Tech Companies’ Plans for Election Violence | The Looming Irrelevance of the U.S. Air Force | Government Was Third-Largest Ransomware Target Last Year, and more

Any institutions that hold the power to stave off violence have real reason to be doing everything they can to prepare for the worst. This includes tech companies, whose platforms played pivotal roles in the attack on the Capitol. According to a drafted congressional investigation released by The Washington Post, companies such as Twitter and Facebook failed to curtail the spread of extremist content ahead of the insurrection, despite being warned that bad actors were using their sites to organize. Thousands of pages of internal documents reviewed by The Atlantic show that Facebook’s own employees complained about the company’s complicity in the violence. (Facebook has disputed this characterization, saying, in part, “The responsibility for the violence that occurred on January 6 lies with those who attacked our Capitol and those who encouraged them.”)
I asked 13 different tech companies how they are preparing for potential violence around the election. In response, I got minimal information, if any at all.

What the Supreme Court Got Wrong in the Trump Section 3 Case  (Ilya Somin, Lawfare)
The Supreme Court’s unanimous recent decision in Trump v. Anderson overturned the Colorado Supreme Court ruling disqualifying Donald Trump from the presidency under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. It does so on the grounds that Section 3 is not “self-executing.” In a per curiam opinion jointly authored by five justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, the Court ruled that only Congress, acting through legislation, has the power to determine who is disqualified and under what procedures. This outcome was predictable based on the oral argument , which focused on this issue to the exclusion of virtually all the other questions at stake in the case. But the Court nonetheless got the issue badly wrong. 
Sometimes, unanimity is no guarantee of correctness. And the seeming unanimity is belied by four justices’ apparent rejection of much of the majority’s reasoning.
Section 3 states that “No person” can hold any state or federal office if they had previously been “a member of Congress, or … an officer of the United States” or a state official and then “engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”
By focusing exclusively on the self-execution issue, the Court left for another day all the other arguments at stake in the Trump case, such as whether the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol qualifies as an “insurrection,” whether Trump “engaged” in it, whether his actions were protected by the First Amendment, whether Trump received adequate due process, and whether the president is an “officer of the United States” covered by Section 3. The justices may hope they can avoid ever having to decide these questions. 
In my view, Trump deserved to lose on all these points, and the Colorado Supreme Court correctly rejected his arguments on them. But I think he did have a plausible argument on the issue of whether his involvement in the Jan. 6 attack was extensive enough to qualify as “engaging” in insurrection. At the very least, he had a better argument there than on self-execution. The Court’s resolution of the latter issue is based on badly flawed reasoning and relies heavily on dubious policy arguments invoking the overblown danger of a “patchwork” of conflicting state resolutions of Section 3 issues. The Court’s venture into policy was also indefensibly one-sided, failing to consider the practical dangers of effectively neutering Section 3 with respect to candidates for federal office and holders of such positions.

American Autocracy Threat Tracker  (Norman Eisen et al., Just Security)
Former President Donald Trump has said he will be a dictator on “day one.” He and his advisors and associates have publicly discussed hundreds of actions to be taken during a second Trump presidency that directly threaten democracy. These vary from Trump breaking the law and abusing power in areas like immigration roundups and energy extraction; to summarily and baselessly firing tens of thousands of civil servants whom he perceives as adversaries; to prosecuting his political opponents for personal gain and even hinting at executing some of them. We track all of these promises, plans, and pronouncements here and we will continue to update them in real time.
We assess there is a significant risk of autocracy should Trump regain the presidency. Trump has said he would deploy the military against civilian protestors and his advisors have developed plans for using the Insurrection Act, said he would invoke the Alien Enemies Act to conduct deportations of non-citizens, continued to threaten legally-established abortion rights, and even had his lawyers argue that a president should be immune from prosecution if he directed SEAL Team Six to assassinate his political enemies. Trump also seeks the power to protect his personal wealth as he faces staggering civil fines, and to bolster his immunity as he faces 91 criminal charges in prosecutions in different parts of the country.
While Trump has claimed he will be a dictator for only the first day of his administration, his promise to do so–even for 24 hours–is antithetical to American democracy. History teaches us that dictatorial powers, once assumed, are rarely relinquished. Moreover, Trump cannot possibly achieve his stated goals for the use of that power (in immigration and energy policy) in one day, meaning that his “dictatorship” would of necessity likely last much longer.

