in July 2024.
“Something is clearly wrong. Something is broken in the system,” said Katherine Yusko, a research analyst with the American Security Project who studies military readiness issues. “They aren’t getting the resources they need. They don’t have the time to maintain the lifestyle they need.”
Yusko said military life itself can make meeting fitness and body composition standards harder, with many troops spending long stretches behind screens, getting poor sleep, and having limited access to healthy food on base. She said those factors make it especially important to approach obesity as a medical condition.
“The military, if it really wants to treat this problem, has to acknowledge that obesity is a chronic disease and not a laziness problem or a lapse in discipline,” she said.
She argued that diet and exercise alone often aren’t enough, and that the military has yet to fully adopt a continuum of evidence-based obesity treatment, including medications like GLP-1 drugs.
“These are relatively new solutions to the obesity epidemic that are showing promising results, provided they’re administered by a licensed physician, in combination with nutrition, dietary changes, and behavioral therapy as well,” Yusko said.
Retired Brigadier General Stephen Cheney, now President Emeritus of the American Security Project, spent more than 30 years in the Marine Corps, with much of that time spent overseeing recruit training and recruiting. He said the military has been grappling with overweight recruits since at least the 1970s, and he stresses that fitness and weight struggles reflect broader national trends — with implications for both the existing force and future recruiting.
But he warned against approaches that emphasize discipline over support.
“These young men and women need a lot more support than just cutting their food intake and making them run more miles. We’ve been doing that for 50 years and it didn’t solve the problem,” he said.
The Defense Health Agency says nutrition counseling, weight loss classes, or medication may be available after a medical evaluation, but they aren’t automatically provided to troops who don’t meet standards. Agency officials added that prevention and lifestyle programs are led by the service branches.
Pentagon officials didn’t answer questions about additional support, but said a review of fitness and weight standards is still underway.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.
Copyright 2026 American Homefront Project
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President Donald Trump is crowing again about “Cognitive Examinations,” bragging that he “ACED” another one, his third in a year, but this time it royally backfired, sending social media into a frenzy about why Trump keeps taking mental assessments.
In a Truth Social post early Friday, Jan. 2, the president appeared to be trying to rein in new speculation and rumors about his potentially declining health after a bombshell interview where he revealed concerning new details about his medical history and lifestyle.
U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks during the signing ceremony for the “Fostering the Future” executive order in the East Room of the White House on November 13, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
“The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED’ (Meaning, was correct on 100% of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” Trump boasted.
But the big question really is, why has Trump taken so many cognitive tests, and why does he keep bragging about them like a badge of honor when clearly there’s a reason doctors keep giving him the test?
Social media erupted after Trump’s post.
News outlet cofounder Brett Meiselas of the MeidasTouch noted, “Yeah so having to take 3 straight cognitive tests is bad actually,” above a repost of Trump’s comments captioned, “Trump again says his health is ‘PERFECT’ and claims he ‘ACED’ his third straight cognitive exam, a test given by doctors to detect signs of dementia.”
Trump again says his health is “PERFECT” and claims he “ACED” his third straight cognitive exam, a test given by doctors to detect signs of dementia pic.twitter.com/VPDOqhgIp2
“This sounds like he told someone what to write and they did it for him. They probably put into sentences that made sense—however, this is pathetic. Everyone around him knows. I would guess he has the type of dementia where he gets really mean—I’m guessing staff are afraid of him,” another X user wrote.
Back in October, Trump again bragged about a cognitive test he took in April, the day before he was scheduled to take another one as part of his second physical check-up in six months.
“I also did a cognitive exam, which is always very risky because if I didn’t do well, you’d be the first to be blaring it, and I had a perfect score,” he bragged.
But he wasn’t done tooting his own horn.
“And one of the doctors said he’s almost never seen a perfect score. I had a perfect score. I got the highest score. That made me feel good,” Trump bragged.
X user Beefy Benny wondered why Trump is even revealing he took these tests, let alone bragging about them.
“Having 3 straight cognitive tests means that there was a reason he had to receive 3 straight cognitive tests. You don’t need to pass 3 straight field sobriety tests unless there was a reason to be pulled over 3 straight times.”
I will let you know when I see a “Giraffe.”
Taking cognitive test every month by this count is not a good sign of a healthy man.
The Cleveland Clinic says there are three types of cognitive tests, including one that requires memorizing a short list of words, naming objects in a picture, and performing other basic tasks. Another test involves counting, identifying objects and common facts. And a third includes memorizing a three-word list of random words and drawing basic objects.
