The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet

It's weird to me that this is "suddenly" an issue.

It has been known for decades that Red Hat Inc's largest customer is the U.S. Army[1]. It's a very large part of the reason why Red Hat took over development of SELinux and made it on by default in their distros.

And the Army isn't exactly known for handing out cupcakes...

[1] https://unixdigest.com/includes/files/Army-RedHat-Whitepaper...

[1] "Red Hat’s partnership with the U.S. Army spans 10 years starting with the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2002 and, to this day, the U.S. Army remains one of Red Hat’s largest customers by volume."

>The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense (e.g. helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion).

Carving out the particular military engagements your company deems less than justified sounds nice but isn't workable in practice. You have to swallow the whole pill if you want to sell to the DoD.

Better to have smart bombs than dumb ones. Or rather, better to have 1 smart bomb than 1000 dumb ones spread across an entire city in order to pick off the particular building, vehicle, or person you want.

> With that in mind, it seems Red Hat, owned by IBM, is desperately trying to scrub a certain white paper from the internet. Titled “Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge”, the 2024 white paper details how Red Hat’s products and technologies can make it easier and faster to, well, kill people.

It appears IBM learned no lessons after WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

That book will need a sequel soon.

who let the Streisand effect out of its cage!?

> I don’t think there’s something inherently wrong with working together with your nation’s military or defense companies, but that all hinges on what, exactly, said military is doing and how those defense companies’ products are being used. The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense

The core purpose of a military is to destroy things and kill people, and the world is controlled by the people who can do that better than others. You can put all the "defense" and "disaster aid" lipstick on that you like but that doesn't change what they train for and what their real purpose is.

"I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

> With things like the genocide in Gaza ...

Population: ~2,050,000

Density: 15,455.8/sq mi

Words have meaning, and their emotional force derives from that meaning. The knowing misuse of a term like “genocide” for its emotional force is manipulative sophistry.

I dunno that 'removes from their website' is sufficient for 'trying to erase from the Internet'

Can we rename this "RedHat removes paper from website on using their software to 'shrink the kill-chain'"

So the hat is red because of all that blood?

Was this written by an Iranian propaganda machine?

It's weird to me that this is "suddenly" an issue.

And the Army isn't exactly known for handing out cupcakes...

[1] https://unixdigest.com/includes/files/Army-RedHat-Whitepaper...

> With things like the genocide in Gaza ...

Population: ~2,050,000

Density: 15,455.8/sq mi

Words have meaning, and their emotional force derives from that meaning. The knowing misuse of a term like “genocide” for its emotional force is manipulative sophistry.

The reality looks more like the worst of both worlds to me.

If you genuinely needed only a handful of "surgical strikes", thete would be no need to "compress the kill cycle".

What we see in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran looks more like "smart carpet bombing": Some AI system generates a continuous stream of "targets" from sensor and intelligence data, according to whatever criteria political leadership defines, then those targets are immediately fed to drones or warplanes to destroy - essentially a continuous "pipeline" that probably "ideally" (in the dreams of those people) should become fully automated.

For THAT kind of vision, "efficiency" in destroying any particular target and checking all legally required boxes as quickly as possible is probably paramount.

(And in addition to that, there are probably still enough "dumb bombs" if no one is looking)

Specially AI Hallucination bombs, that hit a park named "Police Park", because it thinks it's killing policemen[1], or a children school with Shahed in the name[2], because it thinks It has something to do with drones.

[1] https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2029575052535173364

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/6/elementary-school-in...

Channeling my inner Socrates:

You want consensus from non-experts for a plan to use 20 smart bombs.

Your opponent wants consensus for a plan to live-stream a demo of 1 smart bomb, and then use 19 dumb ones.

Your team has more expertise.

Your opponent's plan saves enough money to buy a better PR team than yours, and is still more cost effective than your plan.

Who wins?

That “smart” vs “dumb” distinction doesn’t apply here though. What is discussed has nothing to do with the ability to physically land a bomb in a precise location, that problem seems to be solved reasonably well already. “Smart” in this case has more to do with using ML/LLM to select a target.

You can rationalize anything by only considering the upside relative to alternatives' downsides.

You might be right, but that's terrible

Smart bombs are no good if they are directed by a dumb AI targeting system, a dumb alcoholic accelerationist religious fanatic Secretary of War, or a dumb narcissistic genocidal pedophile President.

I dunno that 'removes from their website' is sufficient for 'trying to erase from the Internet'

Can we rename this "RedHat removes paper from website on using their software to 'shrink the kill-chain'"

who let the Streisand effect out of its cage!?

Carving out the particular military engagements your company deems less than justified sounds nice but isn't workable in practice. You have to swallow the whole pill if you want to sell to the DoD.

