Fox News Is Very Worried About the Wrong Things
A drone hits a server farm in Russia, and suddenly war is dangerous.
This week Fox News ran an op-ed by retired Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis warning that Ukraine has shown Trump “how easily an enemy could cripple an AI powerhouse.” Over four days in October, Ukrainian drones knocked out three of the five large data centers run by Yandex, the company often called Russia’s Google: Sasovo, Kaluga, and Vladimir. Sasovo held two of the three supercomputers Yandex uses to train its AI, and the company still can’t say whether that equipment can be saved.
Maginnis takes this as a warning shot for America. Our data centers have fences, cameras, and guards, but nothing that stops a drone. He points to Loudoun County, Virginia, home to the densest cluster of data centers in the world, and wants the administration to identify mission-critical computing, assign responsibility for defending it, write enforceable security requirements, and run recovery drills that assume more than one site goes dark.
As policy memos go, it’s not a bad one. The facts check out and the recommendations are specific. He even rejects a federal takeover, noting that a government name on the gate won’t stop a drone.
But ask what the piece is actually afraid of. The answer tells you a lot about what we’ve learned to stop being afraid of.