> Overclassification is absolutely a thing, too. I recall when the Snowden NSA leaks came out, government employees were still forbidden from reading the documents, even if they were published in the newspapers. Pointless? Yes. But those were the rules.

Not just government employees. I was at a defense contractor at the time, and we were also instructed to not read any of the documents online, even for people who were technically cleared to read them through proper channels.

Edit: misremembering, wasn't the Snowden leaks, it was some earlier set of leaks on WikiLeaks

Surely either you are training, or you are on a mission, but in that case you should be competent pilot.

training on a confidential mission is just inviting disaster

Training for a mission tends to mean pretending it's the real mission, as closely as possible. People fire off $100k missiles (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrhybKEzb-0) so they know what it'll be like to do it in combat for real.

Competent people still make mistakes. I wouldn't want to be anywhere near DCA airspace, personally.

The ADSB is a simple switch. All it does is broadcast the position. It would have had zero impact on operational readiness. It’s not like they were actually flying “dark” - lights were on, they were in context with ATC, etc.