Making everything a ‘secret’ however is inimical to real Opsec. Examples have been given on this thread of stuff that really shouldn’t be made public (often leaks to make the current admin look good, the Obama admin was at least as bad about this as Bush or current so it’s not partisan). But if you spend time eg. making sure nobody names the submarine which already launched cruise missiles from some general area awhile ago, a virtually useless piece of information to enemies by any reasonable assessment, you don’t spend time making sure actually important things don’t get disclosed.
IME former members of the military often have an exaggerated view of how many things they know or learned in their service that civilians paying attention can’t also read about in reliable sources or figure out by connecting a few dots. So obviously foreign intel agencies can also, even without espionage per se.
And beyond the military per se, anybody who has done archival research on military topics knows how much more wasteful and often illogical classification procedures have become, mainly since 9/11, for example at NARA, as just one example of a US agency. They can be at times ree-diculous (‘it will take us 13 years to translate and redact these foreign govt documents which might mention US topics and personnel before we can give them to you’, but then ‘on further discussion we decided if we give them to you untranslated it’s OK’ :smack:) Resources wasted on silly overclassification can’t be spent on keeping real secrets let alone other useful purposes.
That’s true. What’s missing is a semi-autonomous feature to remove or downgrade classification of certain categories after a period of time. For example: In Afghanistan, laundry lists would go on the SIPRnet which was the classified system. Laundry lists? Yeah, how many folks are at a base and changes in strength are classified. These messages could die after a couple of years. Spare part orders for maintenance - classified in the war zone. Troop movements, systems down for maintenance or lack of parts - classified but irrelevant after a time period.
There are few if any personnel tasked with the declassification process.
[historical parenthesis]
The Spanish Government had spies relaying in code the laundry inventory and activity of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth, monitoring that her menses were regular to keep aware of any funny business about an heir in the offing.
[/historical parentheses]
ETA: Queen Elizabeth I.
ETA2: I/we know this because the reports have been declassified.
Like the USS Jimmy Carter’s… Uncensored status updates from that boat would be really interesting reading, as IIRC, it’s the heir to boats like Parche and Halibut that a lot of us read about in Blind Man’s Bluff. Per the Navy, it picked up a PUC in 2012, an NU (whatever that is) in 2013, and an NE (ditto) in 2016. .
I just thought it was funny that Georgia was supposed to be this big part of the US strike force, lurking in parts unknown of the Mediterranean with gobs of land and sea attack missiles and nope, back at the pier in Kings Bay. Happy homecoming. The ocean is small when they put their mind to it, I guess.
