
The War Logs: An archive of classified military documents - tysone
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html
======
Rod
Also on the Guardian and the Spiegel:

[http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-
war-l...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-logs)

[http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.h...](http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html)

The leaked files on WikiLeaks:

<http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Afghan_War_Diary,_2004-2010>

~~~
mturmon
The Guardian's reporting package is considerably more comprehensive than the
NYT.

------
elblanco
Important to all this, "The editors in chief of SPIEGEL, the New York Times
and the Guardian have agreed that they would not publish especially sensitive
information in the classified material -- like the names of the US military's
Afghan informants or information that could create additional security risks
for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan. "

~~~
tomjen3
It is properly good that they don't publish the names, but "information that
could create additional security risks for soldiers stationed in Afghanistan"
is outside what a newspaper should care about - it should be focused on
getting news, not help or hinder a war.

~~~
pistoriusp
If you're a citizen of a country at war wouldn't hindering the war be
considered treason?

Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit
of effort would prevent potential harm?

There's something good to be said about been good. We are not robots.

~~~
buro9
"Besides that. Why would you want to potentially harm someone when a tiny bit
of effort would prevent potential harm?"

To prevent greater harm to others.

------
Ras_
"Eight Americans were killed and 23 were wounded when 175 to 200 insurgents
outnumbered and attacked this isolated command outpost in Nuristan Province.

This report shows how insurgents were successfully able to cut off small,
isolated outposts like Keating and exposes the weakness of an early American
strategy to set up these centers near the border of Pakistan."

[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/26warlogs.html#repo...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/26warlogs.html#report/1892FD4E-1517-911C-C5601B60F44B345B)

Immersive, in a horrible, but educating way. Confusion, helplessness...

~~~
rdl
It would be kind of interesting to reformat this as it originally appeared --
line by line as IRC messages in mIRC on someone's plywood shack or tent
operations center.

~~~
pistoriusp
They actually use IRC? That's very interesting to me... Do you know where I
could read a bit more about that?

I find it fascinating that these people are typing to each other? Is it to
make sure the commands and information is 100% clear? Is IRC the most
efficient manner to do it?

Do they use mIRC?

~~~
rdl
Yes, mIRC on windows xp or vista, backbone of military command and control. It
is kind of sad. People in the operations center ("TOC") sit there monitoring
HF radios and watching 2-8 mIRC windows for various networks (higher
headquarters, medevac, artillery fires, etc.).

[http://trout.snt.utwente.nl/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=sh...](http://trout.snt.utwente.nl/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=218281&page=1&PHPSESSID=4b3c5fb288b070b9dbe27df28932c74e)

[http://ircreport.com/blog/20100405170/armed-forces-using-
mir...](http://ircreport.com/blog/20100405170/armed-forces-using-mirc/)

They also do a lot of crappy conferences using the Adobe desktop VTC product
(I think branded as Acrobat), and of course HUGE volumes of Microsoft
PowerPoint. Email is sent out as attached powerpoints containing 2-3 lines of
text, often, rather than a simple text email.

It is quite possibly the worst IT environment I can imagine.

The irony here is that the information in the wikileaks release (especially on
the Guardian site) is now vastly better organized and more accessible than it
ever was internally to the military!

[http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/02/17/34550-a-tactical-
comman...](http://www.army.mil/-news/2010/02/17/34550-a-tactical-commanders-
vision-of-ideal-communications/)

[http://books.google.com/books?id=VQQqDxmpG9IC&pg=PA34...](http://books.google.com/books?id=VQQqDxmpG9IC&pg=PA34&lpg=PA34&dq=mIRC+Afghanistan+iraq+siprnet&source=bl&ots=yaZmS7yXo_&sig=e1mJegWY1fP_vPbygqyQktFgtQ0&hl=en&ei=cXxNTI7mKZzrnQekzoXYCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=2&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false)

[http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Decentralized+fires+in+Afghani...](http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Decentralized+fires+in+Afghanistan%3A+a+glimpse+of+the+future%3F-a0113194346)

<http://www.scribd.com/doc/1440756/US-Air-Force-AFD070205069>

~~~
korch
As an IRC junkie, this is an incredible tidbit of info to find out. So all
those wasted years of scripting irc bots could have real-world application at
the highest levels of global warfare!

