[greedo]

Exactly. The USAF has been flying Soviet era fighters and helicopters for ages. And I bet the Russians have samples of M1s, M2s, etc. We know the Chinese got stealth technology from the crash of the Stealth Blackhawk that crashed during the Bin Laden mission in Pakistan.

While it's interesting from a opsec standpoint, there was no material loss of valuable information with the posting of this Challenger 2 data. The design and performance specs of a tank that has less than 300 units in use is a gnat on an elephant.

[mandevil]

In my experience, the US Army cared more about securing their stats on what a T-72 or T-90 could do than what a M1 could do. Which is frankly amusing given that the Russians know exactly- even better than the US- what those numbers are. Of course, the key is that they don't want the Russians to know how they know this, and are afraid that discussing it openly will reveal some of that.

In a similar vein, about 20 years ago the NSA declassified the existence of their program, during the Korean War, to intercept and decrypt Communist Ground Control Intercept messages in real time and then pass the information to American fighter sweeps (the fighter pilots were told it was radar guiding them). While the NSA was happy to talk about the results of this decrypting, they haven't (at least as of the last time I checked a few years ago) released any details on what kind of codes the North Koreans/Chinese/Russians used even though obviously all three countries know exactly what they used and how it works. The reason given to me was that revealing even just how the NSA described these codes from half a century ago would reveal too much of how the NSA thinks about cryptography.