In the thin line between order and chaos

Divide et impera

While the AI drama was all the rage in many circles in the past 2 weeks, or perhaps an algorithmic trap of our own making, many significant events were playing out at the same time. For a more structured piece, I will cover the first, the most significant and impactful of all events.

As Israel kept hunting Hamas down and carpet-bombing the entire Gaza Strip, as forecasted by many individuals, its neighbors responded in a predictable hostile manner. While spillover conflict has yet to happen (hopefully it doesn’t), using proxies is the law of the modern land, an effective form of hybrid warfare.

What at first was mistaken as Iran-backed Houthis, were later found to be Somalis boarded and took control of an Israeli-controlled tanker near the coast of Yemen. They soon left the ship, to later Houthi’s militia launched two ballistic missiles. This already sent small ripples around the logistical world.

Days later, 3 ships were attacked in the same day by Yemeni Houthis, and this was more “advanced” as they used both missiles and drones, and this one sent ripples down the wire, later in the same day, maritime insurance went up a few %, translating to a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars for logistical companies.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Suez Canal are two of the world's most important logistical chokepoints, not just for container ships, but a significant portion of oil and gas, Europe’s much-needed fuel source passes through both strains and the canal. From a disruptive perspective, “pestering” cargo ships weekly has a disproportional ROI from the attacker’s perspective.

You spend merely <100.000 USD to induce billions of dollars in economic damage, and with a little more dedication you can theoretically stop the global economy. Another significantly subtler method is, well… just shoving massive cargo ships into the canal. “Containership Hits Bridge in the Suez Canal”. Attention to both vectors of attack is necessary from any perspective, but the second type is the very definition of a hybrid war move since you can’t predict which captain might be “forced” into stopping the global flow of goods. As they say, by hook or by crook.


And since logistics is the blood of the global economy, interruption flow of goods or a more expensive flow of goods leads to our bitter friend, inflation. And not only of geopolitical cascades and “conspiracies” this vital industry can be affected. Sometimes Mother Nature doesn’t care about our plans.

The Panama Canal, which is one of the most important logistical choke points on our side of the pond, has been facing severe drought for a while now, which is creating massive lines, with wait times going from days to weeks. Ships can choose to pay millions of dollars to jump ahead of the line. Or sail all the way around through South America, or as the referred article states “through the busy Suez Canal”.

“We face less capacity, more trips, higher costs and a less efficient supply chain,” said Paul Snell, chief executive officer of British American Shipping, whose company moves about 20,000 to 40,000 containers per year. “Everyone’s going to have to get creative and decide what they’re going to do.”

Doing the orange line travel, rather than the green one.

Aframax sails around South America to avoid canal

There are no viable substitutes for container ships, most container ships can carry over a dozen thousand containers per trip. It takes very little to set freight costs sky-high again and disrupt global trade almost entirely. And here we fall into a low-level repetition if you possess good memory. Why ?

Once again, by hook, or crook similar events played out every single year since 2020, with different dynamics, even different causes, similar end effects, and similar economic pressure on weaker and stronger economies alike. Keeping attention to events related to maritime shipping and its choke points will be vital in 2024-2025, as the Chapelle meme once said “Modern problems require modern solutions”.

Before going into the next topic, I would like to leave this video out. This is how modernized many terrorist organizations are now. This was Houthi’s (again) taking control of a ship, but unrelated to any of the events covered here. This approach entails SWAT/low-level Special Forces tactics, decently organized.

Another topic covered quite extensively, and depending on your perspective either it possesses as much importance as logistics or more for the general function of society. Energy, the primordial resource for every organism on the planet, and the downfall of complex societies.

During 2022 and for almost 3/4 of 2023, Europe paid exorbitant amounts of money through its teeth to keep its economy afloat, but no matter how much money they could pump into their economy, the problem was demand, therefore some of the biggest economies in the Union passed legislation or “disincentives” to push industry to consume less energy.

