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Pentagon Lobbying For Super ‘Bunker-Buster’ Bomb
The Pentagon is lobbying the Obama administration to speed-up the deployment of a new massive bunker busting bomb called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP).
The 30,000-pound MOP carries more than 5,300 pounds of explosives and can reach even the deepest underground bunker complexes. Once deployed, it would be the biggest non-nuclear bomb ever used.
Boeing says it’s already in the testing phase and could have the bombs loaded onto B-2 stealth bombers by 2010.
The MOP is something we need more than anything at this point. After the dust settled in Iraq, the Pentagon studied the impact of the air campaign against the Saddam Hussein government and were less than impressed.
Many of Saddam’s hardened bunkers were left intact after being hit multiple times with the largest bunker busters in our arsenal. Saddam’s legendary bunkers were simply too deep for our bombs to reach.
Iran has allegedly buried their nuclear program in bunkers that exceed even the depth of Saddam’s bunkers.
Accelerating the deployment of the MOP bomb should be a top priority of this administration — sadly, I fear it won’t be.
Obama Looks To Shatter America’s Nuclear Deterrence
It looks like rolling back successful anti-terror policies isn’t the only thing on president Obama’s agenda. He also seeks to make the long held liberal fantasy of nuclear disarmament (at least for America) a reality. Time has an interesting piece looking at the policy Obama has already set in stone of “no new nuclear weapons” for America. This runs contrary to the military’s position and to that of secretary of defense Gates who has been pushing for the funding of a RRW (Reliable Replacement Warhead) program.
Gates doesn’t want “new” nuclear weapons as in additional weapons for our stockpile, but rather a new generation of warheads to replace our aging ones. The majority of our nukes are from the 1970’s and 1980’s and may no longer function correctly if it becomes necessary to use them. The plutonium core of a nuke suffers radioactive decay over time which lessens their effectiveness and can make them either not function correctly or fail to detonate entirely.
Gates argues the reason we need to have such a large stockpile of nukes now is because the Pentagon must operate on the assumption that a certain percentage of the weapons may not function correctly. If we had a new generation of warheads to replace the aging ones we could significantly cut down on the overall size of our stockpile since the new ones would be certain to work.
Obama and his liberal cronies don’t want that, because in their naive mind they hope the nukes will quit working and we can just get rid of them entirely — thus ushering in a new era of nuclear free peace around the world. That’s a nice pipe dream but it will never happen. Liberals operate on the false premise that other countries only have nukes because America has nukes. If America no longer had nukes the rest of the world wouldn’t need them. That’s of course absurd to the point of being laughable, but it’s nevertheless what the lefties believe.
Nuclear weapons are a horrible thing. I cannot imagine a reason to ever use a nuke except in response to a nuclear attack on us or our allies. Having said that, the nuclear genie is unfortunately out of the bottle and it’s never going back in. As long as a single country in the world possesses nuclear weapons or the ability to produce them, America must maintain a nuclear deterrence. Russia will NEVER give up its nukes, China will NEVER give up its nukes, Israel will NEVER EVER give up its nukes, and therefore America must always have better and badder nukes than anyone else.
Even if by some miracle every country agreed to give up nukes, you could never be sure they didn’t have a couple squirreled away somewhere. The bottom line is that America can never be caught flat footed when it comes to nukes. You don’t get a second chance to deter a nuclear attack or respond to one in kind.
Obama is determined to weaken our national security with his pinko liberal ideology of peace and love instead looking at the world the way it really is. He’s a fool to close Gitmo, he’s a fool to end harsh interrogation, and he’s a dangerous fool to weaken our nuclear deterrence.
-Chris Jones
Chinese Spy ‘Slept’ In U.S. For 2 Decades
From The Washington Post:
Prosecutors called Chi Mak the “perfect sleeper agent,” though he hardly looked the part. For two decades, the bespectacled Chinese-born engineer lived quietly with his wife in a Los Angeles suburb, buying a house and holding a steady job with a U.S. defense contractor, which rewarded him with promotions and a security clearance. Colleagues remembered him as a hard worker who often took paperwork home at night.Eventually, Mak’s job gave him access to sensitive plans for Navy ships, submarines and weapons. These he secretly copied and sent via courier to China — fulfilling a mission that U.S. officials say he had been planning since the 1970s.
