The_Capt

Nothing we have not discussed here, in fact we could have probably written it. Looks at both sides of a Russia post-war collapse. One side argues that there is real risk in a nuclear armed fractured Russia. Further some say the West should see it as opportunity to exploit, others as a nightmare security scenario. Others point to the risk of another strongman replacing Putin who could ride a wave of populist nationalism to wonderful new crappiness. My read is that “victory” means being able to engineer a defeat Russian can live with without totally overreacting one way or the other. Tricky.

Oh dear, this is not from explosive damage as far a I can see. Collision and maybe a partial flip. One helluva on to knock that turret up and out. Back to 4th line likely. Going to happen, especially with new trainees on a compressed timeline. Luckily no one got killed

Back when it still played music. I swear reality tv and emoticons were the first two horsemen of the apocalypse.

I think they both might be right. And they both sound a lot smarter than we were back in the day. Good gawd we were a lost generation back in the 80s.

I don't do emjois (or "emoticons"), however if I did, mine would show a lengthy eyerolling - which is actually derived from a look towards heaven. As if to look to God, despairingly and in supplication for guidance and Job like patience in the face of what is presented.

Coming back to this one because this is how misinformation and conspiracy nonsense starts. And again the US operates under a similar but different legal framework. So government does have control of who they grant security clearances to, or not. Absolutely. However, that authority exists within a legal framework that also ensures that unlawful discrimination is controlled out of the system. For example, imagine if this kid was black. Does anyone think they the US government should start filtering out 21 years old who are black, or Jewish based on that alone (and if you do, please leave)? Security clearance in the public sector = taxpayer funded employment, and as such has to walk that oversight and transparency line like anything else. I have no doubt discrimination happens but the system is built to ensure it is minimized as much as possible, with lengthy reviews, audits etc. These systems are also in place to protect the employer (i.e. the US Government) from law suits of discrimination in hiring practices. E.G. Say this kid held onto his racial bigotry ideas and got a job in security clearances, what mechanism are in place to prevent him from simply only granting clearances to other sad, lonely white men? Before we put this to bed for good, the reason to address it is that there are a LOT of just garbage myths and information out there on how western governments actually work. I mean these are massive enterprises in the 21st century and it is too much to expect the average citizen to understand the layers and layers in play. However, the problem with this is that people fill in the gaps with anecdotes and misinformation. Suddenly the government is capable of doing all sorts of things that legally it simply cannot do, or at least do easily. Hollywood has done us exactly zero favors in all this too. Executive actions (i.e. political assassination's) is one such area. If you believe TV and movies, western governments are doing these everyday and twice on weekends. In reality the levels of controls and authorities to conduct an extra-judiciary killing (outside a defined operational box) are enormous. Hollywood is likely much more accurate on how the other teams are operating, such as Russian FSB but have little to zero reflection on the actual work going on in western defence and security. Probably about as far as I can take this line right now. Bottom line, when you hear some of these claims, just do the due diligence and cross check along a few lines to be safe.

I like to think this is a result of the Digital Refugee generation - a lot of over 50s who have very high voting turnout and political opinions and almost zero modern information assessment skills. People like my mother who was convinced that the Rust shooting-tragedy was a Trump supporter-staged conspiracy to discredit Alec Baldwin for all his unflattering impersonations of the former president. My mother has a PHD in English literature and is a retired college professor, demonstrating that higher education is not really an counter to just plain old online stupid rumors. My hope as we all die out the generations coming up are so much more savvy...because I am not sure they could surpass our current nadir.

