SpaceX avoided a Russian jamming attack in Ukraine
c4isrnet.com
c4isrnet.com
The notion that SpaceX is basically using a Full CI/CD pipeline on a massive satellite constellation is kind of amazing. Meanwhile most large government software requires months of contract negotiation before anyone is even hired to fix the problem.
Do you want the government to hire contractors without contracts?
Our people go on to work at (eg) SpaceX and to found exactly the kind of startups that we're all dog whistling about. (Lars Blackmore?). Lean, focused, fast and providing valuable services to gov and private industries.
This discussion about how 'the government' cannot 'do this' is a vague rorschach blot that reveals people's own motivations only, and ignores the completely different priorities gov has. Do you believe the deep technical expertise that gov-funded experts are surely providing to Ukraine would be posted on Twitter?
* SETA: Systems Engineering and Technical Assistance contractor
* HQE: Highly Qualified Expert
* IPA: Intergovernment Personnel Act detail
* SGE: Special Government Employee
It's just taxes, we definitely could.
The fact that we don't has a lot more to do with government culture and a post-Reagan idea that the government should be a thin and highly reactive operation than the money not being there.
I don't see why they can't have like "Advanced Science" wage table, to compete for the best engineers and scientists rather than hiring either bottom of barrel or end of career people.
I make much more right now with 8 YoE than my boss in the gov't did and he had a PhD with 20 YoE.
Even if Congress corrected for that, they'd still be locked into slow moving pay raises, and they'd probably become a political target at some point, when some anti-spending congressperson begins harping on how there are so many federal employees make a quarter million dollars a year.
Being a military contractor, for better or worse, inoculates you from a lot of politics. So, yes, the government could pay competitively, but I would be leery about accepting such a position.
The way to make money working for the gov't is to get an established company to price gouge them through contracts so you can make a living wage.
The gov't is wasting a huge amount of money paying a 100% premium for engineers because they aren't allowed to pay what the market demands.
A "data entry specialist" and PhD scientist are paid off the same pay scale at different levels, which is great for equality but kind of difficult when you are trying to pay $31k (which is what someone with a BS in CompSci would get, GS-5) for someone who is going for $150k.
If you have experience or a master's, they'll pay you $51k.
It's absurdist. The GS scale caps out at $143k at GS-15 and requires a PhD and probably decades of work.
I get that space and defense are apples to oranges, but there is no reason to think it is significantly different.
Why would any smart person want to work long term at a low paying job for a tyrannical government with extremely frustrating bureaucratic processes?
The best leave often apparently, how many of the best engineers actually stay for years?
One indication that I work with the best is where they go when their work here is done. In some cases, the finest work e.g. SpaceX has done is done with our alumni in leadership and contributor positions.
Another indication is top tier publications. Or the fact that our tech does what has never been done before by definition.
Another indicator is how many people are willing to work for a pay cut to be here and work on what we do. Speaking of coming from SpaceX and every major aerospace company.
Another indication comes from the partnerships we have where we collaborate as equals with any of those mythical "better" places.
It may not fit your world view or experience, but it is possible for good people with top notch skills to choose a career that does not focus solely on pay. We just work in an unprofitable domain. We don't work with incompetent people.
Can a SpaceX employee comment here? Work at SpaceX looks stressful. Elon Musk looks like a workaholic asshole expecting all their employees to do the same, but without getting rich. Maybe government work is boring by comparison, but you get a personal life.
One of the members of my group just left for SpaceX last year, because he just wanted to work somewhere else for a change. He was one of the better FSW engineers we had seen, and I'm sure he's helping SpaceX do great things!
Another friend of mine went off to Amazon to oversee their warehouse automation.
And we just hired a bunch of really stellar folks from NG who were fed up with their workplace. They seem to love it here.
It's an industry. Changeover is pretty normal.
They have an atrocious Work-Life Balance rating and reputation. Like bottom 2%. Expect their mission to become your life’s mission; 50-60 hour weeks.
All to avoid pension liabilities, allow downsizing that can't be blocked by a union, and provide a layer of indirection to coders being paid anything close to market rates. We need a way to hire more full-time govies, but the culture has swung so hard to contracting that there are only small pockets left of in-house talent.
The maximum amount any federal employee can earn is $170k, with zero equity.
