[1024core]

> Even a sport watch can be a security threat as demo by some exercise army personnel.

In the early days of the Afghan (or was it Iraq?) war, people used Strava to figure out the locations of American bases. They'd see a bunch of smart watches suddenly wake up in the morning and start exercising at the same time, a dead giveaway.

[Bimos]

Recently a Russian commander got killed because he shared his daily running route on Strava which was seen by the killer.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/11/europe/russian-submarine-...

[cjbgkagh]

I wonder if killing their dumber commanders might inadvertently be helping them…

[Sebb767]

Even steelmanning the argument, it probably doesn't. For one, commanders need some level of experience and training, you can't replace them for free. But more importantly, having a lower technically skill, which might open one up to inadvertently sharing their running route, probably does not correlate too much with the skills required to be a successful commander. Now, in general (hah), stupid people will probably both be more open to these kind of mistakes and be worse commanders, but being a good commander doesn't mean are not making minor opsec mistakes like this, so in the end you will still loose strategically valuable people.

[cjbgkagh]

We disagree on the severity of the mistake, hiding information from adversaries is a core competency and a big part of training. Someone who failed to learn from that training has a low innate intelligence and even if trained is unable to use the training effectively and is a liability.

The CIA for example drills into their people this same information denial training but they appear to neglect randomness so you end up with a bunch of people with the same peculiar behavioral patterns so they’re ironically rather easy to detect if you have access to click stream data. For example, they’re told not to follow each other on social media, but they still interact so you end up with two people who freely follow lots of people who interact with each other frequently but don’t follow each other. It’s weird, I’m not saying everyone who does this is information hiding but you can extract networks of people who behave in this same weird way with each other.

In order to protect the enigma cracking secret the UK randomly allowed themselves to be bombed with a bias towards less strategic targets. That’s the kind of thing you have to do to hide information, letting yourself be bombed should denote just how serious it is.

[hackernewds]

what a strange argument to make

[cjbgkagh]

Yeah, I'm serious, I'm not making a 'if you kill your enemies they win' argument but part of learning by doing is having the people who make poor decisions suffer the consequence of those decisions so that there are fewer people around making poor decisions. Especially in the military where you're spending other peoples money and other people suffer the consequences of your misadventures. Of course there is quite a lot of randomness in outcomes, but a blunder of this magnitude is inexcusable considering their line of work. Because of the corruption in the Russian army I would assume there is only a weak link between competence and rank and having an actual enemy around to punish mistakes would be helpful in winnowing out the morons. I'm pretty sure Russia knows they're corrupt and have deliberately adopted a learn by doing strategy to improve their warfighting capability for this very reason.

A big part of the process in undermining an opposition is promoting the worst aspects in them. Instead of killing off a moron, perhaps secretly encourage them to run for office and donate to their political campaigns, secretly buy media coverage for them, etc.

[naasking]

Arguments based on natural selection are sometimes unintuitive!

[ethbr1]

It's fair, but they've been working on improving the quality of their officers since 1904.

[eps]

Don't know if you were attempting to make a joke, but Stalin purged the army of older, most qualified officers in the late 1930s, because they came from the pre-revolution times and were viewed as a loyalty risk. One of his biggest blunders that severely disadvantaged the country when the WW2 started.

[vetinari]

Many white-era officers did serve in the Red Army; including Zhukov and his ex-boss Rokossovskij. Being a cadre in pre-revolution times wasn't the issue itself; willingness to sabotage their own country was.

Incidentally, the blunder in the 1941 in the Red Army was an issue of loyalty indeed. Navy didn't experience the same problem.

[ethbr1]

The short version: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yzGqp3R4Mx4

[rsynnott]

I mean, I assume it's mostly a joke, but if you assume that their system of selecting high officers isn't merit-based (which you would tend to assume given that it is Putin's Russia) then assassination which preferentially kills off the more incompetent officers would indeed be beneficial to the military as a whole.

[balls187]

Neither. The US’ wars in both places predate general availability “smart” devices by quite some time.

There were devices like black berries and tmobile sidekick, and gps trackers from garmin (etc) but I think the incidents you were referring to happened much later (2018 vs 2001/2002).

[cookieswumchorr]

but the us only left Afganistan two years ago

[ezconnect]

The issue with the watch is the data is publicly available (social aspect) and requires no effort on the other side to figure out.

[spacebanana7]

I believe the incident you’re referring to happened in 2018 [1].

Also happened across a few American bases across Syria, Yemen, Niger, Afghanistan, Djibouti and more. Some British and Russian bases were highlighted too.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42853072

[malaya_zemlya]

That happened not that long ago, in 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...