In the wake of Facebook’s massive 2021 outage, a concerning pattern emerged in public commentary: the tendency to trivialize engineering disasters through casual metaphors and resigned acceptance. When Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain likened the incident to “locking keys in a car” and others described it as an “accidental suicide,” they fundamentally mischaracterized the nature of engineering failure… and worse, perpetuated a dangerous notion that such disasters are somehow inevitable or acceptable.

They are not.

Casual Commentary Got it Wrong

When we reduce complex engineering failures to simple metaphors that get it wrong, we do more than just misrepresent the technical reality, we misdirect the shape of how society views engineering responsibility.

“Locking keys in a car” suggests a minor inconvenience, a momentary lapse that could happen to anyone. But Facebook’s outage wasn’t a simple mistake, it was a cascading failure resulting from fundamental architectural flaws and insufficient safeguards. It was reminiscent of the infamous north-east power outages that spurred the modernization of NERC regulations.

This matters because our language shapes our expectations. When we treat engineering disasters as inevitable accidents rather than preventable failures, we lower the bar for engineering standards and accountability, instead of generating regulations that force innovation.

Industrial History Should be Studied

The comparison to the Grover Shoe Factory disaster is particularly apt. In 1905, a boiler explosion killed 58 workers and destroyed the factory in Brockton, Massachusetts. At the time, anyone who viewed industrial accidents as an unavoidable cost of progress had to recognize the cost was far too high. This disaster, along with others, led to fundamental changes in boiler design, safety regulations, and most importantly engineering code of ethics and practices.

We didn’t accept “accidents happen” then, in order for the market to expand and grow, and we shouldn’t accept it now.

Reality Matters Most in Failure Analysis

The Facebook outage wasn’t about “locked keys” since it was about fundamental design choices that could be detected and prevented:

1. Single points of failure
2. Automation without safeguards
3. Lack of fail-safe monitoring and response
4. Cascading failures set to propagate unchecked

These weren’t accidents by Facebook, they were intentional design decisions. Each represents a choice made during development, a priority set during architecture review, a corner cut during implementation.

Good CISOs Plot Engineering Culture Change

Real change requires more than technical fixes. We need a fundamental shift in engineering culture regardless of authority or source trying to maintain an “inevitability” narrative of fast failures.

1. Embrace Systemic Analysis: Look beyond immediate causes to systemic vulnerabilities
2. Learn from Other Industries: Adopt practices from fields like aviation and nuclear power, where failure is truly not an option
3. Build Better Metaphors: Use language that accurately reflects the preventable nature of engineering failures

Scrape burned toast faster?

Build fallen bridges faster?

Such a failure-privilege mindset echoes a disturbing pattern in Silicon Valley where engineering disasters are repackaged as heroic “learning experiences” and quick recoveries are celebrated more than prevention. It’s as though we’re praising a builder for quickly cleaning up after people plunge to their death rather than demanding to know why fundamental structural principles were ignored.

When Facebook’s engineering team wrote that “a command was issued with the intention to assess the availability of global backbone capacity,” they weren’t describing an unexpected accident, they were admitting to conducting a critical infrastructure test without proper safeguards.

In any other engineering discipline, this would be considered professional negligence. The question isn’t how quickly they recovered, but why their systems culture allows harm with such a catastrophic command to execute in the first place.

The “plan-do-check-act” concepts of the 1950s didn’t just come from Deming preaching solutions to one of the most challenging global engineering tests in history (WWII), they represented everything opposite to how Facebook has been operating.

Every major engineering disaster should prompt fundamental changes in how we design, build, and maintain systems. Just as the Grover Shoe Factory disaster led to new engineering discipline standards, modern infrastructure failures should drive us to rebuild with better principles.

Large platforms should design for graceful degradation, implement multiple layers of safety, create robust failure detection systems, and build infrastructure that fails safely. And none of this should surprise anyone.

When we casually dismiss engineering failures as inevitable accidents, we do more than mischaracterize the problem, we actively harm the engineering profession’s ability to learn and improve. These dismissals become the foundation for dangerous policy discussions about “innovation without restraint” and “acceptable losses in pursuit of progress.”

But there is nothing acceptable about preventable harm.

Just as we don’t allow bridge builders to operate without civil engineering credentials, or chemical plants to run without safety protocols, we cannot continue to allow critical digital infrastructure to operate without professional engineering standards. The stakes are too high and the potential for cascade effects too great.

