REAPER TRAINING EXERCISE: An MQ-9 Reaper assigned to the 214th Attack Group, Arizona Air National Guard flies over Michigan in a training exercise, July 24, 2019.

NEW AGE OF DECEPTION:

Deep fakes possess the immediate see-hear semblance of authentic imagery and audio. Digital Svengalis create them using manipulative techniques to fundamentally alter imagery (still and video) and audio tracks. They may combine or superimpose images.

For example, your face can be superimposed on Godzilla’s body; as the monster bashes Tokyo, your voice complains about Japanese cars. If it can be done, it has been done: The heads of well-known celebrities have already been superimposed on the bodies of porn actors. Presto! Deep-fake porn videos.

Deep fakes, however, are more than bad jokes and acts of felony libel. Deep fakes are tools for delivering high-speed and pervasive disinformation.

My latest Creators Syndicate column.

GROWLER TAKE-OFF: An EA-18G Growler electronic warfare aircraft launches from the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan. The aircraft carrier is operating in the Coral Sea. (Mistake corrected!)

ON AN AUSTRALIAN BEACH: U.S. Marines conduct an amphibious assault during exercise Talisman Sabre 19 in Bowen, Australia, July 22, 2019.

DEEP FAKES AND THE NEW AGE OF DECEPTION:

Forgeries, malign innuendo, smears, hoaxes and outright lies are primal psychological and emotional weapons. From lovers’ quarrels to great-power warfare, they are innate factors in human conflict.

Unfortunately, we have entered the age of deep fakes (aka deepfakes), where new digital “bottles” can instantaneously, pervasively and persuasively deliver vintage lies and classic smears.

MORE:

…If it can be done, it has been done: The heads of well-known celebrities have already been superimposed on the bodies of porn actors. Presto! Deep-fake porn videos.

Read the entire column.

RELATED: China covertly trying to foil Trump’s re-election.

RAPTOR ABOVE THE SNOW: Dazzling photo of an F-22 Raptor over snow and glaciers in the Alaska Range.

HERCULES WITH INVASION STRIPES: A USAF C-130H Hercules assigned to the 96th Airlift Squadron flies over Minnesota, July 16, 2019. The plane’s WWII invasion stripes honor the 75th anniversary of D-Day. Originally activated as the 96th Troop Carrier Squadron, the 96th dropped 101st Airborne Division paratroopers in Normandy during the D-Day invasion.

COUNTER-TERRORISM: Guantanamo all over again.

Europe is now facing the same situation the United States confronted in 2002 when hundreds of Islamic terrorists were captured in Afghanistan and it was unclear what could be done with them. By 2009 that was still an unresolved problem and ten years later the Americans are not the only ones forced to deal with it. European nations, after accepting millions of illegal Moslem migrants who refused to adapt to their new homeland, found that thousands of their Moslem residents went off after 2014 to join the “Islamic State” in Syria. Most of those European Moslems were killed, captured or, for the moment, are untraceable.

Many of these Islamic State zealots were known to have committed crimes, often gruesome ones that they made videos of the posted on the Internet. Most of those captured in Syria and Iraq want to return to Europe and Europe does not know how to handle those requests coming from those accused of serious crimes, The U.S. faced the same situation in 2002 after capturing over a thousand known or suspected Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan. The American solution was Guantanamo Bay prison. Europeans were highly critical of the Guantanamo solution, which kept Islamic terrorists in custody without a trial because there was not enough evidence to assure conviction in a Western court.

Read the entire post.

HOWITZER LIFT AND DELIVERY: An Ohio Army National Guard CH-47 Chinook lifts a M777 howitzer during a sling load exercise held May 20, 2019.

DRAGON LADY ABOVE: A U-2 Dragon Lady overflies the U.S. Air Force Academy, July 10, 2019.

HONG KONG’S CRISIS CONTINUES:

The former British colony, which returned to China in 1997, is embroiled in its worst political crisis for decades after two months of increasingly violent protests that have posed one of the gravest populist challenges to Communist Party rulers in Beijing.

The demonstrations, mushrooming up almost daily, saw the defacement of China’s main representative office last weekend, triggering warnings from Beijing this was an attack on China’s sovereignty.

More protests are expected on Saturday with demonstrators outraged at an attack on Sunday at a train station by armed men who police sources say included some with triad backgrounds. Some 45 people were wounded.

The attack last Sunday just reeked of a provocation sponsored by Chinese Communist intelligence operatives — Beijing would love to have a pretext for a military invasion.

Two weeks ago I wrote that Hong Kong’s democracy movement presents Beijing with a very intricate political war with roots in Tiananmen Square’s 1989 massacre.

One battle is a clash of national narratives, regionally with suspicious neighbors (including Hong Kong) who resist Chinese expansion, globally as the regime’s most potent international adversary, the U.S., squeezes Beijing economically and cajoles it politically. For example, the U.S. threatens China with legal action and economic penalties for its pervasive theft of intellectual property. China has yet to effectively counter that verifiable charge.

Perceived state diplomatic and economic reliability, systemic credibility and cultural prestige are the stakes in this clash.

The second battle is for the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarian self-preservation — in blunt terms, communist elites remaining in power.

The crisis continues and Red China is threatening invasion. Stay tuned.

RELATED: Michael Yon’s July 21 dispatch.

RAM RELEASED: The USS Theodore Roosevelt launches a rolling airframe missile (RAM) during a live-fire exercise.

