More leaked documents have appeared on the internet, and online sleuths have tracked down the most likely source of them. My statements yesterday turned out to be (mostly) correct. Furthermore, there are some interesting insights about the thought processes happening inside the Pentagon right now that I would like to discuss.
Like some of my other posts, there’s a corresponding video I recorded, for those of you who like listening 🙂
In yesterday’s video, I made an analysis of the information presented in some of the leaked slides, as well as an assessment on if they’re genuine, and what the cause of the leak might have been.
Synopsis of what I said:
-I think these slides are genuine, because replicating them without making mistakes would be enormously difficult. Based on my own first-hand experience, I didn’t see anything in these slides that seemed wrong or faked.
-The leak might have been intentional, but it could have been accidental spillage (someone taking the photo out of carelessness or stupidity but not intending it to go public). It could also be a deliberate leak as an attempt at military deception against the Russians.
I went on to say that the equipment load out and training regimen for the proposed nine Ukrainian battalions to be trained in the West showed a particular desperation, because lightly trained conscripts riding MaxxPros and M113s just aren’t particularly survivable in a conventional war against a peer opponent.
The burn rate and onhand stockpile numbers for GMLRS and 155mm shells was alarming. In particular, at the end of February, HIMARS launchers in Ukraine had fired just a little over 9,600 rounds, or a little over 40 a day on average since they arrived in country, and only had 250 rounds left -meaning that if they fired 14 GMLRS rounds a day, they would run out by 18 March (as indicated on the slide).
This seems to confirm my earlier articles that the Pentagon was trying to keep 12 operational launchers at any given time, as that was the maximum number they could support with ammunition. This also suggests that the Russian MoD are telling the truth when they say they have destroyed some HIMARS launchers. If they had destroyed none, that would mean there are at least 30 HIMARS launchers in operation, and as we can see from this slide, there’s not nearly enough ammo for them. It would be like a platoon of 30 soldiers with 14 bullets for the day. It doesn’t make sense.
By the way, one of the reasons I suggested that this leak might have been accidental spillage, and not a deliberate leak to the press, is because of how carelessly the slide printouts were photographed. The person who did it made no attempt to sanitize the surface he was working on, leaving personal possessions clearly visible that might be linked back to him.
And apparently, this is likely what happened. Social media users on Gab and Twitter are claiming that these leaked documents were traced back to a Discord community that has since been deleted. A guy named Lucca was the one who claims to have initially made the discovery. According to him, a Discord user was arguing with other trolls and started furiously uploading documents to prove that he was right.
As absurd as this story sounds, it’s entirely possible. Idiots uploading classified military documents to social media and video game forums is a fairly widespread and well-publicized problem. It’s not far-fetched that someone got carried away and started uploading pictures of documents he was working with to win arguments, believing that they wouldn’t spread beyond the spaces he was talking in.
That could also explain why there were two distinct releases of classified material. A handful got out of Discord and went viral, causing people privy to the original conversation to realize they weren’t a joke and completely serious, so went back and found the original archives to release everything else. And yes, weirdos who would do something this ridiculous are common in the dank offices and corridors of the Pentagon. I find this explanation completely believable.
One detail that almost every mainstream western outlet from CNN to the NYT latched on is that one of the slides, specifically, the one listing estimated casualties from both sides, had been obviously altered. This is true. Here’s a comparison I’ve found of what is (allegedly) the original, and the badly photoshopped version:
If you look closely, you can see that whoever did this altered the image by just rearranging the digits to create false numbers. An obvious fake. However, the original unaltered version is apparently available, and it is revealing. Or, perhaps, baffling, because it appears that analysts in the highest levels of the Pentagon are just scanning open-source websites like Oryx for their own reports. In other words, the Pentagon isn’t using super high-tech Star Wars technology – they’re just reading aggregated estimates made by other people and stealing their work. The bigger potential problem with this method, besides it being more than a little lazy, is that if sites like Oryx are wrong, that means top-level briefings to the Joint Chiefs of Staff are also wrong.
I believe this accusation is true, and I’ll tell you why from personal experience. Back in 2015, the senior NCO for our intelligence staff section told me, in no uncertain terms, that ISIS would collapse in three months. It was the funniest things anyone has ever said to me (and no, ISIS did not collapse in three months). So basically, let me explain the problem to you. These administrative type guys are required to produce daily briefings like the ones that were leaked. Unfortunately, most people just don’t have something new to say every day, even in the military. But they do have to say something every day so they look productive. And, unfortunately, creating good information products takes a huge amount of work. It’s much easier, and it’s no secret, that intelligence people just look at open source material on the internet when generating their own reports. They generally don’t use super-secret wonder tools like in a Tom Clancy book. And frankly, technology’s ability to glean useful information about the enemy, or even your own allies, is wildly exaggerated. Consider how we are to this day still uncertain about the exact casualties in major battles during the Global War on Terror, like Operation Anaconda. Very often, we just have no idea, and stealing the work of someone else who also has no idea doesn’t make your briefing more true and accurate.
But still, it’s pretty based to leak secret slides just to win an argument on the internet.
Ian Kummer
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My understanding is that within the DoD world, people are not allowed to bring cell phones into rooms that contain classified Secret documents. And these documents are stored in safes, and a log is supposed to be kept of who takes on out, who puts it back, and when. While its not like someone is at the door searching for cell phones (people entering these areas with cellphones deliberately or by accident is not unusual), this involves going into a secure area with a cellphone, removing a classified document from the safe, logging this, then photographing it in the area, or taking the document with you home and photographing it. These are all fairly serious security breaches, and its hard to imagine someone doing all that to win an internet argument. Plus this incident is almost certainly being investigated.
A separate point is that, while both putting open source data in briefings, and getting into a situation where you put something up on a slide to having something on a slide, are common, each of the services do supposedly have their own intel branches or agencies. So if the leadership really wanted to, they could ask their in house intel branches to get them actual intelligence and avoid being fed propaganda by the civilian letter agencies and/ or media organizations.
Yes, mobile devices can’t go into the secure area with you. But it looks like he took these printed documents home with him, judging from the pictures (I talked about that at length in the previous post too). It is a serious incident, though also not the end of the world because these were old slides and not really anything on them that would actually be useful to the other side.
The figures on these slides, are, unfortunately, put in there by the intelligence guys themselves.
Could he have pulled them out of a burn bag? Maybe explains why we didn’t get the whole briefing, but select pages instead.
I’ve seen the burn bag theory. Sure. Stuff is supposed to go thru a shredder (the kind that shreds it down to little squares, not strips), then the scraps are burned. But I think it wasn’t even that complex. He just downloaded and printed.
Z blog did a lengthy examination of this leak and made a good case that it is fake:
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29693
His argument essentially is that it is the sort of leak the supports the official narrative.