Mak was sentenced last week to 24 1/2 years in prison by a federal judge who described the lengthy term as a warning to China not to “send agents here to steal America’s military secrets.” But it may already be too late: According to U.S. intelligence and Justice Department officials, the Mak case represents only a small facet of an intelligence-gathering operation that has long been in place and is growing in size and sophistication.
The Chinese government, in an enterprise that one senior official likened to an “intellectual vacuum cleaner,” has deployed a diverse network of professional spies, students, scientists and others to systematically collect U.S. know-how, the officials said. Some are trained in modern electronic techniques for snooping on wireless computer transactions. Others, such as Mak, are technical experts who have been in place for years and have blended into their communities.
“Chi Mak acknowledged that he had been placed in the United States more than 20 years earlier, in order to burrow into the defense-industrial establishment to steal secrets,” Joel Brenner, the head of counterintelligence for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, said in an interview. “It speaks of deep patience,” he said, and is part of a pattern.
Spies like Chi Mak should get the death penalty for living here all these years and pretending to be a honorable American, but betraying his country all along.
At the same time, U.S. agents could probably learn a lot from these guys. You have to admire the dedication and patience it takes to pull off an intelligence operation that lasts 20 years.
This guy was sent here more than twenty years ago to be educated, employed, and then send back information to China. Imagine how many opportunities there was for Chi Mak to stop reporting back and just live a normal life. I’m sure China sends these kind of operatives to many countries around the world to the exact same kind of thing.
I’m not sure an American agent could pull off something like that. I don’t think you could find a CIA agent willing to move to a foreign country for the rest of his life and work as an undercover operative.
The whole thing is pretty amazing, and it really shows what a cunning adversary China truly is.
-Chris Jones
Pentagon Official Pleads Guilty To Giving Secrets To China
A Pentagon official pleaded guilty Monday to passing US military secrets to an agent working for China after being showered with gifts and gambling money, the Department of Justice said.
Gregg William Bergersen, 51, faces up to 10 years in jail after admitting to one count of conspiracy to disclose national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it, the department said in a statement.
It said Bergersen started handing secret information in March 2007 to Tai Shen Kuo, 58, a Taiwan-born US citizen with business interests in New Orleans.
Bergersen worked as a weapons systems policy analyst at the Defense Security Cooperation Agency, which implements the Pentagon’s foreign military sales program.
I can’t think of anything more disgraceful or repugnant than selling your own country out for a few gifts and some gambling money. Actually, I can’t imagine selling my country out for any amount of money or gifts.
Bergersen deserves a hell of a lot more time than 10 years in prison. In fact, the most appropriate punishment would be for him to hang.
-Chris Jones
Video: Pentagon Scores Direct Hit On Satellite
Pentagon To Shoot Down Broken Satellite
President Bush has authorized the Pentagon to perform the first ever shoot down of a broken satellite in space. The busted satellite is falling out of orbit and straight back to earth, but the problem according to the President is that it’s filled with rocket fuel.
Much of the 5,000 pound satellite is expected to survive re-entry with as much as 1,000 pounds of highly toxic and extremely combustible rocket fuel called Hydrazine still on board.
Depending on where the object lands it could cause serious damage to property or even loss of life.
Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said this at today’s Pentagon briefing:
Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said the “window of opportunity” for such a shootdown, presumably to be launched from a Navy ship, will open in the next three or four days and last for seven or eight days. He did not say whether the Pentagon has decided on an exact launch date.
Cartwright said this will be an unprecedented effort; he would not say exactly what are the odds of success.
“This is the first time we’ve used a tactical missile to engage a spacecraft,” Cartwright said.
After extensive study and analysis, U.S. officials came to the conclusion that, “we’re better off taking the attempt than not,” Cartwright said.
He said a Navy missile known as Standard Missile 3 would be fired in an attempt to intercept the satellite just prior to it re-entering Earth’s atmosphere. It would be “next to impossible” to hit the satellite after that because of atmospheric disturbances, Cartwright said.
A second goal, he said, is to directly hit the fuel tank in order to minimize the amount of fuel that returns to Earth.
Software associated with the Standard Missile 3 has been modified to enhance the chances of the missile’s sensors recognizing that the satellite is its target; he noted that the missile normally is used to shoot down ballistic missiles, not satellites.
I think this might also be some kind of a statement to China that we can shoot things down in space too. If you recall, China shot down a satellite some months causing worldwide outrage.
