Supply Chain Exploits

Guest Post by Visayas Outpost

Good morning, Persons of Interest.

We are not connecting enough dots it seems, in this fog of war.  I refer of course to the Info War, the Total War, the Cognitive War.  Unrestricted Warfare the Chinese call it, or as it has been termed more frequently in the West, Fifth Generation Warfare.  Because unless we are suffering from amnesia, ships have been a target vector since at least 2017.  Sure, the allision of the MV Dali could have just been bad luck or negligence, because that is the official narrative.  It’s just so darned understandable after all.

In the last decade we have seen a cascade of suspicious incidents involving cargo vessels and/or military vessels, lest we forget.  You may recall that the rise of Trump caused the Deep State to throw a hissy fit.  For those still working out the suspicious nature of reality at large, let me give a refresh of what was happening at sea, starting with the US Navy:

• Jan. 2017: the Ticonderoga class cruiser USS Antietam ran aground while at anchor in Tokyo bay, damaging both screws.
• May 2017: another Ticonderoga class cruiser, the USS Lake Champlain collided with a fishing vessel off the coast of South Korea, but without serious damage.
• Jun. 2017: the ACX Crystal, a Philippine container ship, collided with the USS Fitzgerald off the coast of Japan in the middle of the night, bizarrely striking the Captain’s quarters and injuring him.  The Arleigh-Burke class destroyer was severely damaged, while the Crystal continued on autopilot for some distance.
• Aug. 2017: the USS John McCain, another Arleigh-Burke ‘Flight 1’ destroyer, collided with the Alnic MC, a Liberian chemical ship, in the Straits of Malacca.  The McCain was so badly damaged it had to be physically carried to dry dock in Japan.
• Nov. 2017: the disappearance of Argentinian submarine ARA San Juan, prompting an unusual international search.  President at the time was Mauricio Macri, a long time personal friend of Trump, though he would be defeated in 2018.
• Nov. 2018: the Norwegian Frigate Helge Ingstad collided with the Maltese tanker Sola TS, in its own waters near Bergen, resulting in the loss of the Helge Ingstad.  Norway had agreed to purchase 52 F-35s earlier in the year, reaffirming its Trumpian NATO cooperation.

Those US Navy incidents were clumped together so tightly it prompted a two-week operational pause worldwide, for safety checks.  The investigative findings talk about things like crew fatigue and operational tempo.  But they also indicate crew confusion, spatial awareness issues, and specifically call out things like touch screens.

The conning officer of the Helge Ingstad insisted there was a discrepancy with the AIS (Automatic Identification System) in determining which markers were moving and which were stationary. After the John McCain, the Navy began a plan to re-introduce physical controls onto the Arleigh-Burkes, which brings me to the focus of this essay.

Supply Chain Exploits

A well-known investigative report from October 2018 detailed how secret components have been clandestinely installed on circuit boards, at the supplier level in China, for many years.  Call it a Hardware Hack — think of the classical spy-cam-in-a-Xerox-machine, only much more insidious.  The report focused on the company Super Micro, but the implication was it happens all over the industry: a CCP employee at a supplier inserts an innocuous-looking component into the design layout of a complex printed circuit board.  It can be tiny, the proverbial grain of rice, even hidden between the layers of the PCB itself.  Its purpose has nothing to do with overall function, so the board passes all of its tests during design review and manufacturing QC, and goes on up the chain to get approved and assembled into high-end servers, control equipment, and yes military equipment.

Companies like Apple and Amazon, named in the report, quickly issued denials to distance themselves from being victims of these hardware hacks.  But the hacker community is unequivocal that the gist of the report is correct; even if it was from Bloomberg.  Most curiously, the phenomenon known as Q had warned about this very thing as it relates to Navy Ships, in April of 2018.  Six months before the article.  Maybe that was seeded as part of the Psyop^TM?  All of those incidents have official explanations, which the military is very good at producing.  What safety checks do you suppose the Navy was making during its two week pause?

There were a few earlier incidents too.  For instance the 2012 collision of the USS Porter with an oil tanker in the Straights of Hormuz, and even the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen — both of those were also Arleigh-Burkes, incidentally.  Before then, you would have to go back to the 1960’s to find similar incidents.  Something changed.  So what is the connection, and when is this going to start making sense?

Far from being a Navy expert, I do know from military experience that designs go through what you might call a ‘batch upgrade’ at various points during their service.  Air Force electronics will get upgraded to ‘block 20’ for example.  There are 73 Arleigh Burkes in 4 variants, dating from 1991.  You can bet those in the ‘Flight 1’ batch have received an upgrade or two, requiring many billions in Congressional approvals over the years.  What were on some of those upgraded systems, and what parts of the ships did they control?  In what country were the upgrade parts produced?

The implications of the report were staggering, especially considering a suspicious number of military and civilian aircraft incidents.  You mean that Boeing I’ve been flying on?  Probably.  But did US Military equipment really have Chinese circuit boards?  Yes.  Did Navy ships really have inferior Chinese steel?  Yes.  A lot of revelations hit the fan during Trump’s first term.  Were the Bidens sold out to China and Ukraine?  Yes.  What was going on with Uranium One?

