Will > Books: military-and-intelligence-non-fic‎ (87)

On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the
Oakland air base agreed to see her. Eying her credentials once more, he

On Sunday February 18, [1945] the lieutenant in charge of Navy press at the
Oakland air base agreed to see her. Eying her credentials once more, he handed them back.
“And just where was it you wanted to go,” he asked.
She had been rehearsing her response ever since her credentials first arrived in the mail.
“As far forward as you’ll let me,” she replied.
“Be here at 0600, tomorrow,” he said.

…good intentions have rarely paved such a direct route to hell.

She slept in Bedouin tents in the Algerian desert, and in the foxholes she dug herself in the hills overlooking Beirut. She rode in picket boats between battleships off the coast of Iwo Jima and flew in a nuclear-armed jet stationed on an aircraft carrier in the Aegean sea. On New Year’s Eve 1958, she patrolled the Soviet border with the Turkish infantry. On New Year’s Day 1959, she photographed Fidel Castro’s army as they entered Havana. She jumped out of planes over America, the Dominican Republic, South Korea, Laos, and Vietnam. She heard bullets flying over her head in Asia, North America, Europe, and Africa, and knew that they all sounded the same.

I side with prisoners against guards, enlisted men against officers, weakness against power.
—Dickey Chapelle

Lorissa Rinehart writes about art, war, and their points of intersection.
Her writing has recently appeared in Hyperallergic, Perfect Strangers, and Narratively, among other publications…When not writing she can be found photographing the natural world impinging upon the urban landscape or digging in the dirt with her husband and two sons in Santa Barbara, California. She holds an MA from NYU in Experimental Humanities and a BA in Literature from UC Santa Cruz.

There is only one way out of this. The only way out of this outcome is that the November midterms are the final referendum on whether America truly st

There is only one way out of this. The only way out of this outcome is that the November midterms are the final referendum on whether America truly stays America and a democracy or if it becomes a fascist dictatorship. If the Democrats lose the House and the Senate, then it is all over. There may never be another free and fair election in America. If the Republicans take control, we may be teetering on the edge of an American dictatorship. - from The Guardian interview

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call "The Twilight Zone." - One of several introductions used for the show

By Election Day 2020, the Trump-dominated Republican Party solidified itself for what it perceived was a battle to change the soul of America permanently. Trump’s financial backers saw endless opportunity for tax cuts and limitless, tax-free profits. The stock market saw a president who would ruin nearly a century of regulation and allow them unimaginable capital gains that they could pass on to their children without paying taxes. The party investors saw a middle and lower class that would pay for virtually everything Republicans wanted and divest from virtually every social program liberals wanted. In their eyes, the average American would see none of the profits of America but literally pay for the wealth and prosperity of the richest of the rich. In fact, Trump and his lieutenants managed to do precisely that in his first four years. By the end of his administration, money allocated for education, childcare, and mental health would pay for mega yachts. In Trump’s America, executive jet purchases were tax free.

TITUS is a pre-rebellion political-paramilitary alliance that intends to use politics, instability, and violence to meet its goals. The number one goal is reestablishing the Trump dynasty as the primary operating system for America. Then they will use the power of the government to punish their enemies. The political wing of TITUS, the Trump-dominated Republican Party, has already initiated a dangerous plan to embrace the launch of protracted political warfare in America.

Discussing the impeachment of President Trump on Meet the Press, Representative Jason Crow, a Democrat from Colorado, said most members of the GOP are “paralyzed with fear.” He continued: “I had a lot of conversations with my Republican colleagues. . . . A couple of them broke down in tears . . . saying that they are afraid for their lives if they vote for this impeachment.

