Military professionals love a good Clausewitz discussion, especially looking at this past week in Syria. His trinity of people, army, and government has become almost liturgical. It’s the kind of a comfortable framework we apply to everything from counterinsurgency to cyber warfare. But there’s an irony here that Clausewitz himself might appreciate: Our very reliance on his framework demonstrates the human tendency to turn dynamic thinking into static routine.

Perhaps Clausewitz’s best insight, not unlike what has been found in every other profession in the world, was that warfare exists in constant tension between:

• What can be systematized (tactics, drills, logistics)
• What requires judgment (strategy, adaptation, creativity)

But here’s the meta-lesson: The way we invoke Clausewitz has itself become a routine. We’ve turned his warning about the dangers of routine thinking into… a routine way of thinking.

The crystallization of dynamic thought into static procedure appears like a pattern everywhere in human endeavor. Scientific methods become checklist science. Medical diagnosis becomes search engine symptom matching. Strategic planning becomes fill-in-the-blank templates.

The true lesson of Clausewitz thus shouldn’t be reduced to his trinity or his maxims. It comes from recognizing a balance that is often lost, that even our frameworks for handling complexity can become cognitive crutches. His work should be a cradle for military thought, not its grave. The moment we think we’ve fully understood Clausewitz is the moment we’ve missed his point entirely.

I submit that the best way to honor Clausewitz is to recognize when we need to move beyond him, as he argued that each age must write its own book about war. The most dangerous routine might be our routine ways of thinking about how to avoid routine thinking.

The Journal of the United States Artillery once put it like this:

This quote perfectly captures a recursive rule about not following rules slavishly. And the source makes it even more powerful: Grant often was criticized by his contemporaries for being “unscientific” and not following accepted military wisdom, yet he was unquestionably the most successful general of the Civil War, if not all American history.

Even the way we think about thinking needs to avoid becoming dogmatic. The real art is maintaining the tension between structure and adaptability, knowing enough to be competent but remaining flexible enough to be creative.

I’ve heard this as the healthy mental river flow, where we must avoid becoming tangled upon either bank. One is chaotic and forever giving way, the other is rigid and unforgiving. The irony is that this too could become a rigid formula if we’re not careful!

And for what it’s worth, the seditious Confederate General Lee’s rigid adherence to offensive doctrine, a fixation on decisive Napoleonic style measurements, led to several catastrophic decisions.

• Favored aggressive offense to expand slavery, instead of the defensive tactics that were far more strategic to preserve slavery
• Focused on his personal stake in Virginia theater operations despite the war’s center of gravity shift west
• Continued agitating for decisive battle outcomes even after Gettysburg showed this fatally flawed

Grant, by contrast, showed remarkable adaptability and thinking 100 years ahead of his time.

When Grant encountered a problem at Vicksburg, he didn’t just try a different tactical approach, he totally innovated into what was possible. After failed frontal assaults, he executed one of the most audacious campaigns in military history: he marched his army down the western bank of the Mississippi, ran gunboats and transport ships past the Confederate batteries at night (a move considered suicidal), crossed back to the eastern bank well south of Vicksburg, and then lived off the land while cutting loose from his supply lines entirely.

This was mind-bending for the era. Armies were supposed to maintain their supply lines at all costs. Instead, Grant’s troops carrying just five days of rations marched through enemy territory for two weeks, fighting five major battles and confounding both the Confederates and his own superiors. When Lincoln heard of this, he said:

I think Grant has a thought. He isn’t quite sure about it, but he has it.

At Cold Harbor, after suffering heavy casualties in frontal assaults (observing them as mistakes), Grant didn’t retreat to lick his wounds like his predecessors. Instead, he secretly moved his entire army across the James River — a force of 100,000 men with wagons, artillery, and supplies — using a 2,100-foot pontoon bridge. The Confederates didn’t even realize he’d gone until his army was threatening Petersburg.

The Overland Campaign showed Grant’s grasp of both operational art and psychology. Previous generals had retreated after tangling with the “monster” Lee. Grant, instead, kept moving southeast. After each battle, his troops expected to retreat north. Instead, they’d get orders to advance by the left flank. This persistent southward movement had a profound psychological effect on both armies. Union troops began to see they were finally heading toward Richmond, while Confederate troops realized this enemy wasn’t going to quit at first bluster.

