The USS Harry Truman collision on February 12th appeared to be just an isolated incident. Now we know it was merely the opening act.

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) was involved in a collision with the merchant vessel Besiktas-M at approximately 11:46 p.m. local time, Feb. 12, while operating in the vicinity of Port Said, Egypt, in the Mediterranean Sea.

Barely a month later, a far more devastating crash has unfolded off England’s coast—this time targeting a chartered U.S. military fuel supply line.

Just before 10 a.m. local time (6 a.m. ET), a Portuguese-flagged container ship called the Solong careered into the oil tanker, called the Stena Immaculate, which was at anchor in the North Sea about 10 miles off the English coastline, according to the ship tracking tool VesselFinder.

What demands our immediate attention: Weather reports from nearby coastal stations indicated misty conditions with limited visibility that morning, potentially making the ships’ crews even more reliant on their electronic navigation systems. The 2005-built Portuguese-flagged Solong was traveling at full cruising speed—16 knots—when it slammed broadside into the anchored Stena Immaculate. Let me be absolutely clear: such a collision at 8.23 m/s directly into the 183-meter length of a stationary high-sided oil tanker is beyond negligence—it represents a catastrophic systems-level breakdown or, more likely, deliberate external manipulation.

Following the COLREGS (International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea), the Solong would need “ample time” for avoidance, which in this case was around 12 minutes before the crash (3.2 nautical miles away). Without getting too far into the weeds Rule 5 logically requires maintaining a proper lookout by all available means, Rule 7 requires determining if risk of collision exists, and Rule 8 mandates taking action to avoid collision early enough. Rule 18 says Stena Immaculate had an absolute right of way and Solong is required to take ALL measures to avoid.

The mystery isn’t a mystery

Let’s consider the huge violations at play here.

1. Vessels are required to have continuous visual and radar watch
2. Vessels have redundant navigation systems (AIS, ECDIS, radar)
3. Vessels follow clear procedures for giving way and avoiding collisions

There’s zero ambiguity, such that a broadside crash at full speed (hitting the side of the anchored tanker) suggests serious failures across watchkeeping, navigation, and vessel control systems. This does not appear to be merely coincidental navigational failures, given the severity and scope of the multi-level system failure and a decision point so far away as to make it seem intentional.

In other words visual lookouts should have had view of a 183-meter vessel from 12-14 miles away on a clear day, without any doubt in their direct path like a huge wall blocking their plotted route. On March 10th visibility was apparently limited to two miles. STCW requirements for vessels of Solong’s size mandate a minimum of one qualified officer of the watch and a dedicated lookout at all times while underway, so this isn’t a hypothetical. Radar systems would have detected the Stena Immaculate as a clear hazard. AIS (Automatic Identification System) would have clearly shown the stationary hazard. ECDIS (Electronic Chart Display and Information System) would have clearly shown it as well.

Therefore what we are dealing with seems almost certain to be sophisticated electronic warfare defeating container ship navigation systems. Two things are particularly interesting.

First, military vessels run heightened security and navigation protocols. However, a chartered military vessel is a known giant loophole in regulations that is exploited by the U.S. military specifically to avoid high standards of safety (to lower cost of operations). Upwards of 90% of Military Sealift Command logistics depend on chartered commercial vessels.

This somewhat explains why the first attack on a Navy vessel was minor, foreshadowing more attacks, whereas the second attack targeting a chartered military vessel was catastrophic. Defense Logistics Agency’s tanker fleet operates with minimal security protocols compared to actual Navy-run combat-ready vessels, clearly resulting in a huge difference in outcomes from these two military targets.

Second, container ships like Solong are potentially staffed irregularly, maybe even illegally, and of minimum maintenance levels meaning systems often are degraded (competition degrades safety). Panama “topped the list” of worst safety practices. You can hopefully understand how the ships and their crew become soft targets riddled with vulnerabilities for sophisticated electronic warfare.

