The history of warfare teaches us one lesson repeatedly: fixed defenses fail catastrophically if they can’t address mobility of opponents. If you thought “build a wall” ended in corrupt failure (it did) here we are in 2025 watching the same characters prepare to pour $500 billion into the “gate” – a massive fixed AI infrastructure project that manages to ignore virtually every lesson from both military history and information security.
The Digital Fortress Fallacy
As someone who has spent many decades analyzing technological risk while immersed in global information warfare, I can state unequivocally: Stargate represents the single largest strategic miscalculation in the history of warfare technology. It’s not just a mistake – it’s a mistake of such magnitude that future military historians will likely use it as a canonical example of strategic myopia.
The parallels with historical blunders are not just striking – they’re identical in their fundamental misunderstanding of how advantage is gained and lost in technological warfare:
- The Maginot Line cost France 3 billion francs and the illusion of security
- British battleship programs consumed vast resources just as naval warfare was being revolutionized by carriers
- Soviet heavy armor investments in Afghanistan were rendered obsolete by mobile insurgents with Stinger missiles
- Libyan armored divisions were humiliated by Chadian forces in Toyota pickups
Going backwards in time has been a hallmark of Trump, so I must ask whether suddenly driving to make these same old mistakes, at a scale that dwarfs all previous examples combined, is really what Stargate represents.
This certainly would be worse than the “build a wall” rhetoric of fraud that self-defeatingly redirected American security staff away from critical airports and seaports to stand in the empty desert wondering where all their money went.
Bannon never faced federal charges because he was pardoned by then-President Trump on Trump’s final night in office during his first term. The pardon only applied to the federal case and did not preclude state charges. Bannon had told donors to the We Build the Wall campaign that their money would 100% go toward building a wall along the U.S. southern border, while prosecutors say some of the $15 million in donations was secretly funneled to himself and the campaign’s president, Brian Kolfage.
That scam wall is bascially set to repeat as a gate with 33x the scale of losses (from $15M to $500B).
Realities of Open Source Warfare
The recent DeepSeek developments out of China have abruptly exposed the obvious and fundamental flaws in Stargate’s dubious conception. Timing of the announcement is notable. A reported ability to achieve competitive AI performance at a fraction of the cost isn’t an anomaly – it’s the expected outcome of open source warfare principles that have governed technological conflict for centuries. And it means Trump already is creating catastrophic weakness.
When analysts like Gavin Baker try to dismiss DeepSeek’s $6M achievement by pointing to “prior research costs,” they’re making the same deadly mistake military planners make when they focus on R&D budgets instead of deployment effectiveness. Baker argues this cost “excludes prior research” and required “hundreds of millions in prior research” – as if that somehow diminishes the achievement. The Nazis claimed a lowly graduate student alone invented their jet engine when everyone knows German spies stole it from Cambridge, England. Today’s analysts are making the same mistake, pretending DeepSeek’s achievements don’t count because they built on existing research.
Imagine sitting in London as the V-1 falls, arguing “but Hitler didn’t account for prior research costs”. This is exactly equivalent to claiming the Mujahideen’s effectiveness against Soviet helicopters should be discounted because they didn’t invent the shoulder-mounted rocket launcher or account properly for R&D budgets.
In warfare – whether physical or digital – what matters is effective deployment, derivation and adaptation, not who paid for the original art.
Historical Precedent is Asymmetric Victory
Let’s be explicitly clear about what history teaches us:
- Mission 101 (Ethiopia, 1940): at most 20,000 irregular troops utterly routed hundreds of thousands (~300K) Italian fascist forces through clever mobility and tactical adaptation
- The Toyota War (Chad, 1987): Pickup trucks and rocket launchers decimated Soviet-supplied armor columns
- Ukrainian Drone and Bike Warfare (2022-present): Consumer drones and motorbikes with adaptable tactics render Russian billion-dollar air, land and water defense systems largely irrelevant
Each of these examples demonstrates how agile forces using adapted technology consistently defeat massive fixed investments. And that’s before we account for the scale of corruption fraud expected from Trump. The Stargate project ignores the whole history of warfare lessons at a scale that beggars belief.
Don’t get me started on knights in armor sinking into the mud of 1415 Agincourt or how Napoleon’s Navy repeatedly was a sitting duck of disasterous miscalculations while Nelson literally ran circles of fire around them.
