Category: Military

Appellate Court Reinstates Injunction Against “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell”

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This is a good thing, since it appears that the Obama, in another example of moral cowardice, is slow walking this process.  What I like is the fact that they use the Obama DoJ’s words against them:

The government must stop enforcing the law that prohibits openly gay men, lesbians and bisexuals from serving in the military, a federal appeals court ruled on Wednesday.

A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued a two-page order against the policy known as “don’t ask, don’t tell” in a case brought by the group Log Cabin Republicans.

…

Judges Alex Kozinski, Kim McLane Wardlaw and Richard A. Paez stated in their order that “circumstances and balance of hardships had changed” since their initial ruling: the Obama administration had informed the court that repeal of the policy was “well under way,” and in a filing in another case on July 1, the Department of Justice took the position that discrimination based on sexual orientation should be subjected to tough scrutiny. The government, the judges wrote, “can no longer satisfy the demanding standard for issuance of a stay.”

The fact that the most conflicted Republicans in the nation are more proactive in pushing basic civil rights than the Obama administration.

Well, At Least It’s Not My Employer

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Lockheed had to locked down its network after it was massively hacked:

By all accounts, Lockheed Martin’s swift detection of the attack helped avert potential disaster. “The good news here is that the contractor was able to detect an intrusion then did the right things to deal with it,” Cringely said. “A breach like this is very subtle and not easy to spot.” Furthermore, he said, the same day that Lockheed Martin detected the attack, all remote access for employees was disabled, and the company told all telecommuters to work from company offices for at least a week. Then on Wednesday, the company informed all remote workers that they’d receive new RSA SecurID tokens and told all 133,000 employees to reset their network passwords.

In a statement released Sunday, EMC said it was “premature to speculate” on the details of the attack. But if attackers did use information stolen from RSA to hack into the SecurID system used by Lockheed Martin, then EMC could be forced to finally reveal, publicly, any risks that the use of its system might now pose to the 40 million users of SecurID hardware token customers and 250 million users of its SecurID software.

I’m a contractor, so even if my employer were hacked in this manner, it would not effect me, since that don’t give mercenaries like me remote access to their networks.

Of course, they should have locked down their system months ago, when RSA, the company that supplies the keys for their VPN systems, and a lot of other companies out there, was hacked.

Keith is Back

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Keith Olbermann has a special comment about the reactions to Michael Moore’s comments about the killing of Osama bin Laden.

While he disagrees with Moore, in that he [Olbermann] is OK with the idea that the US sent out a kill team with no real plans to capture of al-Qaeda’s founder, he finds the unrelenting attacks of Michael Moore’s character and patriotism by the Obama fanboi to be completely contemptible, and he notes the parallels to the attacks against people who questioned George W. Bush’s campaign of lies to get us to invade Iraq:

Some of us – not enough — questioned the official story in 2002 and 2003. But few of us who did so, had as much to lose as did Michael Moore. We were accused of “intellectual liberal hand-wringing” – even by supposedly liberal commentators on supposedly liberal television networks. We were dismissed, and demonized.

And to this day, even though Michael Moore was right, and George Bush was wrong, and even though Michael Moore was right, and Newt Gingrich was wrong, and even though Michael Moore was right, and John Boehner was wrong – to this day it is Moore who is demonized by the Republican Cult in ways that Bush and Gingrich and Boehner are not demonized by the American Left.

Instead, Moore, himself, now gets demonized in part, by the American left.

I want Michael Moore to question everything. I want him even to repeat the ten tweets he had in the aftermath of the killing of Bin Laden, in which he picked up on his theme from three years ago, when he told Larry King that the story that Bin Laden was living in caves, moving from one to the other, was palpable nonsense, that the only millionaire who willingly lived in a cave was Batman, and he only went there to change costumes.

I want Michael Moore, and every other Michael Moore, to remind us that, indeed, “Pakistan just couldn’t be seen as participating with us” and that, indeed, “the story has changed four times now in four days” and that, indeed, “As long as he wasn’t conducting terror, Osama Bin Laden alive served a purpose. Someone should just fess up: the war industry needs fear to make (money).”

