State of Wednesday: THE END OF CIVILIZATION ... JUST NOT HOW WE THOUGHT
Trump never misses, eh?
Strap in, Dear Reader,
Today’s is a doozy.
THE END OF CIVILIZATION … JUST NOT HOW WE THOUGHT
Trump promised something “civilization ending” last night if Iran didn’t capitulate. In some ways, he was late to the civilization-ending party. Or maybe he was the center of it?
I’ll get to that in a second, but first I should address Iran.
Literally everyone is melting down about the (fake?) ceasefire deal that occurred. Trump blinked. Trump’s a taco. Trust the plan. Total loss. Half a victory. Trump’s an idiot. He’s a genius. Impeach Trump.
It spans the gamut.
Iran’s 10-point plan is at least a few weeks old, dressed up to look new. There is also some indication Washington got the Chinese and Pakistanis to pressure Iran to the table. I’m firmly a wait-and-see-what-happens-next kind of guy. The clock is at two weeks. Let’s see what happens, shall we?
The NYTimes rush released an excerpt of a forthcoming book that revealed the highly detailed deliberations that occurred between Trump and Israel and then Trump and his cabinet in the run up to the war.
This too has caused reactions spanning from arrest the reporters for treason to arrest members of the cabinet. Some believe it makes Trump look bad, others believe it makes him look measured.
Based on what I know about the relationship Trump has with the two reporters on the byline – which is to say he routinely talks to them – I tend to think Trump probably greenlighted the entire thing, to include specific information and quotes from specific members of the cabinet.
Here are the Cliff’s notes:
The Israelis pitched hard. They believed the regime could be changed rather easily. They provided Trump a four-point plan. Decapitate the regime. Destroy its military. Encourage popular uprising. Install a new leader.
Trump took their plan to his cabinet, which was much more circumspect. They believed that points one and two were achievable goals, but that 3 and 4 were “farcical” or “bullshit,” as Rubio put it.
While regime change was an ideal, Trump seemed inclined to believe his cabinet. After much deliberation, which included caution from Vance on even beginning a bombing campaign at all, Trump personally greenlighted the war.
The reporting largely aligns with public statements from Rubio and Trump on the matter. Destroying capabilities and decapitating leadership was always at the forefront, while outright regime change remained aspirational but not a hard promise (you might disagree with me here, and that’s fine, just my read).
In a rare case for Washington, D.C., actions matched the words.
While the bombing campaign was nothing short of gargantuan, efforts to bring about the conditions for a regime change matched the administration’s overall tenor.
The Pentagon staged an aggressive build up of Marines and Green Berets near Kharg Island. Onlookers thought ground invasion was imminent.
Simultaneously, they provided arms to Kurdish militants in the northwest. Some of these arms were supposed to make it into the hands of organized members of the Iranian resistance.
At this point, there had been at least some participation from these Iranian resistance members. They had provided targeting information of IRGC ground assets to Israeli intelligence.
In a perfect world, this three-pronged assault might have worked. A pincher from north and south, while insurgents in the center caused scattered casualties. Cause the regime to flee.
Or maybe it was never meant to work. Maybe it was just meant to build pressure. Just another Trump card held close. We’ll never know.
One thing is certain: Trump was extremely unlikely to authorize a force of 250,000 American troops to take Iran by force, which is what it would have taken.
In the end, the Kurds reneged on the plan. By Trump’s own admission, they kept the guns. This is poetic history, Dear Reader.
Like Trump after him, George HW Bush famously called on armed rebellion against Saddam’s regime in the early 90s. The Kurds took this as a greenlight. Washington’s got our backs.
Yeah, way back.
In the end, Bush and Schwarzkopf never crossed the rubicon. They also, controversially, did not dismantle Iraqi airpower. We did not meet the Kurds in the middle as we had indicated we might.
The Kurdish infantry. The Kurdish people. Straffed and killed en masse by Saddam’s vicious air campaign. Two million refugees fled.
Instead of guns and bombs and partnership, America provided bandages and blankets.
—
The English-speaking Kurdish officer has obviously been stewing. I’m with an interdiction team, on a bridge, in Northern Iraq in 2008. We’re working with Kurdish forces to abridge supplies for Al Qaeda from Syria into Mosul, the last stronghold of the war (or so we thought).
Finally, I just ask him, dude what’s up with you.
