How insulting! I'll have you AND the DCSA know: if I were going to randomly dunk on my career, clearance, and freedom - I would put on a
way better show than that!
All Teixeira-kun did was make my life (and countless other .mil lives) more annoying, give the RU simps something to slobber over in the form of that (poorly!!) PS'd casualty estimation slide (which, by the way, people are giving waaay too much credence to - those numbers were
not necessarily accurate, and I think it even said so on one of the other leaked pics), and piss away the rest of his life in exchange for a bit of clout amongst a gaggle of socially stunted teenagers in his Discord server.
It's sad that I have to say it, but this sorta crap is surprisingly common. A lot of junior enlisted bros (so, inexperienced teenagers) get their first sense of being "special" and having a unique identity when they graduate BCT/OSUT/Boot Camp and are <bestowed> a security clearance. Without proper supervision from their direct leadership, and especially when they aren't "immersed" into the .mil world thoroughly enough (when all ur focus is on milshit, and ur entire social circle is within the cleared .mil community - as opposed to treating it like a "job" that you have a life, interests/passions, and a social circle outside of), a lot of young dudes (again, they're basically still just high schoolers) will flex the amount of access and information they have when interacting with that "outside" social group for social/self-gratification. As a result, it didn't surprise me when I heard a Weekend Warrior did the deed.
The worst part is, because of how public it got, we had to put on a big performative show of ensuring this will "nyever happen again!!11!" as opposed to actually fixing our shit. Do you want to know what isn't going to stop people from doing this shit in the future?
- Harsher punitive measures
- Additional classes/briefings on proper handling of class material
- Strict orders from leadership to "make sure every [BRANCH SPECIFIC NOUN] knows it is THEIR responsibility to prevent another CI casualty!"
- Articles and/or negative counseling for the people who didn't prevent this
- More procedures/regulations/guidelines/etc. involved in handling and accessing class shit
- The DCSA tunneling even deeper into the ass of everyone undergoing an SSBI and taking longer/making it more of a hassle
There's a saying,
"Policies are institutional scar tissue."
What this means is that whenever a new policy/regulation/procedure is implemented, it is usually because something damaging happened and leadership is trying to prevent it from happening again. However, every policy incurs a cost. It slows things down, creates obstacles for people trying to do their job, disincentivizes new people from getting involved, et cetera. So, when they are implemented as part of senior leadership's
"congress-sama! look at how much im doing 2 fix this!!!" dog-and-pony show, they do real harm to the organization without actually remedying the problem(s) that created them
All of these things
look good, and many of them
sound good at first blush, but they don't fucking work and it just makes performing
essential duties that involve handling sensitive crap way more of a hassle.
People ALREADY know just how much of a no-no it is to take, store, disseminate, or otherwise mishandle anything classified. People are ALREADY aware that they can (and should) prevent leaks by conducting themselves properly. People who didn't/couldn't stop Teixeira from doing what he did were ALREADY aware that they should have done so if they could, and quite a few of them
already tried to do so (for instance, look at all of the negative counselings he received that instructed him not to seek out class shit unless actually necessary). The regulations/policies/procedures were ALREADY sufficient to prevent this sort of thing if they were actually followed, and if breaches of policy could be met with appropriately harsh disciplinary action. The whole SSBI process is ALREADY lengthier and more intrusive than needed to weed out as many bad apples as it ever reasonably/legally could.
Ignorance is not the issue. Accountability is not the issue. Procedure is not the issue. Screening is not the issue.
Leadership, Politics, and Culture are the issues here - and you can't fix those with a magic DOD2000.01/AF16-1404 revision.
Culturally, we are a nation of egos. People value showing off how "above" everything they are, and people want (more than just about anything else) social acclaim, recognition, admiration, and envy. We scorn the concept of Duty, insisting instead that "Freedom" and "Liberty" are exercised only by serving one's own interests at the expense of all others. We find meaning and fulfillment not in our own accomplishments or the value we provide, but in how much value we
take from everyone else, and how much of it we can keep to ourselves.
Politically, we are a pathetic, auto-cannibalistic, gerontocratic kakistocracy masquerading as a beacon of Democratic "Liberty" and "Virtue." We treat the "right" to check a box with the name of whichever corrupt, hollow mass of flesh has enough blood on their hands and lies on their tongue to be funded and promoted by one of two """rival""" brands in the same way we treat religion. The self-indulgence and remorseless narcissism of these creatures is something
we fund, promote, and praise. In return, our incumbent flesh puppets lie through their teeth about wanting to do right by their constituents, all while they rob the nation blind at the beckon-call of their financiers. They mindlessly recite anything placed in front of them (and sometimes they can't even manage to do
that!!) with enough feigned conviction to delude a sufficient number of oxygen thieves into supporting an Acquisitions Program (Capitol Hill accent pronunciation for "Jobs Program in my District") or [x] "Improvement Initiative" (Capitol Hill accent for "make [x] number look better so I can brag about it to my voters") or "Force Structure Review" (Capitol Hill accent for "We were paid a lot of money by [Prime Contractor] to force the Pentagon to prioritize procurement and ecosystem development for this specific system or capability that they want to sell").
Our Leadership has embraced this self-devouring popularity contest pretty wholesale. In lieu of meaningful improvements to our Defense and National Security institutions, they are too busy admiring the puppet strings that come included with a Congressional Approval when they get through O-4. Slogans, buzzwords, and PR are the current substitute for improvement - all to make sure some Senior Leader looks good and gets headpats from their Flag-pinned owner for supporting their vacuous "policy agenda."
So...
When a bunch of immature teenagers with no other life experience are told they're the hottest shit since Hiroshima after completing a socially mythologized initial training (which, if my own 13 week vacation aboard BEAUTIFUL, SUNNY Parris Island remains indicative - is really not
that bad), and then when those teenagers are thrust into a unit that is unwilling to properly enforce its own CI rules for fear of rocking the boat and making their leadership look bad, in a role that grants them near unlimited access to the most sensitive information in the fucking country - done so because recruitment and retention is in the shitter (due in no small part to fucking abominable decisions by senior leaders) and no politician is willing to reform our security clearance system - leaving no other real choice; and those teenagers have a completely separate social life that they value above their duty to not randomly shart all over our national security, from which they are able to extract admiration, praise, and respect by flaunting the exclusivity and perks of the role, and all without any real reason to "buy in" to the success of their unit, their branch, or their country (after all, why should they pass on a dopamine W for the sake of an institution they know doesn't give a
fuck about them?)... It's more of a surprise that something even worse didn't happen even sooner.
