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AmericasLove.org · Feature
"Are You a United States Marine! What the Marine Corps Taught Me,
It started innocently enough: an email from an old Marine friend in San Diego, inviting me down for the weekend. He mentioned a "game" he and some fellow Marines were playing, hinting it might be story-worthy. Cryptic, yes. Intriguing, definitely. So, I grabbed a budget flight and headed south, curious about what I'd find.
Attached to his email was a document, a sort of philosophical backbone to this mysterious game titled, "ARE YOU A UNITED STATES MARINE! What the Marine Corps Taught Me," and it read less like a game manual and more like a hardcore creed:
"The Marine Corps taught me that as a United States Marine, when you're given a job, a mission, a purpose in life. You don't ask for more personnel. You don't ask for more equipment. You take what you've got and get it done. And if they tell you to do this job all by yourself. Well, you're a Marine, that should be enough. And if they tell you to do this job all by yourself, with nothing more than your bare hands. Well, you're a Marine, that should be enough. And if they tell you to bring an entire country to its knees, all by yourself, with nothing more than your bare hands. You're a United States Marine. That should be enough. - Robert Steele USMC."
Bold words. But beneath this declaration were the actual rules of the "game"—a surprisingly detailed and, frankly, chilling blueprint for what looked like a one-man, clandestine operation to overthrow a nation.
The game followed a strict set of rules:
Reading these rules, I'll admit, I was taken aback. The idea of Marines, even hypothetically, planning how to single-handedly make a country surrender was both unsettling and, in a strange way, awe-inspiring. It gave me a new, if slightly unnerving, respect for what a Marine believes they can do. Seriously, how many people do you know who practice conquering countries solo? It's wild. And it sparked a thousand questions.
That night, I found myself deep in conversation with five Marines, discussing this "game," the future of warfare, and a whole lot more. Four were active duty and, understandably, wanted to stay anonymous—worried about how their command might view such… unconventional thinking. The fifth, however, was Robert Steele himself, the game's architect. No longer serving, he was free to speak his mind. To keep things clear, I assigned them call signs:
We gathered in the simple apartment two of them shared near Camp Pendleton. Beers were cracked, takeout ordered, and soon, they pulled out their tablets and meticulously prepared plans and picked who would go first.
Now, for obvious reasons, we all agreed that spelling out their exact plans for taking down specific (even hypothetical) countries wouldn't be wise, or socially responsible. Instead, I can share the general tactics and common themes that ran through their strategies. Each plan, in its own way, boiled down to a core formula: Take a nation's financial system and critical infrastructure hostage, then demand surrender. Most strategies kicked off with a covert move—kidnapping or taking over the identity of one or more middle aged single males. Preferably individuals with major financial influence or a key role in a vital company. From there, they'd covertly produce explosives, often hydrogen bombs, nitro glycerin packed high explosives or napalm put into homemade explosive drone payloads, remote/timer detonated explosive devices, rockets, and mortars. They then hire a local crew of temporary employees as 'Useful Idiots' to covertly build an autonomous "army" of drones, and automated devices designed to target specific pieces of the nation's infrastructure. Using 3D printing, YouTube, and Amazon, they would disguise the manufacturing of equipment by making them dual purpose or mislabeling material, then perform the final setup themselves or with a one-day crew of illegal aliens or day labor under the table. They then notified the government and commenced the attack. Usually, they framed the person they took hostage for the attack and Disappear in the chaos.
The common targets across their hypothetical campaigns included:
A crucial part of their strategy was what they called the Hostage Strategy: All critical assets were taken as "hostages," with minimal destruction employed only when a demonstration of capability was necessary. They also stressed a Humanitarian Focus: An unwavering commitment to avoid casualties or bodily harm to individuals. Think 3 a.m. attacks with bomb threats to empty buildings – designed to scare the living daylights out of employees, not harm them.
Rooster, my friend, summed up their core philosophy pretty clearly: "Steele figured out that war is about money, not body counts. If you make a country too broke to feed its people, then they can't fight. Since we use fiat currencies—currencies that have a perceived value based on a country's business metrics—the goal is to change the perceived value of a country's money. We realized this doesn't require killing a bunch of people on the front line; it requires getting at the financial infrastructure and interrupting the country's ability to do business.
We also realized that the more people you keep alive, the easier it is to win hearts and minds when the war is over. You can't change the hearts and minds of dead people, and it's hard as hell to convince their loved ones. Also, killing people and hurting people costs a lot of money, on top of having to pay for rebuilding the country. It's better to take a country's financial and business infrastructure hostage than to go in and kill people and blow a bunch of stuff up."