Towards the end of his tenure at MSNBC, I thought that he had kind of lost his edge, but it appears that he’s back, and he’s right.

FYI, he is specifically calling out MSNBC commentator Ed Schultz, who has been an Obama fanboi for as long as I’ve followed who said, “The fact of the matter is, the intellectual liberal hand-wringing needs to stop in this country. People who voted for President Obama had to know he was willing to go anywhere at anytime to take out the world’s number one terrorist,” which is a truly contemptible attempt to squelch debate.

Between Schultz’s Obama man crush, and the unbearable inside-the-beltway conventional thinking wankfest of Lawrence O’Donnell, all I watch these days on MSNBC is Rachael Maddow.

I cannot wait for his new show on Current TV on June 20.

India Shortlists Rafale and Typhoon for MMRCA Shortlist

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Well, I was wrong in my guess that MiG would win this.

But India has narrowed the bid to the French and the British:

The United States lost a hard-fought competition to supply a new generation of fighter jets to India, which has listed two European manufacturers as the finalists for an order estimated to be worth $10 billion.

The decision was a blow for President Obama, who had pushed hard for this and other defense deals during his visit to India in November as part of his agenda to deepen and broaden the United States’ relationship with India. The American ambassador to India, Timothy J. Roemer, who separately announced on Thursday that he would resign from his post for personal reasons, said the United States was “deeply disappointed by this news.”

While political and economic relations between India and the United States have been warming for years, American arms makers have struggled to win big contracts here. After decades of frosty relations during the cold war, which pushed India to rely extensively on the Soviet Union for military hardware, many in the Indian defense establishment are still wary of American intentions and United States military aid to Pakistan, India’s main adversary.

The American bid to build the fighters came from Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Boeing had offered its F/A -18 jets, and Lockheed Martin pitched its F-16 planes. But India instead narrowed the list to the Rafale fighter from Dassault and the Eurofighter Typhoon jet made by a consortium of European companies. Russian and Swedish bids were also turned down.

I’m not sure what the calculus here.

These aircraft are clearly more capable in terms of payload and range than the Rafale (which is the light weight of the bunch) and the F-16, and faster than the F-18 (so is just about everything flying with an afterburner), and likely more reliable than the MiG.

My handicapping of the race? I think that Dassault is desperate for an export sale, and so will be willing to take a hit up front, and when this is juxtaposed with the fact that the IAF already has experience operating the Mirage 2000, I would give it a slight edge.

And the Winner for Best April Fools Prank of 2011 Is…

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Click for full size

Heh

The US Army:

In a fingertip-to-the-brim nod to its American frontier history, the Army is changing hats again – returning to the tumultuous days of the horse Cavalry in the wild west and adopting a dark blue Stetson as the official headgear for the current force of 1.1 million Soldiers.

“We figure the Stetson will be popular with the troops,” said Sgt. Maj. Bob S. Stone, Army Uniform Board headgear task force president. “It’s been a while since we have changed the headgear, so it’s time. Plus a Stetson is functional and down right American.”

But reminiscent of the controversial switch from the garrison cap to the black beret, the Army faces opposition from one community deeply opposed to losing its special identity with the Stetson – the Armor branch.

“Why in the heck are they doing to us what they did to the snake-eaters?” asked one officer familiar with the board’s deliberations. “If you ain’t Cav, you ain’t ought to be wearing a Cav hat. That just ain’t right.”

The Pentagon is generally the last place I would expect a good sense of humor, so props to the US Army.

Signs of the Apocalypse

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When Peggy “Dolphins Saved Elian Gonzalez” Noonan says that she thinks that an American war is stupid:

The biggest takeaway, the biggest foreign-policy fact, of the past decade is this: America has to be very careful where it goes in the world, because the minute it’s there — the minute there are boots on the ground, the minute we leave a footprint — there will spring up, immediately, 15 reasons America cannot leave. The next day there will be 30 reasons, and the day after that 45. They are often serious and legitimate reasons.

