#command-and-control

#command-and-control

"All of the pieces that are required to make it viable exist." Defense contractors are in full sales mode to win a piece of a potentially trillion-dollar pie for development of the Trump administration's proposed Golden Dome missile shield. CEOs are touting their companies' ability to rapidly spool up satellite, sensor, and rocket production. Publicly, they all agree with the assertion of Pentagon officials that US industry already possesses the technologies required to make a homeland missile defense system work.

In Kathryn Bigelow's new movie, A House of Dynamite, the clock is ticking. The film's fictional president of the United States has less than 20 minutes and very little information to decide whether or not to retaliate against a nuclear missile, launched at the United States, from an unknown source. The story is, of course, fiction, but as with Bigelow's other war movies, it feels disturbingly plausible.

The cyber espionage activity was first flagged by the Russian cybersecurity vendor in November 2024, when it disclosed a set of attacks aimed at government entities in Latin America and East Asia in June, using never-before-seen malware families tracked as Neursite and NeuralExecutor. It also described the operation as exhibiting a high level of sophistication, with the threat actors leveraging already compromised internal servers as an intermediate command-and-control (C2) infrastructure to fly under the radar.

Kathryn Bigelow has reopened the subject that we all tacitly agree not to discuss or imagine, in the movies or anywhere else: the subject of an actual nuclear strike. It's the subject which tests narrative forms and thinkability levels. Maybe this is why we prefer to see it as something for absurdism and satire a way of not staring into the sun to remember Kubrick's (brilliant) black comedy Dr Strangelove, with no fighting in the war room etc, rather than Lumet's deadly serious Fail Safe.