So the hat is red because of all that blood?

It’s low latency for realtime. Discussion of these things have been public for twenty years since Red hat released MRG, and this is a conspiracy theory website.

They still might pull an Anthropic move and send a C&D or DMCA to archive.org.

"I give permission to IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil."

I chuckled. This is, in fact, actual quote, see[1] for explanation.

[1] https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38...

In evil mode it indents by mixing tabs and spaces.

> and the world is controlled by the people who can do that better than others

Yes, welcome to Earth.

There's absolutely no morality in deciding to be weaker than you have to be. If you are eaten by a predator when you had the option not to be eaten, you're not some high-minded righteous peace-lover, you're simply dead.

It appears IBM learned no lessons after WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

That book will need a sequel soon.

IBM suffered no consequences for any of that so there were no lessons to learn. IBM dominated the computer industry from the 1960s-1980s ("Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM") and was a more brutal monopolist than any of the FANGAM corporations.

Ah, now I see where they got the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redcap

Was this written by an Iranian propaganda machine?

How could it be? The US has won the war against them many times over, to the point that they no longer exist.

The reality looks more like the worst of both worlds to me.

If you genuinely needed only a handful of "surgical strikes", thete would be no need to "compress the kill cycle".

For THAT kind of vision, "efficiency" in destroying any particular target and checking all legally required boxes as quickly as possible is probably paramount.

(And in addition to that, there are probably still enough "dumb bombs" if no one is looking)

Channeling my inner Socrates:

You want consensus from non-experts for a plan to use 20 smart bombs.

Your opponent wants consensus for a plan to live-stream a demo of 1 smart bomb, and then use 19 dumb ones.

Your team has more expertise.

Your opponent's plan saves enough money to buy a better PR team than yours, and is still more cost effective than your plan.

Who wins?

You can rationalize anything by only considering the upside relative to alternatives' downsides.

I chuckled. This is, in fact, actual quote, see[1] for explanation.

[1] https://gist.github.com/kemitchell/fdc179d60dc88f0c9b76e5d38...

In evil mode it indents by mixing tabs and spaces.

Ah, now I see where they got the name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redcap

[1] https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2029575052535173364

[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/6/elementary-school-in...

There's also a chasm of (non-)accountability.

You or your subordinates target an elementary school: that's a war crime.

Your "battlefield AI" targets an elementary school: software bug, it happens, can't be helped.

Your links talk about the places that were bombed, but I don't see anything apart for conjecture that this was the product of AI targeting.

Also this is a vast underestimate of the ability of organizations that were able to locate most of Iranian leadership throughout the war in their hiding places, but suddenly their Farsi is so bad they need a twitter account to tell them this is a Park

This has nothing to do with AI, the school got hit because it was directly next door to a military base.

> and the world is controlled by the people who can do that better than others

Yes, welcome to Earth.

How could it be? The US has won the war against them many times over, to the point that they no longer exist.

This directly contradicts most religions, which the people with the biggest weapons somehow claim to follow.

It’s low latency for realtime. Discussion of these things have been public for twenty years since Red hat released MRG, and this is a conspiracy theory website.

They still might pull an Anthropic move and send a C&D or DMCA to archive.org.

There's also a chasm of (non-)accountability.

You or your subordinates target an elementary school: that's a war crime.

Your "battlefield AI" targets an elementary school: software bug, it happens, can't be helped.

This isn't even that new. Part of the motivation for building autonomous nuclear response programs during the cold war was specifically to remove accountability, and guilt, from human operators. But AI does bring it to a new level.

The software is never accountable, so the human running it is always accountable.

Smart bombs are no good if they are directed by a dumb AI targeting system, a dumb alcoholic accelerationist religious fanatic Secretary of War, or a dumb narcissistic genocidal pedophile President.

You might be right, but that's terrible

There is one more layer - America voted for this.

This has nothing to do with AI, the school got hit because it was directly next door to a military base.

You're mistaking it for Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School[1], double tapped with tomahawks in the opening salvo of the war. That was another school, hit later. There was multiple schools attacked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

Your links talk about the places that were bombed, but I don't see anything apart for conjecture that this was the product of AI targeting.

This directly contradicts most religions, which the people with the biggest weapons somehow claim to follow.

It's a popular conspiracy theory, without evidence, and without any perspective on any information that intelligence had. Using civilians as shields is well documented/known for Iranian military and groups they sponsor. For example, hospitals [1].

Shitty, but possibly a valid military target.

[1] https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8666/yemen-human-shields

The software is never accountable, so the human running it is always accountable.

that is how it should be, not how it is.

There is one more layer - America voted for this.

In fact, it didn’t. Trump continued to make “no new wars” a plank of his platform.