The medical facility clearly states on its website that a cognitive exam “requires follow-up testing to make a diagnosis, especially if your provider suspects mild cognitive impairment or dementia,” which could explain why Trump has received three of them.
Social media poster Jesse Battle has a theory on Trump’s repeated dementia tests. “He probably keeps failing it, and every time he goes to see the doctor, he probably asks to take it again and fails it and keeps saying he passed.”
Trump has also repeatedly confused cognitive tests with IQ tests. He took his first cognitive test since retaking office back in April, and months later, he boasted about a “perfect” score on an IQ test.
He also again amplified in his latest post how he believes prospective presidents and vice presidents should take cognitive exams, something he also said in October.
“When they asked would I like to do one I said yeah. I said ‘Did Obama do it? Did Bush do it? Did Biden do it?’ I definitely, Biden wouldn’t have gotten the first three questions right. No, Biden didn’t do it. Biden should have done it,” he squawked.
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President Donald Trump is due to speak later on Saturday, but U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Maduro, who is currently on a Navy ship en route to the U.S., will face narco-terrorism charges after an indictment in New York.
“I will really underline here that it is very early. We don’t understand what the plan for a possible transition could be,” Elizabeth Dickinson, senior analyst for the Andes region at the International Crisis Group, told CNN. “But at the moment everything indicates that the base of the regime, everything that held together the Maduro government, continues to be in place.”
In particular, she noted that the defense minister and the interior affairs minister are hardliners and still appear to remain in power at the moment.
Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, considered an enforcer for Maduro, reportedly appeared on state television wearing a bulletproof vest and sounded defiant.
He claimed the government has everything under control, while calling on the military and police to maintain order. Vice President Delcy Rodriguez also called on regime supporters to take to the streets.
According to Dickinson, the key questions in the immediate future are who has control over critical infrastructure what are the security conditions on the ground.
That will provide critical clues as to how the situation will unfold. But for now, Maduro’s top lieutenants are still in charge.
“So removing Maduro did not necessarily change the fundamental equation of control,” Dickinson said.
To be sure, there will be relief among segments of the Venezuelan population as Maduro ruled over an oppressive government, she said.
And while the country has the world’s largest proved oil reserves, years of sanctions and mismanagement have put the economy in free-fall.
“Venezuela is living day-to-day. We’re talking about a situation of resource scarcity and families that are having to eat sometimes only two times a day,” Dickinson added. “And the way that the government has consolidated its power has really been through that redistribution of limited resources, handing out both food but also just basic supplies to its allies, while again repressing any attempts to stand up against it.”
Meanwhile, international reaction to Trump’s removal of Maduro has been mixed. Few governments in Latin America recognized Maduro’s reelection in 2024, but Mexico said the U.S. military action violated international law. However, Trump ally and Argentine President Javier Milei praised the move.
Maduro backers China, Russia and Iran condemned the his arrest, while the European Union’s top diplomat was cautious, pointing out that the EU has said Maduro lacks legitimacy while calling for a peaceful transition.
“Under all circumstances, the principles of international law and the UN Charter must be respected. We call for restraint,” Kaja Kallas posted on X.
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KRANJSKA GORA – Camille Rast celebrated briefly with both arms in the air after she crossed the finish line. Then she tapped the black mourning band on her left upper arm twice and made the sign of a heart with her hands.
Shortly after earning her maiden career win in a World Cup giant slalom Saturday, the Swiss skier dedicated the victory to the victims of the fire at a Crans-Montana bar.
“This week, in my hometown, there was a tragical accident and I think about those families. We race for them this weekend,” said Rast, who was born in Vétroz, a village about 40 kilometers from Crans-Montana in the Canton of Valais.
“It was a difficult week. But sport has so many emotions, so I tried to do my best and give some good emotions to those people,” she added.
The fire in the crowded bar in the Swiss ski resort left 40 people dead and more than 100 injured during a New Year’s celebration.
Crans-Montana is set to host World Cup speed races for women on Jan. 30-31 and for men on Feb. 1, the last events before the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.
Rast’s win came a week after she finished second in a GS in Austria for what was then her best career result in the discipline. Her two previous World Cup wins both came in slalom, most recently in January 2025, a month before she added the world title in that discipline.
Rast beat second-placed Julia Scheib of Austria by two-tenths, while Paula Moltzan finished 0.47 behind in third for the American’s second podium result of the season.
Teammate Mikaela Shiffrin was just over a second behind in fifth, behind Olympic GS champion Sara Hector of Sweden, who posted the fastest second-run time.
Nina O’Brien in eighth and Elisabeth Bocock in 14th, matching her career best result from a GS in Sweden in March 2023, rounded off a strong showing by the U.S. ski team.
