Proactively “From the Sea”; an agent of change leveraging the littoral best practices for a paradigm breaking six-sigma best business case to synergize a consistent design in the global commons, rightsizing the core values supporting our mission statement via the 5-vector model through cultural diversity.
Not since the last decade of the Cold War have ballistic missile defense, land based cruise missiles, as well as short, intermediate, and medium range ballistic missiles received this much attention outside the compartmentalized and esoteric warfare specialities they belong in. With the realities of our century bidding farewell to the previous century's INF limitations, you shouldn't expect the topic to fade away anytime soon. Shipboard and land based missile defense are rising to meet the threat - using both established capabilities and new ones emerging from the lab. For the full hour this Sunday from 5-6pm to discuss these and related topics, our guest will be Dr. Thomas Karako. Tom is a senior fellow with the International Security Program and the director of the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he arrived in 2014. His research focuses on national security, missile defense, nuclear deterrence, and public law. For 2010–2011, he was an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow, working with the professional staff of the House Armed Services Committee and the Strategic Forces Subcommittee on U.S. strategic forces policy, nonproliferation, and NATO. He is also currently an adjunct professor in the Strategic Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and a fellow with the Institute for Politics and Strategy of Carnegie Mellon University. He received his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University and his B.A. from the University of Dallas.
Join us live if you can, but if you miss the show you can always listen to the archive at Spreaker. If you use iTunes, you can add Midrats to your podcast list simply by clicking the iTunes button at the main showpage - or you can just click here.
One of the worst kept secrets in academia is that China isn't just using our colleges to train their elite to compete against us, but they are also using them to steal intellectual property and national security secrets - all for a few more pieces of silver. Paul Bedard over at the Washington Examiner outlines the problem well;
Several foreign nations, notably China, push students flooded into U.S. colleges and universities to steal trade and defense secrets “whenever the opportunity presents itself,” according to a new report that highlights the threat to national security posed by foreign students.
...
It said that the explosion of student visas to STEM schools takes positions that U.S. students can use and puts potential spies inside institutions that have key national security ties to the U.S. government.
...
The report said that nearly 70,000 foreign students overstayed their visas in 2017. Chinese students were first, with 18,075.
Only a small portion are a threat - indeed my kids have talked to many who have fallen in love with the USA and do not want to go back to China - but we need to better control who is and is not here. Not just for national security reasons either; we need to educate our own. When major research institutions have more foreign students than out of state students - we're doing things wrong.
USNS, Auxiliaries, dry docks, depot level maintenance ... Are you asleep yet, or is your blood pressure up? Either way, I'm beating the drum over at USNIBlog. Come on by!
Time again to bring up a Bill I would dearly love to see in Congress. Let me set the table first. - In my lifetime, I've seen when the military was not held in high regard professionally. In the 80s, I caught the tail end of the "be careful when wearing your NROTC uniform around campus" phase. We should nurture today's climate. - In popular culture, there is a disconnect between some of the cartoon character senior officers - corrupt, grasping, ego-maniacal, etc - and what people see day to day in their work; good people in hard jobs doing the best they can. We need to police our bad actors who play in to that stereotype. - The US military spends an ungodly amount of treasure in men and material. When you have all that money sloshing around in often esoteric areas, the usual rent-seekers, thieves, and other parasitic characters will always be there looking to dip their beaks. Thick and robust firewalls need to be in place. - The uniformed military leadership should always see itself as the customer of the defense industry - not part of that. We imperfectly play that role. Prevent perverse incentives by our weaker characters. - Retired General Officers and Flag Officers (GOFO) are provided with an amazing retirement package - almost unequaled in security and amount by their peers. Look it up. No retired GOFO can plead poverty. - When the government makes the decision to spend tens to hundreds of billions of dollars on defense, the taxpayer should have confidence that the best decision was made for the best reasons. Anything that could throw a shadow on that needs to be carefully addressed. Stewardship. - The revolving door between the civilian sector and industry - especially journalism and financial services - is well known ... and is a growing problem with retired military members. Do not accept the unacceptable as inevitable. We need to act in line with what we like to tell others we are. Why does the military sector employ so many retired GOFO? Simple; their connections and their perceived integrity ... but mostly their connections. They are also used as a shield against criticism. I know a lot of retired GOFO who followed a long American tradition of going in to public service or the civilian sector outside the areas they worked on while in the military. ...and then there are the others. For them, I have long supported the SALAMANDER BILL;
For a period of no less than five years from their effective date of retirement, General Officers and Flag Officers shall not be employed by, be a independent or subcontractor to, an officer of, or a member of a board of directors - compensated or not - with any publicly of privately held company that does business with the Department of Defense.
