Billy Michell Moment 

I see myself as another Billy Michell. Billy Mitchell was court marshaled because he augured that planes with bombs could sink battle ships (1920s). This was heresy to the military of the time. The capital weapon was the battle ship, like we believe today in the aircraft carrier. The military killed the messenger by court marshaling and silencing Billy Mitchell. The invincible nature of battle ships continued as a philosophy for the next couple of decades. Then guess what happened, Pearl Harbor!

My Billy Michell moment is that I am also amazed at our myopia. The myopia is driven by money. The money flowing to the military industrial complex, even in reported times of austerity. We know that confrontation in the world is most often not going to be that of one nation directly against another. It is going to be border-less factions against nations.

In the game of nation roulette we have placed all our bets on “sophisticated hardware”. Such things and nuclear armaments, tanks, ships, subs and planes. A significant attack will be another supposedly 911 surprise.

How do you leverage a position against an adversary of overwhelming force? All over the world, particularly in under developed areas, health researchers identify and track down illnesses. Surreptitious agents offer a bounty for their discoveries that might be used as a weapon, our own CIA amount them.

Here is how things will unfold. Someone will discover a virus, let us call it “H11N7”. The virus will have some unique properties that are native or can be modified to include them. It will be highly contagious. It will be transmittable through the air and by touch. It will have an incubation period of at least 30 days before obvious symptoms. It will mimic many other aliments, making positive identification difficult. The mortality rate will be about 80% after a few weeks steady decline.

A fictional situation: action by certain oligarchs that stand to lose billions with American dominance of the natural gas market. They give untraceable funds to a faction that desires to attack America. They steer them to H11N7 as a means.  A half dozen martyrs of the faction infect themselves. They travel were American tour groups and tourist congregate in international locations. They infect as many people as they can just before they leave to return to America. Then they disappear.

The Americans go home passing through airports, restaurants and resume their lives. Each infected person infects 100 others. By the time the first people becomes sick, over a million have been infected. A frantic search for a cure and vaccine will take 6 to 8 months. The only answer is to identify people that might be infected and quarantine them. But after the fall out from several high profile quarantines, that too is given up. In six months America has over 10 million infected people being cared for by 50 million others.  The stock market has crashed. America as a nation is quarantined. The insurance industry is bust. The medical facilities are beyond capacity. Most people refuse to go where other people congregate, including work. The store shelves are empty, hotels are empty, movie theaters are empty, and schools are empty.

America empties the last of the gold in Fort Knox to buy things on international markets because the dollar has collapsed. Soon America is selling tanks, subs, jets and even aircraft carriers to any and all buyers.

Americans look back on things from a rear view mirror perspective and wonder how could we have been so stupid placing our bet? Another Billy Mitchell moment.