Even his staffing choices showed innovation. While other generals relied on West Point graduates, Grant promoted talented officers regardless of background. He elevated leaders like William Smith (originally a civilian vigneron) and James Wilson (who became a cavalry commander at 26) based on demonstrated ability rather than formal education. Perhaps due to his own “self-made” background, he dismissed patronage as irrelevant to performance.

Then there was his approach to intelligence gathering. Rather than relying solely on cavalry scouts and spies, Grant made extensive use of freed slaves’ knowledge of local geography and Confederate movements. This wasn’t just innovative, it echoed his dedication to human value and talent as transformative, recognizing the strategic value of local knowledge that others ignored due to racism.

These weren’t just tactical innovations, they represented a flexible yet practical way of thinking about the world. A fundamentally different path than what came before.

Lee remained fixated on winning decisive battles in a Napoleonic style, while Grant grasped how the Civil War was changing everything, becoming what we’d now call a “total war,” requiring an operational art that combined military, political, and economic elements… not unlike what we’ve seen in Syria lately.

The campaign that best exemplifies Grant’s touch of transformation was his strategic March to the Sea led by Sherman. While Lee was still obsessing about sitting in his tent for his boots to be shined for future battlefield glory, Grant understood that Confederate resistance depended on both military force and civilian will. The March to the Sea was about demonstrating the Confederacy’s aggression as weakness, revealing an inherent inability to protect itself.

Grant had likely not been exposed to Clausewitz, but the Prussian theorist would have recognized in Grant’s strategy the targeting of the enemy’s center of gravity the key to his resistance.

The rise of cyberwarfare, AI, and hybrid warfare demands the kind of adaptable systemic thinking Grant exemplified rather than Lee’s routine and doctrinaire (e.g. racist) approach. So the next time someone waves an ISIS or Confederate flag, just think about it… because it stands as evidence they don’t.

A former elite gymnast who claims he “tracked ISIS recruits with Palantir in Syria” now wants to be the definitive judge of “where criminals come from” in America. Let’s talk about what his Peregrine-themed company really means…

Adrenaline. Not calm and reasoned thought. Not justice and transparency. Adrenaline.

His Peregine code has leaked, revealing the same dangerously flawed logic as used in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria… to create ISIS.

def surveillance_feedback_loop(population):
while True:
# Step 1: Deploy mass surveillance
# Just like COINTELPRO watching breakfast programs
targets = identify_potential_threats(population)

# Step 2: Create pressure on communities
# See: Every failed counterinsurgency campaign ever
surveilled_groups = apply_monitoring(targets)

# Step 3: Generate radicalization
# Creating tomorrow's threats ensures today's profits
new_threats = fragment_communities(surveilled_groups)

# Step 4: Use new threats to justify expansion
# Capitalism meets Kafka
population = expand_surveillance(population, new_threats)

# Results: Mission Accomplished
yield {"surveillance_expanded": True,
"threats_increased": True,
"public_safety": None,
"quarterly_profits": "Record Breaking"}

To put it plainly, there were four Palantir profit models used abroad to increase dangers, which are being transferred domestically to America by a spin-off called Peregrine.

1. Initial Deployment
   • Claimed: “Identify ISIS recruits”
   • Actually: Targeted entire communities
   • Result: Created collective punishment… PROFIT!
2. Community Impact
   • Claimed: “Prevent radicalization”
   • Actually: Fragmented social structures
   • Result: Increased isolation and alienation… PROFIT!
3. Threat Generation
   • Claimed: “Reduce extremism”
   • Actually: Created conditions for recruitment
   • Result: Generated the terrorists they claimed to be tracking… PROFIT!
4. System Response
   • Claimed: “Adapt to threats”
   • Actually: Expanded targeting
   • Result: Accelerated the cycle… PROFIT!

The playbook is clear:

• In Syria: Label communities as “ISIS suspects”
• In America: Rebrand activists as “extremists”
• The result? Same as Nixon’s era, just with AI-generated PowerPoint slides.