Violent extremists in the United States and terrorists in the Middle East have remarkably similar pathways to radicalization. Both are motivated by devotion to a charismatic leader, are successful at smashing political norms, and are promised a future racially homogeneous paradise. Modern American terrorists are much more akin to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) than they are to the old Ku Klux Klan. Though they take offense at that comparison, the similarities are quite remarkable. Most American extremists are not professional terrorists on par with their international counterparts. They lack operational proficiency and weapons. But they do not lack in ruthlessness, targets, or ideology. However, the overwhelming number of white nationalist extremists operate as lone wolves. Like McVeigh in the 1990s and others from the 1980s, they hope their acts will motivate the masses to follow in their footsteps.

…several Republican legislatures including in Florida, Oklahoma, and Missouri have made the murder of protesters by running them over in a vehicle legal.

As the head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Colonel-general A.V. Kartopolov remarked on Apri

As the head of the Main Operational Directorate of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, Colonel-general A.V. Kartopolov remarked on April 15, 2015, “if in the past war was 80 percent combat operations, and propaganda was 20 percent, then in wars today 90 percent of activities consist of information warfare.”

Russia’s information warfare is sustained and unceasing, and, therefore, so should be our defenses.

Moscow’s attempts to sow popular distrust in governance would not stop after the elections, which are only one event, but would continue after the elections when Russia may attempt to exploit socially divisive themes that could increase suspicion in democratic institutions. And drive communities further apart.

…this book analyzes under what conditions, in what contexts, and in what combinations with other nonmilitary and military measures Russia has employed certain types of cyber operations. In particular, this book explores what conditions have been associated with the employment of various types of Russian state-sponsored cyber operations against political IT infrastructure of NATO countries and invited members.

If we had paid more attention to Russian military doctrine, we could have been better prepared for what happened in 2016. [in Russia’s attack on the USA election] - from the JSOU presentation

Information warfare is applied through strategic media messaging disseminated through all media channels that reach the population of the targeted country. The aggressive party uses information technologies to engage public institutions in the targeted country, such as mass media, religions institutions, NGOs, cultural institutions, and public movements receiving foreign financing. To further help the demoralization of the population and ensure chaos, the adversary targets the disillusioned population and infiltrates these groups with provocateurs. Disinformation, or deliberate falsification of events, can also be considered among the principal information warfare components.

Denounced by the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs,  Dr. Bilyana Lilly  managed projects on ransomware, cyber threat intelligence,  AI,  disinformation, and information warfare. She was a cyber expert for the RAND Corporation and has spoken at DefCon,  CyCon, the Executive Women's Forum and the Warsaw Security Forum. Dr. Lilly is the author of over a dozen peer-reviewed publications and has been cited in the Wall Street Journal,  Foreign Policy  and ZDNet.

Although progress is being made to reduce the pervasive cyber vulnerabilities of U.S. critical infrastructure, the unfortunate reality is that, for at least the next decade, the offensive cyber capabilities of our most capable adversaries are likely to far exceed the United States’ ability to defend key critical infrastructures. The U.S. military itself has a deep and extensive dependence on information technology as well, creating a massive attack surface.

In 2020, after trillions of dollars in military expenditures and multiple wars, a virus originating in a Chinese “wet market” would inflict even mo

In 2020, after trillions of dollars in military expenditures and multiple wars, a virus originating in a Chinese “wet market” would inflict even more economic and human damage. Overcoming the most lethal threats of the twenty-first century—at least those threats that pose the greatest risk to the health and well-being of the average citizen—will require staying the itchy trigger finger of militarized statecraft. Ultimately, achieving true security will require embracing a broader “whole of government” and “whole of nation” set of tools that reflect the full strength of America.

My work in the defense and intelligence space spans more than three decades, and I am vexed by the fact that policies designed to protect America are actually making us less safe. I call this “insanity defense”: doing the same thing again and again and expecting it to enhance our security.

As far as Addington was concerned, when Article II said that “the executive Power shall be vested in a President,” well, that was the end of it—all power, not some power or whatever power Congress provided or allowed. The concept of the “unitary executive,” once an obscure theory at the right fringe of legal thinking, would become the operating manual for the Bush presidency when it came to security policy. I called this a “bloodless coup”—a dramatic power shift in government that occurred almost entirely out of view at the time. Addington was always courtly and polite with me personally. But when it came to any role for Congress, his answer was always a very firm no.