> _LET'S PLAY GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR? Y/N_

~~~
rdl
I think it's kind of sad that they don't have bots, usually (they rely on
humans to transcribe from voice radio to IRC and back again), and use mIRC vs.
something like irssi or even BitchX.

Also I doubt people do channel takeovers, banning, amusing hostmasks, etc.
Warrior using IRC != IRC Warrior.

------
matt1
Is it a crime to download or analyze the data in these documents?

Edit: Clearly it's not if the NYTimes is doing it, but out of curiosity, why
_isn't_ it?

~~~
rdl
Not a crime. The US doesn't have an equivalent of the UK's official secrets
act. I don't think it's actually a crime, although there could be court
injunction against publishing, which you could then be in contempt of if you
went ahead.

If you have a security clearance, it's possibly unwise to download/have this
information on your own, especially if you have had secret access to it,
mainly because there is going to be a bunch of counterintelligence to figure
out how things were leaked (presumably PFC Manning, but who knows?). It would
complicate things during an investigation if you had information on your hard
drive, even if you could document that it had come from an outside commercial
source. With some information, even if it is "known" by the public, having
access to it through classified channels is a way to vet the information, so
if someone posted "super secret a" to a website, and you commented "oh, yes,
I've heard of that", you would actually be corroborating information and
leaking classified information.

FWIW, nothing in these seems to be particularly damning of the US. It is
basically "war is hell", "mistakes are made", "we like to put a spin on
things". It's pretty much par for the course for special operations forces to
do things and then have the positive outcomes attributed to indigenous forces,
and the negative outcomes hushed up.

There probably would be some net benefit to prompt declassification and
publishing of much of this information. I don't condone illegal leaks, but
there is definitely a public interest in having the public informed about what
is going on. Aside from the reporting on TF 373, nothing in the NY Times or
Guardian analysis of the documents (I haven't looked at the raw documents) is
a big deal. As far as I can tell, nothing particularly sensitive about 373 was
published, either.

~~~
grandalf
I thought the finding that the insurgents are using US provided stinger
missiles against US aircraft was fairly damning... it shows that past US
intervention has unforeseen consequences.

Also, it's pretty significant (to a lot of people) to observe that all this
continued under Obama... that there has been no improvement in the way the war
effort is being waged.

~~~
rdl
I don't see anything saying the enemy is using US provided stinger missiles
against US aircraft. There was a report of "smoke trail", which may or may not
be accurate. If accurate, I would assume it's a soviet weapon (SA-7 or
successor), or maybe a Pakistani stinger clone, but very unlikely a US stinger
given in the early 1980s.

Yes, a lot of this is interesting, but isn't far beyond that is available in
the news, at least if you have a basic understanding of military operations in
Afghanistan. If you read 2-3 of the popular military blogs (Michael Yon,
especially), you would know 95+% of this.

~~~
wooby
Unlikelier considering the Stinger is filled with oddball proprietary
batteries, and a canister of argon (for cooling the seeker head right before
launch) that I've been told leaks over time.

~~~
rdl
That's true, but depot-level maintenance could certainly deal with that.
Taliban in caves in Afghanistan probably not, but ISI/AQ Khan organizations in
Pakistan are fairly sophisticated (they built nuclear weapons, after all).

More unlikely because the stingers given to the ISI/Afghans were early models
with less effective seekers (more easily jammed) than the missiles available
today from other sources. Current generation Stingers are the best, but
current missiles from China, Russia, etc. are probably superior to first
generation Stingers, especially ones that have been carted around Afghanistan.

US military helicopters and other aircraft have a variety of countermeasures
-- electronic systems, well chosen flight paths, low altitude operations, and
multi-ship operations (where one helicopter supports another), plus support
from other aircraft for ECM. Compared to a commercial airliner, they're non-
trivial to shoot down. There are plenty of contractor/NGO/etc. operated Mi-8s
and other crappy ex-Soviet helicopters flying, but those crash on their own
quite frequently -- no one needs to shoot them down.

There was a period where people were really scared that stingers would wind up
in the hands of international terrorists who would shoot down a commercial
airliner in the civilized world. There was a huge CIA buyback program for
these weapons; during the Afghan civil war, they were actually too expensive
to expend, and were mainly just kept by various leaders as totems of power.