So we wind up in long, drawn-out struggles when we didn’t mean to, when it wasn’t the plan, or the hope, or the expectation.

We have to keep this phenomenon in mind as we chart our path in the future. It’s easy to start a war but hard to end one. It’s as simple as that. It’s easy to get in but hard to get out. Even today, in Baghdad, you hear that America can’t leave Iraq because the government isn’t sturdy enough, the army and police aren’t strong enough to withstand the winds that will follow America’s full departure, that all that has been achieved — a fragile, incomplete, relative peace — will be lost. America cannot leave because Iraq will be vulnerable to civil war, not between Sunnis and Shiites, they tell you now, but between Arabs and Kurds, in the north, near the oil fields.

She is, of course, writing about the war du jour, Libya, and she is correct.  It’s a bad idea.

What’s more, when this operation is well within the capabilities of other countries, either the UK or France could likely do this on their own, and certainly can do this together, so say nothing of the contributions of Italy and Canada (!?!?!?!), there is no need for any contribution to the kinetic portion of the war by the US, though satellite and signals intelligence could certainly make a difference.

A reader of Americablog nailed what is driving the American involvement in this:

The main reason the US seems to want to be involved seems to be to avoid being left out. If the UK and France could take out Libya on their own, people might start asking if the US really needs to have a military an order of magnitude larger than the UK and French forces combined.

Our bloated giant Pentagon cannot allow our allies to engage in a kinetic war (i.e. shooting) without a major involvement, because if they do, it casts doubt on the raison d’être for us to spend more on our defense than the rest of the world combined.

So, not only does the fact that we are a military behemoth make us stay in places that we have never gone, it makes us go places we should never go, because to stay home when others go would put its continued support at risk.

And Now the New York Times

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Has an editorial condemning the torture of Bradley Manning:

Pfc. Bradley Manning, who has been imprisoned for nine months on charges of handing government files to WikiLeaks, has not even been tried let alone convicted. Yet the military has been treating him abusively, in a way that conjures creepy memories of how the Bush administration used to treat terror suspects. Inexplicably, it appears to have President Obama’s support to do so.

They are wrong, of course about how his torture is inexplicable. The Obama administration has aggressively covered up the wrongdoing of their predecessors, and gone after whistle-blowers with an aggressiveness that makes Bush and His Evil Minions™ look like advocates for open government.

The torture of Manning, as well as the malicious prosecution of whistle-blowers at all levels is clearly a result of a mania in this administration, and considering its aggressiveness, it almost certainly comes straight from the top.

It should be noted though that, true to their mealy mouthed tradition, there no use of the word “Torture” to describe extended solitary confinement, sleep deprivation.

This is rather more significant than the OP/ED in the Baltimore Sun I mentioned yesterday, because, on the villagers inside the Beltway actually read the New York Times, and care what is in those pages.

Something Else Obama Lied About

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I honestly thought that P.J. had committed bureaucratic Seppuku when he gave an honest opinion about the torture detention conditions of alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning, so on one level, I am not at all surprised that Barack Obama fired him.

But Will Bunch, who was lied to by Obama during the campaign, Barack said that he would prosecute torturers and other administration and official law breakers, nails the dishonesty and hypocrisy involved:

“I don’t want to have people who just agree with me. I want people who are continually pushing me out of my comfort zone.”
— Barack Obama, June 18, 2008.

Barack Obama lied.

Again.

He lied because somebody — a good man, a decent man, and a respected spokesman for the U.S. State Department — pushed Obama out of his comfort zone this week. And so what happened? — the Obama administration forced him out of his job. Apparently Obama does just want to have people who agree with him. Imagine that.

I’m not surprised, but I am disgusted.

The Term for this is Bureaucratic Seppuku

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It is also courageous and so if anyone knows of a new job for State Department spokesman PJ Crowley, drop him a line.

You see, Crowley called the torture treatment of Private Bradley Manning by our military “Stupid.”