Slick jumped in, emphasizing the role of technology: "With drones, it's too easy to take a country's infrastructure hostage and leave plenty of people who will realize how much we are about to make their lives suck and there is nothing they can do about it. The goal is to get the populous to overcome their fear of the government and make them more afraid of what we will do to them. We thought about it, and for some reason, people are a lot more afraid of going broke and dying poor than they are about dying from a bullet. Think about how many people commit suicide when they are financially ruined. The Russian men are going to war in Ukraine for the money even with the high casualty rate. Killing the people on the front line doesn't do you any good. All you do is kill the enemy until you can take control of their gold and other valuable assets. The Allies won against Germany and Japan because America brought its resources and manufacturing. Without it, Germany would rule Europe. America carpet bombed and burned whole cities to the ground to deny the enemy manufacturing and business infrastructure. Drones change all that. I don't have to fight my way through your front lines to make a country poor. I can use long range drones with the ability to place themselves on a target and detonate. We let the enemy know that they have no way to retaliate before we can impoverish them. We want them to know the fight is over and we are just talking about how much their lives will suck until they eventually realize fighting is pointless."
Top then explain the strategic thinking behind their surrender terms: "The other part is, you have to take away the mystery of what is going to happen when they surrender. Give them something they can live with or is an improvement in their lives when they surrender. That's why we always make sure it's very clear as to what they're going to have to live with when this thing is over. Steele chose the French Constitution because he figured that's probably the easiest one, we know of, to get some other country to take on as their new constitution. And how many people around the world would love it if they could fire their entire government and hire a new one? While they lose the ability to maintain their own currency, they are getting the stability and security of operating in American dollars, which means their standard of living is going to be standardized against American living conditions. Next, you point out that they have a preferred trading status with America because they're using our money, and you've actually incentivized them to give up without a fight. We also have them adopt the United States currency so that they don't destabilize as their government transitions and to ensure that they're now aligned with our interest in keeping the US dollar valuable. The more people and countries that use our currency, the more decentralized and stable it will be. The more we decentralize our financial system and interlock it with other countries, the harder it is to devalue the dollar with a drone strike or misinformation campaign. Making both countries more secure."
Ace then pointed out, "If America had a standard operating procedure when we engage in country building. If we make it so people know in advance what we're going to do. We would break the will to fight of a lot of people before we attacked. We would also avoid the problem America had in WWII. The Japanese Marines were literally told by their officers that if the American Marines caught them, they would literally eat them. A letter found on a fallen Japanese soldier said, 'Tomorrow we will be fighting United States Marines. A special force recruited from prisons and insane asylums for their bloodlust.' The Japanese were so afraid of what the Americans would do to them that on one of the Islands the civilian population of 3000 people jumped off a cliff and committed suicide just to avoid capture. The Russians tell their soldiers if they are caught they will be tortured. This is a lie. But because the Russians not only torture their prisoners of war but their own conscript troops. Why wouldn't you believe the enemy would do it too? If the world knew exactly what happened when the USA caught a soldier or captured a country, we wouldn't have to fight as hard as we do. We might even get some request to be voluntarily invaded. I mean look how losing to the USA worked out for Japan and Germany. Two countries that were destroyed and a couple of decades later they are economic superpowers with us as an ally and economic partner. Who wouldn't want to be conquered by us?" The others chuckled at the joke.
Listening to them, the historical parallels hit me. With drones becoming cheaper and more accessible, could we be on the brink of economic warfare on steroids? These drones can be precisely deployed, parked on buildings or deployed inside buildings. They are precise enough to take out the dishes and electronics of a cell phone tower without toppling the minimizing collateral damage. They can even target ATM machines and bank vaults.
The conversation, already a mind-bender, took another turn when I asked about the drones themselves. "How come your drones can go so much further than the drones available to the military?" I wondered.
Rooster pointed at Steele and spoke. "Steele found some 1950s technology that just wasn't ready for prime time back then. It lacked the right accompanying tech. Now that we have the necessary advancements, we can achieve much longer battery life and, consequently, far greater range. Steele has a few tricks up his sleeve to really push the limits of drone endurance."
All eyes turned to Steele. "How far can you actually get them to go?" I asked him directly. A grin spread across his face. "Ten thousand miles, plus, if you want. It's just about the proper design. It's a trick." He then explained, in surprisingly simple terms, how he could dramatically boost a drone's range. It seemed almost *too* easy, making me wonder why the military wasn't already doing it.
