A college friend teaches at the Naval War College. Most of these "Pentagon planned for X" stories are breathless reporting on some scenario put together by a low-level officer as a training exercise. Often some component is something "hot" in the culture at the moment to make the training exercise more compelling for trainees. This is also why there was, for example, pentagon "plans" for a zombie apocalypse, etc.
Was about to comment with the same, the military creates all sorts of plans for all sorts of scenarios, even completely implausible ones. In the 1930s for instance, the US had an actual war plan for an invasion of Canada (War Plan Crimson, as a part of War Plan Red which was a general war with the UK) and Mexico (War Plan Green)! These plans were made not because we really had any intention of invading Canada or Mexico, but because it gave our military planners something new to work on. And as a part of this they could come up with new ideas or theories that could be applied to more likely threats, and this planning is a good way to help train officers and sharpen minds for strategic thought
Additionally, I would rather they war game and plan for extremely implausible scenarios, than have them not bother because of course, those scenarios could never happen. ISTM that the things that could never possibly happen are the ones that bite you in the ass when they eventually do, because you were unprepared for that impossibility.
This applies to businesses too, not just the armed forces. Here in the US, I'd bet you many businesses, even those that have some measure of emergency disaster preparedness, had not made any plans around a plague disrupting their China-originated supply lines, much less that same plague hitting this continent. But some had. I can't find the link ATM, but a month or so ago, there was an article here on HN, about how a grocery chain in Texas had managed to keep their stores stocked and their supply chains running, in part because they had gamed out a pandemic scenario and made plans accordingly. Some businesses in my have area managed to become (more-fully) operational sooner than others as local COVID-related restrictions have been eased. And others are still completely shut down, even though they could start operating partially again under the current restrictions. Dollars to donuts, I'll bet the many of former had gamed out pandemic or similar scenarios, and planned accordingly, while many of the latter had not.
> These plans were made not because we really had any intention of invading Canada or Mexico
To be fair, Americans and/or pro-US Texans and/or pro-US “filibusters” fought wars in and opposite one or another Mexican regime (sometimes alongside a competing Mexican regime, as in a war between the Mexican Republic and the Empire of Mexico) in the 1810s, 1820s, 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, 1860s, 1900s, and 1910s.
So, having military contingency plans for invading Mexico in the 1930s wasn't unreasonable, and not just as some kind of abstract exercise.
That's true, a US-Mexican war in that era wasn't nearly as far-fetched as an invasion of Canada. A better example would have been War Plan Gold, which involved war with France
While it had been over a century since our last attempt to invade Canada by then, there has always been a certain flavor of American in love with the idea of continuing the doctrine of Manifest Destiny until the entire continent has been conquered.
(Those snooty Australians lording their continent over us, we'll show them.)
I hope there are even more of them now. It would be pretty cool to read about a contingency plan for an insurgency against a Klingon or Cylon occupation of the earth. That would be an interesting scenario.
Think about it, would it be better for the US military (not to mention the world) to spend it's money on training simulations to improve officer quality, or actual drones and bombs being used in actual wars? Scenario 1, IMHO, is much better for humanity.
There are likely more now than there were in the 1930s. The US officer corps has expanded greatly since then, and computers and better information likely makes creating war plans much easier. Planning a campaign is much easier when you have a database containing a topographical map of the entire planet and the suspected arsenal and troop distributions of every nation, instead of having to dig deep through archives for the right atlas and hoping a military mapmaker has happened across that beach before. Fun fact: the Allied forces lacked military maps of the beaches of Northern France, so had to enlist civilians to send them copies of any vacation photos they happened to take there, and tried to re-assemble them to figure out which beaches they could land at.
EDIT: In terms of war plans the pentagon most likely has, there's the obvious war plans against North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran. I'd expect there to be several variations of each of those: like one for rebuffing a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, another for a naval conflict in the South China sea, the North Korean war plans probably have different variants depending on whether or not China supports North Korea, etc. Probably some for interventions in various world hot spots: Syria, Libya, Ukraine, Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, Sudan, the DRC, maybe the Gaza strip. And those plans would likely also have several variations based on the scale, from a couple special forces operations and an airstrike to a few peacekeeping troops to a full invasion involving multiple carrier groups and multiple divisions. In terms of far-fetched ones, I'd expect at least one preparing involving the breakup of NATO, like two NATO members going to war. One case where it's a NATO member attacking the US, another where two other NATO states go to war and the US tries to negotiate a peace, and maybe one where it's an all out civil war where each NATO member picks a side. Invasion plans for any of the US allies where the relationship is complicated or strained: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Turkey off the top of my head. Oh, and invasion plans for anywhere that control major sea lanes: Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Panama, Egypt
Every new generation of officers to come out of the military colleges writes a few new ones. Nobody is born being good at planning, you have to practice.
