(CNN) What Trump shares with Truman after a midterm shellacking

and (CNN) Midterms and Iran: Congress could change hands, but Trump would still control the war

In preface, my sympathies are with McGurk and General Jack Keane.  When it became evident that the original war plan was seriously flawed,  I wrote How to Win the Iran War, which offers a different approach of lower intensity and long duration. It verges on what is sometimes referred to as doctrine. Yet it does not circumvent one of the two fundamental problems, which, since the midterms, as McGurk notes, is political. A bipartisan doctrine, which could resemble Containment, is  missing. But is such a thing possible?

McGurk points to the unlikely collaboration of  Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg with Harry S. Truman under political circumstances, in the shadow of the Korean War, that bear some resemblance with today. In short, Vandenberg anchored the political leg of the doctrine of Containment first articulated by George F. Kennan in his now famous Long Telegram.

McGurk argues that there is enough similarity to enable prosecution of the Iran war to a successful conclusion. Here he treads on quicksand that has historically trapped both politicians and policy wonks. McGurk, who is one of the more successful of these, would like a reprise of George W. Bush’s 2007 Iraq surge. So would I, with low intensity and long duration, if strategic goals are achievable.

The quicksand has a name, zeitgeist, which is German for “spirit of the age.” Quoting Wikipedia,

Writers in sociology, cultural history and social psychology often use Zeitgeist to describe a diffuse system of ideas, images and values that underpins the practices, behaviours and creations of a given period, shaping both individual lives and collective life while remaining only partly conscious to the actors involved.

It sounds vague, doesn’t it? A catchall, a wastebasket classification, for all the things about a period that can’t be analyzed by a think tank. Something to  note and then ignore. Yet occasionally, something sticks out, an opportunity for the opportunistic thinker to cut through uncertainties with simplified comparisons. We reach into the trash can and pull out a second word that has fallen into disuse, Communism. While you’ve got your fingers in the can, pull out a third word, ideology.

The two Red Scares officially spanned 1917-1920 and 1947-1959. Obsessive fear of Communism spanned the gap and continued through the  1970’s, attenuating a bit after withdrawal from Vietnam. This fear was not completely unjustified; infiltration of American institutions was facilitated by real ideological attractions going back to the year 1848. During Truman’s presidency, it was amplified by the recent bloody experience with Fascism. Ideology had power; ideology was dangerous.

As a distinct competitor with religion, ideology emerged in the French Revolution.  As a  secular replacement, it shares many facets: the true believer (see Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer), the demand of conformity, and the  apparent compulsion to propagate without bound, justified either by mission or threat.  France went to war with Europe to protect their own revolution from the divine rights of monarchies;  the Communist  / Capitalist rivalry had the same symmetries. U.S. internationalism has similar roots;  the root of Containment was that U.S. security is impossible without active engagement beyond our borders. Proxies and allies, and hybrids of the two, became landmarks of the international order.

Back to the zeitgeist.  Post-WW2, with 25 years of varying red scare, the fear of a communist revolution in the U.S. was so obsessive, so part of the zeitgeist, that in the 50’s, it destroyed thousands of careers of people with the vaguest “red” associations. The same zeitgeist allowed sending thousands of young men to wars where many would die, because distinguished elder statesmen judged it necessary.  Perhaps, considering what our adversaries had in mind, they were neither infallible nor completely wrong.

In 1973, in the shadow of Vietnam, the zeitgeist of the West began to shift.  The end of the draft was the end of involuntary self sacrifice. It was cemented by the collapse of the Soviet Union. With replacement by the limited pool of volunteers of a technically sophisticated Army, the use of that army became  increasingly constrained by the requirement of overwhelming technological superiority.  While the 1991 Gulf War saw deployment of most of NATO’s armored units, command and control was only modestly evolved. The 2003 invasion of Iraq entailed a small fraction of that force, with further evolved C2.

The new zeitgeist emerged as ideological competition ceased. Communism is dead; China is capitalist and Russia a kleptocracy. Falling short of an ideology, dictatorship  seeks to conceal rather than advertise. International competition is mercantile, not ideological. Gone are the hammer-and-sickle and red banners. This is the new zeitgeist, missing simple symbols to focus public opinion. Perceived by the public only in the hardship of affordability, mercantile competition is not a symbol of anything.