There is also the fact that they have more take home pay then you might expect, because government salaries are exempt from FICA taxes
https://www.federalpay.org/employees/top-100
Even ignoring those searching through different departments shows plenty earning over 174k -- Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (6), Immediate Office of the Secretary of Education (8), Maritime Administration (34), etc.
(Of course then there's state employees where PE Teachers get multi-million salaries)
What state PE teachers are making multi-million dollar salaries? I hope you're not conflating huge D1 coaching programs with "PE teacher."
[0] https://www.federalpay.org/employees/occupations/medical-off...
The proof was a list of federal employees earning more than X
Using common logic we see in the field on why ic should be paid lower than team leaders.
Second, a good physician - even a run-of-the-mill family doctor - should be collaborating with their peers. They're keeping up to date on new practices and informing the next generation of those practices by reporting observations of the results of today's practices and any anomalies that arise.
I don't think it's unreasonable for some developers to make more than most physicians or for most physicians to make more than most developers. Neither field is narrowly defined.
Administrators who are Senate approved can also get exemptions to the salary cap.
There are plenty of non-doctors earning over 174k too.
(Average doctor salary in Canada is USD140k btw)
I have no idea what you're talking about or thinking about. A percentage of tax receipts? Why on earth would that make more sense than just money up front?
I’ll grant you that dusty old war bonds are unlikely to get strapping young devs very excited, but I’m sure that they can come up with a higher risk, higher reward financial instrument with some imagination.
In a smaller company, the stock may appreciate due to your actions, but there's absolutely no reason to think most employees would do anything that moves Google's stock price. And even less to think anyone would do anything that would impact US government tax receipts.
Working for Google and getting RSUs isn't really higher-risk, higher reward compared to a salary.
That’s exactly what I said, that they need to come up with a higher-risk, higher-reward instrument because bonds aren’t high risk, high reward enough to act as an incentive. Your problem clearly isn’t that the subject matter calls for insulting or dismissing, it’s that you decided in advance to act insulting and dismissive regardless of what the response may be.
The government makes the rules in the first place, I’m sure they can figure something out. At least I object to the claim that it’s obvious that they can’t.
Why bother doing that when they can give you money and you can invest it in lottery tickets, beanie babies, bonds or Google yourself?
Except in the event of a startup, where you don't have the ability to buy in yourself to such a high-risk, high-reward outcome yourself.
But there isn't be much difference between Google offering you RSUs and just more salary (assuming the 'more salary' also vested)
When I've been a contract developer, I've probably been making more than board members in some countries, but that seemed to be accepted over the short term. There's also an issue where enterprise companies wouldn't trust their IT departments, for historical reasons so the good people left or they got consulting businesses in and that made everything worse...
They can recruit very good software engineers out of the Southeast & Midwest for under 170k just fine. It's still going to cost them 6 figures, but they are going to be able to hire good talent.
I will admit though, they're going to have trouble retaining the tippy top of the seniority ladder at 170k.
Now I agree the airforce or some branch could do this, but that would be a military intervention.
[1]https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6974...
If you don't want to pay for that because the government is then expensive, fine, but eventually you'll have an incompetent government that is slow and still expensive due to the mishaps it leads to, for itself and it's constituents.
Federal government can pay enough to get software engineers. FAANG salaries are an outlier. They could easily target some midwestern state, put the headquarters for federal software agency there, find a feeder school, and get employees fed to an agency making a comfortable 6 figures in a low cost of living area. Will there be some attrition? Sure. But plenty will stay cause thats where family is, and where they have their house, and thats where there kids go to school and etc.
I can guarantee you that the contractors they hire from Accenture and IBM are using devs that arent making FAANG salaries. Its kind of a meme how bad some of the government contractors are, its pretty well known you can just be a body that sits at a desk if you can get a security clearance and make easy money just manually running an SQL script once a week on some of these government contracts.
The real reason nothing gets fixed is because the federal workers get free salaries and benefits packages that far outstrip their value that oversee these projects, and the contracting firms get easy money.
They have this already: midwestern schools which have affiliations to the military and act as feeder schools for technical people into the military industrial complex.
These people still make more than the GS schedule cap by mid career with TS clearance. It surely doesn't pay faang salaries, but $150-200k with 25% bonus/profit sharing, and totally paid family health care, and <asks someone> 320 hours of pto. Plus, these places often have nice company events, like corporate retreats to nice locales (including family), etc.