…shipowners were trying to “get away with treating seafarers like some sort of modern-day slaves”. Panama topped the list of abandonments by flag states with 23…

Ship abandonment is a huge safety problem, as signaled by the flag the Solong was flying underway. Panamanian-flagged vessels typically have 15-20% smaller crews than comparable vessels under European flags, with less stringent qualification requirements. What we’re talking about today is directly related to ship crew being in a state of degradation and even abandonment.

To be even more clear, hopefully without saying too much, any poorly-staffed ship built in 2005 also means an ECDIS running on Windows XP without patches. GPS spoofing would have meant fake signals gradually poisoning legitimate data, and navigation systems showing altered positions. For example, back when I worked with a team of military experts testing the woefully insecure Tesla designs, the car thought it was driving through the ocean instead of on land yet continued accelerating to full speed. Careful observers of this blog may remember I gave a keynote presentation in 2016 about these exact integrity breach problems of “automation”.

2016 BSidesLV Ground Truth Keynote: Great Disasters of Machine Learning

Satellite communications (SATCOM) operate out-of-date protocols vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Someone who wanted to fake election results or corrupt vote numbers might hook up a polling station to the SpaceX Starlink, as the most obvious example of this class of vulnerability. And then maritime navigation systems don’t use any integrity controls, such as package signatures, when they connect to the raw Internet for software updates… need I go on?

Perhaps you can see why as soon as I saw a 16 knot container ship broadside crash under a Panamanian flag, I got even more knots in my stomach.

The deliberate driverless crash vector

From a technologist sailor’s perspective the broadside collision in misty conditions suggests the Solong’s navigation systems were showing completely different information than reality. With visibility potentially limited to just two miles, the crew would be highly dependent on easily compromised electronic systems.

Dangerous confusion on the bridge would be enabled by underqualified or unqualified obedient crew, who chose not to override the system. Crew members probably lacked training or experience to understand how to react to discrepancies, they likely were fatigued (reduced reaction capacity), and honoring a hierarchical bridge culture (overly compliant workers) that discouraged any human challenge to automated systems.

This is not novel, but rather the past lesson from known electronic warfare tactics that exploit “automation bias” in humans who misplace trust in machines. It’s why Tesla has been killing up to 20 people a month as if that’s the new normal, versus the Ford Pinto killing around that many in its entire production run and getting labeled as unsafe at any speed.

Even when contradictory information is available, false faith in electronic data comes from a culture of outsized promotion by “automation” conmen like Elon Musk coupled with screen-addiction in a way that induces poor decision-making.

The progression from minor incident (USS Harry Truman) to catastrophic collision (Stena Immaculate) fits with how threat actors typically escalate, testing capabilities, learning from outcomes, and adjusting tactics. The fact that both targeted US military interests within a short timeframe strongly suggests deliberate action rather than coincidence.

To counter such threats would require both technical measures (signal authentication, system redundancy, electronic countermeasures) and human factors solutions (better training, revised protocols, enhanced watchkeeping). However, the economic pressures in commercial shipping work directly against implementing many of these protective measures.

This has to be China

And now for some pure speculation about China being the most likely threat. That’s right, I’m calling it out now.

• Technical capability: China has demonstrated sophisticated electronic warfare capabilities, including GPS spoofing, radar jamming, and cyber intrusions. They often hint with technology about battlefield dominance strategy.
• Target selection: A military fuel tanker specifically hit suggests understanding U.S. Navy logistics in a very symbolic way. China always been uneasy about the “long lines” of U.S. naval power projection using at-sea replenishment and global fuel supply chains.
• Signals pattern: A progression from minor test on a major warship (symbolic aircraft carrier) to a catastrophic attack on a random commercially operated logistics infrastructure fits with Chinese strategic thinking about sending a signal pattern about full capability while targeting lesser support systems rather than combat platforms.
• Maritime flex: China has been rapidly developing both conventional and asymmetric naval capabilities related to sea dominance.
• Plausible deniability: Electronic warfare attacking integrity of commercial vessel systems provides easy obfuscation and fog, making attribution nearly impossible yet also obvious, a hallmark of Chinese asymmetric psychological operations.

