Group Captain (R) Mike Rana VSM is a postgraduate software engineer from IIT Mumbai who served for 29 years in the Indian Air Force and 12 years in the corporate world (including 8 years at the Israeli company AMDOCS in Cyprus). He explains how to capitalise on boardrooms and battlefields in both War and Peace environments.

If Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy man who knew too much, could pull the strings of the whole globe by rubbing elbows with the fat cats and the high hats, did he not prove that the intersection of wealth and leverage is the ultimate Deception? Epstein didn’t just meet people; he indexed them, with metadata that directly implicated them. He understood their vulnerabilities, financial, sexual, or reputational, and filed them away for future retrieval. Before AI could map social graphs, Epstein did it manually.

He wasn’t a socialite; he was seeking the master key to biological immortality. His obsession with seeding the human race in its raw form is just one example of his Deception. If a BRICS leader moves away from the dollar and his name appears in the Epstein logs, for whatever reason, blackmail to move towards the petrodollar could be one.

If Russia launches a tactical nuke in Ukraine without hesitation, why are the Arctic shipping lanes near Greenland not subject to an immediate security sweep? Trump’s Board of Peace (BoP) is a pay-to-play model requiring a $1 billion buy-in, which could undermine the UN’s legitimacy. Why? China’s hypersonic missiles don’t need to fly over the North Pole; they can circle the globe and approach from the South Pole, bypassing the Alaska-based missile defence entirely.

Deception – in War & Peace, is the result of such an exploration of the mind, meant never to be read or shared.