[quantumleaper]

I agree with other commenters that the claims made in the report are strange.

> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed. With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units.

The other quotes and use cases could make sense in terms of using AI jailbreaks to find information more easily, but this one is absolutely ridiculous. Did the clueless researcher just get trolled?

[throw2ih020]

This is a real thing, it's why units like Sturmtruppen or special forces units have been successful throughout history - a smaller, better trained and coordinated force is often better than a large, uncoordinated mob. _Especially_ if your force is made up of people willing to do suicide attacks. Or if you goal is not to take and hold territory, but to trade lives for terror and body count.

A wave of 1000 soldiers won't break a trench line, but a squad of infiltrators can sneak in and make entry. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stormtroopers_(Imperial_German...

[dylan604]

I don't think that's the point of suspicion. Smaller vs larger group tactics have been available in pretty much any place you look. It's in movies. It's in games. It's in books. Like actual military strategy books studied by military students. This has been available for much longer than LLMs.

[Animats]

The books exist, but those books are read by few outside military leadership. The good ones come from leaders who have been there, and they skip over the basics. Being able to talk to a chatbot that can get people past the classic military mistakes could make a force far more effective. Maybe. It's not going to create a Giap or a Rommel, but it might keep a force from repeating classic military mistakes.

There's a brutal little book, "The Defense of Duffer's Drift".[1] It's about classic small-unit mistakes, written from the point of view of someone who has to dream about the same battle over and over. Each time, his plan seems reasonable. But he loses and gets killed. He finally gets it right, after quite a few tries. It's to hammer home the message that there are many ways to screw up an operation. If you don't know the classic mistakes, you're going to make them.

A more modern critic is The Angry Staff Officer. This is a currently serving US Army officer who writes, with a biting wit, about tactics, both real and fictional.[2] He's a good read.

The classics for revolutionaries/terrorists are, of course, Mao and Marighella. Mao is philosophical. Marighella is nuts and bolts.

[1] https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24842

[2] https://angrystaffofficer.com/

[dylan604]

I guess they aren't reading Art of War either. Knowing one's enemy blah blah. People unwilling to learn from others are doomed to repeat other's failures. In some situations, there's a perverse pleasure in seeing them fail. Such a pleasure it'd be great if there was a really fun word to describe it...

[Animats]

The US Army War College publishes a quarterly, "Parameters", with articles about current military issues. "A New Security Framework for NATO’s Eastern Flank" (253 downloads), which is about what to do about Russia pushing against Europe, and "Key themes in Sino-American History" (165 downloads), which is about why China is pushing against Taiwan. Those are kind of important subjects.

"Rethinking Power: E. H. Carr’s Enduring Lessons for Modern Strategists" [1] (344 downloads) is worth a read. Carr wrote about the period between WWI and WWII, and this article compares it to the current situation.

This sort of material is worth reading to understand what happened the last few times there was a big political and military mess, what the players thought going in, and how it played out in reality. The same mistakes do repeat.

Few people read this, and most of the ones who do wear a uniform.

Current big mistakes are mostly covered by the classic line "The belief in the possibility of a short decisive war appears to be one of the most ancient and dangerous of human illusions."

[1] https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol56/iss2/7/

[throw2ih020]

Boko Haram wouldn't have read any of those books because they banned the reading of any book except the Koran.

[dylan604]

So they are okay reading the non-Koran text from the bot?

[throw2ih020]

Yup. If you're looking for intelligence or logical consistency, you won't find it here.

[throwaway27448]

This is why Russians now attack in teams of just two, down from dozens in 2022.

[aprilthird2021]

Why is it a strange claim?

> We used to rely on our traditional methods. We sent 200 fighters because we had a lot of strength, but then 60 got killed.

They used to try to overpower people. We have 600 and that guard post has 400. We should be able to win. That type of logic.

> With the help of AI, we learned that it sometimes makes sense to only send 20. We learned more about well-coordinated attacks and deployment of smaller units

Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective. Also it's possible smaller troop movements are less easily noticeable.