The focus on a container ship colliding with a military tanker is particularly telling. Military planners around the world know the underbelly of U.S. naval logistics vulnerabilities. Global reach always depended on refueling capabilities and supply chains, as I’ve written about many times before. Using a container ship to strike a military charter tanker, the hackers demonstrated they’re thinking strategically about how every container ship in operation now has to be seen as a weapon to limit U.S. naval power projection without direct confrontation.

Starting with the USS Harry Truman, the aircraft carrier that represents the pinnacle of American naval power projection, and then progressing to a logistics vessel, shows a loud and proud messaging strategy with more red flags than a Chinese military parade.

We’re looking at a bright warning flare on a calm sea against the black of a moonless night, lighting up not just technical capabilities but America’s entire strategic awareness and institutional response capacity.

Hey Trump, we can hit your crown jewels, and we can cut off your legs. Make a move on Greenland and maybe watch as we make Taiwan disappear. We could take Hawaii and Alaska while we’re at it, thanks to your doctrine of distracted degraded defense.

Who’s really asleep at the wheel here?

As defense resources and attention are completely diverted into literally ordering all hands on deck just to find the word “gay”, and censor “gender” and dismiss non-white troops… attacks against critical naval infrastructure reveal the true nature of devastating blind spots developing rapidly in American security.

Books have been pulled off the shelves at U.S. military schools around the world pending a “review” for diversity concepts and language. …among those that disappeared from the shelves of Ramstein High – Fahrenheit 451, 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye.

Imagine being a high school student at Ramstein who must now learn Chinese to read “1984” — a novel explicitly warning against totalitarian thought control — because their own American military has banned it. The devastating irony cuts deep: as Chinese hackers demonstrate the ability to crash U.S. military vessels at will, America’s defense establishment busies itself with purging literature that could help the next generation recognize and resist exactly this kind of authoritarian manipulation. This isn’t just censorship; it’s strategic self-sabotage.

It’s not an exaggeration to say the Department of Defense now operates under a headless-chicken leadership lurching from crisis to crisis, attacking its own students, troops, and veterans while simultaneously alienating allies in Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Ukraine. This self-sabotaging chaos has created the perfect opportunity for China to demonstrate its capability of neutralizing all U.S. naval power projection through precisely targeted asymmetric information warfare.

The question looms: who would even stand up for an erratic, unreliable “crazy chicken” America against these attacks on global shipping safety? Allied deterrence has evaporated. And what of nuclear deterrence? Can it possibly remain credible when delivery systems—planes, ships, and missiles—can’t navigate, can’t target, and remain vulnerable to debilitating supply-chain attacks from multiple vectors, including from within our own harbors and airports? We’ve entered an era where America’s military supremacy faces checkmate not by direct confrontation, but simply by corrupting integrity of our vulnerable information systems.

Hackers have announced a new security paradigm of devastating integrity breaches: every commercial vessel can potentially become a guided weapon against essential military targets. This multiplies the challenge for naval protection exponentially, perfectly aligned with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army “systems destruction warfare” doctrine that targets critical node vulnerabilities of support systems rather than direct engagement.

The obvious question is whether an utterly distracted President Musk can recognize and respond to this long-time emerging modern technology threat that he himself can be blamed for facilitating. At least 54 people have been killed in by his lack of integrity control in Tesla Autopilot navigation systems (that I’ve warned about since 2016), far more than even domestic terrorism.

What these two maritime incidents expose to the trained eye isn’t just a technical vulnerability—it’s the Tesla effect of strategic blindness in American “business knows best” cultism. We’ve built a military doctrine on overwhelming force projection while neglecting its fragile information architecture hidden behind a Potemkin village of technological showmanship. China isn’t demonstrating anything new to security professionals—they’re simply exploiting what we’ve known for years: integrity matters most in the navigation systems that direct every vessel, every mission, every supply line.

This is the inevitable culmination of a decade prioritizing dazzling “driverless” fantasies over fundamental safety protocols. The tragic irony: as America’s military leadership scrambles to purge words like “diversity” and “inclusion” from its vocabulary, they’re effectively dousing themselves in jet fuel while China stands ready with matches.

