Today’s CNN report about suicidal North Korean soldiers in Ukraine should terrify anyone who understands institutional collapse.

I’ve spent decades studying how societies descend into authoritarianism and as a security professional, I’m watching patterns that I know all too well emerge at unprecedented speed in American institutions.

Consider what we’re seeing in Ukraine: young North Korean soldiers carrying handwritten loyalty pledges, documenting each other’s “disloyalty,” removing protective gear to prove dedication, and detonating grenades rather than being captured.

These aren’t just tactical choices – they’re the end result of a system that values loyalty to false prophets above all else, including human life.

Now look at what’s happening in American federal institutions. The Office of Personnel Management is installing new centralized communication systems that shatter decades of security protocols. Career civil servants are being illegally replaced by startlingly young loyalists. Traditional agency independence is being deliberately dismantled.

These parallels aren’t subtle to an expert in authoritarian dangers.

Here’s what makes this moment uniquely dangerous, requiring additional expertise in cybersecurity: technology is accelerating institutional collapse beyond anything we’ve seen in history.

When Mao deployed Red Guards, when Stalin conducted his purges, when the Shah’s SAVAK began its campaigns – these transformations took years. Today, a centralized email system can expose every federal employee to loyalty tests instantly. Social media can identify and target “disloyal” staff within hours by running a single query statement like “DEI”. A teenager with an assault rifle can be placed in charge of critical systems with a single administrative decision.

By the time most people recognize automation of decline and destruction, the professional expertise needed to prevent catastrophic steps – like a button-click to end hundreds of thousands of lives – already may be done and unrecoverable.

When Twitter’s $44B purchase led to 80% value destruction, pundits laughed at Elon Musk as incompetent and cruel. They missed his actual intentions dog-whistled by him for years.

Hitler’s 1933 ‘Volksempfänger’ program was giving away radios at a 75% loss to destroy democracy and replace it with Nazi adherents. Both sacrificed billions to gain control of communication infrastructure, celebrating deceptive and illegal “exit package” tactics meant to accelerate end of freedom.

Seemingly “bad business” decisions of massive devaluation and loss make perfect sense when viewed as evil charity – tools for rapid institutional control and cult-like loyalty enforcement rather than profit-seeking ventures. The toxic exit packages are institutional suicide pills, similar to how Hitler’s “Night of Long Knives” eliminated opposition through emphasis on rapid “exits.”

The new appointees – averaging 29 years old compared to the typical 52 – are specifically being selected to lack the knowledge that would recognize catastrophic risks someone wants them to make… again (e.g. MAGA). When a 26-year-old was placed in charge of nuclear command protocols they didn’t understand how keeping authentication systems separate from general communications networks is critical to safety – literally the most famous catastrophic design flaw in all hacker history (e.g. 1983 NORAD near-miss and the infamous 2600 phreakers).

The patterns are clear: when loyalty becomes the only metric that matters, when youth are elevated specifically because they lack the judgment to resist, when technology enables instant implementation of control systems – you’re watching the death of professional judgment and institutional knowledge in real time.

Some will say this analysis is alarmist. They’ll say American institutions are resilient. They’ll say we’ve survived previous challenges. But they’re missing how technology has changed the game. The speed of institutional collapse in the digital age isn’t even comparable to historical examples that were measured in months and years. We don’t have the luxury of analog and physical warning signs.

The North Korean soldiers show us exactly where America is headed at warp speed because, unlike their 1980s view of the world, we are throwing $500 Billion at AI “end of society” announcements: young people primed to throw away lives based on loyalty tests alone, unable to adapt or think independently, following long-outdated patterns even as they die.

The time to recognize deadly devotion to loyalty over competence, to recognize the prioritization of control over effectiveness, is before it becomes irreversible. History is clear on this point: once institutional knowledge is purged, once professional judgment to protect lives is replaced by suicidal loyalty tests, once the young and inexperienced are given authority specifically because they lack the context to resist – the rushed slide into full institutional collapse becomes nearly impossible to stop. Even physical coercion becomes digital:

[Czechoslovakian] President Hácha was in such a state of exhaustion that he more than once needed medical attention from the [Nazi] doctors, who, by the way, had been there ready for service since the beginning of the interview. […] At 4:30 in the morning, Dr. Hacha, in a state of total collapse, and kept going only by means of injections, resigned himself with death in his soul to give his signature [for Hitler to seize power and invade].

We need to name what we’re seeing. This isn’t normal administrative change. This isn’t partisan politics as usual. This is the deliberate installation of North Korean-style loyalty systems in American institutions, accelerated by technology to a speed we’ve never seen before in human history.

The question isn’t why Trump regularly praises authoritarian leaders including North Koreans and what he would do to be like them – history has answered such questions too many times to count. The question is whether enough people recognize it right here and right now to prevent America’s institutions from following North Korea’s path towards youth rushing to blow themselves up and take down democracy, just to prove their absolute loyalty to Musk and his assistant Trump.