The Criminally Stupid Chiefs Who Set Up a Secret Starlink WiFi Network aboard the USS Manchester

Ever since the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, there has been much meme-making and online laughter generated by the unbelievably careless use of cellphones by Russian troops in the combat zone.

Indeed, using a cellphone, accessing the Web, and posting images (and sometimes your GPS location!) to social media while someone is trying to kill you with precision munitions seems pretty dumb. It has also been amazingly common over the last two and a half years of war.

In one notable incident on New Year’s Day 2023, a Ukrainian missile strike killed at least 89 Russian soldiers in the occupied city of Makiivka after the Ukrainians were able to home in on their electronic signature and emissions pattern.

Things got so bad that the Russian Duma last year proposed new disciplinary measures, including up to ten days detention and fines, for soldiers caught using electronic devices equipped with cameras or geolocation technology.

The Russians, of course, have targeted Ukrainians using many of the same techniques.

All this is notable because I’ve grown increasingly skeptical about the ability of American or well-trained Western military units to police cellphone usage among our own troops, even if deployed to a combat zone. (Young American soldiers and Marines are, after all, young Americans first, i.e., they are addicted to their phones and social media.) Mark my words, this is going to be a problem the next time the United States fights a major ground war.

But, that said, I had expected the problem to emanate from individual, foolish, 19-year-old lance corporals trying to check their Instagram feeds, or, yes, senior officers not realizing that their Iridium satellite phones could also be tracked. I manifestly did not anticipate the mind-blowing story that broke open last week, in which a cabal of chief petty officers — a ship’s senior professional enlisted sailors — aboard the USS Manchester installed and operated an unauthorized Starlink terminal and WiFi network while their ship was deployed in the Western Pacific. The Navy Times has the story, and it’s truly a jaw-dropping read:

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.

“The danger such systems pose to the crew, the ship and the Navy cannot be understated,” [a Navy] investigation notes.

Led by the senior enlisted leader of the ship’s gold crew, then-Command Senior Chief Grisel Marrero, the effort roped in the entire chiefs mess by the time it was uncovered a few months later.

Marrero was relieved in late 2023 after repeatedly misleading and lying to her ship’s command about the Wi-Fi network, and she was convicted at court-martial this spring in connection to the scheme.

As I said, the whole story and its various details are mind blowing. The chiefs who were running the scheme absolutely should have known better than to potentially make their ship and shipmates vulnerable to electronic detection. And it was insane to try to lie about it when directly questioned by the ship’s commanding officer. These sailors are supposed to be professionals — the most senior and technically proficient sailors on board a ship at sea. Instead, they acted like selfish amateurs.

Our old friend Jerry Hendrix, a former Navy captain and a senior fellow at the Sagamore Institute, told the Warzone website that the unauthorized Starlink system was “a direct violation of emissions control regulations on board a ship” and “a critical vulnerability in that it would make the ship more detectable by offboard sensors.”

Americans have always been tinkerers. I’m not criticizing that. Americans have won battles and wars by thinking outside the box to develop or improve our weapon systems or communications networks in a way that gives us an advantage on the field of battle. I love stories about junior sailors or Marines finding ways to use off-the-shelf tech to kill bad guys or build a better mousetrap. But the fact that these chiefs would undertake such a scheme, and lie about it, not to beat the enemy or get a jump on the ChiComs but to enable them to check football scores and stream movies in their downtime is simply a criminal dereliction of duty.

There will be more of this in the next few decades. And the U.S. military had better get ready.