If you are telling me that the US is basically a kangaroo court within national security, then it has got some real problems. This is the kind of situation our adversaries are dealing with and it results in gross abuses and overreach along with extremely bloated internal security organizations. Everyone who gets a clearance is made well aware of the consequences of a breach and investigations of breaches happen; however, they need to hold up in court - unless that magic waiver suspends presumption of innocence as a legal norm. What you are describing set up scenarios where someone in CIS who does not like someone can unilaterally and without oversight unpeel an employees life outside of a legal system. I am sorry but that does not match my experience and frankly all these “gunpoint” stories are either exaggerated, or freakin insane. What possible reason does security enforcement have to draw weapons in a conference over uncleared slides?! I mean I think you are being truthful and heard this stuff, don’t take me wrong, but these second hand stories sound a bit strange. I mean seriously where did these guys work? (Don’t answer that, I really do not want to know) Further, no matter how much whizz bang AI keyword search engines we are talking about this is going to require attention and resources. First off one has to gain access to that discord channel, or hack the kids home computer. Then you need to track and record everything going on in there to build a legal case for prosecution. Keywords are easy to dodge with jargon and slang, so to actually go anywhere we are talking a team of living people, with oversight. We just lived this in GWOT. The last time the US played fast and loose with drag netting and broad intel it 1) did not really yield much and 2) blew up in peoples faces badly. I am a big fan of precise and professional jobs not ham fisted butt sniffing exercises, but that is just me. Look, I think we have ridden this little whoopsie about as far is we can to be honest. People can believe what they want to, in the end I have no doubt there will be a lot of heat and light all over this. I am quickly hitting a threshold of things we do not talk about and am not that invested in trying to prove my points on this subject. What we do need to be talking about is how this leak may affect this war, if at all. And where it goes from here. One sad lonely kid who is going to spend 20 years in jail is about as relevant as Chinese balloons at this point. I for one do not think the kid had the know how or skills to do more than a broad intel vomit, most of which are likely already tied off. As to real damage, we will have to wait and see.

Well without getting too far into it then and I am not entirely sure about the US but even with the legal waivers one signs there are still a lot of legal hurdles to jump over. For example one cannot simply send the MPs into this guys home off base, kick in the door and toss the place. There is still due process in place. They can do all sorts of background checks before granting clearance but going after someone for violations is a criminal investigation, not done randomly on a hunch. Your people who have been tracked likely had due legal processes and oversight put in place to do that or anything collected would likely get tossed by a decent lawyer. The US actually has some of the widest protections for citizens as granted by the constitution. So I am pretty sure that no matter what one signs they are not going to start tracking and tapping without due process. That and we are talking about a lot of people to put this kinda push on, probably thousands. Letting loose the AI hounds and waving waivers sounds cool right up to the point you wind up in court.

Not at all. And maybe I actually know what I am talking about, but over to you to judge. It is not “we have always done it this way” it the legal and demographic realities of the work. Now there are some legally age restricted jobs, most of these have to do with child labour. In my country one has to be over a certain age to work with alcohol. But this kid was the age of majority, a legal citizen and taxpayer. You are talking about excluding him based on age, pretty much alone and assigning “responsibility” as a risk mitigation for a made up age of majority. Good luck in court with that one. Then there is the who capacity angle. You think that we have 25 year olds lined up around the block? Military and national security are competing for the same kids as industry and surprise(!) industry can pay better and likely not get you killed. So if we decide to cut off security clearances below, say 25, we now have holes in all those jobs, this is beyond the legal hurdles. So this is legally risky and capacity risky on many levels, hence why sitting around and saying “fix it, they are too young” is missing too many points to ignore. As to “specific risk in specific context”, you wanna spell those out? Are we talking the Air National Guard? All National Guard writ large. Or maybe just this one unit?

You have never actually done this have you? It is not the tech to track. It is the analysis and recording. It is the legal and oversight. You are talking about an op to track a US citizen in their own country - a member of the military no less. The hurdles to do this and the bar to do it within the bounds of the law are extreme. We simply do not “sic trackers on them”, considering if you actually want to prosecute the body of proof needs to be airtight. Sticking a 19 year old on a system to auto track another 19 year old is a legal and public affairs nightmare waiting to happen and no small bill on effort. But people are going to believe what they believe.

I doubt it was that deliberate, but I also would not be surprised. Russia is probably driving itself nuts trying to figure out was real and what was polluted. They are going to spin their end (already have) but the actual payoff is probably pretty limited. Hell your president pretty much already said so.

Damn, critique accepted by the old crone in the back. Regardless, the stuff is legal all over now and you can pick up a bag or two when you go get your beer. Probably should not operate a weapon with either of these two substances - ya know, because kids are the only humans to ever do something stupid.