The next time you hear someone compare a major infrastructure failure to “locked keys” or an “accident,” push back. Ask why a platform handling billions of people’s communications isn’t required to meet the same rigorous engineering standards we demand of elevators, airplanes, and power plants.

The price of progress isn’t occasional disaster – it’s the implementation of professional standards that make disasters preventable. And in 2025, for platforms operating at global scale, this isn’t just an aspiration. It must be a requirement for the license to operate.

When historians examine how societies normalize mechanized violence, the period between 2016 (Nice) and 2025 (New Orleans) will demand particular attention. This era marks a fundamental shift in how vehicular force evolved from terrorist tactic towards automated system of violence.

The Mineta Transportation Institute’s analysis of 78 vehicle ramming attacks between 1973-2018, for example, reveals a clear tactical progression foreshadowing the New Orleans tragedy.

The attacker drove around barricades and up onto the sidewalk of Bourbon Street, New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said, avoiding barriers that had been placed by police. Kirkpatrick said the man “was trying to run over as many people as he could. We had a car there, we had barriers there, we had officers there, and he still got around.”

Vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices (VBIEDs) represented the early apex, requiring extensive knowledge and complex logistics. Their sophistication proved their weakness – the 2010 Times Square bombing failed when the device malfunctioned, while in 2007, two separate VBIEDs in Britain failed to detonate, one even towed away for illegal parking before discovery.

Everything changed on Bastille Day, 2016, in Nice, France. The attack that killed 86 people stripped away complexity, requiring only a truck and a driver. This brutal simplification of attack echoes the natural pattern of mechanized violence evolution – wherever vulnerabilities are made more complex attackers tend to pivot towards opportunities of least resistance. The Nice attack marked one such tactical regression of deadly consequence, where an average of 3.6 fatalities per vehicle incident abruptly rose to 22.0 in crowded zones.

The American “car culture” response to the shift in attacks proved particularly telling. Within months of Nice, while counter-terrorism experts were still analyzing implications, seven U.S. states saw legislation introduced to grant legal immunity for driving into groups of people.

The language in these bills is remarkably similar from state to state, and in some cases, nearly identical.

North Dakota’s HB 1203 explicitly protected drivers “exercising reasonable care” when using their vehicles as weapons.

…the bill got introduced for people to be able to drive down the roads without fear of running into somebody and having to be liable for them.

Florida’s SB 1096 went even further with logic reversal, shifting burden of proof to American victims of terrorist attacks.

…the bill would have put the burden of proof on the injured person, not the driver, to prove that the driver’s actions were intended to cause injury or death.

The bills were written with cynical claims about protecting vulnerable drivers despite a reality of non-violent groups of unarmed people in the street. It was an obviously false victim construction with zero logical basis.

…existing laws already protect drivers who need to flee from a riot to defend themselves and their families. In both the criminal and civil contexts, self-defense laws provide justifications for a driver to use force to protect himself. A driver is further protected by either prosecutorial discretion in a criminal lawsuit or by comparative negligence law in a civil lawsuit. Because of these existing mechanisms, the statute is unnecessary to protect drivers from liability…

Thus, the new bills acted as a coordinated push to codify private vehicular force as state-sanctioned crowd control; the car as political power to undermine safety necessary for people to assemble or even move in public. The normalization of cars hitting people as an offensive action, as rooted in 1930s racist jaywalking laws and forced “side walks” (versus British word “pavement”), created a permissive atmosphere where boundaries between accident and attack, between self-defense and aggression, became deliberately blurred. Use of vehicles as an asymmetric weapon was surreptitiously promoted into common thought.

Media outlets played a crucial role in this normalization immediately following the horrifying Nice terror attack. Major platforms including Fox News and The Daily Caller published, then quietly deleted, articles in 2017 encouraging drivers to dehumanize and assault people as a form of political action.

Here’s a compilation of liberal protesters getting pushed out of the way by cars and trucks. Study the technique; it may prove useful in the next four years.

Social media likewise was filled with information warfare campaigns systematically promoting vehicular violence as white supremacist political action.

St. Paul police have placed a sergeant on leave as they investigate a report that he posted on Facebook, “Run them over,” in response to an article about an upcoming… protest. The comment detailed what people could do to avoid being charged with a crime if they struck someone [using their vehicle intentionally to cause harm].