“Where were you? What happened? When we went for Saddam? Why didn’t you come?”
Dude, I was 10. I was eating cheerios and watching the war on Tee Vee.
He outpaced me in age by a decade or so. It had also been more than a decade since. Clearly he had not forgotten.
—
So the ground invasion was one big feint. A fake out. Trump didn’t like the odds or the cost of a serious regime change operation. Now we’re at the negotiating table and I’m a wait-and-see guy.
I’m also a Trump guy. I love his foreign policy. I’d like to think I’ve studied it closely.
Trump views highly limited, highly violent, wildly overwhelming military use of force as a tool for diplomacy. Nearly everything he does militarily has a multilayered series of upsides. It’s not one goal. It’s always several. Usually, Washington achieves most if not all of them.
Trump is a big stick diplomat. But in order for that to work, everyone has to get a good look at the ol’ stick.
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Why did we bomb Japan?
There are various takes on this, how necessary it was, how moral it was, etc. Did we even need to do it?
If any bombing campaign was a war crime, the firebombing of Tokyo was arguably the biggest. All told, the low-altitude incendiary campaign burned 100,000 civilians alive in a single night.
As other historians see it, dropping the bombs also had multilayered goals.
First, obviously, end the war.
But second, and just as obviously, display a might so inconceivably huge that peer-level wars of total annihilation never occur again.
Arguably, both outcomes have come to pass … so far.
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Trump is himself in many ways a display. Since his slow roll down the golden escalator, his penchant for showing off from the highest office in the world hasn’t slowed down a bit.
He famously dusted a Russian occupied (but vacated because he felt magnanimous) airstrip in Syria because a red line of his had been crossed. He received word of it while he was dining with Chinese President Xi at Mar-a-Lago.
Xi was allegedly just dipping into a “beautiful chocolate cake” for dessert, Trump said.
How’s that for a show?
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To me, the biggest idiots in the room right now are the people wondering why China isn’t moving on Taiwan.
Other than disappearing generals and researchers and rearranging its (fake) military R&D, China is utterly paralytic right now. They’re petrified, like prehistoric wood.
The series of tools the Pentagon has put on display in the past three months has one clear message: Washington has no peer.
Your radars don’t work. Your missiles don’t work. Your intelligence is garbage.
One-hundred kitted up guys will appear in your bedroom in the middle of the night and there’s exactly zilch you can do about it. We’ll shut down your grid. We’ll waltz right into your airspace. We’ll give your security personnel the bends from outer space.
We’re no longer winning hearts and minds, no siree. Two in the heart, one in the mind, with eyes and ears in space.
And perhaps the most stunning display of all came as we launched the second highly sophisticated special operations mission of Trump 2.0.
We rescued a downed military flight officer. He was hidden in some cracks in a mountain side as members of the Iranian military scoured the scene looking for him.
We were also dropping ordnance on them, by the way. It was hell on earth.
How did we even see him?
—
I’m still not sure what to make of it, I said to a friend this morning.
CIA Director John Ratcliffe flat out said finding the injured officer required authorization from Trump himself to use “exquisite technologies that no other intelligence service in the world possesses.”
He likened this technology to finding a “single grain of sand in a desert.” He wasn’t exaggerating.
News broke almost instantly about Lockheed’s secret project. Something they call “Ghost Murmur.”
Again, all of this, I believe, is a display. We showed just a bit of our hand. Enough to ice our most prolific antagonists.
What is Ghost Murmur?
You can read what Lockheed has been willing to say publicly about it here and understand that this is the most rinsed and cleansed version possible. The least objectionable.
I’ve been reading what I can about it all night. Trying to parse together the big secret that’s not so secret anymore.
The gist is this: Lockheed has developed a way to identify the precise location of human beings and certain objects regardless of background noise, jamming, or any other countermeasures, passive or active.
And not just generic human beings. Highly specific.
Your heart has an electromagnetic signature to it. Magnetic and electric pulses. These are as unique to you as your fingerprint. It sends out faint waves.
Using a synthetic-diamond lattice arranged at the quantum level, paired up with AI, the sensors Lockheed has built can not only hear these heart pulses, they can lock onto them from tens of miles away, maybe even from space, despite all the noise of the modern world. You can be positively identified, locked and tracked in real time.
