26 December 2020
Portland, Oregon
A Yon-Genre Mind Dump without edit:
During World War II, the OSS was our clandestine and covert operating force. After the war, OSS disbanded. From OSS formed Special Forces, and Central Intelligence Agency.
Special Forces later took the nickname "Green Berets". (Not to be confused with Special Operations Forces that includes Special Forces, DELTA, SEALs, and more.)
During my Green Beret training at Fort Bragg, one of the first lessons in target selection was based on the CARVER Matrix.
CARVER is a plaining tool passed down from OSS Grandfathers:
Criticality
Accessibility
Recuperability
Vulnerability,
Effect
Recognizability
More detail here: https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm34-36/appd.htm
As a planning tool, the Commander and intel section will develop a list of potential targets, create a matrix, and then score each potential based on resources, time available, and more. Big Air Force and Navy do similar when developing targeting priorities.
Notice the first item on the list normally is communications.
Communications are highly critical, often highly vulnerable. Disruption can have severe effects, especially so when in conjunction with other attacks.
CARVER-type planning tools are used when professionals plan simple local sabotage, strategic bombings, or nuclear attack priorities. Or software attacks such as STUXNET.
The word Sabotage derives from murky etymology.
So let's take the etymology that serves our purpose: Sabots are those cute wooden shoes French used to wear. Textile workers were rioting more than 200 years ago due to machinery taking their jobs. The Luddites used their wooden sabot shoes to ravage the machines. (Okay...Luddites were English, so let's avoid the argument and call them "luddites" instead of "Luddites." Luddites are always fighting the machine.)
Sabot-sabotage of textile machines was a simple CARVER.
The "luddites" had accessibility. Resources required: a shoe. Or something. No missile or chainsaw required. Time on target -- practically zilch. Interesting that even today the machine vs. textile worker remains as important as ever with serious implications for countries like Bangladesh, but that's a side story for now.
Back to Nashville: we are still in the watch-and-see mode, and so I reserve public speculation other than to say this looks as though someone has/had a grasp on CARVER planning. If the communications node was the target, this attack could range from a lone-wolf, one-shot scenario, to a test shot, and probe, for future attacks at the front end of the 2021 American War.
One certainty: of all the years I have spent in wars and conflicts, I have never been to a country that is more vulnerable to itself than is the United States.
Means and Motive? America is filled with millions of highly educated people with incredible skills. Tons of people who put rockets into space as their day job. Others design communications infrastructure, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, metals, magnets, computers. Having spent more than half my life overseas, I've never seen any country with such a deep bench of amazingly serious people who have direct access to amazingly serious nodes and other vulnerabilities.
As a war correspondent, most telling is that more than 36 hours after the attack, relatively few people on any side have openly condemned the attack. This lack of condemnation provides a clue to our 2021.
Time to get back to work. My apology for mind-dump without edit.