Also, there will be hell from the public when the govt. makes a mistake. So, there's all sorts of bureaucracy, checklists etc, to keep that from happening or to at least have people accountable. Which also slows stuff down.
However, the same military has been unable to complete its stated objectives in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. 10 times out of 10, the situation has remained exactly as it was before, or worse.
If the military fails at a core mandate that we mostly agree to be a reasonable one... what makes you think they could maintain complex code?
the military is under civilian control. The US military is very very good at killing people and breaking things. I have no doubt, given the orders, the US military could kill everyone and break everything they've been ordered to kill and break. Politicians direct the military, if objectives were failed to be met then politicians determined those objectives were no longer politically viable.
Worth a read.
You're presenting a false dichotomy, or lacking in imagination.
edit: i'm being a bit dramatic but it's pretty bad. no one will make a decision because a culture of CYA means whoever dared raised their hand is the one on the cross if things go wrong.
- Government can't offer competitive pay due to politics.
- Government contracts big projects to 3rd parties who pay competitively, but lack the transparency that government is required to have.
In a way it would seem to be that government contractor organizations are acting as an abstraction, and are in essence a way of government allocating funds without needing to provide the transparency and accountability of doing things in house.
In essence, if you follow this line --> contractors are basically government. (i.e. Working for SpaceX is basically working for government without the page/scale political challenges of getting stuff done, SpaceX is more or less funded by Gov)
Perhaps things are working how they should.
> The government, on the other hand, has a “significant timeline to make those types of corrections” as it muddles through analyses of what happened, decides how to fix it and gets a contract in place for the fix.
> “We need to be able to have that agility,” Tremper said.
> The government, on the other hand, has a “significant timeline to make those types of corrections” as it muddles through analyses of what happened, decides how to fix it and gets a contract in place for the fix.
Or did you not even read it, but decided to come comment on what you presumed it said?
a vector of attack waiting to be exploited. A news article could read
and the enemy, "slung a line of code and bricked it"
https://www.theinfographicsshow.com/musk-starship-starlink-c...
> "Jamming attacks are common threats to wireless communications and happen when a hostile device creates radio signals that disrupt communications by decreasing the Signal-to-Inference-plus-Noise ratio (SINR)."
> "Possible ways that a software update can help bypass a jamming attack is if the jamming device is targeting a particular frequency. The software can implement FHSS or DSSS, Frequency Hopping / Spreading Sequences of frequencies for anti-jamming purposes. However, FHSS or DSSS, frequency distribution type of protection against jamming is flawed. It is ‘limited by a common assumption that the jammer can jam only part of the communication channels or has a limited transmit power.'"
That article points to this report, which discusses all kinds of novel ways to defeat such attacks, like using counter-jamming as a means of delivering bits between sender and receiver, bit synchronization schemes, and others:
If instead the entire chain were done in hardware, then making these kinds of changes would be rather difficult.
At the same time, if more things are software more things become targets, so you need to care much more about the actual security of these kinds of update systems.
CD is for delivering everything this way, which is not always necessary from business perspective.
If you don’t do CD, it will either be more expensive because you have to maintain two processes or there is a good chance it will fail when you need it most because the critical delivery path wasn’t well exercised.
Why two? Release process is always the same, only decision to go live is manual and can be based on different criteria in different circumstances. CD is enabled by certain level of automation, which is nice to have, but if you do not aim to have CD, a good manual process can still work and may be actually less expensive in certain scenarios if you consider delivery pipeline TCO.
> decision to go live is manual and can be based on different criteria in different circumstances
..this conflicts with previously stated requirement:
> a proper support process where critical fixes can be delivered within hours or minutes.
That the decision to go live is based on criteria and circumstances implies that there are criteria and circumstances that make a release ineligible to go live at those times.
If those criteria and/or circumstances are frequently blocking, then the manual pipeline is not prepared to deliver critical fixes on short notice, because the release pipeline is often blocked (whether CD or not)
If those criteria and/or circumstances are infrequently blocking, and the manual release process is also exercised infrequently, then it increases the risk that the manual release process may not work on a critical timeline, because something may be broken but unnoticed from lack of use.
