Escape in Avoiding WWIII

Review by Bill Doughty

Armed missiles incoming. Artificial Intelligence at the controls. USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78) is the target. A hit…

Punk’s Force, a novel by Ward Carroll and Tony Peak (Naval Institute Press, 2025) hits hard from the very start and builds to a nail-biting climax. This book will especially appeal to tail-hook warfighters and the military’s test-and-evaluation community.

But, in the tradition of Tom Clancy and Stephen Coontz, Punk’s Force is also accessible and rewarding to civilian readers, especially anyone interested in international espionage and contemporary issues facing the United States in general and U.S. Navy in particular. It’s a jolt of a thrill ride.

Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, USN (Ret.), agrees:

“Punk’s Force is a tour de force of international intrigue and edge-of-your-seat flying action,” says Mullen. “It also accurately captures the high-stakes challenges facing the U.S. Navy today. I couldn’t put it down.”

Among the novel’s topical issues and themes: drones, hypersonic missiles and counter technology, cryptocurrency, and use of kompromat to corrupt leaders.

Some key lines that stick:

• Avoid “the cardinal sin of underestimating rivals,”
• AI abuse means “Dr. Frankenstein has lost control of his monsters,” and 
• Bad guys profit even though “war, climate change, and injustice would destroy the planet if allowed to continue unchecked.”

The authors present believable characters with complicated psychological challenges and 3D family dynamics. Readers will enjoy the fun call signs, strong women characters, and realistic portrayal of life aboard an aircraft carrier: “That smell –– a combination of fuels, metal, and humanity.” Smells evoke other senses for any reader who has been aboard a CV or CVN –– the sounds of heavy metal punctuated by the 1MC; the sight of clean bulkheads and dirty hands; the feel of ladder rails and non-skid surfaces.

Realistic rivalries are also themes, including Navy vs. Air Force and brown shoe officers (aviators) vs. black show officers (surface warriors). Pecking orders within the military and between individual services are not only rank-based.

But true leadership is shown when there is universal respect and selfless support. The admiral participates in a FOD (foreign object debris) walk-down on the flight deck; he dines with junior enlisted Sailors and Chief Petty Officers; and he volunteers as a patient in a medevac drill.

The authors work in a reference to “the COVID Cruise” with details (but no names mentioned) of the heroic self-sacrifice of Capt. Brett Crozier, CO of USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71), and how he took care of his Sailors in the early weeks of the pandemic. Such leadership is heralded in the writings of Stavridis, McRaven, and McChrystal.

Character counts in large amounts.

Ultimately, this book is a yin-yang of good vs. evil, service vs. greed, and devotion vs. betrayal. All the while, it builds with action and intrigue in a shadow of avoiding WWIII and the sinking of America’s lynchpin aircraft carrier. This is a good summer read and a proper escape from current chaos.

A blurb by former Director of Air Warfare Rear Adm. Mike “Nasty” Manzanir, USN (Ret.) reads, “From the throat-catching first chapter through the twists and turns, loops and breaks you’ve become used to flying with Punk, Punk’s Force is a constant full-grunt catsuit. Whether you’ve read all the books in the series or just pick this one up for your flight, you won’t put it down.”

In the authors' Acknowledgements, Ward Carroll, creator of the Punk series, thanks his wingman, Tony Peak, a gifted science fiction writer. Peak, in turn, thanks both Carroll and USNI: The Naval Institute's pedigree is impeccable, and I feel privileged to become a part of it."

Top photo: Aviation Boatswain's Mate (Aircraft Handling) 1st Class Sam Smith, assigned to air department aboard the world's largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), directs an E/A-18G Growler, attached to the "Grey Wolves" of Electronic Attack Squadron (VAQ) 142, on the flight deck, April 14, 2025. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class (Photo by MC3 Tajh Payne)

Second photo: An F/A-18E Super Hornet, attached to the "Tomcatters" of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 31, launches from the flight deck of the world’s largest aircraft carrier, USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), April 14, 2025. (Photo by MC2 Maxwell Orlosky)

Upside Down World of AI / Surveillance

Review by Bill Doughty

The invention and deployment of the steam engine accelerated the antislavery movement two centuries ago; the wide use of the telegraph brought about the women’s movement and women’s right to vote 120 years ago; and the intercontinental railroad and telephone helped fire up the Progressive Era while television stoked the civil rights movement.

How technology fuels social movements is one of the insights revealed in “The Private Is Political: Identity and Democracy in the Age of Surveillance” by Ray Brescia (New York University Press, 2025).

“As each net technology emerged on the scene, a new social movement embraced it.” And the country moved forward.

“But the history of all of these technologies and their incorporation into social movement advocacy also had another component to them,” Brescia writes. “Each advance in the ability to communicate brought with it a new threat of surveillance and manipulation.”

