In the introduction post for this essay series idea, I named what I’m calling the American financial kill chain which is the unprecedented sequence where the Treasury Secretary of the United States, Scott Bessent, went on TV and described engineering the collapse of Iran’s economy as followed by military operations weeks later.

It’s the first time in history an American administration is openly admitting to the bank-to-bombing pipeline, and the reason I want to walk through this phenomenon is not only because it is unprecedented (you’re going to see that word a lot in this essay, sorry not sorry). It’s also because most coverage of what happened to Iran either treats the financial phase and the military phase as separate stories or flattens the financial phase under a single banner of “sanctions”. The truth is, neither framing captures what actually happened that is unique to each culture’s context via how an American administration publicly admitted to a sequenced financial and military operation to target another state and how Iran’s shadow banking system is unique to its history and statehood to begin with.

There is no Iran without shadow banking, and the American financial-kill chain as a mechanism exploited something most Western analysts don’t understand about how money moves inside Iran and its shadow banking system which I wrote about in detail before the bombs dropped. If you are interested in specific details about what that shadow banking system is, read the post about it. I’ve been told some of you want me to keep it snappier so that’s what you guys get for being ungrateful, I guess.

But I digress - for now, I want to detail *what* the American financial kill-chain and how it develops in five phases. The first is sanctions targeting financial settlement to cut off dollar inflows, which means going after not just oil exports but the exact point where foreign currency becomes usable inside the economy, until there are no dollars left for anyone to move. The second is what happens when dollar liquidity disappears and rotten banks that were only technically solvent lose their cushion and collapse which results in a cascade of consequences. The third is the domino effect where the central bank prints money to cover the rotten banks’ losses which itself leads to currency collapse meaning purchasing power is destroyed and thus people take to the streets to protest when there’s nothing left of their deposits or livelihood anymore. The fourth phase is military strikes that follow and the fifth is the feedback loop, where every other country watching starts running the math on how fast they can build around the dollar system. The fifth phase is also playing out right now in the Strait of Hormuz, which I’ll get to later.

These are unprecedented times in every regard, aren’t they? You thought you last heard that phrase years ago, but nah, 2026 is the horror movie sequel to 2020 where the cameras never stop rolling because now everyone’s into a situation room type of set-up with multiple monitors.

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Settling scores: causing something and weaponizing it are not the same thing

Speaking of being on camera, Bessent described the first three phases of the American financial kill-chain on TV under oath when mentioning sanctions as a tool along with financial settlement, this then leading to a dollar liquidity crisis, and all of it spurring a currency collapse driving people to protest (though definitely not using the framing of it as an American financial kill-chain, those words are mine exclusively (trademark emoji here).

That’s why I want to be precise about something because precision matters when you’re writing that it is unprecedented for how a government openly executed and admitted to a sequenced financial-to-military operation, and I am arguing exactly that, so let me be precise.

Ayandeh Bank’s collapse was not caused by American sanctions. Ayandeh Bank’s collapse was caused by decades of regime-linked self-dealing, the bank’s founder who lent his own bank’s deposits to his own real estate projects, and a central bank that knew about it for years and did nothing. The documents proving the rot go back to 2022, as the parliament knew, the judiciary knew, my aunts knew, as Leonard Cohen sang, everybody knows, well…everybody knew. That included the seven million people who lost access to their money, their deposits, all this while the parliament speaker called it a success. This is what governance looks like in the Islamic Republic, as everyone acknowledges it as a matter of fact and life that corruption runs deep through the core of every system there.

A bank this rotten should have collapsed years ago but it didn’t, because in Iran’s shadow banking system, there were still enough dollars moving through the sarraf networks and the Iraqi channels and the Dubai intermediaries to keep the lie liquid. If you are still wondering what any of this means, seriously, go read my post explaining it all.

The dollars moving through various channels were the cushion, and Bessent’s Treasury killed it by targeting financial settlement, so when Ayandeh finally went down on October 23rd 2025, there were no dollars left anywhere to absorb the shock. For those of you who are not finance bros (probably for the better), financial settlement is the moment when a transaction actually clears. You sell oil, someone pays you, but the money isn’t yours until it settles, until the dollars actually land in an account you can use. Every previous sanctions regime went after the oil itself, the tankers, the exports, the buyers. Previous administrations took occasional shots at the settlement layer, but Bessent made it the entire strategy by focusing on where payment becomes usable money inside Iran. You can sell all the oil you want but if the dollars can’t settle, you sold it for nothing. If it don’t make dollars, it doesn’t make sense (nor, evidently, settle in this case).

What the sanctions did was to bleed out the power of money in Iran. The sanctions ensured that Iran’s formal corrupted banking system could not be propped up by its shadow banking regime this time, as no dollar liquidity would be left to absorb the impact. And that, folks, is the difference between causing something and weaponizing it.

If there was a book about this, the title would be something like ‘How to turn a domestic banking failure into a systemic currency crisis into a political crisis into a military target’ though I’m not sure Dale Carnegie would be a fan. This is definitely not making friends or influencing people in the way he advocated.

Peace sells, but who’s buying? - the cost of war as of writing today

It has been 19 days since February 28th with the first strikes and bombs and bombs striking Iran, though it all feels like years feeling like decades and decades feeling like years or whatever that Lenin quote is about time passing. It’s been 19 days is my point.

As of writing on March 18th going into the 19th:

• Amnesty International confirmed that a US Tomahawk missile hit an Iranian primary school in Minab, killing at least 170 people.

• Of those 170 people killed, 160 of them were those schoolgirls. They were children.

As of March 19th:

• At least 1,444 people have been killed and 18,551 injured in Iran according to Iran’s Ministry of Health.

• An estimated 4,800 members of Iran’s military forces have been killed according to the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights.

• 15 civilians are dead in Israel with over 3,600 injured.

• The war has spread to Lebanon where more than 700,000 people have been displaced.

• Thirteen American service members are dead with about 200 wounded.

• Israel is systematically assassinating Iranian leadership. Earlier today, Israel struck South Pars, the world’s largest natural gas field, with US coordination, disabling most of Iran’s gas production and halting the flow of gas from Iran to Iraq.

• Trump posted on Truth Social tonight that the United States “knew nothing” about the South Pars strike, then threatened to “massively blow up” the same field himself if Iran keeps hitting Qatar.

• In turn, Iran retaliated by hitting Qatar’s Ras Laffan LNG complex with missile while Qatar expelled Iran’s military and security attachés from the country.

Do you also need a flow chart or some type of graphic to keep up with all these main characters? I do.

The IRGC issued an evacuation order warning Gulf energy facilities are now “direct and legitimate targets” and that attacks will not cease “until their complete destruction.” Over 3,000 projectiles have been fired at GCC countries, more than half targeting the UAE. Iran is also escalating from airstrikes to naval attacks as a ship was struck by a projectile off the UAE coast near the Strait of Hormuz late tonight, bringing the total to more than 20 ships hit since this war began. The Gulf economies are suffering their worst damage since the 1990-91 Gulf War.

Despite all of this, suspected Iranian tankers were still loading oil at Kharg Island this week, days after Trump ordered strikes on the export hub. That means kill chain’s target is still technically operating.

Oil surged past $110 after the strikes on energy infrastructure and the Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed. While the US is dropping 5,000-pound bunker busters on Iranian missile sites along the Strait, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went on Fox News today and said “We don’t need the Strait of Hormuz for our energy here at home.”

Despite all of this, the top US counterterrorism official, Joe Kent, resigned, saying “we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby” and that Iran is “not a threat.” In his first interview since resigning, on Tucker Carlson, Kent said there was “no intelligence” that Iran was planning any imminent attack, that Israel had pulled the US into the conflict, and that Rubio’s justification was circular: the “imminent threat” was that Iran would retaliate if attacked, not that Iran was going to attack unprovoked. The FBI is now investigating him for alleged classified leaks. Senator Murphy said after a classified briefing that the war’s actual goals do not include destroying Iran’s nuclear program or regime change. Iran’s Foreign Minister called the whole thing “Operation Epic Mistake, a misadventure engineered by Israel and paid for by ordinary Americans.”

As all of this is happening, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued a 30-day sanctions waiver on Russian oil last week to “promote stability in global energy markets.” The architect of the dollar weapon against Iran is now easing dollar pressure on Russia.

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Disclosure: Definitely not military, financial, or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

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Peace... Peace sells...

Peace... Peace sells...” — Megadeth, “Peace Sells... but Who’s Buying?” (1986)

We live in unprecedented times, in case you forgot from the pandemic, but when I say unprecedented, I mean read these next few words very carefully because you and I are witnessing in real time how the United States of America has just pioneered an unprecedented new chapter of modern warfare that I am calling the financial kill chain.

Never before in history has an American governmental official admitted openly to the public engineering step-by-step a dollar shortage to collapse another country’s currency that has led to people protesting.

This was not a leak, not a classified briefing surfaced by an investigation decades after the fact, but a public embrace of military doctrine through financial mechanisms that has previously chiefly fueled fodder for academic careers, conspiratorial Reddit posts, and the high brow version of both which is the same thinking stamped with a think tank’s seal of approval.

In early February, Scott Bessent, the Treasury Secretary of the United States, sat smiling in front of cameras at Davos, and then under oath before the Senate Banking Committee, and explained in sequence how America broke Iran’s financial system through financial mechanisms, watched its currency collapse, watched its banks die, watched its bazaars shut down, and watched its streets fill with people who could no longer afford bread though the part we all watched involved seeing the body bags of protestors killed by their government. Bessent called it “economic statecraft, no shots fired” though twenty-three days after his Senate testimony, on February 28th, the United States and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury which killed Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, his daughter, a grandchild, the IRGC Commander-in-Chief, and the Chief of the General Staff,.

This type of public admission by a senior American official has never happened before, and the thing I’m certain of is that the United States has executed a sequenced financial-to-military kill chain and documented it in public. The thing I’m uncertain of at this moment is whether pulling this trigger has started a feedback loop that undermines the very dollar system the financial phase was designed to protect.

That’s what this series is building toward, but I think first we have to understand how the weapon was built. Part 1 here is the essay introduction to a brief mini-series where I’ll trace the financial kill chain phase by phase, and to do this properly, I want to introduce the context setting-up the series in this post.

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1. What is a kill chain? Not a derivative of Hot Topic

For those not familiar with a kill chain, it is not a store for mall goths, but military doctrine also known as the F2T2EA model to find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess. This is the sequence a military follows to destroy a target and an ethnic mother uses to track her children’s life movements. Every defense analyst, like every first generation American, knows it.

These are sequential phases that culminate in destruction or whatever the kill chain’s heart desires, but my point here is that this is unprecedented in that this kill chain logic from military doctrine now applies to financial warfare. It is a documented operational reality right in front of you in publicly available Senate testimony and Davos interviews and Treasury press releases. This is no longer the stuff lurking in the shadows, alleged and unconfirmed, and none of these elements are new on their own. Of course dollar weaponization has precedent, of course sanctions preceding military action has precedent, of course economic destabilization as regime change strategy has decades of precedent.

What has zero precedent is these three things happening simultaneously and admitted to as the integration of military financial doctrine, which is what we are witnessing.

The financial kill chain sequencing for Iran was deliberate and it was designed like dominos falling.

What I’ll call the bank-to-bombing pipeline looks something like this: first sanctions dry up dollar inflows, then dollar shortages kill zombie banks that had been technically liquid, this in turn leads to bank collapses forcing the central bank to print, that printing itself destroys the currency, the currency collapse shuts down the bazaars, and that’s what leads a populace out onto the streets in protest when everything is broken and bread can’t be brought. Every domino was placed with the next one in mind, and if you think that’s a metaphor, Bessent described this exact causal chain on camera and then repeated it under oath. It goes without saying that this financial kill chain pattern was also replicated in an earlier draft in January when U.S. special forces pulled Nicolás Maduro out of Caracas after a decade of escalating sanctions, entity designations, and the targeted financial strangulation of Venezuela’s state-owned oil and gas company.

This financial kill-chain playbook has happened in rapid succession barely two months into 2026, though one wonders if the third time must be a charm and who that may involve.

Photo credit: Album artwork by Ed Repka for Megadeth’s Peace Sells... but Who’s Buying? (Capitol Records, 1986)

2. A history of violence: America’s policy of truth

Every previous instance of American financial warfare preceding military action required decades of declassification to piece together because that’s how this was always supposed to work, because no one says it happened the way it happened as it was happening. Blatantly admitting to it is unprecedented considering the course of history. You do the thing, you deny the thing, you classify the thing, and then historians reconstruct the thing from document dumps thirty years later.