If those criteria and/or circumstances are infrequently blocking, and the manual release process is also exercised frequently without problems, then the critical release should be fine. (Although this case seems suspiciously like CD and I’d be a little surprised to hear that the cost of automating such a finely tuned pipeline is significantly greater than the cost of the manpower to run it manually).
>> a proper support process where critical fixes can be delivered within hours or minutes.
>That the decision to go live is based on criteria and circumstances implies that there are criteria and circumstances that make a release ineligible to go live at those times.
Indeed: you normally do not release the code that is not ready and you do not release the code that will alter the business process before business users are ready to accept the change. It does not mean that it is impossible to deliver a critical fix in such circumstances. Let's look at the delivery process first to understand, if there's really any contradiction.
In a well organized process you have branches and you probably use pull requests to deliver the code to the main branch. This branch does not have to be the same as the branch of the last released code, meaning that you can actually work in both branches. The release cycle on the main branch can be long if your company can manage the complexity of bigger projects. However, if there's a critical bug found, you can develop the fix on the production code branch, then release it quickly and merge the changes to main. The fact that you normally do not push changes as fast as possible to production means that you do not have continuous delivery, but it does not mean that you cannot have automated deployment or even continuous deployment (which would be in this case triggered by a merge to designated branch after automated tests on certain branches are passed).
Now, how about continuous deployment? It appears, you can actually have continuous delivery or automated deployment, but not continuous deployment. For continuous delivery it is sufficient to produce quickly build artifacts via CI, but the way they are released can be really different and may not involve deployment by merge. I worked in an organization where production system was physically separated from delivery pipeline and artifacts had to be copied to a flash drive. We could still produce a change and get it live within 10-15 minutes, because the manual process was actually well-thought and optimized to reduce human errors. We had releases almost on daily basis and we had few times when we actually delivered changes very fast (once it involved a rollback for a complicated $100M transaction through 20 systems that went through because of a missing validation requirement). You may even have a fully automated deployment triggered by one click: the only difference with continuous deployment will be that it's not done once the build is green.
To sum up, CD (continuous delivery) is not the same as CD (continuous deployment) and you can have just one of them or none, still having the automated deployment process. Or not having it, but still being able to deliver critical fixes quickly and with minimal risks. I do not know, what is the process at SpaceX, but the fact that they did fast rollout does not mean they have CD in either sense or it even makes sense for them. It's better to ask their team. :)
In highly secure environments CD may not be possible at all, because of formal processes of verification and manual processes of deployment (e.g. I once worked in a project, where deployment process involved copying build artifacts from CI server to an authorized flash drive and papers signed by customer).
The only "explanation" this article offers is a link to a meandering video that doesn't answer any of these questions.
After "establishing" the premise, the article immediately launches into demands for more resources:
"We need to be able to have that agility"
"We need to be able to change"
"The U.S. needs to think a lot more innovatively"
"This includes incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into next-generation systems to be able to respond faster"
Over time articles like this one make people accumulate an extensive set of assumptions that basically aren't supported by anything except endless repetition.
Doesn't seem like your distinction is commonly used.
https://www.baesystems.com/en-us/definition/what-is-electrom...
It's good that Spacex did send the equipment, but it is still more of advertisement as far as I can see, rather than something keeps the connectivity of Ukraine to the internet. (I'm happy to see reports that show otherwise).
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/txh896/starlink_w...
https://twitter.com/FedorovMykhailo/status/15164744873818972...
> Is Starlink that important? It wouldn't be possible to restore 10 km of cable connection between villages in Chernigiv region after serious battles so quick. Normally it takes few months. Another case: provider Baryshivka-Net resumed the network for 5 villages by using only 1 .I call BS that it was SpaceX that kept the country online.
Eh? Destroying upwards of 50% of residential buildings (apartment blocks) apparently counts as hitting military targets?
But I agree on the role of Space X.
Look at a live twitter geolocation heatmap and it becomes pretty clear which areas are 'offline'.
Good idea but not exactly.
- In Ukraine (similar to other ex-USSR countries) govt laws require from phone companies, to provide service "at least 8 hours after power off". To be exact, this is requirement of all phone licenses, land and cell.
So in real life, on most cell towers accumulators withstand much more - I have worked in telecoms, 24h of work without power is normal for them.