The writing has been on the wall for years. I’ve been pointing to it since 2016. But reading requires critical thinking—something increasingly difficult to cultivate when the DoD is literally removing books that teach it from military school shelves.

A fatal confrontation on the Vermont border has exposed how Silicon Valley’s elitist tech immorality can spiral rapidly into real-world harms to society. This isn’t about innovation – national security experts must acknowledge groups exploiting technological complexity mask straightforward domestic terrorism. The same people who brought you FTX and Musk’s teenage “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) – which purged federal experts while breaching and leaking government systems in a Khmer Rouge-style destruction of expertise are spawning predictable outcomes: from massive financial fraud and incompetent breaches of federal systems to gun-toting assassins, all are powered by the same bogus magical technology thinking.

What began in high wealth individual rationalist circles – where tech elites debated ethics, consciousness, and societal redesign between Burning Man trips – allegedly has led to at least seven dead across three states at the hands of radicalized militant technologists. This follows a pattern in history where domain shifts in technology repeatedly bring with them the threat of trojan horses with destructive aims masquerading as a gift of progress.

Maximilian. Who names their child Maximilian? Elites of the elites.

Snyder and Youngblut both attended Lakeside School, a private high school in Seattle. Snyder studied computer science at the University of Oxford, according to his LinkedIn profile, and in 2023 won $11,000 in an artificial intelligence research competition. Youngblut described herself on social media as a computer science student at the University of Washington.

They formed a group called the Zizians out of the same extremist anti-government soup that produced today’s techno-utopian billionaires. Like Elon Musk’s “DOGEan” teenagers destroying federal expertise in the false name of “efficiency” while breaching secure systems, or his dire warnings about “woke” while he soaks up government handouts, or Peter Thiel’s quest for a sprawling intelligence empire to become a secretive techno-king, they questioned society’s basic moral frameworks and why they should abide by any laws. But where the cunning dishonestly that laundered apartheid wealth enabled South African-born tech leaders to pivot such thoughts into destabilizing and capturing the entire American state, these Zizians chose instead a far more obvious and localized violent path.

[Jessica Taylor, an AI researcher who met LaSota both in person and online through the rationalist community] said Ziz adherents use the rationalist ideology as a reason to commit violence. “Stuff like, thinking it’s reasonable to avoid paying rent and defend oneself from being evicted,” she said.

Their leader, Jack Amadeus “Ziz” LaSota, openly explored what would happen if society were stripped of conventional morality. The group attracted high performing accomplished members – Big Tech engineers, Oxford-educated data scientists, competition-winning mathematicians. They first attempted to escape society via a “Rationalist Fleet”, an ill-fated tugboat scheme reminiscent of many earlier Silicon Valley attempts at autonomous zones.

Elon Musk called his fantasy world “Mars Technocracy” (to invalidate laws).

Peter Thiel called his fantasy world seasteading (to invalidate laws).

The Zizian inexperience and incompetence combined with an ill-conceived autonomous society-on-a-boat plan sank the whole thing, literally. Unlike Musk and Thiel however, they lacked an “invisible” empire that shared a particular vision of “investment” curated through growing up in apartheid South Africa. In other words, the Zizian’s have been disadvantaged in their domestic terrorism approach to unraveling the American state, as minor operators lacking Musk and Thiel’s heavy use of back-room deals for a technology-driven race war.

When the laws of physics forced a Zizian setback it only accelerated the group’s descent into more anti-law madness (e.g. how Elon Musk reframes his increasingly obvious failures at Tesla and SpaceX into investment “opportunities” for even more and larger “rapid disassembly” leading to death). Their protests against rationalist communities turned into extremist angry outbursts and confrontations (e.g. how Elon Musk throws angry Nazi salutes and angrily campaigns for AfD – Nazi party – to take control over Germany). Zizian confrontations led to individual acts of sloppy self-incriminating violence. A landlord serving an eviction for unpaid rent ended in a sword fight, a gun fight and then assassination. An elderly Pennsylvania couple was assassinated. A military veteran serving as a Border Patrol agent doing routine paperwork died in an abrupt fire-fight.

