As the fairly rapid investigation has revealed that the disgrace brought upon the United States by the leak of confidential information regarding the Russo Ukrainian War was committed by one Airman 1st Class Jack Douglas Teixeira, and as this will inevitably lead to all sorts of inaccurate commentary on the National Guard among other things, a few things to keep in mind.
The Air National Guard is not like the Army National Guard in that the Air Guard is pretty much a 24 hour a day, seven days a week, military establishment.
This tends to go really under the wire in the U.S., which tends to think that the Guard is active, other than for monthly drills, when it's called up in an emergency. Not so. The Guard in general is much more active than supposed. I was an Army National Guardsman, as has been noted here in the past, and I worked full time status periodically. Indeed, if I add up all my full time status, and my time in the Army for training, I have as much or more time in day to day uniform as many of the soldiers in my era who did two years in the Regular Army.
And that's the Army Guard.
The Air Guard flies 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and for some of its pilots, that's their full time job. If you have an establishment flying that often, that means that it has ground crews working that often as well. Air Guardsmen that I have known not only have done weekend drills, but week day stints of duty, and the like, even if they're ground crews. Air crews obviously have the same schedules as their aircraft.
Teixer was a member of Massachusetts Air National Guard's 102nd Intelligence Wing, which is probably now reeling in shame.
What's it do?
Well, it doesn't fly anything.
According to its website:
Our mission is to provide worldwide precision intelligence and command and control along with trained and experienced Airmen for expeditionary combat support and homeland security.
That doesn't really tell you much, but what we can piece together is that it's been quietly put on a sort of active duty status at some point to support the U.S.'s mission to Ukraine.
Truly, most of the stuff that was leaked has been interesting, particularly if you are a military geek, but not hugely secret. What is embarrassing, however, is that this is further proof that the U.S. can't keep anything secret.
What's also of interest is this.
The leaker is an AIC.
That's an Air Force two striper, but that's deceptive.
In the Army, two stripes is the rank of Corporal, and at one time it kind of was the same thing in the Air Force. Corporals have always been sort of a big deal in the Army. As late as World War Two, corporals fulfilled a role that was later filled by sergeants. In the Army, a corporal is a Non Commissioned Officer and holds the grade of E-4.
An Army E-3 is a Private First Class.
In the Air Force, an E-4 is a Sergeant. In the Army, a "buck" sergeant is an E-5. An Army Sergeant outranks an Air Force One, in other words.
Most E-4s in the Army are Specialists, a post World War Two rank that is not a NCO. Corporals are rare.
E-3s aren't rare, but this guy has been in the service since 2019. I don't know about the Air Force, but at the time I was in the Army National Guard, a soldier who was an E-3 after four years in the service would have been slated to go right out the door. I frankly doubt he would have been eligible for reenlistment. That's a shocking lack of progress, at least it would have been, but maybe things are different now, or different in the Air Force establishment.
It's rally dangerous to psychoanalyze with; 1) no real patient, 2) remotely, and 3) without a license, but most psychology is flaming BS anyhow, so why not. That leads to this.
This stuff was all leaked, apparently, on a Discord. I'm not familiar with Discord, but from what I understand of this story, this guy was pretty aggressive and got huffy when people weren't reacting with Cyber Joy in his small community over his leaks. This leads to this.
Being an E3 at the end of four years and acting that way seems to put this guy in the oddball status to me. He sure wasn't making grade in the Guard, so why not be a big deal on one of those stupid internet societies.
This is the second time in recent years where leaks were made by somebody pretty clearly psychologically disturbed, the other time being by Army Specialist Bradley Manning. Manning figured in the Wikileaks matter, and there were clear signs that he wasn't right. I don't know about Teixeira, but I note this as the service seems to have at least a semi poor record for screening folks with problems out, even in this era in which its difficult, to some degree, to get into the service. Manning shouldn't have had access to classified documents, and it'll be interesting to see what was known about Teixeira.
What this does reveal, which should have already been known, that not everyone in the service is a hero or even normal. Most people in the service are normal, but in recent years it's gotten so that whatever you did in the service affords you with Audi Murphy like status, which is just nuts.
There are a lot of predictions now that Teixeira can look forward to hard time at Leavenworth for eons. Maybe. That has happened in some prior instances. But my guess it that Manning's story is probably more illustrative. He did seven years in prison, during which time he decided that he was a girl and underwent some sort of process to artificially attempt to affect that appearance, and then was pardoned by President Obama. American justice at work.
That does raise this question, although it probably answers itself. Given as the Russians were seriously wondering, and openly, if this was a disinformation campaign, why not build on that? A more cynical nation might have simply had a couple of guys from intelligence stop by the Teixeira apartment in the middle of the night and give him an option he practically couldn't have refused and turned him into an asset. Indeed, why not? He could have been used to leak disinformation for the rest of the war, or as long as useful. After that, well, he could have been given the choice of being discharged at the E1 grade with the condition he shut up, or assigned to something really unpleasant for a freaking long time.
But we don't do things like that, apparently.
So now we have this drama, which will play out with the drama of the war.
One person trying to make hay from the drama is Marjorie Taylor Greene, the overgrown toddler from Georgia who pretty clearly just uses stuff to draw attention to herself. She's not a serious person, and has suggested that the Airman is a Christian antiwar hero.
Seriously?
Tucker Carlson jumped on the bandwagon a bit too. Carlson shouldn't be taken seriously, but all of this goes to show how far gone the far right really is.
