New 9/11 Evidence Points to Deep Saudi Complicity | The Pentagon Isn’t Buying Enough Ammo | A.I. Chatbots Can Be Taught to Spew Disinformation, and more

Right now, the world’s largest democracy is going to the polls. Close to a billion Indians are eligible to vote as part of the country’s general election, and deepfakes could play a decisive, and potentially divisive, role. India’s political parties have exploited AI to warp reality through cheap audio fakes, propaganda images, and AI parodies. But while the global discourse on deepfakes often focuses on misinformation, disinformation, and other societal harms, many Indian politicians are using the technology for a different purpose: voter outreach.
Across the ideological spectrum, they’re relying on AI to help them navigate the nation’s 22 official languages and thousands of regional dialects, and to deliver personalized messages in farther-flung communities. While the US recently made it illegal to use AI-generated voices for unsolicited calls, in India sanctioned deepfakes have become a $60 million business opportunity. More than 50 million AI-generated voice clone calls were made in the two months leading up to the start of the elections in April—and millions more will be made during voting, one of the country’s largest business messaging operators told WIRED.

The Real Meaning of Trump’s ‘Unified Reich’ Post  (David Graham, The Atlantic)
At this point, Americans will believe almost any story about Donald Trump. That is both a strength and a weakness for him. On the one hand, it means that nearly nothing he says, including for example that he wants to be a dictator, penetrates too deeply. On the other hand, it means people rarely extend him the benefit of the doubt, even when it’s warranted.
That’s what happened yesterday, when Trump’s Truth Social account posted a video featuring fake newspapers with celebratory imagined headlines about Trump (it’s a landslide! trump wins!!). Below, a sub-headline referred to “the creation of a unified Reich.” Naturally, the combination of Trump and a “unified Reich” was combustible. “This man is a stain, a Nazi, a pure a [sic] simple garbage of a human being,” fulminated Adam Kinzinger, the former Republican congressman. “Flush Trump down the toilet.” The controversy is illuminating about Trump and the presidential campaign, but perhaps not in the ways that it first appeared.
Trump’s problem here is that even though his excuse makes sense, he is also an authoritarian who has used anti-Semitic language. Believing that he might have posted subtle Nazi messaging doesn’t require much of a leap. Not only did he attempt to steal the last election and promise to be a dictator, but he has also consistently disregarded checks and balances and suggested “termination” of the Constitution. He called neo-Nazi marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017 “very fine people,” hobnobbed with white nationalists, and delivered menacing remarks about American Jews who do not support him—on Rosh Hashanah, no less. His former chief of staff says Trump once told him that “Hitler did some good things.” It’s no coincidence that so many of those past sloppy reposts came from supporters of his who hold hateful views. (It also doesn’t help that a staffer on the campaign of Ron DeSantis, a rival and would-be successor in the GOP presidential primary, was caught surreptitiously inserting Nazi imagery into social-media posts.)

The Pentagon Isn’t Buying Enough Ammo  (Stacie Pettyjohn and Hannah Dennis, Foreign Policy)
U.S. Defense Department officials profess to have learned one of the starkest lessons from the war in Ukraine: that high-intensity conflicts consume a huge number of munitions and that weapons production cannot rapidly expand. William LaPlante, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, coined the phrase “production is deterrence” in late 2023, and this mantra has been repeated by other senior leaders, including Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks.
Unfortunately, the Defense Department’s budget request for fiscal year 2025, which asks for $1.2 billion less than last year for key conventional precision-guided munitions, belies these claims. The Pentagon cannot continue to kick the can down the road and promise to buy more munitions next year. Supplemental appropriations are needed to replenish inventories of weapons given to partners and expended during operations in the Middle East, but on their own, they are a Band-Aid that will not fix the fundamental problem of production levels that do not match the intensity of modern warfare. The Pentagon needs to consistently buy more of the right weapons to support allies and partners, deal with the threats it faces today, and deter future challenges.
Understandably, U.S. military weapons stockpiles shrunk and the defense industrial base consolidated at the end of the Cold War as the threat of superpower war receded. Over the next few decades, the Pentagon sought to become leaner and more efficient, deciding that it was wasteful to buy and store large caches of weapons that might never be used.
Instead, the department purchased small stockpiles, typically numbering no more than several thousand of the more sophisticated, longer-range missiles—such as the PAC-3, SM-6, Tomahawk, or Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missiles— that could be supplemented by just-in-time production. This procurement strategy was sufficient for U.S. forces that were focused on lower-intensity counterterrorism and counterinsurgency operations because the demand for weapons was expected to be low.
But even small contingencies, such as the 1999 air war in Kosovo and the 2014 operation against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, nearly exhausted U.S. stores of key precision weapons.