Nexus of p(Doom)

Oh, and did you know we're at war?

Happy Saturday. Today, it’s all about doom. But before we walk through that cursed portal, I need you to know this: Never Give Up, Never Surrender! Welcome, my fellow nerds, and you know who you are. By the way, you look marvelous!

We’re not going to talk about MFDOOM or Doctor Doom, mostly because I am an OK Boomer and missed that part of history. But I do know a whole lot about the 80s and 90s.

There’s that scene from “Galaxy Quest”¹ where Mathesar has been captured by Sarris. Jason Nesmith, playing Commander Taggart, is ordered to explain the concept of “acting” to Mathesar.

Jason: Mathasar, there’s no such person as Captain Taggart. My name is Jason Nesmith. I am an actor. We’re all actors.

Sarris: He doesn’t understand. Explain as you would a child.

Jason: We, uh, we pretended. We lied.

Now let’s do that scene, but Mathesar is Donald Trump, Jason is J.D. Vance, and Sarris is Elon Musk. Musk orders Vance to explain meme cryptocurrency, like $TRUMP and $MELANIA (or $DOGE) to Trump. It works better in your head if you keep the voices from the original movie characters but pretend the real people are saying the words. And for the record, Musk makes an excellent Lobster Head.

J.D.: Mr. President, there’s no real coins or money, it’s a blockchain crypto product that only exists in cyberspace.

Musk: He doesn’t understand. Explain as you would a street grifter.

J.D.: It’s money for nothing.

The schtick here is that our president can no more tell a blockchain from a McDonalds cheeseburger. Not to complain: out of all the living presidents, only Bill Clinton has a shot at even beginning to understand it. I’d still put a $20 down that Ol' Bill would be satisfied with “money for nothing,” as it’s defined every day of his life since he left the White House.

You’re probably asking (about me) “where is he going here?” and you’d be justified because, together, we’re going to make some art—like a Justin Pollock piece. But as usual, I promise I’ll try to make a point. Points for trying, right? Who was supposed to bring the participation trophies? Maintenant, s’il vous plait, nous allons commencer.

Image: DALL-e, ChatGPT-4o

In writing, you want to take the reader by the hand and gently lead the mind from one point to the next, in a progressive, transitional, gentle way. Yeah, not today. I’m going to smile at you like the ride operator for the Black Hole 2000 in Seoul when you ask innocently, “Is this a violent ride?” You’ll soon be humming the tune from “Tunnel of Love” by Dire Straits, riding on a ghost train, where the cars they scream and slam.

Now strap in, because here we go: To the Wayback Machine, Sherman!

Rear Adm. William Moffett ran the Naval Bureau of Aeronautics, beginning in 1921. In 1921, flying was something for barnstormers and ex-WWI aces to do. Serious people like the ones who fought ships at sea considered naval aviation a side show. Even when our Navy decided to build them (because the Navy has never, ever turned down a single dollar from Congress if it means they get to lay a keel and take it to sea), they considered aircraft carriers to be auxiliary ships, used for scouting so our battleships can find the enemy’s battleships and have a real fight.

U.S. Army Gen. Billy Mitchell cheered the Navy’s disdain for carriers, because he wanted the Army (meaning himself) to control all military aviation. Unfortunately, Mitchell was a jerk and got himself court-martialed, and Moffett was killed in an airship accident in 1933. However, Moffett’s lobbying yielded funding for a few carriers in 1927. And because the Navy got money to build ships (ask any admiral how to fight a naval war and they’ll tell you: first, get money), they did build carriers like the USS Lexington and the USS Saratoga.

Oh, how the winds of destiny blow. And they did blow in our favor, 14 years later.

On December 5, 1941, the Lexington departed Pearl Harbor on a ferry mission to Midway Island, a movement of which the Japanese fleet was not aware. Meanwhile, the Saratoga was in San Diego finishing a maintenance evolution. Both of these ships were on the target list for Kido Butai, the Imperial Japanese Navy’s task force commanded by Adm. Nagumo. But the bombers found no carriers when they reached Pearl Harbor.

