Ask The Strategic Genius: Iran Edition

Right now, we are being treated to a fascinating mix of genius and antigenius, whipsawed between incredible stupidity and last-minute cancellations of the same – which is a form of genius. As Sun Tzu said, deception is the root of strategy – in which case just confusing the living fuck out of everybody has to be one of the fruit of the deception branch. There are so many things wrong, even with the mistakes being made, that the whole thing would make a great Monty Python skit, except the Pythons were trying to be funny.

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Happy Facial Recognition Day!

I first wrote about facial recognition back in 2017, shortly after starting this blogue. (stderr) Then, (stderr) I discovered to my complete lack of surprise, that there is a lack of proper paranoia about the topic, and – I suppose that’s justified because climate change is likely to wipe us out, while having no more personal privacy, won’t. I guess we’re arguing about “insult to injury” which is a great way of spicing up your injuries. Add it to heirarchical storage and, whups, things look bad. (stderr) It seems like just the other day I was laughing at people who were implementing poorly-planned “data lakes” but it seems that, miracle, AI actually has stepped in to help with the problem.

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A Fascinating New Element to Warfare

There are a few things I find fascinating about the current war. First and foremost, it’s a war of attrition and apparently that never occurred to the pentagon command structure. One of the things that Europe learned pretty thoroughly before the Franco-Prussian War, is that an experienced command structure that knows how to communicate and plan is essential. Or so we would think.

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Ignorant Pontificating

I’m going to declare this up front: I have no private knowledge about this topic; my beliefs are formed by a lot of study of the topic since 1978, a lot of strategy gaming, and a lot of news reading. Naturally, any commentary about nuclear strategy is going to be either a) ignorant except for open source material or b) muzzled by secrecy. I.e.: Those that talk about this stuff are ignorant, those that aren’t ignorant are silent.

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An Oldie

Back in the mid 90s I had an unusual experience, in which I was caught in the blast-corona of Operation Sundevil – the Secret Service’s attempt to gain relevance in cybersecurity [wik]. My role was small but it made me realize that the government, at that time, was ignorant enough that they could easily be stampeded into doing stupid things, a form of “terrorism by stupid cop” which I later re-framed as “a denial of clue attack.”

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Half-Assing

Field-expedient repairs are sometimes expected. You haven’t got all the gear to make a proper fix, so you log a maintenance report saying something like, “I did not have the correct threaded bolt to replace it correctly, so I forced the wrong bolt on to the nut with a pipe-wrench, just to hold the thing together until we got home.”

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