In January we addressed the implications of GPS failures from state sponsored and surrogate actors performing espionage and sabotage of one of the most critical systems that affect all our daily lives. There are no "Global Rules" and enforcement mechanisms to prevent not just GPS attacks but also attacks on the emerging 5G networks that most of us will use very shortly. The Biden Administration should lead both the Five Eyes intelligence allies and the other large democracies in establishing policy norms and hard core technical mechanisms for countering, for just one example, the clear dangers from the Chinese Huawei and its surrogates. Test beds can be cooperatively designed and implemented in much the same way that we have developed the finest SIGINT and ELINT systems since World War Two. We have the collective brain power. The critical infrastructure and dependencies and their vulnerabilities are fully understood by key people in the Five Eyes technical intelligence community. During the Cold War we had the MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) doctrine that prevented nuclear Armageddon. We need a new form of MAD in the digital era to prevent ill intentioned nations, their surrogates, and criminal hackers, from potentially creating economic chaos. We have witnessed how COVID created a level of economic meltdown. Potential attacks on the main global digital system networks that we not only rely on for personal uses, but are the very backbone and life blood of the modern global economy, have to be thwarted. This must be done in not just a technical sense by extremely smart counter measures, but also by international agreements that can be effectively enforced. For example, the Chairman of the United Kingdom's House of Commons Defense Committee, Tobias Ellwood, MP, has eruditely proclaimed in Parliament the critical need for security of the 5G networks. The US intelligence community with full White House support should begin the immediate process of international cooperation beyond the existing agreements and operations. We are in a new era with totally new and challenging paradigms. As Winston Churchill would order at critical junctures during World War Two when British and American lives and the future of democracy was on the line, "Action this Day". Those who were recalcitrant, malingered, or were non achievers, were very quickly gone, and replaced by those who produced the answers. The Biden Administration should follow ruthlessly the Churchill model.

Before we segue from the above to one single domain that affects us all, the critical issue of extreme right wing white supremacy groups and their global networks, let me address one aspect that has to be corrected soonest, and in my professional opinion as a fifty year member of the Five Eyes community, is one underlying reason for the recent successful assaults on US government departments digital infrastructure. The reason at one level is very simple, and at the technical level very complex. US contracting regulations and mechanisms have increasingly favored the lowest bidders in major government contracts in the digital domain. Technical program managers are often thwarted by contract officers who insist that lowest bidders win or, in some cases, specialty companies that are, under government contracting regulations, given priority. The reasons for the latter are extremely well conceived and intended. However, this contracting process has not produced the high quality technical expertise required to address the threat complexities discussed above and in my January Letter. High quality doctoral level digital and communications specialists do not grow on tress. They are expensive, and should be rewarded accordingly for their skills and experience, and prior performance. Unfortunately many of the most able people are not working in key domains because far less able personnel from low bid companies are supporting critical programs. Mediocrity is the result. Classification does not permit me to provide several very serious illustration of where I assess the United States' national security has been jeopardized by appalling contracting mechanisms. It is like giving an Olympic Gold Medal not to the runner who is first to the tape, but the runner back in the field, perhaps a good runner but, very simply, not good enough. This is a very important issue. Hence several of the contractor created systems have been attacked, compromised, and data exported. At Bletchley Park and Station Hypo in World War Two you had the finest minds that both the United Kingdom and the United States could muster respectively. There were no mediocrities producing inadequate results. The cracking of the Enigma Codes, the creation of the first electronic computer, "Colossus", and the extraordinary brilliant work in US Naval Intelligence on the Japanese "Magic" intercepts, were war winners. Imagine the Manhattan Project without J. Robert Oppenheimer and all the other brilliant physicists on the team such as Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, and Leo Szilard, to name just a small few. The challenges we face today, right now, require similar brain power, not the "Lowest Bidders".

Eccentric readers have read my observations in a much earlier Letter about the technical value of inertial navigation systems (INS) technology for navigation and, for one very good example, its use in our nuclear powered submarines when underwater. INS is extremely good, and is an alternative to GPS navigation, but it is very expensive and complex compared to the GPS in your car and on your cell phone. Be aware though that INS is out there, and has been in use for decades, long before satellite based GPS systems.

Extreme right wing fanaticism, in its many forms and incarnations, is not new. Readers may go on line and read for free my own study, "German Public Opinion and Hitler's Policies, 1933-1939", published fifty three years ago, but still read today globally by postgraduate students and specialists. The mechanisms by which right wing fanatics, with racist ideologies, such as Hitler and Mussolini, and to a much lesser degree Franco in Spain and Salazar in Portugal, came to power and sustained their dictatorial regimes, is well understood. The nature of their demagoguery, propaganda, and organization approach, and eventual political control of largely decent societies with predominantly Christian value systems, is well understood. It can not only happen again, but we are seeing stark manifestations of it, here in the United States, today, and not just on January 6, 2021. It has been ongoing for some time. The dark years of the Trump Administration obscured the true nature of American right wing extremism, with severe racist and anti-Semitic overtones and manifestations. What happened in Charlottesville was a dress rehearsal for January 6. Trump was insidiously clever in playing not just to the decent and upright loyal Republicans with perfectly fine intentions but to a seriously large, disaffected, and often uneducated, underprivileged, and easily manipulated extreme right wing racist base. The latter's voting power was pivotal in 2016, just as Hitler's rise to power happened as a result of one critical vote that had been fired by heinously conceived propagandist lies. The latter were believed. The rest is history. In November, 2020 the American people were neither that naïve nor foolish. But the 21st century American demagogue protested, supposedly cheated by electoral fraud, and firing up a right wing racist base that showed its worst manifestation on January 6, 2021. Worse can follow, unless we heed the lessons of history, and also use technology. How then do the issues raised earlier interlock with this new frightening challenge in our midst? How in the digital era, an age of relentless mass communications, with instant gratification for those who wish to parlay their evil thoughts and plans, in a nation with a First Amendment that espouses free speech, and the right to be heard, do we address not just the clear and present danger of the criminal violent aspects, but the much more insidious mechanisms and controls that were used so successfully in the past, and that had none of the potentially odious benefits and attributes of contemporary digital communications. We have a very serious problem. It is not going away. Upstanding Republicans, Democrats, and Independents will need to bury their other differences and use all the power at the United States' disposal in the pursuit of containing white racist extremism. How we may do this in a modern democracy, with a sacred adherence to freedom of speech, and the protection of privacy, will be presented in my April Letter. Meanwhile please be safe and well, and I hope as many Eccentric readers as possible will benefit from vaccination as soon as possible.