It took an act of war, a surprise attack, to eliminate America’s battleships, which sort of made aircraft carriers the most important capital ships to fight a war over 8,000 miles of ocean.

But let’s take a stroll into alternate history, one where the Lexington and the Saratoga were in port at Pearl Harbor, along with the USS Enterprise. Let’s also say the battleships USS Arizona, Nevada, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Tennessee, California, Maryland, and West Virginia were all out steaming circles in some giant exercise. For argument’s sake, we can play this out, and let’s see what happens.

Carriers in port cannot launch aircraft. See, aircraft carriers need to be at sea, steaming along into the wind, for airplanes to fly off their decks. When carriers come in to port, the airplanes depart well before the ships reach the harbor. The air wings on those carriers would have kept their planes on the ground at Ford Island and Kaneohe Bay Naval Air Stations. Sitting like little ducks, they’d likely have been destroyed in the Japanese attack.

In our alt-history, the United States would have been left fighting a war against Japan’s aircraft carriers, crewed with experienced pilots, using battleships, cruisers, and destroyers. I’m not saying Japan would have won—they would not have won in any circumstance—but the war would not have been over in 1945, is my guess. Battleships can’t defeat aircraft carriers, when the carriers find the battleships first (and they pretty much always do). That means one by one, our battleships would be winnowed away, or at least ineffective at winning the war.

And that means…Let’s just say that the whole population of New Zealand might have become lovers of sushi for a few years. The fine blokes in northern Australia might have been subject to the tender mercies of the Imperial Japanese Navy, as well.

Then again, maybe I am wrong, and in 1945, America simply would have dropped a lot more atomic bombs than the two we did drop. There’s lots of room and comfy wingback chairs in the alt-history lounge, for musing over cigars and brandy. It’s fun to mull these scenarios, but it never leads anywhere, except to a point I want to make.

My point is not that the United States didn’t have what it took to win the Pacific war. It is that through the fortunes of war, we lost the ships we could live without (though most of the Navy’s leaders didn’t share that view), and kept the ships we needed to fight. With our carriers, launched the Doolittle raid over Tokyo, and we won at Midway, and we did it in very short order while we rebuilt and repaired our battleship fleet. The rest is, well, not alt-history.

Having everything you need to win isn’t a guarantee you will win, however.

In the Vietnam War, the U.S. had everything we needed to win, except a winning strategy against an enemy willing to die to the last man to beat us. Robert McNamara’s bombings and firebases could not compete with the Ho Chi Minh trail, with its thousands of Viet Cong carrying supplies on their backs. We were fighting World War II against an enemy that had moved beyond those tactics. I am not shy about my disdain for McNamara, and people who think running a war, or a government, is like running a company.

Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France during WWI, is famously credited (he probably never said it) with “War is too important to be left to the generals.” Military experts agree: the generals are always fighting the last war, and then the military experts become the generals in the next war. The French had the more powerful army in Europe at the start of WWII, but the French were fighting the Great War, while Hitler’s generals were doing a Blitzkrieg. The French lost WWII and lived under Nazi occupation for just over 4 1/2 years. Perhaps under better leadership, they would have beat the Germans because Lord knows, they had better equipment.

Let’s talk about now.

I think you know this, but let me review for you.

The United States is the most OP super power in the world. In military terms, we are unassailable. We all know the largest Air Force in the world is the USAF. Who’s got the second largest? The U.S. Navy. Our Navy is so big, it has little navies orbiting around it. There’s a navy run by the Army just to move its Army stuff around the world, and it’s got 132 ships. The US Army’s mini-navy is bigger than all of France’s navy. We also have Military Sealift Command, the civilian-run logistics arm of the U.S. Navy, sporting an additional 125 ships.