Consider how Nixon told CIA Director Richard Helms to “make the economy scream” in Chile in 1970, and we only know this because the Church Committee surfaced Helms’s handwritten notes five years later, though the full picture took decades of declassification after that. The capital flight engineering, trucker strikes, credit strangulation, all of it covert and denied in real time, like a first generation (or really, any child) lying to its mother about eating the cookies or brushing their teeth. Consider how the CIA’s Cuba destabilization program, the sabotage of sugar exports, the destruction of Havana’s European banking relationships, stayed classified for decades. Consider how Madeleine Albright’s “worth it” on 60 Minutes in 1996 - when Albright was asked whether the deaths of half a million Iraqi children from sanctions had been worth it and she said yes - was a gaffe she spent her career trying to take back.

Bessent is not taking anything back, Bessent is not covert, Bessent is in your face telling you about the American financial kill-chain and I repeat: this is unprecedented.

3. What is the price of peace and what is next? When bombs and banks go hand in hand

Can you put a price on peace? It’s priced into a collapsed currency, 72% food inflation, seven million depositors who woke up one morning to find the signage ripped off their branches, bazaar merchants and crowds of protestors on the streets in the thousands while regime insiders led capital flight through wires of everything they had to Dubai.

Bombs and banks go hand in hand in the financial kill chain, and what comes next is anyone’s guess.

As of this morning, March 2nd, markets opened with oil spiking 13% before settling around 8% up with Brent crude, the global benchmark, pushing toward $80. The Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed as one hundred and fifty tankers are anchored in open water and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is broadcasting on maritime radio that no ship may pass. Iran’s retaliatory strikes have hit Dubai, Doha, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Riyadh for three consecutive days and seem to be targeting the five-star hotels, not the Ibis or Holiday Inn, which is some form of consolation, I guess? Debris from intercepted missiles has damaged the Burj Al Arab and commercial operations at Dubai’s airport, the world’s busiest international hub, have been suspended since Saturday when the strikes began. Iran’s Foreign Minister said the military has partially lost control over its units and analysts saying $100 oil if the Strait stays blocked. The volatility index is up 18%, gold is near $5,400, and my Substack remains free.

I want to remind everyone that a stoned metalhead from southern California asked a prescient question forty years ago that opens up this series: peace sells, but who’s buying?

Scott Bessent can answer that, as he went on television and told you the price and twenty-three days later, a war has been bought with it.

Stay tuned for part 2, where I begin to explore the parts and pieces of the financial kill-chain.

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Disclosure: Definitely not military, financial, or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

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“One day when your end is near

I’ll be laughing at your fear

When you’re gone you’ll be no one

Who’ll be fucking up my fun? No one!” — G.G Allin

Author’s note: This essay was written and substantially completed before the Israeli and American strikes on Tehran began on the night of February 27, 2026 as I was busy dealing with close reading of some speculative fiction earlier this week (see here)

The analysis below describes the collapse of Iran’s informal financial system and the parallel banking infrastructure that kept the country’s economy alive for forty years under sanctions. That system was already long dead before tonight.

What you are watching now, in my view, is the next chapter of what this essay describes. I am publishing it because understanding what broke, and how, matters far more tonight than it did yesterday. Everyone has an Iran take and everyone agrees the women are very attractive, the food is good, the people are kind, blah blah blah — but few of you were born in Tehran and even fewer of you who are writing essays for free instead of being a lawyer or a doctor.

The first rule of Persian fight club is that you don’t talk about Persian fight club.

The second rule is that you insist on paying everyone’s tab while everyone else insists on paying everyone’s tab and everyone figures out ways to get around everyone.

The third rule is that one of your aunts will comment on your appearance, your weight, your life prospects, and the specific way you are failing at something somehow, and you cannot say plainly to auntie “bite it you scum,” because the fourth rule is that everyone at this table will be outraged and the fifth rule is that they will never forgive you and the sixth rule is that you will never be invited back (which was the goal anyways, mashallah, though we are not Arabs).

The seventh rule is that not being invited back is a death sentence because this table is where all the good warm food is along with all the cold and dark long-buried family secrets as lore lurking in pauses, casual comments rallied out of nowhere that render you speechless with the brutal efficiency of communicating something you never wanted to know, say, about your father.

A Persian family dinner is a financial system that runs entirely on performance and so is Iran’s economy, yet the only person who ever truly explained what happens when the performance stops through abhorrent behavior was GG Allin, an American musician, punk, and degenerate who walked on stage already bleeding and made it impossible for anyone to keep pretending it was a performance, which is exactly what the Iranian regime does when it kills its own people, not because it is strong but because killing is the only function it has left, the last spasm of an institution that has nothing behind the uniform except the violence itself.

Sanctions this, sanctions that, you’ve heard all about sanctions in Iran, of course, but do you know how actual financial transactions are done? Well, the bazaari merchant class is Iran’s shadow banking system as they are the levers running it.

In practice, this means their relationships are the credit lines, reputations are collateral, their shops are the branches, and the whole thing ran for 40 years as the actual financial infrastructure of a country, a bandage on the gaping wound of Iran’s formal banks being sanctioned into irrelevance.

Now, just like shadow banking system in Iran based on social cohesion and capital, when Persians fight over the check, it’s called ta’arof and it’s a collective clearing mechanism where guilt is collateral, enforcement is the threat of being socially frozen out, and the ledger lives in everyone’s memory. When your aunt comments on your nose, it’s not small talk, it’s small talk, intel gathering, and an overall social credit check.

When you scale that Persian family dinner from six people to 92 million, the architecture is identical with trust-based credit, reputation as collateral, and social exclusion as the enforcement mechanism for bad actors. This shadow banking system was eaten up from the inside by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps while sanctions degraded it from the outside. The death knell, however, was the rial doubling in 12 months to collapse in December 2025. The regime killing over 6,000 people in response was not just an authoritarian crackdown but reinforcement of the fact that an economy decimated inside and out means that there is nothing left, because you don’t shoot your own depositors if you have any other tool left.

Here’s how I’ll work through Iran’s shadow banking system - first, I’ll introduce what the bank run looked like, then the infrastructure underneath the bazaar which is the financial system of the shadow banking system and its practicalities. Following that, I’ll discuss how this shadow banking economy was decimated from internal and external forces, and how the catalyst which broke it signified a new political reality for the country. Finally, I reflect on why the killing is proof that it’s over for Iran by introducing GG Allin’s work as a parallel to the Iranian government, and what may come next.

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I. A bank run without a building: don’t mess with the peaky Bazaari merchants

What no one appears to have said about the situation in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar in late 2025 is that it was not just a protest, but that it was a bank run too, except the bank didn’t have a building. Thinking about Iran from a Western perspective will not necessarily illuminate systems here because we default to the schemas we know for the cultural blueprints which guide us, and Western analysts covering this story treat the bazaar like a voting bloc (much as an individualistic culture would) whereas I’m going to treat it like a balance sheet (which is what a collectivist cultural slant would). The way credit is measured in Iran is also social, and you cannot forget this.

For forty years the bazaari merchant class has functionally operated as Iran’s parallel banking system When formal banking was sanctioned into irrelevance and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps were busy building their own little extractive kleptocracy, the bazaar kept roughly 92 million people’s economy breathing. How did they do this? Merchants extended credit to each other the way banks issue loans, as they wrote IOUs that circulated like currency. Currency exchange dealers converted rials to dollars and back, connecting Tehran to Dubai to Istanbul the way a bank’s international wire desk connects New York to London or some hedge fund manager on fintwit with his various e-girls throughout the U.S.

When thousands of merchants owe each other money in every direction, trusted intermediaries calculate who actually owed what to whom and then cancel out the overlapping debts so that less cash had to move. That move is called clearing, which every major financial system on earth does, but the bazaar did it without the separated buildings, regulators, or Bloomberg terminals.

The Iranian rial collapsing in December 2025 marked a turn from turbulence to terror on the streets in Tehran in the government’s response to the protests. For context, the rial began 2025 at 817,000 to the dollar and nearly doubled to 1.42 million in December 2025. Food prices were up 72% year-on-year alongside the degradation of the currency in an environment already weakened by the impact of sanctions enforcement on cross-border settlement corridors.

Prior to this, historically, the post-revolution deal between the merchants and the IRGC was simple: bazaari merchants got import licenses, preferential exchange rates, and political access while the clerical establishment got financial support and a loyal commercial class.

The arrangement held for a long time the way a hedge fund manager holds with his various e-girls, the entire aesthetic of the relationship centered around shared dysfunction and emotional turmoil fueled by delusion and hard drugs, which is to say it worked fine until the e-girl decided she wanted your portfolio too, though you signed up to be her secondary option and she’s never going to leave her primary partner. The bazaari merchants always knew they were subordinate to the real power structure and would never attain it because it was not their birthright to such power. Khamenei and the clerical establishment were the primary partners, and the IRGC was never going to choose commerce over power the same way the e-girl is never leaving her primary rich guy for the finance guy bankrolling her lifestyle. The merchants entered the arrangement knowing the terms. They knew they were the side piece, and side pieces don’t get to complain when they get cleaned out by the e-girl’s emotional jihad, whether it be financially, emotionally, or in whatever way that makes some of these hedge fund managers bankrupted excuses of human beings incapable of empathy.

Now, in Iran, through front companies, bonyads, and a breathtaking volume of no-bid contracts, the Guards moved into construction, telecom, energy, import-export, petrochemicals, and basically anything that generates cash. Conservative estimates put Khamenei-linked para-statal institutions at controlling roughly 60% of national wealth. The Mostazafan Foundation alone operates like a Fortune 500 company with the accountability structure of a Telegram chat. For the bazaari merchant class, this meant that they were getting shut out and getting systematically poorer, which in turn meant the financial infrastructure they operated was getting thinner with less capital in the system and shorter maturities. Consequently, this leads to higher counterparty anxiety and worse terms. Imagine what it’s like when merchants who used to extend 60-day terms started demanding 30, then 14.

From the outside, sanctions enforcement was destroying the corridors. The bazaar’s cross-border settlement capacity depends entirely on external nodes, and Dubai is the big one. U.S. Treasury enforcement spent years methodically ripping up every external node the bazaar depended on, which means spreads widen as settlement times lengthen and counterparties become harder to verify. Every OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) designation (from the Specially Designated National list) raises the cost of operating every adjacent node because it’s like a zombie virus as a designation means no U.S. person or institution can transact with you. In turn, spreads widen as settlement times lengthen and counterparties become harder to verify.

II. The infrastructure of Iran’s shadow banking system

A sarraf shop in the Tehran bazaar looks, to a Western journalist parachuting in, like a currency exchange counter, but it is much more than that. Think of your local rhetorical Iranian sarraf as three financial institutions crammed into a space the size of a Manhattan bodega though a Persian cat wearily judging you from a dimly lit corner is not guaranteed. The sarraf is a currency trader, buying and selling rials, dollars, euros, dirhams, and quoting prices that reflect how risky he thinks each transaction is. He’s also a wire transfer service, moving money from Tehran to Dubai to wherever and whenever through a network of partner sarrafs in each city, no SWIFT code required, no bank involved. He’s also a middleman who connects buyers and sellers across borders when the formal banking system won’t touch Iranian money. There’s a term for the sarraf in the world of international banking, since the sarraf’s connecting function is called correspondent banking. What JPMorgan does when it processes a payment between a bank in Germany and a bank in Brazil is what the sarraf does with a phone and a handshake.

In other words, when formal banking channels are sanctioned shut, the sarraf network is the banking channel and the actual infrastructure through which trade happens.

Sitting alongside the sarraf system: trade credit. A wholesaler in the Grand Bazaar imports electronics from Shenzhen. He does not pay cash upfront but receives goods on rolling credit, issuing a safteh, a written promise to pay a specific amount by a specific date, signed, witnessed, and enforceable through the bazaar’s social network. In the formal financial world, this is called a promissory note, and when large companies issue them to raise short-term cash, they call it commercial paper. When it is issued to me for my student loans used to study finance, I write these essays for free to keep my writing accessible to all audiences but the majority of my audience seems to involve highly paid professionals who consistently read me with 40% on average opening rates at 2-3x a read each, that’s not a promissory note, that’s called a joke. Pledge here to pay off my promissory notes in part.

That safteh written promise however doesn’t just sit in a drawer, but the person holding it can pass it to someone else as payment in the way you’d endorse a check, or he can sell it to someone for cash today at a small discount. Does this sound like something we’d call bonds? Yes, yes it is. This is how the bazaar creates liquidity out of thin air, as at any given moment, the Grand Bazaar contains thousands of these overlapping IOUs circulating between merchants, and if you mapped them, the web of who-owes-whom would look exactly like what Wall Street calls a money market. A money market is just a system where short-term debt trades between participants, and that’s what the bazaar is though it just doesn’t call itself that. The Iranian bazaari merchant class ran the shadow banking system of the country and for forty years it kept 92 million people’s economy alive. Then two forces spent twenty years destroying it from opposite directions and the currency collapsed.

