Ryli Dunlap
1 min readJan 30, 2025

I'm definitely adding "Samson Option" to my reading list.

Years ago when I was in flight school while serving in the Army, we had a briefing by an intelligence officer who surprised many of us when he pointed out that the greatest intelligence risk to assets on base came not from Iran or China, but Israel. He said his office was far more preoccupied dealing with espionage and cyberattacks from Israel than any other entity.

There was a contingent of Israeli personnel on base receiving training on the AH-64 Apache, and we had direct orders to stay away from them and not interact or fraternize.

There were other nationalities on base as well: Saudi, Dutch, British etc. and we trained alongside them and hung out with them on the weekends - even the Saudis who we often flew with during training. But, we never interacted with the Israelis, I think because 1) the intelligence/espionage concerns and 2) I think there had been several incidences of fights breaking out between US and Israeli personnel prior to the ban on fraternizing with them.

They had a reputation on base of being arrogant, smug, insular, and rather hostile to anyone who wasn't in their clique, so we weren't really eager to hang out with them or be buddies with them anyways.

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Ryli Dunlap
Ryli Dunlap

Written by Ryli Dunlap

Aspiring writer. Recovering programmer. Many opinions — some unpopular. I unload them here. Blog: https://pontifi.co Dance/Music: https://rylito.com

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