The greater Obama’s frustration with recalcitrant Republican majorities—first the Tea Party–dominated House, then the Mitch McConnell–led Senate—the more he would exercise executive action on a range of issues.

I look at what went wrong—and could go right again—through the lens of my own experience: how political moderates became first hunted and then an endangered species, caught in the crossfire between the far left and the far right. The punishment for bipartisanship became harsh and immediate. The business model shifted from working together to solve urgent problems facing the country to blaming the other side for not solving the urgent problems.

One of many mysteries about Cheney is how someone who had risen to House minority whip while a congressman from Wyoming could become so contemptuous of the institution he once helped lead.

One of the least known yet most consequential documents filed immediately after 9/11 was a memorandum of notification to Congress, commonly referred to as a “finding,” which announced that the CIA would be conducting operations that would not be acknowledged. At the time, this notification, submitted on September 17, 2001, seemed pro forma; we all took it as a given that aggressive covert activity would—indeed, must—be part of our response to the horrific attacks. Yet this same finding would cover the CIA black sites, enhanced interrogations, and targeted killings abroad for nearly two decades.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who worked in Lyndon Johnson’s White House and closely studied many presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, said, “I

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, who worked in Lyndon Johnson’s White House and closely studied many presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, said, “I have spent my entire career with presidents and there is nothing like this other than the 1850s, when events led inevitably to the Civil War.

Here’s the deal, guys: These guys are Nazis, they’re boogaloo boys, they’re Proud Boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II,” Milley told them. “Everyone in this room, whether you’re a cop, whether you’re a soldier, we’re going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power. We’re going to put a ring of steel around this city and the Nazis aren’t getting in.”

Trump’s rash and retaliatory dismissal of [Acting DNI Joseph] Maguire would compel retired Admiral William McRaven, who oversaw the Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama bin Laden, to write: “As Americans, we should be frightened—deeply afraid for the future of the nation. When good men and women can’t speak the truth, when facts are inconvenient, when integrity and character no longer matter, when presidential ego and self-preservation are more important than national security—then there is nothing left to stop the triumph of evil.“

Esper, Milley, and Barr—were tracking intelligence and social media chatter for any signs of unrest on Election Day. They and their deputies at the Pentagon, Justice Department, and FBI were monitoring the possibility of protests breaking out among supporters on both sides. The trio also were on guard for the possibility that Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act in some way to quell protests or to perpetuate his power by somehow intervening in the election. This scenario weighed heavily on Esper and Milley because they controlled the military and had sworn an oath to the Constitution. Their duty was to protect a free and fair election and to prevent the military from being used for political purposes of any kind.

“A student of history, Milley saw Trump as the classic authoritarian leader with nothing to lose. He described to aides that he kept having this stomach-churning feeling that some of the worrisome early stages of twentieth-century fascism in Germany were replaying in twenty-first-century America. He saw parallels between Trump’s rhetoric of election fraud and Adolf Hitler’s insistence to his followers at the Nuremberg rallies that he was both a victim and their savior.
“This is a Reichstag moment,” Milley told aides. “The gospel of the Führer.”

In the Bible, the apocalypse is not the final battle between good and evil—that is Armageddon, a word derived from an ancient military stronghold o

In the Bible, the apocalypse is not the final battle between good and evil—that is Armageddon, a word derived from an ancient military stronghold on a trade route linking Egypt and the Middle East. An apocalypse is a revelation—literally an uncovering—about the future that is meant to provide hope in a time of uncertainty and fear.

The title is The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age. To be clear, apocalypse refers to the threat of nuclear war, not to the site itself.