That's just one very reasonable interpretation. Am I missing something?

[chasd00]

> Better coordinating the attacks let them use less people and lose less people while still achieving the objective

and that has to be in the first chapter of every first year battle strategy/tactic book on the planet. They would learn more tactics much faster by just playing bf6 as a team and going through the tutorials.

[throw2ih020]

> and that has to be in the first chapter of every first year battle strategy/tactic book on the planet.

You expected Boko Haram - a group whose name literally translates to "books are forbidden" - to read a book?

[andy99]

Or the researcher read what they wanted to into it. It would be interesting to ask them what they did before to learn things, how much they read, etc. If they were illiterate and uneducated, and got voice AI telling them stuff that would be common sense for anyone with a high school education, I can see how it might make them more effective at whatever they do. But I wouldn’t really blame AI in the way that’s implied.

[quantumleaper]

Human brains were shaped over thousands of years of adaptation for warfare. Just look at how creative and advanced the tactics of other guerrilla forces (like the Taliban and Viet Cong) got, despite their very limited resources. None of that needs a high school education.

[xp84]

It's not about education itself necessarily, but I'd bet any amount of money that most terrorists' IQ is below the overall human average. The average terrorist is not that innovative or creative so the most mundane GPT "insight" will likely be a smarter course of action than whatever their first idea would have been.

[yorwba]

If anything, the average terrorist is probably smarter than the average member of their surrounding societies, since you need a minimum amount of education to understand the ideology motivating the terrorism. Don't forget that Taliban literally means "students." The number of times someone tried and failed to conquer Afghanistan suggests that it's not an easy feat that any fool could have done, but the Taliban managed to do it twice.

Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none. Think open-source developers competing with commercial offerings maintained by huge teams. Terrorists building IEDs when their enemy has a full military-industrial complex are much the same. They just really believe their ideology. On this, https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-nine-lives is a good read.

[xp84]

> Fighting a much more numerous enemy may seem stupid, but if you really believe your ideology, any odds of success are better than none.

Embracing and believing this destructive ideology itself in the first place, when you could devote your life to so many better[1] things, is the sign of stupidity I mean.

Believing that God wants you to murder other people (heck, even babies) over things such as who's worshiping Him correctly... stupid.

1. Better for... you name it: Your quality of life, welfare of other human beings, economically, spiritually, environmentally.

[yorwba]

Making a mistake, even a pretty fundamental mistake, doesn't necessarily mean somebody is stupid. If you need to get really deep into theology before you can even be in a position to make the mistake, it's a mistake only a smart and educated person can make. The list of famous mathematicians who tried to prove the existence of god includes Descartes, Newton, Leibniz and Gödel. A fool's errand, to be sure, but those were no stupid fools.

[el_memorioso]

Do you have some evidence to suggest mundane GPT insights would not be smarter than the average human's idea? There's a reason so many are completely abdicating any responsibility to think to an LLM, and I'd bet any amount of money it's not because they think the LLM is dumber than them.

[quietsegfault]

You don’t think that there were highly educated people in leadership roles in the Taliban or Viet Cong?

[selimthegrim]

You might want to research the origins of the Taliban a little more.

[AnimalMuppet]

You send 200 fighters and 60 get killed. In the same situation, if you send 20, what do you expect would happen? (I mean, you won't lose 60...)

[dylan604]

It's like the Bill Hicks bit about the number of losses in Desert Storm. Iraqi casualties: 20,000 - 50,000. US casualties: 147. "Does that mean if we sent 148 guys we still would have won?"

[quietsegfault]

Depends. If the 20 are more spread out and your enemy is using inaccurate weapons, then maybe more would survive.

[anigbrowl]

Consider the possibility that you're the clueless one here. Pitched battles are generally horribly inefficient for insurgent forces; they're not used to fighting in formation or doing sophisticated combined-arms attacks, and if they just rush their target as a mob it's easy to shoot lots of them with a machine gun. A small force of 20 people is easier to train, coordinate, and deploy and can be much more effective once they learn hit and run and basic ambush tactics.