(Natural News)—The military-industrial complex of the United States is allegedly using Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine to test new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered military technology that assists in detecting targets on the battlefield utilizing drone footage.
The technology, referred to as Project Maven, had its research acquired from the government by Google under a contract six years ago before being acquired recently by other contractors following opposition from engineers and other employees who did not want to be associated with creating an AI tool for military use.
Today, the technology is being tested on the front line in Ukraine, the New York Times reported, as Western and Ukrainian officers, together with some top military contractors from Silicon Valley, are “exploring new ways of finding and exploiting Russian vulnerabilities.”
Thus far, the findings from the testing have reportedly been “mixed.” While Project Maven permits commanders to identify the movements of Russian forces and utilize AI algorithms to predict their next steps, it has seemingly been “difficult” to bring “21st-century data into 19th-century trenches.”
One of the biggest obstacles, the New York Times said, is that due to restrictions enforced by President Joe Biden, the U.S. military can only supply Ukrainians a “picture of the battlefield” without providing exact targeting details.
It is also unclear if the latest technology would even be able to alter the course of the war due to Russia’s ability to adapt to emerging technologies being employed by Ukraine.
“When new technology meets the brutality of old-fashioned trench warfare, the results are rarely what Pentagon planners expected,” the New York Times said.
U.S. military using Ukraine conflict as testing ground for rapidly evolving technologies
Despite the mixed results from testing Project Maven, the conflict in Ukraine is still considered “a bonanza for the U.S. military” and a testing ground for rapidly evolving military technologies.
“At the end of the day this became our laboratory,” said U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Christopher T. Donahue.
Meanwhile, Ukraine has been using a version of Project Maven that does not need the input of sensitive American intelligence or advanced systems.
Ukrainian attack drones armed with AI-powered targeting capabilities have been utilized to target the Russian energy industry and destroy an important part of Russia’s refining capability. (Related: Ukraine claims to be developing “unstoppable” AI-controlled drones that can attack targets on the battlefield.)
The use of AI has allowed the drones to have accurate targeting and resist jamming, improving the precision of strikes on enemy targets.
This primary form of AI, called machine vision, allows drones to map terrain and carry out strikes with high precision without requiring steady satellite contact, giving strategic advantages to Ukrainian troops.
Washington has benefited from Ukraine’s use of this technology by showing the Pentagon the weaknesses and areas for improvement with military-focused AI technology.
The use of AI in combat situations has emphasized the need for a redesigned military satellite system that can work more successfully, comparable with the Starlink constellations of small satellites.
This change in understanding highlights the importance of adjusting and developing military technology to address the requirements of modern warfare.
The application of AI in military operations represents a major advancement in the field of warfare, giving new possibilities for improving precision strikes and critical decision-making.
Follow WeaponsTechnology.news for more stories about AI technology used by military forces. Watch the video below that shows Ukrainian “terminator drones” targeting and striking a group of Russian infantry.
This video is from the High Hopes channel on Brighteon.com.
More related stories:
- Push to expedite AI use in lethal autonomous weapons raises questions about reliability of new military tech.
- Israel deploying next-generation weapons in Gaza, including AI-powered weapons systems.
- AI quickly resorts to launching NUCLEAR WEAPONS as a method of resolving conflicts in war simulation,
- Israel using AI to commit mass genocide in Gaza with little, if any, human oversight.
- U.S. Air Force launches first ever AI-piloted fighter flight as American military pivots to human-less warfare.
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Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.