First up, from Yahoo Finance, October 17:
The amount of crypto stolen by hackers has risen by more than a quarter this year, even as the value of cryptocurrencies has plunged.
Blockchain thieves have nabbed as much as $3 billion of investor funds through 141 various crypto exploits since January, according to data from DeFi Yield, a 31% increase over the same period last year. That means 2022 likely will surpass 2021 as the biggest year for crypto hacks on record.
Of the nearly weekly occurrence's of crypto exploits this year, those involving “cross-chain” crypto bridges have accounted for as much as $600 million in October and $2 billion worth of stolen funds year to date, with at least $1 billion in exploits attributed to North Korean-linked hackers, according to Chainalysis estimates.
“These are serious national security concerns that really stretch beyond the fact that there are millions of dollars being stolen in single episodes that we see with the DeFi hacks and exploits,” Eun Young Choi, director of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), said at Yahoo Finance's All Markets Summit....
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And from Barron's October 21:
If Every Issue Is a Security Issue, Nothing Is
About the author: Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute. He served as a naval officer and as deputy Undersecretary of the Navy and is the author of Mayday and Seablindness.
The Biden administration published its National Security Strategy late last week. The document epitomizes what is wrong, intellectually and strategically, with the current administration’s strategic perspective. Its greatest failure is the securitization of all topics with no attendant focus on any given strategic question. While the Biden administration faces a crisis across Eurasia that is close to drawing the U.S. into active warfare, it has engaged itself intellectually in a public-facing task with no actual substance.
Congress requires every administration to publish a National Security Strategy, but the document released by the administration is the apex of strategic bureaucratization. It is not a defense strategy, nor is it a grand strategy. It is, rather, a messaging exercise primarily for domestic audiences.
In one sense, the National Security Strategy, like many of its predecessor documents, says little about an administration’s actual policy. This document is jam-packed with priorities from countering China and Russia to mitigating climate change and ensuring American resilience.
Nevertheless, the structure of the Biden National Security Strategy does point to a strategic hermeneutic, a set of assumptions about the world, its major actors, and its critical dynamics that are useful to those who seek to understand policy. Four elements are relevant. All of them point to a lack of seriousness, and more fundamentally, to a lack of strategic change since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
First, the National Security Strategy is an ideological manifesto, not a realistic look at, for lack of a better word, the security elements of Eurasian competition. It begins with the same rhetoric that has become commonplace in any administration’s national security strategy—the world is “more dangerous” than at any point, yet the United States retains an “enduring role,” with its strategy’s precepts remaining as sound as they were ten, twenty, or fifty years ago. The notable aspect, however, is the explicit equivalence between traditional and nontraditional threats. The U.S. must compete and cooperate simultaneously. The climate disaster and public health questions, even inflation issues worthy of consideration and relevant to a security assessment. Of course, there is an overlap between climate, inflationary, health, and other questions and a nation’s broader strategy. But a security strategy is the wrong venue in which to discuss, for example, climate adaptation or an anti-inflationary policy. If every issue is a security issue, none is.
Second, the National Security Strategy demonstrates the degree to which the Biden administration does not see current Eurasian competition as military competition. The focus on “nontraditional security issues” dovetails with the Biden administration’s doctrine of “integrated deterrence.” The National Security Strategy defines it as “combining our strengths” to deter America’s adversaries. This concept looks much like “smart power,” the Obama administration’s doctrine that combined diplomacy and military action to achieve American interests—in other words statecraft. Much like smart power, integrated deterrence appears to be a meaningless term with no relevance to the national security professional or interested citizen. In reality it is a strategic dog whistle to Biden’s political allies that the administration does not prioritize conventional deterrence and warfighting capacity. Integrated deterrence serves to create justifications to cut and reorient defense spending and traditional military means in favor of domestic policy priorities.
This points to the third issue, the Biden administration’s supposed conviction that American economic resilience is the foundation of national power. In the abstract this claim is undeniable: Economic power is the wellspring of military strength. Yet it is no longer 1945 or 1960. The United States must apply its power with care and prudence. Instead, the Biden administration has dressed up climate handouts as an anti-inflationary measure. The lost art of Net Assessment—the art of strategy—can be understood as compelling or inducing an opponent to take steps in one’s own interest. The Biden administration has triggered and sustained an inflationary crisis and concurrently introduced a defense strategy that will hollow out U.S. military capacity. The Biden administration’s point is to justify reducing American military strength because it sees competition as a complex concatenation of diverse causes......
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