III. The collapse

When the rial began depreciating, FX dealing froze first as the sarrafs can’t quote stable prices when the rate moves double digits in days. Most stopped quoting altogether, and trade credit became unpriceable. As you cannot issue a 30-day safteh in rials if you don’t know what rials will be worth in 30 days, clearing collapsed. When in freefall, netting positions become arguments and trust erodes fast when every settlement feels like a zero sum equation where someone’s getting screwed. Since trust is the only collateral in this system, it cannot function in such conditions.

Cash-in-advance became the only mode, so the entire system reverted to spot transactions which meant that smaller traders most dependent on rolling credit went under first. They are the ones who shut their shops, which is what the world saw on December 28. It was not a political statement but a liquidity crisis in the form of closed shutters.

Then the internet went down and the system split in two as the shutdown that began in early January, with over 100 hours of near-total blackout, was understood globally as censorship but it was also a financial infrastructure attack on the bazaar’s remaining settlement capacity. There are reports of merchants with Starlink terminals maintaining contact with counterparties in Dubai and Istanbul, settling in USDT while the rest of the bazaar operated blind. The Wall Street Journal reported thousands of terminals entering the country with connected merchants who can still access hard-currency settlement rails. Disconnected merchants, however, are trapped in a collapsing rial-denominated environment with no way to clear, price, or settle anything. It’s not a tale of two cities but a tale of bazaars and two economies for the merchants, so the ones who lost everything are the ones on the street. The merchants who managed to keep their satellite connections and stablecoin wallets will be positioned for whatever comes next.

IV. The show

Now I need to talk about the killing, because if I write about financial plumbing and don’t connect it to the people who are dead, I’ve written the wrong essay.

If you don’t know GG Allin, he was unabashedly violent and anti-social on purpose - he would, for example, walk on stage and smash open his own forehead with the microphone before the first song. Or he’d strip naked, defecate on stage, smear it on himself, throw it at the audience, attack anyone within reach, all total chaos, pandemonium, and repulsion instigated on purpose by him for the sake of it.

Most GG Allin shows lasted less than fifteen minutes before someone pulled the plug because it got too extreme for them. It was not the performance of extremeness they were anticipating, even though reports made it clear Allin was very serious about what he did and said and said he’d do.Every venue that booked him already knew what was coming, just like the audience buying tickets and the promoter promoting them knew what was coming. Everyone showed up and pretended the normal rules for performance still applied, that there’s a stage and there are seats and security maintains order and the performer performs, no blood spilling. But GG proved every single time that none of those agreements existed and he didn’t destroy the social contract. GG Allin demonstrated his disregard for the social contract by showing he could impose his violence and will on others by the degeneracy of his antics that was beyond any performance they had preconceived.

Remember I told you in the opening there was a GG Allin theory of political economy?

Remember how in the family dinner, everyone is performing or everyone knows exactly what it costs and refuses to say so? Just like the bazaar operated the informal economy and the regime provided security and took its cut, the performance of that parasitic relationship is gone too. The IRGC ate the balance sheet as foreign sanctions proved a death knell, so the formal banking system went functionally insolvent as credit instruments stopped clearing. Yet everyone kept showing up and performing their roles because the alternative was to stop performing, and stopping the performance at a Persian dinner table or in a Persian economy means the same thing: you don’t get invited back, and not being invited back is a death sentence. So everyone kept pretending just like the venues who booked GG Allin kept pretending the normal rules would apply this time and he wouldn’t wreck havoc.

What follows is security forces firing into crowds of merchants and students and workers, and that is like GG Allin’s unhinged violence on stage but demonstrated through the state as an actor. The unabashed disdain for human life through violence, sordid violence, has resulted in the murder of thousands of people. When you place it in the context of a punk show, to some it sounds obscene. Yet the comparison isn’t disrespectful, in my view, it’s the opposite. Every time an authority uses language that accidentally dignifies the killing with something vague and airy like “the regime deployed security forces”, “authorities escalated their response”, and more? That is the language of institutions that treats massacre like governance, like a fixed decision made by a functioning state weighing options.

The GG Allin framework says there is no pretense, stop dignifying this, and drop the veneer, there is no performance except for the unhinged violence I’m about to commit because I can and in defiance of everything you’d expect it not to be.. Allin never held himself back from his extremities on stage, just like Iran has never held itself back from extremities on and off stage.

What you are watching is not an institution exercising power but imposing its will through killing and causing carnage. The IRGC firing into crowds is not a government putting down unrest, it is a man covered in his own blood in a room where every agreement has already collapsed, doing the only thing he knows how to do because he has no other capacity left, just like GG Allin performing.

Think about how authoritarian crackdowns usually work, as they are political grievances with economic lives attached. The regime cracked down and people eventually went home because they have shops to reopen, credit lines to maintain, and customers to serve. The cost of staying out on the streets has exceeded the cost of going back to work. That calculus is what every authoritarian regime depends on, since it’s not the guns that end protests but it’s the jobs.

This time, there are no jobs to go back to. The settlement system is destroyed and shops aren’t closed as mere political statements. They’re closed because they cannot operate. The merchant who took to the streets on December 28 didn’t choose protest over commerce because there was no more commerce for them anymore to begin with.

At the same time, the regime can’t stabilize the currency because it doesn’t have the reserves. It can’t reopen the corridors because those are controlled by U.S. enforcement actions, just like it can’t extend credit to the bazaar because the formal banking system is itself insolvent. The regime is effectively out of economic tools, which is why it reached for the only tool it has left in the form of violence. The 6,000+ dead are not casualties of a strong state defending itself because a strong state doesn’t behave like a brute animal. The dead are casualties of an empty state performing the only function it has left, as calling what they’re doing a “crackdown” gives it more dignity than it deserves. It’s not a crackdown but a performance and a show delivered in depraved violence.

You cannot shoot a settlement system back into existence. Even if every protester goes home or gets arrested or gets killed, the safteh still won’t clear, the rial still won’t hold value, and the corridors are degraded. The trust that underwrote the shadow Iranian banking system, the entire clearing mechanism, all that trust built over decades of repeated transactions, is gone. You can’t rebuild social-exclusion-based collateral after you’ve massacred the society that created it. The regime is trying to stop a bank run by killing the depositors because it has nothing left.

V. The morning after war: what comes next for Iran’s financial system? Regime change?

I’m not going to predict regime change as that is beyond my scope for this article, but I will say that The informal financial system that kept Iran’s economy alive under sanctions is dead, and it’s not coming back, regardless of what happens to the regime or who is involved.

If the regime survives, the conventional read is “crackdown works, things stabilize” but the mental balance sheet says nope, impossible. The merchant credit system is structurally destroyed as trust is gone, connections and corridors are degraded, and then what? The economy already in shambles could get worse, not stable. That means the next revolt is incoming, because without jobs to go back to, people will continue to protest for a better life.

If the regime falls or negotiates a transition, the conventional read is “sanctions lift, money floods in, Iran opens.” The balance sheet says that’s slower than anyone thinks. There is no bridge infrastructure for Iran, have you been under a rock the past few decades? You’d have to rebuild formal banking, trade finance, insurance, and correspondent relationships from scratch and in sequence. That takes years, and do you know how much Persians like to talk?!

This isn’t an if, because it is a definite: Iran has roughly 12% of the world’s proven oil reserves, 92 million people, a young and educated population, and an industrial base that most sanctioned economies cannot touch. Like my aunts remind me about myself and my career, the gap between what Iran has and what Iran earns is the entire size of the opportunity. Everything is priced for war and ready for it, but nothing is priced for the day after.

Everyone is debating whether the regime falls, but that’s the wrong question. The economy the regime governed is already gone. The bazaar’s financial infrastructure, the parallel banking system that kept Iran’s 90+ million people fed and clothed and trading under four decades of sanctions, has collapsed all the while the regime can survive and it won’t matter. What comes next is a different country regardless of who runs it, and that’s anyone’s guess.

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Contact: ani@anibruna.com

In September 2008, someone walked into Bunker 22, a U.S. military weapons storage facility near Kabul, signed for more than 200 AK-47 assault rifles using the name “Eric Cartman” from something called the “Blackwater Counter-Narcotics Training Unit,” and then simply walked out with the guns never to be found again. Those 200 assault rifles were actually supposed to go to the Afghan National Police. They did not go to the Afghan National Police.

If the name Eric Cartman rings a bell, it’s because Cartman’s the portly and sociopathic fourth grader from the adult cartoon South Park whose catchphrase is “Respect my authoritah!”

More than two years later in 2010, when Senate investigators found this out, a Blackwater lawyer confirmed that no employee by that name had ever worked for the company.

So how did Blackwater, a private military contractor, end up getting involved in the same serious sentence surrounding the signature of a sociopathic fourth-grader?

Here’s where the truth gets properly insane. Blackwater, fresh off the heels of the 2007 Nisour Square massacre where Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqi civilians, had become toxic. That’s why they created Paravant LLC, a shell company with zero employees whose sole purpose was to win government contracts that Blackwater could no longer get under its own name.

Brian McCracken, Paravant’s vice president, told Senate investigators with remarkable candor that Paravant was created “to be like a company that didn’t have any Blackwater on it” so they could “go after some business.” When asked about concerns with the Blackwater name, he said simply, “the reputation, the baggage.” In fact, defense contractor Raytheon specifically requested Blackwater adopt a different name when negotiating the subcontract. The transcript of the hearing is quite remarkable:

“According to Mr. McCracken, Raytheon paid Blackwater for services rendered by Paravant and Paravant relied on Blackwater for its billing. Paravant and Blackwater were ‘one and the same,’ according to Mr. McCracken, and he added, Paravant was only created to avoid the ‘baggage’ associated with the Blackwater name.”

Thus spake the fake company with zero employees which won a $20 million task order in September 2008 to train the Afghan National Army. Their proposal claimed “many years of experience” and “2,000 employees deployed overseas.” All false. The Army contracting officer testified he had no indication Paravant was connected to Blackwater and did not check references. He managed about a billion dollars in contracts from Orlando, Florida with no one deployed to Afghanistan until May 18, 2009, eight months after the contract began.

Between 2008 and 2010, Paravant LLC obtained over 500 AK-47s from Bunker 22 on at least three documented occasions. The weapons were stored there for the Afghan National Police, not for contractor use. General David Petraeus confirmed there was no written policy allowing contractors to access those weapons. Chief Warrant Officer Greg Sailer, who signed over the weapons, told investigators he thought they were going to the Afghan police. They were actually being distributed to Blackwater/Paravant contractors like party favors.

Every new hire’s first stop was picking up an AK-47.

If you’re wondering how Eric Cartman felt the confidence to sign out weapons, perhaps the quality control measures for determining who obtained these weapons is worth noting for its spectacularity. Employees of Paravant later charged and sentenced to prison for the deaths of Afghan nationals in 2011 included Christopher Drotleff who had a military record including assault, AWOL, and larceny, plus a civilian record with DUI and resisting arrest and Justin Cannon, who was discharged from the Army after going AWOL for 22 days and testing positive for cocaine. Blackwater had no military service records on file for either when they hired them.

In December 2008, a Paravant trainer jumped on the back of a moving vehicle with a loaded AK-47 and rode it in the manner of a stagecoach, which is how tragically, in a moment the vehicle hit a bump, the trainer’s weapon discharged and shot another contractor in the head, partially paralyzing him. Senator Levin noted the bitter irony in how Paravant was hired to teach the Afghan National Army how to safely use weapons. The incident was reported to Raytheon and the Army. No investigation was conducted.

Five months later, on May 5, 2009, Drotleff and Cannon were drinking alcohol in violation of General Order 1, carrying those unauthorized weapons, when they got into a traffic incident with Afghan civilians on Jalalabad Road in Kabul where they fired approximately 30 rounds, resulting in two Afghan civilians dead.

As Senate investigators tracked individual weapons by serial number, they discovered that one specific rifle signed out by “Eric Cartman” in September 2008 was issued to a Paravant deputy program manager and was not returned to the Afghan government until January 25, 2010. That was more than 16 months later and only after Senate staff started asking pointed questions. In June 2009, Blackwater claimed that all weapons had been returned yet 90 weapons were not returned until January 25, 2010, just weeks before the hearing, and with some weapons being destroyed by Blackwater rather than returned.

By the subsequent summer of August 2010, the scandal led to Xe Services (also known as Blackwater Worldwide) being hit with a $42 million ITAR violation and settlement covering 288 violations from 2003 to 2009. The collective violations spanned across Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Colombia, and included the unauthorized training of foreign security forces. From Cartman to Colombia, Blackwater and its entrepreneurial corporate personhoods made false statements to regulators, lost weapons, and continued unauthorized activities even after being ordered to stop.

My take on this story and why I shared it for this month is because of its sheer audacity. Audacity requires some type of complicity, condoning, or coercion to embolden it in the first place, since audacity also requires a comfort with finding something more absurd than average. That means someone felt comfortable enough signing for military weapons using a cartoon character’s name. That audacity devolved to its lowest level of impunity is reflected in how contractors operated within Afghanistan while the U.S. military was supposedly winning hearts and minds. The Cartman incident is a testimony to how completely the system had broken down, how audaciously bad it had become.