This. Right?! Again, the prime target for any government agency or department are young, smart, and clean. By definition they are going to lack experience - that is what years on the job are for. Ya, guys c'mon. Does anyone know what it takes to put a full team on someone? "If someone" is an entire team with legal top cover, oversight and authorities. Those teams are smaller in the 21st century thanks to things like AI but it is still not one guy following this kid around on Tik Tok or pretending to be a 14 year old on a Discord channel. But let's say you get greenlit for a counter-intelligence op (that is what this is btw), now you have to do it for thousands of kids in the system. The kids are kids. We put guns in there hands and send them out all the time. We are going to give them clearances and let them loose in cyber space as well. Now if some people were smart, and I would not be surprised if they were, they have already flipped this thing into a IO win by poisoning the leak. How does the Russia know what was real and what was BS. Is the US AD system really about to buckle are was that a honeypot to pull in and make this war more expensive, for example?

Sure but we are talking about the US Government here. A denial of employment by the US Government based on LGBTQ+ is a fast track to lawsuits. Does it happen, sure. Is it institutionalized like it was back in the 80s, not a freakin chance. This is right next to prayer in public schools...boom. You wanna see the West crack like an egg? Have the US vote in some anti-LGBTQ+ twit with the weight to actually change the laws back to the 60s. Electorates in Europe and Canada are going to explode. Keep going on resurrecting Jim Crow laws and it could go that way as well. Bias is one thing. Laws are another matter. We are off topic here, so dragging it back to the young fella in question. On paper the kid was likely spotless and clean as they come. I mean so far we have "he loved guns", which is just like saying "he loved freedom" in large swaths of the US. The guy got his clearance because he was clean. Weird ideas about restrictions below a certain age and treating security clearances like they are access to alcohol are not 1) sensible, 2) proven by history - it is old disgruntled guys that know what they are doing one has to watch out for, 3) or sustainable from a legal or realistic capacity stand point. We can talk access and compartmentalization all day - this is entirely a different headache and do not think for a second that more layers and controls is going to make things all better. but wide swath policies based on the demographic profile of a single sad dumb young offender is a non-starter.

Peace on the hollow back moral history of organized religion, no need to convince me. My point being that a good Christian boy who goes to church on Sunday is not going to hurt a 19 year old looking for a TS clearance. They are going to do the background sweep (and clearly nothing came up) but he is not going to get the gears compared to a Muslim etc. Or do you think the entire US security apparatus shares your no doubt well earned cynicism? The other part is that a "gay drag queen groomer" is likely a box for self-identification that is more likely to get a young person hired these days - I think the term is LGBTQ+. Newsflash: they are swearing and smoking too!! The days where that was a "sexual deviancy" died about 20 years ago, depending which sexually repressed society you found yourself within. My point is that your start point definition is about as current as "Reafer Madness" in the contemporary environment....now go eat your pudding.

See my points on the age problem above. And we truly are showing our Grey if we think there is a leap of maturity between 21 and 25 in this day and age. The age thing is going to go nowhere for a lot of good reasons. Finally before this fossil club gets too far into our own supply, just gonna leave this one here (he was 35 when it started by the way, and again a good Christian) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen As to the IT/access problem. That is likely where the most heat and light will be placed. Now what was this kids actual job? Was he sweeping up the server room floor or was he an admin? If he was running an entire secure server architecture or on the team who does, then his access was probably pretty wide, hence the clearance. I suspect they will be looking hard at this but they may run into unworkable solutions based on whatever we bought 10 years ago with respect to IT. Everyone is looking for a reason right now because, uncertainty. But the reality is entirely certain, the kid was human and no human system is going to be error free. Only way to keep a secret between three people is if two of them are dead. It is an embarrassment to be sure but this is really more good news than bad. The kid blew up and out really fast, so tied off quickly. The kids was not an insider so really did not understand what he was looking at nor what to really look for. He loudspeakered as opposed to running silent whispers which could have lasted years. And he was not being managed as a foreign asset who again could have been a slow bleedout of critical info until his retirement. In many ways it was better he was a dumb kid and not some disgruntled 50 year old who actually knew where the bodies are buried and how to really hurt us. While at the same time working around the procedures he likely helped write back in the day.

