Looting vulnerable populations and laundering their assets through institutional prestige has a long, documented history.

Look at how Prussia strip-mined the Ottoman territory and built their Pergamon museum around the loot. Look at how the Nazis then systematized that art theft across occupied Europe. The hunt for all the stolen works continues eight decades later.

Don’t look too hard in the estates around the Wannsee.

Powerful actors extract cultural wealth from people in crisis, then use institutional credibility to convert stolen goods into legitimate collections.

Enter Epstein.

Leon Black paid a convicted sex trafficker over $150 million for “financial advice” on looting. That trafficker’s files contain an inventory of Black’s $27.7 million collection of Southeast Asian antiquities, which happen to be objects extracted from Cambodian sites during conflicts that killed roughly two million people.

The supply chain for these objects runs through mass violence, displacement, and exploitation of vulnerable populations.

It brings to light Douglas Latchford’s network, which depended on local labor operating under coercion or desperation in conflict zones to loot these sites. Trafficking in looted cultural property produced by conditions indistinguishable from trafficking in persons. Latchford published one of Black’s pieces in a book, corresponded about selling bronzes to Black, and when an Australian museum canceled a purchase over insufficient provenance, redirected the same piece toward Black. He was indicted for fraud and conspiracy in trafficking Cambodian artifacts. His family returned the collection to Cambodia. The Metropolitan Museum returned 14 sculptures. The US government returned 30 objects.

Black still has his, somehow.

Epstein’s files contain the inventory of these looted acquisitions. I mean Epstein had operational visibility into Black’s holdings. The same Epstein whose own operation depended on exploiting vulnerable people. The financial plumbing connects both trafficking streams together. The wealth extracted through cultural looting in conflict zones, is managed by an operation funded through sexual exploitation.

Black’s spokesperson offers the standard laundering fallacy: looting was done “through a well-regarded and highly reputable art dealer.”

Yeah, we get it. Trump and Epstein were well-regarded. Latchford was reputable too right up until his indictment. An Australian museum canceling a purchase for insufficient provenance, followed by Latchford redirecting that piece to Black, shows conscious avoidance that normally triggers trafficking statutes.

The “reputation” defense works the same in every laundering operation from 1880s Berlin to 1940s Paris to 2013 New York. Buy through a middleman to claim distance from the act. Hire a hit man to say you didn’t do the hit.

Black “cooperated” with a DOJ inquiry five years ago. And then? Somehow he remains a MoMA trustee, a known Epstein associate who now shows up flaunting the files.

…art insiders were wide-eyed to see Black, as well as fellow Epstein pal Glenn Dubin, stride into a private party, apparently hosted by the [MoMA] institution itself…. Black…stepped down as chairman of the museum in 2021 after protest from artists and workers over his connections to Epstein. On Tuesday, a rep for Black told us, “Mr. Black was proud to be at the dinner….” Both Black and Dubin have galleries in MoMA named after them.

The Nazis looted art and trafficked underage girls, building their white man’s empire atop mass suffering. The Epstein network does the same. Black represents how an institutional playbook for elites converts mass atrocity into cultural capital even today.

The most important detail in the Financial Times’ investigation of Ukraine’s front lines isn’t the kill zone, the fiber-optic drones, or the soldiers trapped for 165 days without rotation. It’s the fishing nets.

French and Swedish fishing nets, suspended over roads, hospitals, and critical infrastructure in Kherson, are intercepting 95% of incoming Russian drones. Up from 80% last May. Not with radar-guided missiles, not with electronic warfare, not with AI-powered counter-drone systems. Nets. The oldest barrier technology in human history is defeating precision-guided munitions at a cost ratio that inverts everything the defense industry has been selling for decades.

Simple Economics as Strategy

An FPV drone costs a few hundred dollars. A fiber-optic variant under $1000. Russia produces them by the million. And soon they’ll be 3D printed by field teams themselves. The standard counter-drone response of jamming, directed energy, and kinetic intercept costs orders of magnitude more per engagement than the drone itself. That’s an attacker’s economy. The defender bleeds money and time faster than the attacker spends it.

