How America’s Critical Infrastructure Became Our Greatest Vulnerability
A White Paper on Asymmetric Warfare and the Illusion of Security, by a board game enthusiast with an unhealthy obsession with civil infrastructure
Executive Summary (How I Learned to Fear the Cyber Bomb)
I’m going to do this the same way I’d brief generals, or The Office of the National Cyber Director at the White House: BLUF, baby.
I went to The White House last week to talk about cybersecurity, because I think we’re fucking up. Big time. (I also happen to part of the GABRL team that is a small but strategic part of fixing this massive fuckup. That’s the end of the product plugs.)
The United States has spent nearly a trillion dollars annually building the world’s most sophisticated military machine, only to leave the entire foundation of our warfighting capability, our civilian infrastructure, about as useless as a fishnet condom.
The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t need to match our carrier strike groups or our stealth bombers. They just need to turn off our water, crash our power grid, and post some spicy memes on TikTok convincing Americans that supporting Taiwan isn’t worth the inconvenience of not being able to order DoorDash. And honestly? They’re probably right about our attention span.
This paper examines how our “arsenal of democracy,” the industrial and technological infrastructure that has underwritten American power since World War II, has become a catastrophic single point of failure. Spoiler alert: It’s bad. Really bad. Like, Dallas Cowboys defense bad.
Why This Matters (And Why China Isn’t Us)
Before we go further, let’s establish something critical: China isn’t America. This seems obvious, but it’s a point that gets lost in policy discussions with alarming frequency. The Chinese Communist Party doesn’t think like us, doesn’t operate like us, and critically, doesn’t share our assumptions about how warfare should be conducted.
We think about war in terms of battlefield dominance, air superiority, and blue-water navy operations. We think about rules of engagement, proportional response, and international norms. We build weapons systems designed to win wars that look like the wars we’ve already fought, just with better technology.
China thinks about war as an extension of politics by other means, which, yes, is quite literally Clausewitz, but they actually mean it. (As a Hearts of Iron IV player, which is underpinned by the Clausewitz Engine, this makes me both good at video games, and thinking about grand strategy.) China thinks in terms of comprehensive national power, strategic patience, and the Three Warfares doctrine: psychological warfare, media warfare, and legal warfare. They don’t care about fighting fair. They care about winning. And winning doesn’t necessarily mean defeating the U.S. military in combat. It means making American power projection irrelevant or politically impossible.
This matters because American strategic planning often suffers from what I’ll call “mirror imaging.” We operate under the assumption that adversaries will behave rationally according to our definition of rational. We assume China will try to match our military capabilities because that’s what we would do. We assume they’ll respect certain boundaries because we would. We assume they’ll fight the kind of war we’re prepared to win. We want wars to look friendly on our terms, so thought leaders at major defense primes write lofty white papers about the importance of expeditionary command and control, huge blue water systems, and… all of it is expensive.
I’m here to tell you something that you probably haven’t considered about China, and their ability to match our kinetic, logistical, and operational capabilities.
They won’t. They’re not going to try.
They’re going to fight their war, not ours. And their war looks like systematic infiltration of civilian infrastructure, cognitive warfare campaigns on social media, and leveraging the very openness and interconnectedness of American society against us. They’re going to target the foundations of American power—not our military, but the industrial and social infrastructure that makes our military relevant.
This paper is written for defense, intelligence, and cybersecurity professionals who understand the technical details but might benefit from an outside perspective on strategic vulnerabilities. It’s also for policymakers who need to understand why the conventional wisdom about deterrence and military superiority might not apply in an era where your adversary can wage war through fiber optic cables and social media algorithms.
The central argument is straightforward: We’ve built an extraordinarily capable military on top of extraordinarily vulnerable civilian infrastructure, and we’ve done so while facing an adversary who has studied our system, identified its weaknesses, and is actively exploiting them. The fact that this adversary doesn’t share our cultural assumptions about warfare makes the threat more acute, not less.
