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Palantir, Anduril and a suite of other Tolkien-inspired tech nightmares want to integrate artificial intelligence into every aspect of the U.S. military. Both companies have software suites they’re pitching as agents that will help make command decisions during combat. An AI general, if you will.

Yes, that’s a terrible idea.

On this episode of Angry Planet, Cameron Hunter and Bleddyn Bowen will tell us why. Hunter is a researcher at the University of Copenhagen and Bowen is a professor of Astropolitics at Durham University. They’ve just written a paper that skewers the idea that AI will ever be able to make command decisions.

• The narrow definition of AI
• The folly of the AI general
• The games AI can’t win
• “Targeting things is a command decision”
• The IDF’s use of Microsoft’s use of AI systems
• “The enemy gets a vote”
• Killing more doesn’t mean winning more
• American military as a “glass tank”
• Matthew gets lost in a rant
• “They don’t even have an animal’s intelligence”
• The very real military uses of AI

We’ll never have a model of an AI major-general: Artificial Intelligence, command decisions, and kitsch visions of war

Palantir’s pitch

Palmer Luckey on 60 Minutes

Scientists Explain Why Trump's $175 Billion Golden Dome Is a Fantasy

OpenAI Employees Say Firm's Chief Scientist Has Been Making Strange Spiritual Claims

Eastern Europe Wants to Build a ‘Drone Wall’ to Keep Out Russia

How Palantir Is Using AI in Ukraine

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The Pentagon has been trying to pivot to the Pacific for years now. Under President Donald Trump 2.0, who is focused on China, it just might happen. It’s a complicated body of water with dozens of players and a bloody history. One where Beijing is increasingly asserting itself.

Here to walk us through some of it is Angry Planet producer and Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter Kevin Knodell. He’s just back from the Philippines where he spent two weeks reporting on a joint exercise between the U.S. and its allies in the Pacific.

• Balikatan
• 
  
• Training exercises as signalling
• How 40 years of Balikatan tells the story of U.S.-Philippines relations
• “There are definitely some places where it is about the fish.”
• The Chinese Maritime Militia
• Duterte vs Marcos in 2025
• Why America doesn’t understand China
• Russia’s imperial history in the Pacific (Kevin misspoke here, it’s Fort Elizabeth not Fort Alexandria)
• Why people like Pete Hegseth
• The Nine-Dash line
• The century of humiliation
• Checking up on Red Hill

Hawaii troops forge alliances in Philippines

Army, allies ponder Pacific role

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Recorded 5/7/25

India and Pakistan have been unhappy neighbors since 1947 and Britain’s decolonization of the subcontinent. They’ve fought four wars and there have been countless skirmishes. As Indian jets streak over Pakistani skies and that Muslim nation threatens retaliation, it’s unclear if this is war or just another blip between nations that plain don’t like each other.

Joining us is Sushant Singh, a man with a background that includes academic, journalist and 20-year veteran in the Indian army. He’s written an article on the situation in Foreign Affairs, and brings us up to date.

• The state of play on the morning of May 7th
• The Pahalgam attack
• ‘The Switzerland of India’
• Matthew almost gets everyone into a lot of trouble
• How Pakistan creates instability in Kashmir
• The entire history of the conflict between India and Pakistan in about five minutes
• China’s looming presence
• ‘These are non-escaltory strikes’
• Comparing the militaries
• Getting into the nuclear options
• Pakistan’s tactical nuclear arsenal
• The incredible monetary cost of uncertain missile defense
• We go out on a happy note for once

More than 20 killed after gunmen open fire on tourists in Indian-administered Kashmir

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Great power competition has gotten old for President Donald Trump—never one for a fair fight. He’s looking for a little great power collusion instead, dividing the world with his best buds, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. This kind of thing isn’t new, though, Stacie Goddard, a professor at Wellesley, tells us, in fact it’s the 1800s on repeat. Well, look how that turned out… World War I, anybody?

BTW, check out her terrific article on this in Foreign Affairs magazine.

• Welcome to the Concert of Europe
• The post-Napoleon party
• A taxonomy of aspirational Germans
• Retvrn
• Strong men, weak world
• Government by Mafia
• What becomes of the “middle powers”?
• The era of aging dictators
• The long breakdown
• Empire without ickiness
• Turns out might does, in fact, make right
• 
  

The Rise and Fall of Great-Power Competition

The Concert of Europe

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Conquest is back baby! Eastern Europe, Taiwan, Greenland, Canada? It’s all on the table—and maybe up for grabs. Here to help us sort through this new age of empire building is University of Chicago political scientist Michael Albertus.

• As always, climate change
• Whither Canada?
• The coming Canadian century
• “Territorial ambitions sometimes bite back”
• The biggest caveats ever uttered on the show
• “An empire eats”
• The stories nations tell themselves
• “Getting more America”
• Picking the winners and losers
• A little optimism at the end
• How land confers power
• Those Were The Days
• The false promise of abundance

The Coming Age of Territorial Expansion

Land Power: Who Has It, Who Doesn’t, and How That Determines the Fate of Societies

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Turkey’s president has grabbed a bit more power for himself with the recent arrest of the mayor of Istanbul. The mayor was thought to be one of the few politicians who could challenge Erdogan.

Steven Cook will take us through it.

Talking about authoritarians is one of the things we do here, so strap in for another tale of turmoil on an angry planet.

