If It Walks Like a Duck: Are We Watching the World Prepare for a SciFi-Grade War?

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A figure stands on a cliff edge between two futures: a burning, war-torn landscape of missiles, tanks and a nuclear cooling tower on one side, and a glowing city with wind turbines, a phoenix and an AI-lit silhouette on the other

You know that old expression?

If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck.

There's a shitload of quacking going on around the planet right now. And thanks to artificial intelligence, it's getting considerably easier to hear.

I've always been fascinated by patterns, especially the ones hiding between things that don't look related. Ten years ago I'd stumble across an obscure procurement document, think huh, that's interesting, and move on, because chasing it would eat half a day. Today I can have AI pull original sources, compare historical activity, test technical claims, and map relationships in minutes. It's like having an investigative research department on my desktop.

Which is fantastic. And potentially dangerous. Because when you can connect practically every dot on the planet, you'd better be careful you're not drawing pictures that aren't there.

I've been connecting a lot of dots. Military mobilizations. AI development. Semiconductor competition. Infrastructure failures. Strategic stockpiles. After filtering out the usual internet bullshit, I think there's a theory here worth testing.

What if we're not watching the world prepare for World War III? What if we're watching the old world struggle to survive the birth of a new technological civilization?

Or some uncomfortable combination of both.

Because the competition isn't really about territory, resources, or military superiority anymore. It's about who controls the technologies that could redefine power itself.

Which raises a question I keep coming back to. Is this what a renaissance looks like from the inside?

We've been here before. Sort of.

Remember the Cold War?

Through the 1970s and 1980s, the world was trying to figure out how to live with nuclear weapons, satellites, computers, and two superpowers capable of turning civilization into radioactive dust. Military buildups. Proxy wars. Nuclear drills. Strategic stockpiles. Fallout shelters. Enough geopolitical paranoia to keep everybody thoroughly entertained.

Meanwhile computers were becoming personal, telecommunications were connecting the planet, and entirely new industries were appearing out of nowhere. Technology was changing the balance of power and governments were scrambling to adapt.

Sound familiar?

The Cold War wasn't just a technological growing pain, obviously. It involved real ideological conflict, territorial struggles, and dangerous military confrontations. But technological competition amplified all of it.

Today we're introducing capabilities that could transform far more than military power. Artificial intelligence is changing the economics of knowledge, labor, software, manufacturing, and scientific discovery. Autonomous systems are changing warfare. Quantum computing could eventually undermine the encryption protecting everything. Robotics, satellite constellations, advanced materials, and biotechnology are accelerating in parallel.

And somewhere in the middle of that, we're racing toward AGI and possibly something beyond it.

Nobody knows what those breakthroughs would mean for the balance of global power. Everybody seems awfully interested in getting there first.

Back in the '80s we worried about nuclear missiles, Soviet bombers, and whether Matthew Broderick was going to accidentally start World War III with a computer. Because that's how we partied in the '80s.

Good times.

First, let's remove the TikTok bullshit

The internet is drowning in World War III predictions. Military trucks on a highway? We're going to war. Construction equipment near Washington? Secret underground bunker. Routine emergency alert test? Apparently we should start kissing our asses goodbye. And there's always some guy with classified sources who knows exactly when the missiles fly.

Sure, buddy.

But once you remove the nonsense, there's a substantial collection of legitimate developments left. Individually, every one of them has an explanation. Collectively?

That's quite a collection of ducks. A flock, if you will.

Here's where I have to correct the frame, though, and it's the least comfortable part of this piece.

We're not watching the world prepare for a major war. We're watching a world that's already fighting one, arming for the next, and discovering that the terrain of the next one isn't territory at all.

Start with the carrier. The USS George H.W. Bush Carrier Strike Group left Norfolk on March 31 for what were supposed to be standard six-to-seven-month orders. Its deployment has now been extended twice. On November 9, at a town hall of roughly 500 family members at Naval Station Norfolk, Navy leaders told them their sailors wouldn't be home for the holidays and to plan for a worst-case scenario of a year at sea. Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao was in the room.

