Open Source Intelligence – It’s time to take it seriously

The Open Source Intelligence community warned Afghanistan would fall. We were ignored. We hoped people would listen about Ukraine but we were again ignored.

Early last year the OSINT community watched as US allies began announcing they would also withdraw from Afghanistan, following the US announcement. We predicted at the time that the ensuing vacuum caused by this withdrawal would allow for the Taliban to make a reappearance on the world stage.

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Some listened to our warnings, others mocked us as “a group of faceless entities”.

As August came around it became apparent, we were correct, and I was joined by many other members of the OSINT community predicting that Afghanistan’s fall was imminent, while the US Intelligence Community and the Biden Administration insisted late-September was a more likely date.

Again, we were mocked by many on Twitter and elsewhere, and yet our predictions proved far more accurate than the might of the US Intelligence community was capable of, and sure enough, events culminated in the Kabul Airlift of August 2021, known to the UK military as Operation PITTING.

We had kind of hoped that in light of all this, the world would take the benefits of OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) a little more seriously. We realised as a community that although our individual accounts had ever-growing numbers of followers, we still faced issues of not being seen as a united entity trying to bring critical information to the world. In order to address this, I started by forming the Military Air Tracking Alliance (MATA) with Evergreen Intel (@vcdgf555), a group that now has more than 20 members totalling some 359,000 followers across their individual accounts on Twitter alone. This group’s work tracking the air assets moving people and equipment out of Afghanistan during that period in August 2021 was widely recognised, with some major news corporations quoting our work.

Following on from this I formed the International Centre for Strategic Intelligence (ICSI), a hybrid group focused less on flight tracking and more on general OSINT stuff. This group comprises dedicated members (6 total) and more than 30 unofficial members who act in an advisory role. From this account, we’ve released ‘Travel Advisories’ relating to OSINT being discussed by these 36+ members behind the scenes, in an effort to appear as a more unified voice in providing advice to citizens regarding ongoing crises’ around the world.

But ultimately it is our individual accounts that still have the larger followings and the long-term reputation. Since at least November 2021 we have been warning the world that Russia was making moves towards an invasion of Ukraine, and several members of the group (notably @KyleJGlen) have made appearances on TV discussing what we’ve been seeing on Satellite imagery, TikTok footage and via official statements from governments. The fact that we are here now (20th February 2022) on the verge of a Russian invasion of Ukraine and that the world is still woefully unprepared to face this reality, says rather a lot about how far we still have to go as a community to make our voices heard.

However, it also says a rather alarming amount about the gross incompetence or unwillingness of some national governments to face the fact that a group of OSINT accounts on a platform like Twitter have once again proven better at predicting a catastrophic world event than their own official statements and intelligence communities. For the last 2 months in particular the US and France have been adamant that a diplomatic solution would be found for the ongoing crisis in Ukraine, and it is only around a month ago that the US started admitting that an invasion was looking likely, and only yesterday that France suddenly decided to order its own citizens to evacuate Ukraine immediately – not a great look for two G7 nations or for two of the larger militaries in the NATO alliance.

And that’s something to note too – NATO. While I applaud their continued efforts to try and avoid a military confrontation, NATO’s leadership have been well aware of the crisis brewing on its doorstep and has done very little about it until late January. Even now, there is a general consensus that if Ukraine is invaded tomorrow morning, NATO is in no position to respond militarily and is certainly ill-equipped to deal with the humanitarian crisis which will hit member states like Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Moldova hardest in the initial period, before having a lasting impact on the likes of France, Germany and the UK further down the line. NATO ultimately is a military alliance whose focus is on protecting member states, and so nobody really expected NATO to be prepared to go into Ukraine and fight for its defence (if NATO wanted to make a stand, they should have acted back in 2014).

At the time of writing, Russia has amassed some 150,000 troops on the border with Ukraine currently camped both inside Russia and inside neighbouring Belarus. A fleet of warships gathered from both the Northern and Pacific fleets have joined their Black Sea Fleet counterparts and are now close enough to launch strikes with Tsirkon hypersonic and Kalibr/Klub supersonic cruise missiles. Troops and equipment have travelled over 7,000km in some cases from the far side of Russia, and a growing number of air assets have begun popping up at military airfields near the border areas. Equally alarming is the mass of artillery pieces, rocket launchers, ballistic missile platforms and anti-aircraft systems that have been growing in number for more than 2 months, and the revelation in the last 48hrs that large numbers of these pieces of equipment have moved to as little as 5km from the Ukrainian border.

