Today’s CNN report about suicidal North Korean soldiers in Ukraine should terrify anyone who understands institutional collapse.

I’ve spent decades studying how societies descend into authoritarianism and as a security professional, I’m watching patterns that I know all too well emerge at unprecedented speed in American institutions.

Consider what we’re seeing in Ukraine: young North Korean soldiers carrying handwritten loyalty pledges, documenting each other’s “disloyalty,” removing protective gear to prove dedication, and detonating grenades rather than being captured.

These aren’t just tactical choices – they’re the end result of a system that values loyalty to false prophets above all else, including human life.

Now look at what’s happening in American federal institutions. The Office of Personnel Management is installing new centralized communication systems that shatter decades of security protocols. Career civil servants are being illegally replaced by startlingly young loyalists. Traditional agency independence is being deliberately dismantled.

These parallels aren’t subtle to an expert in authoritarian dangers.

Here’s what makes this moment uniquely dangerous, requiring additional expertise in cybersecurity: technology is accelerating institutional collapse beyond anything we’ve seen in history.

When Mao deployed Red Guards, when Stalin conducted his purges, when the Shah’s SAVAK began its campaigns – these transformations took years. Today, a centralized email system can expose every federal employee to loyalty tests instantly. Social media can identify and target “disloyal” staff within hours by running a single query statement like “DEI”. A teenager with an assault rifle can be placed in charge of critical systems with a single administrative decision.

By the time most people recognize automation of decline and destruction, the professional expertise needed to prevent catastrophic steps – like a button-click to end hundreds of thousands of lives – already may be done and unrecoverable.

When Twitter’s $44B purchase led to 80% value destruction, pundits laughed at Elon Musk as incompetent and cruel. They missed his actual intentions dog-whistled by him for years.

Hitler’s 1933 ‘Volksempfänger’ program was giving away radios at a 75% loss to destroy democracy and replace it with Nazi adherents. Both sacrificed billions to gain control of communication infrastructure, celebrating deceptive and illegal “exit package” tactics meant to accelerate end of freedom.

Seemingly “bad business” decisions of massive devaluation and loss make perfect sense when viewed as evil charity – tools for rapid institutional control and cult-like loyalty enforcement rather than profit-seeking ventures. The toxic exit packages are institutional suicide pills, similar to how Hitler’s “Night of Long Knives” eliminated opposition through emphasis on rapid “exits.”

The new appointees – averaging 29 years old compared to the typical 52 – are specifically being selected to lack the knowledge that would recognize catastrophic risks someone wants them to make… again (e.g. MAGA). When a 26-year-old was placed in charge of nuclear command protocols they didn’t understand how keeping authentication systems separate from general communications networks is critical to safety – literally the most famous catastrophic design flaw in all hacker history (e.g. 1983 NORAD near-miss and the infamous 2600 phreakers).

The patterns are clear: when loyalty becomes the only metric that matters, when youth are elevated specifically because they lack the judgment to resist, when technology enables instant implementation of control systems – you’re watching the death of professional judgment and institutional knowledge in real time.

Some will say this analysis is alarmist. They’ll say American institutions are resilient. They’ll say we’ve survived previous challenges. But they’re missing how technology has changed the game. The speed of institutional collapse in the digital age isn’t even comparable to historical examples that were measured in months and years. We don’t have the luxury of analog and physical warning signs.

The North Korean soldiers show us exactly where America is headed at warp speed because, unlike their 1980s view of the world, we are throwing $500 Billion at AI “end of society” announcements: young people primed to throw away lives based on loyalty tests alone, unable to adapt or think independently, following long-outdated patterns even as they die.

The time to recognize deadly devotion to loyalty over competence, to recognize the prioritization of control over effectiveness, is before it becomes irreversible. History is clear on this point: once institutional knowledge is purged, once professional judgment to protect lives is replaced by suicidal loyalty tests, once the young and inexperienced are given authority specifically because they lack the context to resist – the rushed slide into full institutional collapse becomes nearly impossible to stop. Even physical coercion becomes digital:

[Czechoslovakian] President Hácha was in such a state of exhaustion that he more than once needed medical attention from the [Nazi] doctors, who, by the way, had been there ready for service since the beginning of the interview. […] At 4:30 in the morning, Dr. Hacha, in a state of total collapse, and kept going only by means of injections, resigned himself with death in his soul to give his signature [for Hitler to seize power and invade].