I’ve been getting ready to write this book pretty much my whole life. I grew up in the 1960s in Othello, Washington, a small town in the south-central part of the state just over a ridgeline from a mysterious government facility called Hanford. We knew that Hanford was involved in the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Some people in town knew that it manufactured a substance called plutonium. But it was the Cold War. It was best not to ask too many questions. In 1984 I visited Hanford to write a story for Science 84 magazine, and by the end of the trip, I had decided to write a book about the place. Thirty-six years later, the book is done. - from the NASW interview

”I knew that the effort would be expensive, that it might seriously interfere with other war work. But the overriding consideration was this: I had great respect for German science. If a bomb were possible, if it turned out to have enormous power, the result in the hands of Hitler might enable him to enslave the world. It was essential to get there first, if an all-out American effort could accomplish the difficult task.”

December 16, 1942 found Col. Franklin T. Matthias…and two DuPont engineers headed for the Pacific Northwest and southern California to investigate possible production sites. Of the possible sites available, none had a better combination of isolation, long construction season, and abundant water for hydroelectric power than those found along the Columbia and Colorado Rivers. After viewing six locations in Washington, Oregon and California, the group agreed that the area around Hanford, Washington, best met the criteria established by the Met Lab scientists and DuPont engineers. - from The Atomic Heritage Foundation

The most recent studies indicate that a nuclear exchange of even 50 Nagasaki-type bombs would produce climate changes unprecedented in recorded human history and threaten the global food supply. A large-scale exchange of nuclear weapons would so reduce temperatures that most of the humans who survived the initial bombing would starve. Many people are concerned today that climate change poses a threat to human civilization but the most certain and immediate threat still resides in the nuclear weapons sitting in missile silos, bombers, and submarines around the world.

People shy away from parallels to fascism, but it’s important to note that fascism is not a political ideology or strategy but mental pathology of

People shy away from parallels to fascism, but it’s important to note that fascism is not a political ideology or strategy but mental pathology of societal scale, starting with an impaired individual manipulating psychological weaknesses in the population to achieve power, and then multiplying the disorder by duplicating it in the general culture.

Hamilton said, “The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country is by flattering the prejud

Hamilton said, “The truth unquestionably is, that the only path to a subversion of the republican system of the country is by flattering the prejudices of the people, and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions, to throw affairs into confusion, and bring on civil commotion…” Throughout American history, those confusions and commotions have sprung forth in the form of rebellions, clashes, and civil war. Yet America had never been tested with a leader who had the same mindset of King George III; a monarch who ignored the voice of the majority, who ruled as he lived above the rest, and cared not a whit about the traditions of the free society in America.

Based on my knowledge working in this field for years and the secret intelligence manuals of the KGB, Trump was the kind of quality recruit that spies always sought. Every Russian spy knew that it was the greedy, narcissistic, and self-absorbed conservatives that made for the best assets. Almost invariably, they thought they could handle any situation and rarely looked deeper than their financial pockets. Putin was going to push back against any chance that Hillary Clinton would become president. If that meant having to risk going from a cyber war to a hot war, so be it. Maybe it was time to just introduce a little chaos in America. The American Republican Party had been shifting to the far-right for more than two decades. Many of them supported a strong man and powerful national leader like Vladimir Putin. Putin’s own contacts with the religious right presented him with the opportunity to co-opt an entire party. It was far too tempting to avoid. If it could be done in the United States, it could be done everywhere else in the world—save China. A successful co-option of the American right would lead to an entire “wing of supporters operating the most powerful nation on earth and viewing Putin as its closest ally. Russian intelligence would go back and scrub every document and contact about Donald Trump from his overtures made in the late 1980s. If they could pull it off, why not try?

These European xenophobic parties have the universal characteristic of openly aligning themselves with Moscow and accepting their overt and covert political patronage including being openly funded by Moscow. As a sign of their gratitude, Moscow has become the de facto capitol of the anti-Atlantic, anti-globalization, white conservative world. These groups all have the same ideological worldview. They see themselves as the opponents to the NATO-European world order. They want to realign the world with Moscow as the Christian cultural protector who helps them smash the establishments that kept stability since WWII.

