Israel's New AI Warfare - "Elbit Has Left The Building"

Webb Focuses In On Elbit, The Israeli "Warfare Of The Future" Defense Contractor

Every good caper needs a line that snaps the mind to attention—“The game is afoot,” “Follow the money,” or, this week, George Webb’s gloriously Elvis-tinged: “Elbit has left the building.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elbit_Systems

Neighborhood News commentators Aaron Adler and Mark Buckley and I recently did a show from our Michigan journalism school on this subject.

I have tried something a little different in my piece on this topic. I have written a summary piece from the perspective of the most vitriolic troll. I hope you don’t mind. Taking the viewpoint of a rabid critic in this instance adds to the clarity of my thesis—regime change is coming for Iran. Elbit, the Israeli defense contractor, is the key actor to enable this regime change. Elbit also makes the current “Iron Beam” we see nightly defending Tel-Aviv.

Elbit also makes goal-seeking, autonomous drones, which have become famous for being launched near the Isfahan uranium enrichment plant inside Iran.

https://www.jewishtimes.com/revealed-the-mossads-secret-drone-base-in-iran/#:~:text=Upon%20commencement%20of%20Israeli%20operations,Israeli%20strategic%20and%20civilian%20infrastructure.

Webb knows his Israeli drone vendors: the head-turning reveal that Israel’s smartest murder-bots have slipped their leash and flitted over to Iran, eager as debutantes at the season’s first ball. Except these debutantes, bless them, have no interest in waltzing; they prefer vaporising surface-to-air launchers and any Revolutionary Guard unfortunate enough to be standing nearby. New age, new etiquette.

https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/assessment-of-israeli-strike-on-iran-near-esfahan/

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A quick primer in contemporary sorcery

Picture a swarm of drones fattened on satellite imagery, social-media geotags and the kind of metadata GCHQ collects before breakfast. Lace them with Elbit Systems’ LANIUS brain, sprinkle Palantir’s Project Maven on top (think SimCity for counter-insurgents), and you’ve baked the world’s first self-selecting kill chain.

https://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/assessment-of-israeli-strike-on-iran-near-esfahan/

There’s a whiff of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot in the air, except Asimov’s robots came with ethical guard-rails. Webb’s chrome cherubs have no such inhibitions. They’re goal-seeking toddlers with high explosives—unstoppable, indiscriminate, and rather pleased with themselves.

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Silicon Valley’s accidental arms dealers

How did we get here according to Webb? Begin with Eric Schmidt, late of Google, who—after his engineers mutinied at the thought of weaponised code—tip-toed out, found a twenty-something called Alexander Wang, and financed Scale AI.

Wang labelled pictures of burnt-out tanks in Ukraine so thoroughly he became the youngest billionaire since the original dot-com mania. Enter Larry Summers, patron saint of opportunistic tech transfers. Summers once shepherded DARPA’s “LifeLog” into a neat Harvard dorm-room package we now know as Facebook.

Webb swears Summers has re-run the play: channelling Scale AI’s drone-wrangling smarts into Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. If true, the metaverse will soon host more warheads than cat videos—progress of a sort.

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The Braverman Prophecy, or “Pipes before Peace”

But Webb is seldom satisfied with one apocalypse at a time. Underneath the humming drones, he spies a pipeline—literal, not metaphorical—stretching from Iran’s Bandar Abbas, slithering across Saudi sands, surfacing at Israel’s Gulf of Aqaba, then hitching itself to Europe’s East-Med dream.

He dubs this the Braverman Prophecy, a plan so audacious it might make T. E. Lawrence blush: swap Iran’s mullahcracy for a board of pipeline directors, quash Hormuz choke-points, and let discounted Persian LNG sluice directly to Milan. Commerce follows the path of least resistance, and so, apparently, will regime change.

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Cue the royal understudy

All coups require a poster-boy. Webb’s pick is Reza Pahlavi, son of the late Shah—polite, anglophone, and (crucially) unlikely to don clerical robes.

Matternet’s Brad Sherman has obligingly married the Shah’s granddaughter, arranging a photo-op that drips with Charles-and-Diana nostalgia; one imagines white horses, lilac sashes, and drones forming an honour guard overhead.

https://www.thejc.com/news/world/who-is-bradley-sherman-the-jewish-husband-of-an-iranian-princess-fjys1bgv

The granddaughter of the Shah of Iran has married a Jewish businessman from Chicago, opening up speculation of a new, upcoming Israel-Iran union.

The sales pitch to Tehran’s weary technocrats is brutally simple: help us lay steel pipe and you’ll be toasting IPOs in Palo Alto instead of dodging bunker-busters in Bushehr. Choose wisely.

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Trolls, tics and the gospel of metadata

Webb’s livestream chat, meanwhile, is a Darwinian soup of genuine curiosity, state-sponsored hecklers who type exclusively in ALL-CAPS. He addresses them like a kindly headmaster: Ignore the ad-hominem, follow the logistics.

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/46045

Every breakthrough, he insists, began as an overlooked invoice or a flight manifest someone bothered to read. Eric Braverman’s name in WikiLeaks, Imran Awan’s badge at an iPad transfer, Richard Helms’s 1957 air-defence contract—all breadcrumbs on the same gingerbread trail. Metadata never lies; humans merely refuse to look.

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So where does that leave us?

According to Webb, war’s new hierarchy runs thus:

1. Data (find your target)

2. Drones (erase your target)

3. Deals (replace your target with a shareholder-friendly pipeline)

Traditional armies—tanks, trenches, treaties—are now just colourful set-dressing for the real contest among cloud clusters and venture funds. Elbit’s swarm is the opening riff; the crescendo, should it arrive, will sound more like a Nasdaq closing bell than an air-raid siren.

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A parting clink of teacups

Is Webb right? History has a habit of humiliating confident narrators. Yet even a sceptic must concede the optics: Israeli AI declaiming over Isfahan, Silicon Valley sharpening the quills, Gulf monarchs aligning their balance sheets like thirsty camels at an oasis. If the 20th century belonged to oil and the 21st to algorithms, Webb’s tale is simply what happens when the two elope.

One thing is certain: when the analyst drops an Elvis reference at the start of the show, you’d be a fool to leave before the encore—because somewhere backstage, the drones are already practising their curtain-call. And this time, they won’t be tossing scarves.

Reza Shah has already called for an uprising from the plebiscite in Iran.