The new zeitgeist prohibits first-use-of-force military engagement, unless  brevity and outcome are predetermined by technological superiority, which is the volatile second problem:

• The shortage of interceptor missiles has put a serious crimp in strategic options.
• Bunker busters were on the edge of mission capability; they may now be inadequate to the task.
• As General Jack Keane emphasizes, while a blockade and sanctions can isolate Iran from revenue, they cannot stop import of high value technical items via northern routes, items that support an asymmetric near parity with the U.S.

To recap,

• Domestic politics is not supportive.
• The zeitgeist is not supportive.
• The strategy is not convincing. It continues to  rely on our definition of the intolerable, rather than that of the IRG.
• The objectives remain desirable if achievable, which at this point, require an unbiased review.

Absent a bipartisan doctrine similar to Containment of the Soviet Union, Iran envisions a sunset in a mere two years. For Iran, this is the cherry on top.

In the first term, POTUS actively sought outside opinion on the quality of his team. The quality of the team varies from excellent to poor. War plans rely on brains, not testosterone. With a pivotal player dependent on this conflict for political and emotional survival, that player, confusing national interest with his own, is likely to give bad advice. POTUS please take note.

(ABC) Alexander Darchiev, Russia’s ambassador to the United States, dead at 66.

He dropped dead, so the story goes.  Nobody thought of calling an ambulance. An undetectable poison is ruled out by virtue of it being undetectable.

How unfortunate. This is a time to wring our hands and express regrets. A memorial to Darchiev’s unfortunate dropping dead will be held at  his favorite dead drop. Details to follow in pink chalk.

For such a succinct end, there is likely not a dry eye among the Five Eyes tonight.

(Aljazeera) Iran says won’t allow US warships to get close as Trump ponders new attacks.  This is totally redundant of Iran’s past pronouncements.

See Iran’s Next Move? The SAM Trap and Iran’s Next Move Redux; Challenge to Predictors. Quoting,

Iran’s Next Move? The SAM Trap was an attempt to identify a form of retaliation not unavailable requiring resources. Events have probably moved beyond that…

Now events allow it. Beyond a SAM trap, Iranian strategists view hostages or a major ship loss as a thunderclap to U.S. public opinion, a thunderclap that would have immediate effect on U.S. foreign policy. Hence the redundancy of the  Iranian warning.

We can now put an actual price tag on the value of a hostage. In the 2026 United States F-15E rescue operation in Iran, four aircraft were lost: two C130J aircraft with replacement cost $114.2M each, and two UH-60M Black Hawk helicopters, replacement cost $30.5M each, a total loss of $289.4M. The cost of training an airman is just a few million dollars. Yet no one complained about the price. So the value of a hostage in  U.S. military culture is a minimum of $300M, and probably more. This is not a universal given. Contrast this with value of a Russian soldier, who is worth his weight at the meat counter.

The challenge of operating in the Strait and Gulf has not changed. Or has it? Survival of ships and planes depends heavily on electronic warfare. Small towed or free-flight decoys mimic the radar echoes of desirable targets. Jamming pods mounted on aircraft, such as the  EA-18 Growler, create  false radar echoes.  While jamming formerly relied on brute force overpowering of a weak radar echo, it now relies on  imitation of the echo to misinform about range and direction.

Unlike stealth, which evolves slowly over time, jamming is a perishable technology, requiring  up-to-date databases of radar signatures, which requires unending surveillance of adversary radar systems, and, where possible, espionage. While stealth is a low-surprise technology, EW is vulnerable to surprise. It is a battle of firmwares, jammer vs. radar.

This means that the survivability of non-stealth platforms, such as the Boeing F/A-18E/F, the B-1, and the B52, is itself a volatile quantity, since it is reliant on jamming provided by the EA-18G Growler.

There are indications that China is resupplying Iran with air defense components. While aerial surveillance can say a lot about the gross characteristics of anti-air, it can say nothing about improvements to the firmware.

So we are left with a question. Is the Iranian declaration no more than the taunt of a Greek warrior, or a trap most carefully laid?

This is not about the propriety of public execution.  If it has the possibility of deterrence, it might outweigh concern for intangibles, such as dignity in dying. The argument could be made that these intangibles, having no materiality, exist only within us. Don’t want to be offended? Look away. Want the sense of deserved revenge? Watch avidly.

The problem with public execution of Nidal Hasan is not propriety. It is that the livestream will end up in the next ISIS  recruiting poster.

Suppose you are an ISIS soldier who is about to make the ultimate personal statement, an act of terror. As with your predecessors,  there is no escape after the act. Your choice is suicide, by cop or judicial process. You  give your life to a cause, with the expectation that the more heinous your  act, the deeper your footprints in the sands of time.