Introduction: Geography Is Destiny… Until It Isn’t
Let’s start with a history lesson that won’t put you to sleep. For most of American history, we’ve had a superpower that had nothing to do with our military: We’re really far away from everyone who wants to kill us. The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans have been the world’s greatest moats, making it extraordinarily difficult for anyone to project force against the continental United States. Sure, Hawaii and our Pacific territories are vulnerable (islands gonna island) — but the mainland? That’s been fortress America.
This geographic blessing shaped our entire strategic doctrine. During World War II, while Europe became a charnel house and the Pacific burned, American factories hummed along, churning out tanks, planes, and ships faster than the Axis powers could sink them. We became the “arsenal of democracy” not because we were inherently better at making stuff, but because nobody could bomb our factories.
You know what the problem is with paradigm shifts? They’re super awkward when you don’t know they’re happening. Somewhere between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the invention of TikTok, warfare fundamentally changed. The moats don’t matter anymore when the invasion happens through fiber optic cables.
Lessons from Strategic Bombing: Finding the Fulcrum
Let’s talk about how we used to win wars, because it’s remarkably instructive for how we’re about to lose one.
During World War II, the United States and Britain conducted one of history’s most sustained strategic bombing campaigns against Germany. The goal wasn’t just to blow stuff up for fun (though I’m sure that was a perk) — it was to identify and destroy the critical nodes that kept the German war machine running.
Turns out, even a massive industrial economy has leverage points. Germany’s war production depended on ball bearings — you know, those little metal spheres that make basically everything mechanical work. We bombed the hell out of their ball bearing factories in Schweinfurt. We also targeted their synthetic oil production facilities, because Panzers and Me-109’s don’t run on vibes and enthusiasm.
Additionally, we worked to cut off Germany’s access to petroleum from the Middle East. No oil means no fuel means no Blitzkrieg means you’re learning Russian real quick.
What the lesson here? Modern warfare isn’t about destroying everything. It’s about finding the fulcrums. The critical dependencies. The things that, when removed, cause cascading failure across entire systems.
Now, pop quiz boys and girls: What are America’s fulcrums in 2025?
Data Is the New Oil (And Our Pipeline Is Made of Swiss Cheese)
You’ve heard this cliché before: “Data is the new oil.” Usually, it’s said by some consultant trying to sell you a SaaS platform. But in the context of modern warfare, it’s not just a metaphor. It’s uncomfortably literal.
Oil powered the industrial warfare of the 20th century. Data and digital infrastructure power the warfare of the 21st. Every smart weapon system, every logistics network, every command and control system… they all depend on data flowing through secure networks at the speed of light.
The U.S. military has strategic reserves. In theory, we can sustain ourselves for a period of time with our own logistics, producing food, water, shelter, and other essentials. But here’s the uncomfortable reality: Our defense industrial base is overwhelmingly dependent on civilian infrastructure. One hand washes the other, both wash the face. (Jadakiss – Kiss of Death, 2004)
Your fancy stealth fighter? Built in a factory that depends on commercial power grids. Your precision-guided munitions? Manufactured in facilities that need water and internet to function. Your military satellite network? Controlled from ground stations that use the same fiber optic infrastructure as Netflix.
We’ve built the world’s most sophisticated military on top of civilian infrastructure that has roughly the security posture of a unlocked Honda Civic, parked in Oakland, with the keys in the ignition, and a note on the windshield that says “Be right back, please leave it running.”
The Call Is Coming from Inside the House
Let’s talk about what we know. Chinese state-sponsored actors have successfully infiltrated American critical infrastructure. We know this isn’t hypothetical because we’ve caught them. The Littleton utility in Massachusetts got compromised, a story that made it onto 60 Minutes, which means it was bad enough that even your boomer parents might have heard about it.