The rising cost of floggings will continue until morale improves.

Peregrine isn’t just replicating an abroad failed system domestically. They’re replicating a system that succeeded at:

• Generating own justification — the infamous self-licking ice-cream cone (SLICC) of military history
• Creating the threats it claimed to prevent
• Expanding control through manufactured crisis

The Syria deployment revealed an unstated goal of expanding surveillance infrastructure through threat generation.

A User’s Guide to Hidden Success in Overt Failure

Hey Peregrine people, let’s talk about this exciting new “integrated law enforcement platform” vacuuming up citizen data across the nation like Woodrow Wilson’s nationalization of telephone lines to disenfranchise his opponents (e.g. non-whites, labor unions) from government.

But first, a quick pop quiz about how integrated law enforcement platforms work in practice:

Q: The FBI had MLK under comprehensive surveillance for years. How’d that work out?

A: They recorded his conversations, tracked his movements, infiltrated his organization… and completely failed to prevent his assassination. But hey, they did manage to send him a letter suggesting he commit suicide, so there’s that “data-driven impact” for you.

Speaking of surveillance and psychological manipulation, do you remember when Russian intelligence surveilled Olympic athletes and sent them targeted messages to destabilize their mental health and knock them out of competition?

In 2016, Russian military intelligence selectively leaked medical records and sent personalized messages to athletes, trying to push them to mental breakdown or even suicide.

Can your system yet convince people to kill themselves? Russia really wants to know.

They’ve already demonstrated how surveillance plus competitive targeting equals psychological warfare. I mean I’m very sure a hyper-aggressive competition-minded gymnast’s “integrated law enforcement platform” would never be used in such a way that we already have seen over and over again…

Greatest Hits of Peregrine Predecessors

Let’s review some other spectacular examples of safety technology succeeding at being used for oppression while failing at… safety:

COINTELPRO (1956-1971): Meticulously documented Black Panthers feeding children breakfast

SHAMROCK (1945-1975): Read millions of telegrams to harass civil rights leaders

Today: Exxon contractors hack climate activists. Because nothing says “public safety” like targeting people trying to prevent planetary disaster.

Technology Changes, Patterns Don’t

The Palmer Raids (hat tip to a comment by “Not Nick Noone“) used then-cutting-edge telephone surveillance and census data to round up political dissidents while actual bombers remained at large. Sound familiar, Peregrine?

Remember when IBM’s punch cards made the Holocaust more “efficient”? But don’t worry, this time the data lives in micro services not punch cards, so it’s totally different.

Austria’s census data enabled perfect targeting of Jewish communities. But hey, at least their data integration was on point.

Syria’s surveillance infrastructure came with great Western tech support. Those monitoring centers had excellent uptime!

Peregrine’s Innovation in White-washing

Now here’s Peregrine, with glossy brochures selling a shiny future of policing like nobody remembers:

• Multi-agency data sharing (like Operation MINARET’s illegal intel sharing)
• Automated targeting (like Japanese internment’s IBM cards)
• Real-time surveillance (like COINTELPRO’s activist tracking)
• Predictive analytics (like McCarthy era blacklisting)

But don’t worry, this time it’s different because… failed disastrously in the Middle-East first? Cloud computing? Machine learning?

A nicer font?

Show me some actual safeguards against abuse. None of their story adds up to a better future.

The Peregrine Product: Foreign Spying Failures Applied at Home

Want to know what this technology is actually really good at, and not by accident?

• The census helped round up Japanese Americans for internment
• Telegraph monitoring helped harass civil rights leaders
• Phone tapping helped suppress labor movements
• License plate readers helped target immigrant communities
• Exxon’s hackers helped disrupt environmental litigation

Watch the Peregrine CEO, a former elite gymnast, start to tell press that he really wants to push beyond rushing criminal convictions through courts and into becoming the definitive judge of all societal ills, defining “where criminals come from“…

I try to have a lot of adrenaline for the competition.

Historians, this is your cue. We’ve studied this many times before, and it never ends in happy ever after or “and then everything was fine.” A former gymnast honed in adrenaline-fueled competition… applies his training and “embedded” militarized experience into mass domestic surveillance and predictive policing. What could possibly go wrong?

