Some of the servicemen hurt/killed in Yemen during the special forces raid were heroically wounded by their own airplane, a CV-22 Osprey.[fox]
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
Some of the servicemen hurt/killed in Yemen during the special forces raid were heroically wounded by their own airplane, a CV-22 Osprey.[fox]
One reason the Military/Industrial/Congressional Complex* does the stupid things it does, is because it’s able to keep its mistakes secret. If you really want to lose track of $600 billion, like the pentagon has, the best way to do it is to classify the research, then lose the paper-work.
As you can probably guess, I get a lot of emails related to whatever’s going on in the security world. There was a very short buzz around the “Russia Hacking” thing but very few security practitioners care about it at all. Except one, who sent me this:
The Obama administration is – brilliantly – punishing Russia for “hacking” the US election by censuring a few intelligence officers and forcing them to close a “luxurious 45-acre compound” in Maryland.[1]
Dozens of times in the last decade, I’ve encountered information security tropes about cyber-espionage, usually accompanied by a pair of pictures:
I’ve always been interested in naval hijinks, mostly because navies are the premier means of “projecting power” for nation-states.* And, of course, gathering intelligence as well. The US’ military has a huge emphasis on naval force-projection because of the logistics of having a navy: a carrier task force group is a movable city with its own inner supply chain. As mentioned elsewhere, you can tell a lot about the purpose of a nation’s military by its force structure.
(Content Warning: war, death)
I’m going to begin today’s sermon with a transcript from a podcast I recently heard. It’s David Wood, speaking at Politics and Prose on “What Have We Done: The Moral Injury of Our Longest Wars.” Wood’s view is that wars can cause “Moral Injury” – a sort of post-traumatic stress disorder to our sense of right and wrong. The bit that stuck in my mind, which I went back and replayed and bookmarked, was an example that he gave – an example that is very typical of the experiences of many soldiers:
Content warning: War, Death, Violent imagery.
The other day I posted about the Iraqi army advance on Mosul, and observed that one of the vehicles in the picture appeared to be a US-made M-1 Abrams main battle tank.
I didn’t think that, at $5 million apiece, and still being fairly high-tech, the US would let gear like that out into the wild. TL;DR: I hadn’t realized how badly the warmongers in Washington have been screwing up.
In my recent post “Nationalism Is A Lie” there was so much horror behind what I wrote, that I was either going to have to write a textbook-length incoherent screed,* or leave a lot on the table. So I thought that rather than diverticulating into asides, I’d post this piece separately.
Trigger warning: really horrible people doing really horrible things, with a walk-on by the Roman Catholic Church
About a decade ago, I did a series of talks at various conferences entitled “cyberwar is bullshit” – the problem, I felt, was that the US was talking about being deeply afraid of cyberattack from Eurasia (or was it Eastasia?) but there was considerable irresponsible talk about “weapons of mass destruction-like capability.” Industry insiders like myself wound up divided as to whether it was likely/practical, or good marketing/a chance to make a fast buck. There were a lot of fast bucks made.