I really doubt US stingers are being used to shoot down US military aircraft
in Afghanistan. I admit I'm fairly biased on this, being a frequent passenger,
but I'm pretty sure small arms fire and RPGs (unguided rockets) are still the
primary threats.

~~~
varjag
The countermeasures don't reduce the chance of hit manyfold, certainly less
than twice. Jamming is useless against heat-seeking heads, and flares help
only so much.

It's pretty certain stingers can be, and probably were used to attack NATO
aircraft, successfully or not. Stinger specimen were found as late as in early
2000s in Chechnya, showing there's still quite a few in circulation.

~~~
rdl
AN/ALQ-144A and AN/ALQ-157M is an IR jammer, and effective against IR MANPADS.
The newest Stingers are IR + UV to defeat this. This is the "disco ball".

I don't know how effective these are (I suspect the primary defense is route
planning and flying low/fast), and no one who actually knows the effectiveness
would be able to comment.

------
DanielBMarkham
_Much of the information — raw intelligence_

As a libertarian I am deeply concerned with the huge intelligence complex the
United States has set up. I am concerned with the loss of person freedoms in
the country, and I am concerned that our political leaders -- of every party
-- lie to us rather than deal with some of these serious issues.

But I refuse to take an all-or-nothing view. Our intelligence services also
exist for a very good reason, and they do necessary and critical work.

That's why I remain convinced that this leaker should receive the death
penalty. It's not up to each person in an intelligence organization to make
huge moral judgments about the disposition of millions of documents. If you
have moral problems, resign.

And to suggest, as some have, that the _newspapers_ have any idea what to
publish or not is ludicrous. Intelligence is a process of putting puzzle
pieces together. Unless the newspapers were to know what _every_ other foreign
intelligence service knew, they couldn't know which pieces fill out the puzzle
for which agencies -- or what impact each little piece could have.

Hell, I'm even for publishing secret documents if they show how the political
class is bullshitting us, as in the Pentagon Papers. But this goes way far and
beyond that. We will never know who got killed because of this jerk.

And now for the political/systems note. It seems that as society is getting
more and more full of rules that we get these sudden breakouts of flash-back.
It's almost like the more the system tries to control itself, the bigger the
oscillations and the more unstable it becomes. Just guessing.

~~~
grandalf
I don't think it's contradictory to both support Wikileaks in principle and
also condone stiff penalties for leakers in principle: Such penalties are
legitimate insofar as the state is legitimate, and even most libertarians
grant it some legitimacy.

Surely if a leak is worth leaking then it's worth suffering the penalty for
leaking it if caught. Thousands of people are dying in Afghanistan and so the
people who risked their careers, lives, etc. to get this information out are
heroes.

The value of Wikileaks comes from the sensitivity of the information... If
there were no penalty for disclosing it, then it wouldn't really be secret.
The existence of Wikileaks diminishes the ability of any organization to
conduct secret operations, and so we can expect secrecy to be used less often
and more judiciously _by everyone_.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I agree. I think there is a difference between passionate advocate of a cause
that requires some public leaks -- and being able to accept the consequences,
and being an armchair, couch-potato anarchist.

Last night my youngest son and I watched "Tora Tora Tora!", the story of the
attack on Pearl Harbor.

Back then, the United States had cracked the Japanese embassy codes. We were
literally reading all their messages before they were.

This information -- that we had cracked the codes and what the traffic
contained -- was limited to only 12 people in the entire government. After the
president left one of the reports in a waste-basket, _he was taken off the
list_.

Revealing even one of these messages would have been cause for long-term
imprisonment. For a member of the military, sworn to protect the constitution,
to release hundreds of thousands? I can't imagine any worse intelligence
catastrophe. And that includes losing the A-bomb secrets.

The activist (or foreign intelligence service) has a cause and is will to
suffer the consequences for using the information. The anarchist has only
chaos as a cause. The activist selects what to leak, selects how to leak it,
and sometimes dies for the revelation -- a fair penalty since leaking
information can easily cause the deaths of others. The anarchist simply wants
openness and lack of secrecy -- their enemy is reality itself, the fact that
secrecy is necessary in some cases. A much more dangerous situation.

~~~
grandalf
Well put.

I think there is an inherent tension between the state and the governed, which
is amplified when there is secret information involved.

A military officer sworn to obey the chain of command is not a perfect vessel
for secrets, which is why there are all sorts of levels of trust/clearance,
etc. Why? Because most humans can be counted upon to exercise their individual
moral judgment on matters of grave importance.

The grouping of minor leakers into the category of armchair anarchists
diminishes the role of independent moral discretion that may have motivated
their actions. Even if it's poorly formed/articulated, I think the leakers
have a sense of the moral consequences of their compliance with secrecy rules,
which explains why they risk punishment to bring forth the leak.