• Shilling for kagi.com
• “Competitive authoritarianism”
• Negotiating with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party
• How to court the Kurdish vote while killing Kurds
• A stable of failsons
• “The Turkish Marc Andreessen”
• Why Erdogan hates Pennsylvania
• Disproving McDonald’s Diplomacy, once again
• Leveling a park to build a mall
• How Erdogan processed the Arab Spring
• “Fools, knaves, and rubes”—Oh my!

Turkey Can’t Live With, or Without, Erdogan

Ukraine Has Written a Folk Song About Its Drone

Turkey and Israel are becoming deadly rivals in Syria

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Special for our international listeners, did you know you can now buy a pathway to U.S. citizenship for the low, low price of $5 million sent directly to the U.S. treasury? For decades America’s immigration policies were a boon to its national defense. No one has better intelligence on a rival country than a fleeing dissident with firsthand knowledge.

Times have changed.

Gil Guerra of the Niskanen Center is here to talk all about those changes. It’s an episode packed with bizarre anecdotes and interesting tidbits about how America runs now. You’ll learn why evangelical Christians are turning their back on refugees, why China won’t accept deportation flights, and how to navigate the Darien Gap using short form video posts.

• Immigration is a foreign policy tool
• Dissident refugees as a strategic win
• What we know about how the “Gold Card” will work
• “You simply can’t create greencards out of nowhere.”
• How Mexico uses immigration to get concessions from the U.S.
• “At a certain point the people who send you into the blades look like the bastards.”
• Dealing with a dictator
• 20,000 Chinese nationals at the southern border
• The internet has made it easier to immigrate
• Navigating the Darien Gap, one TikTok video at a time

Op-ed: Trump’s gold card visa, explained

Domestic debate, global strategy: Revisiting immigration in U.S. foreign policy

China owns 380,000 acres of land in the U.S. Here's where

Weapons of Mass Migration

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For mercenaries, death is a business. It’s all about finding the right market. Wagner and other Russian mercenary groups have found willing markets in Africa. Journalist John Lechner spent years in Africa among the mercenaries and he’s on the show today to tell us about what he learned.

Lechner tells us how Wagner’s men think the U.S. media killed Prigozhin, why every theater (or market) is different, and the training regimen of a fresh convict recruit. It’s all in his new book Death Is Our Business: Mercenaries and the New Era of Private Warfare.

The threats change…but the mercenaries stay the same.

• Interlinking militant Islam and the rise of modern mercenaries
• Russian mercenaries before Wagner
• Prigozhin rising
• Putin’s Chef was the father of ‘Hybrid War’
• Wagner in Africa
• ‘No one said mercenary life was gonna be easy.’
• Life inside Wagner
• ‘Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.’
• You can’t judge intent by results
• The Russian “royal” court is full of self starters and entrepreneurs

The Tip of Russia’s Spear

Death Is Our Business

Pardoned for Serving in Ukraine, They Return to Russia to Kill Again

Taliban Bureaucrats Hate Working Online All Day, ‘Miss the Days of Jihad’

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A lot of the people designing America’s technology and close to the center of American power believe some deeply weird shit. We already talked to journalist Gil Duran about the Nerd Reich, the rise of the destructive anti-democratic ideology. In this episode, we dive into another weird section of Silicon Valley: the cult of Rationalism.

Max Read, the journalist behind the Read Max Substack, is here to help us through it. Rationalism is responsible for a lot more than you might think and Read lays out how it’s influenced the world we live in today and how it created the environment for a cult that’s got a body count.

• Defining rationalism: “Something between a movement, a community, and a self-help program.”
• Eliezer Yudkowsky and the dangers of AI
• What the hell is AGI?
• The Singleton Guide to Global Governance
• The danger of thought experiments
• As always, follow the money
• Vulgar bayesianism
• What’s a Zizian?
• Sith Vegans
• Anselm: Ontological Argument for God’s Existence
• SBF and Effective Altruism

READ MAX!

The Zizians and the Rationalist death cults

Pausing AI Developments Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut it All Down - Eliezer Yudkowsky’s TIME Magazine piece

Explaining Roko’s Basilisk, the Thought Experiment That Brought Elon Musk and Grimes Together

The Delirious, Violent, Impossible True Story of the Zizians

The Government Knows AGI is Coming | The Ezra Klein Show

The archived ‘Is Trump Racist’ rational post

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The Israeli military is using AI products from Microsoft to conduct its war in Gaza. Off the shelf AI products powered by the tech company’s Azure cloud computing system and OpenAI are helping the IDF sort through data, translate Arabic, and even pick targets. But AI translations aren’t perfect and these systems often make mistakes.

What happens when the consequences are life and death?

Associated Press global investigative reporters Garance Burke and Michael Biesecker are part of a team that broke the story about Israel’s use of Microsoft’s commercial AI in a war. They’re on the show today to help us sort through it all.

• Defining “AI”
• Off the shelf solutions for war
• Microsoft Azure as war’s translator and search engine
• “The Israel military is one of the leading militaries in the world adopting the use of AI to assist in its war efforts. They’ve been doing this for years.”
• AI is picking targets
• Students to militants
• AI’s mistranslations
• Blaming AI for human sins
• Matthew’s vision of a hellish automated future
• Employees push back
• The money is just too good

How US tech giants supplied Israel with AI models, raising questions about tech’s role in warfare

As Israel uses US-made AI models in war, concerns arise about tech’s role in who lives and who dies

Microsoft workers protest sale of AI and cloud services to Israeli military

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