The_Capt

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

Not entirely how it works. Resistance/partisans are a bit of a lost art in western warfare. We were pretty good at it in WW2 with the SOE and OSS, and during the Cold War we held onto skill sets but it got pretty messy. In the post-Cold War we got all righteous and uppity “we don’t negotiate with X” which is often very much resistance space. The term being thrown around is “support to resistance” which is really unconventional warfare (itself a subset of irregular warfare). In conventional conflicts partisans do two things really well - 1) intelligence as has been noted and 2) creating uncertainty. They along with SOF are the great “undeciders”. This is a main effort in just about all unconventional warfare campaigns as it can act as a strategic force multiplier for conventional comparing (see Lawrence of Arabia etc). So with respect to the occupied areas in the south, partisans are really good at intel and then symbolic compartmentalized actions that drive Russians crazy in rear areas, to the point that a “rear area” ceases to exist. Every now and again partisans get tagged with some sort of strategic strike, normally when no other options are left. No they can be activated en mass and integrated into a broader conventional campaign a la Normandy and France, but this is extremely tricky. More often than not they risk both sides shooting at them thinking they are enemy hybrid elements. That said, we really do not know what 21st century irregular warfare looks like - could be a version of crowd-sourced warfare we saw back in Phase I. I would not get too excited about it though, at least until it happens. A lot of points of failure in this sort of work, but if the UA can make it work it could be glorious particularly as this is their own country. The reality is that we probably won’t know the full UA irregular warfare details until this thing is over. Just one more thing to unpack after the war.

We have had a lot of debates on the spotting models in CM. No game is perfect but CM’s is pretty solid. A lot of times players get frustrated but this is entirely realistic. Perfect no, and we always get weird instances but having playing both sides a lot the game is not that far off. As to Unhook The Leash - this is the last scenario of the US campaign. You have M1s and Bradley’s versus 2nd ech Soviet troops, that are also kinda beat up. Not sure of player CW experience levels but this scenario is pretty asymmetric for the US player…up to a point (and it has the MGB!). Soviet tanks are not fantastic for spotting but they were not really designed for duelling, they were designed for getting in close and crushing. If you start duelling T72s with M1s you are going to lose badly. Maybe the T80 and T64 but even they have to be careful.

I honestly have no concerns on if a UA offensive will succeed, too many factors working against the RA at this point. The real question is: how much will it succeed? How far can the UA push before the RA can establish a new defensive line? They have to balance that limit with what they can support and sustain. And then there is “how much is enough?” Apparently all that ground taken back last Fall didn’t do it, so how much does the UA need to retake to convince Russia, the West and in some ways themselves, that this thing is not over yet?

Gorram forum buttons.

Density on the Ukrainian side are likely lower than the RA but this is apples to race horses. The UA C4ISR superiority allows it to leave a small trip wire force forward along most of the line because they are pretty much impossible to surprise. The UA has demonstrated a much more highly mobile force with a rapid C2. The UA clearly upguns density in areas under assault but in quiet sectors they can sit back and simply wait because they will see (and hit) any RA concentrations well back being fed western ISR feeds - and by now their own architecture is likely pretty robust. The UA also can move in the backfield better. We know Russian ISR is challenged the deeper into Ukraine held territory one goes and they lack PGM, so the UA likely has greater freedom of movement for c-moves. The RA does not have this advantage, so they have to try to push out more density on the line. So the UA conducting an attack in one area to draw in limited RA resources, forces them to commit, and then attacks in a second area for a break-in/out/through just like they did last fall, makes a lot of sense. The RA could be surprised and dislocated in that scenario, again repositioning challenged by UA deep strike capability linked to likely the best ISR on the planet right now.

It is not the tanks that is going to kill the RA, it is the crews. They likely only had enough crews for about 2000 tanks (ie those in ready service), with some reserves. This crews must have been taking horrendous losses in the first year, and the Russian tanks do not look very survivable when hit. We know some crews got out but a lot of examples of them not. They do not have a lot of time to train replacements, so they go out poorly trained, make mistakes and become more casualties. The “so what” is that the effectiveness of their tank corps overall all is going to drop in a non-linear rate, compared to linear losses. And then we could talk logistics and maintenance of the force in contact.

But they just laid down and died…except for the Reavers.

Even with x2 (add mobilized and tossed on frontline), these are very low densities. Take Zap-Blue. Double the density to 214 per km. So chop a third for logistics/support, so 140-150 actual frontline troops (which is generous). That is a healthy company with no one behind it, nor an ability to rotate out and off the line. Based on what we have seen troop rotations are likely happening horizontally from loud to quiet sectors, not from front to rear. This is the Russian problem. A lot of people are handwringing about “frozen front lines” and Russian defensive belts but that is an enormous frontage to try and defend and nowhere enough troops to do it with. Russian LOCs are interdict-able - I would be saving a lot of deep strike for that, so as the UA assaults the RA are going to be challenged to c-move (which will be highly visible). The RA is simply spread too thin and likely does not have the logistics, ISR or C2 to be able to cover those sorts of ranges. I think that once the UA drops the hammer that whole thing is going to crack like an eggshell. The RA counter-moves are going to get hit while trying to re-position. RA targeting cycles are too slow and its logistics are fragile. This has all the hallmarks of the setup for an operational collapse.

Still painting it.

I live in the New Eden where I can buy pot in a store and smoke it behind a military mess. Not that it is really doing that much for recruiting.