While legislators and media normalized intentional vehicular violence, a parallel development was emerging from a notoriously racist car company: the automation of vehicle control systems. This shift would prove significant, as it removed even the psychological barriers that might give human attackers pause. Instead of requiring radicalization or intent, demonstrated within Minnesota police themselves, automated systems could now cause widespread harm through a programmatic indifference to (race-based) pedestrian safety.

A permissive framework would prove prophetic when autonomous systems began demonstrating systematic failures. Tesla’s Autopilot system has primarily revealed how automated control can inflict widespread damage globally without accountability. Between 2020-2024, over 900 “phantom braking” incidents and 273 documented crashes demonstrated how mechanical systems could exceed human actors in efficiency – a single software update affecting hundreds of thousands of vehicles simultaneously.

The contrast is stark:

• New Orleans attack (2025): 15 deaths, massive response with claims of ISIS links
• Waukesha parade (2021): 6 deaths, national crisis
• Tesla Autopilot (2020-2024): 273+ documented crashes, treated as acceptable business risk
1. “Phantom braking” incidents: 900+ cases risking chain collisions and dozens killed
2. Monthly Tesla fatalities surpass historic terrorist vehicle ramming attacks

To put it another way, when three students in Oakland, California were killed by an electric fire in their Cybertruck, Tesla said nothing about the unexplained tragedy and the CEO was uncharacteristically silent even as regulators announced their investigation. However, when one person was then killed by a fire in their Cybertruck in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas, the Tesla CEO immediately promoted the concept of a truck firework and camping fuel fire being an unknown concept worthy of his entire senior team’s commitment to a full investigation.

Fireworks started an estimated 31,302 fires in 2022, including 3,504 structure fires, 887 vehicle fires…

And yet:

Likewise, within hours of the New Orleans attack, officials announced the discovery of an ISIS flag in the vehicle, prompting immediate calls for particularly targeted surveillance and control systems. This familiar pattern – using terrorism as justification for increased mechanization of particular control – obscures a crucial shift: while earlier attacks required human ideological motivation, automated systems can now inflict similar damage through simple errors or intentional manipulation. The flag, whether planted or authentic, serves primarily to maintain older narratives about vehicle violence while missing the much more pressing and broader systematic vulnerabilities (flags flown in Tesla factories).

The response to New Orleans illustrates this misdirection perfectly. While media is dragged by racist politicians into reporting a single flag in a single vehicle, twisting the narrative to serve their selfish nativist/xenophobic agenda, the more significant threat comes from concentrated private autonomous vehicle networks designed to exploit loopholes in urban safety. The same politicians who cited the ISIS flag as a cause for action simultaneously have discussed removing regulations and fast-tracking permits for Tesla to deploy even larger unrestricted fleets – effectively increasing the very vulnerability they claimed to be fighting. The cynical manipulation of terrorist narratives more fundamentally will be about control of emergent technology for urban warfare. As politicians stoke fears about individual attackers using one vehicle, they’re simultaneously enabling deployment of massive autonomous networks that weaponize thousands of vehicles via simple software changes. We’ve moved from isolated incidents requiring human intent to infrastructure-scale vulnerabilities that will be triggered remotely.

The Grünheide Tesla facility near Berlin exemplifies this blind spot in urban security. America has demonstrated how quickly societies normalize mechanized violence – first through social media campaigns promoting vehicle attacks, then through weak regulation of autonomous systems, and now through massive concentration of networked vehicles near population centers. Each step made the violence more efficient while reducing accountability. Export of these weapons systems to other countries is yet another predictable outcome.

When future historians analyze this progression, they’ll note how “dual-use capability concentrations” were hidden behind marketing promises of hands-free driving and cheap taxi rides. The evolution from Nice to New Orleans shows how vehicular violence became systematized – from complex terrorist operations to simple ramming attacks, then to legally-protected tactics, and finally to automated networks that could be weaponized through existing command infrastructure.

The critical question isn’t whether such systems will be deployed; they already exist in cities worldwide and are being quietly tested. Charlottesville saw a rare exception where a terrorist using the heavily-promoted “run them over” tactic was convicted of a hate crime. Would he have gotten away with it if he had used remote control instead and wasn’t in the car?