Ok, well you are not wrong, but you really are. Lemme try and illuminate without straying too far into it. Older people have baggage. It is called life. And as such they have a lot more possible security clearance issues than someone who has only been alive for 19 years. So, yes, the your friends should be “sweating” because they have the things that trip up a clearance…like debt. A 19 year old kid, not so much. They are clean slates in many ways. Beyond the whole constitutional and legal implications of age discrimination, if we filtered them out based on age and experience we are seriously cutting into recruiting…we need them, you might even have noticed a tv ad or two to that effect? As to brain development. Again, totally accurate assessment…and also why we recruit them. That partially developed mind can be constructed and shaped for warfare…tale as old as time. We can wring hands about security clearances but in reality we recruit them to kill. We put a lot of firepower in their hands and expect them to be ready to employ deep judgement under fire on the use of lethal force. “But what about the chain o command”?! Well trust me when I say that adult supervision is probably the second casualty of war. These kids survive a few months and they are the adult supervision. These are the kids who fight and die in your nations wars…exactly how did you think the entire thing was getting done? So when we are talking technology, here is a crazy truth you missed on brain development - old people brains are as slow and dumb as rocks. So we purposefully recruit sharp (money on the bar this kid had a high IQ) kids who grew up with this stuff to run networks and all that “computer stuff”. Cyber operators, the guys who are actually conducting ops in the main are in the same age category. This is good because they can relate to the rifleman who they graduated schools with. Anyway, these kids can collapse a national economy so they too are cleared just as high, and likely much easier than their 40 year old boss who is on his third marriage and has a bunch of traffic tickets. Finally as to religion, c’mon seriously? Tell me how you think a devout Muslim would have faired in comparison? The kid likely came up entirely clean with no extremist linkages - “oh look he is a middle class white kid who used racial slurs online”. If that was a showstopper we may as well close shop right now. Here is a shocker…he probably told a few dirty jokes too, heavens no! From what we have seen on the news the kid is a poster child for a quick and easy clearance. And how do we screen for “young, lonely and insecure” particularly after a pandemic? I mean basically stop at “young”, and as I explained that would be a major problem.

What planet do you live on where “gay drag Queen groomers” is going to get a security clearance blocked? - 1950 called and they want their “Commie Deviants” back. I am talking about illegal sexual proclivities, which again “good Christians” are not immune; however, in screening he likely came away as completely clean and going to Church every Sunday probably reinforced it.

Not sure what the age issue is, he can vote and kill people for his country, he can hold a clearance. In fact on the surface he looks like a poster child for clearances. Likely zero foreign contacts. No wife, no kids, no bills or leverage. Good Christian boy so likely no illicit or online sexual weirdness. Likely no addictions record and probably had a spotless criminal record. The kid was likely clean as a whistle. Doing a low level job that required him to work on what looked like server maint for classified networks, hence access. I mean what should the cut off age be? Of course the military has young people doing this work…we recruit them for it. I doubt anyone saw this one coming. The kid was a sad lonely guy who was trying to show off to friends and did something incredibly dumb. And now he is going to jail for probably about as long as he has been alive. Now should the US military take a long look at how TS data is stored and maintained, yep. Are we going to suddenly stop taking teenagers into cyber (there are likely operators with even higher clearances in that bunch)? Nope.

Oh trust me, it extends well beyond a bunch of gamers. There are corners of defence going apoplectic right now. Camps are forming up very much along similar lines we see here: - Bah, they are Soviet tradition Eastern Europeans, we would crush them no matter which side we were facing. Let’s buy more hardware and smother it in force protection - double down!! - Ok, it ain’t great but we just need [insert new tech] and we will be fine. That and we need more depth, so let’s buy a lot more of what we already have. - Crap, we are hooped. That ISR thing just changed ground warfare forever and freakin UAS bent whatever was left. Now what do we do as we convinced the political level to spend billions on a bunch of scrap metal walking. Well “fake it til you make it” - We freakin told you clowns! Can we start buying the actual capability we need? - Uh can to you repeat the question? Hey I think I will retire now. Good luck and my consulting fee is about 500$ per hour.