The Pentagon had a plan for the invasion of Iraq that was loosely followed. The State department did not however, leasing to the mess predicted by the Pentagon's plan. Additionally, limited information is available about several North Korea plans.
Canada and Mexico may still have some plans, but the US's primary strategy is just to ensure an anti-US regime can never get power. So more the CIA's area.
Reminds me of a story that made it onto HN some months (years maybe? how time flies) back about an entrance exam prompt to some British university program requiring the candidate to craft a message defending some unsavory deed on the part of the UK government. That kind of "gaming" is super-common and very valuable in (for example) political science circles, so wasn't, per se, a bit weird or bad or even unusual, but was made to seem so for a headline.
[EDIT] specifically I think the prompt was something like "It's 10 years in the future, such-and-such party has control of government and can be assumed to hold policy positions basically the same as they do now. General world situation is X. The government has just violently put down mass protests over [something]. Craft a statement for the prime minister defending these actions as necessary for the preservation of the government and protection of general welfare." Which is a completely normal—if simple—sort of poli-sci exercise.
I though school entrance exams, particularly at the high school level, should be selecting for meritocratic principles such as competence and intelligence.
The reason it's controversial to some of us is that currently schools seem to be moving more and more toward selecting for obedience. This creates a feedback loop where the system selects for those that will not want to change it, but instead will play along.
It seems that when a system declares a purpose for an exam and then doesn't comply with that purpose, reasonable people would question it.
It also seems the feedback loops can be so intense the system selects those so willing and desirous to submit to authorities that they categorize anyone even questioning the system as 'ignorant' without any irony.
Being able to craft a statement justifying such an event, with all the mental gymnastics that might be involved if it's not a position you would support normally, is one step in recognizing those statements in real life.
If the student does support the action, accurately anticipating the objections of the other side and explaining why the action is justified in a way meant to mollify them is also useful.
Bottom line, being able to (or attempting to) write a PR document at that level requires a lot of understanding and thinking, and being willing to forego your initial prejudices to explore an idea as fully as possible. That's exactly what a good student does, so I can see why they thought this might be a useful exercise. I don't think a writing exercise causes "obedience" in any way.
Truthfully, I'm much more worried about what I see as the common trend of only viewing and reacting to the surface level of any event or topic, and immediately seeking others lend support and credence to that interpretation rather than trying to understand the motivations and purpose. That's always happened, but it seems to have become much more common.
I'll continue to take the assumption that asking a (prospective) student to conduct an exercise involving a thought experiment implies support of the premises of the exercise on the part of those asking it, an expectation that the student supports them, or an attempt to shape the student to support them, as a sign of ignorance within at least the confines of what those sorts of questions are used and useful for.
That the position the student is asked to assume is a bit uncomfortable is very likely part of the point. Seeing what they make of it—the tone, the message, what they choose to add or leave out, how and whether they fill in the gaps in the prompt WRT the events, circumstances, the state of mind of the prime minister, the mood of the people, and so on, which are numerous, how and whether they balance all this with the particular limitations and goals of the message itself, or hell, whether they reject the prompt and walk out in a huff (bad) or do something else by ignoring all or part of the prompt and its explicit and implied constraints (potentially very good if done just right)—can all be useful, and in ways "craft a message about how awful this was and why it should never happen again" wouldn't be.
People have been making the point long before Chomsky. Education for the masses is about training people to fit into domination based hierarchies[1]. In the past such systems produced better outcomes.
As info explodes and people learn there are other structures besides Hierarchies that can produce outcomes (such as Networks) the Hierarchies start teetering. And training for obedience becomes less important.
Bill Deresiewicz made a similar point in his book Excellent Sheep. Students are rewarded for conforming and following the designated educational path. But is that really what we want?
My thoughts exactly. People do this sort of thing to spice up training that must done. This is done in other fields as well like software development, eg. “in this tutorial we will be building a game with space zombies where...”