Navy leaders also said Iranian attacks continue to pepper U.S. ships enforcing the blockade of Iran.

That's not a mobilization exercise. That's a navy holding a blockade, getting hit, and telling families the calendar is now a suggestion. An EA-18G Growler squadron out of Whidbey Island is facing the same possibility.

So when I ask whether we're watching the world prepare for something, understand that the preparation is not hypothetical and it isn't quiet. It's on a calendar with extensions.

The military isn't planning a company picnic

American military planners have a word for the thing that keeps them up at night: simultaneity.

It's what happens when the shit hits the fan in several places at once. Suppose substantial National Guard forces are needed overseas. Now add a hurricane, a grid failure, or a major cyberattack back home. Who's left to respond?

That's not my speculation. Army National Guard leaders have been saying it out loud. The Guard's roughly 329,000 soldiers have to be ready to mobilize at scale for war while still answering to governors for domestic emergencies, and the message to civilian leaders has been blunt: plan for domestic operations during a war, because the old predictable mobilization model is gone. In October, Guard leaders from all 54 states, territories, and the District of Columbia stress-tested mobilization at scale.

Meanwhile NATO allies have committed to 5 percent of GDP on defense by 2035, split between 3.5 percent for core defense and 1.5 percent for infrastructure and security-related spending. Finland is looking at anti-tank barriers along an 830-mile border with Russia. The Baltic states are building a defensive line of ditches, trenches, and bunkers running some 950 kilometers, with a prototype tested in Latvia.

And here's the part that should keep you honest about all of it. Poland promised a 700-kilometer shield against Russia. Two years on, satellite imagery shows four short fortified zones. Announced capability and delivered capability are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where strategy goes to die.

Does any of this prove World War III is coming?

No. Military preparation can deter a war as easily as it can enable one. But you don't spend these numbers preparing for scenarios you've dismissed as unrealistic. And an awful lot of governments are preparing for some very unpleasant possibilities.

Quack quack.

The science fiction part isn't fictional anymore

When people imagine World War III, they picture missiles, carriers, tanks, and armies grinding across continents. All of that remains possible.

But a modern great-power conflict looks different. Drone swarms. AI-assisted targeting. Satellite warfare. Electronic warfare. Cyberattacks against grids, communications, transportation, and financial networks. Undersea cables and semiconductor fabs as strategic terrain.

And data centers.

Not someday. Now.

In March, Iranian drone strikes hit two Amazon data centers in the United Arab Emirates, with a site in Bahrain damaged as well. In July, Iran struck the Bahrain facility again. By September, Amazon was telling customers it could not restore service to Bahrain and one of the three UAE zones, that some customer data was gone permanently, and that clients should plan to leave its Middle East data centers. The UAE started talking about underground data centers. Russia has hit data center facilities in Kyiv. Ukraine has hit Yandex.

An NBC News analysis published October 17 counted at least 27 attacks affecting data centers across global conflicts, in five countries. Twenty-seven. That's not a thought experiment about the future of warfare. That's a body count for buildings full of servers.

Which means the sentence I want to write next isn't speculative anymore. Nvidia isn't just selling expensive chips. Taiwan's fabs aren't just industrial facilities. Data centers aren't just buildings full of servers and cooling.

They're strategic assets. And they're targets. Both things are already true, and the people who own them are still running them like the second thing isn't.

Then there's the part that's still ahead of us. Autonomous drone swarms. AI-assisted targeting at machine speed. Q-Day, the theoretical point where a sufficiently capable quantum computer breaks the encryption protecting... everything. The uncomfortable thing about Q-Day is that the data being stolen today can be decrypted later, which means the deadline for post-quantum migration already passed for anything with a long shelf life.

Or consider one country developing an AI capability that delivers an overwhelming advantage in scientific discovery, military planning, or economic productivity.

