Remember that MIT study I wrote about that found that the overwhelming preponderance of AI projects fail? And I attributed the failure to bad management?

It seems there’s an article in Fortune captioned “An MIT report finding 95% of AI pilots fail spooked investors. It should have spooked C-suite execs instead.” It apparently said pretty much the same thing.

I don’t subscribe to Fortune so I couldn’t read the whole thing. Maybe if someone else does (or are better at hacking into it than I am), they could verify my supposition about the article.

This whole generative artificial intelligence frenzy reminds me of an old wisecrack about computers from fifty or more years ago: with the aid of a computer in a fraction of a second you can make a mistake that would have taken years to make by hand.

I’ve got another one that I do know the source for: “To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.” The newspaper columnistBill Vaughan wrote that in 1969.

I see that the editors of the Chicago Tribune (via Yahoo) have reacted to the news that the Trump Administration plans to send the National Guard to Chicago in a way not dissimilar to the way I did:

Speaking Wednesday to reporters flanked by National Guard troops and Washington, D.C., police that had been commandeered by the Trump administration, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller had a clear message for Chicago and other major cities.

Prepare yourselves for the kind of “protection” the nation’s capital has been provided over the past 10 days or so.

Continuing:

The last thing needed in Chicago, which isn’t as economically healthy as Washington was prior to Trump’s strongman maneuvers, is discouraging more people from patronizing bars, clubs and restaurants, as well as other attractions.

Downtown Chicago continues to be distressingly light on foot traffic, explained less by worries about crime than the paucity of workers returning to the office compared with other major U.S. cities.

A bit farther on they come to the meat of the editorial:

While all would agree there remains too much violent crime in Chicago, the latest numbers show that crimes against public safety are being prosecuted far more aggressively and most of what’s now occurring is related to street gangs that have been a scourge in this city for generations. In terms of federal action, a revitalized U.S. attorney’s office — Boutros is actively recruiting dozens of new prosecutors as we write — could and likely will do far more to improve the progress being made here than any destabilizing influx of outside federal forces.

I think the editors and President Trump as well are underestimating the role of gangs in Washington, DC’s lawlessness. For example, I question that DC could have as many carjackings per year as Chicago does without some level of organization to it. And that returns to what I’ve been saying. Where we really need resources is in dealing with criminal street gangs. I don’t have any knowledge of the situation in DC but Chicago’s problem with criminal gangs has been exacerbated by city government being in bed with the gangs. Sure, the NGOs have different names but they’re just the gangs operating under different names. Sort of like the difference between the Irish Republican Army and Sinn Féin. They’re the same organization—they just wear different hats.

The caption on the piece is “The last thing Chicago needs is Washington-style dystopia”. Hence my title. I see no way an impartial observer could look at the declining population, the rates of violence and crime in the city, our exorbitant taxes (the highest sales tax in the nation; the highest property taxes in the nation and the number of our elected officials incarcerated for corruption without the word “dystopia” coming to mind. However, it’s Chicago-style dystopia not the imported DC kind.

I’ll reserve judgment on President Trump’s deploying the National Guard to Chicago. Here’s Michelle Price’s report from ABC 7 Chicago:

CHICAGO — President Donald Trump on Friday said Chicago will likely be the next target of his efforts to crack down on crime, homelessness and illegal immigration.

Trump indicated that the Midwestern city could receive similar treatment to what he’s done in Washington, D.C., where he’s deployed 2,000 troops on the streets.

“I think Chicago will be our next,” Trump told reporters at the White House, later adding, “And then we’ll help with New York.”

The comments came as the Pentagon on Friday began ordering troops in Washington to carry firearms, though there have been no overt indications they have faced threats that would require them to carry weapons.

Trump has repeatedly described some of the nation’s largest cities – run by Democrats, with Black mayors and majority-minority populations – as dangerous and filthy.

My immediate reaction is that it’s a mistake. Start with the legality.

IMO use of the National Guard in Washington, DC is tenuous but defensible (just barely). I don’t think it’s nearly as defensible in Chicago.

High as Chicago’s crime rate is, Washington, DC’s crime rate is much higher.

Washington, DC is much more densely populated than Chicago. Chicago is four times the size of Washington, DC in area (225 sq. mi. vs. 61 sq. mi.).

Where does he plan to deploy the Guard? Much of the crime in Chicago is concentrated on what we call the South Side and the West Side (particularly the Englewood, Grand Crossing, South Shore, Austin, Humboldt Park, and Garfield Park neighborhoods). And, unlike in Washington, DC, those neighborhoods are pretty far from the more tourist-y areas, e.g. the Loop, the Magnificent Mile.