“It’s a really fun team to be a part of,” Moltzan said. “I mean, I never really know who is going to be quite the fastest in training, but I also feel that way on race day.”
Moltzan raced with a bruised back following a nasty crash in last week’s GS. Her career best result in the discipline is a second place, from the season-opening race in October.
“I am actually happy and a bit relieved. Last week, it was extremely difficult for me. I’m still not feeling maybe a 100%. So to be able to pull it off feels really nice. I have some bruising on my spine,” Moltzan said.
“Basically any time I hit a bump doesn’t really feel that good. So lucky that the snow is actually quite smooth here, so it feels less painful.”
Shiffrin holds the women’s record of 22 World Cup wins in the discipline. But with six weeks to go until the Feb. 15 giant slalom at the Olympics, the 2018 gold medalist has not been on a GS podium for 11 World Cup races since January 2024.
Shiffrin suffered from PTSD last season following a horrifying crash at her home race in Killington in November 2024 and has been working her way back up the GS rankings since her return more than two months later.
“Happy and satisfied are different, because I would like to be faster, but I’m taking steps and I feel very good with that,” Shiffrin told Austrian TV after the first leg when asked whether she was 100% happy with her run.
“Last year, I remember watching this race from home and I thought, ‘Oh, I can’t do that.’ So, it’s pretty incredible to be here one year later and to be in the mix with the fastest women right now.”
Scheib, who has won three races this season, extended her lead in the GS standings as her closest challenger, New Zealand’s Alice Robinson, skied out in the first run for a second straight race, this time on a course set by her coach Nils Coberger. Rast is now second, trailing Scheib by 119 points.
Shiffrin remains in the overall lead, 140 points ahead of runner-up Rast.
A slalom on the same hill is scheduled for Sunday. There are no men’s World Cup races this weekend.
Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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This is an edition of The Wonder Reader, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a set of stories to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Sign up here to get it every Saturday morning.
Challenge has become a dirty word in literary circles, Robert Rubsam wrote recently: “This era of declining literacy and unsteady sales has led publishers to seek out writing that is summarizable, adaptable.” But books that demand effort, Rubsam argues, can help us encounter new possibilities in both literature and life.
“Whatever the limitations of the marketplace, great writing remains as capable as ever of breaking open your sense of the world and your place in it,” Rubsam writes. Today’s newsletter rounds up some of our recommendations for books that will challenge you and grab your attention.
On Reading Habits
A Bizarre, Challenging Book More People Should Read
By Robert Rubsam
The true pleasure of literature can be found in demanding works such as Your Name Here, by Helen DeWitt and Ilya Gridneff.
I recently asked readers to share a photo of something that sparks their sense of awe in the world. “Walking near my house in Seattle on a rainy fall day, I saw a number of leaves stuck to the sidewalk with rain beaded on them. This one was my favorite,” Dave B., 65, writes.
I’ll continue to feature your responses in the coming weeks.
— Isabel
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President Donald Trump has confirmed that a “large scale strike” was carried out in Venezuela Saturday morning, leading to the capture of President Nicolas Maduro and his wife. According to administration officials, President Maduro will stand trial in the United States on drug and weapons charges.
By way of still developing reports, the United States carried out a strike in the South American nation in the early morning hours of January 3, shocking not only Venezuelans but also other leaders and observers from around the globe.
Images of the strike show several structures ablaze in this BBC report, which is following the events in great detail as they occur. President Trump took to his Truth Social platform to share news of the strike and announced an 11 am ET press conference to provide more information on the operation.
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A CBS News report confirms that Delta Force, the U.S. Army’s special missions unit, carried out the strike and capture of President Maduro and his wife Cilia. U.S.
Attorney General Pam Bondi backed Trump’s announcement with one of her own, stating that Maduro and his wife have been indicted in the Southern District Court of New York.
Bondi says Maduro has been charged with “Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices, and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States.”
She added, “They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”
The strike comes after months of elevated aggression toward the nation, with War Secretary Pete Hegseth leading an extensive operation to sink alleged drug transport in preventing the transport of narcotics into the United States. Last month, the U.S. military prevented oil tankers from leaving the region in an orchestrated blockade.
In an Al Jazeera report, Venezuela is accusing the United States of targeting both civilian and military locations in the strike and has denounced the attack as “military aggression.”
World leaders have also commented on the strike, with United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer announcing this morning that his nation was not involved in the attack and is still examining the facts.
Russian officials are condemning the strike and have pledged their support for Venezuelans ahead of an emergency United Nations meeting.