During a records check, the unidentified female passenger was removed from the vehicle for further questioning, broke free, and began shooting at the agents, the incident report shows. After the female suspect was hit by return fire, Bauckholt emerged from the vehicle and also began firing on the agents. He sustained gunshot wounds and was pronounced dead.

This Vermont tragedy at the border has been generating the most news of all because the German “wiz” mathematician Ophelia Bauckholt and Teresa Youngblut had wrapped cellphones in foil while wearing tactical gear garnished by open carry guns. It exemplifies how child-like fascination with technical sophistication as a form of privileged power feeds into anti-government technologist madness.

Authorities who searched the car found a ballistic helmet, night-vision goggles, respirators and ammunition, the FBI said. They also found two-way radios and used shooting range targets.

The fetish of fast in guns, encryption protocols and cryptocurrency operations reflected the mindset as DOGEans who breached federal systems, and the billion-dollar crypto frauds, as the same pseudo-super-society-hacker fantasy expressed through different tools. Their sloppy tradecraft and tactical mistakes repeatedly reveal what happens when technological magical thinking meets physical reality.

The pattern is an inevitable outcome of Silicon Valley’s tendency to view society as a system to be hacked and disabled – from DOGEans purging government expertise like digital Khmer Rouge to Zizians taking up arms – whether through market manipulation or direct violence. When young privilege-driven technical minds untether from conventional morality, the results can be deadly. The same drive to disrupt and rebuild, which creates billion-dollar frauds who capture federal politicians to destroy federal aid, also can turn into targeted murder and stoke local chaos.

Remember the Rajneeshees? They at least needed a physical compound. These new tech cult killers are more dangerous – they’re nomadic, using technology as their virtual compound, armed with both Python and pistols, treating America like their personal hackathon project gone catastrophically wrong. The same mindset that leads some to build racist digital empires to destroy lives at the national-level leads others to pull physical triggers in a pointless assassination.

Zizian investigations at the local level continue across jurisdictions, while DOGE’s teenage destructive force gets away with systematically dismantling federal expertise. Four Zizian group members sit in custody on murder charges. Three remain at large, including LaSota. The broader question remains: how many other groups are following similar philosophical paths toward anti-government violence?

The real horror isn’t just the body count – it’s how this fits a pattern. From DOGE’s teenage purge of government expertise to cryptocurrency schemes that vaporize retirement savings, Silicon Valley’s rationalist communities keep “exploring how to rebuild society’s ethical frameworks.” Most channel these ideas into lossy startups and wacky manifestos that drain investors. But as the Zizian bloodshed shows, some experiments in moral philosophy end not just in huge stock fraud but in body counts.

Next time your local teenage tech billionaire talks about redesigning society’s moral framework, remember: whether through market manipulation or direct violence, it’s really about insecure kids of privilege using technology as their magical shield against accountability, leading inevitably to violence against society – sometimes financial, sometimes physical, always destructive terrorism.

Technological innovations can easily mask dual purposes: the printing press enabled both enlightenment and racist propaganda, gunpowder birthed both festive fireworks and modern warfare, and machine guns sold as tools of colonial control using automation became instruments of mass trench death in WWI and a genocidal Holocaust. What’s marketed as progress often conceals potential for accelerated destruction where left unchecked.

Related: OpenAI CEO Altman Announces End of Civil Society in Stargate AI Plan

The Navy is reporting a 190ft bulk carrier ship built in 2003, the BESIKTAS-M operating under a Panamanian flag, has collided with the American flagship aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman.

The Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) was involved in a collision with the merchant vessel Besiktas-M at approximately 11:46 p.m. local time, Feb. 12, while operating in the vicinity of Port Said, Egypt, in the Mediterranean Sea.

Currently the report reads that the Truman’s nuclear power plants were unaffected, with no injuries or flooding. Questions surround how and why the BESIKTAS-M failed its navigational requirements.