Notice the tired and sad pattern here? Every single adrenaline-driven “innovative” surveillance system excelled mainly at controlling targeted populations to “win” in rushed competitions, while failing at its stated security purpose.

The gymnastic co-founder proudly boasts he tracked ISIS recruits with Palantir in Syria, which means he hasn’t been held accountable yet for creating the terrorists he claimed to be preventing.

No joke. Not an exaggeration.

The Peregrine co-founder literally could be charged with unsubstantiated accusations abroad. Just think, if he hadn’t been able to get away with Palantir harms like causing a rise in terrorism, and instead held accountable, he wouldn’t be hawking a domestic version of the same system expected to end in yet another societal disaster.

Learn History or the Results Never Change

1950s: “Wire taps will stop communists!”
Result: Blacklisted actors, missed spies

1960s: “Surveillance will prevent violence!”
Result: Harassed civil rights leaders, missed terrorists

2024: “Peregrine will transform data into impact!”
Coming Soon: Targeted activists, missed threats, record profits

The Only Thing We Learn…

The NYPD’s demographic unit spent years mapping Muslim communities after 9/11. Did it prevent any terrorism? No. Did it destroy community trust and create detailed data for targeting minorities? You bet!

Now Peregrine wants to “optimize resource allocation” with the same capabilities that have consistently optimized oppression while failing at safety.

Peregrine’s Future is Written in the Past

Every single time we’ve built these systems, they’ve failed at their stated purpose while succeeding spectacularly at political control. But I’m sure Peregrine’s version is so different because they were born out of Palantir’s total failure and pivoted on terms like domestic “data-driven” and “real-time analytics” to more quickly incarcerate citizens into a Kafkaesque fever dream.

Here we are in 2024, watching a gymnast who helped create the threats he claimed to prevent in Syria perform his next routine: selling that same failed system to control Americans. The military-industrial-congressional-complex judges might give him perfect scores, but history already knows how this performance ends.

But hey, at least the dashboards destroying society are pretty.

…right?

Just ask Syria.

Remember: These systems don’t fail at threat detection.
They succeed at threat creation.
That’s not a bug.
That’s the business model.

When the disgraced men of Colonel “Mad Mike” Hoare stood trial in 1982 for a failed mercenary operation in the Seychelles, he justified their actions by claiming to be “the bastion of civilization in Africa” fighting against what he called a “Communist onslaught.”

Hoare’s mercenary force, the “Wild Geese,” embodied a militant survivalist ethos popularized in certain South African circles during the Cold War.[1]

This wasn’t happening in isolation, and rather in concert with wider efforts to spread white nationalist thinking around the world. In 1940, Elon Musk’s grandfather was arrested in Canada as a national security risk for his leadership role in the “Technocracy” movement of extreme racism. Despite having built himself an elite life with a 20-room home and private aircraft, he fled to South Africa specifically to help lead a newly established post-WWII apartheid regime… building an even bigger home and more private aircraft on the back of state-sanctioned racism. His vision of a technologically-enforced white ethnostate for his children and grandchildren would echo through generations, and set the stage for his grandson Elon Musk’s push into the same vision.

By 1988-89, as apartheid crumbled under international pressure for democratic reform, wealthy beneficiaries of the system rushed to move their assets internationally. The Musk family, by their own account, hurriedly sold everything and moved their racist pile of wealth to Canada, following a common pattern of capital extraction before a racist regime’s collapse. This mirrored earlier patterns of flight by others, such as Peter Thiel’s parents, who profited immensely from racist extraction systems and sought to avoid accountability after war and during democratic transitions.

Today, these survivalist themes have evolved into something more insidious: a sophisticated form of technological fraud that preys upon the same fears and desires that once made advance-fee schemes so effective. Just as “Nigerian prince” scams targeted educated professionals by exploiting their specific blind spots about international finance and wealth extraction, today’s marketing of “apocalypse-proof” vehicles exploits educated consumers’ technological blind spots. Doctors, lawyers, and other highly trained professionals who would never fall for a crude email scam find themselves vulnerable to slick presentations about “full self-driving” and “bulletproof” vehicles — precisely because their expertise in other fields doesn’t transfer to evaluating complex engineering claims.

