TXSG8R

Yea, if anything it’s even worse for their EU membership now that they are losing infrastructure and facing huge rebuild bills. The EU doesn’t want to add to PIIGS. It’s probably another reason Russia turned to bombing the shit out of cities.

I should have read more of the thread, others already covered the meat of my post. To add for clarity, the US does not deal with lethal chemical or bio weapons as policy. We maintain facilities to research defensive and detection methods, but we don’t manufacture or weaponize any of it. We have one response to CBRN, and that’s nuclear. That’s why the NORKs are never coming across the dmz. Their entire plan is to flood the run to Seoul with chemical attacks, which means we are making a lot of NK into a parking lot.

It depends, the good CBRN attacks are fast but non-persistent. You want to use it to clean an area and then disperse so your troops can move in. Chemical attacks are much more reliable in that regard. Most have an immediate effect, but have a predictable fall off as they disperse. Bio attacks aren’t as predictable, usually harder to manufacture, stores and deliver, and have much longer ramp up to impact. VX is a chemical attack. Anthrax is a bio attack. If you want to kill all the troops in a fighting position so you can roll through, you use a chemical weapon. If you want to inflict longer term mass suffering, crater morale, and reduce fighting effectiveness for something like the siege of an entrenched city/population, bio is the better choice.

We have drones that marines can operate, so they are pretty damn easy.

To expand on this thought. I doubt we will ever get an honest accounting out of Russia barring someone offing Putin, but I’m really curious if history will look back and credit the Olympics and global warming from ultimately doing Russia in. If this kicked off a month or two ago the conditions are there for Russia to roll across more terrain and probably lock Kiev down closer to their original estimates.

I believe he thought he had the hook deep enough and with Covid driven inflation Europe wouldn’t be able to wriggle free. Waiting for NS2 to be flowing would have been even safer, but my guess is he thought with Covid starting to wane he wouldn’t have better economic conditions to lock Europe in.

It’s week 2, and the Russians haven’t even gotten serious about civilian casualties yet.

I’m ignorant on squid warfare, especially on the Russian side. I thought I had read reports of them shooting land based targets with their boats.

I had it first!

People need to understand that a no-fly zone would have no real impact on Russia’s capability. They can level Kiev with artillery and MLRS from Belarus. They can level most of the southern areas with naval guns. For the stuff outside of the cheap guns range they have ballistic and cruise missiles. A no-fly zone doesn’t solve anything.

Propaganda wouldn’t be a thing if it wasn’t effective. The olds are more susceptible because their media consumption is usually very simple. One news station, one paper, that’s it. I would guess younger Russians would at least have questions because all of a sudden they don’t have access to so many things they are used to, from all over the world.

I’m starting to believe Putin wants to draw NATO in. He dangled a 40 mile convoy, and now he’s doing an oops on a nuke plant?

I can see them feeding conscripts to a meat grinder as part of the plan, but the vehicle losses, especially air power, doesn’t square up. You don’t “spend” heavy lift as part of your plan. They definitely underestimated the resolve and capability of Ukraine and are paying for it.

RMF is one place it’s really hard for a GO to flex any muscle. This process is entirely out of their food chain and in that first year there were some significant programs that weren’t compliant, and no amount of yelling fixed it. I have more questions, but it’s probably better for another thread.

Yea, that’s what I was curious about with the power sector. Most cyber issues are user driven (bad passwords, permissions, etc) so I was curious how hardened their stuff actually is. At least on the DoD side we have encryption as a major hardware hurdle for attackers to get over. On the colorless side you’re always one bad password away from giving up the Gibson.

