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

0:01WBUR Podcasts, Boston. Anyone that's interacted with AI knows that AI can make mistakes. How do we use this technology? And are we making sure that it's making the U.S. military more precise in its operations? Artificial intelligence, memes, and the art of war in 2026.

0:35It's Tuesday, March 17th, and this is Here and Now, anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.

0:44Today on the show, how the U.S. and Israel are using AI in their attacks on Iran. Also, Chet, is it cringe to post pro-war memes? It looks like internet humor, but it basically functions like political communication or propaganda. Internet trolling as a White House comms strategy. Coming up in about 15 minutes.

1:12But first, an update on the war. Israel says it killed two of Iran's highest-ranking leaders in an airstrike overnight. They are the country's top national security advisor and the head of the Besiege militia. Meanwhile, President Trump is bashing allies for declining to help secure the Strait of Hormuz, which has been effectively closed by Iran. And a top aide to the Director of National Intelligence in the U.S. 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 advisor to former President Joe Biden. And he spoke to Scott Tong.

1:52Before we get to the Strait of Hormuz, these Iranian leaders, Israel says, it killed. If true, what would the 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 suggests significant operational success, significant intelligence success. But whether they're able to convert these operations, these actions into actual strategic victory in this conflict remains quite elusive, I think, for the United States and Israel.

2:32The 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. And still potentially blocking the Strait of Hormuz. So let's talk about oil flow. Oil flows and diplomacy, I mean, this episode has pushed up oil prices. The international price of oil that everyone pays a gallon of gas in this country is now$3.79 on average, according to AAA.

3:12President Trump asked U.S. 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 noncommittal. 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 an administration 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 you to help other countries and sometimes other countries are in a position to help you.

3:50The Trump 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.

4:26You 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. 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 are not providing more support than he would like. John, what about economic reasons to say no? The world has seen$100 oil before.

5:01Are 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 Strait of Hormuz, this critical waterway, 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 a barrel oil, gas prices high, this is going to become a very severe constraint.

5:48It'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 opposed this war. The president did not ask Congress beforehand.

6:23Today, Joe Kent, one of Trump's top national security officials, resigned in protest 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 abhorrent views expressed by Joe Kent. So I think that's less of a relevant factor here. 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.

7:01And I think many other countries look at that, look at some of the discourse and dysfunctionality in our country. And that is 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.

7:30Coming up next, the role of AI in the war. We'll be right back. Thank you.

8:05right life insurance policy. Life insurance is never cheaper than it is today. Get the right life insurance for you for less and save more than 50 % at selectquote.com slash anytime. That's selectquote.com slash anytime. 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 reported use of AI in target selection, when Iran's health ministry says U.S.

8:49and Israeli strikes have killed at least 1 ,200 civilians, including children. Paul Shari worked at the Pentagon on weapons and technology policy and is a former army ranger. Now he's at the Center for new American security. And he told Scott Tong, the military is indeed using large language models in its war with Iran. The U.S. has the need to sift through massive amounts of information, drone video feeds, 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.

9:33And 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 into strike 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.

10:11I think anyone that's interacted 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 on the battlefield?

10:52I want to ask you, Paul, about the potential limits of the super high-tech warfighting. 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 an 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.

11:47And that'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, where despite an overwhelming advantage in 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 Strait of Hormuz and disrupting oil shipping and the global economy. But we've seen this in other conflicts as well.

12:23In 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, real quick 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.

13:13But 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 are certainly some risks that 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?

13:52Is 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.

14:35Paul 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.

14:51So 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 wring 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.

15:34This message comes from Rince, who knows that mastering the perfect house party table spread takes time. But so does laundry. So Rince takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door, expertly cleaned. And you can take the time once spent sorting and waiting, folding and queuing, to finally pursue your real passion. Rolling delicate roses of capicola alongside meandering ribbons of Amon Serrano. transforming a humble plank of weathered barnwood into a show-stopping charcuterie spread. Rinse. It's time to be great. Way back in the 2015-2016 campaign for the White House, Trump supporters bragged about winning the meme wars.

16:17They 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 Kombat. I am the danger. F.A. Time to find out. Maximum effort.

17:02Progression. Here it comes. War! Now hit this! Flawless victory. 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 memification of war is Tina Monk at Nottingham Trent University in the UK. Here's her conversation with Scott. Well, it's interesting because mimetic 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.

17:51It'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 functions like political communication or 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 desynthesized how we see war and how we understand war. But also it's framed like a video game or an 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.

18:41But here it becomes quite a weird way of a reality show where we have winners and we have losers. But it's not just the U.S. 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 U.S. 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. Very dramatic music underneath.

19:21What is Iran trying to do there? So they're also exactly the same way, just turning around with losers and winners. And they are portraying, of course, themselves as winners. And they're linking, for example, the administration and the U.S. 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 White House 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.

20:03Well, you mentioned Legos, you know, which originally were meant for kids, which leads me to want to play another White House meme video. Let's listen to that. You want to see me do it again? You want to see me do it again? That, of course, was SpongeBob, the cartoon character, next to missile footage from the U.S. 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.

20:50And 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 reaching 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 the narrative to spread really rapidly and change in real time as well. Yeah. Yeah. 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 in World War I pointing straight out, you know, at me on the street, saying, I want you for the U.S.

21:51Army. Of course, Rosie the Riveter showcasing the role of women, you know, 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 memes go further, so they are faster, they are participatory, and they're highly adaptable.

22:31So 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 is the key distinction between them. Otherwise, it's basically a bit of the same. Tina Monk studies digital warfare, she's senior lecturer of criminology at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.

23:15Tina, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. That's it for the show today. But there's always more on our website, hereandnow.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 hereandnow.org. And sláinte.

23:41Here and Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Sam Raifelson, Julia Corcoran, and Hafsa Qureshi. Our editors were Todd Munt, Michaela Rodriguez, and Michael Scotto. Technical direction from Caleb Green and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and me, Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Allison Hagen and Grace Griffin. And here on Now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. Happy St. Patrick's Day. We'll be back with you tomorrow.