The Ultra Paradox

The cost of maintaining an illusion

The information war isn’t for everyone. I would suggest it is a cognitive war and not everyone is cut out for it. At the very least, we are in the midst of an Irregular War that has gone on now for well over 17 months. Whatever you want to call it, we are at war, nonetheless. While our victories are mounting every day and more and more of the enemy’s defenses are failing, we still suffer at the gas pump, grocery stores, and court of public opinion. Shouldn’t winning feel better than this?

                I look across the landscape of all we have been through since the Crime of the Century and we have never been in a better position in terms of wins. If this were the NBA playoffs it would be like having 3 games to zero lead at home in a seven-game series. But then I am reminded this is not a regular war; this is not a seven-game series and who knows when it will all end. This irregular warfare is unlike any before and in many ways, it is a game to be played out in our mind and souls. I reminded of a movie I recently watched called The Imitation Game.

Imagine if you had the power to save lives. Imagine if you had the power to leap into the future and prevent and accident or foil a terrorist attack. What if you had the power to save an entire fleet of Allied ships from German U-boats? Most everyone would not hesitate at the chance to be that kind of hero. Well, the Allied forces in World War2 did not have a time machine but they did crack the code for German secret communications. Having done that, the Allied Intelligence Project could quite literally have saved and entire fleet of ships….but they chose not to. In the Oscar nominated movie The Imitation Game they briefly touch on this paradox:

In order to win the war, we must lose certain battles; in order to save lives, we must sacrifice others.

                The movie is based on the real-life story of Alan Turing and his contributions to “Ultra” which was the codename for the Allied Intelligence Project during the early years of World War 2. Ultra consisted of many efforts to decrypt and decode intercepted German messages. For Turing’s part, he was tasked with decrypting the German Enigma machine. It is a fascinating movie on several levels that span concepts of game-theory, artificial intelligence, computer science, counterintelligence, humanity, and the Ultra paradox of what to do with all the German decrypted information. I could write several articles on Alan Turing alone and his contributions to computer hardware, computer software, artificial intelligence, and computer theory. However, it is the paradox of Ultra that I find most fascinating.

                Before we get into the Ultra Paradox, I want to lay a foundation. I found this excerpt in the Washington Post that is an excellent start:

Our digital world is the product of countless inventions, business moves and design decisions, with all of it resting on a platform of applied mathematics and information theory. The computer age has evolved in surprising ways; no one fully anticipated the reach of the Internet, the power of search engines or the explosiveness of social media.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-imitation-game-didnt-tell-you-about-alan-turings-greatest-triumph/2015/02/20/ffd210b6-b606-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html

                Regardless of whether today’s war is kinetic or informational, both would require applied mathematics, information theory, computers, game-theory, the internet, social media as well a host of other technologies that can trace their lineage back to people like Alan Turing. That is because people like Alan Turing were different. They saw the world differently and the world saw them differently. One of the great lines from the movie goes like this:

“Sometimes it is the very people who no one imagines anything of, who do the things no one can imagine.”

                Alan Turing was a mathematician; a really, really good mathematician. However, even the challenge of math was not enough for him as he saw past the numbers and the values they represented. He saw something they all had in common. Math problems were like puzzles and puzzles were like codes. Alan Turing’s character (Benedict Cumberbatch) has this to say:

“Codes are a puzzle. A game, just like any other game.”

The common denominator in all this was binary logic: it either fits or it doesn’t. It is through the prism of binary logic that people like Turing view their world. Let me explain further.

                I was on a plane several years ago and I grabbed a copy of Sky magazine and came across an article about Legos and IT professionals. My childhood was polluted with Legos and so was every room of our house. My first Millennium Falcon was one I created long before Lego ever did. So, I was naturally drawn to the article and was fascinated to discover that studies have shown an overwhelming correlation between IT professionals and kids who grew up playing with Legos. I had always seen a lot of Lego figures on computer monitors or little figures posed in various settings in the cubicles of other IT folks like me, but never really made a connection. There is a strong connection. It is called binary logic. The kids who grow up playing Legos learn very quickly that it either fits (1) or doesn’t (0). In binary logic a ”1” is yes and a “0” is no. This binary logic can be taught but is second nature to us Lego builders. And binary logic is the absolute base of all communications and computer language.

I will spare you the nuances of the machine that Turing built to crack the Enigma code and just tell you that it wasn’t enough to intercept the messages. Those messages had to be used to determine the Enigma wheel settings. Once you had the wheel settings then you entered the messages for that day, and they could be decrypted. The wheel setting changed every 24 hours. Turing’s machine (Bombe), which was built in Bletchley Park England, needed to go through millions upon millions of possible settings to arrive at just one setting. In other words, millions and millions of binary decisions: does it fit (1) or not fit (0)? It was an impossible task made possible by someone who thought differently, and no one imagined much of.