When your oversight is so nonexistent that people think it’s funny to seriously, physically, literally, really, concretely, absolutely actually use South Park references on weapons transfer forms, you’ve created the perfect conditions for civilian casualties. The fact that Blackwater just rebranded as Paravant and kept getting contracts reinforces the notion that escaping one tainted reputation through cover of a moniker was not just a shell company here, it became literal as shells on the ground were the result of these consequences and how those shells passed civilian lives to get there.

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

I’ll show how AI governance is the logical end point to inform future policy making positions and decisions in lieu of obvious interventions like encouraging more women to study engineering.

If you’re new here: I’ve spent five parts documenting how America voluntarily handicaps itself in defense technology by excluding women while China mobilizes everyone. The short version is we lose $100 billion annually, China closed an 80% AI capability gap in 13 months, and we keep forgetting that we solved this problem during WWII and Apollo.

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Xuejun’s feet were not bound and neither were her capabilities, as China learned to unbind both women and their potential to serve the country’s defense needs. Meanwhile, America, lagging severely behind its adversaries in the defense industry, has a superpower we refuse to use desperate innovation. When we absolutely must win, whether World War II, the Space Race, or finding bin Laden, we suddenly remember that talent comes in all packages. Then the crisis passes and we forget. Our distinctly American amnesia indicates we know h…

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Did your middle school bestie steal your boyfriend of three days named Alex K? (It’s a true story, reader. Last I heard, he is now married to a woman who bears a striking resemblance to his mother and is Hispanic, even though he’s a big Trump supporter/MAGA. Everyone emerged from this battle a winner, methinks.)

If you think violence requires a body count, I have a thesis for you - the iconic 2004 film Mean Girls is the closest thing we have to a US defense doctrine training film on drones and the Pentagon is only now catching up.

We should thank our lucky stars every day it was Carl von Clausewitz and Otto von Bismarck writing military theory, not Carla and Odette. If women had been running war doctrine, they’d have figured this out centuries ago and the rest of us would still be running to catch-up.

The Pentagon knows this and they just don’t know how to say it out loud - the logic which wins modern wars is the same running American high school cafeterias.

The antagonist of Mean Girls is teenage queen bee Regina George and I’m going to make the case that we are also seeing Regina Drone here given all the parallel structures about drone warfare reflected in the film.

Over the past decade, US defense doctrine has been quietly rewriting itself around concepts like “mosaic warfare,” “distributed lethality,” and “kill webs.” When you strip the jargon away, they’re all describing the same shift in war from big expensive platforms slugging it out in direct confrontation.

We’re instead barreling toward distributed networks of cheap nodes coordinating to overwhelm, deny, and exhaust, just like teenage girls swarm their enemies. It’s not about mortal combat one on one, but power through coordination instead of individual strength and where information is the primary weapon, just like teenage girls disseminate information in their networks.

Nowadays, victory in modern warfare is achieved by making it impossible for your opponent to operate, which is also just like what teenage girls do. If you have never seen teenage girls fighting over a boy, you do not know what hearts of darkness in warfare truly exist. We’re in force multiplier territory, and the force is teenage girls.

Before I point out the parallels between drone warfare and Mean Girls, for those of you who have somehow lived the past twenty one years without encountering this iconic film, a quick run-down of the plot is helpful (it’s not a movie, it’s a film.)

Cady Heron, homeschooled in Africa, arrives at an American high school bright eyed and bushy tailed with zero understanding of its social architecture. She gets recruited by outsiders Janis and Damian to infiltrate the Plastics, the ruling clique of their school composed of three girls led by Regina George. The Plastics maintain power through coordinated social behavior, information warfare (found in their gossipy grimoire known as the Burn Book, a journal full of damaging intel on every girl in school), and rigid access control to their network (”you can’t sit with us”).

Make no mistake about it - the Plastics are a drone swarm and on Wednesdays, they deploy in pink. Individually they are of varying intelligences and capabilities, but collectively they are dominant.

Then there’s Cady herself, who turns out to be a rogue mercenary figure in a cartel. After all, Cady is an outsider with no native understanding of the system, she is recruited by local handlers (Janis and Damian), and then embedded inside the dominant network to learn its tactics from within. She didn’t invent new methods, she absorbs the Plastics’ playbook and turns it against them.

These are of course also the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) used to operate and control drones, and Cady’s experience is just like the first-person view (FPV) drone pipeline in human form, where one goes to where the expertise is, learns from its best practitioners, and then uses those TTPs to deploy against their targets..which is exactly what ends up happening in this tour de force film.

Cady’s infiltration eventually destabilizes the network, hijinks ensue, the whole system collapses, and of course, there is a boy involved between the adversaries. Mean Girls earned Tina Fey multiple screenwriting award nominations, and it should win her a Pentagon consultancy.

Now, if you haven’t been doom-scrolling defense Twitter or violating aerial flight laws for Instagram shots using drones, presuming a reader’s familiarity with the matter, in layman’s terms, I think that your mental health is probably in a better place than most and some quick insights on drones are worthwhile.

Drones are cheaper than Botox injections nowadays and by that I mean they’re cheap-cheap. You can get one for around $500. They are hella handy as one would say in the Bay area where I’m writing this from, and drones are ready to hand because they are present to hand cameras, bombs, Amazon deliveries, or perhaps even all three at once nowadays (someone send this to Palmer Luckey to verify please and do not mistake this for Heidegger’s meanings).

Drones can fly in coordinated groups called swarms where they share information and attack from multiple directions at once. In Ukraine, they’re responsible for the majority of battlefield casualties. The old way of war was building a $120 million fighter jet and hoping it survives. The new way is sending 100 drones that cost less than a used Honda Civic and not caring if you lose half of them. That’s so fetch, as one of the Plastics would say. It democratizes warfare in a way that also breaks everything the Pentagon was built to do with heroic single combat. Gone are the days of Maverick in Top Gun (some would say that’s a film too) with one pilot, one jet, one kill. What government actors are facing now is death by a thousand paper cuts from enemies who learned their tactics on YouTube and bought their hardware online.

Sound familiar? It should.

1. Fear and loathing in the cafeteria

Do you know what happens if you cross the drone swarm leader? You will be met by an assault from all corners clothed in various shades of pink as they swoop in on you.

What makes the Plastics terrifying is not Regina herself, who is just the node with the highest status, but rather the fact that they operate as a coordinated system with simple rules - you sit here, wear this, hate her, don’t eat carbs on Tuesdays. When we hear the rule that “On Wednesdays we wear pink”, we’re hearing about the drone coordination protocol, a low-bandwidth, high-clarity signal that shows being synced with the swarm. Violate it and the error handling is immediate - social ostracization as “You can’t sit with us.”

This is exactly how engineers model drone swarms. Like the Plastics, you don’t need each drone to be smart. You just need them all following simple rules and responding to the same signals. There’s power in numbers, so maintain X distance from the nearest friendly, prioritize target class Y, and if jammed, switch to fallback behavior Z. The hive mind intelligence of the drone swarm is distributed in the network, it isn’t beholden to any single node, which is an assignment China most certainly understood.

Their Jiu Tian drone mothership is a 16-ton high-altitude aircraft that can deploy up to 100 smaller attack drones from 50,000 feet. Imagine Regina George with a 25-meter wingspan, where the central coordination node gives the swarm its power and its direction, and all else follows the leader. The actual violence emanates from Regina Drone across all those little loitering munitions fanning out beneath her. Kind of awing, really, in a morbid way.

The thing about Regina, though, is that her power looks invincible until you realize she’s a single point of failure, and Jiu Tian has the same problem. Put that over the Taiwan Strait and you run into the dilemma where Regina Drone is huge, non-stealthy, and flying predictable paths at predictable altitudes. Huge targets get shot down, like how in the film Regina meets a bus…but what about all the small drones she’s already deployed? What happens to the other Plastics once Regina is out of commission?

2. Regina Drone’s high-G hair flip

Imagine your middle school bestie who stole your boyfriend of 72 hours regenerating over and over again no matter how many times you tell people to write nasty things in her yearbook.

Chinese researchers have developed something not too dissimilar with what’s called “terminal evasion,” bolting tiny side-mounted rocket boosters onto drones so they can pull 16G lateral maneuvers in the final second before a missile hits, and in simulations survival rates jump from around 10% to 87%. When a missile is incoming, in the final second before impact the boosters fire and the drone jerks sideways with 16G of force, all that force and violence and fast, fast, fast maneuvering due to the supports means the missile sails right past. Regina Drone lives to see another day. 16G would kill a human, as to put it clinically, your organs would crush, but drones don’t have organs.

Consider what this means from a defense perspective. You launch an interceptor (a missile designed to catch and kill other flying things) that costs $1-3 million, it locks onto a drone that cost maybe $10,000, the interceptor is screaming toward its target, and then at the last possible moment the drone does the tactical equivalent of “Oh my god, I love your bracelet” and sidesteps out of the kill zone, hurtling all your efforts with this expensive missile towards hitting nothing at all. Meanwhile, the cheap drone just keeps living, as American actor Matthew McConaughey is so fond of saying and naming his charity foundation after.

From a cost and effort standpoint, this is devastating for traditional air defense. Your probability of a kill, much less a clean strike becomes moot, your $3 million interceptor is now trading against a $10,000 drone that might just move, and your entire system assumes the target would cooperate by flying in a straight line. You thought you were in a duel, the drone knows it’s in a network, and a triangle requires a metaphor I am too tired to write about right now to be honest.

So if you can’t shoot them down one by one, what’s left?

3. “You can’t sit with us” - access denial as electronic warfare

One of the Plastics’ main tools is access control - you can’t sit with us, you can’t wear a ponytail more than once a week, you can’t wear sweatpants on Monday. Reframe what would be considered bullying somewhere as protocol elsewhere, and this access control is the same thing as jamming in electronic warfare.

Drone jamming is when your drone thinks it has a warm welcome in the radio frequency spectrum, a nice stable link to its controller, and then suddenly the signal gets mean-girled off the network. The connection has been cut, denied, sayonara, goodbye, and your drone doesn’t know what to think anymore. Alone and confused, your jammed drone is either falling out of the sky or flying in circles until its battery dies.

Trading $3 million missiles for cheap drones takes up way too much money, so the Pentagon has shifted towards a new strategy where instead of shooting them down one by one, they’re frying whole swarms at once with directed energy weapons.

In September 2025, a system called Epirus Leonidas, which could be charitably described as high-power microwave, basically a truck-mounted brain fryer, neutralized 61 of 61 drones in a live-fire demo, including 49 in a single pulse. With the push of one button, 49 drones dropped out of the airspace, like Lucy in the sky with cooked electronics. In April 2025, the UK tested something called RapidDestroyer in Wales, which is a place where no one really knows it, by the way, and this RF directed-energy weapon took out more than 100 drones across multiple swarms at a cost per kill of roughly 13 cents.

These systems are peak jamming because they exist to fry a drone’s capabilities instead of not trying to hit it. Jamming doesn’t care about terminal evasion maneuvers and it doesn’t need to, because once systems are down, it’s game over. In colloquial words, once your drone is jammed, you’re cooked. If Mean Girls had an electronic warfare scene, it would be when the beleaguered and exasperated math teacher Ms. Norbury also colloquially cooks (not literally) by photocopying the Burn Book and tossing it into the hallway to reveal its secrets to all students.

Ms. Norbury is doing the jamming here because it’s instant network collapse for the Plastics as everyone’s secrets are out there everywhere, and their all powerful system has collapsed in on itself choking on its own information. So defense has an answer through jamming and directed energy, but does this actually work long-term, does ‘don’t shoot but fry’ scale?

4. The limit does not exist (not even between civilian and military)

One of Cady’s big moments in the film involves solving a high school math question, and her response is in the line “The limit does not exist.” She’s talking about a mathematical function that approaches infinity, and she’s also accidentally describing drone economics. There is no limit left to who uses drones for what, when, where, and how.

Cady starts off as a civilian and by the end of the film becomes a militant figure like Regina. That’s modern drone warfare now where the limit does not exist anymore between military and civilian.

The same DJI quadcopter nephew got for Christmas is being strapped with grenades in Ukraine. The same tech that does vineyard mapping and Amazon deliveries is doing reconnaissance for artillery strikes. The same FPV racing drone a teenager flies for YouTube content is the same one cartels like Jalisco Nueva Generación are using to drop explosives on Mexican police.

There’s no “military drone” and “civilian drone.” There’s just drones, and anyone with $500 and a YouTube tutorial can enter the chat. When the limit does not exist, neither does a barrier to entry.

5. So you agree? You think swarm warfare is really pretty?

Mean Girls is a film about networked power, who has it, how it spreads, and what happens when the underlying rules change. Drone warfare is the same thing, just without pink cardigans and insults about your weight replaced by shrapnel.