But here’s the terrifying part: We have no idea how extensive this infiltration actually is. How many water treatment plants? How many power substations? How many municipal networks have Chinese state actors already burrowed into, waiting dormant like cyber-sleeper cells?
The ones we’ve found are… just the ones we’ve found. It’s like seeing a cockroach in your kitchen at 2 AM. If you only have one cockroach in your kitche, no it’s not. That’s not your only cockroach. That’s just the overconfident one. That’s the cockroach that came out to mock you for having the audacity to leave your Chipotle in the foil on the counter. You lazy ass. Throw it away, or put it in the fridge. Otherwise, you’re telling the cockroaches to take their chances.
And before you ask: No, we can’t just “scan everything and remove them.” These networks are vast, disconnected, and often built with security as an afterthought. It’s not that we’re incompetent… well, pause. Okay, we’re a little incompetent. But it’s mainly that securing legacy infrastructure is like trying to retrofit seatbelts into an early 1900s Model T. Even if you have the seatbelt installed, it’s not going to save you from the lack of crumple zones, and the fact that many parts of the car are made from literal wood.
Why China Doesn’t Need to Beat Us. They Just To Annoy Us to Death
Let’s put ourselves in Beijing’s shoes for a moment. You’re a Chinese military planner, and you’re looking at the United States military. What do you see?
You see carrier strike groups worth more than your country’s entire annual military budget. You see an Air Force that could achieve air superiority over any nation on Earth within 72 hours. You see a logistics network that can deliver a physical Burger King restaurant, anywhere on the planet, in 36 hours. You see a military that spends more on air conditioning in Afghanistan than your entire navy’s operational budget.
Now, here’s your strategic problem: You cannot match this. Full stop. It’s not just financially untenable (though it absolutely is) — it’s also industrially impossible. China simply doesn’t have the industrial capability to produce comparable high-end weapons systems at scale. Sure, they can make cheap drones by the millions, but they can’t make F-35s.
So what do you do? You don’t fight America’s war. You fight your war.
You make American power projection impossible by attacking the industrial base that enables it. You make the American population unwilling to support war by making their daily lives miserable. You turn American society’s greatest strength, its comfortable, connected, consumer-driven lifestyle, into a strategic vulnerability.
The Taiwan Scenario: A Choose Your Own Dystopian Adventure Novel
Let’s game this out. It’s 2027. The Dallas Cowboys still haven’t won a Super Bowl. My mother-in-law still has no idea how to program her Roku. Things are basically the same as they are today. China decides it’s go time for Taiwan. Maybe they’ve developed drone swarms that can overwhelm traditional naval defenses. Maybe they’ve got new anti-ship missiles that make the Taiwan Strait a no-go zone for carriers. Maybe they’ve just done the math and decided the window is closing.
The United States, being a loyal ally, decides to intervene. We mobilize our Pacific Fleet. We start surging forces to the region. And then… the lights go out. Not everywhere. Just enough lights.
Power grids across the West Coast start experiencing “technical difficulties.” Water treatment plants in major cities shut down due to “cyber incidents.” Internet service becomes sporadic. And suddenly, Boeing and Lockheed Martin can’t manufacture replacement parts because their supply chains are offline. My old boss Chris Bogdan was the former PEO for Lockheed F-35, and I remember him telling me that Lockheed was an integrator. I forget the number exactly, but only like 35% of the parts on an F-35 are made by Lockheed Martin. Translation? 65% of their supply chain comes from smaller, more vulnerable third parties.
Meanwhile, Americans are freaking out. Not because they deeply understand the geopolitical implications of Taiwan. Shit no. Most Americans couldn’t find Taiwan on a map if you gave them three tries. They’re freaking out because they can’t flush their toilets, they can’t charge their phones, and they definitely can’t order Thai food at midnight from DoorDash.