Steele, picking up on my thoughts, leaned in. "Because the government is using the same couple of, in my opinion, rip-off, unimaginative, thieving, weapons development corporations for the last fifty to sixty years. Unimaginative, behind-the-times companies like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. They make a guaranteed 14% off everything they spend. So, creating cheap and simple drones doesn't make you nearly as much as wasting billions of dollars on another jet fighter that they may get to work one day and will be obsolete when it hits the battlefield. I've already designed a drone system to nullify jets and missiles as a threat—I call them 'web drones and stealth bombers and jets are obsolete with the right equipment.' The five contractors the government uses are more interested in selling us more 3-million-dollar tanks when we're watching them get toasted by a couple hundred dollars' worth of drones in Ukraine. The onset of drones changes the whole game. It's no longer about bigger; it's now about smaller and lots of them. Now you'll be throwing a whole bunch of small, highly accurate drones at targets. So instead of having one FPV drone, you will have one hundred AI-driven mini-drones attacking from all sides at once, specifically targeting the weak spots. We can't protect ourselves from 100 drones with 5-pound grenades, flying three hundred miles per hour, coming from all sides in multiple waves of twenty-five drones each yet."
He continued, his voice intense, "Cheap, easy-to-produce, AI-driven drones are the future of warfare. Drones are the original smart bullet that you will be able to point and click, and it will pursue the target, even around corners, with multiple sensors to prevent evasion. Very soon, you'll only have a bunch of machines that are operated by people who aren't anywhere near the battlefield. And since nothing is going to change until one of the countries runs out of machines, it doesn't make any sense to attack the frontline. Just go after their money and business infrastructure. When you start working out that it only takes a couple of drones in the right places to bankrupt a country like America, you start to see that war just isn't going to be tenable anymore. We're eventually going to have to decide the lines on the maps are set and find another way besides getting poor people to die committing industrialized mass murder for the rich politicians who profit from the body count."
Steele added, with a dismissive wave, "There is no way to defend against it. Because of all the weaknesses in the system and the unprotectable infrastructure, you just can't stop a big enough drone attack. Marines will be building drones that are a couple of inches long that can cover 1000s of kilometers undetected. They won't even have to leave their base in most cases. AI will use cameras, GPS, satellite photos and pictures from the internet to navigate, eliminating electronic warfare countermeasures interfering with navigation, to eliminate very specific human and other targets. Equipment like a tank just doesn't make sense anymore. They cost too much. They're hard to transport because of their weight and size. They're logistically impossible to keep supplied, and they can be taken out with a drone for a couple hundred dollars. The tank is over 100 years old. The chariot eventually became obsolete too.
The Marines pointed out that for the price of an F-35 jetfighter without munitions, America could build 500,000 armed drones with longer range than the jet fighters. For the price of 10 unarmed jetfighters America could have a fleet of 5 million armed drones. With AI these drones would constitute one weapon because AI can pilot all 5 million drones at once. Marines would have an attack plan for every country in the world pre-installed and updated as needed. The president would Command the Marines to attack a country and wait a couple of hours for the countries unconditional surrender. It only gets hard if you want humans to approve targets. If you just take the infrastructure hostage. Then all targets would have been pre-approved and no worrying about casualties because you will have them clear any building as needed. Make the whole system dependent on maintaining signal contact with the drones, otherwise they detonate. Proximity fuses for anti-tampering along with other precautions.
Then came a truly breathtaking claim from Steele: "With my long range drones The United States could execute a first strike and take out the fifty thousand or so jets that the rest of the world has in one night. In a 5-minute coordinated attack worldwide. Take out all the manufacturing plants and supply warehouses for jets also, and America would be the only ones left with any jet fighters. Take out a couple of thousand battleships and aircraft carriers and America could establish air and naval superiority worldwide for less than two hundred and fifty million dollars. We could reduce our jet and naval fleets by half and the costs that go with it. America would maintain air and naval superiority indefinitely."
"Until somebody takes out OUR jets and navy in one night with a drone attack," Top shot back, a wry comment that made the Marines chuckle.
Steele went on to draw his vision of war in the future. "If we don't target a country's money and ability to do business, we will just throw machines at each other until someone runs out of machines. The humans won't be anywhere near the dangerous battlefield. They would just get in the way and give the enemy a target. Human soldiers will be a liability, not an asset, on 90% of the battlefield."
Slick quickly added an important counterpoint: "On the other hand, we will also be able to tell the AI to minimize collateral damage and unnecessary civilian casualties. When the AI is formulating a plan it will take extra precautions to avoid unwanted casualties, it will think more like a sniper and less like artillery. Because it can coordinate and fly the drones faster than a human ever could, the AI can figure out and execute solutions that minimize collateral damage before a human can call in an airstrike. It's also why small, cheap, and plentiful will be preferred over expensive and hard to mass-produce.
