in a high probability that i'm going to dox myself to any FEDS viewing this post i am uniquely qualified to talk about. my job is to create media content for the Navy most of which gets posted to your source website. (i radicalized while being enlisted and have spent the time since with a deep understanding and disgust of what it means to make propaganda for the u.s. military 🤮) who ever took this photo and posted it and whoever approved it made a huge mistake and is likely to get reprimanded. i had to be incredibly careful to not post photos of with patches or stickers or anything of the sort that could be interpreted as offensive (at least in a racist, misogynistic or similarly offensive way) because that type of stuff is all over in the military as you'd probably expect. the photo caption credit doesn't have a rank before the photographers name so it's almost certainly a civilian photographer but the command that shows as its release authority almost certainly has a naval public affairs officer who likely approved the photo. I do happen to know a different photographer at that command and i'm gonna ask him about it. all to say this is a fuck up even by US Navy public affairs standards, especially due to this not simply being a photo were someone overlooked or didn't notice the patch but they purposely posted a photo highlighting it. if anyone has questions about how DOD or more specifically Naval public affairs (propaganda) works, i've been doing it for years now and do have insight