Digital War Veteran Reality Check
From an information security perspective, Stargate represents everything we know doesn’t work in cyber defense. Concentrating resources in massive overpriced fixed infrastructure of our grandparents’ fears creates:
- Single points of failure
- High-value targets
- Reduced adaptability
- Resource drain from more effective defensive measures
It’s as if we’re building the world’s most expensive castle while our opponents are already fielding artillery. It’s like celebrating WWI veteran and politician Maginot building a concrete line from his past while opponents simply launch radio directed fast attack planes and tanks of WWII. How hard is Putin laughing at Stargate right now?
Strategic Cost of Watergate Stargate
Stargate isn’t just replicating the strategic errors of fixed fortifications – it’s potentially worse because it represents the privatization of core national security compute infrastructure. We’ve seen how this story ends before with military contractors: the taxpayer gets the bill, the private entity gets the profit, and the actual security capabilities often end up compromised. Imagine if the NSA had outsourced its core computing infrastructure to a private contractor in the 1960s – that’s effectively what we’re contemplating here, but at a far larger scale and with far higher stakes. The lesson from France in the crucial years just before WWII is that every dollar poured into a digital Maginot Line is a dollar not spent on:
- Distributed AI development capabilities
- Asymmetric technological advantages
- Adaptive defense systems
- Actual technological innovation
Ask a Historian or Lose
History’s judgment of fixed fortification strategies is universally harsh. Maginot’s Line, Hitler’s Atlantic Wall, the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, Israel’s Bar Lev Line, Israel’s Gaza Wall, South Korea’s DMZ… and countless other massive fixed defenses share one common feature: they have failed spectacularly when overconfident and unable to address asymmetric mobility. Stargate appears poised to join this list, but at a scale that would make even the most wasteful military planners of the past blush.
The truly tragic aspect of the Stargate project is that we know better in the same way that tying our shoe laces is better than tripping over them. Once you know, you know.
American special forces have demonstrated daily how distributed, adaptive approaches work. Our cyber warfare units understand the superiority of mobile defense. Our best military historians and technologists have documented these lessons repeatedly.
Yet here we are, like Teapot Dome never happened (another case of private interests corrupting national resources)…preparing to build the most expensive fixed fortification in human history. Not just concrete and steel this time, but centralized chips and software. The lessons of history could not be clearer: this way lies disaster.
Do I know whether Stargate will fail at stated objectives? Did ChoicePoint get breached? When we privatized and centralized critical data processing infrastructure without diligence or regulation, it led to catastrophic security failures. History gives us that answer with crystal clarity. The real question is how much damage this strategic misallocation of resources will do to American technological competitiveness before reality forces a course correction.
Palantir sued the U.S. Army to Force itself in and then promised as a monopoly on intelligence it would find terrorists. Instead it created them and destroyed any chance of peace and stability (a darling of Wall Street bulls known as “self licking ISIS-cream cone”). Stargate could unleash an even bigger stock pumping bullsh*t avalanche destroying society as we know it.
Past is prologue. Look at my record since 1995: history is the best predictor. When faced with Nazi Germany’s overwhelming conventional superiority, many “realists” urged Churchill to negotiate from a position of weakness. They saw only the massive fixed infrastructure of German power – the tanks, the planes, the divisions. But Churchill understood something deeper about asymmetric warfare that applies perfectly to today’s AI arms race:
Churchill’s brutal response – “I am ashamed of you” – came from understanding that apparent power imbalances can be overcome through unconventional approaches. He knew that Britain’s real strength lay not in matching German industrial might tank-for-tank, but in mobility, adaptation, and unconventional warfare. Today’s architects of Stargate are making the same mistake as Churchill’s doubters – assuming that massive fixed infrastructure (digital rather than industrial) is the path to security.
Stargate at first blush sounds like the worst boondoggle, even worse than the fragile Cybertruck, gifting future historians the ultimate example of how not to approach technological warfare in the information age.
Unfortunately, that huge sucking sound seems to be $500 billion of taxpayer money being flushed, along with America’s technological leadership position. The people who couldn’t build a wall without it falling down, while they stuffed its budget into their pockets, are back with an even bigger fraud.
As if to prove the main point here deeper, OpenAI just announced ChatGPT Gov – another massive centralization of government AI infrastructure into fixed, high-value targets. They’re proudly announcing 18 million messages from government agencies flowing through their system, as if concentrating sensitive government communications in private hands while deregulating safety was something to celebrate rather than a huge strategic vulnerability.
