Posted on Feb 20, 2015
Capt Cyber Systems Operations
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The Pentagon briefed the public on it's plans for taking Mosul from ISIS in April/May. It doesn't seem like a smart move to me. What do you guys think?
Posted in these groups: PentagonMicrest IntelligenceMultinational force iraq emblem  mnf i   1 5 IraqIsis logo ISIS
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Responses: 16
MSG Intermediate Care Technician
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To me, that violates OPSEC. Also, if one recalls, Geraldo Rivera was kicked out of Iraq when he was reporting troop movement/plans.
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CPT Army Reserve Unit Administrator
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CPT Multifunctional Logistician
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I don't like it one bit. If I were an Iraqi Soldier training to kick doors in Mosul, I'd be kinda pissed off right now. I'm not sure why the standard rules of OPSEC don't seem to apply here...
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SPC Angel Guma
SPC Angel Guma
10 y
OPSEC only applies to social media. Not when said individuals are brown-nosing the media and government elites. Then it gets classified as something else
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CPT Multifunctional Logistician
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They tied the approximate number of troops involved to their planned battle positions (generic, but still...) and put it all on a tentative timeframe. Da'esh now knows they have approximately 2 to 3 months to reinforce their positions and maybe even launch a preemptive spoiling attack to disrupt the offensive. Unless this is part of some elaborate disinformation strategy, I am having a hard time understanding why they would put all this out there. I hope there are some frustrated staff officers in the Pentagon rewriting the entire battle plan right now. If not, there could be a lot more Iraqi and Kurdish casualties that wouldn't have been necessary.
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LTC Paul Labrador
LTC Paul Labrador
10 y
Don't think current Admin is sophisticated enough to for this to be a disinformation campaign. As i've stated earlier, to me, this smacks of a political move to give the impression that they are doing something.
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CPT Multifunctional Logistician
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SPC Angel Guma, OPSEC applies to much more than just social media. Social media has been the popular OPSEC focus as of late, but it includes much more. According to AR 350-1, Ch. 1, 1-5:
" OPSEC is a process of identifying critical information and analyzing friendly actions attendant to military operations and other activities to—
(a) Identify those actions that can be observed by adversary intelligence systems.
(b) Determine indicators and vulnerabilities that adversary intelligence systems might obtain to be able to interpret or piece together to derive critical information in time to use against U.S. and/or friendly missions and poses an unacceptable risk.
(c) Select and execute measures that eliminate the risk to friendly actions and operations or reduce to an acceptable level."
OPSEC directly supports military operations and it can be violated by a lot more than just posting sensitive info to your facebook page. Simply aggregating several pieces of unclassified information into one place (like a news article) can raise the classification level from unclassified to secret ot even top secret. I feel like that is what happened in this case. The timeframe on its own wasn't an OPSEC violation, but when tied with troop numbers and locations, it gives away essential secrecy. Essential secrecy is defined as the condition achieved from the denial of critical information to adversaries through the combined efforts of thraditional security programs and the operations security process (OPSEC). AR 350-1, 1-6.
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