Combine this with Russia’s insistence that there are war crimes going on in Ukraine, namely genocide and deliberate targeting of civilians, and you can quickly see that Russia is going to invade, very soon, and it has spent all this time providing justification to its own population.

Once again, the west is showing it has no political appetite for a fight. A combination of the debacle in Afghanistan and repeated political statements from major nations in NATO stating they did not believe Russia will invade, has given President Putin confidence to act. Ultimately, I do not see Ukraine being able to stand alone against Russia, and I do not see NATO or anyone else intervening to prevent the fall of Kyiv. The test will be if Russia stops there – a crazy idea in my mind but one that even UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss has suggested today – Russia could push beyond Ukraine as part of Putin’s apparent big plan to re-take former Soviet territories. Belarus is his puppet, its leaders having willingly fallen into line. Ukraine was a thorn in his side, but if invaded it will quickly fall and provide a buffer that Russia believes it needs. We’ve already seen what happened with Georgia in 2008 and Putin no doubt regards the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania as easy targets – which is why we’ve seen UK and other NATO forces trying to bolster their presence in these nations in the last few weeks.

I don’t think Putin will go beyond Ukraine – let me be clear about that. The problem is that I didn’t think the whole coalition would all leave Afghanistan at once either. Political decision making made the fall of Afghanistan inevitable, and it remains to be seen if those same decision-makers have learnt anything when it comes to dealing with Ukraine and Russia. I sincerely hope for the people of Ukraine that the crisis resolves with minimal casualties (and yes, I do believe Ukraine is probably a lost cause now regardless of how hard they fight for their freedom), but with the amount of Russian kit on the border, Russia appears ready to wipe the nation off the face of the map – some areas may well see complete annihilation under the massive firepower of cruise missiles, artillery attacks, rockets and bombs.

Ultimately the saddest thing about this situation is that we predicted it. We warned the world what was coming. I grant you, to most folks we are just a group of faceless/nameless entities who are passionate about our work, and so why should world governments listen to us? Well… because there are enough ordinary citizens out there who have listened, have seen us proven right with Ukraine, Afghanistan, and with previous crisis’. We will probably never be taken seriously, but believe me when I say we watch now with bated breath, knowing that had those in power listened to us sooner, this crisis and the inevitable casualties that will follow could either have been partially avoided or at least mitigated against.

I know I speak for the whole OSINT community when I say… as with Afghanistan before it, our thought and prayers are with the people of Ukraine in the days, weeks and months ahead.

And we hope next time a crisis arises like this, the world will pay more attention.

You can follow myself and other members of the OSINT community here:

• The International Centre for Strategic Intelligence – https://twitter.com/ICSI_OSINT
• Military Air Tracking Alliance – https://twitter.com/MATA_osint
• DefenceGeek – https://twitter.com/DefenceGeek
• KyleJGlen – https://twitter.com/KyleJGlen
• Osinttechnical – https://twitter.com/Osinttechnical
• EvergreenIntel – https://twitter.com/vcdgf555
• IntelDoge – https://twitter.com/IntelDoge
• CasusBellii (French OSINT) – https://twitter.com/CasusBellii
• Marqs – https://twitter.com/MarQs__
• Casualties of the Day – https://twitter.com/Ayei_Eloheichem
• MrRevinsky – https://twitter.com/Kyruer
• Conflicts Worldwide – https://twitter.com/ConflictsWW
• Intel Air & Sea – https://twitter.com/air_intel
• Aleph – https://twitter.com/no_itsmyturn
• Woofers – https://twitter.com/NotWoofers
• World Events Live – https://twitter.com/IdeologyWars
• Coupsure – https://twitter.com/COUPSURE
• TheWarOfNow – https://twitter.com/TheWarOfNow 
• Gerjon – https://twitter.com/Gerjon_
• AuroraIntel (David) – https://twitter.com/AuroraIntel
• AuroraIntel (Knish) – https://twitter.com/Aurora_Knish
• AuroraIntel (Adam) – https://twitter.com/AuroraIntelAdam 
• ELINT News – https://twitter.com/ELINTNews
• Aldin – https://twitter.com/aldin_ww
• IntelOmarion – https://twitter.com/IntelOmarion
• GlobalMilInfo – https://twitter.com/Global_Mil_Info