Comment by CobaltFire
11 hours ago
As someone who spent over 20 years active duty, and spent a ton of my career in the IT, security, etc. side of the house:
Unlikely to be a hack, more likely to be a misconfiguration or update sent incorrectly.
That said, the timing of the disclosure and the issue are rather concerning.
Regarding the highest value targets to hit with an attack like this, you would want to target Guam, Hawai'i, and other isolated overseas locations where this would have ripple effects in the local economy. Guam specifically would cause catastrophic supply shortages, since DeCA probably supplies around 50% of the groceries on that island (that's a WAG based on my time there).
Generally agree with your assessment, but in the case of Guam or other more remote installations if there were catastrophic issues we'd just airlift food in. Costly but certainly manageable.
Hawaii I'm not sure why that would be an issue unless the whole island was attacked or shut down. Even if the on-base shops were hacked you could just go shop at Wal-Mart or Costco or any number of other locations on the islands. If there was an extended issue then the commander could authorize meal stipends as they do for some units today and then you would just go buy food off-base. Ideal? No. Manageable? Very much.
Did they airlift better supplies to a floating aircraft carrier somewhere in the northern Indian Ocean recently? No.
Aircraft carriers are not particularly well suited to be supplied by cargo aircraft.
The largest cargo aircraft with the strengthened landing gear, arresting hook, and catapult attachment used to be the C-2 Greyhound. It had a range of approximately 1,500 miles with a 10,000 pound cargo. It was retired on July 28th, 2026. The C-2 has been replaced by the CMV-22B Osprey. It has a range of only 1,150 miles and a more limited cargo capacity of only 6,000 pounds. 6,000 pounds isn't nothing, but it's not a lot either.
There's not a lot of stuff within 1,150mi of the Arabian Sea. Your two options are one of the US bases in the southern Persian Gulf (Kuwait is too far) and Diego Garcia. Neither are ideal. In both cases you're doing a transfer out in the field.
On the other hand, the C-5 Galaxy can carry 120,000 pounds to a range of 4,800 miles. You can fill it with food in the continental US, fly to Hickam AFB in Hawaii, refuel, and fly the rest of the way to Guam. On the return leg, an unladen C-5 can fly directly to the 22nd Airlift Squadron's home base California without a layover.
The C-17B Globemaster is smaller than the C-5, although it's nearly as capable. With a 160,000 pound cargo, it has a range of 3,200 miles, (the C-17A has a shorter range) which is just short of the 3,800 miles to get from Hawaii to Guam. I don't know how much cargo it's capable of carrying 3,800 miles, but on the order of 100,000 pounds is a reasonable guess. It is also capable of an empty flight back to the US without a layover.
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Surely airlifting supplies to a carrier in a war zone is not totally comparable to airlifting supplies to a base in a US territory?
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More to the point for Guam and similar locations, canned and non-perishable food can are probably around and more can be airlifted in to get people through it. It was pretty much the standard back in the day.
The diet in Guam is already heavily dependent on shelf stable foods. I know this from personal experience but theres a surprising (to me) amount of research on it as well (c.v., https://www.guampedia.com/health-consequences-of-modern-diet...). However, it is worth noting that food on a military installation =/= food nearby, for many obvious and non obsvious reasons.
I didn't mean to imply that this would hit Hawai'i as hard as Guam, just that it would be one of the more effective places to hit with a DeCA supply chain attack.
Guam freezers and chillers were offline several times the years when I was there. You just didn't get milk, butter, eggs, ice cream, meat, etc those weeks.
Can't recall them going offline island wide when I was there (given there are two on not quite opposite sides of the island). I do recall one having downtime when the other was up and having to deal with that.
When were you there?
With the current admin, assumptions about capabilities are just wrong.
One of the reasons for consitency above all else is to use the power of history.
Ahistorical is now the defacto standard. All asdumptions about America power are toilet paper.
I always wonder by folks with some "inside" knowledge like you will then come out to share more details. Why? I understand that there's no security through obscurity, but I don't think that the details to get your point across matters. Loose lips sink ships.
Nothing I shared is, in any way, even close to something I am concerned with sharing.
This type of wargaming scenario is literally stuff they give to brand new kids out of high school to get them thinking. It's not anything close to "loose lips sink ships."
We are a very social species who likely evolved to feel good when we share juicy information.
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>Unlikely to be a hack, more likely to be a misconfiguration or update sent incorrectly.
Are these materially different? Assuming that there wasn't a literal command to turn off all freezers, from an organizational, non criminal perspective, to the organization the damage will be the same, the root cause will be a bug (whether exploited by chance or malice), and the fix will be the same(fixing the bug).
> Are these materially different?
A hack implies an adversary, and intentional targeting.
But is it materially different? Or is it a difference in quantitative increase of likelihood of the exploit?
The thesis "everything hackable" will be hacked, and with the advent of hacking LLMs, the boundary between criminal hacking and civil hacking is being blurred, it's no longer attributable to a criminal intent, hacking commands are just something that happens through no criminal intent.
Practically, the hackers, whether human or syntehtic, are a catalyst, they accelerate the rate at which a bug that causes damage will manifest, and perhaps the magnitude of the manifestation, but the essence of the negative manifestation of that bug is the same. Whether it was triggered by a solar ray flipbit or by a rogue LLM or by a russian hacker, the essence of the issue is the same.
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