We need to name what we’re seeing. This isn’t normal administrative change. This isn’t partisan politics as usual. This is the deliberate installation of North Korean-style loyalty systems in American institutions, accelerated by technology to a speed we’ve never seen before in human history.

The question isn’t why Trump regularly praises authoritarian leaders including North Koreans and what he would do to be like them – history has answered such questions too many times to count. The question is whether enough people recognize it right here and right now to prevent America’s institutions from following North Korea’s path towards youth rushing to blow themselves up and take down democracy, just to prove their absolute loyalty to Musk and his assistant Trump.

The history of warfare teaches us one lesson repeatedly: fixed defenses fail catastrophically if they can’t address mobility of opponents. If you thought “build a wall” ended in corrupt failure (it did) here we are in 2025 watching the same characters prepare to pour $500 billion into the “gate” – a massive fixed AI infrastructure project that manages to ignore virtually every lesson from both military history and information security.

The Digital Fortress Fallacy

As someone who has spent many decades analyzing technological risk while immersed in global information warfare, I can state unequivocally: Stargate represents the single largest strategic miscalculation in the history of warfare technology. It’s not just a mistake – it’s a mistake of such magnitude that future military historians will likely use it as a canonical example of strategic myopia.

The parallels with historical blunders are not just striking – they’re identical in their fundamental misunderstanding of how advantage is gained and lost in technological warfare:

• The Maginot Line cost France 3 billion francs and the illusion of security
• British battleship programs consumed vast resources just as naval warfare was being revolutionized by carriers
• Soviet heavy armor investments in Afghanistan were rendered obsolete by mobile insurgents with Stinger missiles
• Libyan armored divisions were humiliated by Chadian forces in Toyota pickups

Going backwards in time has been a hallmark of Trump, so I must ask whether suddenly driving to make these same old mistakes, at a scale that dwarfs all previous examples combined, is really what Stargate represents.

This certainly would be worse than the “build a wall” rhetoric of fraud that self-defeatingly redirected American security staff away from critical airports and seaports to stand in the empty desert wondering where all their money went.

Bannon never faced federal charges because he was pardoned by then-President Trump on Trump’s final night in office during his first term. The pardon only applied to the federal case and did not preclude state charges. Bannon had told donors to the We Build the Wall campaign that their money would 100% go toward building a wall along the U.S. southern border, while prosecutors say some of the $15 million in donations was secretly funneled to himself and the campaign’s president, Brian Kolfage.

That scam wall is bascially set to repeat as a gate with 33x the scale of losses (from $15M to $500B).

Realities of Open Source Warfare

The recent DeepSeek developments out of China have abruptly exposed the obvious and fundamental flaws in Stargate’s dubious conception. Timing of the announcement is notable. A reported ability to achieve competitive AI performance at a fraction of the cost isn’t an anomaly – it’s the expected outcome of open source warfare principles that have governed technological conflict for centuries. And it means Trump already is creating catastrophic weakness.

When analysts like Gavin Baker try to dismiss DeepSeek’s $6M achievement by pointing to “prior research costs,” they’re making the same deadly mistake military planners make when they focus on R&D budgets instead of deployment effectiveness. Baker argues this cost “excludes prior research” and required “hundreds of millions in prior research” – as if that somehow diminishes the achievement. The Nazis claimed a lowly graduate student alone invented their jet engine when everyone knows German spies stole it from Cambridge, England. Today’s analysts are making the same mistake, pretending DeepSeek’s achievements don’t count because they built on existing research.

Imagine sitting in London as the V-1 falls, arguing “but Hitler didn’t account for prior research costs”. This is exactly equivalent to claiming the Mujahideen’s effectiveness against Soviet helicopters should be discounted because they didn’t invent the shoulder-mounted rocket launcher or account properly for R&D budgets.

In warfare – whether physical or digital – what matters is effective deployment, derivation and adaptation, not who paid for the original art.

