Bleeding Edge

Cyberwar, cybersecurity, and cyber sabotage, are very much in our mind, and on our plate today, as North Korean ICBMs with nuclear heads target most of the major US cities according to intelligence. Of course we all know that the Korean missiles are the tip of the arrow of the Chinese Military, that provide plausible deniability to our adversary and commercial ally — People’s Republic of China.

And this is what I remembered when I thought back on Thomas Jefferson, who had been away as ambassador to France, for three years right after the American Revolution, and who when he came back home, asked: “What did I miss?”

In the New Year, we all have a “What it is that I missed moment” because stuff & shit, happens all the time, all around in the world, and we keep learning and thinking about that, and about what is right and what is wrong, and what has been left out of the Mass Media News stories, that we best get to know soonest.

Because we all know that it is our responsibility to be educated and it’s always up to us to keep abreast of the News and the Intelligence that needs to be read behind the News. And if you do that in earnest, you get ti know the stories because even though you might have missed important stories and events, that continued to develop as we were traveling around the World on a Lecture tour — things unfolded as I had predicted about the important events of this year, like the first cyberwar that our enemies brought against the United States and won since they caused all the guidance and navigation systems of our Naval Fleet and the Air Force and our Missile Command, to fail. They demonstrated that Victory quite well, when they caused our navy vessels to crash onto each other, and onto random commercial traffic, with tragic loss of life and other terrific consequences that placed our dominance on the High Seas in question and doubt.

So of course, we lost that cyberwar, quoting an anonymous US government official to whom I had spoken in the waning months of the past year 2017 that saw the exploits of the Chinese hackers into our satellite GPS systems being successful. Of course, in the months since the navy ships collisions, the scope of that cyberwar has become even more apparent, as has now all of the imagined scenarios we used to prepare. Our nightmares have turned out to be true, but also to be the tools that mislead us terribly and throw us off target.

Mainly because we thought that cyberwar, would involve hacking into our terrestrial systems, denial-of-service attacks, manipulating data, or perhaps taking down the power grid, telecommunications, water supply, nuclear plants, or banking systems, and we missed that it would be a war directly targeting the human guidance element that results from the GPS system that is rotating above the Earth’s atmosphere.

It was that GPS system that was hacked and purposefully failed us. And in turn this failure destroyed the trust of the navy navigators, the pilots of said ships, and our gunboats, same as our Air force pilots, and our missile guidance operators — onto the same system that is vital for anything that we need to do and that involves telemetry and telematics.

In this version of cyber warfare it is indeed, we, not only our machines, that were hacked, because on the US Navy we have several layers of observation and command for the vessels to follow a certain course, and they all failed massively as the various collisions proved. The machines were simply the vector by which it was done, but the human assets failed like a series of dominoes as well.

The satellite GPS algorithms were not modified by the Chinese and their North Korean brotherhood of malicious hackers, but the GPS satellites’ positioning ability was. And so was the trust that these satellites had earlier given to the navy navigators, and the captains, and pilots and now all their coordinates are suspect, and our faith on the system has been badly shaken. The Chinese hackers unleashed imaginary bots, that masqueraded as phantom shipping traffic, and at the same time masked the real vessels sailing and operating nearby, and thus caused our vessels to maneuver onto the oncoming traffic, and cause catastrophic mid-sea collisions.

Now, we could effectively compare the current state of algorithmic big data satellite hacking systems, the physical take over of satellite communication systems, by one of our enemies, and the requisite Artificial Intelligence required to accomplish this, with our wish for Technological Superiority, forgetting that sometimes we need less Tech, not more. As a matter of fact, we need less tech that goes badly awry, and we need more human intelligence to fall back on. We need now more paper maps and charts to compensate for the digital ones that get hacked and become the “Trojan horse” and the onboard enemy saboteur.

And in all of my North Korea Nuclear Threat talks, since the Naval “accidents” and the various Navy vessel Mid-sea “Collisions,” I’ve also used that image of our overt reliance on High-Tech that can be our downfall, since it perfectly sums up, and encapsulates the state of Cyberwar against our enemies, but also against those friends who are now trying to come to grips with the monsters that this cyberwar has unleashed, and they want more technology, instead of more disruptive technology and old fashioned Human Tech to rely upon.