China’s mothership drone Jiu Tian is Regina with a 25-meter wingspan, the directed energy jammers Leonidas and RapidDestroyer are Ms. Norbury with a stack of photocopies and absolutely zero patience, and Cady is like a rogue cartel figure infiltrating the kingdom ruled by the Plastics to usurp them using the same technologies, tactics, and procedures.

The logic of teenage girls at warfare in high school as drone warfare scales.

You go from football turf to cartel turf to a South China Sea turf standoff, all of this made possible by cheap nodes, fast information, and the social physics of the machinery coming together.

It’s awing and it’s frightening (much like teenagers themselves, frankly) especially in the way where we can think about the Pentagon being like a wayward parent, intending all the best, spending so much time and money building for a different kind of war.

Gone are the days of one platform, one pilot, one glorious engagement, one dive towards victory lock stock and barrel.

What warfare is now when Claudia Clausewitz rewrites it is swarming, indirect, relentless, and very much not interested in a fair fight.

Teenage girls, of course, figured this kind of warfare a long time ago already. The rest of us are just beginning to catch-up.

Disclosure: Definitely not military, financial, or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

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But how does this exclusion actually happen? It’s not enough to observe that defense is 23% female while China mobilizes 46% of their technical workforce. We need to examine the specific institutional mechanisms that create and maintain these gaps while preventing any evidence-based reform.

Part 4 identifies four structural barriers that aren’t accidents of history but active design choices embedded in…

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1. The STEM pipeline hemorrhage - where we lose women at every transition point

2. The attrition cost - $2.8-3.9 billion annually in preventable losses

3. The prime directive needs reworking - how defense contractors fail at parity

4. The systematic sorting problem - horizontal segregation within engineering disciplines

5. The economic hit - $100 billion every single year

Let’s get specific about what this culture of exclusion costs us, because I did the math and it’s worse than you think. While China mobilizes 2.85 million women in technical roles who start contributing to military capabilities on day one, America hemorrhages 10,000 to 13,000 female engineers annually. That’s ten MIT graduating classes walking away from engineering every single year.

Part 1 and 2 of this series established the reality that China fields 10 times our drone fleet, closed an 80% AI capability gap …

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1. All we have is words, all we have is worlds - defense tech’s sexualized discourse

2. The language that kills careers - from discourse to documented harm

3. From words to harassment to diversity - what research shows about homogeneous vs. diverse teams

4. The innovation cost of homogenous thinking - when exclusion becomes economic sabotage

We’ve built a system so perfectly calibrated to exclude women that it’s practically art. While we’re sitting here admiring our magnificent self-sabotage, China has massively increased their participation of women in defense tech through both policies and institutional support, which is how they’re building the weapons that will make ours in America obsolete with a workforce fueled in part by 46% women.

The introduction to this series and Part 1 established China’s competitive advantages from having millions of women participating in their defense tech pipeline which is now producing 10x our drone fleet, closing AI gaps in 13 months that sho…

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1. The legal situation: China’s dual use technology approach via military-civil fusion vs U.S. constitutional barrier

2. The numbers situation, or gender arithmetic: comparing China’s labor stats with America’s in defense

3. What China’s utilization of women produces at scale: drones, AI, and weapons

In this first part of the China Girl series, I begin by looking at the legal and regulatory frameworks that shape both China and the US’s respective labor pipelines for defense technology. I then examine the labor pipelines, their economics, and the measurable strategic production outputs of each.

This seven-part series will examine how innovation economics and competition policy intersect with gender as a strategic imperative in defense technology, and why this matters from a forward looking perspective especially in regards to AI development and governance. Part 1 here quantifies China’s structural advantages through broader workforce integration and the measurable innovation outcomes that result. Parts 2-5 will analyze the policies and institutional failures causing America to voluntarily restrict its own talent base through cultural barriers, policy constraints, and bureaucratic inertia. Part 6 will examine the historical precedents of women in defense and the economics involved. Finally, Part 7 extracts lessons for AI governance, where identical vetting requirements and talent access challenges will determine which nations can develop advanced AI systems at the scale and speed required for strategic competition.

Before we get started, some groundwork as I think it is necessary to make clear what exactly is meant here. When I say innovation economics, what is that? What does that even mean? Since I basically have half a PhD and despise jargon, let me just say, excellent question, dear reader. If you didn’t ask it, now you know it is an excellent question to ask.

So, innovation economics, what is it?

Innovation economics is the conceptual framework for how I’ll approach practically analyzing (1) how labor market dynamics are a competitive factor, and thus (2) how the structural advantages of each labor market form the de facto competition policy of the countries. I then use the information from the labor market dynamics and competition policy along with projections/current stats to quantify them and ultimately measure the economic impact of these things.

By quantifying measurable outcomes, it becomes easier to identify some emerging questions to consider, in this case about workforce as a strategic variable, and particularly, how integrating more women into the workforce is a distinctive competitive advantage.

I like ideas like I like people, and I want to translate them. I’m interested in taking on a multi-disciplinary approach to think about innovation from questioning and developing a thesis on this issue. Specifically, I’m curious about what we can learn regarding innovation by analyzing an adversarial geopolitical situation involving technology, economics, and policy choices.

I want to know how each country approaches utilizing women in a male dominated field, and how that has second order effects for the country’s economics, innovation capabilities, and technological achievements.

Section 1: I am the law - the regulatory & legal policies surrounding China and the United States’ approach to military-civil work

The representation of women in defense technology is generally abysmal across the world, and China isn’t better at diversity as much as China is better at gaining access to labor through sheer ability which increases the representation of women.

Before I get into the sheer numbers, readers should understand the mechanisms and systems driving them in the first place.

Key points:

• Women in China have their work contribute to both commercial and military use from day one due to the Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) which is a national doctrine encoded in law and policy permitting immediate dual-use cross-over and application of commercial work. This is completely unlike the U.S., where both constitutional constraints alongside security clearance processes with oft extended backlogs prevent such transitions between commercial and military usages.

• China’s Military-Civil Fusion doctrine compels compulsive contributions between civilian tech work and defense applications, eliminating friction between industries for dual-use.

• America’s constitutional constraints prevent such a set-up due to the First Amendment (compelled speech), Fifth Amendment (takings), and the Thirteenth Amendment (involuntary servitude).

• Why is understanding the legal framework important? Through non-consensual coercion, China mobilizes their entire technical workforce instantly whereas the U.S. has legal and cultural barriers to compelled cooperation.

Women in China have their work contribute to both commercial and military use from day one due to the country’s Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) plan which is a national doctrine encoded in law and policy permitting immediate dual-use cross-over and application of commercial work. The MCF as a system of laws and policy decisions removes barriers between industries as well as compelling dual use development while making it a legal obligation to cooperate, license routes for defense industry work, and much more. Though there is no omnibus type of legislation for the MCF, it is through its infrastructure and policy mandates that the MCF is an obligatory and compelled nonconsensual mobilization of labor across all of private Chinese industry to share commercial development and innovation with the Chinese government.

This is completely unlike the U.S, where both constitutional constraints alongside security clearance processes with oft extended backlogs prevent such transitions between commercial and military usages. As I go into more detail below, any attempt to implement China‑style compulsory integration of civilian and military tech in the U.S. would be a catastrophe immediately colliding with First, Fifth, and Thirteenth Amendment protections, as well as political norms. The American strategy has to rely on voluntary and compensated cooperation.

Contrast this with how the MCF doctrine uses as its legal pillars China’s respective 2010 National Defense Mobilization Law and 2016 National Defense Transportation Law alongside practical policy decisions and administrative measures to integrate work across domains for dual governmental/military use. The 2010 and 2016 laws require that civilian infrastructure and resources be built to military standards and be convertible to military use in wartime. The core MCF policy goal as repeated across official documents is to “...form a pattern of deep integration that is all-elements, multi-domains, and high-efficiency.”

Beyond those legislative instruments, China publishes sectoral laws, administrative regulations, five-year plans, and “opinions” that operationalize MCF in specific fields. Some are binding laws, whereas others are official policy documents issued by the Party or State Council linked to China’s governance model. The near seamless transition this sets up is in stark contrast with the arduous and segregated procurement methodology of the U.S. as well as its security clearance situation. Where one country is speed-running, the other is stalling.

In practice, this means when Alibaba hires a software engineer (it is a company where 47% of employees are women), that engineer works on e-commerce recommendation algorithms. The same machine learning techniques predicting what products customers want also apply to intelligence analysis, predicting what information analysts need. Through state coordination mechanisms, the commercial algorithm development simultaneously informs People’s Liberation Army (PLA) capabilities. Alibaba’s engineer doesn’t need security clearances, doesn’t need to wait eight months for background investigations, doesn’t need to do anything at all except for show up to work on Monday to write code, and both Alibaba’s commercial products and China’s military intelligence benefit from her work. Any commercial development by a Chinese company has capabilities which flow directly to the Chinese military’s use via the state’s coordination and joint laboratories, as there is no ‘division’ of the work between the “defense” and “civilian” tracks. They’re all accessible for national security priorities without bureaucratic barriers unlike in the U.S.

Meanwhile, the United States faces dual-use constraints through its legal and regulatory frameworks. Firstly, we can’t replicate Military-Civil Fusion as constitutional constraints prevent it. The First Amendment’s compelled speech doctrine means the government can’t force Anthropic or Google to hand over their AI models for military applications. The Fifth Amendment’s takings clause requires just compensation if the government wants private sector technology. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibits involuntary servitude, which is why you can’t conscript software engineers into weapons development like you could from the earlier example of the Alibaba engineer. In China, her work on commercial algorithms to identify customer recommendations can be transformed into military use to identify whatever use case they deem appropriate.

We can’t copy the Chinese method due to these constitutional points and we shouldn’t. It is anathema to everything American to forsake the values these constitutional components codify.

After all, America is agentic, all-in, always on.

That’s been our story from the founding of our country and something to leverage to our advantage. Voluntary motivation drives innovation in ways different from conscription or state compulsion. Yet constitutional advantages only materialize if we actually mobilize talent including women through voluntary attraction rather than excluding them through artificial barriers. The mechanisms forming America’s legal and policy choices currently mean that even though the ethos of being proactive is there, we live in between the limbo of being agentic (through enabling innovation) and being administrative (through bureaucratic backwaters).

In additional to the legal frameworks of constitutional constraints, regulatory measures abound as America maintains a security clearance system that’s basically economic sabotage disguised as national security. The average amount of time a Top Secret clearance takes to process is 249 calendar days. That’s eight months of waiting while China’s engineers start contributing on day one. With massive labor shortages and over 70,000 defense positions currently sitting unfilled, this results in an estimated $14 billion in foregone annual economic activity (assuming approximately $200,000 in productive output per cleared technical worker). Compound this with the 300,000 current cases backlogged in a security clearance system that cost $1.7 billion to modernize and yet still doesn’t work, and it becomes all the clearer how the advantages of sheer numbers, sheer diversity of thought, and sheer speed mean China is on track to win while leaving America in the dust.

Given the legal mechanisms undergirding what is possible in China with the fusion of military and civilian technologies and how that is not the case in the U.S., the labor market pipeline and its measurable outcomes serve as entry points defense analysts track quarterly.

Section 2: Gender arithmetic/the numbers situation

Here I’ll establish the competitive reality of the current landscape by comparing the raw numbers of women in tech and defense between China and the U.S., showing how the representation gap compounds at every transition point.

Key points:

• China: 2.85 million women in STEM R&D (40-46% of workforce), all accessible for defense through MCF from day one, with 1 million new STEM graduates joining the Chinese labor market each year.

• U.S.: Women earn 53% of STEM degrees but drop to 23-29% in defense contractors

• 40% of women with engineering degrees in the U.S. leave the field entirely within years (vs 10% of men)

• At current rate of change (0.15% annually), Lockheed reaches gender parity in 2189

• If U.S. defense matched 47% labor force gender distribution = 275,000 additional women working (which is four times the existing 70,000 unfilled positions)

China has 2.85 million women working in STEM research and development, which is around 40-46% of their total STEM workforce. The United States graduates approximately 400,000 STEM students annually, with women earning 53% of STEM degrees, but then hemorrhaging them from defense work.

America’s numbers tell a different story. Women represent only 15% of practicing U.S. engineers despite earning 20% of engineering degrees.

In absolute numbers, thousands of women engineers walk away from the field each year in America. From recent cohorts alone, if 33,000 women earn engineering degrees annually and nearly 40% leave within a few years, that’s over 13,000 women lost from each graduating cohort, which is 3 times more than MIT’s entire undergraduate enrollment.

At the major defense contractors where weapons systems, satellites, fighter jets, and missile defense actually get built, women comprise 23-29% of workforces.

Lockheed Martin hit 23% women in 2022. In 1976, they were at 16% women. That’s 7 percentage points of improvement over 46 years of stated commitment to diversity regardless of shifting political administrative machinations in the background.