                This kind of logic, once you know it, is everywhere and it is all over the battlefield of the war we are in now. It’s the basis for all internet traffic, IP address schemes, computational logic, software code and even problem solving, predictive analysis, and game-theory. Game-theory is a natural evolution of this as it is a way to predict outcomes and uses series of matrixes based on binary decision-making. I am no genius. However, I did play with a bunch of Legos when I was kid and I have been in the IT field for quite a while. I think I know binary language. I also think I know people who are like me and who think differently. Donald J Trump is one of those people.

                I don’t believe Donald Trump necessarily cracked any code as it relates to the DS. If anything, I believe we are trying to decrypt the battle plans that he enacted. Its possible Q is the Enigma machine that our military uses to communicate with other parts of the military, who knows? What I do know is that there is no shortage of anons trying to figure it all out. I don’t think we ever will. It’s okay though. If we don’t know the exact details of the plan, neither does the enemy. The enemy’s playbook is known, and their moves have been war gamed. Moves and countermoves have been calculated by different minds that are adept at mathematics, economics, and game-theory. Something mere politicians could never do.

And so that brings us to the Ultra Paradox: if Trump has the upper hand and we are winning then why is there pain being felt all across America? It can feel like we are defenseless cargo ships in the North Atlantic with German U-boats closing in us. We say the military is the only way, why don’t they save us now? Let’s look at the challenge that faced Ultra during WW2:

By early 1942 the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park were decoding about 39,000 intercepted messages each month, a figure that rose subsequently to more than 84,000 per month—two messages every minute, day and night.

Decoded messages revealed the positions of the submarines, enabling ships to avoid contact. Great care was always exercised to conceal the fact that Bletchley had deciphered these messages. For instance, British intelligence leaked false information hinting at revolutionary new developments in long-range radar.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ultra-Allied-intelligence-project

                There was certainly enough intelligence gained to win every battle. However, by winning every battle they would have given away Bletchley Park and all the gains it had made. An illusion had to be made that they never cracked the code; that the Germans were still in charge of the game. Great care was taken to conceal that Bletchley had not deciphered the code.  It makes sense that certain battles with the Democrats, the Biden Administration, and the Deep State would be conceded to further the illusion that they are in control; to conceal that Trump had this game figured out. The long game demands it. Look at the victories we have had recently with SCOTUS! Now consider these victories for ULTRA and compare:

·         During the Battle of Britain, Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, Commander-in-Chief of RAF Fighter Command, had a teleprinter link from Bletchley Park to his headquarters at RAF Bentley Priory, for Ultra reports. Ultra intelligence kept him informed of German strategy,[47] and of the strength and location of various Luftwaffe units, and often provided advance warning of bombing raids (but not of their specific targets).[48] These contributed to the British success. Dowding was bitterly and sometimes unfairly criticized by others who did not see Ultra, but he did not disclose his source.

·         Ultra intelligence made a very significant contribution in the Battle of the Atlantic. Winston Churchill wrote "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril."[60] The decryption of Enigma signals to the U-boats was much more difficult than those of the Luftwaffe. It was not until June 1941 that Bletchley Park was able to read a significant amount of this traffic currently.[61] Transatlantic convoys were then diverted away from the U-boat "wolfpacks", and the U-boat supply vessels were sunk. On 1 February 1942, Enigma U-boat traffic became unreadable because of the introduction of a different 4-rotor Enigma machine. This situation persisted until December 1942, although other German naval Enigma messages were still being deciphered, such as those of the U-boat training command at Kiel.[62] From December 1942 to the end of the war, Ultra allowed Allied convoys to evade U-boat patrol lines, and guided Allied anti-submarine forces to the location of U-boats at sea. - Wikipedia

                The are numerous more examples from WW2 and yes, many vessels were saved in the North Atlantic…but not all. Deception (MILDEC) had to be used to maintain the illusion that the Enigma code had not been broken. Deception is being used now as well. What if we surrender a few minor victories to the Democrats and yet win the larger victories like Roe V Wade? I think the larger war is being won in that case. Also, let’s not forget that the pain we feel is being felt by many and is being put squarely on Bidens shoulders. They own this inflation; they own the economy, and they own the recession to come. The good news is, we have a master chess player on our side of the board. We have a different sort of leader that many did not imagine much of, and he has done more than any of us could have imagined.

Biernutz_71

7/5/2022

“I would rather die with Christ and hope in my heart and be called a fool than to stand over the dead corpse of the Republic and say, I told you so.”