Steele leaned forward, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial tone. "People must understand, war is no longer about body counts or blowing things up. It's about having a weapon system that executes one overwhelming, AI-coordinated, pre-planned attack focused on collapsing a country's economy or taking it hostage. Killing people in uniform is a waste of money and time. Lengthy wars that just use up resources to the inevitable conclusion of who will run out of money first are a waste of time and money. Threaten to take the enemies' money and make their lives suck while offering them terms that they can live with. Make them an offer they can't refuse," he said, pulling off a surprisingly bad Godfather imitation.
My head was spinning. Were these guys actually talking about a path to… world peace? Could AI and drones make traditional war too financially risky? What do you do when every country has a fleet of 5 million long range, AI driven drones with an attack plan already devised for every country on earth? "What about the war with China coming up?" I asked, concerned how all this fit into such a massive potential conflict.
"Steele thinks this is going to be rather impossible as long as we have the right setup," Top replied, turning to Steele.
"First," Steele pointed out, "this isn't World War II. We have satellites that make finding enemy ships easy, and naval ships are going to be on an ocean where they can't hide. A fast battleship can only move about forty miles per hour. China only has one coast to launch the attack from, which means we know where the ships are coming from and where they are going. We know there are a little less than four hundred ships and what they are. We will see the attack coming. There will be no Pearl Harbor surprise this time."
Top then prompted, "Steele, explain your cargo plane idea."
Steele jumped right in. "If we build plane drones with large wings that make them long-range and we launch them from a high altitude out the back of a cargo plane, they will be able to go 600 hundred miles at least. We attach the wings to my 'Steele Rain' fuselage missile. We launch them from cargo planes. Each of the pallets has fifty drones on them that are triggered to activate when the pallet is pushed out of the back of the plane. The Master Drone is preprogrammed with a destination point. The cargo plane does a high-altitude deployment well out of range of any surface-to-air missiles or other threats to the cargo plane. Once the drones turn on, they will self-righten and head to their preprogrammed destination. One of the fifty drones will be the master drone for remote piloting of the swarm, while the other forty-nine are slave drones that maintain distance and position in relationship to the master drone. The drones are programmed to maintain spacing over fifty feet apart at different altitudes and have other anti-radar devices that just make them look like a big cloud in the air to radar. There's no way to target the Master drone. Once the target has been located and an impact point on the ships deck has been set, the drones simultaneously will start their dive bomb at a ninety-degree angle to the deck. The one place no one ever sets a ship's guns to shoot is straight up. The wings will detach from the Steele Rain fuselage when it enters its gravity powered dive to reduce drag. The missiles will be guided by the X fins on their tail. By the time they hit the ship, they'll be traveling over 1000 meters per second. The impact will set off the hydrogen bomb in the back half of the missel, driving the tungsten or depleted uranium nose into the ship as an armor piercing round. There are fifty missiles in each swarm that will all hit the same spot within a couple of inches of each other or can be programmed to spread out and cover a precisely designated area."
He continued, the image he painted stark, "We place a small group of drone pilots in the back of the cargo plane with their own flight control center. The cargo plane will have the altitude and power to maintain contact with the drones until they're used. We build the wings and body of the drones out of cardboard and PEX plexiglass. We can make them cheap, for less than two thousand dollars, I think. Fifty-pound missel traveling at 1000 meters per second powered by gravity is like trying to stop an Artillery round. Even if they can interfere with the electronics the precalculated trajectory set by the AI when the wings separated gives it an accuracy of 5 meters."
Steele then crunched the numbers: "So, if we want to take out three hundred ships, or seventy-five percent of their navy, let's say it takes us 100 drones per ship to sink them, at two thousand dollars per drone. That comes to 60 million dollars to end China's ability to invade anybody in a couple of hours, one night. Execute a first strike before they can load the ships, and we end the war before it can ever begin. Spend another five million dollars, and we can destroy their shipbuilding capabilities. We don't need Marines on the islands along China's coast, hoping they can hide the overpriced anti-ship missile launch system from China's drones. That's ridiculous. How are they going to hide for months from thermal imaging and AI targeting? The Chinese know they are there, so they know where to look. It doesn't make sense when we can destroy the fleet in a day from the air-conditioned, Marine bases we have all over the Pacific. How much are those poor Marines going to cost just to recklessly endanger their lives while they suffer in the jungles of some crummy island somewhere? We can destroy them from our own bases cheaply. Or let Taiwan build their own system. It's not like they can't afford it.