And here’s where the cognitive warfare kicks in. Social media, already a cesspool of disinformation, gets flooded with coordinated messaging: “If America wasn’t involved in Taiwan, we’d have our infrastructure back.” “Is defending Taiwan worth not having clean water?” “Your government cares more about some island you’ve never heard of than your family’s safety.”
Americans Are Fickle. And That’s Not an Insult. It’s Strategic Reality.
Here’s a simple, annoying truth that makes defense planners uncomfortable: Americans have not been asked to make personal sacrifices for a foreign ally in over three generations. The last time the average American citizen had to materially sacrifice for war was World War II. Korea happened, Vietnam happened, Iraq and Afghanistan happened, but none of those conflicts required civilians to ration food or deal with systematic infrastructure disruption.
We have no cultural memory of collective sacrifice for geopolitical objectives. We do, however, have a very strong cultural expectation that modern amenities should work 100% of the time. You know how annoyed you get when your WiFi stops working when you’re taking a shit? How are you going to watch car build videos on YouTube? What kind of third world country are we living in here?
Okay, imagine a scenario where that happened for weeks on end.
Turn off Americans’ water and power, and we freak out. This isn’t a moral judgment, it’s entirely logical. If I can’t stare at my phone and doom-scroll through TikTok, if I can’t order anything I want from Amazon at a moment’s notice, if I can’t access immediate entertainment and gratification, I genuinely don’t know what to do with my life.
Yes, I’m aware this makes us sound pathetic. Yes, I’m aware our grandparents would be ashamed. But that doesn’t make it less true. Today’s luxuries are tomorrow’s necessities, and we’ve built a society completely dependent on infrastructure that we’ve left essentially undefended.
A sophisticated combination of cyber warfare and cognitive warfare could absolutely break American political will. And it wouldn’t even take that long. Three weeks without internet? Americans would trade Taiwan for a functioning WiFi router and feel good about it. We’re the worst kind of ally to have, because we will fold at the most minor inconvenience.
IT and OT: The Systems We Can’t Live Without and Can’t Defend
Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) systems are the central nervous system of modern civilization. IT is your traditional computer networks; the stuff that runs your email and makes Zoom calls occasionally work. OT is the industrial control systems that run power plants, water treatment facilities, manufacturing lines, and basically everything that keeps society from devolving into a Mad Max hellscape.
Here’s the problem: Most of these systems were designed when “cybersecurity” meant changing your password once a month. They’re running on legacy hardware with legacy software, often connected to the internet because someone thought that would be “convenient” without thinking through whether convenience and critical infrastructure should maybe never be in the same sentence.
We need control of these systems to fight wars. If we can’t manufacture replacement parts, if we can’t move materiel through ports, if we can’t power our military installations, then we can’t fight. It’s that simple. The most sophisticated weapon system in the world is just an expensive paperweight if the supply chain that supports it collapses.
And before you say “But the military has its own systems!” … Yes, they do. And those military systems interface with civilian systems constantly. You can’t wall off the Department of Defense from civilian infrastructure without fundamentally breaking how the modern economy and military function. We’re all in the same swimming pool, and someone just took a dump in the deep end. There’s two options here: It’s a floater, or it’s liquid. Neither is good. I’m not going to argue over the semantics of “what is the consistency of shit in the swimming pool” — because it’s shit in the swimming pool. I’m getting out of the pool. I’m draining the pool. I’m bleaching the walls of the pool until my skin falls off.
The problem here, is that there are people who will honestly tell you, with a straight face, that there is an acceptable level of shit in a swimming pool. They’ll draw complex distance equations, cordially explaining how shit in one end of a swimming pool doesn’t pose a risk to these specific command and control systems, etc.
These people are fucking morons.
The Human Element. Why We Can’t Just Fix This with Better Firewalls?
Now we get to the really morbid part. Even if we had perfect cybersecurity, which we don’t and never will, there’s still the physical human element to consider.
