War is deadly. Why is Trump turning it into a meme?

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Anyone that's interact with AI knows that AI can make mistakes.

How do we use this technology and how we make sure that it's making the US military

more precise in its operations?

Artificial intelligence, memes, and the art of war in 2026.

It's Tuesday, March 17th, and this is here and now any time from NPR and WVUR.

I'm Chris Bentley.

Today on the show, how the US and Israel are using AI in their attacks on Iran, also chat

is it cringe to post pro-war memes?

It looks like internet humor, but it basically function like political communication

of propaganda.

That trolling, as a White House comms strategy, coming up in about 15 minutes.

But first, an update on the war, Israel says it killed two of Iran's highest ranking

leaders in an air strike overnight.

They are the country's top national security adviser and the head of the besiege militia.

Meanwhile, President Trump is bashing allies for declining to help secure the straight

of Hormuz, which has been effectively closed by Iran, and a top aid to the director

of national intelligence in the US has resigned, in protest of the war.

Those are some of the things we wanted to ask John Feiner about.

He was a national security adviser to former President Joe Biden, and he spoke to Scott

Tong.

Before we get to this straight of Hormuz, these Iranian leaders, Israel says it killed

if true, what would this significance be?

Well, if true, it continues a pattern in which the United States and Israel have been able

to penetrate Iran's intelligence apparatus to the extent that they are able to locate

Iranian leaders and conduct strikes that take them out, that suggest significant operational

success, significant intelligence success.

But whether they are able to convert these operations, these actions into actual strategic

victory in this conflict to remain quite elusive, I think, for the United States and Israel.

The Iranian regime has continued to hold together.

Its capacity to wage war has been diminished, but not eliminated entirely.

And for the foreseeable future, I think that is likely to be the case.

And if the war ended today, the Iranian regime would still be in place.

It would still be able to threaten its allies.

And so we would have to think about whether all of this was worth it, given the market impact

and other things.

Iran still potentially blocking the Strait of Hormuz.

So let's talk about oil flow, oil flows in diplomacy.

I mean, this episode is pushed up, oil prices, the international price of oil, that everyone

pays a gallon of gas in this country is now $379 on average, according to AAA.

President Trump asked US allies to give military help to protect and reopen the waterway.

For now, Germany, Japan, Italy and Australia have said they will not.

France, South Korea and the UK have been non-committal.

John, we just heard the President talk about NATO.

Is Trump's rocky relationship with Europe and other allies coming back to bite him here?

Well, I think you're seeing what happens when you decide early in a demonstration that

actually you don't need friends in the world.

That you're better off not having the burden of international relationships that sometimes

call on me to help other countries and sometimes other countries or in a position to help

you.

The administration made that decision very early.

Now, President Trump, not having consulted really with any of our friends and allies

other than perhaps the Israelis before waging this war, wants to invest them in a conflict

that many of them do not support, even if rhetorically they're being relatively quiet

about it at this point.

And so you're not seeing them step up and assist the United States, which I don't think

should surprise anybody.

So in private diplomatic channels, how do you imagine these conversations going?

I think that these countries are trying very hard not to have an additional rupture in

their relations with the United States.

You know, Trump threatens them with tariffs, sometimes he imposes tariffs on them, sometimes

on our adversaries more often even on our friends.

And so they have their own battles to fight with the administration and they are looking

to avoid any additional points of friction, but they're also not stepping in to provide

support for a war that I think many of them rightly believe is unwise.

So they're doing this delicate dance and you're seeing the president's increasing frustration

that they're not providing more support than he would like.

John, what about economic reasons to say no?

The world has seen $100 oil before.

Are we at an economic emergency in the world yet?

So I think what you're seeing is countries questioning whether a military solution to

this conflict is going to resolve the economic situation.

The United States and Israel have dropped an enormous number of munitions, bombs on Iran,

on Iran's leadership, on Iran's military targets, on Iran's energy infrastructure.

And Iran has retained the ability to hold the straight-of-four moves this critical water

way at risk and there's not a lot of evidence to suggest that additional bombing is going

to alter that fundamental situation.

So the longer that the global economy is dealing with 100 plus dollar of barrel oil, gas

prices high, this is going to become a very severe constraint, it's not just oil.

It's also natural gas, which is a critical input in power generation in countries.

It's minerals like helium that are critical to industrial capacity, including the production

of advanced semiconductors around the world that fuel the technology industry.

So there's a lot going on here and the globe is paying a significant price for the war

that the United States has launched.

Yeah, and fertilizer, yet raw material for fertilizer around the world.

John, quickly, let me ask how you think American allies are looking at the domestic situation

here.

Democrats pose this war, the president and not as Congress beforehand.

And today, Joe Kent, one of Trump's top national security officials, resigned and protested

over the war.

How is that being seen from the outside?

Well, look, I've been critical of this war, I guess, from his statement, Joe Kent was

critical of this war.

I do not associate myself with a lot of the important views expressed by Joe Kent.

