Can’t Steer A Ghost Ship

Aug 15

Evolution of Elbridge Colby
https://www.sentientmusings.com/essays/the-evolution-of-elbridge-colby
(I am reminded that I use the word Evolution all the time).

“You can’t steer a ghost ship,” a thought muttered while the kettle reached a boil. It didn’t ask for permission to enter; it just sat there, cold and factual. A long time ago I figured out that most of the thoughts that arrived or appeared from the recesses of my mind weren’t my own. The reason being that I simply wouldn’t think that way in my past life before it all went to shit. Not that it wasn’t shit before, but in comparison… sometimes comparisons is all we have.

In my earlier notes on Elbridge Colby and the Pacific hawks, we traced the grand strategists—the men and women of PNAC, CNAS, and the Marathon Initiative who argue over where to point the guns. But while the strategists were busy designing grand chessboard games for the Taiwan Strait and counting hypothetical casualties in the hundreds of thousands, another group entered through the basement. They weren't interested in naval balance-of-power equations or semiconductor choke points. They came with wire cutters for the switchboard.

When former CIA analyst Julia Curlee surfaced on Decoding Geopolitics, she didn't sound like a partisan pundit. She sounded like an engineer who watched the flight controls get ripped out of the cockpit at thirty thousand feet. She described the Day-3 phone call that dismissed the career National Security Council detailees, followed months later by a second purge of the very loyalists hired to replace them. She compared it to Paul Bremer signing CPA Order 2 in Baghdad—firing four hundred thousand armed Iraqi soldiers overnight and acting surprised when the vacuum birthed ISIS.

Then Annie Jacobsen sat down with Shawn Ryan to talk about Devolution—the classified continuity-of-government architecture signed off by Obama’s FEMA chief Craig Fugate, where designated shadow personnel disappear to cold sites with gas masks and nuclear footballs while the surface collapses. It's a thin pam that brings no harm, I'd type. All's quiet with Pam? Sometimes she'd reply back with CH. Cypress Hill, Beach, Chief, or Mischief.

The two videos are opposite sides of the same coin. One documents the deliberate dismantling of the visible state’s cognitive nervous system; the other documents the pre-programmed shadow reflex designed to survive its collapse. If you smash the institutional switchboard on the surface, who holds the list for the bunker?

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MEMORANDUM

TO: Strategic Planning / Narrative & Literary Development

FROM: Institutional Intelligence Briefing Desk

SUBJECT: The Anatomy of Administrative Decapitation: From Interagency Purge to Devolution Mechanics

1. Executive Summary & Structural Overview

The modern American national security state is undergoing a structural transformation distinct from traditional ideological foreign-policy debates.

The External Grand Strategy Elite (PNAC → CNAS → Marathon / Hudson / FDD) focuses on the external application of power: great-power competition, denial-based Indo-Pacific containment, and defense procurement.
The Administrative Deconstruction Cadre (AFPI, CRA, CPI, Claremont) has operationalized a campaign targeting the internal apparatus of the state: civil service dismantling, intelligence subordination, and the liquidation of the interagency process.
The Convergence of Failure: By systematically dismantling civil service protections and gutting the National Security Council (NSC), this cadre eliminates the structural friction that historically prevented catastrophic strategic overreach.

2. Comprehensive Personnel Directory: The Deconstruction Cadre

Group A: The Legal & Executive Order Drafters

The legal architects who engineered the statutory mechanisms to strip civil service protections and subordinate independent regulatory agencies to unitary executive authority.

James Sherk: Director, Center for American Freedom at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI); former Special Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy. Primary author and architect of the Schedule F Executive Order. He conducted the comprehensive review of Title 5 civil service jurisprudence to design the legal loophole converting career policy analysts into fireable at-will employees.
Jeffrey Clark: Director of Litigation, Center for Renewing America (CRA); former Assistant Attorney General. Formulated the operational legal doctrines asserting that Article II grants the President direct, unmediated command over the Department of Justice and regulatory agencies, formally challenging post-Watergate independence norms.
Gene Hamilton: Vice President and General Counsel, America First Legal (AFL); former Senior Counselor to the Attorney General. Designs tactical playbooks for bypassing federal notice-and-comment rulemaking, challenging federal employee union contracts, and building defensive legal strategies against wrongful-termination suits brought by purged civil servants.

Group B: The Personnel Machinery & Shadow Cadre Pipeline

The logistical operators who manage the vetting databases, training academies, and transition pipelines designed to replace career technocrats with pre-screened political loyalists.