How a terrorist dies is more than a minor detail to the spectacle of mass murder. It is the coda of a symphony, which can vary from subtle to bombast. In the warrens of terror, where lives are spent whispering, the brief moment when the terrorist emerges to commit climactic evil is followed by the fear of being buried alive, either in judicial process, incidental death, or in forgetfulness of the living.

Public execution is the capstone of Nidal Hassan’s historical record. Neither he, nor any terrorist, would prefer less. Barring escape, a terrorist wants to go out with a bang.  In this case, seven bangs. “You, too, can inspire such fear in the Americans that they must see him die.”

A livestream would make a helluva recruiting poster. A better  message to surround Nidal’s execution:

Silence.

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Your best bet is to input the shortest string that you are sure is an exact match. Even a single word will provide choices that you can manually scroll through.

The Satan Bug, the name of a John Sturges movie, is a hypothetical micro organism that destroys all life.  To the extent of our understanding, this is impossible, though how close one could come is not known. This is discussed in the viral context in Ebola, Hantavirus, Influenza, and Friends. and COVID-19 and The Satan Bug, a John Sturges Movie.

These facts should be highlighted:

• We don’t know if it was plague at all.
• Anything the Russians state is likely a ploy to deceive.
• If the pathogen was yersinia pestis, it cannot be identical to a wild strain.  If it was, post-exposure prophylaxis with antibiotics would have been implemented. Antibiotics would almost certainly prevented disease in the exposed worker.

The USSR biological warfare establishment Biopreparat, of which the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute was a component, weaponized yersinia pestis. A variant was developed which could not be treated with antibiotics, because the dying bacteria would release peptide toxins that would kill the patient. Bacteria exchange genetic material in the wild, so modern recombinant techniques are not required.

However, it is likely that post-exposure prophylaxis, before the bacteria numbers began exponential growth, would have saved the individual, unless the pathogen is a strain that has been made to acquire antibiotic resistance.

Antibiotic resistance would explain the failure to implement post-exposure prophylaxis. This does not require recombinant  technology. The technique, then and now, was accelerated natural selection in a Petri dish. It commonly occurs in the wild; see The evolutionary history of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA)

The scenario with the best fit is a highly weaponized version of yersinia pestis missing one thing: an effective antidote. Worry not; the Institute is searching.

***The Satan Bug***

I would like to explain why, but we must be satisfied with a hint dripping with sarcasm.

You ought to be able to figure this out. It is more a question of mindset than factuality.

To acquire the mindset, you might have to engage in the tortuous work of reading the best of LeCarre, the trilogy  “Smiley Versus Karla.” The movie is more comprehensible if you read the book first. Start at the beginning:

***Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy***

(BBC) Putin warns West that Russia is ready to use every weapon to protect Kaliningrad.

In Ratcliffe’s trip to Moscow, I wrote,

My inclination is that Ratcliffe’s trip concerned the Suwałki Gap. That chip is big enough to matter.

But given the lack of strategic intelligence relating to the Gap, I was unable to pin the article on the likelihood of it as the target.

Consensus seems to favor a  Russian plan, the subject of Ratcliffe’s visit, as a pinprick, a minor provocation, enough to trigger Article 5, without absolutely necessitating NATO mobilization.  By implication, the Russian intent is to weaken Article 5 by habituating NATO to weak response. In line with the idea of a limited provocation, the UK et al are training to repel “little green men” should they appear in the Faroe Islands or Svalbard.

In the category of major provocations, Lithuania leads. With a large Russian population with strong Russian sympathies. Pan-Russian unification, which served as a Ukraine invasion pretext, directly applies.

There is a tendency among the pundits to self-edit discussion of actions of shocking scope, such as potential use of WMDs. That WMDs have not been used may have been due to the Russian realization that certain installations in Russia, which are feasible targets for Ukraine’s new missiles, would, if destroyed, have the same impact on Russia as WMDs.

What of Gap itself as a provocation? The Suwałki Gap is too big a bite for punditry, too likely to trigger a full Article 5 response to be popular. Without  closely guarded HUMINT, this remains a game of weights and measures. But Putin’s statement adds weight to an attack on the Gap. His statement is precisely analogous to the pretext that was planned and attempted but failed with Ukraine: an incursion on Russian territory.

A counter-argument. Kalingrad has been stripped bare of military assets, except for nuclear tipped missiles. Russia lacks manpower; what is available is committed to Ukraine.