So I think that's less of a relevant factor here and more what that suggests is the president

has put into positions of authority in this country, people who have extreme views on

a wide range of topics, including, in some cases, anti-Semitic views and other views that

should be outside of the mainstream.

And I think many other countries look at that, look at some of the discourse and dysfunctionality

in our country.

And even more reason why when the president says, hey, we need some help here from our

traditional friends and allies, they are more likely to sit this out than they are to

join in.

John Feiner is former principal deputy national security advisor in President Biden's White

House.

John, thank you.

Thank you.

Coming up next, the role of AI in the war will be right back.

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The head of U.S. Central Command, Admiral Brad Cooper, recently extolled the virtues

of artificial intelligence on the battlefield, saying it helps American troops and spies

quote, sift through vast amounts of data in seconds and to make smarter decisions faster.

But there's reason to be skeptical, not least of which being the report-adduce of AI

in target selection, when Iran's health ministry says U.S. and Israeli strikes have killed

at least 1,200 civilians, including children.

Paul Shari worked at the Pentagon on weapons and technology policy and as a former Army

Ranger.

Now he's at the center for new American security.

And he told Scott Tongue, the military is, indeed, using large language models in its

war with Iran.

U.S. has the need to sift through massive amounts of information, drone videofeed, satellite

imagery, signals intelligence collection, other forms of intelligence, sift through all

that to make decisions in real time about targets on the ground in Iran, senior military

commanders, mobile drone launchers, mobile missile launchers, and then prioritize those.

And we know that language models are being used as a tool to help the military assess

those targets and prioritize them and then build those in discrike packages.

There's a lot of details though that they say that we don't fully know yet because

these are being used in a classified environment by the military.

I imagine the promise of AI is that it processes data so well that it might be able to be

used to make more accurate strikes, reduce civilian casualties.

Is that necessarily true?

Well, not necessarily.

That's one of the hopes of the technology.

I think it certainly has that promise, but that depends a lot on how it's used.

I think anyone that's interact with AI knows that AI can make mistakes.

Systems can sometimes be wrong.

You need a human checking them.

We do have humans in the loop checking those outputs right now, but there's a problem

of, first of all, just making sure that the systems are reliable, that given the volume

of information that humans are able to actually double check all that accurately, and then

moving forward, there are a lot of open questions about what does that balance look like

between AI and human decision making?

Are humans always going to be in the loop for these decisions or is there some time

in the future where maybe AI is going to be making its own decisions about what targets

to attack in the battlefield?

I want to ask you, Paul, about the potential limits of the super high-tech war fighting.

I mean, I'm thinking about Iran, and its use of low-tech mines in the Strait of Hormuz

really cheap drones to attack Americans in the region, neighbors in the Gulf, is there

asymmetric way for countries like Iran to counter?

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, I think one of the takeaways here is, all this technology drones AI will proliferate

very, very quickly, it'll be available not just to the United States and China,

and other advanced militaries, but to less capable countries, even to non-state groups,

and lots of different actors are going to have the ability to fuel drones, fuel low-cost missiles,

eventually use AI as AI tools proliferate as well, and it's going to relatively level the

playing field.

Now, big militaries are always going to have advantages, but there are going to be lots

of ways that other actors can thwart them that can impose costs on them.

We've seen that not just in Iran's operations, we're despite an overwhelming advantageant

conventional power by the United States, Iran's still been able to launch over 2,000 drones

across the region, causing a lot of damage, a lot of disruption across the region,

and of course, to the straight-up hormones and disrupting oil shipping and the global economy.

But we've seen this in other conflicts as well.

In Ukraine, the Ukrainian military was able to basically neutralize Russia's Black Sea

naval fleet using small, cheap, expendable, explosive drone boats.

Yeah, and Paul Rollquick, before we let you go, are there clear rules about AI use in war,

when it's ethically, legally okay and not okay?

Well, no, not yet.

That's been a topic of a lot of debate, certainly in the last few weeks,

in the dispute between Anthropic, one of the world's leading AI companies in the Pentagon,

surrounding, for example, lethal autonomous weapons.

But there's no international treaty, there's no international set of rules about how AI should

be used in warfare other than what already exists, which is the law of war, and certainly

countries should be complying with. But specific to AI, it's really an open question.

And are there going to be any new rules that govern how AI is used?

There's certainly some risk that it could be quite dangerous, and I think there's probably a need

to be having that conversation. One of the central questions is about the role of humans versus

machine decision-making over targeting and kill decisions on the battlefield.

It's one thing for AI to be sifting through this information and helping people make decisions.

But if we move in the future towards some tipping point where humans are letting the AI

make these targeting decisions, is that acceptable? Is that morally right?

And some of that depends upon how reliable the technology is.

But there are also, I think, really important legal and ethical questions as well.

And I think there's strong reasons to want humans involved in these decisions,

not just because humans bring a lot to the table in terms of understanding the broader context

and applying judgment, but also because humans understand the stakes of war.

You know, humans can see something like this accident, this attack on this girl school,

and the casualties of that, and understand the consequences, and a machine doesn't.