If there is anything that pisses off Barack Obama, it’s whistle blowers.  His administration has prosecuted them more aggressively than any other administration in  history, and the torture of Manning is delibrate:  They want to extract false testimony from him to implicate assange, and, more importantly, they want to terrify any would-be whistle blowers out of telling the truth:

Mr Crowley made the remarks about Bradley Manning to an audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Nonetheless Bradley Manning is in the right place,” Mr Crowley said.

Private Manning is being held in solitary confinement at a maximum security US military jail.

He is shackled at all times and has been on suicide watch at the Quantico marine base in Virginia.

Mr Crowley was asked whether his comments were on the record and replied, “sure”.

President Barack Obama was questioned about whether he agreed with Mr Crowley’s comments at a news conference on Friday.

He responded by saying he had asked the Pentagon directly if the terms of Pte Manning’s confinement were “appropriate” and received assurances that they were.

Mr Obama added that some aspects of Pte Manning’s treatment “has to do with his safety as well”.

Obama’s response is pure, unadulterated bullsh%$.  You asked, and were told that they were appropriate, and that “some” aspects have to do with his safety.

So, you just stated that you know, and that you chose to look the other way.

I am so glad that I live in Maryland, and so I never have to vote for this contemptible ratf%$# ever again.

That being said, now that the dirty laundry is out, how much do you want to bet that the treatment gets better?

I Generally, Don’t Approve of Armchair Generals…

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But with all the inside Beltway pukes, (and yes, I do mean you, John Kerry) calling for aggressive air strikes in Libya under the fig leaf of a “no fly zone”, I think that I need to put on my incredibly incompetent tactician cap, and kick some metaphorical butt.

First, I think that a lot of people think that a “No Fly Zone” is where we wave some sort of magic wand, and fly planes over hostile territory to keep the other guy from flying his planes.

It’s a lot more involved.

In order to enforce a no fly zone, you have to be able to fly over hostile territory with impunity, which involves:

  • Thoroughly disabling every SAM site in the country.  (Bombing)
  • Thoroughly disabling every AAA site in the country.  (More bombing)
  • Crippling the command and control systems (yet more bombing, and likely boots on the ground to confirm this).
  • Bombing all the air fields, and pretty much anywhere that an attack helicopter might be based.

A no fly zone is invasion-lite.

OK, so, if you want to support the anti-Gaddafi forces, what do you do, if you don’t want to go Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia on his ass?

Well, here is where I put on my stupid hat, and make a military suggestion.

What you do, is that you give the insurgents some sort of aid that:

  • Has a low marginal cost.
  • Cannot be transferred to entities who are hostile to the US (see Stinger missiles given to the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan)
  • Is highly perishable, so that you can withdraw it and get them to stop when you want it to stop.

The thing is that there IS something that fulfills all this criteria:  Accurate real-time tactical intelligence.

Between satellites, long range radars on AWACS and E-2Cs, and signals intelligence (Sigint), we could be giving warnings of things like air-strikes, and the specific order of battle of Gaddafi’s forces.

Ironically, about a decade ago, the US Army thought that this sort of situational awareness would allow them to largely dispense with armor on their vehicles, which brought forth the abortive FCS, but the Army, as is the rest of the Pentagon, is constrained by a need to have zero casualties, while the rebels in Libya are under no such artificial constraint.

They just need to die less than their opponents.

Then again, my military experience would fit in a thimble with room to spare.

Yes, This is a War Crime, and Barack Obama is Authorizing It

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So now alleged Wikileaks source Bradley Manning is forced to stand outside of his cell naked for extended periods:

Manning, a 23-year-old Army private suspected of passing thousands of classified documents to the online site WikiLeaks, was placed on suicide watch for two days this week – against the recommendation of the jail’s forensic psychiatrist, attorney David E. Coombs said.

During this time, Manning was forced to stay in his cell around the clock, stripped to his underwear, the lawyer said. His prescription eyeglasses were taken from him, except for the hour of television he is allowed to watch or when he was reading, Coombs added.

