For a variety of reasons, including operational security, a crew’s internet access is regularly restricted while underway, to preserve bandwidth for the mission and to keep their ship safe from nefarious online attacks.
But the senior enlisted leaders among the littoral combat ship Manchester’s gold crew knew no such privation last year, when they installed and secretly used their very own Wi-Fi network during a deployment, according to a scathing internal investigation obtained by Navy Times.
As the ship prepared for a West Pacific deployment in April 2023, the enlisted leader onboard conspired with the ship’s chiefs to install the secret, unauthorized network aboard the ship, for use exclusively by them.
So while rank-and-file sailors lived without the level of internet connectivity they enjoyed ashore, the chiefs installed a Starlink satellite internet dish on the top of the ship and used a Wi-Fi network they dubbed “STINKY” to check sports scores, text home and stream movies.
Holy shit. And they used Starlink. This Starlink.
They need the book thrown at them for risking putting their ship in the hands of a billionaire who thinks he knows what is best in a military operation.
I’m amazed. Basic IT training should be enough to know that Starlink systems at the very least would be advertising their location to a third party non-US megacorp.
Easy solution: nationalize Starlink. That keeps it out of the hands of a lunatic man-child, and sailors can get their sports scores! Talk about a win win situation.
Third party, sure, but Starlink is absolutely a US corporation. They have joint projects with the US military, even
I never knew the scope of the errors in judgement that the navy chiefs have made lately.
The chutzpah on these motherfuckers.
I may or may not know of a wired LAN that was setup in a ships berthing once for filesharing with some sleek cabling, but that network never touched the internet.
To rig up a ship wide wifi network and play it off like it didn’t exist while deployed, over and over for months? I’m both impressed and honestly a bit pissed the main player only lost a rate or two. The rest getting NJP and likely no reduction in rate is bullshit as well. I’ve seen lower enlisted get just plain turbo fucked for incredibly minor things at NJP, and this is not that.
Its a small ship and all that so things are more lax, but come the fuck on.
If the lack of creature comforts is really such a big deal, It wouldn’t be that hard for them to provide canned entertainment and retrieve sports scores and basic news from shortwave or even receive only satellite traffic.
“STINKY” is the default SSID for Starlink routers. These stupid motherfuckers couldn’t even figure out how to change the default settings. I wonder if they were using a default username and password too?
OpSec my ass.