At that rate of change (0.15 percentage points annually), Lockheed will reaches gender parity with the U.S. labor force in the year 2189.

2189.

In the year 2189.

Reader, in 2189, I’ll be dead.

You’ll be dead.

Everyone reading this will be extremely dead.

Extraterrestrial life forms may be the first beings to witness when Lockheed Martin achieves gender parity (if Lockheed Martin is still around by then, and I mean, I’d hope the engineering quality by then reflects making contact with E.T. or his 3rd cousin or such…)

Notice how along the way of every transition how the representation of women drops? I didn’t even include the statistic where for example, 40% of women earning engineering degrees leave the field entirely within a few years of graduating. That’s not 40% of women leaving their first job, that’s 40% of women with engineering degrees exit engineering as a career forever.

If American defense matched the 47% labor force gender distribution, we’d have 275,000 additional women working in defense, which is already four times the 70,000 currently unfilled positions in the labor shortage plaguing the industry. We are clearly not lacking the talent, but rather, we’re excluding the talent through artificial shortages and administrative burdens.

China is adding 1 million women with STEM backgrounds into their labor market every year. We don’t even have 10% of that number being added annually (as of current writing).

China’s number of women working in STEM means approaching gender parity in fields that determine whether you build hypersonic missiles before your adversary does, whether your AI systems close capability gaps in 13 months instead of 13 years, or whether your drones dominate the skies at 10x the scale of your competitor’s fleet.

How do you engineer the best Jenga tower? You find the best talent and you nurture it. When women represent 40-46% of your technical workforce, you’re not scrambling to fill positions or delaying weapons programs because you can’t find qualified personnel. You just hire the qualified people who exist, and half of them are women, and your Jenga tower keeps growing while your competitor explains to shareholders why the hypersonic missile program is delayed another 18 months due to “workforce constraints” and a lack of access to the other half of the Jenga box pieces.

Through MCF, women contribute to defense innovation from day one. China isn’t improving representation but is approaching gender parity in the fields that determine whether you build hypersonic missiles before your adversary does, whether your AI systems close capability gaps in 13 months instead of 13 years, whether your drones dominate the skies at 10x the scale of your competitor’s fleet.

Section 3: What China’s utilization of women actually produces for measured outcomes

Here I’ll connect the dots between how more women in the workforce and their hard data capabilities reflects what gender parity produces at scale.

• Drones: China fields 10x fleet size of US/Taiwan combined, DJI has 70-90% global market, 44-62% women in electronics manufacturing

• AI development: US lead collapsed from 103 points to 23 points in 13 months (what analysts thought would take 5-7 years)

• 2 million data annotators training China’s AI (majority women in rural poverty programs)

• Weapons acquisition: China acquires high-end systems 5-6x faster than US

Specifically, I’ll analyze measured outcome dynamics via drones, AI development velocity, and weapons acquisition speed as it ties to the participation of women in the labor force. This will then identify which questions matter for strategic competition in the future when one country is using all the Jenga pieces and the other has voluntarily left the other half in the box.

Drones: 10x fleet size advantage
A colorful fact that is arguably as memorable as Andruil founder Palmer Luckey’s Hawaiian shirts is that China’s drone fleet is estimated at 10 times the combined size of US and Taiwan forces. In 2024 alone, they added 720,000 drones. DJI commands 70-90% of the global consumer drone market. Where do women come in?

Well, here’s the gender component that matters by making this production advantage possible - China’s electronics manufacturing workforce is around 50% women at parity. Official Chinese statistics show that women make up around half of the workforce in the manufacture of computers, communication and other electronic equipment, and about two-thirds of employees in urban non-private firms in that industry which is in comparison to around 40% female employment in manufacturing overall. Women in China are especially found in labor-intensive roles like assembly, and women are predominately around 80-85% of the workforce in the manufacturing processes pipeline though exact figures vary.

This means that these women assembling consumer devices and military components aren’t in separate facilities. It’s the same factories with the same workers and the same production lines. I repeat: these women assembling consumer devices are not somehow segregated in separate factories from those building military components. This integration means China can surge military drone production by redirecting existing capacity without building new facilities, hiring new workforces, or waiting for security clearances.

Meanwhile, per PricewaterhouseCoopers, US defense contractors and their tens of thousands of unfilled positions translates into how they cannot scale drone production because they cannot find enough cleared personnel to staff production lines.

AI development velocity
In January 2024, US AI models held a 103-point performance lead over Chinese equivalents on standardized benchmarks. In February 2025, just thirteen months later, that lead had collapsed to 23 points. China closed 80% of a capability gap that analysts expected would take five to seven years to bridge. They did it in thirteen months. When it comes to production timing, China closed that gap faster than Lana del Rey’s most prolific year in music.

Outside of Lana’s later life choices, here’s the part that should really give you pause and drive the point home for you in case everything else before didn’t, since the mechanism behind this velocity isn’t mysterious. Remember how I said China employs approximately 2 million data annotators training their AI systems? The majority are women, particularly middle-aged rural women in poverty-alleviation programs. In Qingjian County, one of China’s poorest regions, the Aidou project employs 70% mothers from the 1990s generation, processing 20,000+ images daily for 4,000-5,000 yuan monthly—among the best-paying local jobs.

These women are literally training the AI models that the PLA uses for battlefield scenarios, facial recognition, and autonomous weapons. China turned rural female poverty into a strategic AI advantage. It’s also not just rural data annotators though, as China’s utilizing every woman from every background.

I realize I am repeating this point repeatedly, so let me also ground this concretely to the real Chinese women behind the scenes making China stronger every single day. Let’s name some names - there’s Zhu Xuejun, known as China’s “Missile Goddess,” served as chief designer for the DF-17 hypersonic missile system that travels at Mach 10-12, which are flight paths our defenses cannot track. Another woman, Le Jialing, created an AI system that autonomously designs hypersonic weapons reducing analysis time from weeks to minutes. The PLA Rocket Force reports that full AI control could enable 10-fold improvements in hypersonic accuracy. While America’s culture wars are arguing over diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, China is laughing all the way to the bank and to the skies. For China, these aren’t diversity hires or token appointments. These are the women building the weapons systems that keep Pentagon planners awake at night.

I want to be clear that the strategic value of gender diversity isn’t just about the sheer quantity of more people in more roles, it’s also about innovation quality. Research on over 800,000+ scientific papers finds that gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact work as mixed-gender author teams receiving more citations than same-gender teams. When it comes to Chinese innovation, studies of Chinese patent data specifically show that inventor gender diversity is associated with higher patent quality measured by forward citations especially for radically innovative patents.

Forward citations are a barometer for influence because they are how many times *other* patents cite a specific patent in the future. It’s basically “how many people thought your invention was important enough to reference when they filed their own patents later” and it turns out patents from gender-diverse inventor teams are cited more often by subsequent inventors, meaning they produce more influential patents that other inventors build upon. When you’re designing autonomous weapons or AI targeting systems, diverse teams catch blind spots that homogeneous groups miss, which is a repeated point emphasized constantly in AI safety and fairness research.

All of Chinese society is benefitting massively from the winds of technological change and their output is reflecting this warp-speed reality. Meanwhile, in America, we are bickering amongst ourselves in lieu of mobilization.

Our inability to see the trees for the forest, to see how diverse perspectives and studies can be leveraged for gains across innovation, to see a longer-term societal net gain of goods from unity rather than division - this helps American adversaries who simply disregard such discussions and find them irrelevant to the actual production and use of innovation. Imagine having brains and brawn available in different forms and then just making everyone sit at a table to argue with each other instead of contributing through their diverse perspectives, experiences, training, and insights.

Weapons acquisition speed

A 2024 analysis concluded that China acquires high-end weapons systems 5-6 times faster than the United States. Five to six times. Not 10% faster or 25% faster. An order of magnitude faster. Pentagon assessments describe the PLA as operating on “wartime footing” versus America’s “peacetime footing.”

When you can immediately staff 10 parallel development programs because you’re drawing on 2.85 million women in STEM R&D who can start work instantly without clearance delays, you move faster than a competitor who can only staff 2-3 programs due to an artificially constrained workforce. It’s not as if the work is better or worse, if people are working harder, etc. It’s just the numbers. Literally, more people doing more work.

Consider how China’s ability to staff teams would mean something like how these ten teams don’t just test ten approaches, but that they test ten approaches simultaneously. Contrast this to how our American (barely staffed) Team 1 finishes testing Approach A and discovers it doesn’t work, China’s teams have already tested Approaches A through J and identified three that do work. By the time an American team has managed to complete our first development cycle, China is already deploying to production. You snooze, you lose is the adage that applies here alongside it being numbers, sheer numbers.

More teams testing more approaches means faster identification of what works, which is why China closed an 80% AI capability gap in 13 months that analysts expected would take 5-7 years.

Much like dating, much like job hunting, much like engagement farming, much like anything, it’s a numbers game. More teams testing more approaches equals faster identification of what works. China understood the assignment. We have too, but to what pace?

Section 4: American amnesia and next steps:

Today is November 10th, 2025, and as of writing, to recap with clarity, here is where we are with facts mentioned in this analysis so far:

• China has 2.85 million women in STEM R&D, which is 40-46% of their technical workforce.

• All of these women are accessible for defense work from day one because the MCF doctrine means there’s no separation between “commercial” and “military” work. It’s just work and all of it counts.

• In the United States, we graduate women with 53% of STEM degrees and then proceed to lose 40% of them from engineering as a subfield forever.

• Our major defense contractors sit at 23-29% women while 70,000 positions stay empty because we can’t figure out how to staff them with security clearance bottlenecks left and right.

• China fields 10x our drone fleet. They closed an 80% AI capability gap in 13 months when our analysts said it would take 5-7 years. China acquires weapons systems 5-6x faster than we do.

I’ve mentioned Jenga multiple times in this post, and it’s because the introductory backstory about it is inspired by a national security conference I attended alongside memories of a game I play with a Chinese friend. Go read the post. Come back to this one. Jenga is the symbol for defense technology, in case it wasn’t clear.

China isn’t inherently better at playing Jenga, it’s just because they’re using all the pieces and we’re leaving half of ours in the box.

We’re not falling behind and losing because our framework is wrong. We’re losing because we’re voluntarily restricting our own talent pool including women for no strategic reason whatsoever.

Our competitive reality in defense technology currently reflects a cognitive disassociation between the endless march of American domination and dynamism without extending any dignity to our inherent advantages as a nation of agentic individuals - China forces its women to participate while we exclude ours by artificial designs and barriers. There is no dignity in being dominated and there is no dignity in domination. There is only success - and the reality is that China is far more successful at accelerating innovation in defense technology than we are right now in large part due to their utilization of women and all the practical as well as innovation work this contributes forward. The wild part - beyond the facts and figures of our current state of things - is that we’ve actually done this before in America where we mobilized women in defense technology, and the results were decisive enough to change the outcome of World War II, and then we just... forgot. China, on the other hand, remembered. We forgot. Part 2 examines what we learned, what we forgot, and what that amnesia has cost us.

Reader note: This is analysis of innovation economics, competition policy, and governance frameworks. For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com.

When I left America, I had never heard of drone fireworks shows. Apparently these are a thing now.

When I left America, ChatGPT had not been released to the public and large language models were not a ubiquitous part of daily life - people still hand wrote their own LinkedIn posts. Apparently these are a relic now (Slop Intensifying ™).

When I left America, there was no war in Ukraine or Gaza, and Hafez al-Assad’s tomb had not yet been set on fire. Apparently this dizzying speed of geopolitical change instantly shared real-time live is our new multipolar normal now.

Perhaps it is just the change in sea level and the fact that I’m constantly out of breath since everywhere is uphill and I just spent four years in the Netherlands where a mountain is a myth. Reader, I left America only for 1,430 days in total. It has been 121 days since I’ve returned.

When I returned to America, I encountered family, friends, family friends, some friends who are family and some family who I would not be friends with. In fact, one of my first dinners back featured a surprise appearance by what I can only deem the Adversarial Armenian Aunt (trademark pending) who is the embodiment of a masterclass in psy ops. I have not seen this person in well over a decade, but within five minutes of sitting down, I experienced first hand what I can only describe as a full tactical interrogation disguised as familial concern.

I’m sitting there jetlagged and disoriented after also having had significant luggage lost, but like a herd of gazelles or stampedes of bulls, there’s a certain beauty and terror to observing the certain type of amorphous yet salient powerful phenomena such a skilled manipulator posses. I remember just thinking to myself immediately that this woman needs to be running In-Q-Tel or something (In-Q-Tel is the Central Intelligence Agency’s venture capital arm). The Armenian auntie network for surveillance is something else. Get on that, people, these are skills honed over thousands of years of busybodies doing what they know best, and it would make for excellent SaaS (Secret Sharing as a Service).