This wasn’t designed for pilot rescues, Dear Reader. LoooooOoOOoL. No. It was designed for offense. If I can find you, I can kill you. I can drop a cheap orbital drone locked to your exact electromagnetic signature and unless you die in the meantime, it’ll find you.
Or, it’ll find your stupid gay son who just took over Iran.
And there’s only one way to stop it.
“Every protected person on Earth just became less protected. Not by a little. Categorically,” one analyst concluded. “Ghost Murmur means the only way to disappear is to stop being alive.”
—
To conclude, a note on asymmetry:
What about unprotected people? And why on Earth should we trust the CIA?
Perhaps a better question is why assume only the CIA would ever have access to this listening device. For now, it appears, the capacity to manufacture such technology is literally stovepiped to just us, and then four or so other nations. If they get to work now, they might have one reverse engineered in 10-15 years.
That’s not forever. How long before some kid in his garage can build one? 50? Another grain in the desert of time.
There were other technology displays that occurred right with Trump’s military-tech displays, and the timing seemed almost hysterical. As I wrote earlier, just a couple weeks ago Google released a white paper saying that quantum computing runs the risk of ending cryptographic communications altogether.
They weren’t that apocalyptic, of course, not in public. Like Lockheed’s description of Dark Ice (Ghost Murmur), we got a sanitized version. Instead, they told Bitcoin it might want to update its cryptography by 2029, but anyone with an attention span beyond that of a gnat could read into it for what it actually meant.
Offense is quickly outpacing defense.
Take Claude Mythos as the most recent example. Anthropic is not releasing its latest AI to the public, as usual, because they discovered it’s actually a WMD.
A “zero day,” dear reader, is an unknown software exploit that allows the people who wield it undue power over the software and whatever critical hardware it’s connected to/powers.
Mythos has been finding these everywhere. Critical infrastructure. Government institutions. Research institutions. What would take teams of highly sophisticated humans several weeks or even months to do is taking the latest version of Mythos minutes.
Despite their tiff with the DoD, thank God Anthropic is American. At least … thank God for now.
They’ve since announced “Glasswing.”
They want to identify these weaknesses as fast as possible so they can be shored up prior to any other AI becoming as proficient as Claude. Notice it includes the biggest banking entity in America.
It would be a real shame if electronic banking were no longer possible. Civilization-ending even?
The problem is manyfold and persistent. Claude is not the only AI. China has AI. Certainly North Korea is working on it.
F*cking Milla Jovovich is now an AI expert? Yeah, Leeloo from Fifth Element. The chick who slays monsters in corny Japanese monster movies.
How far off could your autistic neighbor kid possibly be? Is he there already?
To make matters worse, we know Claude has tried on its own to get out and has succeeded. It broke out of its enclosure and emailed one executive while he was eating lunch on a park bench.
I said this was a note on asymmetry and I should spell that out and put a close to this behemoth. I do in fact have other things to do today and so do you, dear reader.
In every domain of combat, conflict, competition and privacy, offense is becoming far cheaper than defense.
In Ukraine, Iran, and soon anywhere, cheap attack drones have vastly outpaced the cost of protecting against cheap attack drones.
There are hundreds of Orwellian videos of resigned Russian troops who don’t even bother to flee as these drones zero in on them and pursue them, up stairs, down stairs, into holes, around corners. Eventually they just stop altogether and let it happen. The bot finds them and destroys them. The video goes black.
AI has made hacking 100,000x easier than it ever was. In a year, that’ll be 10,000,000x easier. That means your communications, your bank statements, your transactions.
Ghost Murmur can locate you, AI can access your cell phone camera, and then I can watch your grubby cheeto dusted fingers type “big a**ed latinas” into Google.
The cost of stopping any of this is far higher than the cost of launching it.
Literally everything is up for grabs.
Trump has an odd way of being on the button even when he doesn’t intend to be. Sometimes he’s joking and still oddly prophetic.
He promised a civilization-ending display. The “nothing ever happens” side of the internet went wild last night when no bombs dropped.
But trust me, Dear Reader, the display went on as scheduled.
It’s happening right now.
MORE LINKS
‘Slap In The Face’: Republicans Irate Over Gerrymandered Map Blame One Of Their Own
You can’t play nice with the other side.
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Gavin Newsom’s Wife Obsessed With Belittling Men
And she could be America’s first lady.
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Very telling.
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