“The pretexts cited to justify these actions are untenable. Ideologically driven hostility has prevailed over practical pragmatism and a willingness to build relations based on trust and predictability,” read a portion of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s statement as shared by The Moscow Times.
It added, “We reaffirm our solidarity with the Venezuelan people and our support for the course pursued by its Bolivarian leadership to defend the country’s national interests and sovereignty.”
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei shared Russia’s sentiment, writing on X, “What’s important is when one realizes an enemy wants to force something on one’s govt. or nation with false claims, they must stand firmly against that enemy. We won’t give in to them. With reliance on God & confidence in the people’s support, we’ll bring the enemy to its knees.”
As this situation continues to develop, we will return to this post for any important updates.
Dry, warm & sunny this weekend (Copyright KSAT-12 2026 – All Rights Reserved)
FORECAST HIGHLIGHTS
TODAY: Cooler and breezy, highs in the 70s
TOMORROW: Chilly morning, pleasant afternoon
NEXT WEEK: Warm and dry, rain chances midweek
FORECAST
THIS WEEKEND
A weak cold front moved through this morning, shifting winds to the north and bringing cooler air. Highs will settle in the low to mid-70s, with gusty winds up to 25–30 mph. Saturday night will feel much cooler, dipping into the 30s in the Hill Country and 40s elsewhere. Fire danger is something to watch because of dry conditions & winds.
Dry, warm & sunny this weekend (Copyright KSAT-12 2026 – All Rights Reserved)
Sunday starts cold but warms nicely. Expect morning lows in the 40s, then highs in the low to mid-70s under plenty of sunshine. Winds will be lighter, making it a great day to be outside.
RAIN CHANCES
Rain chances return midweek with a weak system bringing a 20–30% chance of showers late Wednesday into Thursday. Most areas will stay dry, but keep an umbrella handy just in case. After that, cooler air moves in to end the week.
Rain chances return by mid-week (Copyright KSAT-12 2026 – All Rights Reserved)
NEXT WEEK
We are starting off dry and warm. Highs climb back into the upper 70s and low 80s. Some spots could flirt with record highs again. Cooler air returns after Thursday night, with another chance of rain next weekend.
8 Day Forecast (Copyright KSAT-12 2026 – All Rights Reserved)
Daily Forecast
KSAT meteorologists keep you on top of the ever-changing South Texas weather.
Shelby Ebertowski joined KSAT 12 News in January 2025. She came to San Antonio from Fargo, North Dakota via the University of North Dakota, where she learned the ropes as a weekend forecaster over two years at KVLY. Her love of weather love began after experiencing Hurricane Harvey in 2017.
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For far too long, two specters have been haunting the world of artificial intelligence and warfare, and they both featured in the same movie. The first is Skynet — the specter of general artificial intelligence achieving consciousness and turning against its creators. The second is the Terminator itself — the anthropomorphized killing machine that has dominated our collective imagination about automated warfare. These twin phantoms have served as convenient distractions while a more prosaic but equally revolutionary transformation has unfolded: the gradual automation of the broader organizational and operational structures of the military through the merger of Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex.
Anthony King’s AI, Automation, and War is sociology that reads like an illuminating intelligence briefing, rich in description and light on both jargon and normative positions. It is based on interviews with 123 insiders across the developing US, UK, and Israeli tech-military complex. His analysis seeks to demystify some of the most egregious forms of “AI fetishism,” while shifting the focus to actual developments and their influence on the social arrangements of war.
His argument is clear: The fears (and hopes) of full autonomy are misplaced. AI is not “replacing humans.” Nor is the idea of human-machine teaming — which places weapons or systems on an equal footing with human agents — accurate. What we are seeing instead are decision-support systems: tools, if transformational ones, that enable planning, targeting, and cyber operations. Such tools are and will be “used primarily to improve military understanding and intelligence.” In the process, civil-military relationships are changing.
King is right to shift the focus of the discussion away from the apocalyptic fetish of killer robots and superintelligence. His account is descriptively rich. And yet, both his central distinction and overall argument should be subject to some skepticism. It is not clear where support and “empowerment” end and the loss of human agency begins. What is becoming increasingly clear is the convergence of automation across military decision-making structures and the deepening of corporate involvement in war — and that each is animated by similar fetishes.
As in early modern Europe, when the revolution in military cartography transformed how armies understood terrain and planned campaigns, today’s technological tools are revolutionizing how militaries process information, identify targets, and coordinate operations. This is primarily a software revolution, but it does include the integration and coordination of hardware, especially the tools that link surveillance to targeting. Unlike the dreams of “Good Old Fashioned AI” from the beginnings of the field in the 1950s, we are not dealing with a single symbolic map representing all of reality. Instead, the merging of the territory of war with its representation in software is increasingly pursued not through all-purpose general models, but through applied and bespoke applications — a shift that requires the growing integration of civilian tech actors with the military.