For smartphone power, in Ukraine most people have powerbanks, so also could tweet for 24h and more.
But when without power for few days or more, sure business activity fall and less people will be active on internet.
Also huge factor in this war, huge number of refugees. Even considering not all people flee abroad, but about 12 millions (from approx 40 millions) moved from east/north/south regions to west regions.
https://onemilliontweetmap.com/?center=48.1367666796927,33.4...
I found the site above. Is there a better map?
What really need in modern environment, high availability, so it is not problem when one server rebooting, while others could continue deliver service.
It even more impressive that SpaceX was able to update it that quickly as well as a huge selling point for the military markets they are targeting so I can't quite understand why Musk has to make such a false statement.
[1] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1507505633259630599
Edited text below this line
"Some Starlink terminals near conflict areas were being jammed for several hours at a time. Our latest software update bypasses the jamming."
So usually made trick - EW find when sync should be, and emit short high energy impulses, so snr become too low to receive sync part, and transmission effectively blocked.
Spacex implemented new encoding, where sync is in random place in time-frequency, so now EW could emit, and this will lead to speed degradation, but not to full blocking.
By the way how will we "feel" when the Chinese or some Russian billionaire launches their own "Starlink" which will also be operating over the US? From what I have read there are several such systems in the pipeline in China.
Perhaps we can to have systems, like the "we're testing an ICBM" system we have in place, to avoid escalations that will draw us into WW3. There must a way to get a reasoned, thoughtful and cooperative answer to this question. For example, let's say we place 5 test satellites in orbit and if you shoot one (?) of those down, you get to request blocking internet service in a geographical region, without escalating things into a space war.
Unfortunately any real hope for that ship has sailed down the toilet at hypersonic speeds. Its not about the amount of good, smart, moral etc. folks that are still in Russia, in relatively educated population of 160 million there will always be quite a few of those.
But this layer is, and will be marginal and powerless in Russia unless its already part of government and thus on side of corruption, theft and organized murder. Mainstream applauds Putin genocide or not, or in best possible scenario indulges in complacency, preferring seemingly strong dictator over any uncertainty that more freedom can bring. Weakening any russian influence and strength is by far the best course of action, short term and especially long term.
Only a fool comes again and again with open hands for an embrace to a sociopath wielding blood stained knife.
Its a mistake when trying to apply western thinking and actions to Russia, they are very far from it and getting further away as we speak.
All this, and much much more. Plus yeah, Putin is a mass murderer, allies didn't negotiate much with Hitler neither. He also said and put in contracts whatever gave advantage at that moment, only to break it at first occasion.
But then we've essentially already set the stage for a re-run.
"@elonmusk , while you try to colonize Mars — Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space — Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people! We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations and to address sane Russians to stand."
https://mobile.twitter.com/elonmusk/status/14977014840032133...
It's irrelevant whether a private corporation software update or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand causes a world war to break out, it must be avoided.
I don't really see the problem with having a foreign Starlink operating over your country. It just provides communication, doesn't it?
What if a chinese Starlink provides services in Afghanistan and the Taliban use it while the Americans attempt to control the country?
Would you be ok with it?
He's the thing with these services: if they're controlled by a single government with the intend of using them as leverage over others, that means that at some point they're going to be denied to the people. I would strongly prefer redundancy in such systems to increase their reliability.
Take GPS, for example. The US controls it, and at least initially, their goal was to be able to reduce the accuracy of GPS for other parties. Europe has its own competing Galileo satellites to increase reliability for ordinary citizens. I'm strongly in favour of that. I don't see military applications as a higher purpose than civilian use.
It’s been accepted that as long as troops from one of the side are not directly shooting at uniformed troops from the other side (sides here being US/Russia!), it’s a proxy conflict, not a direct one.
Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korean War being some of the larger versions of this.
With Russian troops on the ground right now, adding any NATO or US troops would mean it isn’t a proxy conflict anymore once someone from the US or NATO side shoots at someone in a Russian uniform. But providing weapons to Ukrainians has a lot of precedent as being ‘not a war’ between them. Even if the Ukranians use them to shoot Russians.
During the Korean and Vietnam Wars, Soviet pilots engaged in dogfights with Americans, which makes the amount of handwringing over just sending weaponry being a escalation laughable.