Bulk Cargo Shipping

Who can forget some of the spectacles in recent years regarding bulk cargo?  Apply everything just discussed, but to commercial shipping.  March seems to be a busy month for these things.  March Madness, you could say:

• March 2021: The Ever Given container ship ran aground suspiciously in the Suez Canal.
• March 2022: The Ever Forward container ship ran aground suspiciously in the Chesapeake Bay about an hour after transiting under the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore.  Same company, how interesting…
• February 2024:  A Chinese container ship struck a bridge in Guangzhou, China, destroying one span and killing 5 people.  Hmm, didn’t hear about that one…
• March 2024:  The MV Dali apparently lost control and struck the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, destroying it completely.

Now I won’t explore all the theories of what happened on the Dali, no doubt they are fascinating.  But I do wish to add these supply chain exploits to your onboard gray-matter analyzer, Readers.  How much simpler would it be to hack a container ship than a Navy destroyer?  Talk about an easy target…  Those ships are built in one country, owned in another, registered in another, and operated out of yet another.  You want a Chinese controller card with back door access to the navigation system?  You got it pal, for a price.  What about a touch screen that doesn’t only respond to touch?  Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy, and your black budget can easily afford it.

With the well known partnerships between governments and industry in these quasi-fascist times, one could easily imagine a kind of SCIF where intelligence types are monitoring all of their ocean assets in real time via the AIS database.  At the opportune moment, a signal is sent to the engine room of a tanker and poof no more throttle.  Or poof we just lost rudder control.  As with other aspects of the deep state, if you can imagine it, then they are doing it.  Seriously, this kind of thing seems like it would be child’s play to Intelligence and Military orgs who routinely overthrow governments at will.

If this is the first time considering such a scenario, then try this mental exercise:

• Is it technically possible to make such a hack?  Yes.
• Are there people or groups who would be motivated to accomplish such a hack?  Yes.
• Are there people with lack of moral scruples, who would carry out any order for a payment?  Yes.
• Are there funds available to pay such people, and to carry out the crime from start to finish?  Clearly, yes.
• Is there opportunity to carry out such an attack?  Absolutely.  The longer you wait and the more assets you have in place, the easier it is to find opportunity.

This exercise can apply to all sorts of ‘unthinkable’ situations, like voting.  “But surely elections must be safe, because our republic is built on that very principle…we can’t afford for them not to be safe.”  Don’t convince me, but do try to apply that mental exercise to the elections, and see what you conclude.  If it can be compromised, then it is being compromised.

Surely there are both Corporate and Military risk analyzers who have thought through everything I just laid out.  Surely, both ‘sides’ are capitalizing on such opportunities as they arise.  Did the U.S. just piss you off enough to trigger some action?  Then steer the next available ship into the Key Bridge, that will send a message.  Want to disrupt international shipping to help your pipeline?  Just block the Suez canal.  The beauty of all of these is they just look like accidents to the rest of the world.  They have perfect plausible deniability:  oops, the fuel just shut off for some reason…yeah we’ve been having problems with it…

My working assumption is that all countries and organizations with the necessary capabilities are hacking and manipulating global systems in a similar manner, to their every advantage.  Why wouldn’t they?  It is much lower risk than trying to send in Special Teams in an underwater raid, and that is what makes it 5^th Gen Warfare.  We have woven a Rube Goldbergian society of interconnected parts, so it becomes that much easier to exploit.  That is the price we are paying.  Meanwhile most of us blithely carry on, too obsessed with sports or TikTok to pay much attention.

Sand in the Gears

This Substack has suggested practical steps and ideas about what we should be doing next; what some of us are doing next.  If the train wreck cannot be stopped, then what does our future look like?  How can we rebuild it, better, stronger, faster than before (to quote the six million dollar man)?  It is not by embracing the status quo.  It is not by utilizing the existing compromised systems.  We have to at least recognize the state we are in, and its likely outcomes.  Good men doing nothing can’t accomplish much.

I don’t recommend many blogs, but James Corbett has the right idea on what the ultimate answer is to 5^th Gen Warfare, which he outlines at the end of this piece.  To summarize, he figures we have been conditioned to always ‘fight our enemies’, which leads us to the ‘war on everything’ as a solution.  But the real win is found in discarding their ideas and false paradigms altogether.  He recommends parallel societies. I advocate something very similar on these pages in my own way:

• Knowing what you stand for and which side you are on.
• Filling your mind with the things of God rather than the World / Babylon system.
• Getting out of debt to throw off banker and tax controls.
• Becoming self-reliant in various skills, and group-reliant for close societies.
• Be as disruptive as possible to the ideas and institutions that make us less human.

I discovered in my own life that there was a distinct point, a fork in the road, where I had to choose either the interconnected Babylonian technocracy…or a simpler, more wholesome and purer existence.  I found that life in the Philippines, but there are lots of ways you can find it.  It does put me outside of the orbits I used to circulate in and the high-paying projects I used to enjoy.  Totally worth it, despite the tradeoffs.

That first step is a doozy.  If you stand for goodness and light, then get on that side, Friend.  As a funny anecdote, our Scripture lesson this morning was from Matthew 17, and included the scene of Jesus telling Peter to go and catch the first fish he hooks, and there would be a coin in its mouth.  Enough to pay the temple tax for both of them, but nothing they actually worked for.  To me it is a picture not only of the Grace we receive when we trust Christ as savior, but a reminder from the Man himself not to sweat the small stuff.

Get this part straight, and sleep sound as a baby, Readers.  The world will keep eating its own tail while we quietly rebuild society.

Wait…did I just invent 6^th Gen Warfare?? 

Peace be upon you in Christ from the Philippines,

Visayas Outpost 

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