Much and many thanks, @Walken_After_Midnight . I am frankly astounded by those numbers, that over 1 million employees could have a job requiring Top Secret clearance says to me that either too many people have those clearances or too many documents are getting the Top Secret classification these days.
YMMV.
Is that since the beginning of time, or currently active?
Think about all of the people who work for a defense contractor or are in the military. It seems about right to me. Many of them never see super secret stuff but are adjacent to it and may need access at some point due to the nature of their jobs.
It’s worth remembering that, even with a given level of clearance, everything is still on a need-to-know basis. Give a person the highest level of clearance there is, and they still won’t be able to get access to any information they don’t have need of in their work. Most of those people with that sort of clearance probably only have one or two specific things that they work with that require it.
Of course, it’s still nice for a defense contractor to have a decent number of employees cleared, because then if a contract goes out to build some other sort of secret gizmo, it makes it a lot easier for them to put those folks to work on it.
We’ve been hearing that Bakhmut is about to fall since last year. I don’t know if it’s a deliberate PR thing, or if they’re just basing the estimates on when it’ll fall on the assumption of a competent enemy.
I held a security clearance for years working at a defense contractor, but I never once had access to a document classified higher than FOUO (For Official Use Only) which is the very lowest of the low classifications and that only happened once during a time when the information was in the process of getting declassified entirely anyway. I’m not even sure I saw the part of the document with the actual classified information in it.
TS is more expensive and harder to get, so there’s probably not as many people with a TS who never needed to use it, but yeah, having a clearance doesn’t automatically grant you the keys to the kingdom.
As I recall, Top Secret doesn’t mean all that much. There are higher security clearances. I had to pass a background check in the Navy just to work in a few places on the Ship as an electrician.
Bakhmut is about 80% already in Russian hands, and the Ukrainian positions remaining in the city are not particularly tactically sound. Since the advances on the flanks of Bakhmut following the fall of Soledar the entire city has been in some danger of encirclement. That danger has actually eased slightly with Ukrainian counterattacks having some limited success near Ivaniske and Khromove, but it’s a precarious situation. The Ukrainians have been slowly withdrawing from the city, trading space for time and at least in theory maintaining a lopsided casualty rate. Whether it’s been lopsided enough to justify committing the reserves they have to the fight is an open question.
I wouldn’t expect the major counter-offensive rumour has the Ukrainians launching any day now to be anywhere near this portion of the front. Rather I would think they will mount two separate offensives, one in the northeast towards Kreminna and Svatove and ultimately Starobilsk, picking up where they left off with the Kharkiv offensive last fall, and one in the south somewhere between Vulhedar and the elbow of the Dnipro south of Zaporizhzhia, aimed at Melitopol/Berdiansk/Mariupol. If they have enough forces to significantly threaten both regions they can force the Russians into having to make a series of no-win decisions and any significant success on either front would have serious ramifications for Russian logistics. I would not expect any significant attempts to break through Russian lines in the Donetsk region. They might make localized counterattacks to take advantage of exposed Russian flanks or to improve their own defensive lines, but anything more than that would be a big surprise.
Some other parts of the intel leak that are germane to the Ukraine War:
Russian special forces have been badly depleted
China has/had plans to send disguised military aid to Russia
And Germany has approved Poland’s plan to send jets to Ukraine.
There’s video of Russian soldiers punishing one of their own by inserting a metal pole into his anus. There have been many videos of Russians beating and mistreating their fellow soldiers.
You know, I’ve never been in the military, but surely that isn’t the best way to get the most from your forces…?
Yeah, it’s really not productive to make it so the enemy’s POW camps are more comfortable than your own front line.
A couple of alleged intercepted Russian communications, with orders given to shoot their own troops:
Was not the “no retreat” policy a serious problem for the armies of the Third Reich?
True but there’s the added “incentive” where they threaten your family back home if you end up there.
Things may finally be catching up with Russian ultranationalist Igor Girkin:
Girkin has been highly critical of Russia’s incompetent conduct of the war, likely in part because he has been sidelined from things, with his main means of influence now being his video podcast.
He recently said Russia is heading for military defeat:
Prigozhin is contemptuous of him, as is to be expected with Russia’s far-right infighting:
We’re a couple of days past the anniversary of former Russian FSB agent Girkin’s leading of a group of militants to seize the executive committee building, the police department, and the Security Service of Ukraine offices in Sloviansk in 2014:
I feel the German soldiers in WWII were probably more inculcated with ideology, while Russia is basically a Mad Max-style crime/gangster state, with soldiers not having an idea what they’re fighting for:
Wow, the circular reasoning in that is very circular.
But some of their commanders were willing to be hanged with piano wire for ordering a retreat.
The Russians, not so much.
I think the policy was more at the strategic level than at the operational or tactical - individual units were allowed to withdraw from fights if they had to, so long as the army groups as a whole held their ground. Say what you want about the Nazis, but they were rarely stupid.