Russell Vought: President, Center for Renewing America (CRA); former Director, Office of Management and Budget (OMB). Strategic ideological leader of administrative deconstruction. Pioneered the doctrine of utilizing the budgetary apparatus to place the permanent civil service "in trauma," explicitly advocating for the dismantling of the administrative state.
John McEntee: Senior Advisor, The Heritage Foundation; former Director, Presidential Personnel Office (PPO). Established systematic loyalty-screening protocols used to audit executive branch personnel, establishing precedent for overriding cabinet secretaries to purge officials deemed ideologically unaligned.
Paul Dans: Former Chief of Staff, Office of Personnel Management (OPM); former Director, Project 2025. Coordinated the centralized database of vetted personnel, mapping the administrative infrastructure of OPM to facilitate rapid Day-One appointments across cabinet agencies.
Ed Corrigan: President & CEO, Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI). Directs the operational and logistical hub on Capitol Hill that trains incoming legislative and executive staff in procedural maneuvers to override agency bureaucracies.
Spencer Chretien: Former Associate Director, Project 2025; former Special Assistant to the President. Managed the curriculum of the "Presidential Administration Academy," designing operational modules on how political appointees can identify and neutralize bureaucratic resistance within career ranks.
Ashlea Frazier: Chief Operating Officer, Center for Renewing America (CRA); former Chief of Staff, OMB. Specializes in drafting agency-specific action directives designed to install parallel leadership structures within federal departments immediately upon executive handover.

Group C: The NSC & Intelligence Community Dismantlers

The national security operators focused on neutralizing the traditional interagency process, shrinking the NSC staff, and suppressing dissenting intelligence estimates.

Fred Fleitz: Vice Chair, Center for American Security at AFPI; former National Security Council Chief of Staff. A 25-year CIA and DIA veteran who authored the blueprint advocating for the radical reduction of the National Security Council staff (from ~350 personnel down to under 100), arguing that the interagency structure acts as an unconstitutional brake on presidential foreign policy.
Kash Patel: Former Chief of Staff to the Acting Secretary of Defense; former Senior Director for Counterterrorism, NSC. Author of Government Gangsters. Formulated tactical plans for sweeping security clearance revocations, the closure of interagency liaison desks, and the restructuring of FBI/CIA operational oversight.
Cliff Sims: Former Deputy Director of National Intelligence for Strategy; author of The Darkness Has Not Overcome It. Directed the implementation of ideological and loyalty screening frameworks within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), targeting the mechanisms through which career analysts brief the executive.
Michael Anton: Senior Fellow, Claremont Institute; former Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications. Author of "The Flight 93 Election." Provides the philosophical rationale defining the permanent foreign policy establishment (the "interagency consensus") as fundamentally illegitimate and incompatible with sovereign democratic governance.

Group D: The Devolution & Continuity Overseers

The historical technocrats who built and codified the classified infrastructure designed to maintain operational governance in the event of total catastrophic failure.

Craig Fugate: Former Administrator, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA, 2009–2017). Executive signatory of the modern Devolution Blueprint (ratified January 2017). Oversaw the codification of protocols establishing pre-designated shadow leadership lists, decentralized operational relocation sites (Hot, Warm, and Cold sites), and statutory succession triggers outside standard civilian lines.
Dr. Henry S. Heine: Former Senior Research Microbiologist, U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID). Provided technical research into high-fatality aerosolized pathogens (e.g., pneumonic plague, antibiotic-resistant strains) that define extreme Continuity of Government (COG) activation parameters.

3. The Narrative of Execution: How the Wiring Was Cut

The Day-3 Liquidation: Within 72 hours of transition, the interagency detailees comprising the working core of the National Security Council—career professionals on rotation from the CIA, State Department, and DIA—were summarily dismissed. The physical and digital communication loops that historically connected the White House Situation Room with department desks ceased to operate.
The Secondary Flush: By the third month, the initial replacements—often conservative staffers possessing traditional defense backgrounds—proved too hesitant to execute extreme directives without legal review. A second purge eliminated them, establishing a rigid hierarchy where loyalty to executive instinct superseded operational feasibility.
The Epistemic Collapse: Intelligence briefers, cognizant that contradictory field reports resulted in public termination and clearance revocations, altered the tone of finished analytical products. Unvarnished intelligence was replaced by confirmation loops.
The Structural Paradox: While the visible administrative state was stripped of its institutional memory, the classified Devolution Apparatus—a Cold War relic continuously modernized through 2017—remained intact. The state severed its operational senses while retaining the automated machinery to govern from the bunker once the surface failed.

4. Conclusion: The Realist Illusion

The grand strategists of the "Realist Right" operate under the assumption that they can wield the American state like a precision scalpel—pivoting forces from Europe to the Indo-Pacific, imposing industrial tariffs, and conducting surgical deterrence.

What the actions of the Deconstruction Cadre demonstrate is that power cannot be separated from the machinery that exercises it. When the administrative state is reduced to an at-will patronage network, the state does not achieve absolute freedom of action. It achieves blindness.

When you fire the switchboard operators, you do not liberate the commander; you ensure that when the crisis hits, the only operational order left on the desk is the one that leads to the bunker.

Rakesh Sanghvi

Sentient

https://sentientmusings.com