The circumstances of Manning’s confinement have drawn public attention. The United Nations special rapporteur on torture has said he submitted to the State Department a formal inquiry about Manning’s treatment.

You know, the other stuff, covering up the war crimes by Bush and His Evil Minions™ is a secondary crime, an accessory after the fact.

This is something different. This is him authorizing torture on his own, because he is at the top of the chain of command, and he knows it is going on, and he is allowing it to happen.

I’m with Mark Kleiman on this, “This is a total disgrace. It shouldn’t be happening in this country. You can’t be unaware of this, Mr. President. Silence gives consent.“

There is a part of me who wants a Republican to win the 2012 election, who then prosecutes Obama  for war crimes.

Of course, they won’t, because it would apply to them then, but the fact that there have not been cabinet level prosecutions over this is a travesty.

Little Davey, Don’t You Know That This Was a Political Ploy? Why Do You Hate America?

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Fresh on the heels of claiming that Afghan parents burn their own children for crall political purposes, little Davey Petraeus is apologizing for a helicopter strike that killed 9 children who were collecting wood:

A NATO airstrike that Afghan officials said Wednesday killed nine children collecting firewood in eastern Afghanistan the day before became the latest irritant in the tense relationship between President Hamid Karzai and the international force in the country.

Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top NATO commander here, issued an apology for an error that military officials attributed to faulty communication as an air weapons team responded to an attack on a NATO base Tuesday in Konar province.

“We are deeply sorry for this tragedy and apologize to the members of the Afghan government, the people of Afghanistan and most importantly, the surviving family members of those killed by our actions,” Petraeus said in an unusually contrite written statement. “These deaths should have never happened and I will personally apologize to President Karzai.”

The strike increased the already high tension between Karzai and NATO commanders, who came under scrutiny late last month because of another case in which Afghan officials alleged that dozens of civilians were killed in a U.S. military operation, also in Konar province.

Why does he hate America?

Doesn’t he know that whenever we blow up innocent civilians, it’s because they were trying to get killed, because it helps the Taliban?

“Unusually contrite” my ass.

I’m not sure why he isn’t following his usual pattern, lie, release phony facts, and a few weeks later issue a correction on the weekend, but somehow or other the truth got out despite his best efforts.

This is not typical behavior for him.

Now They are Charging Bradley Manning With a Capital Crime

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They have added, giving aid to the enemy, which carries the death penalty to the list of charges against the soldier accused of leaking diplomatic cables, and probably the “collateral murder” video, to Wikileaks.

What is going on here, with his pre-trial detention, with 23 hour a day solitary confinement, which is best described as torture, and now the threat of execution, is that they are clearly attempting to coerce perjured testimony, so that they can gin up some charges to engage in a political prosecution of Julian Assange.

Yet another truly repulsive embrace of Bushes Stalinesque embrace of the unlimited national security apparatus by Barack Obama and His Evil Minions™.

There’s his campaign slogan for 2012: Marginally less morally repugnant than whoever he is running against.

Too True

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This has a core of truth to it

Full disclosure, I’ve never worked at the Pentagon, but I’ve worked on a number of doomed Pentagon projects, most notably MEADS and the Future Combat Systems, and there is much to to be desired in the ways that we make our own weapons of mass destruction.

I’m just saying.

Stay Classy David Petraeus

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In response to allegations of civilian casualties in response to military operations in Konar province, America’s favorite showboating general claimed that Afghan parents probably burnt their own children for propaganda purposes:

To the shock of President Hamid Karzai’s aides, Gen. David H. Petraeus suggested Sunday at the presidential palace that Afghans caught up in a coalition attack in northeastern Afghanistan might have burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties, according to two participants at the meeting.

…………

The U.S. military “did have initial reports that the feet and hands of the children appeared to have been burned,” Smith said. “We have observed increased reporting of children being disciplined by having their hands and feet dipped into boiling water. No one is claiming this is the case in this instance, but it may well be.”