Also MacArthur’s pursuit of the North Koreans across the 38th parallel brought China directly into the war and precipitated a much, much larger conflict, and cost a great many American and UN Allie’s lives. It got him (rightly, IMO) fired. But that was too late.
[https://www.marshallfoundation.org/articles-and-features/mar...]
If everyone agrees that shooting at each other’s pilots isn’t a ‘direct conflict’, then it isn’t.
The US didn’t want to officially care to that level that Chinese jets (or troops) were killing US troops, because the US could waltz back home and Korea would be the one to take the hit. At least one of the parties could accept a failure, somewhat.
The stakes for Russia here (and especially for Putin), like when MacArthur crossed the 38th, are much, much higher for them. A well armed, actively hostile (well earned hostility or not), and aligned with the west Ukraine is right on their doorstep, with no meaningful geographic barriers. Historically a scary situation for Russia.
And Europe, which has a lot (depending on if we’re counting countries or $$) of influence over NATO and is nuclear armed themselves, is also existentially threatened by Russia doing what they are doing. Russia has a recent and very painful history with many of those countries. And even if the WW2 push west from Russia was precipitated by Nazi Germany, nothing they did afterwards left a warm and fuzzy feeling.
The hand wringing is because after a long period of peace that people became accustomed too, this is a real and present danger to a lot of folks livelihoods and safety even if nothing goes nuclear.
And this turns up the dial on stress in a way that no one can look at it and really be sure the other side wouldn’t go nuclear over the next step or two.
Would he be super stupid and self destructive? Yes.
But when in an information bubble and when threatened by existential threats is exactly when folks are most likely to do stupid and self destructive things.
Would you be willing to bet there is no (crazier) MacArthur, potentially one that has access to a nuke or dirty bomb or the like, in the power structure somewhere there, or even in Ukraine if you really looked?
Madmen need to be checked. Getting nuked is also terrible. Starting WW3? Just yikes.
So is it a strategic move to be the first to attack?
Yes, that's another dimension in this complex problem.
In this case for instance, if NATO had moved in before Russia into Ukraine however, that would be really, really bad.
A big factor behind this war already is Russian insecurity about NATO strength and being frozen out of traditionally Russian territory.
It would be a bit like Russia occupying some of the Aleutians all the sudden. Not likely to go well. Sudden double flashes not well.
So can we expect other similar moves from Russia into countries that are not part of NATO and which have no common frontiers with US?
They’ve been threatening countries like Finland, Sweden, etc. every time they consider it too.
When it was non-western aligned Soviet breakaway republics, it was easier to ignore.
The invasion of Ukraine was too obvious and ham handed. Moscow has doubled down on the threats to those on the fence since then, enough to push folks back over to the other side.
Which likely just pushes Russia more solidly into doubling down/existential threat mode.
Here is some timely news on the topic.
[https://news.yahoo.com/finland-and-sweden-moving-toward-poss...]
Forecasts say, this will change in nearest decades, but at the moment machines considered incapable.
Some people have other opinion, but for us important, that Russian govt agree with what I write.
In this case it is extremely dangerous to err on the side of caution, or Putin will be able to apply salami tactics and get whatever he wants.
Unfortunately that is not true anymore [1]. Otherwise I 100% agree with the sentiment of your post.
[1] https://liveuamap.com/en/2022/21-april-pentagon-says-new-800...
This is a former-USSR internal kerfuffle, it’s the “Yugoslav” civil war translated to the former Soviet space. Thankfully we’re a not a former Soviet republic. I wouldn’t want to live in Estonia or Lithuania right now, though.
You fail to spot the real enemy though: it's not a WWIII between Russia, China and USA/UK. It's a war between a little oligarchy and the rest of the humanity. War between USA/UK +submissive allies and Russia is just a war between two oligarch cohort, war for Taiwan and south Pacific in general (perhaps Solomon and Chagos Islands (see Diego Garcia) just toward the Philippines will probably follow again for more practical purposes like the China desperate need for food vs the USA/UK desperate struggle to keep dominance of the seas. Those wars though are not much WW wars, they are just some big&powerful confronts to remain in power/increase it. The real global war is the classic élites vs the people. Time since first nazi-fascism series against socialism is enough to restart a new nazi-fascist era and that's precisely what happen now.