On the other hand, games are never just games there’s always a point.
> "global cyber campaign to expose injustice and corruption and to support causes it deem[s] beneficial... The group... funnelling ... bitcoin to ... "worthy recipients"
> The Pentagon war game documents ... revealed after ... Representative ... called for the government to "freeze" the money of demonstrators after country-wide protests
> "One of the most important tools in the authoritarian toolkit is the ability to freeze the funding of legitimate political dissent,"
> By separating the infrastructure of money from the infrastructure of state power, bitcoin makes it that much harder for this type of politically motivated confiscation.
People have been using bitcoin to donate to Snowden or get money to people in place like Venezuela. Cyprus happened. Now it might happen that anyone who protests might lose their ability to access banking services.
Yet somehow many here think this is just a scenario.
> Now it might happen that anyone who protests might lose their ability to access banking services.
What? Why? How? Did you just make that up? Beyond that, if you lose access to banking services then bitcoin isn't going to help you since you need banking services to turn bitcoin into usable money.
RTFA it's literally in there. Admittedly it says 'freeze the money'. Though I'm really not sure how that's different than 'lose their ability to access banking'. Come to think of it, freeze their money is worse, since that implies losing access to existing funds and the system, not just losing access to the banking system.
I took a government representative saying they are considering doing something as a sign that the government is considering doing something. Crazy.
I agree it's mostly likely just political 'bloviating'. But the Patriot Act did happen and we did create the category of 'enhanced interrogation' and 'enemy combatant'. If I were to tell my grandparents that was going to pass in the 90s they'd have said the same thing; just political bloviating.
So you'll have to forgive me if I take the governments own words as a sign to be defensive about what the government might do, even if it is unlikely.
> I took a government representative saying they are considering doing something as a sign that the government is considering doing something
Ok, but that's not how the government works, like not even close. A state representative making a statement doesn't mean "the government is considering doing" it, there are more than 1000 state reps across the country, willfully assuming anything they say is going to happen is just silly.
> The group, called Zbellion, encourages cyber attacks against organizations that support "the establishment," funnelling stolen cash into bitcoin to make "small, below the threshold donations" to "worthy recipients" and Zbellion members.
That happens. Most of the non-drug and non-porn sections on dark net marketplaces are about tools for doing this specific thing, and creating completely parallel identities for bank accounts and investing.
Illicit funds in, get crypto, leave crypto into fake/real/not-you person bank account.
They even have entire marketplaces for compromised windows computers, so that you can find a computer near the address of someone's compromised visa card, so that it is more likely your transactions will not get blocked because it looks to be in the same area.
They're not about "the establishment" and "worthy recipients" though, they are ordinary criminals, which is great news for "the establishment", because the people that want to scam people or phish info etc are usually quite aware that they wouldn't be able to do that if it wasn't for "the system" at large operating at a very stable level.
It's more lucrative and much safer to be a criminal in a stable, advanced society with lots of laws and regulation and little social mobility than being a criminal in Somalia. Successful criminals don't want to see society end or even change massively, they are doing fine.
yeah, I'm just pointing out the Pentagon's creative writing prompt adds an unnecessary reason to something already quite prevalent, suggesting they don't even know it is prevalent.
So, from the comments, it's not a real action plan, more like a scenario for case analysis.
Which is a shame. I'd really like to read about how well blockchain technology -- which is based on very transparent p2p communication -- would fare against the NSA or the Great Chinese Firewall if the US or China actually wanted to stop it.
The whole public transaction log makes it easy to trace every transaction made by a person, especially in widespread use. If you want to stop bitcoin, making using it a crime and then set up false flag merchants (or give immunity to merchants for cooperating) and it becomes trivial to track individuals.
And as for p2p communication, again, easy to find and charge anybody participating in the network.
Alternatively, don't make bitcoin illegal, just heavily use it to track and arrest people using it for already illegal things, preferably in a shock and awe way where you make a big show of arresting a bunch of criminals at once and then brag in the media about how bitcoin made it all possible.
Bitcoin is terrible at privacy unless you're trying really hard to conceal your identity.
Change bitcoin to its successor and "theft" and selective redistribution to transference and automatic redistribution along a curve back to labor or into public works, and I think you've got something that probably should destroy finance, insurance, etc.