Functionally, the revolution is one of intelligence gathering, analysis, and the automation of decision-making cycles, up to and including the “kill chain.” Data aggregators and predictive algorithms connect information gathered by sensors to classification parameters to produce action points. The presence of humans in the overall decision-making cycles and their contribution to specific decision points is constantly reassessed. From planning, to the identification of potential targets, to the decision to engage, human judgment is being systematically “aided” or “enhanced” — some, though not King, may say “replaced” — by algorithmic processes. The human remains in the proverbial loop. But the nature of this loop is changing. And that change is twofold: automation is spreading, and so too is the ever-deeper participation of the civilian tech sector.
How did we get here? As with so much at this stage of late and extreme technocapitalism, the present situation is both an evolution of, and a leap beyond, the military-industrial past. The capacity to survey and militarily engage potential “threats” across the globe has been the goal of the US military-technology apparatus for the last century. As General William Westmoreland put it during the Vietnam War: “On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control.”
This goal has been served consistently by the business operating on the West Coast of the United States, as vividly described in Malcolm Harris’s Palo Alto. And this is the message — and the tradition — driven home, if in tortured, convoluted, and hollow ways, in Palantir CEO Alex Karp’s recent manifesto, The Technological Republic. Technological capitalism’s purpose and obligation, alongside profit-making, is in the service of the military domination of the world by “the West.”
The appearance and trajectory of Palantir Technologies can be read as the central case study in this latest stage of corporate-military evolution. It is by now a familiar story. Founded by Peter Thiel and Karp, Palantir was explicitly designed as a national security company from its inception. Post-9/11, the skies of those subject to the War on Terror were dominated by drones gathering surveillance and increasingly conducting targeted assassinations. However, even though Palantir was from the very beginning supported by members of the military and intelligence establishment, it initially struggled to penetrate traditional military procurement processes, before finding its opening by working with Special Forces units frustrated with constraints on their operational tempo and lethality.
It wasn’t robots but logistical solutions that Palantir offered: the dynamic aggregation and analysis of the vast amounts of data generated by military sensors, satellites, and open-source intelligence, tailored for active operations. Their ambition — now largely realized — was to become the nervous system connecting unlimited surveillance with targeting, operating across conflicts and alliances, while at the same time collapsing the line between warfare and increasingly securitized domestic politics, most notably immigration, policing, and health care.
A key turning point in the establishment of this model was the Pentagon’s Project Maven, an ambitious effort to use machine learning to analyze the terabytes of video footage generated by years of drone operations. Initially partnering with Google, the project aimed to automate the analysis of surveillance imagery — work that would have otherwise taken human analysts hundreds of thousands of hours. When Google employees famously revolted against military applications of their technology, Palantir stepped in.
King astutely identifies the Google revolt as marking “the beginning of this new golden age of the tech-military complex.” Rather than representing successful resistance to militarization, it merely cleared the field for companies keen on defense work. The result has been the emergence of what might be called “military-native” tech companies — firms like Palantir and Anduril that were designed from the ground up to serve defense markets. They have been proliferating ever since.
One can survey that burgeoning ecosystem by looking at the “American Dynamism 50” list compiled by Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm which has been central to both the financing and the politics of the field. “Peace through strength,” in anticipation of a potential war with China, is the connecting investment rationale, as well as — now — US national security strategy.
At the same time, corporate actors with initially expressed qualms, or who had hitherto maintained a primarily civilian focus, including giants like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, have been brought around. Project Nimbus — the cloud computing contract between the Israeli government, Google Cloud, and Amazon Web Services, which has played a central role in Israel’s capacity to run the surveillance and targeting operations both in the occupation of the West Bank and the destruction of Gaza — is a case in point. The US army is increasingly relying on SpaceX’s Starlink satellites for command and control, as has, of course, Ukraine, in its defense against Russia.
The Israeli model shows how ever-increasing integration between tech companies, intelligence services, and military units is seen as the very ideal that this global ecosystem aims to emulate. Some of King’s interviewees criticize the US and UK systems as not living up to the degree of functional integration achieved in Israel or praise them for moving in that direction. The direction is one of broad militarization.
In the Israeli tech-military complex, one Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) source told King, “[s]ome civilians are not really civilians. And some military industries are not really industries.” Netanyahu’s “super-Sparta” comment — his description of Israel as a hypermilitarized, self-reliant tech power — was meant to capture not only an ideal of autarky but also the further deepening of connections and the weakening of barriers between civil and military forces.