Fishing nets flip the ratio back. The cost per meter of industrial netting is trivial. Once installed, it works continuously with zero per-engagement cost. No operator, no ammunition, no power supply. A drone hits the net, tangles, detonates harmlessly or falls. The net gets repaired or replaced for almost nothing. The attacker has to keep spending thousands per attempt against a barrier that costs pennies per interception.

That’s an economic advantage that’s sustainable.

Who Built It First

Kherson has been the laboratory. The city’s population dropped from 250,000 to 60,000 under relentless Russian drone strikes, with over 9,500 attacks on civilians by December 2024. Governor Prokudin responded with what he calls a “drone dome”: layered netting over critical routes and buildings, combined with EW systems, sensors, and civilians trained with shotguns. In some districts the sky is barely visible through the mesh.

The FT describes the same approach spreading across the front. Thousands of kilometers of nets now form tunnels over main highways, stopping suicide FPV drones from diving at vehicles. The Pentagon recently issued guidance recommending nets, barriers, and camouflage as low-cost physical defenses against small drones. Taiwan is building its T-Dome program directly from Kherson’s experience.

Nets Answer the Drone Zone Question

Last November I wrote about Ukraine’s quartermaster problem in Pokrovsk — the 20km death zone where centralized linear logistics had become suicidal under persistent drone interdiction. The FT’s kill zone report confirms that condition now covers the entire front. Two soldiers held position near Orikhiv for 165 days, thirty relief attempts failed, fog saved them. Supplies move by cargo drone and UGV. Troops crawl under thermal cloaks for days.

I compared the problem to Grant’s quartermaster insight: you don’t counter interdiction with better tactics, you build a supply architecture more resilient than the enemy’s ability to disrupt it. Multiple independent routes, pre-positioned caches, expendable logistics with losses built into planning ratios.

Nets are one such logistics architecture. Cover the supply routes with physical barriers, and the kill zone starts to shrink. Vehicles can move under netting. Positions can be resupplied. The 30 failed relief attempts become possible when the approach route is physically shielded. The engineering problem I described, to sustain forces inside a drone-saturated environment, has an inexpensive answer.

Machine Guns and Barbed Wire

The defense establishment keeps comparing drones to the tank of 1916 as if a new offensive capability awaiting doctrinal innovation. That’s backwards. Drones are the machine gun. They destroyed the old paradigm of conventional movement.

The kill zone is no man’s land. And nets are barbed wire’s inversion.

In WWI, barbed wire made from surplus telegraph supplies was cheap passive defense that made the kill zone lethal for attackers. Nets are cheap passive defense that makes the kill zone survivable for defenders. Same principle. Physical barriers that cost almost nothing defeat expensive offensive systems, by working in the opposite direction. Wire aided the machine guns. Nets defeat the drones.

The 40km fiber-optic cables, the dynamic mining, the electronic warfare stalemate — all of that is real and accelerating. But the counter already exists. It’s sitting in declining or dormant fishing ports. Defense spending could revive coastal economies instead of enriching bumbling contractors.

The question is whether militaries will scale it as infrastructure or keep chasing expensive technological and ideological unicorns while soldiers crawl through the mud under thermal blankets.

General Grant would have ordered net production over six months ago.

Sitting on my desk is a ship in a bottle my father gave me, made by Bill Donovan. When I look at the tiny masts, their delicate rigging, above the blue painted waves, I’m reminded how the precise qualities of an operator used to be measured.

And then I look over at Seth Harp’s book.

He explains Special Operations missions in the GWOT as:

…covertly liquidating the male population base of recalcitrant ethnic and tribal groups that resist U.S. military occupation.

Ouch.

The book gets reviewed plainly by some as an emerging revelation about how badly things turned out under Bush. The far more important exposure actually needs to be about what’s developing post-GWOT.

