Saturday, August 21, 2010

A Russian smoke screen?

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Earlier this month a seeming tragedy started to unfold across Russia as brush fires broke out and spread across much of the country. Hundreds of casualties have been reported as well as thousands of homes destroyed:



As with any major new story that comes out of Russia, I immediately cast a suspicious eye on this development. The question in my mind was, could these fires have been intentionally stoked for strategic "maskirovka" purposes in the context of Russia's secret war plans? I believe this is a possibility.

From GlobalSecurity.org, "Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition":

Threat RSTA (reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition) encompasses all methods, such as photographic intelligence (PHOTINT), imagery intelligence (IMINT), and human intelligence (HUMINT). The most reliable methods and therefore the most used methods of RSTA are also easily defeated by smoke and obscurants.

Russia's recent brush fires have shrouded the countryside in thick smoke:



What purpose might this serve? This map I think reveals one possibility:



What if a smoke screen was generated over the Russian landscape so that Moscow could surreptitiously redeploy their strategic nuclear missiles (involving swaps with decoys?) which are mostly based on trucks and trains? (Of course, other strategic redeployments could have happened as well.) This would mean the U.S. is currently, or may soon be, unable to accurately target Russia's nuclear arsenal. (The brush fires reportedly could continue into October.)

Keep in mind how the Smolensk crash of Poland's "Air Force One" likely compromised key NATO codes back in April. After that occurred, NATO likely had to pull on-the-ground human intelligence (HUMINT) gathering sources from Russia that might have been exposed. Thus, the West might now by solely reliant on satellite reconnaissance to ascertain Russia's strategic deployments, reconnaissance compromised by smoke that has clouded over the Russian countryside.

Quite frankly, I don't know how much sense this makes, but hopefully any members of the U.S. intelligence community who read this blog can check into such a possibility since, if this suspicion is correct, the national security concern is about as grave as you can get. (For instance, a pattern of intense smoke clouds over a majority of key strategic nuclear missile centers would likely be telltale.)

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