Here's the disturbing part: you don't need anyone to invent superintelligence to trigger an arms race. You just need everybody to believe somebody else might get there first.

It's like somebody combined WarGames, Terminator, The Matrix, and a particularly unpleasant network administration incident. Except the technology isn't fictional anymore.

Wonderful.

Meanwhile, our infrastructure is held together with duct tape

Which brings us to Friday the 13th. Apparently the universe decided subtlety was overrated.

At 3:36 p.m. Eastern, air traffic control facilities across the country experienced instability in radar information and communications with aircraft. The FAA issued a nationwide ground stop, halting departures until further notice. More than 3,500 aircraft were already in the air. The stop held for more than four hours, and up to 5,000 cancellations followed.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy put it plainly. Aging analog telecommunications equipment, switches and routers, became overloaded with data. "It's the old hardware that went down."

Not a confirmed cyberattack. Not rogue AI. Not Skynet. A Justice Department source described it as a frequency issue and said there was no terrorism connection. Officials ruled out any link to the Microsoft outage the day before.

Old networking equipment having an exceptionally bad Friday.

The FAA never lost all radar, and it kept medical evacuations and shipments of lifesaving medication moving, which is the part of the system that worked and deserves to be said out loud. But Duffy's assessment is the one that matters: he'd already been lobbying Congress that week for $30 billion to modernize air traffic control, on top of the $12.5 billion in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. He has pledged to replace aging copper telecommunications lines and install 27,000 new radios by 2028.

Consider the irony. We're racing toward artificial superintelligence, autonomous warfare, and quantum computing while the machinery that keeps airplanes apart depends on analog switches that buckle under load. Duffy was asked about future ground stops and answered: "You will have more of them unless the American people and the Congress tell us to build, and I can't wait for that."

That's a cabinet secretary telling you the failure mode is now recurring.

The Microsoft and FAA incidents haven't been established as connected. But they rhyme, and the rhyme is the point. Both were automated systems doing what they were told under conditions they weren't designed for. Microsoft's health checks pulled capacity that turned out to be load-bearing. The FAA's network update pushed traffic through gear that couldn't carry it. In both cases a mechanism built to protect service degraded it.

If ordinary failures can do that, imagine what happens when those same systems are operating under the pressure of a real conflict. Or don't imagine it. Look at the carrier whose deployment got extended twice.

What if this is a renaissance?

We tend to look at historical renaissances through the comfortable distance of centuries. We see the breakthroughs, the art, the expanding knowledge, and the civilizations transforming.

But what did it look like from inside?

The European Renaissance coincided with political conflict, religious upheaval, competition between powerful interests, and the wholesale disruption of established institutions. The printing press transformed the distribution of knowledge. Information that had been expensive and difficult to reproduce could suddenly spread. It challenged traditional gatekeepers. It also made propaganda and political manipulation considerably easier.

Sound familiar?

Now consider what artificial intelligence actually represents. The printing press reduced the cost of reproducing knowledge. AI is reducing the cost of applying it. That's a different kind of transformation.

Capabilities that once required specialized institutions, expensive expertise, or enormous organizations now fit on a laptop. At the same time, building the most advanced systems requires staggering investment in compute, energy, chips, and talent.

Which produces the contradiction at the center of everything. A technology capable of distributing intellectual capability may also concentrate enormous power in whoever controls the underlying infrastructure. That's why the power grid became a national security asset with its own executive order. In August, the administration declared a national emergency over foreign threats to the bulk-power system and moved to restrict foreign-made grid equipment, expanding the Energy Department's authority over what gets plugged into the country's electrical backbone. That's not energy policy. That's treating electrons as a strategic stockpile, because whoever controls the compute controls the capability, and compute runs on power.

Governments want technological sovereignty. Corporations want dominant platforms. Individuals want independence and access. Military organizations want superiority. Everybody wants a piece of the future before anybody knows what the future looks like.

Tears for Fears had it right. Everybody wants to rule the world.