China’s navy has about 246 (give or take) more ships than ours, about 730 total. My friend Mike (the name I call ChatGPT) told me through unreliable sources and Wikipedia that the PLAN (the People’s Liberation Army Navy, which is what Americans call a football game) sails a measly 157 Blue-Water ships, including just two—count’em—aircraft carriers. They’ve got a lot of submarines, but 30 of them are old diesel-electrics only good for littoral (coastal) operations. Only 26 percent of China’s sub fleet is nuclear. The last non-nuclear sub the U.S. Navy sailed was decommissioned 35 years ago.

In fact, if you add up the U.S. Navy, Military Sealift Command, the Coast Guard, and the Army’s ships, we’ve got about 1,000 ships total. At sea, the Navy is super-deadly, and also, we are really good at moving large amounts of military gear around the world, fast. Iraq found that out in 1991.

It would be foolhardy for China, or any world power, to take on our Navy, or our Air Force. Our armed forces have so much gear that we can afford to give billions of dollars worth (a top line figure, not what our used equipment is worth) to Ukraine to burn up in its war with Russia. We have so much that we moved tens of thousands of rounds of artillery we stored in Israel after the Yom Kippur War to Ukraine. Israel, it turns out, didn’t need the extra stock.

No Air Force on earth has ever shot down a single F-22 air superiority fighter. Entire squadrons of F-15s and F-16s have been downed in simulated battles with just a pair of F-22s. Our F-35 multi-role fighter—in Israel’s hands—has turned the Russian SA-3 protected airspace over Iran and Syria into a sieve.

China reportedly has over 300 of its 5th-gen J-20, and a small but unknown number of J-35s (they even stole the designator from us). The U.S. has 183 F-22 Raptors, and somewhere over 500 F-35 Lightning IIs (in addition to another 300 or so delivered to allies). China is good at making iPhones (though I think more iPhones are now made in India and Vietnam), but nobody can make fighter jets like the land of the free and the home of the brave, birthplace of Rosie the Riveter.

Let me go further.

If we really wanted to beat Russia out of Ukraine, we would have done it ourselves two years ago, and it would have been finished two years ago. And if we had decided to do it, Mr. Putin would not be pressing the nuclear button, or any button at all, lest he have it pried from his cold, dead hands. And be assured that Putin knows this. But the Biden administration hewed to that old saw about using our military: in for a penny, in for $0.01. The words of John Paul Jones echoed in the White House situation room during the Biden years—I have not yet begun to fight. And that’s because we actually had not begun to fight, nor would we be fighting. But if we wanted to, we could have cold-cocked the Russians, or anyone else who dared fight us on our terms.

Enough said. Our military rocks, regardless of what any of you might think of DEI at the Pentagon, or transgenders in uniform, or the competence of military dentists, or random other distractions. We are freaking lethal. Look up FAFO in the dictionary and it needn’t show anything but a picture of a U.S. Soldier in full battle rattle.

Okay, you’ve made it this far. I’m getting to my main point, and it’s this. We are, at this moment, at war. Yes, war. You wouldn’t know we’re at war because everything in this country is billed as a “war on” something. War on drugs, war on illegal immigration, war on obesity, war on violent video games, war on Red Dye No. 3. War on really bad Marvel shows running on Disney+. But be assured, we are at war, a real one, that is not being fought on our terms, so we don’t get to be super-lethal. We might even lose.

Just like France’s generals in WWI, and McNamara in Vietnam, we are fighting the last war, while China is fighting the next one. Though it doesn’t rival America, the CCP has enough military gear to protect their homeland (from us), and maybe enough to take Taiwan (but not enough—yet—to hold it). It’s a rear-guard action, a distraction, even a ruse. When the CCP takes Taiwan, they want to do it without a shot fired, or at least with as few bullets as possible. We are at war, and China’s attack is in a domain of warfare that we haven’t done enough to dominate, never mind become super-lethal in.

Let’s talk about domains for a moment.

