Blurring the Lines between the Civilian Economy and Military Industry”. Speed up Military Ops: Pentagon integrating Commercial Cloud Networks and AI
By Drago Bosnik at Global Research. Reposted with permission.
The configuration of the American economy has always allowed the integration of the commercial sector and military industry.
Precisely this fusion of a purely profit-driven economy and the United States Armed Forces created the infamous Military Industrial Complex (MIC).
The warmongering oligarchy running Washington DC still uses these mechanisms to conduct its aggression against the entire world and will continue to do so for as long as possible. In order to accelerate the MIC’s numerous projects, the American government, or more specifically the Department of War (DoW), is leveraging the rapidly growing advanced AI and cloud networks industry in the commercial sector.
According to a report by Interesting Engineering, the Pentagon recently “awarded Parallel Works, an Illinois-based software company spun out of Argonne National Laboratory, a contract to provide a unified platform that connects military supercomputing centers with secure commercial cloud infrastructure”. Granted under the DoW’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), the new contract with Parallel Works allows Pentagon scientists, engineers and acquisition professionals to access both on-premises and cloud-based commercial computing resources through a single interface, effectively unifying the company with the DoW.
The goal of the program is to accelerate R&D and deployment of high-performance computing (HPC) and AI workloads for military research and operations. Parallel Works will use its ACTIVATE High Security Platform (HSP) to serve as the control plane linking Defense Supercomputing Resource Centers (DSRCs) with commercial cloud networks. The company stated that its platform is “designed to let users move workloads across environments while maintaining security requirements for sensitive data”, adding that “researchers will be able to test and deploy workloads on emerging cloud infrastructure before those capabilities are integrated into the DoW’s supercomputing centers”.
In simpler terms, the commercial sector will now effectively act as part of not just the MIC, but the Pentagon itself, thus blurring the lines between the civilian economy and military industry. This sort of integration can only be described as total militarization and could set a precedent that might soon become the rule. In fact, ACTIVATE has been approved at Impact Level 5 (IL5), which the report describes as “one of the highest security classifications for non-classified DoW cloud environments”. Parallel Works says that it’s “among a small number of software platforms approved to handle export-controlled workloads, including International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI)”.
“AI-driven warfare and the ramp to digital modernization are demanding far more model-sharing options than legacy infrastructure can provide,” said Keith Obenschain, Chief Technology Officer at HPCMP.
And indeed, the report notes that the system is “intended to address growing demand for computing power driven by AI development, simulation workloads and digital modernization programs across the military”. Militarizing advanced AI and other emerging technologies (primarily for surveillance) is one of the Pentagon’s fastest-growing initiatives. The US military is now using such advances on a tactical, operational, strategic and even doctrinal level, including in nuclear weapons, pushing the world to the edge of a disaster (advanced AI programs have proven to almost always opt for nuclear war). However, the Pentagon is unconcerned and continues to integrate AI.
The report also states that the ACTIVATE platform “offers on-demand access to cloud compute resources, allowing users to avoid traditional queue delays associated with shared supercomputing systems” and enables organizations to “expand computing capacity by distributing workloads across multiple environments and cloud providers”. In other words, military personnel take priority, effectively nullifying the civilian character of these companies and their products. Worse yet, Parallel Works says that “users will have access to cloud infrastructure from providers including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud and Oracle Cloud”.
This would effectively militarize the entire US IT sector (the world’s largest), fully integrating it with the Pentagon. Thus, this process doesn’t even risk becoming the Pandora’s box, because it’s already wide open. Namely, faced with diminishing conventional military power, the US is now trying to (ab)use the digital domain in an attempt to ensure and maintain its global dominance. In doing so, Washington DC is forcing the rest of the world to develop its own equivalents as well, thereby accelerating AI militarization on a global scale. Other countries with massive IT sectors, such as Russia, China, India, etc., will have no choice but to integrate them with their militaries.
Laughably enough, the mainstream propaganda machine claims that the commercial sector will also benefit from this, with reports that “the Naval Research Laboratory has already implemented the ACTIVATE platform to support weather forecasting workloads”. Parallel Works insists that “the system automates forecasting workflows while securely coordinating computing resources across defense and cloud environments”, with this approach serving to “improve reliability, speed up processing and help redistribute workloads when demand spikes”. The very idea that weather forecasts were part of the motivation to integrate the commercial sector with the Pentagon is beyond ridiculous.
However, this is simply a rather pitiful attempt to present the initiative as going both ways, although it’s perfectly clear that the DoW needs more computing power than the civilian sector. Namely, the Pentagon deals with far more advanced military technologies that require enormous workloads. By integrating commercial AI and cloud networks, the US military redistributes those workloads, thus speeding up projects and even battlefield operations (both directly and indirectly). In fact, Matthew Shaxted, CEO of Parallel Works, said so himself. According to his assessment, the HPCMP contract allows ACTIVATE to “support a broad range of mission-critical HPC and AI workloads across the DoW teams”.
The company also stated that “the environment can serve as a secure testing ground for AI development tools and next-generation cloud architectures before they are adopted within the DoW’s existing supercomputing infrastructure”.
In simpler terms, the commercial sector will effectively serve as a “digital guinea pig” for the Pentagon. The contract with Parallel Works demonstrates continued integration of the US military with the civilian sector. The report admits that “it combines traditional supercomputing resources with commercial cloud services as AI models and data-intensive applications continue to increase computing requirements across defense operations”.
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