And there's the thread. Maybe we're not simply watching countries prepare for war. Maybe we're watching existing power structures scramble to hold position while the foundations of power change underneath them. The old world hasn't disappeared. The new one hasn't arrived. Everybody's trying to figure out where they fit.

It's like upgrading the operating system of civilization while eight billion people are still using it. No maintenance window. No rollback button. And apparently some of the routers are from 2003.

We're still running the same human software

There's another uncomfortable consideration. Our technology has evolved at an extraordinary pace.

Human nature hasn't.

We still compete for territory, resources, influence, wealth, and power. We still distrust rivals. We still form alliances, create enemies, and occasionally make spectacularly stupid decisions. The tools changed. The motivations didn't.

That's where the real danger sits. We're approaching technologies capable of transforming civilization, giving individuals, corporations, and governments powers that would have seemed unimaginable a generation ago. And we're navigating it with political institutions, economic incentives, and geopolitical instincts inherited from previous eras.

We upgraded the hardware. We upgraded the software. We connected the entire planet. Nobody thought to update the humans.

Perfect.

None of this means every conflict is caused by technological disruption. There are deep historical and political roots underneath all of it. But technological competition amplifies existing tensions and introduces new ones, and sometimes the perception of a coming breakthrough is nearly as destabilizing as the breakthrough itself.

Look at the Pacific. China ran unannounced drills around Taiwan in early November involving more than 100 warships and patrol vessels, described by Taiwan's officials as "silent intimidation" and by analysts as rehearsal for area denial and blockade. Taiwan's government said the exercises included simulated attacks on Taiwanese cities. This happened in the weeks before a Trump-Xi summit, which is either terrible timing or exactly the timing you'd choose.

That's what an adversary does when it wants you to understand something without saying it. Nobody wants to discover their opponent has gained an advantage they can no longer overcome. That uncertainty alone drives extraordinary behavior.

So maybe it isn't a duck

I'm not predicting World War III. I don't have a classified calendar. I'm not building an underground bunker. I haven't started stockpiling toilet paper, although recent history suggests that might be a sound investment regardless of geopolitics.

But something fundamental is changing.

The military deployments are real, and so are the extensions. The strategic stockpiles are real, including a roughly $12 billion critical minerals reserve. The infrastructure vulnerability is real; a cabinet secretary said out loud that the failures will keep coming. The data center strikes are real, and there have been at least 27 of them. The technological arms race is real.

What we don't know is whether those developments represent the prelude to a larger conflict, an extraordinarily disruptive transition, or some uncomfortable combination of both.

Maybe we're watching the old global order struggle to adapt to capabilities it was never designed to hold. Maybe the next balance of power is being negotiated simultaneously through computing, energy, algorithms, industrial capacity, and military force. Maybe some of this instability isn't evidence that civilization is ending, but evidence that pieces of the existing order are becoming obsolete faster than their replacements can arrive.

And maybe everything feels unstable because nobody, not Washington, not Beijing, not Moscow, not Silicon Valley, actually knows what the world looks like on the other side.

Is this what a renaissance looks like from the inside? I don't know. History names an era after what it created. The people living through it experience what it's destroying.

Five hundred years from now, historians might look back at this stretch as the beginning of the Intelligence Age, or a second renaissance, or something we don't have a word for yet. They'll see what emerged. We're the ones living through the transition, and transitions are messy, dangerous, and occasionally ridiculous.

So keep examining the patterns. Check the evidence. Laugh at the absurdity when you can.

Because pattern recognition isn't proof. But it tells you where to start looking.

And if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck?

Maybe this time it isn't a duck. Maybe it's a phoenix. Maybe all this noise isn't civilization falling apart but something new struggling to be born.

And knowing humanity, we'll probably try to shoot the damn thing down before we figure out what it is.

Sources and further reading

Rich Washburn is a technologist, strategist, and Founder & Chief AI Architect of ARIA AI Labs, working at the intersection of AI, infrastructure, communications, and capital. He also serves as Managing Partner and Chief AI Officer at Eliakim Capital.