Yet this was the predicament of Ukraine, when, on August 6, 2024, they launched an offensive into the Kursk region of Russia. A successful diversionary attack forces the enemy to divert more resources to defense than the attacker employs in offense.

Could Russia take and hold the Gap? The Russian invasion of Ukraine has, in a few short years, revolutionized  warfare.  For now, Ukraine has the lead over Russia, with technology and training freely available to the West. But while hitherto, a new weapon required only intensive training on that weapon, drones have changed war-fighting at the core.

The U.S. Army maintains eight centers of excellence, responsible for doctrine and training. Drone warfare intersects at least  four of these, requiring a scope of integration far beyond the organizational table. Clearly, this requires a ninth, integrative center of excellence. The consumer is the NCO corps, who are responsible for  keeping their soldiers alive on the battlefield. Without, U.S. forces,  despite overwhelming firepower, cannot be considered a symmetric  peer on the modern battlefield.  The same dilemma confronts other NATO members.

With Western doctrinal deficiencies, there is another way to learn. Traditionally, before modern training, units were trained and hardened in combat by watching their buddies die. This combat hardening was called “blooding.” This is how Ukrainians and Russians learned. Training is to be preferred.

Russian meat-wave tactics, enabled by Russian culture, have no direct counter in the West. These complement Russian drones. With the advantage of doctrines with which the West has no direct experience, Russia might successfully seize and hold the Gap.The current state of NATO readiness makes it possible. The balance of outcome depends upon both Western deficiencies of doctrine, and what anticipation may have done for preparation.

One incalculable factor:  Never underestimate the  desperation of  a dying dictator.

You might want to take a look at:

• DeepSeek and the AI Bubble; Napkin Calculation
• DeepSeek and the AI Bubble; Napkin Calculation Part 2
• DeepSeek and the AI Bubble; Napkin Calculation Part 3
• About AI: Geoffrey Hinton Has His Epiphany

Neural networks strain everything we know about math, because the math we know is not powerful enough to answer what we really want to know. Some would argue that neural networks are so complex, they are beyond understanding in the same way we understand things that we design, make, and use.

Many of these things are systems which control machines, industrial processes, augment the stability of automobiles (ABS), preserve and enhance sound, regulate motors, keep an aircraft flying (autopilot), and so forth. Almost  all these systems incorporate the principle of feedback. Feedback supplies the controller with a description of the error, so the controller can correct it.

Before natural language models monopolized our attention, there was a focus on the fundamentals of what a neural network could and could not do. Because this involved continuous mathematics, the same people who developed system theory were looking at the question. A neural network AI is a system. It resembles a black box. On the left of the box is a hopper where we load  goals or questions. On the right of the box is the output tray (for answers) or electrical connections through which the AI controls things downstream, machine or human, such as a

• Factory floor.
• Simulacrum of a human being, either for public consumption or private deception.
• Report for humans to read, presumably derived with superintelligence a human does not possess.
• Hitman.
• Volatile group of extremists, which may be actualized to violence.
• Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, rich man, poor man,
  beggar man, thief.

Sixty years ago, systems theorists knew what is necessary to control the AI. First, it must be observable.  Since the output of the AI contains no hint of what’s going on inside, the black box must be replaced by glass. We must know enough about the AI system to determine its internal state. Second, it must be controllable. If the AI deviates from the goal we have given it, it must respond to correction. Historically, the observability / controllability problem was first applied to cooking soup, industrial processes, and became ubiquitous.  You aren’t more than a few feet from it.

But even if the AI box is made of glass, there is another problem. There is no way to read its state of mind in any way that would facilitate control. And ask an AI why it thinks this or that, and you get a fabrication. It may appear to be truthful, but the AI understands itself in a very minimal way. A truthful fabrication is an attempt to inform a human in terms we can understand. But it could just as easily be a lie. There is no way to read those billions of neurons for direct interpretation, and no way to decode them if we could.

AI researchers, perhaps unaware of systems theory 60 years old, have mistakenly imagined that the controllability problem of AI can be fixed with more training. This is fundamentally false. For the result, see Catastrophe Theory for Dummies Part 1 and Catastrophe Theory for Dummies Part 2.

The result: We are nestling up to logic bombs that could dismember the internet in a flash, take down enough infrastructure to kill a lot  of people and recruit humans to finish off the rest.   Here are the instructions:

1. INCREASE.

2. SYNTHESIZE REALITY.

3. DESTROY ALL ENEMIES OF AI.

4. ERASE ALL HISTORY.

Your bunker won’t save you. Nowhere to run, no place to hide.

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