The Houthis created a fake audio of a major Yemeni commander telling his troops to retreat which was subsequently amplified on Twitter/X, telegram, etc.
Apparently, this helped the Houthis advance quickly as the opposition forces were in disarray.
If that's true, it's insane that it worked. It should be obvious to not take orders from twitter. There's a chain of command for a reason and random people on social media are no part of it. Sounds like the opposition forces would have to be so stupid that any number of Looney Tunes style tricks would have worked. Maybe next they can send out a rabbit in a dress to make opposition fall in love with it.
I just realized how much money one could make by hacking Truth Social and posting some "truths" under Trump's account. It's a relatively new, relatively complex platform; surely there are bugs.
This belies a fundamental misunderstanding of Yemeni society. Arab political structure is based on tribal loyalty. Leaders of tribes pledge allegiance to other tribes or coalitions of tribes. They're not part of the same command structure because such a thing does not exist. Usually instead of being defeated tribal loyalties change with the political winds and tribe leaders neogtioate with other leaders. Twitter is also ubiquitous in Arabia and the natural place for political announcements.
While that's helpful and insightful, it's not hugely the issue.
The military units are not very well organized, they don't have clear and stringent command, control and communications.
They understood a regional commander to be fleeing, units fell back.
This is kind of stuff is absolutely as old as time, and it's #1 rule in conflict aka deception.
The parallel would be reproducing a General's order to withdraw - meaning the command would have legitimacy among troops and junior officers, believing their own commanders were just out of the loop.
And yes - their command structure will be de facto organized along social lines, but it's more descriptive.
Not the military stuff but Arab tribal society, read "The First Muslim" by Lesley Hazleton, about Arab society around the year 600. It's an absolute eye-opener.
AoW is one of the most important historical treatises, it's not just 'something that was written in history', maybe the oldest true 'textbooks' of objective knowledge, and also realpolitik. Also there's hints of metaphysics in there, in a way. It absolutely stands up today.
The very first work of the Western Cannon: Trojan Horse.
Information / espionage and deception has made most of history; Hannibal, Caesar, Alexander etc.
A fun exercise would be to look at battles of history from the lens of information warfare and deception, and contemplate the outcome without it.
> The US President routinely announces policy decisions on social media…
Yes, our current President also does stupid things, and our military forces shouldn't be using his incoherent ramblings on Twitter to make snap judgements on the battlefield without checking with their chain of command either.
> ...and our military forces shouldn't be using his incoherent ramblings on Twitter to make snap judgements on the battlefield without checking with their chain of command either.
You mean the chain of command that has been purged of experienced professionals?
You don't come back, you slide back to normal country status while 2 generations of people pretend you're still an empire until you really can't anymore.
That sounds like a fake storyline. The much simpler explanation
is that the local Saudi merc army sucked. If you followed the
whole conflict in the last 20 years this is largely the case -
the Saudis aren't really great at warfare, typically depending on
foreign mercenaries (also for cleaning etc...). These in turn
have very low morale.
You have far, far too much faith in the professionalism of armed forces in the developing world. 99% of it is just random 22 year old guys with guns and dual-use communication tech.
I dont know that its a matter of professionalism. Everyone in the world has known that AI can generate video and audio that is imperceptibly fake, for years. And thats to say nothing of man-made forgeries in the years prior.
I have a hard time seeing people on the front line throwing down arms and running away because of an unsourced twitter clip.
We, as in the terminally online, have known that AI can generate imperceptibly fake footage. There are still plenty of average people who still gets caught off guard.
You gotta touch grass and get outside and talk to normies.
And then recognize that the normies you talk to are VASTLY MORE internet-savvy than the illiterate child soldiers on the front lines in Yemen. You have no concept of the info environment they live in. It is all magic electronic soup.
yeah and so does the ardupilot documentation including examples. A basic guidance system, which is like single waypoint navigation, is a solved problem. It's in basically every prosumer drone too.
OK, that is a plausible argument given Dario's public positions. I have to admit that I keep cutting them some slack for standing up against automated kill chains, and domestic surveillance.
Automated kill chains and domestic surveillance are happening regardless of what one corporation wants. These technologies will never be inaccessible to the government or government contractors who already have zero issues navigating red tape.
The point of regulation is to kill competitors and prevent private individuals from having unfettered access.
To be clear, I don't think they're doing it because they want all the money, I think they truly believe that this is existentially threatening, and are trying to regulate their open source competition away because they think that's the way to be safe. That they can be trusted with the power, but if it's out and about, that's unsafe - they like to compare it to nukes, and they want nuclear non-proliferation.
This is the most "I get both sides" issue in my mind these days. I am still not sure where I fall, or if there is even a correct position with which to agree. It really seems like there are no good options.
On the one hand, if all knowledge work ended up in two dude's hands, that is really bad. On the other hand, if every surviving child victim of war (US, RU, IL, CN, whatever) has access to the knowledge to make custom viruses for a few grand, that is also really bad.
Yeah, it's really tough, there's so much potential good, and so much potential bad. My intuition says that decentralized will probably be better, the other way seems to concentrate power while also not really keeping it out of the hands of anyone. It doesn't seem likely that the US firms will be able to convince the Chinese to agree to an international regulatory framework for this stuff. Opinion polls there have the populace being quite optimistic about the benefits of this stuff, and I think the cat's too far out of the bag to really put it back in, anyway.
It’s actually embarrassing the industry haven’t implemented optional signing into everything with a text box,
with the press of a USB key or other device into/onto what you’re using.
This can be used to verify consistent identities for the cost of an AirTag or less - but without mandating it as a government-involved thing, which is most of the holdup.
Apparently, this helped the Houthis advance quickly as the opposition forces were in disarray.
https://x.com/BashaReport/status/2097862335494795579