This blurring of boundaries is exemplified by companies such as Elbit Systems, which King describes as having “integrated with operational units in the IDF . . . to design, develop, and improve software” in real-time battlefield conditions. At least eighteen American tech corporations are involved in the conflict in Ukraine. While little detail of the specific practices is open to the public, some are providing hands-on assistance through bespoke algorithms on the ground. Palantir has openly claimed it is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine.”
The result is a feedback loop where military operations generate data that improves algorithmic systems, which in turn enable speeding up the “kill chain” and “reducing the cognitive load,” with most of this loop increasingly automated and captured by corporate actors. Such loops are generating a particular type of military procurement. Elke Schwarz has shown how these ever-faster feedback loops fit within a venture capital ethos — moving fast and breaking things — with what VC investor Reid Hoffman has called “blitzscaling.” Indeed, between 2014 and 2023, the value of defense sector venture capital deals grew eightfold.
Speed, volume, transformation, and integration now constitute a new form of dynamic mapmaking, altering both war and civil-military relationships. Such developments are deliberate, celebrated, and openly recognized. In June 2024, senior executives from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI were formally commissioned as Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonels and senior advisers as part of the Army’s Executive Innovation Corps — a visible symbol of how thoroughly Silicon Valley has penetrated Pentagon leadership. The US Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Unit is headquartered in Silicon Valley, dedicated to accelerating the adoption of commercial and dual-use technologies, and staffed by individuals with extensive connections to the tech sector.
Can we, then, talk about the automation of war as the replacement of political judgement by algorithms? Or is what is happening fundamentally different? King thinks so and tries to draw a clear distinction between fully autonomous weapons and the decision-support systems that increasingly dominate the battlefield. In demystifying the promise of full automation and the far-fetched ideas of artificial (general) intelligence in war-fighting, he applies Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism to military AI systems. Just as commodities obscure the social relations of production that create them, AI-powered military systems obscure the organizational choices and human decisions embedded in their algorithms. A targeting recommendation generated by an AI system appears as an objective, technical assessment rather than the product of specific political and military priorities programmed by human designers.
Indeed, to simplify a long line of interdisciplinary critique and connect it with common sense, artificial intelligence is not real intelligence. To argue otherwise is mystification. And, in war, such mystification serves multiple functions. It provides political cover for controversial targeting decisions — after all, the algorithm, unclouded by hate, recommended it. It creates distance between the end result and those that set the parameters that led to it, weakening both moral and legal accountability. And it obscures the growing influence of private corporations over life-and-death military decisions.
Those opposed to fully autonomous weapons have long argued that, even if there is functional equivalence between humans and machines in cognitive and kinetic capabilities, artificial systems lack the moral agency necessary for them to be responsible participants in war. A taboo on fully autonomous weapons is barely holding, with the UN General Assembly Resolutions upholding it appearing increasingly precarious and subject to crucial holdouts.
King argues that the developments he is describing — the mapmaking, the bespoke tools, the functional merging of tech and war-fighting — are very different from the promise and specter of full autonomy. Such decision-support systems maintain the taboo against full autonomy and maintain human — political and military — agency and judgement, from the planning to the operational phases. Instead, they revolutionize the application of that agency, as well as the social structure of war-fighting. According to this view, both the enthusiasts and the doomsayers have been wrong: the ultimate commodification of human thought through the specter of general intelligence and full automation has been a red herring.
And yet, such red herrings have served a function. While humans have remained, precariously, in or on the proverbial loop, the loop has changed in ways that evoke familiar Marxian concepts of alienation, commodification, and fetishism — not just of the commodity form but of the corporate form as well. Keeping the specter of full autonomy at bay, if only just, has allowed a deeper and more pervasive automation of war across both routine and critical military functions, with ultimately quite similar effects in terms of the loss of political agency and judgement in the conduct of war. In addition, we may be moving toward an even deeper type of technological commodification, one that spreads and totalizes war across the civil-military divide.
The examples of the tools used for the destruction of Gaza are instructive. The two central tools, Lavender and Gospel, are data aggregators, operating on preset parameters and generating predictions, classifying humans and objects as proposed targets. There are, of course, key elements that clearly reflect human political and moral — and legally significant — judgement: the broad nature of the classifications; the extraordinarily permissive collateral damage parameters; the combination of the target classification with the disturbingly named Where’s Daddy tool that prioritizes the targeting of suspected fighters at their personal homes and with their families; and the use of these tools, including through the prioritization of volume of targets requested, in a campaign of total destruction.