Populist dictators and strongmen use divisive techniques and attacks to foster splits in their societies and to break the hold of establishment norms in order to rise to national leadership through a negative form of “people power”—to assert that the system “is rigged against you,” where in many cases, the system is built and working properly for these very same people. The populist authoritarian is the master of the rant, a demagogue of the highest order, and runs an agenda which generally brings about ruin.

…America seems to remain fearful of strategic adaptability in any setting. We are wedded to the notion that we shouldn’t change a policy until it h

…America seems to remain fearful of strategic adaptability in any setting. We are wedded to the notion that we shouldn’t change a policy until it has failed, unwilling to ask ourselves how we can do better. Clinging to the status-quo is, in the short-term, an easy course of action, but it is also a dangerous one.

Conflicts breed like tribbles, and the international community is proved powerless to stop them. This growing entropy signifies the emergence of a new global system that I call “durable disorder,” which contains rather than solves problems. This condition will define the coming age. The world will not collapse into anarchy; however, the rules-based order we know will crumble and be replaced by something more organic and wild.

Cyber is important, but not in ways people think. It gives us new ways of doing old things: sabotage, theft, propaganda, deceit, and espionage. None of this is new. Cyberwar’s real power in modern warfare is influence, not sabotage. Using the internet to change people’s minds is more powerful than blowing up a server, and there’s nothing new about propaganda…Weaponized information will be the WMD of the future, and victory will be won in the influence space.

From the weakening European Union to the raging Middle East, states are breaking down into regimes or are manifestly failing. They are being replaced by other things, such as networks, caliphates, narco-states, warlord kingdoms, corporatocracies, and wastelands. Syria and Iraq may never be viable states again, at least not in the traditional sense. The Fragile States Index, an annual ranking of 178 countries that measures state weakness using social science methods, warned in 2017 that 70 percent of the world’s countries were “fragile.” This trend continues to worsen…But the Westphalian Order is dying.

One can begin to see a medieval universe unfolding, in which nations, churches, and the wealthy each pursue global ambitions as world powers. They will all use force when necessary because it can be bought once again, as in the Middle Ages. The use of private force will expand in the decades to come, because nothing is in place to stop its growth, and in so doing, it will turn the super-rich into potential superpowers.

Stay where you are and simply feel the panic without trying to distract yourself. Place the palm of your hand on your stomach and breathe slowly and deeply. - recommendation from the NHS

I think people are very familiar with the American heroes of the story—or antiheroes if you like—whether it’s Paul Manafort or Carter Page or Donald T

I think people are very familiar with the American heroes of the story—or antiheroes if you like—whether it’s Paul Manafort or Carter Page or Donald Trump Jr. But they are less familiar with the Russians. And what we’re talking about here is an alleged conspiracy with two halves. What I wanted to try and illuminate was what the Russians were doing. And I wanted it to be contextual, to explain that if you really want to interpret what happened last year [2016] in America, you need to go backwards almost through a kind of wormhole toward Cold War times and you need to be a sort of student of espionage, and in particular of the KGB method. I wanted to marry some of the contemporaneous stuff that we’ve seen in the news with my own reporting from Moscow. It’s also important to look at how the KGB used to do things in order to understand Vladimir Putin and his methods. Putin operates in the manner of a classic KGB-trained spy. He uses strategies of subterranean influence that were tried and tested during the ’60s and ’70s under [then–Soviet Secretary General] Leonid Brezhnev and so on. I wanted to pull that together. - From The Nation interview

we can't say that Trump was recruited in 1987. But what we can say with absolute certainty is there was a very determined effort by the Soviets to bring him over, and that moreover, his personality was the kind of thing they were looking for. They were looking for narcissists. They were looking for people who were kind of - dare I say it - corruptible, interested in money, people who were not necessarily faithful in their marriages and also sort of opportunists who were not very strong analysts or principle people. And if you work your way down the list through these sort of - the KGB's personality questionnaire, Donald Trump ticks every single box. - from the NPR interview

Some say the heart is just like a wheel. When you bend it, you can’t mend it.