Though derived from a chaotic and political mess, state actions (war plans,
etc.) must be treated by the state as essentially sacred (and to go against it
must be considered a "high crime"). Once in a while a person has the
opportunity to see state actions through his/her individual moral lens and
also feels empowered to act upon that feeling.

As misguided as that feeling often is, I think that its presence is a major
force in the prevention of tyranny.

------
ilamont
The "explosive" Wikileaks collection will not have the same impact as the
Pentagon Papers. The documents seem to amplify or confirm what many have
suspected for years in terms of Pakistani intelligence collaboration with
militants.

~~~
Rod
Exposing the truth is not a popularity contest. The goal is not to take
Ellsberg's place, the goal is to inform the people of what their government is
doing with the taxpayers' dollars.

Yes, we already knew about Pakistan's intelligence collaborating with the
enemy. But did you know for sure that the Taliban were shooting down U.S.
choppers with _stinger_ missiles? I did not. I do now.

~~~
curtis
Do you mean specifically "Stinger" missiles, or simply "man portable surface
to air missiles"? The difference is fairly important.

~~~
rdl
The scary thing is that Pakistan apparently now produces "Stingers" as well
(ANZA-II); probably superior to the other foreign MANPADS out there. We let
them distribute thousands to the Muj in Afghanistan vs. the Soviets, and they
apparently reverse engineered some.

~~~
Maktab
The Anza range of MANPADs is based on Chinese MANPAD designs, themselves
clones of Soviet/Russian MANPADs, and not on the Stinger. If you view photos
of the Anza system the resemblance to Eastern Bloc weapons like the SA-7
Strela are quite clear, whereas it seems to share very little if anything with
the Stinger.

Neither the Anza nor the Stinger (with the exception of the unordered Block II
variant) could be regarded as superior to all other foreign MANPADs as both
are handily outranged and otherwise bettered by newer fourth-generation MANPAD
systems.

People need to get over the idea that any mention of a surface-to-air missile
in Afghanistan must mean it's a Stinger. It's unlikely any of those ancient
Stingers still work and the Soviet/Russian MANPAD variants were distributed so
widely around the world that pretty much every two-bit terrorist has one these
days.

~~~
rdl
Sort of off-topic (it's highly doubtful the Taliban have the latest
generation...), but which MANPADS would you consider top for the anti-
blackhawk mission? The Starstreak?

~~~
Maktab
Hard to say really, as it's been a while since I dove into this subject. But
yes, considering the missile approach warning systems, directed infrared
countermeasures and countermeasure dispensers available for use on helicopters
today, it's probably fair to say that a beam-riding SACLOS missile like the
Starstreak is likely to be amongst the most effective against helicopters.

------
grandalf
Has anyone on HN donated to Wikileaks? I have to admit I'm afraid to do so.

~~~
rdl
I do think they did a more respectable job of releasing this information than
they did with the Iraq Apache guncam footage. It's unedited, relatively
unbiased, and they did go out of their way to redact specific irrelevant but
potentially damaging information (names of Afghans). I think the involvement
of "real journalists" probably helped a lot.

~~~
grandalf
I agree. They showed a bit of discretion and also managed to provide a
resource to established media outlets.

With this sort of collaboration, vetting, etc, I really think it's hard to
make the case that Wikileaks is a bad thing. In this case it
empowered/emboldened the NY Times to write a series of stories that never
would have been written.

------
Jach
I know this isn't exactly on topic, but a query for summary like '%killed%'
returns 666 records...

------
numeromancer
What kind of soul-rot afflicts a man who can't say "What the documents
circulated by WikiLeaks say isn't true anymore", but must say instead "The
documents circulated by WikiLeaks do not reflect the current on-ground
realities"?

~~~
rdl
He's Pakistani; Pakistani (and Indian) English tends to have different
phrasings -- probably tending toward stilted and archaic to western taste.

I think he was just trying to say "it's not like that NOW" without saying it
was necessarily true in the past. Passive voice, indirection, implication,
etc. all have a long tradition in bureaucracy.

Also, he's an ISI commander, so there is no chance he has soul-rot, as he has
no soul.

~~~
numeromancer
I don't know Pakistani, but I don't think that's the cause of the awkward
phrasing. It's more likely that he has picked up bureaucratic English too
well.