At the same time, it is also quite clear from the relevant reporting that human agency is being reduced, at least at the mid- and lower-operational level — especially where the priorities of volume and speed in physical destruction and killing leave little space for human intervention or make it easier for human operators to live with the results. It may be that blind approval of all proposed male targets within a twenty second window reflects some minimal form of judgement, but it is, at best, judgement reduced to participation in a broader, increasingly automated system.
In assessing the continuing existence of human agency, it is important to understand the extent to which individuals at all relevant points in a targeting cycle meaningfully engage with the application of core legal principles: distinctions between civilians and combatants, and between civilian objects and military objectives; proportionality in the infliction of incidental civilian harm; and the obligation to take all feasible precautions in attacks to determine the nature of the target and minimize civilian harm, as required by the law of war. These requirements demand the exercise of cognitive agency, discretion, and judgement — both to balance military necessity with humanitarian protection and because the law is a human creation, irreducible to code, aimed at governing relations between human beings in the world, even a world at war.
Whether a given technological system, given its classification parameters, is capable of drawing the relevant distinctions required by law, both at the level of sensing and accurately recognizing and classifying a target and at the point of engagement, is still very much an open question. Increasingly, that question is being sidelined by technological and institutional developments. Even with the increasing sophistication of sensing, data analysis, and the synthetic representation of reality to users, an assessment will require situated judgment and not the near-blind following of a recommendation.
Whether, for example, a building by “nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage,” as required by treaty law, cannot be determined by the automatic ping of a mobile signal associated with an individual algorithmically ranked as a potential militant. This is not only because of the unacceptable margin for error, or because such an approach reflects an overly broad and permissive interpretation of the term “use.” It is primarily because decisions that lead to death and destruction are — and should always remain — human responsibilities. Unless, of course, the priority is the rubber-stamping of indiscriminate destruction.
The phrase “meaningful human control” has been promoted over the last decade in order to try to draw a line beyond which automation of a given system shouldn’t cross. It is a vague and imperfect phrase, which has proven unable so far to stem the tide. The spread of these technologies throughout the targeting cycle is rendering it increasingly hollow. More recently, the concept of “context-appropriate human judgement and control” has been advanced; wordier, perhaps more textured, but it, too, risks being an empty shell.
Where is the line between decision support and full automation — the line we should not cross? Consider three factors:
First, key exercises of discretion and judgement in the identification of specific targets and their engagement are being commodified. They increasingly appear as abstract values churned out by automated systems on the basis of set parameters. Those parameters may be scrupulous in their claimed adherence to legal rules or, as in the IDF case, extremely permissive, to put it mildly. But in both cases classification is automated, abstracted, commodified, dehumanized.
Second, there is a reduction of human agency. This reduction may be not absolute. It may still be possible to regard those who set the parameters, deploy the weapons, activate the system, or provide final approval as, to some extent, responsible. In certain circumstances, as King’s interviewees occasionally argue, participants may perceive the technology as providing richer informational inputs that benefit the exercise of judgement and agency. And yet, at the same time, the gradual automation of the targeting cycle inevitably saps agency — removing the participants from the cognitive and moral costs of war. This is especially true where speed and volume are overriding priorities. As in Gaza, such speed and volume may be serving the goal of indiscriminate and comprehensive destruction. But even in conflicts where annihilation is not the wave that carries all human judgement, there is a point at which it is simply not possible for human beings to exercise agency over the volume of information that machines are able to process — where bespoke interactive tools are effectively taking their human users for a ride. In this context, any potential objections to the adoption of AI tools and their recommendations, whether at the operational or broader social and political level, are becoming increasingly weak.
Finally, there is a crucial third factor which is, I think, less clearly understood. What, for our purposes, is the relationship between commodity and corporate form? What is the relationship between, on the one hand, a political, military, or legal judgement that is commodified through algorithmic mystification and, on the other, the increasing involvement, influence, and even capture of war-fighting by profit-maximizing corporations? Does the latter, by its nature, advance the former?
King thinks not, hence his distinction between full autonomy and decision-support technologies developed by the emerging tech-military complex. He argues that the shifting civil-military relationship requires our attention but does not necessarily entail loss of agency — and, indeed, that its technological expression is currently “empowering” decision makers. We have seen however, that at least with respect to the demands imposed by the law of war, agency is in fact being lost. Still, perhaps there’s no necessary connection. Perhaps power and judgement over war-making are shifting toward corporate actors within the growing complex of hypercapitalism and militarism. And perhaps the corporate promotion of the gradual automation of the decision-making loop is fundamentally opportunistic — a “disruption” facilitating capture — and only happens to coincide with the commodification of judgement and loss of agency.