-Chris Jones
Satellite Imagery shows cleansing of suspect Syrian site
New satellite photos show that a Syrian site believed to have been attacked by Israel last month no longer bears any obvious traces of what some analysts said appeared to have been a partly built nuclear reactor.
Two photos, taken Wednesday from space by rival companies, show the site near the Euphrates River to have been wiped clean since August, when imagery showed a tall square building there measuring about 150 feet on a side.
Israeli Air Strike on Syria Kindles Debate in the U.S.
There is an interesting article in the New York Times this morning that discusses an internal debate within the Bush Administration about how to deal with North Korea.
As of right now our agreement with the North to provide various kinds of economic aide in return for dismantlement of their nuclear program still stands.
However, Israel is arguing that in light of the recent discovery of a possible clandestine nuclear program in Syria thanks to the help provided by North Korea, we should reconsider that deal.
Israel recently launched air strikes against a facility in Syria that is alleged to be home to some type of clandestine nuclear program. The Israelis allegedly sent special forces soldiers in to Syria prior to the bombings to retrieve some type of proof that the facility was indeed a nuclear facility.
They showed the proof to President Bush and he gave the go ahead for the air strikes. Now some in his Administration are advising him that the North cannot be trusted in light of these recent events.
According to the article Bush, Rice, and Defense Secretary Gates remain committed to the deal with the North at least for the time being.
By Chris Jones
The Hot Joints
The Geopolitical Foundations of Blackwater
This is the best explanation I have read for why we need Blackwater and how it got that way. This excellent piece comes from the private intelligence firm Stratfor. Everyone should check out there website.
For the past three weeks, Blackwater, a private security firm under contract to the U.S. State Department, has been under intense scrutiny over its operations in Iraq. The Blackwater controversy has highlighted the use of civilians for what appears to be combat or near-combat missions in Iraq. Moreover, it has raised two important questions: Who controls these private forces and to whom are they accountable?
The issue is neither unique to Blackwater nor to matters of combat. There have long been questions about the role of Halliburton and its former subsidiary, KBR, in providing support services to the military. The Iraq war has been fought with fewer active-duty troops than might have been expected, and a larger number of contractors relative to the number of troops. But how was the decision made in the first place to use U.S. nongovernmental personnel in a war zone? More important, how has that decision been implemented?
The United States has a long tradition of using private contractors in times of war. For example, it augmented its naval power in the early 19th century by contracting with privateers — nongovernmental ships — to carry out missions at sea. During the battle for Wake Island in 1941, U.S. contractors building an airstrip there were trapped by the Japanese fleet, and many fought alongside Marines and naval personnel. During the Civil War, civilians who accompanied the Union and Confederate armies carried out many of the supply functions. So, on one level, there is absolutely nothing new here. This has always been how the United States fights war.
Nevertheless, since before the fall of the Soviet Union, a systematic shift has been taking place in the way the U.S. force structure is designed. This shift, which is rooted both in military policy and in the geopolitical perception that future wars will be fought on a number of levels, made private security contractors such as KBR and Blackwater inevitable. The current situation is the result of three unique processes: the introduction of the professional volunteer military, the change in force structure after the Cold War, and finally the rethinking and redefinition of the term “noncombatant” following the decision to include women in the military, but bar them from direct combat roles.
The introduction of the professional volunteer military caused a rethinking of the role of the soldier, sailor, airman or Marine in the armed forces. Volunteers were part of the military because they chose to be. Unlike draftees, they had other options. During World War II and the first half of the Cold War, the military was built around draftees who were going to serve their required hitch and return to civilian life. Although many were not highly trained, they were quite suited for support roles, from KP to policing the grounds. After all, they already were on the payroll, and new hires were always possible.
In a volunteer army, the troops are expected to remain in the military much longer. Their training is more expensive — thus their value is higher. Taking trained specialists who are serving at their own pleasure and forcing them to do menial labor over an extended period of time makes little sense either from a utilization or morale point of view. The concept emerged that the military’s maintenance work should shift to civilians, and that in many cases the work should be outsourced to contractors. This tendency was reinforced during the Reagan administration, which, given its ideology, supported privatization as a way to make the volunteer army work. The result was a growth in the number of contractors taking over many of the duties that had been performed by soldiers during the years of conscription.
The second impetus was the end of the Cold War and a review carried out by then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin under then-President Bill Clinton. The core argument was that it was irrational to maintain a standing military as large as had existed during the Cold War. Aspin argued for a more intensely technological military, one that would be less dependent on ground troops. The Air Force was key to this, while the Navy was downsized. The main consideration, however, was the structure of the standing Army — especially when large-scale, high-intensity, long-term warfare no longer seemed a likely scenario.