The Cybertruck represents a masterclass in this kind of deception. Its highly targeted disinformation pitches transform military survivalist themes of white nationalism into a consumer product while playing on the same psychological vulnerabilities that make advance-fee fraud so persistent. Just as scammers promise vast riches for a small upfront investment, the Cybertruck promises “invincibility” for the price of a luxury vehicle to those prone to believing in a rapid elevation in selfish privilege. The same worldview that once described “wild humans” below private aircraft now markets vehicles as futurist personal fortresses against imagined threats — but beneath the poorly-designed false promises and dangerously-poor quality lies a deadly bait-and-switch.

The tragic deaths of three college students in Piedmont, California in November 2024 throws Elon Musk’s whole deception strategy into stark relief.

The Cybertruck, perhaps directly related to the fraud of its marketed indestructibility, abruptly “veered” off Hampton Road in the early morning hours, struck a tree and concrete wall, and burst into flames. This crash fits within a pattern familiar to experts in technological fraud: victims, believing in promised protections, take risks they otherwise wouldn’t for future promised gains that turn only into massive losses.

Just as a mark might drain their savings believing in guaranteed returns from an African prince, Cybertruck owners throw money at false confidence in their vehicle’s supposed “survival” design.

The latest crash isn’t unique to one Tesla model, but rather a well-known pattern for those reading the notes in Tesla’s rapidly rising death toll in every model. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) are now investigating this predictable tragedy of Tesla. The Cybertruck has seen six recalls and three previous investigations of the vehicle this year alone, including an August 2024 crash in Texas with eerily similar characteristics that really should have “grounded” all Tesla vehicles… to save lives from fraud.

The even bigger through-line from 1980s South Africa to modern Silicon Valley reveals a consistent pattern and origin of the tragedy: sophisticated fraud schemes that exploit specific blind spots in otherwise capable people’s knowledge. From Hoare’s mercenaries believing that they could overthrow a government dressed as a “beer-drinking tourist party,” to wealthy Musk and Thiel families believing they could permanently extract wealth ahead of democratic transitions, to today’s marketing of “apocalypse-proof” consumer products, there is a theme that stays constant. The victims change, but the exploitation of targeted ignorance persists.

The Piedmont tragedy thus raises urgent questions about how racist 1980s South African-themed marketing narratives are showing up in the 2020s to influence risk perception, particularly among communities like Piedmont that desire “safety” so badly they fall victim to a snake oil salesman. When vehicles are marketed to wealthy families as virtually indestructible, it may create a false sense of future gains that sets them up instead for a tragic end, like the American Vietnam vet who was shot up and barely survived following Hoare’s failed coup attempt. The fact that this crash occurred at 3 AM, with young college students home for Thanksgiving break, suggests the deadly potential of combining buggy software, buggy hardware, and marketing that emphasizes the exact opposite of reality — the unmistakable bogus elixr of mystical invulnerability in a cooked-up vision of false threats.

As Captain Chris Monahan of the Piedmont police noted, they are “looking into actions that occurred before the collision.” But beyond the specific circumstances of this crash, we must examine the broader implications of marketing military-grade protection to civilian communities. Piedmont is known for its 0% Black population demographic surrounded by communities with 30% Black residents. Does anyone really think marketing to this community wouldn’t influence how people there — particularly young people — perceive risk as a function of their race-based privilege?

The candles and handmade cards left at the accident scene tell a different story than the glossy marketing. They remind us that nobody who dons a stainless steel version of the white robe with an X is truly invincible, no burning cross is an actual safety act, and that the cost of believing such things can be devastatingly high.

As investigations continue and the Piedmont community mourns, we must consider how the white flight mindset of survivalist marketing narratives have evolved from Hoare’s era to today — and more importantly, how they might influence decisions that put lives at risk. The same racist-driven swagger that led Hoare’s “Wild Geese” to disaster has been repackaged into a consumer product, but the potential for tragedy remains. Instead of getting themselves shot-up in a firefight trusting Elon Musk’s grandfather in 1981, these kids were driven by Elon Musk straight into a tree and burned alive in 2024.

