There are a couple hundred US armed forces bases each with commissaries that would be managed by DeCA.

An attack like the author hypothesized would require a LOTL modus operandi, and doing so on 14 locations wouldn't justify completely blowing up an entire LOTL operation, because it exposes indicators, registers, and tradecraft that is then shared amongst all security vendors.

The way it's framed is clickbait at its worst with the added issue of limited security experience, but the same can be said of HN in general.

Then I would suspect that this is either down to the common control system, or there has been a batch failure of the controllers in the freezers that were presumably ordered and supplied at the same time.

I've seen batch failures in radio equipment where I could predict 100% accurately which devices would fail based on the range of serial numbers.

So what's the denominator? Every base has some kid of refrigerator, and there must be 100s-1000s of bases.