Beyond Boats

Watching the rising clamor around the Venezuelan boat debacle, I feel reflexively tempted to perform the “Orange Man Bad” ritual, because the situation strikes me as legitimately bad both in principle and precedent, to say nothing of the capriciousness and hypocrisy, but I don’t imagine we will have a useful conversation that transcends present tribalism without zooming out to an historical arc that long predates either Trump presidency.

I remember well where I was — standing agape in the living room of a shared house during my senior year of university — when I watched the two towers in NYC fall. I intuitively grasped the magnitude of the events set in motion but I could scarcely have imagined the details and didn’t yet fathom the degree to which it would shape my own professional destiny and the rules of war themselves.

How quickly a concrete situation — a brazen terrorist attack on US soil, conducted by a namable organization, with origins in a particular country — spiraled into a regional conflagration that proved a quagmire for the US on a scale not seen since Vietnam. No sooner had we garnered the world’s support to enter Afghanistan to target Al Qaeda did we declare an “Axis Of Evil”, invade Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, further radicalize a newly sandwiched Iran, and ostensibly spook North Korea into accelerating their nuclear weapons program while we were distracted, all while providing Russia and China convenient conduits to bleed us, never mind the drift from nation-state war-making readiness now made painfully obvious by Ukraine’s voracious consumption of artillery shells and a Chinese navy whose shipyard stats make the US seem already to have ceded dominance of the seas.

When I arrived at the DoD as a civilian in the summer of 2005, having just completed graduate study funded by the NSF’s Scholarship For Service program, I found myself thrust into an ecosystem with a curious distribution of co-workers around me and an astonishing amount of responsibility heaped upon me. I would come in time to understand that this peculiar situation stemmed from a workforce contraction and hiring stall spanning the fall of The Berlin Wall to the fall of The Two Towers, an ill-advised starving of the DoD/IC talent pipeline that ended with a surge of funding and attention when the Global War On Terror commenced.

Twenty some years ago I found myself ill-equipped to comprehend matters contemporaneously, but in hindsight I can see that obvious atrocities like the Abu Ghraib scandal foreshadowed the dearth of structure and guidance I would find while engineering SIGINT systems back at headquarters. Such matters further portended the sloppiness, cruelty, and non-transparency of ICE operations throughout 2025 in the wake of a hiring surge that followed neglect under the Biden presidency, as well as the recent drone strikes on purported Venezuelan drug-running boats performed under a regime where serious people speak openly of the DoD and the DOJ alike as having experienced “purges” of a kind foreign policy analysts have historically deemed alarming when seen in other countries.

If you want good governance and rule of law then you should really want within every key area a stable talent pipeline that cultivates non-partisan experts who embody a clear code of ethics, appreciate technical details, respect logistical complexities, and, crucially, mentor their successors. Ambiguity, inconsistency, churn, and loyalty oaths poison these pipelines.

Coincident with rising challenges in government talent management, we have seen the pace of technological development reach the knee of the curve, causing the legislative branch to fall ever farther behind, the executive branch to operate with decreasing clarity, and the judicial branch to increasingly be called either to referee or to rubberstamp.

The SIGINT tradecraft born circa WWII operated mostly in the realms of radio and telegraph and the relevant laws and policies could not have anticipated the maddening complexities of an Internet that now blankets the planet like an omnipresent nervous system that defies logical boundaries. The first Anglo-American practitioners of warcraft communicated most expeditiously with semaphore signals and horseback riders while tactically projecting power no farther than a cannonball could fly, yet their descendants inhabit a system wherein the president may oversee in real-time via satellite imagery a drone strike on the other side of the planet against an actor that no nation-state recognizes. Small wonder that we are struggling so mightily to reason about laws of war and the legitimacy of conflicts…

By way of establishing historical context, let’s pause briefly to enumerate all the times the US has formally declared war since WWII…

* crickets *

That’s right — it has happened precisely zero times. Wait, really? Yuhhhp. If the US can do a Vietnam or Iraq sans formal declaration of war then imagine how nebulous things might get in conflicts more narrow or indirect. There have been a whole lot of “authorizations”, “resolutions”, “mandates”, and so on, but actual “war” per our lexicon is a relic of set-piece battles from a bygone era. Even committing hundreds of thousands of troops to long-term high-intensity conventional combat doesn’t necessitate any such declaration by the standards of nearly the past century, but you wouldn’t know that just by listening to modern politicians and pundits or observing the onerous costs born by service personnel and their communities. We have sent so many artillery shells to Ukraine to fire at Russia that planners now be like “whoa whoa whoa let’s um maybe save some of these puppies for ourselves, eh?” but still we are not at “war”. How can we begin to navigate a debate on “war crimes” in the wake of such procedural and linguistic drift?

