Perhaps the most glaring example of that culture of openness is that you can lay hands on US field manuals very easily. You can go download an official PDF of the Army's small unit tactics bible off of an official US Army website with a .gov address and everything. Can't do that for anyone else.
And of course c.) there's a culture of openness about things that in other nations are considered secret; there's a million official releases about the structure of the Special Forces Groups down to the ODA level, whereas the Brits won't disclose anything about the SAS except it's led by a colonel
Alex Wellerstein has a really good book (Restricted Data) about the evolution of specifically nuclear secrecy that goes over some of this but NDA enforcement is incredibly gun-shy because a.) you really do not want a big flashing "ALL THIS SHIT IS REAL" sign and b.) enforcement is legally fraught
Part of it is that a lot of stuff is not actually classified but should be, and part of it is that it's really hard to have *any* censorship regime that's compatible with the 1A so it's really hard to enforce the NDAs in practice. Plus when enforced that confirms whatever was said as true
The closest anyone has ever gotten to real legal trouble for NDA violations is Matt Bissonnette for writing that book about killing bin Laden, but even then all he had to do was pay back some royalties
Guys like Eric Haney and Larry Vickers got PNGed basically instantly and it didn't matter because they were making so much money on the outside. There's also cases like what happened to Tom Greer where he got PNGed and then all his buddies said "lol fuck that" and kept hanging out with him anyway
The problem is most NDA-related discipline means being PNGed from unit reunions and the like, which was a very effective tool in the '80s and '90s when there wasn't such a big market for SOF stories, but "you'll never get to see your friends from the unit again" isn't as big a threat these days.
what i want to see out of future democratic party leaders is a recognition that federal spending is legitimately good, that we should do more of it, and that doing so will require collective contribution that many, many people are going to scream absolute bloody murder about
Because her book on nuclear war wasn't aneurysm-inducing enough, I guess
Tweet from the Prime Minister of Israel: "Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Antisemitism knows no limits or boundaries. Israel is attacked because it is the Jewish state. Temple Israel in Detroit was attacked today because it is a Jewish house of worship."
Speaking as a Jew living in Diaspora, who needs to exist as a minority at a time of rising antisemitism, I would really appreciate it if the Prime Minister of a country where I do not live would not say that attacks on a sovereign country are analogous to attacks on a synagogue.
It can be striker-fired if it absolutely must but it's gotta be at least somewhat rare, like a P99 or a Steyr M9. No Glocks or P10s.
You gotta have a unique hammer-fired pistol for someone to take from your corpse as a legendary loot drop while they work their way through you and your fellow minibosses or you're NGMI. I'm sorry I don't make the rules.
NEW, from me: A secret chapter of Cold War history, told here for the first time. A deep cover Soviet Bloc spy in America at the end of the Cold War. The shocking moves by a European intel chief. And the incredible CI chess games by FBI and CIA counterspies.
www.politico.com/news/magazin...
There was discussion among the leftier side of Bluesky a week or two back about how criticism of the DSA IC sucking is silly because existing natsec policymakers also suck but actually have power to implement their bad policy, this seems like a continuation
Mass murder as more content for reactionary manchildren to jack off to, what a fucking time to be alive
I will not be jumping with a parachute packed by the Dort, thank you very much
That Always Sunny joke is 100% true btw, there’s a reef about 1000 feet off the island with some really cool barracuda. But that’s SCUBA not snorkeling
There is a photograph of 11-year-old Peck with Jeffrey Epstein’s sex pavilion in the background.
The YPG were dropped because they had the habit of rejecting a deal, losing the ensuing fight, and then demanding yesterday’s deal now. They also treated Arabs within the AANES *terribly* and the Arab majority areas wanted them out; Kurdish minority governance over those areas was never stable.
The Kurds are not a monolith. Ankara-Erbil ties are close since Barzani keeps diming out PKK members to MiT, and the Turks don’t much like the IRI.
As far as trust, the KRG is not the AANES. The US has kept faith with the Iraqi Kurds since Provide Comfort and has major infrastructure in Erbil.
Eh, that’s a Syrian Kurd thing. We’ve kept the faith with the Iraqi Kurds. What I want to know is why Barzani is suddenly chill with this goat rope given how much he stands to lose — even if nothing goes wrong Iran can make Erbil a very dangerous place to be
Calling themselves “guardians” is lazy hack shit too, there’s any one of a million other things (like espatiers) they could have done. Design-by-committee-ass nomenclature
Well there's pretty big differences in what happened to the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, the AANES was always doomed to collapse and the YPG's hubris is why it went so badly for them
The bigger reason this won't happen is Barzani has a good thing going right now and he's not gonna fuck it up for us
I do think we should seriously look at reopening the Bronco line though, an OV-10H would be way better suited for the COIN CAS and Draco replacement role than OA-1K
It would *probably* fit but unfortunately nobody makes Broncos anymore, you'd probably need to go with C-208 or some shit like that
Not too fond of that Haman fellow
Yeah, I've run into the same thing. You have to explicitly tell it to write the code in R and R alone at the start of each session or it'll waste a ton of tokens doing that
CTACs finally getting to do something related to their JSOC support responsibilities other than watch from the cuck chair
French doctrine is whatever, there's a number of other countries with similar nuclear show-of-force policies (including the Russians, kinda). Pakistani nukes are much scarier to me than French because they do not have real PALs controlling who can employ them
