Marine vet journalist contextualizes War Thunder’s multiple real-world military doc leaks

October 30, 2023 8:00 PM

War Thunder players using sensitive military documents to win arguments or stump for updates to in-game vehicles has been something of an unfortunate trend over the last couple of years to say the least, but players have now reportedly done this a grand total of 30 times, the most recent of which involving a technical manual related to the Apache Longbow attack chopper. That’s a frankly alarming number of times that this has happened, far more than the half-dozen or so big ones we’ve covered, so you might think it’s cause for a lot of worry. But according to one military vet and blogger, there’s likely no major cause for concern. (Just, you know, exasperated snickers.)

This assessment comes from Alex Hollings, a Marine veteran and writer for the vet-led military news blog Sandboxx News, who leverages his own knowledge about these leaks, collects several of the bigger ones in a full list, and then goes through each one to explain their severity to the related nation’s security.

According to Hollings, almost all of the leaks were indeed found to be sensitive but not necessarily beneficial to adversary countries, largely because the documents were already widely available to vehicle crews, are not considered classified, or in some cases are easily viewable through a search.

In closing, Hollings still says that posting these documents is not a good idea despite how little impact doing so has on national security, but he also recognizes that War Thunder fans’ inability to control themselves is too meme-able to pass up – which is pretty much in line with our community’s conclusions too as we were more worried about legal repercussions for the leakers than for the impact to national security.

“National governments devote significant resources to gaining access to legitimately classified documents and designs,” he writes. “For these War Thunder leaks to have real value to adversary nations, it would suggest that these nations have access to the War Thunder forums… but not the rest of the internet where these documents remain available.”