Did you know there are “domains” of warfare beyond sea, air, and land? There’s other domains like cyber, space, and social. China has executed acts of war against America in all of them. For a good primer on the domains of war, watch Destin Sandlin (Smarter Every Day on YouTube)’s video on the subject.

Just this week, China’s DeepSeek AI startup announced an AI that took just a fraction of the compute power to train versus the leading U.S. company offerings, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4, Microsoft Co-Pilot, Google Gemini, or xAI Grok. The U.S.-based AIs rely on massive infrastructure, which has driven chip-maker Nvidia’s stock to stratospheric levels.

In one stroke, China erased $1 trillion of market capitalization, with Nvidia losing 17 percent, along with slides from Microsoft and Alphabet (Google’s parent company). DeepSeek did this deed without the advanced chip technology the Biden administration banned for sale to China. Some have described it as AI’s “Sputnik moment.” But I think it’s much closer to Pearl Harbor than the space race with the Russians.

The Biden administration had banned sales of AI chips to China, because of concerns about spying and the cyber war we’ve been fighting. But China has not been idle. They’re all over our country, from ports to plains, buying up land adjacent to military bases and important infrastructure sites. They spy on us and collect massive intelligence. They hack us. They fly drones over our military bases. They abuse our leniency regarding illegal immigration to infiltrate spies. Yes, they do that, despite all the media denials as “fake news.”

We are at war, economically, in the cyber and the space domain, with China, even as we are trade partners with them. President Donald Trump’s tariffs are not the best idea in the world, but punitive tariffs are an instrument of war, just like our military. It’s not a very effective weapon, but it’s not nothing either. The CCP will respond in kind, and continue to wreak economic havoc on our nation.

They will also continue groundbreaking research on what’s known as post-quantum crytpography (PQC). All the cryptographic systems the U.S. relies on could be broken in a few days by an operating quantum computer. Google says their Willow chip might be the answer to scalable quantum computing. But the Chinese have been testing quantum computers for years, and even have prototyped an unbreakable space-based quantum cryptosystem that uses cosmic rays.

Whoever wins the PQC race will get the entire crypto domain as their prize. We were surprised by DeepSeek. If China releases the world’s first, or most economical PQC system, as the kids say, we’re cooked.

Of course, our fallback is to go to DefCon-some low number. I never understood why DefCon numbers worked that way—wouldn’t it be cooler if DefCon 99 was war, so you could ratchet the numbers up in increasing levels of threat? Instead we have 5 through 1, and we never get to 1. Nuclear war? How quaint. But all the fighters, carriers and battleships in the world won’t do diddly-squat if the Chinese are literally reading our mail and decoding our orders in real-time. Kind of like we did to the Japanese in WWII, or the British did at Bletchley Park to the Germans.

America is very dependent on our space assets, which owes much to Elon Musk. The Chinese and Russians are working on ways of destroying StarLink or disrupting it to the point of failure. Don’t think they haven’t launched it.

All this plays into p(Doom), the probability something terrible (generally linked to a superintelligent AI, or ASI—artificial super intelligence) is going to happen to mankind. Most AI experts have a higher estimate of p(Doom) than the average Joe on the street. Perhaps some ASI might arise to enslave us all, but I am in the camp of low p(Doom) from ASI, since all our eggs are in the generative LLM basket, which with its tendency to hallucinate and forget how to do physics or basic world modeling, can never get to AGI never mind ASI.

But I do think p(Doom) is hauntingly high. The kinds and domains of war we’re fighting with China, under the noses of Americans who would rather argue over culture wars than actual ones, could usher in the p(Doom) era. It won’t be driven by superintelligent AIs. It will be driven by stone-cold men and women intent on beating America at our own game, and the terrifying response when we figure out we’ve lost.

Then again, we’re Americans. We never give up. We never surrender. I have hope, at least until they start building underground vaults. They should be finished right around October 23, 2077 (IYKYK).

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1. “Galaxy Quest” is deemed by many in the film industry as one of a very few that fit the definition of a “perfect movie.” You may not agree but you’d be wrong.