The 1600: Age of Asymmetry
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The Insider's Track
Good morning,
We talked on Friday about the rapidly advancing AI technology that threatens to upend the white-collar workforce. But after this weekend, I think we only hit on part of the bigger story. It's less about the actual AI, and more about the asymmetry.
AI is but one tool that is making asymmetry easier to manifest in all facets of life. Drones are another. The images out of Russia yesterday were remarkable. The Ukrainians appear to have destroyed a third of Russia's strategic aviation capabilities using dozens of cheap, basically off-the-shelf drones. Ukraine smuggled the drones deep into Russia inside the backs of trucks, which opened remotely at the point of attack. The drones then swarmed these strategic bombers sitting on airfields thousands of miles from the frontlines, near Mongolia, where they surely were assumed safe from Ukraine's air capabilities.
These are the planes that have been bombing Ukraine's civilian infrastructure incessantly, and are a big part of Putin's nuclear deterrence. If he were going to launch a tactical nuke, it would likely be on one of these bombers that have been reduced to fiery wreckage. We don't yet know the full scale of the damage—some reports say 40 of these bombers have been taken out—but this will almost certainly end up being one of the most asymmetrical events of modern warfare, at least on par with Pearl Harbor, in terms of cost versus outcome. Drones that cost a few hundred bucks—and are available to civilians—taking out billions of dollars in military infrastructure is the contemporary equivalent of the Japanese surprise attack on our Pacific Fleet in 1941.
The massively successful surprise drone attack (the White House says it wasn't given a heads up), comes as Ukrainian and Russian delegations are meeting for a new round of talks in Istanbul. Putin is surely livid, and humiliated, and will respond as such. This war is very far from being over.
Terrorism has long been the classic example of our age of asymmetry. Al Qaeda brought the US to its knees, and into a 20-year morass in the Middle East, with 19 hijackers using box cutters you can buy at the hardware store. Hamas provoked the Israelis into a quagmire in Gaza by brutally raping and murdering young concertgoers and kidnapping families from their kibbutzes. It's that asymmetry that makes terrorism, as a tactic of war, so efficient. We even see it in these smaller-scale attacks on Jews here in the US.
An Egyptian national wielding a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails attacked a march of mostly elderly Jews marching for the return of the hostages in Gaza yesterday in Boulder, Colorado. One of the victims is a Holocaust survivor. Another is 88. The attacker shouted "Free Palestine" as he was being taken into custody, much like the guy who executed those two young Israeli diplomats in DC last month. Fox is reporting the suspect overstayed his visa but was given a work permit under the Biden administration.
If you're wondering why the backlash to the Trump admin's most heavy-handed deportation policies is not as severe as you were hoping it would be, it's because of stories like this. Most normie Americans do not believe that the US should be hosting immigrants who appear to be hostile to America and our way of life. It's not that crazy, and it doesn't make them racists or fascists to believe people like this guy in Boulder should simply not be here to begin with. Dems would do well to try to understand this very basic, human concept if they plan on winning any elections again.
If it sounds like I'm trying to make some grand point between this terror attack in Colorado and the Ukrainian's surprise assault on Russia's nuclear triad, I guess I am? I don't know. I just know that we're living in history right now.
What comes next will not look like what came before.
The Rundown
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis wanted to be king. For a moment—a real, electric flash between the fall of 2022 and the spring of 2023—it looked like he might be. He was the governor of the third most populous state in the country, a combat-tested Navy veteran, a Harvard- and Yale-educated culture warrior who had turned Florida into a hard-right policy lab in the wake of his handling of the pandemic. Then he ran against Donald Trump. Read the story.
Also happening:
Trump's tax bill: Sen. Rand Paul said that he's confident there are enough members of his party to vote against President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful" spending bill amid concerns that it does not make enough cuts to spending. Paul has spoken out against the spending bill and said he will not vote to pass it due to the inclusion of a mechanism that would allow Congress to increase the nation's debt limit by $5 trillion. Read more.
Sen. Rand Paul said that he's confident there are enough members of his party to vote against President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful" spending bill amid concerns that it does not make enough cuts to spending. Paul has spoken out against the spending bill and said he will not vote to pass it due to the inclusion of a mechanism that would allow Congress to increase the nation's debt limit by $5 trillion. Read more. US-China: Beijing has hit back at Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth after he described the country as a threat to the U.S., amid growing tensions. "Hegseth deliberately ignored the call for peace and development by countries in the region, and instead touted the Cold War mentality for bloc confrontation," the Chinese foreign ministry said. Read more.
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