Historical Precedent is Asymmetric Victory

Let’s be explicitly clear about what history teaches us:

• Mission 101 (Ethiopia, 1940): at most 20,000 irregular troops utterly routed hundreds of thousands (~300K) Italian fascist forces through clever mobility and tactical adaptation
• The Toyota War (Chad, 1987): Pickup trucks and rocket launchers decimated Soviet-supplied armor columns
• Ukrainian Drone and Bike Warfare (2022-present): Consumer drones and motorbikes with adaptable tactics render Russian billion-dollar air, land and water defense systems largely irrelevant

Each of these examples demonstrates how agile forces using adapted technology consistently defeat massive fixed investments. And that’s before we account for the scale of corruption fraud expected from Trump. The Stargate project ignores the whole history of warfare lessons at a scale that beggars belief.

Don’t get me started on knights in armor sinking into the mud of 1415 Agincourt or how Napoleon’s Navy repeatedly was a sitting duck of disasterous miscalculations while Nelson literally ran circles of fire around them.

Digital War Veteran Reality Check

From an information security perspective, Stargate represents everything we know doesn’t work in cyber defense. Concentrating resources in massive overpriced fixed infrastructure of our grandparents’ fears creates:

1. Single points of failure
2. High-value targets
3. Reduced adaptability
4. Resource drain from more effective defensive measures

It’s as if we’re building the world’s most expensive castle while our opponents are already fielding artillery. It’s like celebrating WWI veteran and politician Maginot building a concrete line from his past while opponents simply launch radio directed fast attack planes and tanks of WWII. How hard is Putin laughing at Stargate right now?

Strategic Cost of Watergate Stargate

Stargate isn’t just replicating the strategic errors of fixed fortifications – it’s potentially worse because it represents the privatization of core national security compute infrastructure. We’ve seen how this story ends before with military contractors: the taxpayer gets the bill, the private entity gets the profit, and the actual security capabilities often end up compromised. Imagine if the NSA had outsourced its core computing infrastructure to a private contractor in the 1960s – that’s effectively what we’re contemplating here, but at a far larger scale and with far higher stakes. The lesson from France in the crucial years just before WWII is that every dollar poured into a digital Maginot Line is a dollar not spent on:

• Distributed AI development capabilities
• Asymmetric technological advantages
• Adaptive defense systems
• Actual technological innovation

Ask a Historian or Lose

History’s judgment of fixed fortification strategies is universally harsh. Maginot’s Line, Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, Israel’s Bar Lev Line, Israel’s Gaza Wall, South Korea’s DMZ… and countless other massive fixed defenses share one common feature: they have failed spectacularly when overconfident and unable to address asymmetric mobility. Stargate appears poised to join this list, but at a scale that would make even the most wasteful military planners of the past blush.

The truly tragic aspect of the Stargate project is that we know better in the same way that tying our shoe laces is better than tripping over them. Once you know, you know.

American special forces have demonstrated daily how distributed, adaptive approaches work. Our cyber warfare units understand the superiority of mobile defense. Our best military historians and technologists have documented these lessons repeatedly.

Yet here we are, like Teapot Dome never happened (another case of private interests corrupting national resources)…preparing to build the most expensive fixed fortification in human history. Not just concrete and steel this time, but centralized chips and software. The lessons of history could not be clearer: this way lies disaster.

Do I know whether Stargate will fail at stated objectives? Did ChoicePoint get breached? When we privatized and centralized critical data processing infrastructure without diligence or regulation, it led to catastrophic security failures. History gives us that answer with crystal clarity. The real question is how much damage this strategic misallocation of resources will do to American technological competitiveness before reality forces a course correction.

Palantir sued the U.S. Army to Force itself in and then promised as a monopoly on intelligence it would find terrorists. Instead it created them and destroyed any chance of peace and stability (a darling of Wall Street bulls known as “self licking ISIS-cream cone”). Stargate could unleash an even bigger stock pumping bullsh*t avalanche destroying society as we know it.

Past is prologue. Look at my record since 1995: history is the best predictor. When faced with Nazi Germany’s overwhelming conventional superiority, many “realists” urged Churchill to negotiate from a position of weakness. They saw only the massive fixed infrastructure of German power – the tanks, the planes, the divisions. But Churchill understood something deeper about asymmetric warfare that applies perfectly to today’s AI arms race:

Churchill’s brutal response – “I am ashamed of you” – came from understanding that apparent power imbalances can be overcome through unconventional approaches. He knew that Britain’s real strength lay not in matching German industrial might tank-for-tank, but in mobility, adaptation, and unconventional warfare. Today’s architects of Stargate are making the same mistake as Churchill’s doubters – assuming that massive fixed infrastructure (digital rather than industrial) is the path to security.