Some say the heart is just like a wheel. When you bend it, you can’t mend it.

As Afghans, beginning around 2005, found the international presence in their country increasingly offensive, it was not because of their purported age-old hatred of foreigners. Nor did puritanical horror at the presence of unbelievers in their land enter our conversations, or outrage about Afghan sovereignty trod underfoot. My neighbors pointed to the abusive behavior of the Afghan government. Given the U.S. role in ushering its officials to power and financing and protecting them, Afghans held the international community, and the United States in particular, responsible. My neighbors wanted the international community to be stricter with Afghan government officials, not more respectful. “You brought our donkeys back,” one man put it in 2009. “You brought these dogs back here. You should bring them to heel.”

…there was one vice that Machiavelli admonished his reader to shun if he cared to prolong his reign: theft of his subjects’ possessions. In other words, corruption. “Being rapacious and arrogating subjects’ goods and women is what, above all else . . . renders him hateful,” he wrote. And widespread hatred of a ruler was conducive to conspiracy. And conspiracy reliably brought down governments.

INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES are driven by the questions their clients ask them. If they have not compiled much information on the security impacts of acute corruption to date, it is because few policy makers have pointed them at that problem.

In the UK and the US, we’re in danger of letting our republics slip out of our hands without even noticing it and the results could be really devastating over time.

On March 11, 1941, in Australia, General Douglas MacArthur spoke the three words he would be remembered by for the rest of his life, “I shall retur

On March 11, 1941, in Australia, General Douglas MacArthur spoke the three words he would be remembered by for the rest of his life, “I shall return.” But what about in the meantime?

On 30 May, Frederic Wake-Walker, a naval officer on board HMS Hebe, surveyed the scene from La Panne westwards. It was, he said, ‘One of the most

On 30 May, Frederic Wake-Walker, a naval officer on board HMS Hebe, surveyed the scene from La Panne westwards. It was, he said, ‘One of the most astounding and pathetic sights I have ever seen. Almost the whole ten miles of beach was black from sand-dunes to waterline with tens of thousands of men. In places they stood up to their knees and waists in water waiting for their turn to get into the pitiable boats. It seemed impossible that we should ever get more than a fraction of all these men away.

German children were not being raised to believe in a world of tolerance and acceptance. According to [Bernard] Rust, ‘God created the world as a place for work and battle. Whoever doesn’t understand the laws of life’s battles will be counted out, as in the boxing ring. All the good things on this earth are trophy cups. The strong will win them. The weak will lose them.’

This mentality was distilled Nazism. Describing it as Europe’s greatest problem, [William] Shirer wrote about it in his diary on the eve of the German Blitzkrieg. A fellow American war correspondent, Web Miller, had died in a rail accident, and the German press was full of stories that he had been killed by the British secret service. ‘What happens,’ writes Shirer, ‘to the inner fabric of a people when they are fed lies like this daily?’ It is a question as important today as it was when posted on 9 May 1940.

Opening one of the battalion’s final ammunition boxes, Captain Starkey had been devastated to find that it contained not bullets but flare cartridges. A supply error had been made. But rather than bemoan his luck, Captain Starkey thought laterally. The enemy’s effective mortar fire, he had noticed, was always signaled by a red-white-red pattern of flares. After a while this would be replaced by a white-red-white pattern, signaling the mortar fire to stop and the infantry to attack.