The question is whether we’ll recognize this pattern of weaponized vehicles for asymmetric attacks before the next wave of manufactured crises further normalizes urban population terrorism.

References:

• Police Chief Magazine, “Low-Tech Terrorism: The Threat of Vehicles and Vehicle-Assisted Attacks,” International Association of Chiefs of Police.
• Dakin Andone, “These states have introduced bills to protect drivers who run over protesters,” CNN, August 19, 2017.
• Jenkins, Brian Michael and Bruce R. Butterworth, “An Analysis of Vehicle Ramming as a Terrorist Tactic,” Mineta Transportation Institute, 2018.
• Wamsley, Laurel, “Vehicle Attacks Rise As Extremists Target Protesters,” NPR, June 21, 2020.
• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “Standing General Order on Crash Reporting for Automated Driving Systems,” 2024.

A broad pattern in American history is that business interests often sought immigrant labor while simultaneously supporting policies that kept those same immigrants socially and politically marginalized. That’s because immigrant workers in America historically have been viewed primarily as a source of cheap labor rather than as future citizens:

• John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (1985)
• Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (2004)
• Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door: American Immigration Policy and Immigrants since 1882 (2004)
• Nelson Lichtenstein, State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002)
• David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (1991)
• Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (2001)

Leland Stanford, perhaps the most obvious and odious example of this history, expressed strong anti-Chinese views while serving as Governor of California (1862-1863). He campaigned on tight restrictions on immigration, such as in his 1862 inaugural address to the California Legislature when he officially spoke against the Chinese by using horribly racist terms.

Then, as the president of the Central Pacific Railroad, he sought out and employed thousands of immigrant Chinese workers. After undermining their social status with racist campaigns, he paid them significantly less than white workers and subjected them to much more dangerous working conditions (a “China man’s minute” came to refer to insufficient time to avoid being killed by dynamite).

We see clearly today that the immigrant Chinese, who were being hired by the avowed anti-immigrant anti-Chinese Stanford, made up about 90% of his workforce five years later by 1867.

This was a very cruelly curated formula of oppression. Railing against immigration by declaring Chinese a threat, while relying heavily on increased use of Chinese labor, was actually common in California business ethics that later evolved into… internment camps.

California businessmen swept through the state whenever they saw fit, seizing land and assets from non-white families using mass deportations or incarceration. White male executives and politicians wanted access to cheap non-white immigrant labor, while blocking prosperity and fair competition practices. Restrictions based on race forced specific workers into a subordinate economic position meant to prevent them from gaining political power or establishing permanent communities. Should the Chinese or any other Asians manage to avoid these harsh political headwinds, let alone the fate suffered by other non-white communities, they often would be burned to the ground (e.g. Elaine 1919, Tulsa 1921).

That’s the proper context from history that explains why today President Musk has told his assistant Trump that he needs immigrants to work in his companies, while loudly campaigning against immigration.

It’s a throwback to overtly racist and fraudulent business practices very common in America, as Stanford so clearly demonstrated to the world as his route to prosperity and outsized legacy.

The relationship between business interests and immigration policy has evolved significantly since Stanford’s era. While modern H-1B visas, unlike historical patterns of pure exploitation, were explicitly designed as pathways to citizenship and include significant worker protections. Workers earn high wages ($108,000 median) and have contributed critically to American innovation – for example, eight companies that developed COVID-19 vaccines brought in over 3,300 scientists through the program.

However, elements of worker vulnerability persist in more subtle forms. While H-1B differs dramatically from historical exploitation in offering citizenship pathways and legal protections, visa dependency can still affect workers’ ability to advocate for themselves or freely change jobs. The solution isn’t restricting this vital immigration pathway – which would only hurt immigrant communities and American innovation – but rather strengthening worker protections and making the path to permanent residency more secure.

So when we see companies simultaneously seeking H-1B talent while opposing reforms that would reduce visa holder vulnerability, we’re seeing a more complex modern echo of historical patterns. Not in wages or working conditions, which have improved dramatically, but in how immigration status can still be leveraged to maintain workplace control. The answer isn’t repeating historical mistakes of restriction, but rather expanding and protecting immigrant workers’ rights and accelerating their path to citizenship.

Who proudly wears a Stanford hat or sweatshirt today? Who puts Stanford on their resume? Silicon Valley is full of such people. It would be like traveling to Munich and seeing a “Hitler” brand on everyone’s clothing. Not an exaggeration, if we make a direct comparison between the two men. Stanford curated genocide, setup killing machines, the likes of which Hitler was inspired to recreate 100 years later.

