How do you Fight if you Can't go Green?

maybe mission command will be the only command you'll be able to exercise

One of my favorite “skunk at the picnic” phrases when people talk about this “war winning” idea/system/technology or —with an claim bordering on the delusional—that only we have it or will ever have it, is simply to say:

Now, that isn’t quite true. Let’s see, how can I put this…umm…errr…OK. I’ll try.

Let’s say you have an exceptionally gifted person or lab that accidentally—or through plain smart, hard work—wanders into a previously unknown/overlooked/misunderstood side-eddy of physics or math that gives you an almost unimaginable advantage over even your most challenging adversaries.

The ability to see through rocks…to smell cheese from a continent away…to warp time-space in small areas…let your imagination run wild. If it were really new, you might be able to hide this little side-eddy and keep it contained. Could there be entire sub-areas of physics that were discovered and then hidden—only known by a special group of researchers and operators? Perhaps. Many people are saying. Maybe not.

History is full of such things. Greek fire, the steppe bow, gunpowder, repeating rifles, the Enigma machine, cracking the Enigma machine, Roman cement, nuclear weapons, ozempic—pick your example. Some were open and public, others closely held and forgotten to history, and a precious few are still behind walls inside walls inside SCIFs inside walls…where they properly belong.

Regardless of how “war winning” something seems, it may not operationalize the way you expect at scale, or even worse, you get overconfident that you will always have that advantage to yourself. You may not know that your adversary already has it, but you just don’t know about it. Maybe he has a spy inside your lifelines to giving away all you develop.

It has happened before.

You also need to be humble to ponder the question: what do our adversaries know that we don’t? Anyone who was in the military for any length of time knows some “cool” things that, once you see behind the curtain, you all of a sudden realize that—even though you see behind this one curtain—there are a thousand other curtains with equally “cool” things behind them. What are they? Not your compartment. Not your business.

At the core of all of them is math. You can’t classify math if your adversary has mathematicians as good as or better than yours.

I just finished Nimitz at War: Command Leadership from Pearl Harbor to Tokyo Bay by Craig L. Symonds. So much of our early success was owed to a bit of luck, and good codebreakers.

Wars have been lost—and will be lost—because someone thought they had unbreakable codes and fail-safe security.

You don’t. No one ever does.

It isn’t just the military that relies on secure communications, business and finance increasingly do as well…and it all rides on the back of math.

Take a moment to ponder the short clip below where Eric Schmidt warns of the upcoming AI superintelligence.

Before we get back on topic, did you catch the energy part of the above? Ponder this graph and ask yourself, who is seeing—and acting on—what is to come?

Now, back on track.

Encrypting voice and data along the spectrum from business to the military has a lot in common, but also has significant differences.

Beer, wine, scotch, vodka, tequila, Everclear…they’re all alcoholic drinks, but their use, creation, and effects are quite different. However, they all will get you where you want to go.

An imperfect comparison, but it explains why the below conversation about the security of the once-seemingly impregnable bitcoin had me thinking in larger terms about how much of our economy—and military—relies on the planning assumption that things are secure.

To put on my operational planning hat (red in this case), what happens when your planning assumption is wrong?

The below is from the latest edition of Investor’s Business Daily by Reinhardt Krause and Harrison Miller—sadly not available online.

…along with enormous upside, quantum computing brings risks. That’s because it’s widely believed that quantum computers will eventually overpower current data encryption technologies.

As a result, everything from bank accounts and email security to online transactions and national secrets could be at risk.

The time when quantum computers will be able to crack encryption codes is known as Q-Day. Estimates of its arrival range from a few years to two decades from now.

Malicious actors, likely state-sponsored, are thought by crypto experts, research groups and government officials to be planning ahead. In other words, they’re gathering encrypted data today so they can unlock it in the future. The cybersecurity industry is well aware of the threat. So is the U.S. government.

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2024 released three post-quantum cryptography (PQC) standards. These encryption tools aim to thwart hackers.

“With quantum computing, that changes the landscape completely,” said Bilal Chinoy, chief technology officer at sFOX, a crypto broker and institutional trading platform. “Now those hundreds of years to break one such algorithm would take days.

“It’s definitely coming,” Chinoy said. “At the current trajectory of advancement, the base cryptography that’s in use (in bitcoin and some other cryptocurrencies) — some of it, not all of it — will break, will be able to be compromised. So that is an inevitability. The question is when the advancement (occurs) and how we’re going to, as an industry, deal with it.”

Remember about 10 years ago, with all the blockchain hype? When AI-driven superintelligence starts writing its own code on quantum computers…well…you understand my concern.

Cracking codes that are uncrackable. Hacking unhackable systems.

Scared or challenged? Either works for me.