194
Declassified US Intelligence Reveals Massive Russian Losses in Ukraine
(www.voanews.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
194 points (96.6% liked)
News
23649 readers
2374 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Sources and methods are never compromised in these releases.
Second, one of the things they teach you in intelligence analysis is to not only read the facts that are being reported (and try to measure their accuracy), but to ask why they’re being reported. Not as in “Why is the NYT making this a headline” - that’s not what matters unless you’re doing media studies or sociology. I mean “Why is the government/organization putting this out there?”
In this case, it’s obvious. There’s a current narrative around the Russian war on Ukraine, and it’s being pushed by some American politicians and news agencies as well as foreign actors, and it’s being used for political effect. There’s perfectly justified reasons for skepticism from numbers published by both Ukraine and Russia for both fog of war and propaganda reasons.
The Biden administration has an active interest in maintaining US and international support for the war, and that’s in danger because of a perception of a lack of success. They need to counter that narrative.
I don’t have any reason to believe that these numbers are wrong - I very much suspect they’re largely right - but the political angle is why they’re being reported, while US intelligence estimates of other conflicts currently going on around the world are not.
I'm obviously not talking about this assessment, which is a product of DOD battlefield analysis.
I'm talking about the hand full of times early on when the US released stories to the press stories about Russian plans. Russia plans a false flag event for provocation, etc. Those events didn't happen because the world knew what they intended. That Intel came from somewhere.
Battlefield analysis in this context would notionally be a product of signals intelligence, photo reconnaissance, and information sharing with allied forces. It’s still sources and methods stuff, and the people doing it are part of the US intelligence community. That includes the branch intelligence services, DIA, CIA, and other three letter agencies.
For something like Putin’s plan on invading on a certain date, those are more going to lean on CIA drawing on resources in the Russian government and military. They will also involve signals and imagery, which often belong to other agencies. In these cases it is still a multi source intelligence product that cannot (in theory) be reverse engineered to leak sources and methods.
Things do leak, of course. I remember a photo published in the congressional record (which made it into Aviation Week iirc) that showed a US Keyhole photo in which you could read the tail numbers on a parked plane. That leaked the resolution of that generation of satellite, which is among the most highly classified subjects.
You are right, though. Sometimes the US will publish otherwise highly classified info, such as was used to document the engineering of WMDs in Iraq. That didn’t work out too well in the end but the general idea was that making a conclusive argument for war justified the potential exposure of that information (and Curveball was I believe already in the US at that time, but it’s been awhile).