Petraeus apparently had suggested something along these lines at the national security council meeting Sunday, remarks that “really bothered everyone,” including Karzai, one participant said.

“He claimed that in the midst of the [operation] some pro-Taliban parents in contact with a government official decided to create a civilian casualty claim to pressure international forces to cease the [operation]. They burned hands and legs of some of their children and sent them to the hospital,” a second participant said.

I know that Petraeus sees his mission as continuing the various “Forever Wars,” because it keeps that old Pentagon gravy train rolling along, but this is beneath contempt.

Maybe, instead of coming up with alibis for civilian casualties, he should try to reduce the number.

I Predicted This 12 Years Ago

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The Pentagon has killed the MEADS surface to air missile system:

The Pentagon announced today it would kill MEADS, an anti-missile program once declared the highest priority weapon system for the United States and its allies to build together.

The Army has tried several times before to kill the program, which uses the Patriot interceptor, but has always been overruled before by the Office of Secretary of Defense. Germany and Italy have made major political and industrial commitments in pursuit of MEADS and they will doubtless let America know just what they think of this decision.

I did some very preliminary work on MEADS about 12 years ago. Essentially, because, unlike the PAC-3, it did not exactly need to have 4 missiles to fit in a 4-pack that had the same form, fit, and function as the larger Patriot PAC-2, which allowed for some logistical enhancements.

At the time, I said that the program was doomed, because it was a multinational program, and, like the Roland SAM, it would be dropped by the US military, because the opportunities for cushy consulting gigs for retired generals would be too small.

I was right, and I am not alone in my jaundiced assesment of the decision:

To get expert perspective on MEADS’ demise, we contacted Frank Cevasco, one of the top international defense consultants and someone who has closely followed MEADS for more than a decade. While a senior Pentagon official he and colleagues at OSD pushed the Army to create a program office to manage a future extended air defense program, which eventually became MEADS. He said he does not represent any of the companies involved in the program.

Cevasco said at least part of the cost overrun can be attributed to a plan to replace Patriot with MEADS on a one-for-one basis. “I was told that doesn’t make sense as a MEADS fire unit has substantially greater geographic coverage than Patriot. I agree there would be additional costs associated with integrating MEADS with a separate Army command and control system, a requirement that was levied on the program unilaterally by Army about two years ago. Moreover, a portion of the cost overruns and schedule slippages can be attributed to the Army and DoD technology disclosure community who refused to allow the MEADS industry team to share key technology. The matter was resolved but only after intervention by senior OSD officials and the passage of considerable time; and, time is money with major weapons system development programs,” he said in an email.

Bottom line for Cevasco: “Army has done its best from the every beginning to sabotage the program, preferring to develop a US-only solution funded by the US (with funds provided by the good fairy).”

The military funds fairy is named either Obama or Gates, your choice.

House Votes to Kill F136 Engine

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While I expect to see some continued efforts by GE, Rolls Royce, and their supporters, I think that this is the death knell for the F136 engine:

The U.S. House of Representatives today voted to kill funding the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter backup engine made by General Electric Co. and Rolls Royce Group Plc.

By a vote of 233-198, the House voted to cut $450 million for the engine from legislation funding the Pentagon for the remainder of the fiscal year ending Sept. 30.

It is the first time in more than four years of votes that the House has come out against the GE-Rolls Royce engine for the F-35, the stealth fighter made by Lockheed Martin Corp. In May, 2010, the House voted 231-193 to continue the program.

This is important for a number of reasons.

First, with this defeat on the table, the onus now falls on the supporter of the F136 to bring the engine back, which is hard.

Second, and more importantly, House Speaker John Boehner, whose district, and neighboring districts, directly benefit from the engine, could not whip the votes necessary to support the engine.

Like I said, the engine is toast.

In the long run, this is a bad thing, because leaving Pratt & Whitney as a monopoly supplier for the engine is likely to increase costs, and reduce performance, a lot down the road.

That being said, I do experience no small amount of amusement because Boehner got seriously served on this.