Even if we could develop APS umbrellas, they are going to be making a lot of noise in protecting our mass, which is hot and highly visible. We manage to create a great ATGM wall - which is a tall freakin ask when one considers sub-munitions, stand-off and decoys. But let’s say for a second we could do it. Well it will feel great for about 5 mins before the long range fires come lobbing in. A combination of unmanned loitering, artillery and high trajectory missiles…we don’t have an answer for that. And this is before we start talking UGVs, freakin EFPs with legs and a brain. So in a fight against a comparably UA empowered force we are talking adversaries ISR outside the theatre so “no touchy” or we run escalation. So we create a force protection dome to protect our combined arms mass. Surprise is dead at that point. And we would need to load up the FP to the point it starts to get uneconomical to try and protect those same formations. Logistics and technical support, sustainment etc all stack up really fast to try and build a mobile Iron Dome. There will come a point that trying to defend our current formations stops making sense. We are not there yet but I can definitely see it from here. As to AirPower and “the might of NATO”, c’mon we are at risk of sucking and blowing at the same time here. On one hand we are 20 minutes from running out of munitions and equipment to support this war, but in a comparable next-war, we now would have bottomless weight? We would not be stumped at Bakhmut for months…because we likely would have run out of ammo in the first 6 months before we ever got to Bakhmut. As to AirPower, good lord, Russia had the 3rd largest Air Force in the world and got stumped hard: https://www.wdmma.org/russian-air-force.php At the higher ends of readiness (always a contentious one for Russia) they have as many fixed wing aircraft as the Gulf War:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign Orxy has Russia with only 79 aircraft lost, so a pretty small fraction of their fleet. Yet we are not seeing a lot of Russian air action beyond lobbing well back from front lines. The reason for this, cited by many, is denial. Air forces are like navies, extremely expensive and insanely long build times. No one is going to throw them into a denied space because the costs just get too high. Does anyone think that if entry costs escalate in a NATO war to the level we see in Ukraine that “national caveat” light are not going to light up like an Xmas tree?

Neither of those two factors match up with reality. Ukraine is employing a distributed and dispersed C4ISR system linked into western ISR which is outside the theatre. This means that MANPADs and IADs get cued well out on incoming Russian strike packages early and accurately. They have enough time to reposition and wait. We do not have SEAD for passive MANPADs, we have some c-measures but they have not frankly been tested in these environments. The EW planes cannot blind space-based assets, and OS built on civie IT networks. And once someone puts a Starstreak on a UAS that MANPAD could hit up past 30k feet. I am not convinced we could get full air superiority, let alone supremacy, below 20k and might even lose it to denial (A2AD) above that. Then we are high altitude bombing which comes with so much legal risk as to make CAS nearly impossible. Troops on the ground would do better with indirect fires and tac UAS to be honest. ATGMs - “APS will save us”. Well not from top-down (yet), nor submunitions or decoys. And last I checked we were not putting those systems on every logistics truck, which is a problem as our tanks need gas too. I have seen a lot of tank lusters working overtime to show how the tank can be protected and completely ignoring the fact that the tank is just the end of a capability system that reaches back to production lines. As to western bias, sure. Almost unavoidable. But in CMs favour, the battlefield results of Russian armour are not far off how badly they get mauled in CMBS. In fact the shortfalls in CM are that it was probably too generous with respect to indirect fires and lethality.

So from the “you’re doing it wrong” file: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/the-white-papers-exclusive-report-challenges-ukrainian-tactics-used-against-russia-1.6355219 Has anyone here actually found a copy of this document? I have searched and came up with a blank. I am immediately suspicious when authors refuse to identify themselves. While I have no doubt the UA has substantial after action and learning points, this smacks of “well if you only fought like us…without air supremacy, without land power supremacy, without sea control and facing a peer force who is better equipped than any military force the west has faced since Korea…you would have won already.” As I have said many times, given similar strategic or operational conditions I seriously doubt “more western C2 or ‘combined arms’” would have done much better. I also am entirely convinced that if we were in a war facing the UA right now - again where air denial was in place, our loses would be so high that the shock would have likely led to a political withdrawal. For example, as was noted by the Atlantic Counsel paper: how does one “combined arms” against ATGMs that have a 4.5 km range and 80%+ success rate? https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Game-Changers-or-Little-Change-Lessons-for-Land-War-in-Ukraine-.pdf