I also caught up with old friends, including one of the best game players I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing. A friend of mine constantly strategically outmaneuvers me all the time in Jenga and I absolutely love it. She’ll pull a piece from some impossible angle and the whole tower just stays up. This woman builds and builds and builds without batting an eyelash, without bated breath, without breaking a sweat.

Meanwhile I’m over here holding my breath thinking the thing’s going to collapse any second. I asked her the first time we ever played Jenga how on earth she kept this up, and she simply replied deadpan that it’s her “Chinese wisdom.” This has become one of our in-jokes now throughout the years. She is cunning, cutting, and clear. You want her on your team because you will win. She strategically outmaneuvers me all the damn time, and I absolutely love, love, love it.

Yet I doubt this is something to love on a mass scale of warfare, and that’s exactly what is happening if we switch out my friend and I for the symbolism of China and the U.S. as countries.

Pressingly, at a national security conference I attended at Stanford right after running into Adversarial Armenian Auntie (™ pending) and making plans to see my friend, I noticed a topic entering the chat across panels, over and over, was China. Defense tech start-up best practices? China’s innovation velocity.

Re-industrialization? China’s manufacturing scale and ability to move from prototype to production in a fraction of the time it takes us. AI? China’s integration of civilian and military technology. China entered the chat over and over and over - how do we compete? How do we move faster, how do we not fall behind, how do we X and Y to achieve American Military Domination American Dynamism American Winning American You Name It, We Won (™ also pending). Whether it be moonshots or mining materials, as above, so below, the sense of urgency was palpable on every level of iteration and discussion and desire to win.

You could feel it in the rooms. This sort of existential yearning and dread mixed with this weird techno-optimism that somehow we’ll figure it out because we always do. Except we’re not figuring it out. If we did, we wouldn’t be having these conversations to begin with.

Even more interestingly and pressingly, I also noticed that this conference had 12 panels with 40 speakers. 37 out of the 40 speakers were men.

And it was so clear to me immediately: I bet some solutions to innovation are simply not being discussed because you’re missing half the perspectives in the room.

How do we compete? How do we move faster? How do we not fall behind? How do we ensure America continues winning when we’ve shut out half of America’s talent from contributing to the innovation fueling the wins we’re chasing?

During the conference lunch, I kept thinking about my Chinese friend and her Jenga skills, and how was she strategically outmaneuvering me? That’s what’s happening right now on a mass scale in defense technology innovation. China is pulling pieces from angles we’re not even considering. They’re building higher and higher and the tower isn’t collapsing. Meanwhile we’re sitting in rooms full of men talking about how to compete while actively demonstrating why we’re losing. We’re trying to play Jenga with half the pieces still voluntarily left in the box.

China mobilizes its entire technical workforce including nearly 50% of their 2.85 million STEM researchers who are women as well as non-highly educated laborers. They’re all in. They’re locked in. They are in it together. Yet we don’t. We’re not yet all in. Our mobilization is fractured at the moment due to multiple factors, and the Jenga tower of our competition is looming while we’re losing with partially built structures.

This six-part series will examine how innovation economics and competition policy intersect with gender as a strategic imperative in defense technology , and why this matters deeply for future policy making and AI governance. Part 1 quantifies China’s structural advantages through broader workforce integration and the measurable innovation outcomes that result. Parts 2 - 5 analyze the policies and institutional failures causing America to voluntarily restrict its own talent base through cultural barriers, policy constraints, and bureaucratic inertia. Part 5 will examine the historical precedents of women in defense and the economics involved. Finally, Part 6 extracts lessons for AI governance, where identical vetting requirements and talent access challenges will determine which nations can develop advanced AI systems at the scale and speed required for strategic competition.

I’m interested in taking on a multi-disciplinary approach to think about innovation from questioning and developing a thesis on this issue. Specifically, I’m curious about what we can learn regarding innovation by examining an adversarial geopolitical situation involving technology, economics, and policy choices. As such, this series of posts will examine the proverbial Jenga tower through an economic analysis of how artificial labor market constraints create quantifiable competitive disadvantages. The math is straightforward, the implications are profound, and we all know what happens when a Jenga tower tips over.

Part 1 drops this week on Monday morning (November 10th).

Reader note: This is analysis of innovation economics, competition policy, and governance frameworks. For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com.

Neither involved a functional understanding of what shouldn’t be committed to the public record.

Playboy Magazine, March 2010

PLAYBOY: In 2006 you began dating Jessica Simpson, and the paparazzi started stalking you, turning you into a tabloid fixture. Certainly you knew that was going to happen.

MAYER: It wasn’t as direct as me saying “I now make the choice to bring the paparazzi into my life.” I really said, “I now make the choice to sleep with Jessica Simpson.” That was stronger than my desire to stay out of the paparazzi’s eye. That girl, for me, is a drug. And drugs aren’t good for you if you do lots of them. Yeah, that girl is like crack cocaine to me.

United States v. Panchernikov et al., Central District of California, 2021

Overt Act No. 26: On November 20, 2017, an eBay seller e-mailed defendant GOHMAN, “This is an ITAR item and must stay in the US.” Defendant GOHMAN replied, “Sure stay in US.”

Playboy Magazine, March 2010

PLAYBOY: You were addicted to Jessica Simpson?

MAYER: Sexually it was crazy. That’s all I’ll say. It was like napalm, sexual napalm.

United States v. Panchernikov et al., Central District of California, 2021

Overt Act No. 41: On January 5, 2018, defendant GOHMAN e-mailed defendant SHIFRIN instructions for sending packages to three addresses in Moscow, Russia: from “John Mayer” at 687 N. Milwaukee Ave, Vernon Hills, Illinois to “Olga Sotnikova,” with the contents listed as “Manual tool Pacific.”

Playboy Magazine, March 2010

MAYER: Have you ever been with a girl who made you want to quit the rest of your life? Did you ever say, “I want to quit my life and just snort you?”

United States v. Panchernikov et al., Central District of California, 2021

Overt Act No. 52: On February 24, 2018, an unknown co-conspirator exported a package to “Olga Sotnikova.” Sender: “John Mayer,” an alias. Contents: “Kitchen Accessories, Women Clothes, Women Shoes.”

Photo by Nikita Karimov on Unsplash

What better way to talk about arms export than consider how John Mayer’s indubitably good name was involved in an international arms trafficking scheme?

For anyone who doesn’t spend their free time reading export control regulations (I don’t blame you, though there are always so many hidden gems in legal documents, they’re a veritable frenzy of easter eggs), ITAR stands for the International Traffic in Arms Regulations. For some quick historical context to understand how this works as a legal instrument given that ITAR violations can be used in civil and criminal charges, ITAR is the regulatory framework implementing the actual law of the Arms Export Control Act (AECA) which was passed by the U.S. Congress back in 1976.

What actually is ITAR? An introduction to arms export regulations

To begin with, ITAR is the U.S. legislative instrument that controls defense articles and technical data. The items on the United States Munitions List exist there because they change what’s possible on a battlefield, so for example, think about how night vision devices let you see in complete darkness while thermal scopes let you see heat signatures through walls, and why that can become very problematic very quickly depending on how its used.

Sidenote: As I write this, Carrie Bradshaw begins to beckon me as I couldn’t help but wonder…was there an episode of the 1970s children’s cartoon Schoolhouse Rock that explained ITAR, for example, an episode about export controls? Imagine animating ‘I’m Just a Bill’ but make it about thermal rifle scopes? Could AI video technology be used for this? Ani, author note to self for future potential inquiry. As such, when people get charged with things like import/export arms smuggling, it’s technically for violating the AECA, but everyone just says “ITAR violation” because that’s the regulatory framework you’re actually dealing with on the day to day basis (I guess I could subtitle these as ‘Wild Arms Export Control Act Violations’ for SEO purposes…).

How people end up violating ITAR

Now, ITAR is a legal liability labyrinth and most people have absolutely no clue what’s compliant unless they’re either extremely specialized in export controls or have been scared straight by a compliance officer at some point. As we’ll see throughout this series, these violations exist on a spectrum ranging from people who genuinely had no idea this was even a thing to those who knew exactly what they were doing and tried to cover it up by using the name of a washed-up guitarist.

Ways to think about controlled items (with help from vampires hiding in Staten Island the past 200 years)

I think one helpful way to understand what ITAR covers is to wonder how it works in practice, to imagine it in action. Ask yourself: What is something on the military grade level of power that needs to be controlled and have legislative framing for its use, dissemination, etc.? How does something get to that level? In asking myself this, I think of a clip from the TV series ‘What We Do In the Shadows’ (about a group of vampires living in Staten Island, a spin-off of the eponymous movie written by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement). There’s an episode where the beleaguering energy vampire Colin Robinson and the beleaguered aristocratic vampire Laszlo Cravensworth must defend themselves from a beguiling deadly siren beckoning with her swan song which includes a hauntingly melodic cover of LMFAO’s 2009 hit ‘Shots Ft. Lil Jon’’.

That’s how one of the gang, Laszlo, ends up being bewitched by a Best Buy representative when buying headphones with maximum surround sound to protect himself from the siren. Think about this and imagine ITAR as thus the military grade version of these tools - they are not mere consumer electronics though they could certainly pass for it. I mean, this isn’t Best Buy, it’s not like you’re Laszlo Cravensworth going to test new headphones. Same applies to night vision goggles or night vision cameras, such as this one for sale at Target for 199.99.

These would not fall under ITAR - though I also have no idea why for many use cases this would be used as a consumer, I’m racking my brains but the only thing I can think of is for a Halloween costume in honor of Tom Clancy’s ‘Splinter Cell’ or maybe as Solid Snake from Metal Gear Solid? You tell me! Nonetheless, you could buy it and use it in the U.S. but the moment you pack these to go abroad with them, they may become an export subject to control. This, of course, brings us back to the perennial ‘why would you even be buying these to pack them in your beat up luggage anyways to begin with, and don’t tell me, as it is not my circus nor monkeys to contend with’.

So how did John Mayer’s good name get evoked by Russians in an import export scheme involving night vision material?

The case: when a remarkably ordinary looking arms trafficking ring used a remarkably extraordinarily cringe inducing name to do its law breaking

Between 2016 and 2020, a network of people bought thermal imaging riflescopes and night vision goggles from U.S. online sellers, routed them through apartments in California and Illinois, then forwarded them to Moscow. The whole operation was extremely mundane in its consumer facing operation - they were selling these night vision materials just as readily as you or I would be selling antiques on eBay or clothing on Poshmark, use USPS to ship it, all of this ho-hum quotidian methodology via mailrooms and brown boxes which looked like any other personal shipment…except for the highly regulated ITAR ruled equipment inside of them. In fact, some had even caught on, as an email exchange from eBay in November 2017 recounts - a seller let the scheming buyers know - ‘This is an ITAR item and must stay in the US.’ They responded with: ‘Sure stay in US.’ Two months later, that same buyer (Gohman) shipped the equipment to Moscow from the U.S. and listed it as ‘Manual tool Pacific’ from a sender named John Mayer.

The shipment descriptions read like thrift store receipts and the purported sender names rotated through a catalog of fake names including Alex Brown, Oleg Semenov, and yes, John Mayer.

Yes, yes, I know. I can hear you tensing up while reading this. Why? Why would anyone do this? Someone somewhere somehow decided to ship highly regulated defense equipment to Moscow while listing the sender as “John Mayer” on the customs form, as if that’s a normal name to put on a box containing thermal rifle scopes headed to Russia. Now, I don’t know what night vision goggles are like but since wearing glasses can already get foggy, I’m inclined to just automatically imagine some creepy mouthbreather situation where someone is saying ‘your body is a wonderland’ but literally it’s your body’s heat channels. One shudders. Egads. Ick.

Non merci, but apparently, it really truly happened - one “John Mayer” in Vernon Hills, Illinois, serial shipper of ITAR controlled items with the contents obfuscated and listed as things like “Manual tool Pacific” and “Kitchen Accessories, Women Clothes, Women Shoes.” The actual contents were night vision devices and thermal imaging equipment that cost between $6,000 and $17,500 per unit, and the declared values conveniently happened to stay under $2,500 where export filings would get more attention.

Multiple people were charged in this arms trafficking ring of spectacularly bad judgment and bad taste where they had exported 19+ controlled items. The charges filed by the Department of Justice were straightforward conspiracy to violate the arms control export act, given that no export licenses were obtained while thermal imaging and night vision materials were sent to a foreign country, let alone sent to Russia.

Igor Panchernikov, an Israeli citizen who lived in Corona, California and had served in the U.S. Air Force Reserve, pleaded guilty in March 2023 and got 27 months. Another defendant, Elena Shifrin of Mundelein, Illinois got 24 months in July 2024. Interestingly, charges against a third defendant, Vladimir Pridacha were dismissed on January 19 at the request of prosecutors while the other two case defendants are fugitives who remain on the run (though decidedly not in the style of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s ‘03 Bonnie and Clyde) - they are Boris Polosin of Russia and Vladimir Gohman of Israel.