If software world managed to create esoteric languages like brainfuck, expect from any military to study a hypothetical spontaneous human combustion pandemic. The exercise itself is useful for learning despite the comical outcome or product.
Tracking funds across a transparent ledger like Bitcoin is unfortunately too easy. After going after individuals is trivial. Would love to know if they're also planning to attack more private options decentralized networks like Monero!
The cheapest way to deal with a Bitcoin rebellion is to use some of the military budget and buy and run Bitcoin miners to dominate the chain and then do stuff like double spending, etc to undermine confidence in Bitcoin.
Meh. Just buy off Bitcoin's developers and stall the development. This would cause fees to grow explosively and cause companies like Steam and Stripe to drop support, undermining the original purpose of Bitcoin (to pay for stuff). Much cheaper than entering the cutthroat mining business.
A bitcoin transaction is considered valid as long as it is in the longest uninterrupted chain of blocks. If the military could buy and run enough equipment to create blocks faster than all the rest of the miners around the world combined then they could mess with Bitcoin's fundamental consistency by making longer chains of blocks than the rest of the world. The only thing preventing this from already happening today is that it would cost an insane amount of money to be able to mine blocks faster than everyone else in the system combined
>The only thing preventing this from already happening today is that it would cost an insane amount of money to be able to mine blocks faster than everyone else in the system combined
The US Military budget is insanely large. The total value of Bitcoin is estimated at around $160 Billion[0]. The annual military budget is 750 Billion dollars. If there is the will, being the money would not be the issue preventing such an attack.
The military also has access to extreme computing resources that are not available to the general public. If the pentagon cared to develop their own ASICs they could easily dominate the network.
Not going to lie I don't think the military or the pentagon is that sophisticated to build their own ASICs. They'd just buy ASICs from one of the Chinese miners that has already perfected the game. The primary resource at the US disposal is ridiculous sums of cash, but we aren't exactly on top when it comes to expertise and manufacturing.
No. As long as you'd have more than 50% of hashrate you will win in the long run and you're free to reverse transactions and double spend as you choose.
So you're saying they just accept a block because it's in the longest chain and don't check for double-spends? I have a hard time believing that given that cost for checking should be extremely low relative to creating a valid block.
No, they do check for double-spends, but the transactions you reverse are now in the shorter chain and no longer exist in the history when you follow the longest chain.
Say for example you have these blocks:
b1 <- b2 <- b3
And you have a transaction t in b2 that you want to reverse. Then you build another chain starting with b1 like so:
b1 <- b2' <- b3' <- b4'
Where you double-spend t in b2'. The miners thinks that both b2 and b2' are valid. When they choose to switch from the b2 chain to the b2' chain, it will seem like all transactions in b2 and b3 just disappear (unless included in the other chain of course).
Yes it does. So you spend once in b2 and once in b2'.
Assuming 6 blocks of confirmation the attack is then:
1. Spend in b2, create blocks until b8.
2. Switch the chain to b2', spend again there and run with it until bX' > bX.
Assuming 6 blocks of confirmation and 51% hash power, you'll lose a lot of money in the process (it'll take ages until bX' > bX [1]) so it better be worth it. Also, you can probably estimate the risk of this happening via the transaction volume in the block. The higher, the more valuable a double spend would be.
[1] Assuming 6 blocks à 10 minutes and you achieving 51%/49% ~ 4% more hashpower, such an attack costs you 25h (150 blocks) so at the very least 150x3.75x51% ~ 286 BTC in opportunity cost plus equipment plus electricity plus the risk that someone switches on his new nodes and your 51% become only 50%.
The cost regarding your equipment will also be full purchase price because if you succeed, you ruin bitcoin and your equipment value becomes 0 with your attack.
Holy shit, this is absolutely fascinating. I find it incredibly interesting that this scenario of a "Generation Z Rebellion" was constructed in 2018, and projected increasing tensions until 2026, at which point things would flame up. Yet the current pandemic has essentially forced everybody's hand and put history on fast forward. Maybe, in the end, the pandemic will end up being a strategically good thing for the United States, at least compared to how our adversaries will fare.
Yet the saddest thing about your comment is that even in the face of a virus pandemic that sees no borders or races, you still see it as a "good thing" against your "adversaries" as if you're somehow worthier that everybody else in the planet.