Some of his base will follow wherever he goes, but he would not have been elected without those who supported him on the basis of this (broken) promise.

You're mistaking it for Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School[1], double tapped with tomahawks in the opening salvo of the war. That was another school, hit later. There was multiple schools attacked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack

Shitty, but possibly a valid military target.

[1] https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/8666/yemen-human-shields

> Gatestone Institute is an American far-right think tank known for publishing anti-Muslim articles.

> The organization has attracted attention for publishing false or inaccurate articles, some of which were shared widely.

> The Gatestone Institute has been frequently described as anti-Muslim, regularly publishes false reports to stoke anti-Muslim fears, and has published false stories pertaining to Muslims and Islam.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatestone_Institute

The US and Israel have repeatedly claimed that schools and hospitals are legitimate military targets with no evidence. A highly partisan think tank which is known for putting out misinformation is not a valid source.

If you're going to destroy hospitals and target civilian infrastructure and kill children, you should be accountable on a world stage and provide evidence. Unless you would you accept Iran bombing elementary schools in the US because they claim to have intel that there are terrorists hiding under them?

that is how it should be, not how it is.

In fact, it didn’t. Trump continued to make “no new wars” a plank of his platform.

Some of his base will follow wherever he goes, but he would not have been elected without those who supported him on the basis of this (broken) promise.

Trump said this wasn’t a war.

Americans voted for this confrontational, disrespectful, and chaotic way of governing.

> Gatestone Institute is an American far-right think tank known for publishing anti-Muslim articles.

> The organization has attracted attention for publishing false or inaccurate articles, some of which were shared widely.

> The Gatestone Institute has been frequently described as anti-Muslim, regularly publishes false reports to stoke anti-Muslim fears, and has published false stories pertaining to Muslims and Islam.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatestone_Institute

Trump said this wasn’t a war.

Americans voted for this confrontational, disrespectful, and chaotic way of governing.

Home > Red Hat > The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet

It shouldn’t be a surprise that companies – and for our field, technology companies specifically – working with the defense industry tends to raise eyebrows. With things like the genocide in Gaza, the threats of genocide and war crimes against Iran, the mass murder in Lebanon, it’s no surprise that western companies working with the militaries and defense companies involved in these atrocities are receiving some serious backlash.

With that in mind, it seems Red Hat, owned by IBM, is desperately trying to scrub a certain white paper from the internet. Titled “Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge”, the 2024 white paper details how Red Hat’s products and technologies can make it easier and faster to, well, kill people. Links to the white paper throw up 404s now, but it can still easily be found on the Wayback Machine and other places.

It’s got some disturbingly euphemistic content.

The find, fix, track, target, engage, assess (F2T2EA) process requires ubiquitous access to data at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. Red Hat Device Edge embeds captured, analyzed, and federated data sets in a manner that positions the warfighter to use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to increase the accuracy of airborne targeting and mission-guidance systems.

[…]

Delivering near real-time data from sensor pods directly to airmen, accelerating the sensor-to-shooter cycle.

[…]

Sharing near real-time sensor fusion data with joint and multinational forces to increase awareness, survivability, and lethality.

[…]

The new software enabled the Stalker to deploy updated, AI-based automated target recognition capabilities.

[…]

If the target is an adversary tracked vehicle on the far side of a ridge, a UAS carrying a server running Red Hat Device Edge could transmit video and metadata directly to shooters.

↫ Red Hat white paper titled “Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge”

I don’t think there’s something inherently wrong with working together with your nation’s military or defense companies, but that all hinges on what, exactly, said military is doing and how those defense companies’ products are being used. The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense (e.g. helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion).

There’s always going to be difficult grey areas, but any military or defense company supporting the genocide in Gaza or supplying weapons to kill women and children in Iran is unequivocally wrong, morally reprehensible, and downright illegal on both an international and national level. It clearly seems someone at Red Hat feels the same way, as the company has been trying really hard to memory-hole this particular white paper, and considering its word choices and the state of the world today, it’s easy to see why.

Of course, the internet never forgets, and I certainly don’t intend to let something like this slide. We all know companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Google have no qualms about making a few bucks from a genocide or two, but it always feels a bit more traitorous to the cause when it’s an open source company doing the profiting. It feels like Red Hat is trying to have its cake and eat it too, by, as an IBM subsidiary, trying to both profit from the vast sums of money sloshing around in the US military industrial complex as well as maintain its image as a scrappy open source business success story shitting bunnies and rainbows.

It’s a long time ago now that Red Hat felt like a genuine part of the open source community. Most of us – both outside and inside of Red Hat, I’m sure – have been well aware for a long time now that those days are well behind us, and I guess Red Hat doesn’t like seeing its kill cycle this compressed.

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The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet

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