Dear pundits. There's a really easy way to fact-check whether US ships fired tomahawks into somewhere. Well, easy if you're prepared ahead of time, which you should be bc this is your job. Also, OPSEC / COMSEC thread, and how the Navy plays checkers instead of chess with COMSEC
So all US Navy ships have internet and the sailors are allowed to use it. So then, there's a constant flow of posts, reposts, likes, RTs, etc to public social media accounts from all US Navy ships at any given time. Except for basically one of two times.
One is when the comms gear that does the internet breaks. The other is during Restricted Communications postures. There's a few variants of that but one thing they all have in common is the internet is turned off for everyone except a couple people. So
If you know where ships are deployed (coarsely by official public information, and easily enhanced in resolution by also public information) and you've enumerated public accounts already then whenever a ship goes dark it's statistically obvious. They're either rivercity or broken
This is at least as big a deal as the #Strava "breach" but no one's noticed it yet. So the logic behind RC postures downing the internet but not, say, SHF itself, is that they don't want sailors to do something like tell family they're about to strike XYZ before a strike happens
But if I'm SECNAV, I'd get rid of the postures that down services but not antennas. If you need to down an antenna itself for stealth, fine (whole separate rant here about how they used to try to exclude SHF bc they confuse "line-of-sight" comms with something literally only LOS)
Or at least, I would in the case of an impending strike. Just have analysts watch those ships' comms for the 48 preceding hrs. I guarantee, maybe not Syria, but Russia & China knew of the strike long before it happened purely bc which ships and where went to a certain RC posture
(And intel agencies have actual intel to add to this. This, I can do by writing a script and letting it run. Then every so often I know when something was happening. This might or might not be something I already do just to sanitize propaganda from my inbound news. Just saying.)
Anyway, sidebar, big navy got a lesson on sidelobes and SHF by me and a few others one time so presumably that RC vulnerability is still fixed. And for everyone else, just absorb the thread as a lesson on how the absence of comms can be just as telling a COMSEC violation as comms
Related to Big Navy being technically incompetent when it comes to certain policies, maybe later I'll tell you a funny story about ordnance and personnel RADHAZ postures and people not understanding how phased array radars work
