As you know, humans like to invent comfort words. One of my favorites is "luck". The theory being that yes, the universe has dice, but they are loaded in your favor. Properly used, these words are a spell - they allow us to have courage when a sober mind would quail. But when you become a professional, you have to give up these crutches. Only poor poker players believe in "luck".
In computer science, and especially in machine learning, one of these words you have to give up is "consciousness", which makes a lot of the current discussion on AI feel pompous and unbearable. Just because you can feel something doesn't make it real. The other day someone said to me, "I don't know why, but it FEELS true to me" and I haven't been able to get that out of my head since then.
In security we are often challenged to reject the assumptions a system is built on so we can develop a third sight - in some cases clear enough you gain the ability to predict the future. The raw fuel of this is a vast reliance on an information torrent that to any outside party looks like addiction.
I'm by no means an expert on war, conflict, or the Middle East, but what Israel has done to Hezbollah is stunning to most of the experts, and in my opinion, it's because they missed a major shift in warfare that was largely driven by *Java Middleware*, of all things. So many of us lived through the transformation brought about by precision GPS and ISR-based air power. This much is obvious to the crowd that writes articles in war journals. Air war is cool in a very teenage way, and drone movies have a certain visceral feel to them that academics like to write about because it says to the world that they are the kind of hard-core experts that understand the blood-and-guts reality of modern combat. You know what's not sexy? Java.
But what is network centric warfare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network-centric_warfare#:~:text=Network-centric%20warfare,%20also%20called%20network-centric%20operations really if not endless rooms full of programmers having meetings about Java Beans and SOAP contracts. What does it look like when a real team goes after your entire society and builds surveillance into everything? It's hard to move in the modern world without a wake billowing behind you into the ether. Al Quada learned this the hard way, and now I think we can see what it looks like applied to another decentralized covert organization.
In the end, it's not the drones or the missiles that make the difference—it's the quiet, relentless infrastructure underneath it all, overlooked by those too focused on the shiny surface of modern warfare. The real revolution isn’t in the explosions but in the code. The experts who missed this shift weren’t outmaneuvered by luck or brute force; they were outmatched by those who embraced the unglamorous, intricate work of building a machine that sees all and remembers everything. The future of conflict, like security and AI, won’t belong to those dazzled by the spectacular. It will belong to those who understand that, more often than not, the real power lies in the invisible.
-dave