The U.S. Army’s active-duty component, in particular, was reduced. It was assumed that in time of war, components of the Reserves and National Guard would be mobilized, not so much to augment the standing military, but to carry out a range of specialized roles. For example, Civil Affairs, which has proven to be a critical specialization in Iraq and Afghanistan, was made a primary responsibility of the Reserves and National Guard, as were many engineering, military-intelligence and other specializations.
This plan was built around certain geopolitical assumptions. The first was that the United States would not be fighting peer powers. The second was that it had learned from Vietnam not to get involved in open-ended counterinsurgency operations, but to focus, as it did in Kuwait, on missions that were clearly defined and executable with a main force. The last was that wars would be short, use relatively few troops and be carried out in conjunction with allies. From this it followed that regular forces, augmented by Reserve/National Guard specialists called up for short terms, could carry out national strategic requirements.
The third impetus was the struggle to define military combat and noncombat roles. Given the nature of the volunteer force, women were badly needed, yet they were included in the armed forces under the assumption that they could carry out any function apart from direct combat assignments. This caused a forced — and strained — redefinition of these two roles. Intelligence officers called to interrogate a prisoner on the battlefield were thought not to be in a combat position. The same bomb, mortar or rocket fire that killed a soldier might hit them too, but since they technically were not charged with shooting back, they were not combat arms. Ironically, in Iraq, one of the most dangerous tasks is traveling on the roads, though moving supplies is not considered a combat mission.
Under the privatization concept, civilians could be hired to carry out noncombat functions. Under the redefinition of noncombat, the area open to contractors covered a lot of territory. Moreover, under the redefinition of the military in the 1990s, the size and structure of the Army in particular was changed so dramatically that it could not carry out most of its functions without the Reserve/Guard component — and even with that component, the Army was not large enough. Contractors were needed.
Let us now add a fourth push: the CIA. During Vietnam, and again in Afghanistan and Iraq, a good part of the war was prosecuted by CIA personnel not in uniform and not answerable to the military chain of command. There are arguments on both sides for this, but the fact is that U.S. wars — particularly highly politicized wars such as counterinsurgencies — are fought with parallel armies, some reporting to the Defense Department, others to the CIA and other intelligence agencies. The battlefield is, if not flooded, at least full of civilians operating outside of the chain of command, and these civilian government employees are encouraged to hire Iraqi or other nationals, as well as to augment their own capabilities with private U.S. contractors.
Blackwater works for the State Department in a capacity defined as noncombat, protecting diplomats and other high-value personnel from assassination. The Army, bogged down in its own operations, lacks the manpower to perform this obviously valuable work. That means that Blackwater and other contract workers are charged with carrying weapons and moving around the battlefield, which is everywhere. They are heavily armed private soldiers carrying out missions that are combat in all but name — and they are completely outside of the chain of command.
Moreover, in order to be effective, they have to engage in protective intelligence, looking for surveillance by enemy combatants and trying to foresee potential threats. We suspect the CIA could be helpful in this regard, but it would want information in return. In order to perform its job, then, Blackwater entered the economy of intelligence — information as a commodity to be exchanged. It had to gather some intelligence in order to trade some. As a result, the distinction between combat and support completely broke down.
The important point is that the U.S. military went to war with the Army the country gave it. We recall no great objections to the downsizing of the military in the 1990s, and no criticisms of the concepts that lay behind the new force structure. The volunteer force, downsized because long-term conflicts were not going to occur, supported by the Reserve/Guard and backfilled by civilian contractors, was not a controversial issue. Only tiresome cranks made waves, challenging the idea that wars would be sparse and short. They objected to the redefinition of noncombat roles and said the downsized force would be insufficient for the 21st century.
Blackwater, KBR and all the rest are the direct result of the faulty geopolitical assumptions and the force structure decisions that followed. The primary responsibility rests with the American public, which made best-case assumptions in a worst-case world. Even without Iraq, civilian contractors would have proliferated on the battlefield. With Iraq, they became an enormous force. Perhaps the single greatest strategic error of the Bush administration was not fundamentally re-examining the assumptions about the U.S. Army on Sept. 12, 2001. Clearly Donald Rumsfeld was of the view that the Army was the problem, not the solution. He was not going to push for a larger force and, therefore, as the war expanded, for fewer civilian contractors.