Then Top dropped a chilling counter-scenario: "It won't matter because the Chinese will remove America from the fight before they attack Taiwan and the rest of the South Pacific islands. We played the game with America as the target country a couple of times. It was easy to beat. The Chinese have anywhere from four hundred thousand to one million tourist visas alone issued every day in America. In 2017 the CCP passed a law that said all Chinese citizens must assist the government in its espionage and spying so every tourist is a Chinese Communist Party agent no matter if they want to be or not. They or their families will be punished by a psychopath from the CCP if they don't cooperate. Every Chinese national you meet is a spy forced to work for the CCP. Given the choice of risking going to prison in America, or you and your family going to prison in China maybe even disappeared, what would you choose?
What if 2,000 of those tourists are ordered to go to a preselected storage unit where they find twenty-five drones and the ingredients and instructions needed to make homemade bombs. They assemble them in a couple of hours. On a selected night they launch those drones at 4AM New York time nationwide. The entire nationwide attack will be over in fifteen minutes. Fifty thousand drones can do a lot of damage in fifteen minutes."
Top continued, "The purpose won't be to kill people. That would give us justification to use nukes. It will be to force us to withdraw our military and financial support worldwide by destroying enough of our jet fighters, cargo planes, and naval ships that we recall the rest to protect them and don't have the financial resources to help Taiwan.
Plus, right now the Chinese are facing economic collapse, and the Trump tariffs made that worse. If we played as China," Top said, gesturing to the others, "we would sell our dollars and euros to buy gold and other investments that will profit from an American and EU economic collapse. We would do it right before China started to stage the attack on Taiwan. We would drone strike America and NATO first to make money to finance the war while removing America and NATO from the battlefield. Then we would take the opportunity to take over the South Pacific including Indonesia and Australia, securing an oil supply and increasing their fishing territory, farmland, mining, and tax base."
Rooster then chimed in on China's potential motivations: "The Chinese never intended to engage America with their military. Look at their fleet. It's a bunch of small ships that will be great for controlling the shipping lanes and therefore the islands around the South Pacific. They can't say they built them for defense—who wants to invade China? It's a mess that no one wants. They built those to expand, and they were going to do it after they used spies and sabotage to take out our country, which is already tired of being the global police. China is going to collapse economically in the next couple of years if not less. We also don't know how many people they have to go to war with. Over half of their population is over age 60. China lied to cover up population decline. It never had 1.4 billion. It could be as little as four hundred million. But the overall consensus is it's below a billion. So, if you were the Communist Party and knew you were going to go broke, why not get rich by economically collapsing your enemy, the United States, and their allies in NATO? The world is not going to be buying your products anymore, so how many choices do you have? He trailed off, the unspoken possibilities hanging heavy in the room. The conversation had already covered a dizzying array of unconventional warfare tactics. With the focus now squarely on China,
The American media are willing 'shills' and 'useful idiots' for the CCP, amplifying their propaganda and turning a blind eye to the truth. They fail to report that the primary victims of the CCP's rampant human rights abuses are not Americans, but the Chinese people themselves. The Party's grip on power is maintained only because the West continues to buy into the fiction the CCP sells us.
China is a master of espionage. You must understand, for them, the shooting war is the very last phase of a conflict. The real war is the one happening now, the preparation of the battlefield. They know they can't match our military head-on, so they are committed to undermining us through espionage. Under this paradigm, you must assume that every Chinese citizen here on a visa has a mission, and behind them looms a ruthless CCP handler who cares nothing for the Chinese citizen, only for what they can steal or do for the Party.
The hard reality is this: the best thing we can do for the Chinese people—and for our own national security—is to start refusing them visas and access to America until they depose the CCP. As long as the Chinese people are more afraid of the CCP than they are of losing their future, they will remain enslaved to the 200 or so families that make up the Chinese Communist Party.
We are not doing Chinese students any favors putting them in the direct line of fire, by giving them access to research the CCP desperately wants. It is not the Chinese people who are the enemy; it is the two hundred families of the CCP who dehumanize them. The families of the CCP make their own citizens disappear into prisons, where the CCP profits from the multi-billion-dollar business of selling organs harvested from prisoners. Do you really think their government sees them as humans or cattle?
The Chinese people are enslaved by ignorance. They are controlled mentally by a torrent of party propaganda and lies. We must stop perpetuating, and start breaking the chains of CCP propaganda, which not only enslaves a billion people but puts the entire West in harm's way. Do not underestimate the Chinese people, or the CCP that has enslaved them. These students and the other Chinese here on visas don't act as spies because they choose to. They do it because they must!
"How would you beat China?" I asked. Top pointed at Steele and said, "Tell him your plan?"