So, does he plan to deploy the Guard in the Loop and Mag Mile where they’d be more visible? Or in the Englewood or Austin neighborhoods where they’d do more good?

As I say, it sounds like a mistake to me. And then there’s a paraphrase of that line from Casablanca. There are certain sections of the South Side I wouldn’t advise him to deploy the National Guard in.

I was somewhat distressed by this post by Judge Glock at City Journal in support of incumbent New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s proposal for involuntary treatment for individuals addicted to drugs:

On Thursday, New York City mayor Eric Adams proposed the Compassionate Interventions Act, allowing doctors and judges to order involuntary treatment for people addicted to drugs or alcohol who pose a danger to themselves or others. “We must help those struggling finally get treatment, whether they recognize the need for it or not,” Adams said at a Manhattan Institute event. “Addiction doesn’t just harm individual users; it tears apart lives, families, and entire communities, and we must change the system to keep all New Yorkers safer.”

Adams’s plan is a welcome step. He understands that addiction, violence, and public disorder are closely linked, and that the city must address them together. Paired with more funding for rehabilitation, the measure could significantly reduce public drug use.

It’s not that I am pro-addiction or that I don’t think that people should be able to get treatment for drug addiction.

The sad reality is that involuntary treatment is rarely particularly effective. There’s truth in the dictum that admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to recovery.

But that raises another very troubling question. The rate of relapse after an overdose is extremely high—maybe as much as 60%. There’s been quite a push for Naloxone for the last several years. Why? How do we reduce the likelihood that saving someone after an overdose is just maximizing the likelihood that they’ll continue to abuse?

I’m still waiting for someone to propose a credible plan by which Ukraine can prevail on the battlefield against Russia. Most of the plans along those lines call for us to send the Ukrainians weapons we can’t produce to be employed by soldiers the Ukrainians don’t have.

The most recent alternative I’ve seen is “the Danish model”, described by the Wall Street Journal’s Jillian Kay Melchior:

The West’s options to mitigate Russia’s resource advantage also have battlefield implications. For procurement, Kyiv has been promoting the Danish Model, a plan pioneered by Copenhagen to supply Ukraine with weapons. Western partners including Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Canada and Norway make financial donations and the EU sends interest from frozen Russian assets to pay for Ukraine to make its own weapons. Russia also has about $300 billion in reserves in the West, which Europe could confiscate, turning the money over to Ukraine to ramp up production.

Ukraine has figured out how to make some weapons less expensively, and it benefits from breakthroughs like Shahed-intercepting drones. But Russia’s aerial attacks can still overwhelm air defenses, leaving high-value targets vulnerable. Ukraine has made its command and logistics centers mobile, but weapons manufacturing is less flexible. For the Danish Model to work, the West would need to provide air-defense systems that Ukraine can’t produce to protect weapons-manufacturing facilities and the energy infrastructure that supports them. Western nations could team up with Ukrainian arms developers to establish production facilities elsewhere in Europe. In June Copenhagen announced an agreement for one such $78 million project in Denmark.

I could support such a plan with some provisos. The first is it needs to oversight to work, something I suspect both the Europeans and Ukrainians would oppose. Without serious oversight there’s no guarantee that the funds will actually go to producing munitions. Those villas in Spain and Malta don’t buy themselves, you know.

The second proviso is that the Europeans must be willing and able to provide the “air-defense systems” proposed above.

The third proviso is that Russian attack on those systems being transported into Ukraine would not be construed as triggering NATO’s Article 5 mutual defense.

I can see how such a plan would be attractive both to the Europeans and to the Ukrainians. It doesn’t require the Europeans to fork over any money of their own and it doesn’t require them to furnish troops. It provides the Ukrainians with maximum flexibility in how the money is spent. Whether such a plan would be sufficient to allow the Ukrainians to prevail in the field I couldn’t say.

I absolutely loved this story. From Fortune via Yahoo Sheryl Estrada reports on an MIT study that found that 5% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing:

Good morning. Companies are betting on AI—yet nearly all enterprise pilots are stuck at the starting line.

The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business 2025, a new report published by MIT’s NANDA initiative, reveals that while generative AI holds promise for enterprises, most initiatives to drive rapid revenue growth are falling flat.

Despite the rush to integrate powerful new models, about 5% of AI pilot programs achieve rapid revenue acceleration; the vast majority stall, delivering little to no measurable impact on P&L. The research—based on 150 interviews with leaders, a survey of 350 employees, and an analysis of 300 public AI deployments—paints a clear divide between success stories and stalled projects.