Stargate at first blush sounds like the worst boondoggle, even worse than the fragile Cybertruck, gifting future historians the ultimate example of how not to approach technological warfare in the information age.

Unfortunately, that huge sucking sound seems to be $500 billion of taxpayer money being flushed, along with America’s technological leadership position. The people who couldn’t build a wall without it falling down, while they stuffed its budget into their pockets, are back with an even bigger fraud.

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As if to prove the main point here deeper, OpenAI just announced ChatGPT Gov – another massive centralization of government AI infrastructure into fixed, high-value targets. They’re proudly announcing 18 million messages from government agencies flowing through their system, as if concentrating sensitive government communications in private hands while deregulating safety was something to celebrate rather than a huge strategic vulnerability.

The poor, poor souls who fall victim to the advance fee fraud (AFF) known as Tesla regularly show up in social media very angry they didn’t realize the scam sooner.

Advance fee fraud is when [Elon Musk] targets victims to make advance or upfront payments for goods, services and/or financial gains that do not materialize

As an expert in decoding “African” email scams, often known as 419 email, I can say that Tesla ranks as the worst of them all by racking up unprecedented economic damage. Insurance companies signal this truth by immediately valuing a Tesla at less than half its asking price – totaling vehicles at the mere sight of a scratch.

One brave soul recently shared their complete fraud victim story, detailing how they fell into the trap of artificial demand buzz generated by Musk’s marketing machine. They paid $50,000 over asking price after years of waiting, only to receive a vehicle that fails to achieve even baseline capabilities – the definition of advance fee fraud.

Side-swiped by a scooter? Look at that damage.

Not only did Musk defraud buyers on basic vehicle capabilities, he clearly overstated everything like a typical advance fee scam. A tiny little scooter bumps into a new Tesla and the whole thing is “totaled”! $100K gets evaporated in an instant by anyone believing they paid Elon Musk a premium for something he personally engineered to handle their basic road conditions, let alone the apocalypse.

The Cybertruck exemplifies the fraud perfectly – for years the Tesla CEO generated buzz using the end-times fear tactics rooted in his family’s white nationalist empire of apartheid South Africa.

“[Elon’s mother and family] came to South Africa from Canada because they sympathised with the Afrikaner government. They used to support Hitler and all that sort of stuff.”

Like his ideological predecessors, racist “support Hitler” teachings from his grandfather and mother, Musk’s unfounded beliefs and empty promises can be expected to collapse when confronted with simple reality.

It is impossible to avoid seeing how this heavily promoted ‘go anywhere tackle anything’ campaign invoking his white supremacist visions of domination produced instead an overpriced dumpster that instantly succumbs to scooters and rain drops. In this we see history repeating itself. From Hitler’s swastikas to Musk’s swasticars, the cascading failures of Nazi fraud remain unchanged.

75 percent of the German Army relied on horses for transport. Horses played a role in every German campaign, from the blitzkrieg in Poland in 1939 and the invasion of Russia to France in 1944. …the notion of the mechanized might of the German Wehrmacht was largely a glamorized myth born in the fertile brains of newspapermen.

No wonder Musk bought a social media platform to spread glamorized myths of deep swastika thought, as depicted in 2023 by the famous artist Ai Wei Wei.

And just like Hitler refused to admit, which Musk clearly refuses to admit too, all the horse power in the world doesn’t mean much when they die instantly from… weather.

The Cybertruck demonstrates what happens when fraud meets reality, and I mean the most basic things like a bump, scrape or atmosphere. Nazis either steal viable ideas from others, disposing of the inventors quickly to hide the evidence, or they target and seduce non-expert believers into unsustainable fantasy death-traps while deflecting all blame.

The Nazis in public used to not say the obvious Heil Hitler out loud, or give their obvious Hitler salute, because that would be far too obvious. Instead they stick a “88” everywhere to represent the 8th alphabet letters H-eil and H-itler. So clever, who could ever detect these genius Nazis hiding in plain sight?

Fast forward to Cybertrucks dying everywhere and guess who is emboldened by such failure…

Anyone surviving the massive Tesla fraud rooted in pathetic anti-science Nazism can say after losing hundreds of thousands of dollars (that they’ll never get back because Elon Musk apparently lives above the law) they’re at least still alive to warn others before more fall victim to one man’s elaborate swasticar scams.