"Force a revolution." Steele explained further, "We build a bunch of long-range drones. We make them cheap with Chinese parts; I can make and send them from a warehouse in Las Vegas. We drop them at tourist spots on a national holiday when the tourist spots are packed. We load them up with a cargo drop of thumb drives on parachutes saying, 'The Truth. What the CCP doesn't want you to know.' We Include the truth about Moa and what's going on in their country and how impossible a war with Taiwan would be. Let them know that we are willing to help them if they get rid of the CCP and adopt a new constitution, submit a proposed conditions to use or start from. Make them reinstate and enforce past and present intellectual property rights and adopt fair business practices. Then offer them a plan on how we're going to help them by turning them into a bunch of college graduate temp labor that can come over and help us build our fully automated manufacturing system over the next couple of years.
Steele leaned back, a look of conviction on his face. "America is gonna run into a real shortage of brain power coming up. The Chinese have mountains of college educated students that just need some work experience and they're going to be masterminds that are going to pay off big time in the long run. I mean they're working 6 days a week, 12 hours a day, now and they consider that normal. Now put that with a college degree in your company, how much benefit you think you're going to get out of them now. Their elderly generation that is the Mao Generation is dying off quickly because of COVID and neglect. The amount of wealth we would be throwing away in brainpower if we were to let them fail as a society would be astronomical. If we just educate them and make them an offer they can't refuse how much money are we going to make importing their talents and paying them instead of giving them donations and waiting for them to be a highly advanced criminal state when they economically fail?"
He continued "To beat the CCP you get a guy like me to go ahead build the drones and run the whole operation as an independent citizen. First the government claims plausible deniability. They can say 'We don't know anything about it.' Then the government blames it on me. When the CCP demands they do something about it. The Government can remind them I'm an American. I'm not doing anything wrong under our laws. So, there's nothing they can do to stop me. If the CCP has a problem with me, they're going to have to talk to me. This gives the CCP no one to blame but me. And ask me if I give it a F* about that. Give me a couple million and I'll kick the CCPs' A*S from Las Vegas all by myself." Steele concluded with a dismissive tone while punching the table with his finger.
The sheer audacity of Steele's plan for China was breathtaking, a comprehensive vision for induced regime change packaged with economic incentives. Before I could fully process it, Top shifted the conversation, bringing the focus to another global conflict.
In a conversation that veered from global geopolitics to the intricate workings of the U.S. economy, the focus suddenly shifted to a surprising vulnerability much closer to home. It was Top who first identified it, framing it not as a financial issue, but as a matter of national security.
"The stock market is a national security threat for America too," he stated plainly. His proposed solution was as radical as his diagnosis. "We need to replace it with individually secure, governmentally backed up, webpages attached to a company's website that allows for the sale of shares that are automatically registered with the government in a read-only storage file."
The idea was to create a decentralized system immune to the kind of systemic shocks that could cripple the nation. "This allows for technical glitches in a decentralized system that can't be hacked, bombed, or influenced by AI deep fakes," Ace explained. "The stock market system is an outdated system that is no longer necessary. It's a rip-off for the average American and a massive national security threat."
At this, Robert Steele leaned forward, his agreement palpable.
"They're ripping people off," Steele said, emphatically tapping the table with his finger. He described a system he sees as fundamentally rigged against the common person. "The brokers get to prioritize execution of their trades before yours. You and others do research and place a trade to be executed when it hits a certain price point... Because the broker now has the inside information, knowing your future trades, if the price point gets close to your chosen purchase price, they buy it before you, making money off the bump they know is coming from all your purchases."
To Steele, this isn't just market mechanics; it's a structural injustice. "Just being a broker means they have insider information. They automate it with AI, perform a bunch of micro trades and they rip the public off for billions daily" he argued. "Most people actually have to work for a living. They can't spend all day staring at a blip on a computer screen hoping for a pattern to emerge or waiting for the right time to place a trade. Somebody's got to keep the country running and Warren Buffet isn't doing' it. The entire system is rigged to victimize the working class and is a national security threat that can economically cripple us in minutes"
He pointed to the immense resources poured into gaining microseconds of advantage as proof of a broken system. "When companies are willing to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to run fiber optic cable from Chicago to New York just to get hundreds of milliseconds worth of advantage, it's not a fair-trading platform. It screws every part time investor that actually has to perform a useful job that keeps the company earning and makes the stock worth anything to begin with."
Steele's vision for a replacement mirrored Ace's, but he fleshed it out with the pragmatism of a field operator. "The government could literally charge a dollar per trade for electronically registering the trade, another dollar as trade insurance to cover any fraud or technical difficulties and maintain a system of backups," he proposed. This, he contended, would ensure that "no company's trading platform can be hacked to the point that we can't undo what the hackers did."