I’m still trying to access the study itself. I’ll post on it when (if) I do.

95% is a remarkably consistent outcome. Based on the article most companies are trying to implement their own gAI solutions and failing at it. From my experience that’s either due to unrealistic expectations, mismanagement, or both and I don’t find it a bit surprising. It’s very much where companies were with respect to personal computers and networking in 1990. They thought it should be improving their bottom lines but it wasn’t.

It wasn’t the Internet that changed that; it was adoption of an operating system (Windows 95) that was more-or-less stable and was Internet-ready that changed it. Of course, that transition cost a substantial amount of money.

It’s possible that today’s managers are prepared to spend a lot of money when the right gAI framework comes along but I doubt it. Judging by the reported findings of this study that’s exactly what’s happening. I think they’re a lot more likely just to lay off a lot of people in the hopes that gAI will replace them.

I recommend you read this piece at Compact by Michael A. Reynolds. I hasten to note that’s not the same person as the former commenter here and frequent commenter at OTB. Dr. Reynolds is a professor of history and diplomacy.

The piece is a sort of backgrounder on NATO expansion and the war in Ukraine. Here’s his summary of where we are and how we got there:

By aggressively courting Ukraine as an ally and turning it into a military partner against Russia, Washington threw down a gauntlet to Moscow. This was the culmination of a longer process of reckless confrontation. The same post-Cold War bipartisan consensus of heedless liberal internationalists and proponents of a quasi-utopian global primacy that squandered American lives and treasure across the Middle East has now led the nation into a strategic dead end on the Great Eurasian Steppe, draining American money and scarce resources and weapons needed elsewhere. More than three years into the war, there is no compelling reason to believe Russia will suffer defeat. Its economy has proven resilient in the face of sanctions, and it fields a larger and more capable army than Ukraine.

Our actions during the Yugoslav civil war:

Yeltsin had been unabashedly pro-American and famously got along so well with Bill Clinton that their partnership was known as the “Bill and Boris show.” Washington’s use of NATO to bomb Serbia in 1999 brought that show to a crashing end as Yeltsin warned of war and even risked one by ordering Russian paratroopers to seize Pristina’s airport ahead of NATO troops. Before the end of that year, Russia had a new leader, Vladimir Putin. Clearly, Russian opposition to NATO was a function not of Russian domestic politics but of American and NATO behavior.

Extending offers of NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine:

The NATO candidacies of Georgia and Ukraine were, for reasons of culture, history, and geostrategy, qualitatively different from those of the Baltic states. Whereas even Tsarist administrators had openly acknowledged that their rule of the empire’s Baltic periphery was anomalous because it boasted higher levels of development than the imperial center due to the Catholic and Lutheran Balts’ long history of integration with Europe, Georgia was an Eastern Orthodox land in the remote Caucasus where it had been a victim of Persian depredations and perennial raids by Muslim slavers from Crimea and the North Caucasus. Russia, responding to fellow Orthodox Christians’ appeals for protection, annexed it in 1801. It was Tsarist authorities who abolished serfdom in Georgia, albeit slightly later than in the empire’s Slavic lands out of deference to Georgia’s nobility.

That Georgia, too, should now become an outpost of the West rankled. But more substantively alarming was that Georgia borders on Chechnya, where Federal Russian forces and loyal Chechens were battling a chronic jihadist insurgency, complete with suicide bombings, hostage seizures, and beheadings. Georgian territory had served as a conduit for fighters, funds, and arms to those jihadists. The precedents of Bosnia and Kosovo, in which Washington and NATO tolerated or even facilitated the flow of arms to jihadists and the KL before intervening and changing international borders, loomed large.

Ukraine:

Ukraine at the beginning of the century was a most unlikely candidate for NATO. It was so misgoverned and corrupt that, despite possessing some of one of the most generously endowed territories in Europe and a large, educated population, only in 2006 did its economy return to the size it had been in 1990. The economies of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, let alone Poland, had all outstripped Ukraine in growth. In 2009, the International Monetary Fund quit the country in protest of its pervasive corruption and abysmal governance. Moreover, Ukraine’s population expressed no vocation for NATO. To the contrary, opinion polls revealed that less than 30 percent of the population favored membership in NATO and solid majorities opposed it. So why was Washington so insistent that this distant, diffident, and floundering country become a treaty ally?