The people who control our IT and OT systems are still people. They live in houses. They drive cars. They have daily routines. And critically, they often advertise exactly who they are and what they do on professional networking sites like LinkedIn. Oh joy. I sure hope there is no adversary who would be motivated to map those relationships. (Horror music begins playing.) “I said, I sure hope no adversary would map who these critical people are. It’d be a terrible thing if something happened to them.” — as the echoes of that statement reveberate through the halls of an empty high school, and a door slams in the distance, booming down the hallway.
Let’s be very direct about the threat model: The Chinese government has the capability to bring Chinese nationals into the United States on tourist and student visas. No matter how thorough our background checks are, and let’s be honest, they’re not that thorough, some of these individuals could be hostile actors.
Here’s a scenario that should keep security professionals up at night: A coordinated action where armed Chinese assets, in a single day, target key personnel at critical infrastructure nodes. Not kill them necessarily, just hold them hostage, gain physical access to their credentials and computers, and compromise systems directly.
This is disturbingly feasible. The ease of access to firearms in the United States means that any Chinese asset could obtain weapons at a gun show without a background check. They could identify targets through open-source intelligence, LinkedIn profiles that helpfully announce “Senior SCADA Engineer at Almost All of Idaho Power Grid” or “Lead Cybersecurity Architect at Most of Atlanta Water and Waste Processing.”
They could show up at someone’s house at 6 AM with a gun and a simple proposition: “Give me access to your systems and you live. Refuse and you don’t.” Most people, understandably, would choose to live. Unless they’re Dallas Cowboys fans, in which case they might just choose death, because most of us have contemplated if it’s still worth it on a Sunday afternoon.
This isn’t science fiction. This is basic threat modeling. If I’m a Chinese war planner and I want maximum impact with minimum resources, I combine cyber attacks with physical coercion. I hit systems remotely where possible and use physical assets where necessary. And I do it all in a 24-hour window before anyone can effectively respond.
The AWS US-EAST-1 Incident: A Preview of Coming Attractions
Remember when AWS US-EAST-1 had a DNS outage and huge swaths of the American tech sector just… stopped working? That was accidental. A configuration error. Whoops. My bad. Unplug it and then plug it back in.
Now imagine that wasn’t an accident. Imagine it was coordinated, simultaneous, and designed for maximum disruption.
Data centers across the United States, in Virginia, Ohio, California, Texas, are poorly defended civilian targets. They’re not military installations. They don’t have armed guards and surface-to-air missiles. They’re buildings in office parks with a guy named Steve who checks IDs at the front desk. Steve breaks for lunch at 12:30 every day and goes to Jersey Mike’s.
If I bump into Steve at Jersey Mike’s and snatch his access card, I’m in the building doing whatever I want with a 30 minute head start, because Steve is going to sit down and eat his sandwich. He’s going to be watching a YouTube video about how to replace the radiator on his Ford truck when a network outage impacting 30 million people begins.
My point is, these data centers? They’re softer than baby thighs. Softer than socks straight out of the plastic bag. Softer than Drake’s lyrics.
When Cyber Warfare Gets Bored and Gets Kinetic (Spoiler: They Can Also Make Things Explode)
Let’s add kinetic effects to this nightmare scenario. Physical destruction of data centers would almost certainly collapse the IT infrastructure of the United States. We’re talking about facilities that host critical services for everything from financial systems to emergency services.
Assets from the Chinese Communist Party could, with advance planning, execute physical attacks on these facilities. We’ve seen what can be accomplished with rudimentary explosive devices. The Oklahoma City Federal Building bombing demonstrated that homemade explosives can cause massive destruction.
The same types of kinetic effects could be obtained by hostile foreign adversaries. The materials are available. The targets are poorly defended. The planning could be done years in advance, with assets pre-positioned and waiting for a go signal.
And here’s the really fun part: The U.S. military is not prepared for this. Why? Because defending civilian infrastructure from coordinated physical attacks isn’t the Pentagon’s job. It’s technically the Department of Homeland Security’s job. And as someone who has worked as a federal contractor for both DoD and DHS, I can tell you that the level of coordination between these organizations is somewhere between “poor” and “do these people know the other department exists?”