Drones, the Air Littoral, and the Looming Irrelevance of the U.S. Air Force  (David Barnd and Nora Bensahel, War on the Rocks)
Today, the U.S. Air Force faces an almost-existential crisis. During the past several years, the service has been battered by the loss of its prestigious space mission to the nascent U.S. Space Force. It has also struggled to balance the continued acquisition of stunningly expensive new manned aircraft with the rapid developments in unmanned technologies, which are making pilots increasingly superfluous.
What a difference a few years makes. In 2016, we published a column entitled “The Catastrophic Success of the U.S. Air Force,” which argued that the service had completely dominated the air domain for so long that it was not fully prepared to fight a bloody war for control of the skies. But those days are long gone, thanks to the drone revolution.
The biggest problem facing the Air Force is that masses of uncrewed drones have now wrested command of the air away from manned aircraft in the skies above the modern battlefield. The drone revolution means that it will be very difficult, if not impossible, for the service to achieve air superiority in future conflicts — which has been the centerpiece of its mission for decades. Drones, not manned airplanes, now dominate the skies above ground forces fighting in Ukraine. The contested air littoral has emerged as a critical new subdomain of warfare. It stretches from the earth’s surface to several thousand feet, below the altitudes where most manned aircraft typically fly, and is now dominated by masses of drones. This is a paradigm shift of epic proportions, which will require the Air Force to fundamentally transform itself in a very short period of time.

Modernizing America’s Nukes: The Stakes of the Sentinel ICBM Project  (Doug Lamborn and Robert Peters, National Interest)
For decades, the United States has fielded a nuclear “triad” consisting of nuclear-capable bombers, ballistic missile submarines, and intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). All three of these systems have prevented nuclear war and kept America and its allies safe—in large part because they’re tested and updated on a regular basis.
Nuclear-capable bombers such as the B-2 and B-52 help signal American intentions. Being visible, they assure our allies and deter our adversaries. Ballistic missile submarines are always at sea, undetectable, thus providing a continuous presence and an assured second-strike capability that can rain destruction on any target on Earth should the unthinkable occur.
ICBMs, due to their incredible speed and range, provide prompt long-range strikes from controlled environments and are nearly impossible to intercept. Stationed in underground silos, they are difficult to destroy and thereby complicate the designs of adversary targeteers, who know that it takes at least two nuclear strikes to destroy a single silo-based missile.
All three of these systems are being modernized. The Air Force is replacing the nuclear-capable B-2 stealth bomber with the next-generation B-21 bomber. The Navy is replacing the Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine with the Columbia-class submarine. The Air Force is also replacing the Minuteman III (MMIII) ICBM—first fielded in the early 1970s and meant to be retired and replaced when Ronald Reagan was President—with the Sentinel ICBM.
Unfortunately, things are not going at all well with the Sentinel missile.

Government Was Third-Largest Ransomware Target Last Year: FBI  (David Dimolfetta, Defense One)
Government facilities were the third-largest critical infrastructure sector targeted by ransomware attacks in 2023, according to cybercrime statistics released Wednesday by the FBI.
The agency’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, or IC3, unveiled the findings in its annual report that unpacks complaints, financial losses and other metrics used to determine the severity of cybercrime activities reported to federal authorities.
Of the 1,193 complaints IC3 received from organizations belonging to U.S.-designated critical infrastructure sectors, government facilities came in third place with 156 complaints, while critical manufacturing and healthcare centers took the second and top spots, respectively.