SOF operators increasingly hint towards decoupled regional commands, district-style zones of interest, an end to the global sharing frameworks that defined twenty years of allied operations. Everyone points to the Delta operation in Venezuela using narrow cartel designations as proof the model works without foundational coalition architecture.

This is regressive doctrine dressed as adaptation. It’s like how people invoke Monroe as cover for the exact opposite doctrine. I mean, look at what “special” has meant and what operators increasingly want it to mean next.

Tailored and Relative Defense

The original Special Forces mission that we study, such as Bank, the OSS lineage, and de oppresso liber all defined “special” as being tight and tailored. Small teams shaped to specific cultural contexts, building indigenous defensive capability relative to local threats. The operator learned the language, lived in the village, measured success by what the partner force could do after Americans left. The 12-man ODA existed to enable durable local resilience. Medic as community entry point, intelligence sergeant building networks through relationships, team sergeant as institutional memory.

“Special” meant fit to context and oriented toward defense that enabled populations to protect themselves. Force multiplication structure, training, selection all followed from this. The screens were for cultural adaptability, communication aptitude, comfort with ambiguity, patience measured in years.

Universal and Industrialized Offense

GWOT flushed all that away with a rush to produce body tags. McChrystal’s F3EAD cycle (Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, Disseminate) redefined “special” as universal champions of death tolls. One kill chain applied anywhere and everywhere. Track a target, kill him and every military-age male nearby, seize documents, generate more names, repeat again hours later. Speed through targets, shoot first, and only ask questions so you can start shooting again. The same process in Anbar, Helmand, Mogadishu, the Sahel. Context didn’t exist beyond the shape of the kill zones. Cultural knowledge didn’t matter beyond the direction the door kicked in. The machine was industrialized offense, optimized for speed and volume of kills on a full sprint.

This required total information access across allied networks and worked because Five Eyes plus NATO SOF plus partner nations operated as a single organism with shared targeting databases. The global architecture made universal application possible.

It also inverted de oppresso liber completely. Indigenous partners became consumable inputs to the targeting machine. Afghan commandos serviced American kill lists. A force designed to enable tailored local defense was reoptimized into universal industrial offense that depopulated resistance. And the more the thoughtless machinery depopulated areas, the higher the percentage of resistance. Just like Vietnam. Go figure.

Decoupled and Unleashed

The operators calling for regional decoupling lately think they are wisely preparing for a world where the U.S. no longer has authority. Turkey running SOF against the American-trained forces in Syria. France pushed out of the Sahel by Wagner. Gulf states with SOF relationships that bypass JSOC. The global sharing framework broke when Hegseth used it for war crimes in the Caribbean, so formalize it.

What they actually propose is a third model worse than either predecessor. Not tailored defense. Not even universal offense with its coalition constraints. It’s a decoupled offense of regional fiefdoms operating under their own legal authority, political cover, and information control, answerable to whoever holds the designation authority in their district.

“Special” stops meaning tailored or even universal. It means unleashed, above the law because loyal to the directed mission only. A force pointed at whatever target the political sponsor designates, with no doctrinal requirement to build anything, no allied framework providing oversight, and no cooperative architecture satisfying the SOF truths that most special operations require non-SOF assistance.

The GWOT model, for all the horrors that Harp documents in his book, at least maintained the structural possibility of allied pushback. Partners who share a common operational picture can object. Decoupled districts eliminate that. Each zone operates in its own information silo, like Chad or Guatemala under Reagan. Nobody outside sees the full picture until criminal tribunals investigate decades later.

De oppresso liber is a trust doctrine.

Populations considering partnership with American SOF watched what happened to the Montagnards, the Kurds, the Hmong, the Afghans. The institutional record is politically conditional treatment. Decoupled regional commands with rotating political sponsorship will only make that worse. What serious opposition figure in Venezuela or anywhere else will invest in a relationship with a force that has no doctrinal commitment to their survival and no allied framework holding it accountable?

Tailored relative defense built things that lasted. Universal industrialized offense destroyed them. The new trend towards decoupled and unleashed doesn’t even pretend to try.