Organizational Dysfunction: A Love Story Between DHS and DoD
The missions of the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security are seen as fundamentally different. DoD focuses on external threats, expeditionary warfare, power projection abroad. DHS focuses on domestic security, border protection, and trying to make the TSA seem like a competent organization. (Good luck with that.)
This organizational separation made sense in a world where threats stayed in their lanes. But modern threats don’t respect org charts. A cyber attack on civilian infrastructure that cripples military logistics is simultaneously a DHS problem and a DoD problem. But whose problem is it really? Who’s in charge? Who coordinates the response?
If I could observe this dysfunction at a topical level as a contractor, you can be damn sure the Chinese Communist Party has done detailed analysis on it. They understand that our interagency communication is poor, our lines of authority are unclear, and our response to coordinated attacks across civilian and military infrastructure would be confused at best and chaotic at worst.
This is a feature of our system, not a bug. It’s the cost of bureaucratic separation and democratic oversight. But it’s also a massive vulnerability that a determined adversary can exploit.
The Asymmetric Cost Equation: How to Break America on a Budget
Let’s talk about money, because the cost asymmetry here is actually hilarious in the darkest possible way.
The United States spends nearly a trillion dollars annually on defense. Add in the Department of Homeland Security’s $250 billion budget, and we’re spending more on security than the GDP of most countries.
And yet, our homeland security infrastructure is poorly defended from an IT perspective, an OT perspective, a physical/kinetic perspective, and an operational perspective.
Meanwhile, with a budget that’s probably in the millions, maybe tens of millions at most, the Chinese Communist Party could likely cripple most U.S. civilian infrastructure. The cost-benefit ratio is absurdly in favor of the attacker.
This is the ultimate asymmetric warfare scenario. We spend a trillion dollars building tanks and planes. They spend a fraction of that planting malware and pre-positioning assets. When the balloon goes up, our trillion-dollar military grinds to a halt because the civilian infrastructure it depends on is offline, and we’re left wondering how we didn’t see this coming.
Space: The Final Frontier (Of Our Stupidity)
Let’s talk about satellites, because this is where things go from “concerning” to “are you kidding me with this shit?”
U.S. satellite infrastructure is predicated upon civilian control mechanisms. Ground stations, the facilities that actually control these satellites, often rely on civilian telecommunications infrastructure. Yes, military satellites have laser cross-links and other fancy technology, but at some point, a human being on the ground needs to send commands, and those commands travel through networks.
The security infrastructure of our satellites is something we could quite easily lose access to if the ground control systems are compromised. Imagine losing command and control of GPS satellites, communication satellites, reconnaissance satellites, all because someone got into a ground station network.
(Billy Mays impression voice.) But wait, there’s more! Commercial satellite imagery is now so good that foreign adversaries have a high-definition view of every single asset in the United States that might need to be targeted. This was civilian infrastructure, created by U.S. civilian companies, that foreign adversaries can use against us in a military situation.
I find this hilarious and ironic and kind of scary all at once. It’s insane that we created tools that our adversaries can use against us, and no one can really explain why we thought this was a good idea. It’s like buying your wife’s boyfriend an expensive sports car. Expensive sports cars are cool, but not for your wife’s boyfriend. Also, we should talk about the whole, “My wife has a boyfriend problem” too.
The Dallas Cowboys Defense: A Perfect Metaphor
Speaking of things that look good on paper but fail spectacularly in practice, let’s talk about the Dallas Cowboys.
It is objectively true that Dak Prescott has been having a great season. The Dallas Cowboys offense is statistically putting up better numbers than any other offense in the NFL. They’re exciting to watch. They score points. They make highlight reels.