But there are grounds to be skeptical. The very logic of capitalism and its associational forms are geared to promoting moral distance and structures of irresponsibility. The loss of agency through automation serves that very same function. The fueling of war by the profit motive is, of course, as ancient as war itself, but a sociology of this tech-military complex may yet show how the breakdown of barriers through militant hypercapitalism connects the commodification of AI to the commodification of the social organization of wart-fighting
In the meantime, the actual killer robots — potentially fully autonomous “unmanned systems” — are very much in development, testing, and partial deployment. The mutual capture of militant hypercapitalism and the national security state is preparing us to welcome them as equals.
Great Job Ioannis Kalpouzos & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
Non-normative families may challenge social norms, but real resistance requires redistributing care, time and resources beyond the household.
This essay is part of an ongoing Gender & Democracy series, presented in partnership with Groundswell Fund and Groundswell Action Fund, highlighting the work of Groundswell partners advancing inclusive democracy. You’ll find stories, reflections and accomplishments—told in their own words—by grassroots leaders, women of color, Indigenous women, and trans and gender-expansive people supported by Groundswell.By amplifying these voices—their solutions, communities, challenges and victories—our shared goal is to show how intersectional organizing strengthens democracy.
So you and your polycule have found a cute little house to rent, and you’re finally going to build the queer commune of your dreams. All that’s missing is the rainbow flag in the window and the “In Our America…” sign on the lawn.
While it would be all too easy to subscribe to the idea that your very existence is a form of resistance, we should all be mindful to avoid this trap.
It’s true, for those of us in blended, non-normative, queer and chosen families, our ability to succeed and thrive is something to celebrate. So many of our nation’s systems, from insurance coverage to hospital visitation to workplace bereavement leave, only offer benefits to very narrow definitions of nuclear families formed by biological and legal means. Especially in this moment, when Project 2025 has declared the nuclear family “the foundation of a well-ordered nation and healthy society” and the current administration pushes a pro-natalist vision of IVF, there’s no doubt that existing as a non-normative family makes a radical statement.
However, our existence alone is not enough to challenge the oppressive systems we live under. We should all take a closer look at our identities and ask ourselves, “What am I actually doing to disrupt the current order?”
… The only way we will survive the coming years of advancing authoritarianism, climate collapse and increasing precarity is by actively investing in networks that are much wider than our households
Protesters participate in the “ICE out of New York” demonstration in Foley Square outside of Federal Plaza on Aug. 9, 2025, in New York, USA. (Selcuk Acar / Anadolu via Getty Images)
For many LGBTQ+ people, especially those who are white, cisgender, well-educated and wealthy, for example, authentically living out our sexuality alone does not help dismantle the structures that perpetuate racism and poverty. As scholar Cathy Cohen illustrated, to realize the radical potential of queerness, we cannot simply exist as queer people—we must recognize our affinity with all marginalized people and work to stop the forces that subjugate us all.
The same goes for those of us in non-nuclear and chosen families. Imagine a non-normative family with more than two co-parents who work high-paying jobs to fund their lifestyles without engaging in any form of justice work. It makes little difference that they stray away from the nuclear family model if they continue to benefit from their privileges without challenging them or extending resources to other people. It is not enough to go against the institutionally sanctioned way of building family if our actions do not oppose the many other harms of our institutions—particularly to BIPOC, poor folks and disabled people.
… To realize the radical potential of queerness, we cannot simply exist as queer people—we must recognize our affinity with all marginalized people and work to stop the forces that subjugate us all.
There’s no cut-and-dry answer to the question of whether “existence is resistance,” because we all hold so many different identities, but it’s worth keeping in mind where the phrase comes from: the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty. For Indigenous people, such as Palestinians, staying alive and preserving their culture is a profound form of opposition. Existence is radical when you are under direct attack, when the state is working against you rather than for you.
For most of us living in non-nuclear formations, that is simply not the case. For that reason, our actions must extend beyond our households and spread outward. If you live in co-operative housing or with multiple partners, could you use the money you save living communally to give back to your unhoused neighbors? Could you use the time and energy you save getting childcare from your village to participate in community organizing?
I know this is easier said than done. Too many of us struggle to support our families and immediate care networks as it is. However, the only way we will survive the coming years of advancing authoritarianism, climate collapse and increasing precarity is by actively investing in networks that are much wider than our households.
Start getting to know your neighbors. Get involved in local groups organizing for change. Deepen your commitment to caring for people in your community the way you care for your family. We owe it to ourselves and to each other to deeply question our own complacency with these systems and commit to doing more to subvert them.
Great Job Marin Hart & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