This year’s Department of Defense budget request included six fewer F-35 Joint Strike Fighters than planned, setting off a firestorm of protests from the program’s boosters. Part of that pushback, organized by the Congressional F-35 Caucus, was a letter in support of the program signed by 128 retired senior military officers. The letter failed to disclose that 50 of the signatories stand to benefit if Congress authorizes more F-35 purchases because of their actual or potential personal or financial ties to the program.
...
Some of the signatories to the letter are in the Project On Government Oversight’s Pentagon Revolving Door Database, and others would likely appear in the Defense Department’s own ethics database—though we have no way of knowing, because that database has not been made available to the public. Information about all of these former officials’ connections to defense contractors should be publicly available: taxpayers and lawmakers need to know who’s influencing spending decisions and what interests they’re representing.
While the disclosure should absolutely be public - and shame on us for allowing it not to be - I stand it is not enough. Also worth your time is Mandy's NOV18 article on the revolving door at The Pentagon.
“We’re at the point where we really have to get them out there to start understanding how tough are these things, how robust, and how are they going to integrate with the fleet, what kind of policies are going to surround these systems when you start talking about potentially separating weapons from humans,” Vice Adm. Bill Merz, then deputy chief of naval operations for warfare systems (OPNAV N9), told USNI News in April.
“So we’re cautious on that side, but we’re very aggressive in getting it out there, so we’re trying to run these parallel paths and illuminate these challenges and start resolving them in parallel.”
It has been curious to watch so many get so overexcited about this - a bit too much science fiction reading, I guess. Perfect example is from the UK. I know it is a tabloid, but a good representation of the heavy breathing in some places about this project. Everyone should slow down their expectations a bit. 1968's view of 2001 was a bit optimistic, as was 1975's view of 1999. A lot needs to be worked out. My top-3: 1. Operations in a non-permissive EW & SATCOM/NAV environment. 2. Collision avoidance & accountability. 3. Force protection & hijacking prevention. Big Navy, to my relief, is not overselling this concept. We're investing some significant cheese in the concept - but in a good way. Take some time to review last month's Congressional Research Service report as well. Build a little, test a little, learn a lot. It works.
In war, it often is not what you were designed to do. It is not what in theory what you were primarily trained, manned, and equipped to do. No. More often than not it is what you must do. What you are needed to do. What you may be the only unit in place to do. There is also, like we saw in the below - what must be done now with what is at hand. With the right leadership, a lot is possible. The dogmatic, rigid, and blinkered - things that are often rewarded in peace - are not what gets the job done in war. One hopes that in peace we accept the above truth and only have our minds dogmatic, rigid, and blinkered. Hopefully we have enough intellectual and material flexibility to be able to do what is needed and must be done. To improvise, adapt and overcome. A bit of a encore FbF, but as the original video links don't work from 2010, and I like to emphasize the important fundamentals, I would like to bring back the Battle of Beersheba; almost 97 years ago.
The Turkish defences of Beersheba were strongest towards the south and west. There they had a line of trenches, protected by barbed wire, supported by strong redoubts, all constructed along a ridge. To the north and east the defences were much weaker, and crucially lacked any wire. No serious attack was expected from the area of rocky hills east of the town. Beersheba had just been designated as the headquarters of a new Turkish Seventh Army, but on 31 October that army had not yet come into being. The town was defended by 3,500-4,000 infantry, 1,000 cavalry with four batteries of artillery and fifty machine guns.