The central problem regarding private security contractors on the battlefield is that their place in the chain of command is not defined. They report to the State Department, not to the Army and Marines that own the battlefield. But who do they take orders from and who defines their mission? Do they operate under the Uniform Code of Military Justice or under some other rule? They are warriors — it is foolish to think otherwise — but they do not wear the uniform. The problem with Blackwater stems from having multiple forces fighting for the same side on the same battlefield, with completely different chains of command. Indeed, it is not clear the extent to which the State Department has created a command structure for its contractors, whether it is capable of doing so, or whether the contractors have created their own chain of command.
Blackwater is the logical outcome of a set of erroneous geopolitical conclusions that predate these wars by more than a decade. The United States will be fighting multidivisional, open-ended wars in multiple theaters, and there will be counterinsurgencies. The force created in the 1990s is insufficient, and thus the definition of noncombat specialty has become meaningless. The Reserve/Guard component cannot fill the gap created by strategic errors. The hiring of contractors makes sense and has precedence. But the use of CIA personnel outside the military chain of command creates enough stress. To have private contractors reporting outside the chain of command to government entities not able to command them is the real problem.
A failure that is rooted in the national consensus of the 1990s was compounded by the Bush administration’s failure to reshape the military for the realities of the wars it wished to fight. But the final failure was to follow the logic of the civilian contractors through to its end, but not include them in the unified chain of command. In war, the key question must be this: Who gives orders and who takes them? The battlefield is dangerous enough without that question left hanging.
Written By George Friedman
Pentagon: al-Qaida Operative Captured
WASHINGTON (AP) – The Pentagon announced Friday the capture of one of al-Qaida’s most senior and most experienced operatives, an Iraqi who was trying to return to his native country when he was captured. Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said the captive is Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi. He was received by the Pentagon this week from the CIA, Whitman said, but the spokesman would not say where or when al-Iraqi was captured or by whom.
The Pentagon described Al-Iraqi as an associate of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and as someone who may have been targeting Westerners outside of Iraq.
The Pentagon took custody of al-Iraqi at Guantanamo Bay, the detention center for terror suspects, Whitman said. He is the 15th so-called high-value detainee to be taken to Guantanamo Bay after being held by the CIA in secret prisons abroad. The other 14 were sent to Guantanamo Bay last September and have since undergone military hearings there to affirm their status as enemy combatants eligible for military trials.
Whitman said al-Iraqi was believed responsible for plotting cross- border attacks from Pakistan on U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and that he led an effort to assassinate Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, as well as unspecified officials of the United Nations.
“Abd al-Hadi (al-Iraqi) was trying to return to his native country, Iraq, to manage al-Qaida’s affairs and possibly focus on operations outside Iraq against Western targets,” Whitman said, adding that the terror suspect met with al-Qaida members in Iran. He said he did not know when al-Iraqi was in Iran.
The Pentagon said al-Iraqi was born in Mosul, in northern Iraq, in Whitman said he was a key al-Qaida paramilitary leader in Afghanistan in the late 1990s, and during 2002-04 led efforts to attack U.S. forces in Afghanistan with terrorist forces based in Pakistan.
In August 2005, al-Iraqi appeared in a purported al-Qaida-made video that shows militants in Afghanistan—including Europeans, Arabs and others—preparing to attack U.S. troops and showing off what they said was a U.S. military laptop.
Al-Iraqi, speaking in the video with a scarf hiding his face, said the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have created “two fronts” for recruiting terrorists to the cause of bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar.
“Now all the world is united behind Mullah Omar and Sheik Osama,” he says.
Whitman said al-Iraqi was associated with leaders of other extremist groups allied with al-Qaida in Afghanistan and Pakistan, including the Taliban. He worked directly with the Taliban to determine lines of communication between Taliban and al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan, specifically about the targeting of U.S. forces, the spokesman said.
According to biographical information provided by the Pentagon on Friday, al-Iraqi served in the Iraqi military. It said he spent more than 15 years in Afghanistan and at one point was an instructor in an al-Qaida training camp there. Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he was a member of al-Qaida’s ruling Shura Council, a now- defunct 10-person advisory body to bin Laden, the Pentagon said.
He also was a member of al-Qaida’s military committee, which oversaw terrorist and guerrilla operations and paramilitary training, according to the Pentagon.
[AP]
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