Captain Starkey, with his huge supply of coloured flares, waited for the German infantry to advance before firing a red-white-red pattern above their heads. German mortars duly opened fire, hitting their own men. The Germans quickly fired off a white-red-white configuration to rectify the situation. The mortars stopped and the surviving infantrymen moved forward. Captain Starkey waited a moment before sending up another red-white-red pattern. The mortars opened fire once more, and the infantrymen were again bombarded. The chaos continued to grow until the mortars ceased firing and the infantry stopped advancing . Cunning had overcome strength

Jim [Thorpe] remembers travelling across the Channel many times. He recalls German aircraft strafing the boat, and the soldiers on board firing back with their rifles. But did he realise the importance of the job he was doing?

‘No. You don’t think about that sort of thing. You think about—just get those men home. They were trying to do something for us. You think, Let’s get them out!’

Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy personnel have suffe

Harassing activity against all embassy personnel has spiked in the past several months to a level not seen in many years. Embassy personnel have suffered personally slanderous and falsely prurient attacks in the media. Family members have been the victims of psychologically terrifying assertions that their USG [United States government] employee spouses had met accidental deaths. Home intrusions have become far more commonplace and bold, and activity against our locally engaged Russian staff continues at a record pace. We have no doubt that this activity originates in the FSB.

John Beyrle, US ambassador in Moscow, confidential State Department cable, November 9, 2009

Zersetzung is a technique to subvert and undermine an opponent. The aim was to disrupt the target’s private or family life so they are unable to continue their “hostile-negative” activities towards the state. Typically, the Stasi would use collaborators to garner details from a victim’s private life. They would then devise a strategy to “disintegrate” the target’s personal circumstances—their career, their relationship with their spouse, their reputation in the community. They would even seek to alienate them from their children.

In her study [of Zersetzen, Sandra] Pingel-Schliemann concludes: “These days a total dictatorship doesn’t need to use methods of open terror to subdue people for years and make them weak. Moreover, developments in technology and communications offer future dictators ever more subtle possibilities for manipulation.” Her comments strike me as prescient. In Herr J.’s case Stasi operatives had to creep round at night hanging individual notes in his village with the words: “Whore,” “Drunkard,” “Speeder” and “Bigmouth.” Today’s Kremlin bloggers and faceless state patriots have it much easier. They need only reach for their mouse.

Darkness
Extended periods of darkness, longer and more profound than anyone not living in one of America’s great cities has ever known.
As power shuts

Darkness
Extended periods of darkness, longer and more profound than anyone not living in one of America’s great cities has ever known.
As power shuts down there is darkness and the sudden loss of electrical conveniences. As batteries lose power, there is more gradual failure of cell phones, portable radios, and flashlights.
Emergency generators provide pockets of light and power, but there is little running water anywhere…Emergency supplies of bottled water are too scarce to use for anything but drinking, and there is nowhere to replenish the supply. Disposal of human waste becomes an issue within days…. - this goes on quite a bit

There is scant consolation to be found in the fact that a major attack on the grid hasn’t happened yet. Modified attacks on government, banking, commercial, and infrastructure targets are already occurring daily, and while sufficient motive to take out an electric power grid may be lacking for the moment, capability is not.

A 2008 report predicts that only one in ten Americans would survive a year into a national blackout.

Q: How likely is an attack on our power grid?
Ted Koppel: Very. When I posed that question to former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, she put the likelihood at 80 or 90 percent. General Lloyd Austin, who currently heads up the U.S. military’s Central Command, told me that it’s not a question of “if, but of when.” Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has warned of a cyber Pearl Harbor, and President Obama highlighted the threat to our power grid in his 2013 State of the Union address. In short, government and military leaders think it’s likely, and I found no compelling evidence to the contrary. - From A Conversation with Ted Koppel - on his site for the book

Unlike any other kind of threat this country has ever faced, it can be very difficult tracking the source, the origin of a cyber attack. Given all of that you might assume that the government has formulated special plans to deal with the aftermath of such an attack. There are plans for hurricanes, and blizzards, and earthquakes, but this would be very different. The power outages caused by a targeted cyber attack would last longer and cover a much wider area than any of those natural disasters. So, is there a plan? No. - from Koppel’s video intro to the book, on his site

…as Mike McConnell [then director of national intelligence] said: ‘For the record, if we were attacked, we would lose.’