For the sake of future young lives, we must look past false narratives of mystical indestructibility – whether they come from white African technocrats, white African mercenaries, or white African manufacturers promising a trip to Mars — and recognize that true safety comes not from racist narratives of apocalyptic survival, but from building democratic institutions that allow for actual risk science, known as peaceful reform and representation.

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[1] “Cooked Goose”, Time Magazine, Monday, Aug 09, 1982 (provided here for reference from an original printed copy)

“Mad Mike” gets ten years.

During his five-month trial, Colonel Thomas Michael (“Mad Mike”) Hoare, who gained notoriety while soldiering for fortune in the Congo during the 1960s, put up a plucky front. During recesses Hoare entertained visitors with tales of his derring-do and signed copies of his swashbuckling biography, entitled Congo Mercenary. But last week the bravado was gone from the man who used to run a swaggering group of commandos in the Congo who called themselves the Wild Geese. His face ashen, Hoare, 63, slumped in his chair in a Pietermaritzburg courtroom as Judge Neville James found him and 42 fellow mercenaries guilty of airplane hijacking and sentenced Mad Mike to ten years in prison.

Hoare and his mercenary band of brothers were forced to stand trial following their bungled attempt last November to overthrow the socialist government of the Seychelles led by President Albert René. The armed mercenaries entered the Seychelles disguised as a beer-drinking tourist party, “The Ancient Order of Froth-Blowers.” Hoare’s objective was to return to power ex-President James Mancham, 49, a pro-Western leader who was deposed by René in a 1977 coup.

But the operation failed when a Mahé airport customs inspector found a weapon hidden in a Froth-Blower’s luggage. A gunfight broke out at the airport, in which one mercenary was killed and several oth ers wounded. Desperate to escape, the raiders fought their way to the control tower, guided an incoming Air India 707 to a landing and commandeered the plane. They forced the Air India pilot to fly them 2,500 miles across the Indian Ocean to Durban.

Lawyers for Hoare argued that the mercenaries had harmed no one nor demanded any ransom. Indeed, the government had initially released most of the men after their flight to South Africa, holding only Hoare and four others on the lesser charge of kidnaping, which carries no minimum sentence. But that leniency was abandoned after other nations, including the U.S., warned that South Africa could be struck from air-travel routings unless Pretoria enforced international agreements against harboring of air hijackers. The government then brought hijacking charges against all 43 of the escaped mercenaries.

Only one was declared not guilty last week: Charles William Dukes, an American veteran of Viet Nam, who was carried onto the 707 under heavy sedation after being seriously wounded during the Seychelles gunfight. He was ruled incapable of having taken part in the heist.

Throughout the trial, the Irish-born Hoare insisted that his operation had had the blessing of the South African government. “I see South Africa as the bastion of civilization in an Africa subjected to a total Communist onslaught,” he said. “I foresee myself in the forefront of this fight for our very existence.” Indeed, more than half of the convicted mercenaries had been members of either the South African Defense Force or the army reserve. There was also evidence that Soviet-made AK-47s and Chinese grenades and ammunition used by the mercenaries had been supplied by South African Defense Force officers.

Judge James declared that individuals in the National Intelligence Service and Defense Force had clearly known about the operation but, nonetheless, ruled that allegations of an official South African connection to the operation were “purely hearsay.” The day after the trial, Prime Minister P.W. Botha, who had refrained from commenting until the legal proceedings were completed, insisted that the government had not known of the affair. He charged that Hoare had approached members of the intelligence and military forces with his plan and admitted that arms and ammunition had been given to him. Botha said that “departmental action” would be taken against anyone who had cooperated with Hoare.

The colonel, who got his rank in the Congo, drew the stiffest sentence. His fellow raiders were given from six months to five years, and the judge later reduced most to six months. Hoare and his co-defendants were clearly the lucky ones. Last month four of Hoare’s soldiers of fortune who were left behind in the Seychelles were convicted of treason by René’s government. They are under sentence of death by hanging.