This image also perfectly captures what we should be afraid of AI, not that it will get a mind of its own, but that it won’t and will continue its relentless pursuit of our ill-considered wishes, whose consequences we don’t understand.

And this, is what we must fear the most, because we must also consider the abuse of AI by those in military power, and in positions of authority, like the Admirals that have close contacts with the military industrial complex that always pushes for more fancy weapons systems that cannot operate on the disrupted battlefields of tomorrow that has suddenly arrived. This cyberwar pushed the food off of our plate, because too few people understand, let alone worry what foreign powers will do with the abundant AI that can hack into our satellite systems and our terrestrial radars, and guidance and navigational systems onboard our vessels and our flying assets, missiles, and airplanes, as well as rockets of all kinds…

And we also have to think about the fragility of the whole of our satellite fleet, and our other celestial assets, even more than what we worry about the naval fleet, or the missile, and gunboat fleet, that are guided by them.

At least after many decades of government’s complacency in Space, we finally have a SPACE COUNCIL that was inaugurated by President Trump, and that is the trenchant light that we need to shine on the Heavens Up Above too.

Now, I make the case that we don’t need to look to a far future of hacking enemy’s AI in order to see a runaway objective function with the unintended consequences of their algorithms.

That’s my call to all of you thinking, like me, about what we’ve learned in the past year, and what we must resolve to do going forward.

Most important is to give up on fatalism, and the idea that technology is going to make our our military and our world a safer place to be, and that the future we hand on to our children and grandchildren will be better than the one we were born into.

Let’s get busy making a better world, and a safer world by re-learnig the ancient skills of the Mariners that were able to navigate accurately by the stars and the landmarks using a magnetic compass and an astrolabe. Because if we cannot have these capacities now — we will eternally beholden to a technology that can be hacked at will by our enemies as they demonstrated and that will push our missiles and our airplanes and vessels astray and thus make our greatest military assets obsolete.

Yet, I am optimistic not because the road ahead is easy but because it is hard.

And this is my faith in humanity, and the American exceptional Spirit of Innovation and Enterprise coupled with that unique Spirit of Liberty.

And it is that we can rise up when the circumstances demand it, to meet the great challenges ahead of us.
Because it is a high moral imperative to do so. It is not a choice, not intelligence, nor creativity, that is our greatest asset — but this sense of a Christian Moral Imperative to safeguard and save Western Greco-Roman Christian Civilization.

Please keep that in mind because things will surely get much worse before they start turning around and begin to be getting better.

But we can choose Life, and Decency, and to Fight for our Democratic Republic, because this is the only way for us to lift each other up, to build a war machine that is not fully reliant on electronic tools that an EMP ICBM could render completely useless in a few seconds, and to create a resilient all inclusive economy where people’s well being and basic needs matter far more than luxuriant High-Tech toys that are easily broken.

Surely, we can dream big dreams and solve big problems, but we don’t need an electronic donkey substitute when we can have a platoon of real donkeys, mules, and horses, for far less money than the cost of a single Boston Dynamics built fake mule.

Capice?

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

So instead of using technology to replace people, and beings, we should use it to augment the living assets, so they can do things that were previously impossible.

After all the most important Capital in every war is always the Human Capital and the power of Intelligence to subvert, subterfuge, and sink, the enemy’s morale, their psychology, and their will to fight, along with all of their military plans – long before the war has even started.

And that is what Ulysses taught us from that long ago famous and utterly successful Trojan war of the cunning Man winning against the brutal strength of the barbarians…

After all, according to Homer, Ulysseus’ heroic trait is his cunning intellect, his intelligence, and his Stratagems that have elevated him high enough, to be considered as a “Peer of Zeus” in Counsel, in Strategy, and in Military Genius & Vision.

So now, we only have the use of our natural Human Intelligence in order to thwart our Enemy’s plans so we best get cracking.

And until such time that our Satellite technology gets “hardened” and improved to that stage where we can reliably outfox and outwit our opponents — we need to go low tech and disruptive tech to be able to stem the tides of Nuclear War and Total Catastrophe, and replace them with a conventional show of force in the Skies Up above…

A showstopper for our enemies is what we need to produce now urgently…

And that is what we are busy building as we speak.