These days continual, pervasive, low-intensity conflicts, often covert, proxied, or contracted, often done with a mix of air power, special forces, and intelligence operations, often involving non-state actors whose dispositioning as “unlawful enemy combatants” exempts them from certain Geneva Convention provisions, dominate the global battlespace and create a never-yet-forever state of not-quite-war. If that already sounded scary by 2024 then it should really frighten you in a 2025 where institutions are withering while power consolidates in a would-be unitary executive.

You might find much of Trump’s behavior and decisions disagreeable or even abhorrent, and certainly I do, but the man is also the product of a time where rising technical complexity, falling legal clarity, hollowing out of government, soaring public discontent, and looming crises both economic and geopolitical create the perfect opportunity for the Norm Violator Extraordinaire we currently have as Pentester-In-Chief to grab every lever of power he can reach. Signal Pete may be disgracing the office of SECDEF in a manner heretofore unprecedented and yet what we’re really learning is not so much that being a weekend Fox News anchor doesn’t qualify you to run the most complex and dangerous organization in the world but rather how much we have long relied on precedent and protocol versus rule of law to prevent executive overreach and the politicization of the organs of state.

I sometimes find myself pining for the presidential bearing of Dubya as I struggle to stomach a second Trump term. And I call this out in particular because of the irony around my actually being legitimately pretty horrified by many things that happened during his time in office. In that era we had somewhat of a figurehead president while shadowy architect Dick Cheney held the office of vice president and directed many operations — from exaggerated intelligence, to brutal torture, secret prisons, and extraordinary rendition — that undermined the moral authority of the country and remain a stain on our legacy to this day.

Now in Trump we have a president who wants to gather all the power to himself as he makes a torrent of decisions as capricious as they are self-serving. Mixed in between we had a Biden administration that oversaw the most disgraceful extrication from Afghanistan one could imagine as our erstwhile allies clung to the bellies of departing American transport planes and came under the sway of a brutal and vindictive Taliban. Maybe you agreed with how Obama played things or maybe you didn’t but the fact of the matter is that he called in about 10x the drone strikes Bush did as we ground away at ISIS and precedent built for the current state of play.

Looking across the ages it appears that the problem of a feckless and toothless Congress extends much farther back than the era of knee-bending MAGA RINOs. The present moment just happens to be an especially bad time for it — one where the norm busting Dealmaker-In-Chief is employing a mixture of tariffs, pardons, deregulation, and brinksmanship in concert with a complete disregard for The Emoluments Clause to further what increasingly appears to be a nakedly kleptocratic agenda that isn’t even serving the populist agenda that brought him to office, something now so obvious to his room-reading congressional supporters that some have begun quite publicly scurrying for the exits.

Civil society, when it works well, rests atop a deep foundation of trust, competence, engagement, and investment. We ignore the required talent pipelines at our peril.

The US military operates an all-volunteer force to which some dedicate their entire careers and for which all make enormous sacrifices while shouldering substantial risks — they deserve a chain of command and a cadre of JAGs that they can trust to behave in a lawful and ethical fashion while having their backs. We have already seen how readily Pete “kill them all” Hegseth will gladly push all the blame down the command chain to the people in uniform who are laboring in an ecosystem where the vibe includes our president literally calling for the death of Democratic lawmakers for the offense of reminding military personnel of their obligation to refuse unlawful orders… instead of, you know, being like “duh — of course” and then having his legal counsel quibble over the details, as any prior administration would have done. How long will the men and women of the kind we should want in uniform tolerate this?

Many military personnel, having completing active duty commitments but wanting to stay involved as their life diversifies, elect to join the National Guard. In doing so they sign up to show up for their country in real emergencies, knowing that this service may create hardship elsewhere in their lives — professional, financial, and personal. We not only do current guard members a disservice when we deploy them gratuitously but also low-key induce them to resign as well as dissuade future enrollments. Trump’s recent usage of the guard variously to antagonize political opponents and set precedents for future actions at decisive moments should cause serious misgivings… but we would be remiss not to note the damage also done to the force by sucking them into forever wars across the globe where they perhaps lacked sufficiently clear objectives and solid mandates. The attendant collapse in morale and enrollment could leave us without adequate surge capacity in real emergencies.

If you really want to “support the troops”, then support the troops. So often our national discourse conflates supporting a particular operation with providing the personnel of our military ecosystem what they really need — reasonable rotations, adequate training, modern equipment, functional logistics, quality intelligence, fair compensation, solid career paths, accessible healthcare, and, not least of all, clear legal frameworks.

What of the civil servants spanning DOJ and DHS as well as state and local levels who have devoted their lives to law enforcement but find themselves crammed down or kicked out as our Pardoner-In-Chief directly interferes in some investigations, demands the initiation of others, and whimsically issues pardons at record levels to individuals against whom cases were methodically developed at great cost to professionals and taxpayers alike. How do we square the War On Drugs pretext for the extrajudicial evidence-light drone strikes on Venezuelan boats with Trump’s pardoning Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández who was set to spend life in prison after being convicted for flooding the US with cocaine? An honest broker of the J6 debacle, meanwhile, would not have issued a blanket pardon to EVERYONE instead of selectively reviewing matters case-by-case to see if some people were unfairly swept up in a moment of partisan hysteria. This is not how a society that exalts rule of law functions and, as with the DoD, the capricious treatment of law enforcement will do multi-generational damage, a rather odd outcome under a party that long trumpeted Law & Order as a rallying cry.