Russia...turned off the electric grid in part of Ukraine last December, mostly to show that they could.

Security experts point to evidence that a well-funded Russian hacking group, known as Energetic Bear, has been probing the networks of power grid operators and energy and oil companies in the United States, Europe and Canada. That could be exploration — or it could be preparation of the battle space in the event of a future conflict.

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, 330 people in the United States have been charged with some kind of jihadist terrorist crime ranging in s

Since the attacks of September 11, 2001, 330 people in the United States have been charged with some kind of jihadist terrorist crime ranging in seriousness from murder to sending small sums of money to a terrorist group. An astonishing four out of five of them are U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.

…flies in the face of the conventional belief (largely attributable to the fact that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by nineteen foreign-born Arab hijackers) that those involved in terrorist activity in the United States are foreigners. In fact, the overwhelming number of those engaged in jihadist crimes in the States have been Americans. Moreover, more than one hundred American citizens or residents have been charged after traveling overseas to join a terrorist group, and a further thirty-nine were arrested in the States while planning to do so.

Since 2001 forty-five Americans have been killed by jihadist terrorists in the United States. In that same period, by contrast, forty-eight Americans have been killed in acts of political violence by far-right extremists.(1)

…in the name of defeating Islamic terrorism, since 9/11 the FBI has instigated more jihadist terrorist “plots” in the States than al-Qaeda or any of its affiliated groups—thirty versus ten.

The Chicken gun has a sixty foot barrel, putting it solidly in the class of an artillery piece. While a four pound chicken hurtling in excess of 40

The Chicken gun has a sixty foot barrel, putting it solidly in the class of an artillery piece. While a four pound chicken hurtling in excess of 400 miles per hour is a lethal projectile…

Until this trip, I thought of sweat as a sort of self-generated dip in the lake. But sweat isn’t cool. It’s warm as blood. It essentially is blood. Sweat comes from plasma, the watery, colorless portion of blood. (A dip in the lake cools by conduction: contact with something colder. Highly effective but not always practical.) Sweat cools by evaporation: offloading your heat into the air. Like this: when you start to overheat, vessels in your skin dilate, encouraging blood to migrate there. From the capillaries of the skin, the hot plasma is offloaded through sweat glands—2.4 million or so—onto the surface of the body to evaporate. Evaporation carries heat away from the body, in the form of water vapor.

On a long sortie out of Diego Garcia island, the only crew member capable of operating the plane’s defensive equipment abruptly left his post to use the chemical toilet—while flying over Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. On the return flight, a faulty seal combined with the pressure differential between the toilets tiered chambers causing the contents to spew into the crew cabin. “Be assured,” he deadpanned, “this blue-brown precipitation affected the navigator’s ability to concentrate on his duties.”

Samples were prepared and delivered to the NRDC [National Research Defense Committee] in two formats: a more intense “paste-form stink,” for smearing, and a liquid stink in a squirtable two ounce lead tube. Crocker assured his clients that the latter would render a target “highly objectionable for not less than two hours at 70 F.” He promised nothing short of “complete ostracism,” concluding his report with a tagline surely unique in the annals of marketing: “as lastingly disagreeable as a product of this kind can be.”

None of [researcher Pam] Dalton’s other bottled vilenesses approached a workable criterion of universality. Sewage Odor was no good at all. Fourteen percent of Hispanic subjects described it as an odor that would make them feel good. Around 20 percent of Caucasians, Asians, and black South Africans thought it smelled edible. Vomit Odor made a similarly poor showing, with 27 percent of Xhosa subjects describing it as a feel-good smell and 3 percent of Caucasians being willing to wear it as a scent.