The part that haunts me most

Why John Mayer though? Some questions have no good answers

Why they used John Mayer’s name remains unknown, and this is probably the part of the case that haunts me the most. Of all the names and people in the world to choose, why John Mayer? I willingly listened to 1 minute and 54 seconds of a John Mayer song as a part of my research for this and I made it to the first 28 seconds of Mayer’s cover of Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’” and I just know in my heart of hearts I have accidentally ruined this song forever (I’m more of a “Last Dance With Mary Jane” type anyways). Not the actual John Mayer, obviously, though given his 2010 Playboy interview where he described Jessica Simpson as “sexual napalm” and said “I want to quit my life and just snort you,” I guess the real John Mayer has also demonstrated questionable judgment about what shouldn’t be committed to the public record. Maybe there’s a karmic link here. Maybe they thought his music was so bad that there is little to no reason for anyone to look into him randomly shipping out items six times from a quiet suburb in Illinois. That cover of “Free Fallin’” also remains a real crime as far as I’m concerned.

At least the real John Mayer kept his contribution in the public record of bad decision making to magazine interviews instead of federal indictments. This is also the only place I’ll ever willingly write or mention John Mayer of my own volition again (simply because of this case’s existence to begin with and the documentation of it, so yay, yippie, never again!)

Reader note: This is not legal advice or anything in the form of advice so don’t @ me with legal tomfoolery. Nonetheless, for comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. Like and subscribe for updates on future violations.

“You think darkness is your ally, but you merely adopted the dark. I was born in it. Formed by it. I didn’t see the light until I was already a man. And by then, it was nothing to me but blinding. The shadows betray you, because they belong to me.” – Bane, The Dark Knight Rises

Comfortably numb: preface

International law, just like individuals, is shaped by a history of violence. After all, the twentieth-century post-war global order was forged in response to the trauma caused by state-sponsored violence, genocide, and mass population migrations. Born from loss and molded by grief, international law followed the tsunami of trauma left behind after the wreckage of war after war where the daily experiences were littered with distress, death, and decay. Put simply, worldwide societal traumatic experiences turned into the basis of codifying what permissible state behavior is and what it is not.[^1]

The personal was the political, as traumatic experiences informed and thus became embedded into the foundation of international legislative instruments focusing on state responsibility and security. This served as a state-initiated mechanism for societies worldwide to address their history of violence and the trauma caused by it.

Memory painted by René Magritte, circa 1948.

International law thus promotes progress through pain by shaping state behavior to prevent or mitigate the high cost of human harm while providing a means of coping for affected societies. Yet the idea that progress can be made through pain, as articulated by international law, is limited in scope, as it pertains only to the redemptive narrative of a history of violence on a broad scale. The individual experiences of trauma stemming from events anchored in politics and international security, however, often recede into the historical narrative, becoming akin to distant ship smoke on the horizon.[^2] As such, individual experiences of trauma both legally and politically are not always fully acknowledged or addressed, hindering true progress in addressing and healing from such trauma, despite the proliferation of high-profile trials and tribunals that address the trauma inflicted by authorities on a grand scale.

We have known that trauma from these histories can manifest in various ways, as the examples are as prolific as they are mundane: we intimately know these histories of violence as societies from the macro to the micro, as seen for example in post-war soldiers experiencing erratic behavior due to hearing specific sounds, turning seemingly minor incidents of post-war days into potentially devastating scenarios, or in the recent investigatory explorations of how trauma can literally transform genetics across generations due to epigenetic inheritance of trauma.[^3] Indeed, tsunamis of trauma followed families, communities, and societies struggling in silence to leave the past where it was.[^4]

Subsequently, while traumatic events such as international crimes and atrocities among them have readily informed discussions worldwide in courtrooms, political chambers, and newsrooms, the individual trauma of these events has chiefly remained a personal narrative to grasp, if even acknowledged at all. This can in turn leave individuals and communities struggling to cope with the aftermath of traumatic events in silence, debilitated by trauma and unable to make any narrative of it at all, much less a narrative of progress through pain. At the same time, history begets narrative and narratives beget a historical understanding. We know this from scientific research which has repeatedly shown that narratives, stories, and histories are essential to individuals making sense of their lives.[^5] As such, the failure to recognize, resolve, and provide a means of narrative making for individuals with a history of violence stemming from trauma can leave them without a means of understanding and making sense of their experiences.

So what are these individuals supposed to make sense of or do with a narrative unrecognized or unresolved, which can have detrimental effects on their ability to cope and heal?[^6] Analogously, states create narratives in securitization endeavors, and as such arguably also have a responsibility in creating and shaping narratives for their citizens, since a state’s failure to recognize, resolve, or offer a means of narrative making from trauma on a societal level can impede their ability to understand and make sense of their experiences, as well as those of their citizens, on both institutional and cultural levels. In turn, such a failure hinders the possibility of progress, acknowledgement, and perhaps someday resolution on a societal level.[^7]

If to live is to die, then perhaps purgatory is the twilight state of a life suspended between beginning and end where no narrative exists in between these markers, since trauma occupies that liminal wide space comfortably numbed instead. We intuit this to some extent as a society, since it is now widely known and accepted that individuals living with trauma face numerous barriers, including its impact on physical and mental health, societal taboos, and lack of access to qualified help. For these individuals, suffering does not have clear boundaries, making it difficult to understand and address. This idea of trauma as occupying a liminal space is also increasingly acknowledged in the field of international security as scholars recognize trauma and its application in the field, shifting the landscape of how though trauma is often embedded in international law, politics, and security issues, it is not always fully addressed or understood.

I wanted to preface for readers a foregrounding on trauma precisely because my thesis utilizes a “trauma-informed” care approach (henceforth abbreviated as TIC to encompass the interchangeable terms used in scholarship of ‘trauma-informed care’ or ‘trauma-informed approach/approaches’). Though chapter 3 details further, briefly, TIC is a practice drawing from extensive research in fields such as medicine and psychiatry.[^8] TIC uses an awareness and understanding of trauma psychology and its impacts to then integrate this understanding into practices in a ‘trauma-informed’ way for more effective, humanitarian, and practical results - i.e. TIC has been used to avoid retraumatization and harm in practices and has successfully integrated into practices across fields to improve outcomes.[^9]

Specifically, I examine the issue of the foreign returnee/returning women and children (henceforth referred to as ‘the’ RWAC) of the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) in regards to how TIC can apply to the political and legal processes surrounding them now.[^10] It is noteworthy how trauma informs the debate between state practices and security expert opinions on the RWAC’s post-caliphate repatriation, as state responses vary and often avoid repatriation, while the consensus of security expert opinions advocate for repatriation and for states to acknowledge trauma in post-repatriation processes.[^11]

Given the complex, controversial, and contentious situation of the RWAC in international security situating them squarely between international law and politics, I kept these parts and pieces about trauma, securitization, and narrative floating around in mind while reflecting on my graduate studies. I found myself returning to the thought about how important narratives are to not just our individual experiences, but their utmost primacy in securitization as well. After all, just like how research has shown that like individuals make narrative meaning of existence, so do terrorist organizations in weaponizing narrative making, as narratives are pertinent in shaping extremist behavior or ideologies influencing individuals towards terrorism or violent behaviors.[^12] Consider how narrative histories of violence are so powerful that even United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 2354 (2017) is specifically about countering terrorist narratives, requiring member states to actively combat them![^13]

Furthermore, to be clear and discussed further in chapter 2 on methodology and research design, it is important to note that this thesis does not aim to advance normative assumptions about trauma. This thesis is not about the securitization of trauma. Rather, I am interested in exploring how trauma may become a securitization issue and to do this, TIC in application to the processes surrounding the RWAC is the chosen way forward.

Reader note: This is not legal advice or anything in the form of advice so don’t @ me with legal tomfoolery. Nonetheless, for comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. Merci

Footnotes

[^1]: The following examples demonstrate: On Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, see J. David Kinzie et al., “The Psychiatric Effects of Massive Trauma on Cambodian Children: I. the Children,” Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry 25, no. 3 (1986): pp. 370-376, https://doi.org/10.1016/s0002-7138(09)60259-4. On the Yugoslav wars, see Metin Başoğlu et al., “Psychiatric and Cognitive Effects of War in Former Yugoslavia,” JAMA 294, no. 5 (March 2005): p. 580, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.294.5.580. On the Iran/Iraq war, see Hassan Shahmiri Barzoki et al., “Studying the Prevalence of PTSD in Veterans, Combatants and Freed Soldiers of Iran-Iraq War: A Systematic and Meta-Analysis Review,” Psychology, Health & Medicine, 2021, pp. 1-7, https://doi.org/10.1080/13548506.2021.1981408. On the Rwandan genocide, see Déogratias Bagilishya, “Mourning and Recovery from Trauma: In Rwanda, Tears Flow Within,” Transcultural Psychiatry 37, no. 3 (2000): pp. 337-353, https://doi.org/10.1177/136346150003700304.

[^2]: Pink Floyd. “Comfortably Numb”. The Wall, 1979.

[^3]: Natan P. Kellermann, “Transmission of Holocaust Trauma - an Integrative View,” Psychiatry: Interpersonal and Biological Processes 64, no. 3 (2001): pp. 256-267, https://doi.org/10.1521/psyc.64.3.256.18464. See also: Linda O’Neill et al., “Hidden Burdens: A Review of Intergenerational, Historical and Complex Trauma, Implications for Indigenous Families,” Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma 11, no. 2 (2016): pp. 173-186, https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-016-0117-9.

[^4]: Awais Aftab, “Trauma and the Politics of Diagnosis: Janice Haaken, PhD.” Psychiatric Times, July 13, 2021. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/trauma-politics-diagnosis.

[^5]: Robyn Fivush, Jordan A. Booker, and Matthew E. Graci, “Ongoing Narrative Meaning-Making within Events and across the Life Span,” Imagination, Cognition and Personality 37, no. 2 (September 2017): pp. 127-152, https://doi.org/10.1177/0276236617733824.

[^6]: Nina Thorup Dalgaard et al., “The Transmission of Trauma in Refugee Families: Associations between Intra-Family Trauma Communication Style, Children’s Attachment Security and Psychosocial Adjustment,” Attachment & Human Development 18, no. 1 (2015): pp. 69-89, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616734.2015.1113305.

[^7]: A 2014 New Yorker profile on Angela Merkel by George Packer briefly highlights trauma in an anecdote regarding the German government’s political stances towards Russia at the time: “Germans and Russians are bound together by such terrible memories that any suggestion of conflict leads straight to the unthinkable. Michael Naumann put the Ukraine crisis in the context of “this enormous emotional nexus between perpetrator and victim,” one that leaves Germans perpetually in the weaker position. In 1999, Naumann, at that time the culture minister under Schröder, tried to negotiate the return of five million artifacts taken out of East Germany by the Russians after the Second World War. During the negotiations, he and his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Gubenko, shared their stories. Naumann, who was born in 1941, lost his father a year later, at the Battle of Stalingrad. Gubenko was also born in 1941, and his father was also killed in action. Five months later, Gubenko’s mother was hanged by the Germans. “Checkmate,” the Russian told the German. Both men cried. “There was nothing to negotiate,” Naumann recalled. “He said, ‘We will not give anything back, as long as I live.’” George Packer, “The Astonishing Rise of Angela Merkel,” The New Yorker, November 24, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/01/quiet-german.

[^8]: “What Is Trauma Informed Care?,” Trauma Informed Oregon (Regional Research Institute for Human Services, Portland State University, April 15, 2022), https://traumainformedoregon.org/resources/new-to-trauma-informed-care/what-is-trauma-informedcare/.

[^9]: Eve Rittenberg, “Trauma-Informed Care — Reflections of a Primary Care Doctor in the Week of the Kavanaugh Hearing,” New England Journal of Medicine 379, no. 22 (2018): pp. 2094-2095, https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmp1813497.

[^10]: Readers should note that I refrain from using grammatical articles with the abbreviation RWAC and instead use it as a catch-all term inclusive of the articles when the abbreviation is used due to brevity needs for thesis word count constraints.

[^11]: Elian Peltier and Constant Méheut, “Europe’s Dilemma: Take in ISIS Families, or Leave Them in Syria?,” The New York Times (The New York Times, May 28, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/28/world/europe/isis-women-children-repatriation.html.

[^12]: David Webber and Arie W Kruglanski, “The Social Psychological Makings of a Terrorist,” Current Opinion in Psychology 19 (2018): pp. 131-134, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2017.03.024. See also Max Taylor and John Horgan, “A Conceptual Framework for Addressing Psychological Process in the Development of the Terrorist,” Terrorism and Political Violence - Volume 18, 2006 - Issue 4 18, no. 4 (2006): pp. 585-601, https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/09546550600897413.

[^13]: United Nations Security Council Resolution 2354 (2017), https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N17/149/22/PDF/N1714922.pdf?OpenElement