And I think it's really important to keep that element of human empathy and moral judgment

in war as well. Paul Shahari is executive vice president at the center for a new American security.

His books include four battlegrounds, power in the age of artificial intelligence.

Paul, thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks for having me.

So there's the issue of AI potentially alienating members of the military and intelligence

agencies from the cost of their decisions, but then there are those who'd rather not ring

their hands over death and destruction in the name of American power coming up war as content.

And how the White House is selling war in Iran to Americans online with clips from Braveheart,

Grand Theft Auto, and even Wii Sports. Come to think of it, Operation Epic Fury even sounds like a

forgettable video game. We'll be back in a minute.

Way back in the 2015-2016 campaign for the White House, Trump supporters bragged about winning

the meme wars. They flooded the internet with pro-Trump posts, often explicitly racist and sexist,

meant not just to grab attention, but to get a rise out of their perceived political enemies.

Ten years later, Trump is in his second term, launching his second war against Iran alongside Israel,

and the meme wars are an official front of American public policy.

If you haven't seen the White House's social media feeds lately, they're full of stuff like this,

videos splicing footage of real-life killings in Iran with scenes from top gun,

call of duty, and mortal combat.

The White House captioned that one justice the American way.

What's the point of all this? Well, one person who's been thinking about the memeification of war

is Tina Monk that nodding him Trent University in the UK. Here's her conversation with Scott.

Well, it's interesting because an emitted warfare in itself is a form of information warfare,

where it's conducted through the creation and adoption and circulation of memes,

basically to achieve political or strategic or ideological objectives.

But when we see the White House using the meme format in direct communication,

it's something changed. It's no longer just culture. It's about states, the way states are

messaging the population. So it looks like internet humor, but it basically functioned like

political communication of propaganda. I mean, we're talking about

this is people killing people. Is it appropriate to reduce it to a video like this, a manly video

like this? I think it becomes problematic because it's disincenti-ized how we see war and how we

understand war. But also, it's framed like a video game on action heroes where we can see the

enemies faceless or abstract or dehumanized. And in some way, it becomes entertainment and war

is ugly and bloody and the human suffering. But here it comes quite a weird way of a reality show

where we have winners and we have losers. But it's not just the US who is using this format,

a number of other states are using it as well. And we can see Iran is using exactly the same

format against the US. You mentioned what Iran is doing and it has put out an AI-made video

featuring Legos, right, casting the Americans as the Lego villains for a dramatic music underneath.

What is Iran trying to do there? So they're also exactly the same way just turning around with

the losers and winners and they are portraying of course themselves as winners and they're linking

for example the administration and the US president to the Epstein files in that little video.

So they use the same format of popular culture in order to reach out and communicate directly

to their population. Basically in the same way as we can see the lighthouse are using the other

types of video which is quite fast where you have all the hits, the wins and the clear outcome.

And there's no doubt there's no visible consequences in building these videos.

Well you mentioned Legos which originally were meant for kids which leads me to want to play

another White House meme video. Let's listen to that.

That of course was SpongeBob the cartoon character next to Missile footage from the US military.

There's another one featuring Pokemon. So these are TV shows, these are games for kids.

What is the message there intended or not?

Well it is in all these videos but also in this one it is to create a bit of fun. It should be

read as a bit of fun. So it's merging fun and political messages at the same time

and not everybody are able to differentiate between what is the message in the actual meme,

what is the message in the video. Is this a joke or is it a political signal that we are sending?

But it's softened up by using characters that we all know from movies, from series, from games.

So it is a way of reading out to a large audience at once and also to create a narrative

that taps into popular culture, to tap into what people already understand.

And then it allows a narrative to spread really rapidly and change in real time as well.

And Tina Monk, given you, I mean you analyze this messaging, I want to ask you about

what's happened in the past where there were wartime propaganda posters in the United States.

The picture of Uncle Sam and World War I pointing straight out at me on the street saying,

I want you for the US Army. Of course, Rosie the Riveter showcasing the role of women and their

muscles in World War II. Are today's videos that we're talking about a version of the same thing

or are they entirely different? So the memes function today much like these propaganda posters that

you just mentioned what they did in the past. They are simple, they're visual, and they are

emotionally charged tools used to shape the public perception during a war or a conflict.

But what I think and what I have observed is that the memes goes further. So they are faster,

they are participatory, and they're highly adaptable. So instead of being produced only by the state,

they are created, they're remixed, they're shared by the online users as well. And that allows,

as I said before, the narrative to spread rapidly and also change in real time.

So if you compare these two, so why the propaganda posters aim to persuade the memes actively

mobilize and also engage an audience and make them quite a powerful tool in the contemporary

information warfare. And I think that the key distinction between them, otherwise it's basically

a bit of the same. Teen Among Studies Digital Warfare, so you've seen your lecture of criminology

at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Tina, thank you very much.

Thank you for having me. That's it for the show today. But there's always more on our website

here at Now.org. Today we're celebrating St. Patrick's Day with a story about the history of the

holiday and, of course, some Irish music. Check it out at here at Now.org in slunch it.

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