https://www.meforum.org/58334/generals-vs-islamists-in-libya

the chaotic Libyan battle is in fact a proxy war pitting clients of two key power axes in the Middle East against one another

Haftar and his LNA have benefited since 2014 from the support of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Haftar appears also to have secured the support of Saudi Arabia.

Haftar is thus the ally and client of those broadly Western-aligned, authoritarian Arab states that find a common enemy in the Sunni political Islam of the anti-Western Muslim Brotherhood and its allies.

On the other side, Turkey and Qatar (and the now-deposed Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir) are strongly supportive of the Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood associated elements that share power with the government in Tripoli. Evidence has emerged of illicit arms shipments by Turkey to the forces in Tripoli.

Qatari support, meanwhile, is offered to Islamist militias and powerful individuals associated with the jihadi trend, most notably the Benghazi Defense Brigades

It is worth noting that Haftar and the LNA are currently in the unusual position of enjoying the tacit support of both Russia and the US.

https://breakingdefense.com/2019/04/simulating-a-super-brain-artificial-intelligence-in-wargames/?

ARMY WAR COLLEGE: Theater commanders around the world want weapons they can see and use right now, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the Army War College. It’s a lot harder, Gen. Joseph Dunford said, to sell experienced senior officers on an untested and intangible capability like Artificial Intelligence.

The immediate objective: come up with ways to mimic the effects of an AI so the school’s in-house game designers could turn it into either a computer simulation or a table-top exercise within 10 months — without new money. The hope is that the 2020 game, in turn, will intrigue Army leadership enough that they’ll support a larger, longer-term AI effort.

The most famous case is the Naval War College in the 1920s and 1930s, which ran more than 100 games exploring a possible war with Japan, often with officers moving miniature ships around a tiled floor used as a giant gameboard. Admiral Nimitz famously said that these games explored so many different technologies and strategies that “nothing that happened during the [actual] war was a surprise… except the kamikaze tactics.”

If you can actually write or modify a computer wargame, instead of doing a pure tabletop exercise, your options get more sophisticated and fiendish. You can put each player at a different screen and manipulate how much information they get, how quickly, and how accurate it is. You can cut off in-game messaging between players to simulate radio jamming, or send false messages to simulate their network getting hacked. You can use crowdsourcing to simulate an AI’s ability to generate a wider range of strategies. The non-AI players can only brainstorm among themselves, but the team simulating the AI can post the game board on the Internet and get hundreds of suggestions for its next move.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/apr/26/irked-dccc-rule-liberal-group-backs-marie-newman/

A liberal group rallied behind Rep. Dan Lipinski’s challenger in part out of protest against the DCCC’s attempt to undercut insurgent candidates in the 2020 primary election cycle.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s refusal to work with consultants that help out candidates running against incumbent House members is making it more difficult for Marie Newman to hire help.

“We proudly backed Marie Newman when she ran against Lipinksi in 2016, and the DCCC’s anti-primary blacklist policy and the impact its already having in her race made it even more important for us to get her back early in her 2020 campaign,” said Charles Chamberlin, executive director of Democracy for America.

Ms. Newman told Politico this week that vendors have passed on the chance to work with her because of the new DCCC rule, which was put into place in an effort to avoid messy primaries that could hurt the party’s chances of defending their House majority.

Democrats blacklisting candidates, somebody ask Bernie about this