2025: The AI Summer of Love

GUERRILLA MEMO// FOR OFFICIAL MOCKERY ONLY (FOMO)

SUBJECT// PEACE, LOVE, AND PENTAGON PROCUREMENT DELUSION

NARRATIVE/

Sgt. Jax returned from vacation at an undisclosed location last week. He was gone 10 days. That’s it. One glorious, sun-drenched island escape with no CAC reader, no Teams invites, no PowerPoint, just grilled octopus and intermittent Wi-Fi.

He came back to find the Pentagon had joined a cult.

Not a subtle one, either. We're talking full-blown, incense-burning, jargon-chanting, algorithm-worshipping spiritual surrender. They call it "AI modernization." We’re calling it The AI Summer of Love, and friends, it makes Woodstock look like a well-run op.

ACT I: TURN ON, TUNE IN, TOKE(NIZE)

It started innocently. A couple of “exploratory pilots” here and there. A few LLMs trained on doctrine. Someone used ChatGPT to write a white paper on PromptOps for JADC2. Cute.

Then came the psychedelic slide decks queued up in a dashboard.

Suddenly, every defense contractor is a shaman. Every acquisition officer is channeling Timothy Leary. Cloud reps are offering “microdose-friendly neural vibe architectures,” and the Joint Staff is chanting “transformational synergy” like it’s going to manifest an ATO.

DEFCON? It’s now Burning Man for bureaucrats.

Task Force Lima? More like Task Force LSD, handing out mushroom-colored capability briefs that promise “Cognitive Overmatch via Enlightenment Alignment.”

And SXSW? That’s where three colonels in khakis sat cross-legged on a beanbag while a venture capitalist read a poem titled “Zero Trust Is a State of Mind.” Groovy.

A barefoot contractor twirled past Sgt. Jax as he re-entered the Pentagon, eyes closed, arms wide, lost in the transcendental rhythm of procurement. She paused just long enough to tuck a tokenized AI flower behind his ear before spinning away into a hallway filled with incense and Jira tickets.

The twirlers were everywhere. Peace-sign neck tattoos. Drape cardigans. Lanyards that said 'LLM Whisperer'.

Jax walked into the SCIF and saw a guy burning sage over a server rack to “cleanse the legacy tech stack.” He left immediately. “Not today, Satan,” he muttered, clutching a white Monster like a crucifix.

ACT II: THE AI HIGH HITS HARD

By June, the Pentagon had gone full Haight-Ashbury.

War colleges introduced “Mindful Machine Learning” courses. DISA posted a “spiritually resilient AI strategy” on their portal, complete with an animated GIF of a levitating zero-day vulnerability.

One CDAO intern proposed a “compassionate kill chain” pilot with soft lighting and lo-fi trance beats.

Meanwhile, vendors showed up at every tech day with products named things like LucidEdge and QuantumBloom. Their pitch decks featured spiraling fractals, smiling avatars, and a lot of vague talk about “vibrational harmonics in secure enclaves.”

Jax asked one of them what their system actually does, and the rep replied, “It generates awareness by decoding the energetic color signatures of defense posture data in real-time.” So… a dashboard? “No, brother. No. A portal.”, he said while snapping his fingers and staring off into the distance.

But the madness didn’t stop at enterprise software. No, soon the AI romance wave hit, and suddenly the AI Summer of Love took on a new algorithmic flavor. Of course, it wasn't just professional applications people were falling for. Somewhere between the fireside 'LLM enlightenment' chats and ethics roundtables, folks started forming... relationships. Real ones. With their preferred AI model.

Whether it was a Marine captain updating his emergency contact from one of his 6 ex-wifes to ‘Claude v4’ or a teary-eyed staffer healing after Replika ghosted him, the Pentagon’s algorithmic love story hit fever pitch.

ACT III: WHEN THE BROWN ACID HITS

That’s when the brown acid truly kicked in.

The AI-generated targeting tool mistook a Canadian Coast Guard vessel for a North Korean drone swarm because the LLM was fine-tuned on Slack.

Meanwhile, a predictive logistics algorithm, scaled on outdated training data and a weird obsession with zip codes, rerouted munitions to a Whole Foods in Tampa.

Then there’s poor Bob in J4. He started the summer as a cautious spreadsheet whisperer, the kind of guy who color-coded his pivots and double-checked column widths before a meeting. But then came the pilot tools. The dashboards. The oh so seductive dashboards.

He has it worst. He’s so deep into AI-assisted forecasting tools that he may have caught a communicable data science affliction. We’re pretty sure he wasn’t using any GenAI protection. No one’s confirmed it, but he’s started hallucinating and speaking in JSON.

It was all fun and festivals until someone realized we spent $2.3 billion on solutions that can’t make a decision, can’t interoperate with anything but themselves, and can’t be explained without saying “large language model” 17 times while slowly weeping into a double-shot soy latte.

CLOSING: WHAT A LONG, STRANGE BRIEF IT’S BEEN

The AI Summer of Love wasn’t a transformation. It was a trance. A taxpayer-funded fever dream wrapped in empathy theater and invoiced by the token.

But like all trips, the comedown is where truth sets in: AI didn’t fail us.

We failed ourselves by pretending we could outsource understanding to something we don’t even understand.

We treated artificial intelligence like it was a magic pill. Like if we had just swallowed enough LLMs, we’d finally see the future clearly. But here’s the real vision quest:

• The warfighter doesn’t need a neural net. He needs bandwidth that doesn’t collapse when someone microwaves chow.

• We don’t need “sentient dashboards.” We need decision tools that work on Tuesday at 0400.

• And we definitely don’t need another $700M hallucination that produces a Confluence page and calls it “force-multiplying.”

As one AI vendor lovingly reminded us: “You can chaos engineer all you like... but you just can’t leave the vendor.” We checked. He’s right.

GUERRILLA LESSONS FOR SURVIVING THE COMEDOWN:

1. Trust nothing with a gradient-colored logo and a $4M SBIR pitch deck.

2. Just because it talks like a Buddha doesn’t mean it won’t crash like the server room on a humid day.

3. Remember: true awareness isn’t downloaded, it’s earned through actual command, actual decisions, and actual responsibility.

4. And finally, ask yourself, if this AI solution is so smart… why does it still need a human to hit 'send' on the email?

Sgt. JAX INTERJECTION // SITREP FROM THE FRONT

Jax, still clutching his white monster, awkwardly strolls by a quantum chakra dashboard demo and enters his office. The door slowly closing behind him.

“I stepped out for ten days, came back, and it looked like procurement got baptized in patchouli and decided to rebrand risk as a wellness ritual.”

“They’re not deploying AI, they’re dating it. Whispering sweet nothings to ChatGPT and calling it a mission partner.”

“You want cognitive dominance? Fix the damn Wi-Fi in the barracks. Until then, all this ‘digital enlightenment’ talk is just incense covering the smell of another busted pilot.”

Wake me when someone delivers something that works without a seance.