The proposed system, Steele argued, would fundamentally change the nature of investing. "A lot of the false rumor stuff would be eliminated because people looking to sell their stock would have had the time to do research to make sure they had properly priced the stock... People would price shares on the data not on chart pattern recognition."
The ultimate goal, from his perspective, is to safeguard the nation. "You would slow down the stock market so it can work fairly for everybody and eliminate the ability for any country or crime syndicate to collapse our economy by taking out a couple of key financial buildings with drones."
He was, proposing an end to an institution that has been a pillar of the American economy for over a century. The monetary impact would be far-reaching and immediate. They were right about one thing: the attack on 9/11 almost crippled the economy. The questions that hung in the air were as massive as the proposal itself. Could we really stabilize corporate stock pricing and protect the economy by dismantling the stock market? How much would traders save in fees? How would this new economy work? How much is going to have to change, and how fast?
Rooster then continued, shifting the focus back to military procurement. "We need to change the way we procure weapons and military equipment. The present system is outdated and is leaving us behind other countries in weapons tech. It's a national security threat in today's world of war. The Ukrainians are beating the Russians because they can innovate and get someone in the military to not only look at their ideas but give them guidance on why it won't work for the military so the creator can make it work. The Ukrainians are using 3D printers and cheap Chinese parts to invent and produce equipment and weapons in garages and basements. They are doing more with less. They have taken control of the sea around Crimea with FPV Remote controlled jet skis and speed boats loaded with ammunition and remotely controlled from shore. The Russian navy has been reduced by half in the Black Sea by Ukraine. The Russians have a naval base in Crimea they can't even use. Reality is, we probably wouldn't do much better. Our ships just aren't set up to defend against drones. The Ukrainians have even shot down Russian jet fighters with missiles attached to a drone speed boat. If the Ukrainians can take control of the Black Sea away from Russia without a navy, why would they spend money on an aircraft carrier?"
Slick, in an exasperated voice, said, "Steele has an idea for a drone detection system for drones under two hundred feet, and it will be able to be carried by infantry—it's less than five pounds. He knows how to get drones anywhere on the planet nonstop from the US. That is an awesome weapon, and we aren't using it because he doesn't have millions of dollars to bribe Congress with campaign donations like Anduril Weapons manufacturing can. Anduril has hundreds of millions of dollars, and Anduril still must pretend to have a Republican and a Democrat as CEOs just to get an audience. How can a guy like Steele compete against a company like Anduril? He's got tons of great ideas. Think of how much we could do with drones that can travel thousands of miles. Anduril with their cool looking but limited usefulness and overpriced drones are allowed access but Steele can't contribute? Anduril boasts about their coding but with AI why do I need people writing code. AI would create a custom operating system that only it can understand after it's decrypted. Trying to decipher an unknown computer operating system from an encrypted code. That would be pretty much impossible. And because only the limited access offline AI with limited functionality would know how to produce it There really wouldn't be any threat from hacking. So no hacker taking over our system because they know our code. So even though Anduril Is spending all this money to sell their their products most of what they're selling is about to be obsolete anyway. Their AI operated jet fighter Might make a good initial delivery platform for the drone contingency they're going to launch but they're never going to actually be used in combat. What are is Anduril's jet going to do against 1000 drones trying to Suicide bomb it out of the sky. And It will cost 1/100th of what Anduril Is gonna charge for the fighter not to mention fuel and maintenance costs. You know what doesn't cost a fortune to fuel and maintain like Anduril Fighters are single used drones that you keep in a crate till needed. Anduril's AI jets won't even have the range of most drones. "
"If you knew how many times Steele has complained about how many ways they could have won by now," Ace joked, "He's always bitchin' about the 'Corrupt Crayon Eaters' in the Pentagon, and the 'Corporate Whores' in congress that are bought and paid for by their 'Pimps on Wallstreet. We have to fight this f___ing 'Corporate Communism'." he said impersonating Steele while the other Marines laughed.
Steele leaned forward, his frustration palpable. "I was contacted by the Marines about my Landmine Removal Barrel. They invited me to the base to build some prototypes. Then they cancelled and said I can't play because I'm a security risk. The 'Short Bus Riding, Crayon Eating, Generals' in the Pentagon, who have been given the most powerful and expensive military in the known universe—more powerful than the next ten countries combined—and they still can't beat a couple of third-world dictators. The Ukrainian war should be done by now, and we should already have the unconditional surrender of Russia. China is only a threat to the 'Short Bus Squad' AKA 'The Joint Chiefs of Staff' in the Pentagon."
