> Also, it’s very difficult to keep secret a project that involves more than 10 people, especially if it involves building things.
But not impossible, and there are a lot of examples of things being built (or destroyed for that matter) in perfect secrecy involving groups larger than 10 people.
Again, there are operators in that space that don’t have any incentive to keep your program secret. And I am not talking about complete transparency.
People retire or fall out, documents get lost, someone slips somewhere. It does not take much for the existence of a project to become public knowledge. It’s the other side of the OPSEC coin: a single mistake and some information gets available.
Still, I am not saying this is impossible, merely improbable. Which, combined with the other factors, makes the story being a secret military project implausible.
But not impossible, and there are a lot of examples of things being built (or destroyed for that matter) in perfect secrecy involving groups larger than 10 people.