On Russia’s invasion of Ukraine:

American intelligence on Russian military movements and activities near and along Ukraine’s border was exceptionally good. In late 2021, it detected preparations for an invasion. In November, Biden dispatched Bill Burns, now serving as Director of Central Intelligence, to deliver a blunt message to Putin: We are fully aware that you are contemplating an invasion of Ukraine and if you follow through, we will assist Ukraine, we will rally the whole of the West, and we will impose crushing sanctions on you. The message, conveyed both orally and in a personal letter from Biden to Putin, was designed to intimidate and deter. It failed.

It failed because it violated the ancient admonition of Sun Tzu not to press a desperate enemy too hard, for even a weak opponent will fight ferociously if convinced he has no other choice. From the end of the Cold War, Washington had pursued a consistent expansion of its presence in Eurasia, virtually doubling the size of NATO from 16 members in 1991 to 30 in 2022. Washington has done this despite the consistent objections and then explicit warnings of the only logical target of this alliance, the Russian Federation. Although Washington failed to bring Ukraine into NATO as a formal member, it did transform Ukraine into a de facto ally of the United States after 2014. Following the Russian invasion, multiple officials in Washington openly—and cynically—hailed Ukraine’s war as a means of weakening Russia.

Almost as if it feared anyone might wonder whether it bore any responsibility for the war in Ukraine, the Biden administration insisted on affixing the qualifier “unprovoked” to references to Russia’s invasion. Yet even Robert Gates—a self-described hardliner on Russia with a record to prove it—had called Washington’s effort to bring Ukraine into NATO as “an especially monumental provocation.”

It’s lengthy but I recommend reading the whole thing, taking it with a grain of salt. Clearly, Dr. Reynolds has a point of view, colored, no doubt by his opinions of the fecklessness of our invasion of Iraq. He does a good job of articulating and defending his point of view. I don’t believe it should be dismissed out of hand.

As most of us predicted in anticipation of the meeting between President Trump and Russian President Putin in Anchorage last week little was accomplished but the president, as they say, tried to put the best face on it.

Today on the “talking heads” programs many of the media and political (Democratic) pundits took President Trump to task for not immediately imposing additional sanctions on Russia (as he said he would). On Face the Nation Colorado Rep. Jason Crow, after castigating the president for having produced a “historic embarrassment” for meeting with Putin at all made a useful observation to the effect that Mr. Putin only cares about three things: economic pressure, diplomatic isolation, and military defeat.

I think that provides a handy framework for considering the options in dealing with the situation. Of those I think that military defeat is the most easily dispensed with. Some minor saber-rattling on the part of the French aside, I don’t believe that any European country has expressed an interest in joining with Ukraine against the Russians. Is there any prospect for the U. S. entering into combat directly? I don’t see it.

That leaves economic pressure and diplomatic isolation. Are there any direct sanctions left to be applied against Russia? I don’t know of many.

I have no opposition to imposing indirect sanctions against countries continuing to buy oil from the Russians. That would include China, India, and Turkey, just to name some of Russia’s notable customers. The only way that could prove effective is if those countries see trade with the U. S. as more valuable to them than buying Russian oil. Do they?

To my eye we’ve been more successful at isolating ourselves on the world stage with our diplomatic postures than we have at making Russia into an “international pariah”. To my knowledge they’re active participants in more international organizations representing more of the world’s people than we are. NATO isolating itself is not synonymous with turning Russia into an international pariah.

So far as diplomacy is concerned there’s a century-old quip (attributed without evidence to Will Rogers) that diplomacy is the art of saying “nice doggie” while you look around for a rock. We appear to be stuck in the “nice doggie” state.

There’s a telling quote in George Will’s latest Washington Post column:

U.S. military aid for Ukraine has been inhibited by this: Our nation, which faces global challenges from two near-peer adversaries, has chosen to not have an adequate defense industrial base.

The column ostensibly compares our 1930s military build-up in the face of aggressive Germany and Japan to our situation now. I have two questions for Mr. Will.

1. Primacy, i.e. military supremacy, has been the objective of our military since the end of World War II. Does Mr. Will support that objective?
2. Assuming he answers that question in the affirmative, what would constitute an adequate defense industrial base to accomplish that objective?

I think there’s a major difference between now and 90 years ago. In the 1930s we already had whole supply chains in place. We mined the iron and coal; we produced the steel; we had lots of manufacturing that could be adapted for military uses. Today nearly every one of our major weapons systems requires components that not only do we not make here we don’t even have the supply chains needed to make them. Such are the costs of deindustrialization and too close an embrace of (allegedly) free trade.

There’s an old joke with the punchline “you cahn’t get theah from heah”. Okay, how do we get there from here?