Item — HN Reader

Not a crime. The US doesn't have an equivalent of the UK's official secrets act. I don't think it's actually a crime, although there could be court injunction against publishing, which you could then be in contempt of if you went ahead.

If you have a security clearance, it's possibly unwise to download/have this information on your own, especially if you have had secret access to it, mainly because there is going to be a bunch of counterintelligence to figure out how things were leaked (presumably PFC Manning, but who knows?). It would complicate things during an investigation if you had information on your hard drive, even if you could document that it had come from an outside commercial source. With some information, even if it is "known" by the public, having access to it through classified channels is a way to vet the information, so if someone posted "super secret a" to a website, and you commented "oh, yes, I've heard of that", you would actually be corroborating information and leaking classified information.

FWIW, nothing in these seems to be particularly damning of the US. It is basically "war is hell", "mistakes are made", "we like to put a spin on things". It's pretty much par for the course for special operations forces to do things and then have the positive outcomes attributed to indigenous forces, and the negative outcomes hushed up.

There probably would be some net benefit to prompt declassification and publishing of much of this information. I don't condone illegal leaks, but there is definitely a public interest in having the public informed about what is going on. Aside from the reporting on TF 373, nothing in the NY Times or Guardian analysis of the documents (I haven't looked at the raw documents) is a big deal. As far as I can tell, nothing particularly sensitive about 373 was published, either.

1 comments

I thought the finding that the insurgents are using US provided stinger missiles against US aircraft was fairly damning... it shows that past US intervention has unforeseen consequences.

Also, it's pretty significant (to a lot of people) to observe that all this continued under Obama... that there has been no improvement in the way the war effort is being waged.

I don't see anything saying the enemy is using US provided stinger missiles against US aircraft. There was a report of "smoke trail", which may or may not be accurate. If accurate, I would assume it's a soviet weapon (SA-7 or successor), or maybe a Pakistani stinger clone, but very unlikely a US stinger given in the early 1980s.

Yes, a lot of this is interesting, but isn't far beyond that is available in the news, at least if you have a basic understanding of military operations in Afghanistan. If you read 2-3 of the popular military blogs (Michael Yon, especially), you would know 95+% of this.

Unlikelier considering the Stinger is filled with oddball proprietary batteries, and a canister of argon (for cooling the seeker head right before launch) that I've been told leaks over time.

That's true, but depot-level maintenance could certainly deal with that. Taliban in caves in Afghanistan probably not, but ISI/AQ Khan organizations in Pakistan are fairly sophisticated (they built nuclear weapons, after all).

More unlikely because the stingers given to the ISI/Afghans were early models with less effective seekers (more easily jammed) than the missiles available today from other sources. Current generation Stingers are the best, but current missiles from China, Russia, etc. are probably superior to first generation Stingers, especially ones that have been carted around Afghanistan.

US military helicopters and other aircraft have a variety of countermeasures -- electronic systems, well chosen flight paths, low altitude operations, and multi-ship operations (where one helicopter supports another), plus support from other aircraft for ECM. Compared to a commercial airliner, they're non-trivial to shoot down. There are plenty of contractor/NGO/etc. operated Mi-8s and other crappy ex-Soviet helicopters flying, but those crash on their own quite frequently -- no one needs to shoot them down.

There was a period where people were really scared that stingers would wind up in the hands of international terrorists who would shoot down a commercial airliner in the civilized world. There was a huge CIA buyback program for these weapons; during the Afghan civil war, they were actually too expensive to expend, and were mainly just kept by various leaders as totems of power.

I really doubt US stingers are being used to shoot down US military aircraft in Afghanistan. I admit I'm fairly biased on this, being a frequent passenger, but I'm pretty sure small arms fire and RPGs (unguided rockets) are still the primary threats.

The countermeasures don't reduce the chance of hit manyfold, certainly less than twice. Jamming is useless against heat-seeking heads, and flares help only so much.

It's pretty certain stingers can be, and probably were used to attack NATO aircraft, successfully or not. Stinger specimen were found as late as in early 2000s in Chechnya, showing there's still quite a few in circulation.

AN/ALQ-144A and AN/ALQ-157M is an IR jammer, and effective against IR MANPADS. The newest Stingers are IR + UV to defeat this. This is the "disco ball".

I don't know how effective these are (I suspect the primary defense is route planning and flying low/fast), and no one who actually knows the effectiveness would be able to comment.