So what happens to an easily manipulated society when the tsunami of all technology –– AI –– washes over us?

“Today, new technologies like generative artificial intelligence and quantum computing stand poised to supercharge all aspects of communications technologies in ways that are beneficial to humankind but, in others, that will likely prove destructive, completely shredding all semblance of digital privacy along the way and undermining the freedom to advance change,” Brescia observes.

“As we enter a world dominated by generative artificial intelligence, the institutional order is likely to change, and not necessarily for the better. In such a future, the ability to seek out, leverage, manipulate, and inundate individuals with information that will try to sway their actions, chill their speech, incite them to engage in harmful ways, or cause them to disengage such that their inaction is actually against their interests is nearly limitless.”

Brescia’s book is scholarly and sometimes dense, and is filled with both warnings and prescriptions for anyone concerned with preserving democracy in the face of a rising tide of authoritarianism.

“Democracy requires a high degree of protection for individual identity and political privacy, regardless of the the source of the threat to that privacy,” he writes.

“Early in the digital age, before smartphones became personal appendages, techno-futurist Ray Kurzweil envisioned a new type of consciousness ––“the singularity” — that would emerge as a product of the fusion of computers and human intellect.' While this prediction has not yet come to pass, in many ways the melding of the personal and the digital is well underway. Since the early 1990s, an array of new technologies has transformed the ways we live and the power of individuals to influence society and change the world. With the rise of the internet, mobile technologies, social media, and artificial intelligence, the ability of individuals, groups, movements, and political parties to effectuate change has never been greater…

“What is more, soon we are likely to see the widespread adoption of driverless cars; the proliferation of the Internet of Things, a global network of products connected to the internet and to each other; and the encroachment of generative artificial intelligence across all aspects of life. Records of our bodily functions will be digitized and medical treatment revolutionized. Computer servers throughout the world will contain a vast amount of biometric data about us. Our movements will be monitored, just as our steps are being tracked today. Strangers will know and artificial intelligence will track our heart rate, breathing, glucose levels, body temperature, and other biometric data in real time. Our state of being itself-our opinions, our moods, our fears—will fall within this digital system, a shadow, parallel world, like the "Upside Down" from the Netflix retro sci-fi thriller Stranger Things. It is in this world where blurry, spectral versions of us will take shape; yet the characteristics of our avatars may be a more accurate reflection of us than the image we project of ourselves in the real world.”

In fact, corporations create “digital voodoo dolls” as avatars of their customers based on information they collect and store.

Algorithms control what people see and hear, allowing foreign trolls and home-grown miscreants to chip away at unity to create chasms of division. This happens despite how we humans evolved toward altruism, cooperation, and reliance on community. Brescia quotes historian Yuval Noah Harari: “Change through cooperation with others is what may truly make us human and differentiates us from other species.”

In George Orwell’s 1984, a disembodied Big Brother spews, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” In an upside-down world of fiction as fact, an unsuspecting public can be manipulated by big lies, repetition, celebrity, and surveillance by a would-be autocrat.

“George Orwell’s Big Brother had nothing on the surveillance state that now exists,” according to Brescia, who studies institutional theory, perspective, and convergence in order to protect integrity of individual and collective privacy.

“Given the critical role that the integrity of identity plays in the achievement of personal self-realization, as well as individual and collective self-determination, our institutions, laws, and norms must offer robust protections for our private actions and engagements, even our thoughts, as they are manifest in the digital and analog worlds. A recognition of the severe threats to political privacy that lurk in the digital Upside Down is necessary to understand that preserving the integrity of identity is an essential feature of a functioning democracy. This work is an attempt to explore the ways that our laws, institutions, and norms can catch up to new technologies, with all of their capacities as well as the threats that lurk within them, to ensure that we can preserve the integrity of identity in the digital age and advance and enrich the pursuit of democracy, meaningful social change, and, ultimately, human flourishing.”

Brescia says our goal in America should be strengthening the legal infrastructure to protect privacy. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides a framework to protect individual freedoms, including freedom of speech and assembly without interference from the government.

But what happens when leaders no longer respect or defend the Constitution?

Free and independent thinkers ask questions such as these: How and why can the military be used to confront protesters in cities of political opponents? How can the government use Orwellian tactics to skew the truth about issues such as immigration arrests, assaults on elected officials, attacks on education institutions, realities of an insurrection attempt on the U.S. Capitol, attempts at foreign intervention without congressional approval, and overall disrespect for the judiciary and rule of law?

What if an administration is so corrupt if chooses personal profit and power over the welfare of people and personal privacy?