They also have the worst defense in the NFL. They’re allowing the most rushing yards and the most passing yards of any team. They have the best offense and the worst defense simultaneously, which means they lose games they should win because you can’t just outscore problems forever.
This is America’s national security posture in a nutshell. We have the most powerful offense in the world. We can project force anywhere, anytime. But our defense? Our actual homeland defense? Our ability to protect the infrastructure that enables that offense? That’s the Cowboys secondary getting torched by a backup quarterback for 400 yards.
Conclusion: Asymmetric Thinking for Asymmetric Threats
Look, I’m just a person with no military background who played too much Axis and Allies and Hearts of Iron IV, and has a bizarre obsession with civil infrastructure. I’m not a general. I’m not a spymaster. I’m just someone who obsesses about things like nuclear reactor deployment and energy independence and thinks about worst-case scenarios for fun.
But here’s what I know: If I were a Chinese war planner, I wouldn’t try to beat the United States in a traditional war. That would be stupid. I would fight asymmetrically. I would target the foundations of American power, the civilian infrastructure that enables military operations and the comfortable lifestyle that makes Americans willing to support those operations.
I would use cyber warfare to compromise critical systems. I would use cognitive warfare to break political will. I would pre-position physical assets to execute kinetic attacks on key infrastructure nodes. And I would time it all for when America needed to project power across the Pacific, making intervention in Taiwan operationally impossible and politically untenable.
The uncomfortable truth is that this strategy would probably work. Not because America is weak, but because we’ve spent decades optimizing for the wrong threat model. We’ve built an extraordinary machine for winning wars in the Middle East while leaving the home front essentially undefended against peer adversaries willing to fight outside the rules we’ve optimized for.
We need to think asymmetrically about defense because our adversaries are thinking asymmetrically about offense. That means hardening civilian infrastructure, improving interagency coordination, treating cybersecurity as a first-order national security priority, and accepting that the nature of warfare has fundamentally changed in ways that make our geographic advantages obsolete.
Or we can keep doing what we’re doing, which is spending a trillion dollars a year on a military that depends on civilian infrastructure we’re leaving undefended, and hope that nobody notices the glaring vulnerability. That seems to be the current plan.
Final Thoughts
To the defense, intelligence, and cybersecurity professionals reading this: I know you’re professionals in this environment. I know you’ve dedicated your careers to keeping America safe. I know this probably reads like an outsider who doesn’t understand the complexities of what you do.
But sometimes outsiders see things that insiders miss precisely because they’re not embedded in the system. Sometimes a perspective from someone who obsesses about Hearts of Iron IV and grand strategy can illuminate vulnerabilities that are hidden in plain sight.
The point of this paper isn’t to criticize. It’s to illuminate. It’s to get people thinking about how an adversary would think about defeating us, not in the ways we’re prepared for, but in the ways we’re not. Not to put too fine a point on this, but it’s not like our COIN (counter insurgency, for non DoD folks) strategy worked in Afghanistan and Iraq. We know that our military sucks at executing anything other than expeditionary conflict. We know that we can’t bomb people back to the stone age when they’re already basically living in the stone age.
So why are we allowing the greed of defense contractors to lead us into wars we won’t fight? Because it’s profitable for them to build multi-billion dollar weapons systems that don’t fit the actual fight? No offense, but fuck their stock prices for a second, and let’s do what needs to be done. The mission matters, not the stock price.
We have to put ourselves in the shoes of our adversaries and plan accordingly. Not to beat the United States in a typical war the way we think about warfare, but to fight in an entirely asymmetrical way.
That’s how we should be planning our defense and national security posture. Because if we don’t, someone else will plan how to exploit the fact that we didn’t. And when that happens, all the carrier strike groups and stealth bombers in the world won’t matter if the people back home can’t flush their toilets and decide that defending democracy isn’t worth the inconvenience.
Thank you for reading. Now please, for the love of all that is holy, go check your firewall configurations and maybe put a guard on your water treatment plant.