OPSEC and the Violators

DJ Elliott a retired US Navy Intelligence Specialist with 22 years of service and the primary author of the Iraqi Security Forces Order of Battle and co-author of the the Baghdad Security Operation Order of Battle writes a post at The Fourth Rail detailing who are the biggst violators of OPSEC.

He writes:

Since we started to publish the Iraqi Security Forces OOB and the Baghdad OOB, Bill has received the occasional complaint about the reports being a violation of OPSEC. The complainers continually miss the point.

The Order of Battles we have published are not OPSEC violations, they are reports of OPSEC violations. All of the data contained within the OOBs is available with a simple word search on the Internet and any intelligence operation worthy of its name already has the data in far greater detail than what we publish in these OOBs. Most of the information used to compile the OOB comes from the PAOs and senior officer briefs. By far, these are the source of the greatest OPSEC violations in this war.

Also since we started publishing these OOBs, the reported unit IDs have dropped by more than half. Some of the previous OPSEC violators have either rethought what they were doing or been "counseled". Good. The harder it is for the OOB to be updated the better I feel.

The worst OPSEC violator in the senior staffs is the Pentagon.

Go on over and read the whole thing and then compare this revelation with the revised OPSEC rules recently published and LEAKED to the media by the Army. To think that our enemies aren't reading our stuff is assinine, case in point: if AlQaida’s paying close enough attention to Harry Reid’s declarations of defeat to cite them in their communiques, they’re paying close enough attention to know what units are in theatre simply by reading the CentCom and Pentagon webpages let alone the NYT and press releases.