We need to support these “troops”, too.

It’s fun and easy to conspiracize about a Deep State and dump on the Intelligence Community, sometimes some elements have at least somewhat deserved it, and perhaps nowhere do greater abuse-of-power risks exist, but Americans won’t enjoy a world where their fellow citizens don’t want to sign up for civil service in this realm, and they really won’t enjoy a world where nearly all of the technology and operations get outsourced to private firms and nobody of competence remains to provide strategic direction and tactical oversight. For all the Trumpian rhetoric about the corruption and opacity of the Deep State, nothing could be more deep, obscure, and unaccountable than a tiny number of absurdly powerful west coast tech bros orchestrating everything after their campaign contributions helped buy an election and their subsequent tributes solidified their seats at the gilded table.

Hug a spook. They’re people, too, and most of them are trying to do the right thing in a technical arena that has become unrecognizably complex and infuriatingly hardened in a span of time far shorter than a career, coincident with public sentiment that vacillates between hate for doing their jobs and hate for not doing their jobs, depending on whether today’s trending story involves an intelligence leak or an intelligence failure.

It’s also trendy to hate on ICE these days. Lord knows they’re doing plenty worthy of opprobrium — rolling up in masks and stuffing people into unmarked vehicles without showing badges, engaging in excessive force, detaining people in horrendous conditions, grabbing people just because they’re brown and need to make quota, and deporting detainees to dangerous places without due process. But we actually really do need ICE and we very badly need them to look and feel like a properly professional workforce operating under clear legal frameworks with operational policies that promote transparency, accountability, decency, and fairness. We need an ICE where all the officers not only arrive uniformed in properly marked vehicles with masks off and badges out but also actually feel (reasonably) comfortable doing so because it’s just another law enforcement job in a society that venerates rule of law, to include immigration law.

I won’t try to convince you to hug a random ICE agent in 2025, but at least try to imagine a world where perhaps by 2035 being one could be a non-contentious run-of-the-mill law enforcement job in a country that didn’t have an immigration case backlog for people already in country that runs into the millions. Most of us would likely prefer that future to one of regular pogroms.

Should you hug a judge or lawmaker? Yeah, that might not be a bad idea. Or at least speak out when you see them made the target of ostracism or political violence for taking difficult stances. Trump may not have specifically called for violence against any judges but his regular knee-jerk calls for their impeachment when they disagree with him certainly rolls down the hill to those of even greater truculence who gladly do his dirty work. And he absolutely has called for violence against politicians who displease him. This creates an incredibly toxic ecosystem where one would arguably have to be irrational to sign up for political life. Consequently we risk seeing a race to the bottom in which eventually only the most narcissistic, sociopathic, corrupt, and generally contemptible individuals are left in the game.

The world, meanwhile, is mind-bogglingly complex and rapidly becoming more so. This naturally gives rise to the experts required to navigate the fracturing sub-disciplines and boy do populist movements seem to hate experts. Some of that hate is well earned — all institutions carry a risk of self-dealing that prioritizes self-perpetuation over the general welfare of society — but a world in which we pillory and purge experts along partisan lines will quickly become a very confusing, scary, and brutish one. And frankly it already is. If QAnon and CDC had a baby it would be RFK Jr… and they did. And he’s running a health department under which CDC, NIH, and FDA are getting gutted. We should strive to trust science without trusting scientists but we should also really not trust people cosplaying at being scientists and definitely not install them in cabinet-level positions. We need rule of reason as desperately as we need rule of law in the present moment, but instead we are running the country on vibes.

If all that weren’t scary enough, consider now the wealth and power consolidating effects of AI and robotics. For the majority of human history, all systems had a strong element of democracy in them, regardless of how overtly authoritarian they may have attempted to be. The families of soldiers that go to war in war pre-roboticized societies operating under conscription systems feel the burden viscerally and the soldiers themselves might desert if the conditions become sufficiently heinous, but those natural back-pressures are rapidly disappearing. Societies have generally compelled individuals toward lawful behavior, for whatever definition of lawfulness they adopted, but there has always been a certain back-pressure on the autocrat’s predilections toward totalitarianism, taking the form of non-collaboration of the population if circumstances devolved too far, but the advent of facial recognition algorithms and robotic police dogs threaten to render consent of the governed optional.

We had best figure out this Rule Of Law thing in a hurry — time is running out and our existing code of laws looks increasingly like an ineffectual pile of vibe coded slop that accreted over a quarter millennium at the hands of people who didn’t know what they were doing and hadn’t heard of refactoring.