As California’s governor, after overseeing Indian affairs, Stanford participated in and led state policies during a period of what historians now recognize as genocide against Native Americans.

During this period (particularly the 1850s-1860s), California’s Native American population declined catastrophically through:

• State-sponsored militia raids and bounties
• Forced relocation and displacement from lands
• Disease
• Starvation from destruction of food sources
• State policies that facilitated and incentivized killing of Native people

While Stanford made it intentionally difficult to provide an exact number that died specifically under his governance (infamous for cooked books and extensive business fraud), the overall death toll of California Indians during this period was devastating.

Historians estimate at least 120,000 native people (majority of the popupation) suffered an early death from 1846 to 1870 through direct violence, starvation, and disease.

Stanford specifically supported and helped implement policies that:

• Provided state funding for militia campaigns against Native people
• Enabled settler seizure of Native lands
• Restricted Native rights and movement
• Allowed forced indenture and essentially slavery of Native children

That probably sounds familiar to Americans who study Nazi Germany.

Moreover, Stanford verbally supported what he called “extermination” as a final solution to what he termed the “Indian problem.”

Can you imagine selling genocidal brands and logos of a Hitler University? America prevented such atrocious marketing from happening in Germany, yet has done nothing of the kind at home.

The difficulty in providing exact numbers stems partly from the fact that Stanford kept deaths undocumented through a loophole in responsibility across multiple state and local authorities. However, it is undisputed that Stanford was the key figure in implementing and maintaining the broader system of violence against immigrants as well as California native populations that reverberated for at least 50 years (e.g. foundation of California forced internment camps in 1942).

The systematic nature of Stanford’s approach to racial exploitation went beyond immediate economic gains – it helped establish enduring institutional frameworks for discriminatory labor practices in California. His influential position as both governor and railroad tycoon allowed him to create what historians call a “dual labor market” – one that deliberately segmented workers along racial lines while maintaining plausible deniability through ostensibly race-neutral policies.

This system’s sophistication lay in how it interwove private business interests with state power, creating legal and social structures that could survive long after individual policies were officially repealed. The Central Pacific Railroad’s practice of maintaining separate payroll systems and work crews became a model for other California industries, establishing patterns of employment discrimination that would persist well into the 20th century.

Hitler, more to the point, recognized this system when he specifically cited American race laws as a model for German discrimination underpinning genocide. The Nazi regime sent researchers to study American systems of racial oppression to help design their own policies.

• James Whitman, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law (2017)
• Robert Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer (1999)

Stanford’s specific contributions that influenced Nazi Germany included:

• His model of exploiting targeted racial groups for labor while denying them rights
• His implementation of systematic genocide against Native Americans
• His development of state mechanisms to facilitate and fund mass killing
• His “extermination” rhetoric and “final solution” framing
• His methods of distributing responsibility to obscure death counts
• His combination of business interests with state power to enable genocide

Trying to build walls and distinctions between Stanford and Hitler minimizes an important direct historical connection and influence that is seldom acknowledged. Stanford’s policies and actions weren’t just similar to Nazi practices, they helped inspire and inform them… as well as Elon Musk.

Musk, a South African naturalized U.S. citizen who at one point in time held an H1-B visa [now dictating orders to his assistant Trump] … voiced support for bringing skilled foreign workers into the U.S.

The history is instrumental in understanding why a young man fled the fall of South African apartheid in 1988 with giant bags of cash to launder as an illegal immigrant to America. He saw the shameful exploitative legacy of Stanford as a stepping stone for his future destiny. Today he is expressing many of the same ideas that historians recognize as the worst in history.

Tesla and Twitter, as two clear examples, already have been gutted of worker rights and filled with immigrants being held in precariously weak jeopardy by Musk. The premise is eerily similar to his family’s architecture of South African apartheid: his staff must accept unfair work without complaints, or be deported or worse.

As an illegal immigrant himself Elon Musk now rants publicly about the threat from immigrants, all the while saying he will go to war to ensure he can hire more immigrants to discriminate against and exploit. It’s the kind of self-dealing extreme contradiction that reminds me of another time and place.