Production development in energy-intensive industrial sectors

Talking to the Financial Times, one of Germany’s leading steel makers and industrialists asked for others to “stick to the country”, otherwise the economic center of the European Union faces mass deindustrialization, and competitiveness loss, thus creating the feedback loop of a dying economy. To maintain high, but not as exorbitantly expensive energy prices as they were in 2022, Europe killed its Petrochemical Industry and Europeans consume almost 3 times more plastic than the rest of the world. Disruption of the logistical choke points can worsen an already glass-like fragile situation.

Plus, all the Russian sanctions led to…nothing. Everybody, especially Europe is still buying Russian commodities, the only export Europe is not getting by the metric ton in the literal sense, is natural gas. Otherwise, I suggest you watch this Bloomberg Original short documentary on Russia’s Shadow fleet. Entertaining and informative.

But as I forewarned in my very first “Beyond Mathematical Odds” article almost 2 years ago, cyber warfare was, is, and will be one of the primary weapons any adversary will use.

This important nuclear site has been compromised since, at the very least, 2015, and no single person involved in the matter knows how much information, or how deep the access the attackers had. These are not “AI-aided” cutting-edge hacks, these are low-cost, sophisticated tools developed by different nation-state-backed hacker teams.

I wrote recently that in the future, in a world where conflict is constant, and plentiful and most can’t discern what is true, what is a lie, and what is manipulation, there will be 2 types of kinetic measures.

• Highly advanced, LLM/AI-based vectored attacks, agent swarms, drone swarms, advanced weaponry, expensive, very hard to execute, harder to deal with, easy to trace back

• Low-tech, low-cost solutions to the above

And Russia is kind in the second. As we witness the slow shift in the general gestalt over the Ukrainian conflict, with the UN head actively stating the EU and Ukraine should prepared for the worse (as in loss, and conceding what Russia asks), Russian Special Forces and its cyber warfare elements gained experienced no other army or group in the world has right now. As exemplified by this remarkable article.

Sandworm Hackers Caused Another Blackout in Ukraine—During a Missile Strike

Russia's most notorious military hackers successfully sabotaged Ukraine's power grid for the third time last year. And in this case, the blackout coincided with a physical attack.

You can read a very detailed guide titled “The GRU’s Disruptive Playbook” here. Another country that has advanced cyber capabilities is Iran, and (again) as a byproduct of the Israel-Hamas conflict, an Iran-linked “threat group” launched a global series of attacks aimed at critical infrastructure, such as water treatment facilities, Florida was hit too.

The threat actor targeted a Unitronics Vision series programmable logic controller (PLC) with an integrated human-machine interface (HMI). 

Unitronics is an Israel-based company and its products are used not only in the water and wastewater systems sector, but also in industries such as energy, healthcare, and food and beverage manufacturing. In some cases, the PLCs may be rebranded and appear to have been made by other companies.

In the weeks prior to attacking the Aliquippa water utility, Cyber Av3ngers targeted ICS at water, energy, shipping, and distribution organizations in Israel. However, some of their claims turned out to be false. 

There are many other variables to take into account, such as the fluctuation in prices of staples (rice ain’t becoming cheaper, neither is sugar, and almost every other important foodstuff now lives into a cyclical inflationary trend where it never settles down to what used to be even 12 months ago), for less complexity sake, and digestibility, we come down to the aforementioned title.

As we enter 2024, we find ourselves on the thin line between order and chaos, and as many nations find themselves struggling economically, socio-politically, and culturally but of significant interest, resource-wise, we will see more and more disruptive efforts, achieving success into causing systemic disruption. And there is one country that excels in this strategy. China. Repeating the same playbook, exploiting cognitive openings and failures in the rest of civilization to induce shock and awe at a systemic level.

People in China Are Starting to Worry About COVID Testing and Controls Coming Back

My intention here is informative, rather than feed into negativity and doom and gloom, hopefully, my readers find this article helpful.

I appreciate your support, thank you =) !