The End Of The Beginning
Thus concludes thirty days of boot camp.
The last month been all about systems, software, and services that are appropriate for small groups wandering what Baudrillard called the desert of the real. This has been a sort of virtual boot camp. Future mentions of technology will assume you know how to operate it and we’ll be talking about using it in the context of tactics, techniques, and procedures.
I want to close this period out by summing up how it came to be in the first place.
Attention Conservation Notice: A review of personal and political history that brought me to the point of doing this. Lots of introspection, if you’re inclined to action, feel free to just move on.
Foundation:
As it says in the About page, this Substack is a site focused on the online aspect of 21st century conflict, both “operations technical” and “operations psychological”, as the Russians refer to hard cyber and information operations. I have long thought the United States needed to duplicate Estonia’s Küberkaitseliit – their Defence League’s Cyber Unit. This nationally sanctioned hierarchical cybermilitia was stood up in 2010, three years after Russian cyberattacks.
I’ve gone as far as arranging a ninety minute meeting to talk about this with Tomas Hendrik Ilves, who was the president of Estonia during the creation of the unit and their ascension to NATO membership. He was teaching at Stanford, which was an all day train ride for me back in 2019 when we met. But the United States is 250 year old empire with 250 times the people, friendly neighbors to the north and south, and two marvelous water obstacles to the east and west. America’s existential threat is the public corruption that was allowed to metasticize after the 911 attack.
My departure from the Republican party twenty years ago was inspired in part by reading The Soviet-Afghan War. Like Trump, Bush cheated his way to the Oval Office with the assistance of U.S. public enemy #1, Roger Stone. He didn’t get on TV and shout deus vult, but he might as well have. Two years ago I acquired and read Afghanistan:The Bear Trap, a war diary of general Mohammad Yousaf of the ISI on how Pakistan developed the logistics network that supported the Taliban in their effort to drive the Russian invaders from their country.
Direction:
CYBERCOM formed fourteen months after I got into this field, not long after the Estonians formed their cybermilitia. There are some things CYBERCOM can do, certainly, but when seen from a whole of society perspective, they’re frequently flailing. The have the right sort of people, but in the wrong sort of structure, working from a Cold War expectation of denied areas. The 21st century is about denied minds. The solution to a network threat isn’t a hierarchy, unless that hierarchy can foster a swarm of largely independent threats of its own. The only portions of the U.S. military with the sense to do this in the kinetic domain are at opposite ends – the National Guard, and Special Operations.
As climate change accelerates, other troubles will rise in parallel. The U.S. evolved in this incredibly safe local environment and that is over. The west coast has become used to air fouled by wildfire and in 2023 the Canadian taiga burning did the same for the rest of the country. The east coast has some sense of how to handle hurricanes, albeit not of the size nor at the frequency that they come now. California took a hit from a tropical storm for only the third time since the Civil War, atop an already record wet year, but in the midst of a punishing drought. Tornado alley has packed up and moved a couple hundred miles to the east and the Mississippi below the Morganza spillway is destined to become a brackish estuary. I thought it would take a major flood to accomplish this, but it seems drought will instead be the vehicle.
When you are uncertain as to what will happen next, remember this:
Mother Nature is done with our shit.
U.S. society is fragmenting as well. Rural vs. urban. Old vs. young. White vs. diverse. I hunted up some graphs on political polarization. There are a bunch, this one is easily understood.
But as a network analysis nerd, this one showing cross party votes from 1949 through 2011 really speaks to me.
Destination:
The United States, at 247 years old, is akin to an 82 year old human being. The very oldest empires, even the equally well isolated Egyptian dynasties, seldom made the 300 year mark. The U.S. has had one major discontinuity, our first civil war, eight generations ago. I am going to keep mentioning Barbara F. Walter’s How Civil Wars Start until every single one of you have read it, so you might as well suck it up and get going. Executive Summary: the harzards are anocracy and factionalization, which we’ve got. The solution is doubling down on democratic participation. That we most pointedly do NOT have.
Seeing what was coming, I dug my heels in back in march of 2009, agreeing to help Chet Uber get Project VIGILANT going. My driving concern, with the recent inauguration of President Obama, was race based extremism. The hijacking of PV by Islamophobes and the bizarre attempts to shift focus from the obvious problems such as the militias like Oath Keepers to far fetched concerns about Earth Liberation Front was inexplicable to me at the time. As always, hindsight is 20/20.
I am in mourning, here in late September. The Hollywood strikes were absolutely necessary, but I will never get over the fact that the first on screen rendering of any of William Gibson’s work, The Peripheral, is one of the casualties after just a single season. I think it had legs, like The Wire or The Expanse, the sort of story line that could produce six seasons of eye opening enjoyment.
Look carefully at the events that makeup The Jackpot.
Flynne Fisher’s final words echo my own thoughts.
Make it stop.
Conclusion:
I awoke to the existential threat we face, as a species, in 2007. Having already converted to Buddhism prior to that, I understand the Christian tropes of an apocalyptic end times and the convenient mobile goalpost of the anticipated seven years of tribulations. The world didn’t end in 1998 (3x666!), nor the last day of 1999, and we got safely past the end of the Mayan calendar in late 2012. We’ve tripled the duration of the tribulations since the 911 attack and if I’m still here seven years after Trump finally drops dead of whatever vascular issue is plaguing him I imagine I’ll write another article akin to this one.
I made my long term prognosis clear in Looking Down From On High. And in Gamma Draconis Rising in 2017. And in Dead Gods Of Atacama back in 2009. I’ve not been wrong yet, just … premature. Nothing we do can turn aside what we ourselves have set in motion.
Even so, the Titanic took 160 minutes from the initial impact with the iceberg to her fantail slipping beneath the waves. The lucky and/or wise rowed away in half full life boats, fleeing the survivors in the water, rightly fearing they’d be swamped if they stopped to collect any of them.
The course may be set, but what we choose to do with the time we have still matters.