For Longolongo, the fact that his mother was Tutsi and that he’d had Tutsi friends became a justification for his actions; he felt he had to make a public spectacle of his executions, to avoid suspicions that he was overly sympathetic toward the enemy. He feared that if he didn’t demonstrate his commitment to the Hutu-power cause, his family would be slaughtered. And so he kept killing. He killed his neighbors. He killed his mother’s friend. He killed the children of his sister’s godmother. All while he was hiding eight Tutsi in his mother’s house. Such contradictions were not uncommon in Rwanda.

Don’t miss the signals. Beware the obvious signs. Learn your history.

We keep making these same stupid mistakes over and over again as Americans because we don’t seem to appreciate history the way that other countries do.

Work hard to prevent repeat disasters.

[Stanford] was elected as California’s eighth governor when his business partners effectively bought the job for him after he had lost four previous election campaigns by embarrassing margins. His crowning achievement was the completion of the transcontinental railway, a feat [of horrible immigrant exploitation] financed by the federal government with loans he never repaid.

Angry anti-immigrant man in transit company has huge loans he never repaid? Sounds very familiar.

Elon Musk, Who Wants To Stop People ‘Taking Advantage Of Government,’ Had $830,000 In Federal Loans Forgiven

A performative anti-immigrant stance while simultaneously exploiting immigrant labor to steal taxpayer money is particularly striking, as it illustrates contradictions that signal deep and very dangerous systemic issues.

Recent developments in Ukraine’s UGV deployments force us to confront an uncomfortable reality about Europe’s autonomous vehicle concentrations. The Grünheide facility and its adjacent storage areas near Berlin represent what military planners term a “dual-use capability concentration” — a euphemism that barely masks its strategic implications.

The positioning of thousands of networked, autonomous-capable vehicles within striking distance of a major European capital isn’t just a supply chain curiosity. It’s a potential force multiplier that would make Cold War military planners blush. Each vehicle represents roughly 2,000kg of mobile, precisely-controllable explosive chemical cluster bomblets, networked to a centralized command infrastructure. The mathematics of concentrated force here are stark.

While some might reference WWII motor pools, a more apt comparison is the pre-WWI railway mobilization networks. Like those railway timetables, modern autonomous vehicle networks represent a “use-it-or-lose-it” capability. The critical difference is that instead of requiring weeks of mobilization, modern software-defined vehicles can be repurposed almost instantaneously.

The Lyptsi victory over Russia just demonstrated exactly how UGVs can be effectively weaponized in rural terrain, but urban environments present an entirely different magnitude of potential.

The concentration of autonomous vehicles near Berlin isn’t just about industrial efficiency. It represents a latent capability that could, through software alone, transform from a commercial asset into something far more concerning. Unlike traditional military assets, these vehicles are already positioned in strategically significant locations, require no physical modification to repurpose, and can be activated simultaneously through existing command infrastructure.

From a historian’s perspective, the Ukrainian victory represents a watershed moment bearing similarities to the first deployment of tanks at the Battle of the Somme in 1916. While those early tanks were clumsy and unreliable, they signaled a fundamental shift in warfare. What we’re seeing now may be equally significant.

The widespread presence of connected autonomous vehicles in cities like Berlin represents an unprecedented network of potential dual-use technology, far surpassing previous examples of civilian-to-military conversion like Ford’s River Rouge plant during WWII. The key difference now is that infrastructure wouldn’t need physical modification — merely trivial software updates that the Tesla CEO promises (completely fraudulently) will always maintain accuracy in combat.

What’s particularly striking is the speed of adaptation versus the urgency of civilian defense. While it took years for armies to develop effective tank doctrine after WWI, we’re seeing tactical evolution happen in near real-time in Ukraine. The establishment of specialized units like Ukraine’s Typhoon unit suggests institutionalization of these capabilities, moving beyond ad hoc experimentation. This kind of organizational change historically presages major doctrinal shifts.

The Russians learned this lesson the hard way in Kharkiv. Urban warfare is no longer just about controlling physical space, but about controlling the networked assets within that space. The question isn’t whether such concentrations of autonomous vehicles represent a strategic concern — that much is evident from Ukraine. The question is how national security planners are adapting to this new reality of Tesla fleets developing rapidly into a clear and present threat.

“Locally autonomous drone warfare,” Musk added, “is where the future will be.” Then he said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, because this is dangerous, but it’s simply what will occur.”