"Let me handle it, and I'll beat them for cheap." Offered Steele. "Give me a couple of million, and I'll give you 'The Midget from Moscow,' Putin, in handcuffs in a couple of weeks, all by my- F---king-self. I have always wonder how many Americans would donate a buck or two so I can build a bunch of long-range drones in my back yard and acquire Russia's surrender by my F---king-self from Las Vegas. It's too F---king easy. Give it to a Devil Dog that can win a war for you. Then Steele asked with a mischievous smile and the gaze of a predator in his eyes. I wondered what would happen if we gave America a choice. They can continue using the Short Bus Squad and the Crayon Eaters at the Pentagon or hire me and get the job done in a couple of months CHEAP."
"We tried, but it's like Steele says, they are still fighting like it's World War II. We lost Vietnam because we were fighting like it's World War II. The world is never going to fight us like that because they can't. They must use espionage and guerrilla tactics against us. Command just doesn't know how to fight a war like that, or the one in Ukraine, and it's going to take them too long to figure it out. The changes we are talking about are extreme and radical. We are nobodies in the big picture. We need to get someone fighting for a modern solution with extreme and sometimes unpopular changes. How much will Lockheed Martin lose alone if they can't do business as usual? There isn't as much profit in a drone that is easy to develop and costs a couple thousand compared to a jet fighter that costs a billion. Not to mention the additional coemption because of the simplicity of drone desighne and building. No humans in the vehicle means the vehicles are easier to design and cheaper to produce. The prototype usually can be built with parts ordered online then built in a garage or a moderate size warehouse. Lockheed Martin will go out of business when the lose their 14% guaranteed profit by overspending to develop and build an item" Top explained.
Steele added, with a bitter tone, "The 'Corporate Whores' in Congress will never give up the cash they get from the preferred weapons developers. The Pentagon told Congress we don't need any more tanks, and they are still building them. Think of all the taxpayer funded corporate welfare that they lose if my drones can do what I say they can. If their F-35s are obsolete, then so are they. My ideas are cheap and effective. Not a lot of profit to be made making cheap long-range drones. And that is a problem for them. I'm not looking to rip the American people off; I just want to win a war." Steele finished looking frustrated and pissed.
Their "game" was far more than a mere intellectual exercise; it was a chilling glimpse into a potential future where the very nature of conflict is irrevocably transformed. The traditional metrics of war—body counts, territorial gains, the roar of conventional arms—seemed to fade into obsolescence, replaced by a surgically precise drone strike aimed at the economic lifeblood of a nation.
The implications were profound, extending far beyond the battlefield. If their theories hold true, the future of warfare might indeed be financially untenable, forcing humanity to confront the absurd cost of conflict in an age of hyper-efficient, AI-driven destruction. The questions that had swirled in my mind during the conversation now solidified into a stark realization: the world, and indeed the military-industrial complex, might be on the precipice of a revolution it was entirely unprepared for. "Are you a United States Marine?" was no longer just a game; it was a stark warning, spoken in the quiet hours of a San Diego night, about a future that could be both terrifyingly destructive and, paradoxically, a path to world peace.
This conversation was just the beginning of a deeper dive into the mind of Robert Steele and his fellow marines. Beyond the strategies of global economic warfare and weapon design, Steele shared another, more personal battle—one he fought not on a foreign battlefield, but within the walls of the Las Vegas City Jail.
He chose to be incarcerated in protest over a fine for a traffic ticket, a decision that escalated into an all-out war with the local courts.
Even though he was denied access to a law library and forced to draft legal briefs on the floor of a solitary confinement cell with blank printer paper and a 3-inch golf pencil. He got his sentence of 115 days reduced to 50 days.
The incarceration involved a 42-day hunger strike. As punishment for his defiance, he spent 47 of his 50 days in solitary, 17 of which they tortured him by keeping him on 'Suicide Watch' where he was kept naked in a freezing cell, torturing with sleep and time deprivation, with nothing but a cement floor to sleep on. They purposely gave him a concussion and tore the cartilage in his right shoulder. A wound that still hasn't healed months later. The Las Vegas jail finally gave up before he broke.
He endured all of it because they denied him his constitutional right to a fair trial—for a TRAFFIC TICKET!!!!!
If you've ever wondered why you don't deny constitutional rights to a United States Marine, prepare for my next story: 'A Marine vs the Esquire Mafia: Robert Steele's Fight to End Judicial Corruption and Prisoner Abuse,' coming next week.
If you are interested in supporting Steele or want to know more about his drone building or legal efforts you can find him at USLove.org .