People are wondering how a young airman could have had access to the classified information compromised in the recent leaks. It’s quite simple, the low-level clerical jobs in military facilities are handled by privates, seaman, and airman who are supervised by more senior specialists and by NCOs. The PFCs and Spec4s in the comm center I ran in Viet Nam were all 19 or 20 years old, and they handled classified traffic on a routine basis every day.

Of course, the young men working in that comm center were highly motivated to do their jobs well. The consequence for screwing up was loss of one’s security clearance, which meant leaving the nice, air conditioned, underground comm center bunker and serving in one’s secondary military occupational specialty. All my men had a secondary MOS of 11B (Infantryman).