The DoD transitioned to Risk Management Framework for Cyber 4 or 5 years ago, sounds like it’s based on the same NIST/CNNSI guidance. My program was in the first block of systems to switch over from DIACAP. They gave us a 12 month timeline and it took almost 2 years to get our ATO. It was and is a nightmare on the DoD side to implement because of the diversity of systems and the gov’ts need to apply templates and standards which doesn’t fit everybody. One of the key parts of the NIST framework is tailoring controls, which of course the DoD wouldn’t allow. RMF is pretty straight forward on the enterprise side, standard users on standard networks. On the tactical side things get squirrely fast. Our system was a command and control suite that flew around in the back of a Blackhawk, but got on the colored networks through comsat links. Big army decreed anyone touching SIPR was immediately a high, high, med system. That meant we had untailored HHM controls applied to an ad hoc system, in a helicopter, in a tactical environment. Super fun. Controls are how you fix or mitigate a vulnerability, and they cover everything. Policy, physical security, logistics, auditing, budget, personnel, technical, etc. IIRC our system had 1200ish controls, and within a control there can be up to 15 tasks. Tailoring controls removes any that obviously don’t fit that system. You can’t remove it because it’s hard or you want to speed things up, but if a control says “the building will have a fire suppression system that activates within x seconds” and your system isn’t in a building, obviously you can tailor that out. That’s how it’s supposed to work, but again, DoD didn’t want systems purging controls that were hard and the volume of systems didn’t allow any real visibility from the top to approve/deny tailoring, so they just threw out the tailoring step entirely. So back to the Blackhawk example, yep, I had to mitigate why my system didn’t have a fire suppression in the building that is a Blackhawk in my Plan of Actions & Milestones (POAM), which gets reviewed and updated quarterly. One of the biggest strengths of RMF is closing all the “someone else is responsible for that control” loopholes that plagued DIACAP, and cybersecurity as a whole. On tactical systems we would say that a higher NOC did a bunch of stuff, and that the owning tactical unit was responsible for all the user level stuff, and wipe our hands of it even though we knew units rarely enforced passwords properly, or patched AV on schedule, etc. Now you have to show your work. If someone inherits a control, it flows up or down to their system and gets rolled into their evaluation as well. So if the unit gets evaluated and isn’t doing X controls, they fail, and that failure flows into your system and can trigger a failure for you as well. That’s the academic version of how it’s supposed to be. In reality the Army has realized it’s just too big and hard on the tactical side so there is a lot of leeway being given to systems and vulnerabilities are being left open because of budget (fix this new vuln now, but your budget was already set for the next 5 years and can’t be changed, good luck), or lack of oversight on the hundreds of potential systems, and thousands of implantations at the unit level. The elephant in the room is also on the logistics side. Supply chain protection is a massive part of RMF, and practically impossible to achieve with foreign manufacturing, JIT logistics, and now Covid impacts to the supply chain. I took the long way around to get to this question (for the NERC guys, shady just provided a convenient roll up). Is the NERC implementation pretty tight top to bottom, or do you have similar issues? I would think it’s much more standard wrt the network side (all one color network, pretty standard enterprise guidance, etc), but all the local control/access still leaves some big holes (giggity) to be exploited. Sloppy admin rights or password policies leads to elevated rights, which leads to attack vector, which leads to yada yada.

It would have been a lot less conspicuous to come in via train or shitty car. Plenty of Russians were already there, it’s not like someone would blink at another Russian guy on the street. It’s quite possible that they were abandoned because they are dry on armor or fuel. Doesn’t mean they went back to Russia, they could easily have just linked up with other forces because their vehicle was down. I don’t think deserters and their families will be treated well in Russia, so that has to be cutting though the fuck this shit mood in those conscripts.

This game is good as hell, and it’s hard to explain the scale of it. An absolute unit of a game world.

I did land nav through the marshes in Savannah Georgia and it sucked the heel off an army boot.

First, fuck you, welcome to surly. Second, I know. I’m largely in agreement. It can be discussed without CRing, as long as you aren’t invested in one of the teams. We aren’t the only dog in this fight, and NATO/EU isn’t beholden to our political whims. None of this was on the table with them either before the invasion. In fact they were even more standoffish. Putin made Switzerland pick a side FFS. That’s all you need to know about what’s possible now versus what was possible even a week ago.

Again, with hindsight it seems great. None of that was remotely on the table with us or NATO until Russia invaded. There’s no chance we would ever approve them for export control hardware with the corruption that was rife in their gov’t and country at large. They are getting all of this as a result of Russia’s invasion, there’s no chance it would even be considered without it. Putin is his worst enemy.

Yea, hindsight is 20/20 and all that. No way we would pump serious arms into one of the most corrupt countries in the world without Russia’s boot on their neck.

I’m not sure how it could be handled much differently. We could have applied more sanctions I guess, but as this incident is showing, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. We would have the same reluctance for any direct intervention.