“Whether democracies can continue to function in the age of Surveillance Capitalism, artificial intelligence, misinformation, and manipulation remains to be seen. The threats to democracy across the world are significant. In the United States, the world's oldest democracy, authoritarianism and threats to the rule of law are real and increasing in force. Today's technology-fueled media environment, because of disintermediation, social media, and artificial intelligence, poses significant threats to the preservation of the American form of democracy, one in which a delicate balance of institutions –– public, private, civic, communicative ––operates to help citizens achieve individual and collective self-determination. In turn, these institutions are reflections of the popular will. I have shown in previous chapters and in past work the symbiotic relationship between institutional change, the ability to communicate, and social movements. What is more, that relationship is constantly changing, as the technology that enables and shapes communication, as well as society and the citizen, is also changing. When that technology is placed within democratic societies, the connections run even deeper, but so does the possibility that such technologies can be used not just to advance democracy but also to undermine it. For these reasons, the need has never been greater to ensure that the communications tools of today and tomorrow are not weapons that can strike at the heart of democracy but rather tools to help realize it.”

Among Brescia’s suggested remedies: using those tools to set up and enforce simple and mandatory disclosures (not obtuse fine-print agreements), instituting “search” protections, ensuring transparency by tech companies of what data is gathered and stored, disclosing the sale of personal data, disclosing uses of algorithms, enforcing clear remedies for breaches of cyber privacy, and embracing an overall shift to an information fiduciary relationship by corporations.

Ultimately, the remedy requires an informed public willing to speak out and stand up for freedom.

Political scientist Erica Chenoweth studies antiauthoritarianism. In her findings about quantitative outcomes, she concludes that 3.5 percent of a population is “required to mount a successful campaign of civil resistance.”

Carrying out civil resistance requires influencing five key pillars: military, business elites, civil servants, state media, and police. The key strategy: nonviolence even in the face of violence. The key proof of success: when public backing of the regime goes away.

Change can be made with “institutional convergence.” For example, Brown vs. Board of Education came about when the interests of civil rights advocates converged with white elites and public pressure at a time when Cold War Soviets criticized the hypocrisy of Jim Crow South’s treatment of African Americans. A coalition of opposition does not have to be homogenous.

A final question: In this century, can the power of AI be harnessed to create a positive social movement to preserve democracy or will everything be turned upside down in an American autocracy or theocracy?

After publication of Brescia’s book, which calls for a framework and methodology to “preserve political privacy in private law contexts,” Americans witnessed an unprecedented invasion of privacy by the Trump Administration in coordination with a technology giant who reportedly paid $350M to help elect a president. Brescia penned an op-ed condemning the Trump administration’s invasion of privacy after Elon Musk and his band of privateers raided the Social Security Administration –– via DOGE.

Brescia wrote, in part:

“…unvetted individuals working for a 'department' that doesn’t officially exist have gained access to the private financial information of hundreds of millions of American taxpayers and businesses. Veterans, retirees, taxpayers, you name it, had such rights swept away by DOGE mercenaries in an instant, with no court review, with no justification, without any consideration for due process rights. And we don’t know the full extent of the release of this information, who has access to it, what their designs on it are and whether they intend to sell it to other companies or even foreign countries, even when it appears some of this information may have been fed into a computer program, driven by artificial intelligence, to help DOGE identify potential cuts.”

The op-ed was written last February, and Brescia urged immediate action by Congress to curtail DOGE’s invasion of privacy. “This is necessary to protect the American people and businesses from this seemingly lawless abuse of privacy and due process and to understand the damage already done.” Sadly, so far his warnings have gone unheeded.

Ho’oponopono – Remembering Judge King

Review by Bill Doughty

He’s been gone for 15 years, but the remarkable legacy of Federal Judge Samuel P. King, a Navy veteran and Republican icon from Hawaii, lives on.

And, considering the chaos of today, his philosopher’s voice needs to be heard for its common sense, clarity, and relevance.

King was born in China in 2016 to a U.S. Naval officer father (who later became governor of Hawaii). His dad captained USS Samar (PG-41) as a river pilot navigating on the Yangtze.

Sam, himself, joined the Navy as an intelligence officer show spoke French and Japanese. He served during World War II, including aboard the minelayer USS Adams (DM-27).

King was one of the first Americans to visit and see the destruction of Hiroshima in 1945.

His autobiography, “Judge Sam King: A Memoir” (Watermark 2013), published posthumously, was written with the help of newspaper reporters Jerry Burris and Ken Kobayashi.

The book’s foreword is penned by another WWII veteran, Hawaii’s late Senator Daniel K. Inouye, who commends King for helping to navigate Hawaii from territory to statehood.

Hiroshima Memorial

One of the highlights in “Memoir” is in an appendix with King’s keynote address to the Japan-Hawaii Lawyers’ Association in Hiroshima, Japan, in April 1985, a speech given 40 years ago –– and delivered 40 years after WWII ended. Speaking to fellow lawyers, he said, in part:

“That August 1945 explosion over this city was a terrible event in the history of mankind, and one which mankind must prevent from ever happening again. The attainment of world peace is the most important duty of our leaders, yet we all have a responsibility to exert our best efforts to the same end. Lest we lose our sense of urgency in this struggle, Hiroshima exists as a reminder that our goal has not been achieved until the chance of nuclear war has been rendered impossible.