Allenby allocated a very powerful force to the attack on Beersheba. Three infantry and two cavalry divisions would take part in the attack. Two of the infantry divisions were to attack against the main Turkish defences, to the south west of the town, to tie down the Turkish garrison. The third division was to protect against any Turkish reinforcements arriving from the north-west. Meanwhile, the two divisions of the Desert Mounted Corps (Anzac Division and Australian Division) were sent around the town to the east, with orders to sweep into the town through the weaker eastern defences.
The infantry attack proceeded entirely according to plan. The bombardment began at 5.55am, and lasted, with one gap, until 8.30. Over the course of the day the Turks were slowly forced out of their strong defensive positions, the last of which fell at around 7 p.m. The attacking infantry suffered 1,200 casualties during the battle.
At 9.00 am the Desert Mounted Corps was ready to attack the eastern defences of Beersheba. The New Zealand Brigade of the Anzac Division soon ran into a problem. The Turks had a strong defensive position at Tel es Saba, a steep sided flat topped hill three miles east of the town. The battle to capture the Tel took up all of the morning and much of the afternoon, and did not end until 3 p.m.
General Chauvel then decided to take something of a gamble. The delay at Tel es Saba threatened to prevent the capture of Beersheba before dark. Rather than continue with the methodical plan of attack, Chauvel ordered one of his reserve brigades, the 4th Australian Light Horse, to mount a direct assault on Beersheba. They had the ideal terrain for a cavalry charge – a long gentle slope running down into Beersheba. It was defended by two lines of trenches, but crucially not by barbed wire.
The attack soon developed into a classic cavalry charge. The 4th A.L.H. simply galloped over two lines of Turkish trenches. Part of the brigade then dismounted to attack the trenches, while the rest galloped on into Beersheba. There they found a Turkish column preparing to retreat. The sudden appearance of the Australian cavalry caused panic. Most of the 1,500 prisoners captured by the Desert Mounted Corps on 31 October were taken during the charge of the 4th A.L.H. The Australians suffered very light casualties during the charge of 32 killed and 32 wounded, most of them in the attack on the trenches east of Beersheba.
The whole movie The Lighthorsemen is available - but I would like you to go ahead to the 1:20 mark for the charge (the German officer's assumptions at 1:34 is critical). One of the best filmed scenes in the genre - if it doesn't raise your heart rate, pressure nothing will.
Yesterday's post reminded me that we are well past that point where it is impossible to think that there are entities out there that would, if they had the ability, plan for the murder of hundreds of millions of souls. In the Cold War, the USA & USSR did - with an after thought by a few others - with nukes, chemical, and biological weapons. The last one was mostly, but not exclusively, looked at in detail by the Soviets ... but they learned that there is a big problem with biological weapons as a strategic weapon - blow back. A human is a human, and odds are any weaponized biological infection would cross in to the nation who deployed it first. Science marches on. Designer babies, custom DNA based treatment programs, chimera, and that interesting CRISPR technology, had to lead to a dark place where we know people reside. It tickles the tribal brain; kill the other tribe. Scale up tribe in to ethnicity ... and ... well ... we know more than one group who would like to eliminate certain groups - humans have been doing this to other humans for over a hundred thousand years.
Biological weapons could be built which target individuals in a specific ethnic group based on their DNA, a report by the University of Cambridge has warned.
Researchers from Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) said the government was failing to prepare for ‘human-driven catastrophic risks’ that could lead to mass harm and societal collapse
This has been a topic for futurists of long standing. As Derb pointed out, Irwin Shaw in 1967 wrote about it in, "The Mannichon Solution." Each year it gets closer.
Not since the last decade of the Cold War have ballistic missile defense, land based cruise missiles, as well as short, intermediate, and medium range ballistic missiles received this much attention outside the compartmentalized and esoteric warfare specialities they belong in.