KEEPING THE PRESSURE ON IRAN: A report from VOA and the AP:

The Trump administration’s new Pentagon chief says he aims to ensure a U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf that would deter Iran from threatening to stop or seize any American commercial ship.

Mark Esper, who was sworn in as defense secretary on Tuesday, tells reporters that this arrangement wouldn’t mean having an American warship escorting every U.S. commercial ship.

As Esper puts it, “to the degree that the risk demands it,” the U.S. military will do what it can – by air and by sea – to ensure secure navigation in the Gulf and through the Strait of Hormuz.

According to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, allied navies will be involved in the effort to counter Iranian threats to close the Strait of Hormuz:

The United States believes a proposed European initiative to bolster maritime security in the Gulf would complement ongoing U.S. efforts there instead of being a “stand-alone” operation, the top U.S. general said on Wednesday.

Washington in June first proposed some sort of multinational effort open to all allies and partners to bolster maritime security in the Gulf after accusing Iran of attacking oil tankers around the Strait of Hormuz, a critical maritime chokepoint between Iran and Oman.

But fracking has fractured the ayatollahs’ oil weapon. “Fracking hasn’t quite fractured the ayatollah regime, but combined with economic sanctions imposed by the U.S., American fracking has helped sap and impoverish the dictatorship.”

As a result, Hormuz isn’t as critical an economic chokepoint; “secure navigation” for tankers and other commercial shipping matters, but closing it isn’t the economic threat it was even a decade ago. Recall geo-strategic community organizer Barack Obama’s statement in 2012: “We can’t just drill our way out of a problem.” The faculty club fool also wanted to let the ayatollahs build nuclear weapons.

FRACKING AYATOLLAH IRAN’S OIL WEAPON:

Iran’s corrupt religious dictators continue to talk, taunt and act as if their periodic attacks on oil tankers and cyclic threats to close the Strait of Hormuz to commercial and naval vessels still have the power to spike global oil prices, depress stock markets and economically throttle the industrialized nations the ayatollahs despise.

But geo-strategically, 2019 isn’t 1973, 1990 or even 2014, when oil exporter Russia invaded Ukraine and threatened to restrict natural gas sales to the Kremlin’s European critics.

Have you hugged a fracker today?

COMBINED FORCE ASSAULT: U.S., Japanese and Australian amphibious assault vehicles participate in a combined force assault exercise on Langhams Beach, Shoalwater Bay Training Area, Australia.

STRATEGYTALK: Examining Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan — the Ego Sultan. The podcast also discusses Turkey’s relationship with NATO and selling F-35s to Turkey.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN ANARCHIC SOMALIA: The Global War on Terror continues — because the terrorists’ war on everyone else continues.

JUMP AND SWIM: Army Reserve soldiers training at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, jump from a Blackhawk into Mott Lake and swim to shore. They are training for 2019’s Best Warrior Competition.

AFTER THE SQUAD’S FRACAS WITH TRUMP, ILHAN OMAR’S CURIOUS CASE SUDDENLY RECEIVES A DRUDGE REPORT LINK: Powerline’s Scott Johnson continues his series of posts on Rep. Ilhan Omar’s strange (possibly bigamous) marriage, likely fraudulent tax filings and other troubling shenanigans. In his post today he notes that The Drudge Report has now linked to a June 23 page-one Minneapolis Star Tribune article that “provides mainstream validation to points” Powerline’s been making for three years. The Strib reporters attempt to soft peddle Omar’s situation, but do admit “Omar declined to make her tax and immigration records available for this report.” Hmmm. Well, Trump has raised her profile. Will she now receive the scrutiny she deserves?

PRIME WARTHOG: Corrosion control technicians apply primer to an A-10 Thunderbolt II. Photo taken July 2, 2019, at Hill Air Force Base, Utah.

FLYING OLD GLORY IN THE TASMAN SEA: The guided missile destroyer USS Campbell flies the U.S. flag as it trails the Royal Australian Navy’s HMAS Canberra and the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan. Look to the left and you’ll see the conning tower of the nuclear attack submarine USS Key West. The sub’s running on the surface. The ships are participating in exercise Talisman Sabre 2019.

PREPARING TO LAUNCH IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN: On the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt sailors prepare to launch an F/A-18E Super Hornet.

HONG KONG DEMONSTRATIONS INTENTIONALLY INVOKE TIANANMEN SQUARE MASSACRE:

Despite drastic efforts to literally erase the event’s historical reality, for three decades, Tiananmen’s dark “tiger” has haunted the regime, seeding distrust of regime motives and encouraging quiet resistance to the party dictators.

The Politburo knows it’s distrusted. It spends massive amounts of money attempting to control information (e.g. digitally erasing internet mention of Tiananmen) and police Chinese citizens. Its Social Credit Rating system collects data on a particular person from cellphones, public video cameras, internet activity, travel logs and the opinion of neighbors. Security operatives analyze the individual’s behavior, looking for criminal patterns or — get ready — signs of anti-government behavior.

Hong Kong’s citizens reject Beijing’s “socialist system.” That’s why they’re demonstrating in the streets.

APACHE ON A GERMAN PAD: An AH-64 Apache attack helicopter undergoes routine maintenance at Katterbach Army Airfield in Ansbach, Germany.

SOMEWHERE IN THE CORAL SEA: A USMC amphibious assault vehicle enters the well deck of the USS Green Bay.