“We lawyers and judges and law professors may not be able to guarantee peace in our world, but we can and do make substantial contributions to peace. After all, our training centers around dispute resolution. It is our function in society to identify the points of conflict between individuals, develop the facts, apply accepted principles and reach just conclusions.

Within a single country, our activities may well be limited to disputes and conflicts that relate to internal harmony. What we do at home in handling divorce cases, breach of contract suits, civil rights actions, etcetera has little bearing on world peace. But when we cross over our national boundaries and concern ourselves with disputes and conflicts that arise between persons in different countries, we build bonds of understanding and friendship that ease the way to dispute resolution in international transactions.

I do not mean to claim too much for this modest beginning. We are not here to fashion solutions to disputes between nations. I do maintain that in relations between peoples of different countries, every increase in understanding, and every expansion of friendship, and every consensus on a procedure for resolving disputes, makes international harmony— and therefore world peace-more likely.”

Another appendix is King’s remarks in 1969 to the Pearl Harbor Commissioned Officers’ Mess for Law Day USA. Titled, “Justice and Equality Depend Upon Law –– and YOU,” King spoke about each individual’s responsibility to embrace the rule of law, including accepting personal accountability.

“Our system of criminal justice depends very largely upon the acquiescence and even support of those charged with crimes,” he said.

In the same remarks to those naval officers, delivered during the height of the Vietnam War, King spoke of the importance of mutual understanding and love in the pursuit of justice:

“If we love one another, justice becomes a byproduct of our humanity. Where there is unrestricted freedom, there is unleashed equality.” And he said, “A little mutual respect will go a long way toward bridging the apparent chasm in understanding.”

King’s father, Samuel Wilder King, entered politics as a Republican member of the Honolulu Board of Supervisors, and was later elected as a Hawaii Territory delegate to U.S. Congress. As a libertarian, the elder King strongly opposed the military’s imposition of martial law on civilians in the aftermath of the infamous Massie case (see previous related Navy Reads post from 2019).

“Partly in response to the Massie case, my father was a very strong champion for statehood and introduced a bill for statehood in 1935.” He would go on to write a draft constitution for Hawaii and serve as chairman of the Statehood Commission.

“Dad served three terms in Congress but withdrew right after Pearl Harbor to return to the Navy as a commander, and later became captain. My father's second round of Navy service took him to Saipan, American Samoa and eventually aboard a ship assigned to Japan to repatriate American prisoners of war. After the war, he returned to Hawaii, where he busied himself with politics and the pursuit of statehood.

Dad felt strongly about the need for statehood. He was one-eighth Hawaiian and very proud of it. He resented that we were only a territory and had no political representation, whereas all the states had two senators and more power to control their own destinies. Congress could do anything it pleased to a territory –– declare martial law, for instance –– and it wouldn't have any say in the matter. He had a very low opinion of most of the congressmen, especially the ones from the South. Back in those days, you got off the airplane in Atlanta and everywhere you looked, it said whites only, blacks only.

He didn't want people who came from that mentality making decisions for Hawaii.

After the war, he returned to Hawaii where he busied himself with politics and the pursuit of statehood.”

Samuel Wilder King went on to become governor of the territory before retiring from public service. He passed away in 1959 just two weeks after Hawaii became the 50th state.

After his own service in the Navy, younger King honored his father’s long career of service by becoming a judge. His proudest achievement, he said, was creating Hawaii’s family court. He conducted thousands of marriages and signed many divorce decrees, including the divorce papers for the parents of President Barack Obama.

He believed in accountability, integrity, and truth and was strongly in favor of “justice tempered with mercy.” His watchwords were “aloha,” “pono” (respect), and “ho’oponopono” ("doing something the right way, the just way").

As a Federal Judge, he oversaw cases involving organized crime, including tax evasion, murder (including the Palmyra Murders Case), treason, and other criminal issues.

He also championed environmental issues, abortion rights, nuclear disarmament, and anti Death Penalty initiatives. He believed strongly in defending the Constitution, especially the First Amendment. For example, he sided with the media after Mayor Frank Fast banned some reporters from news conferences, calling Fast’s act “unconstitutional.”

Understandably, folks wondered whether Sam King was really a Republican, and King admitted he was “not like the right-wing conservatives we have today.” He said, “I’m a strong believer in the ‘three party’ system: Republicans, Democrats, and Incumbents. And the Incumbents almost always win.”

King is author with Randall Roth of “Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement & Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust,” published in 2006, a landmark book in Hawaii credited with cleaning up corruption by the rich and powerful –– ensuring accountability and ho'oponopono.