Armchair Generalist

Casual Fridays

Don't get between Germans and a good dinner. You don't know to what lengths they will go for good home-cooked meals. This story seemed pretty amusing.

Sausage-noshing German ambassadors used a 67 million GBP Eurofighter warplane to fly emergency supplies of mustard to a VIP party.

Diplomats in Croatia wanted to serve traditional white bangers at the bash to celebrate Germany's 60 years as a democracy but couldn't get the right mustard anywhere locally.

So they called in air support from the Luftwaffe who sent pilot Norbert Biehler with a case of the special sweet mustard for the party, reports Croatian newspaper Jutarnji List.

You might remember earlier stories about the German troops in Afghanistan requiring their allotments of beer and sausage. I do enjoy the occasional trip to the German restaurants myself. My weakness is the spaetzle. MMMmmmmm....

The Dream Team

Batocchio at the Vagabond Scholar has a solution to the Republican fears about Islamic terrorists breaking out of prisons to attack US citizens - get Jack Bauer and Wolverine on the case.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

WASHINGTON, DC – Seeking to quell fears of terrorists somehow breaking out of America's top-security prisons and wreaking havoc on the defenseless heartland, President Barack Obama moved quickly to announce an Anti-Terrorist Strike Force headed by veteran counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer and mutant superhero Wolverine. Already dubbed a "dream team," their appointment is seen by experts as a crucial step in reducing the mounting incidents of national conservatives and congressional Democrats crapping their pants.

"I believe a fictional threat is best met with decisive fictional force," explained President Obama. "Jack Bauer and Wolverine are among the very best we have when in comes to combating fantasy foes." Mr. Bauer said, "We're quite certain that our prisons are secure. Osama bin Laden and his agents wouldn't dare attempt a break-out, and would fail miserably if they tried. But I love this country. And should Lex Luthor, Magneto or the Loch Ness Monster attack, we'll be there to stop them."

The move has already earned widespread praise, and veteran columnist David Broder hailed the bipartisan nature of the team. But not all were convinced. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) scoffed, "I thought the president was a Spiderman guy. And what a surprise that a Canadian would use knives on his hands versus a good ol' fashioned American Uzi."

Read the whole thing. It's truly hilarious.

Apologies to SOCOM

I have to reach out and apologize to the SOCOM community for my earlier post. Upon closer examination of the first photo and this one (at the Army Times site), in particular their captions, I realized that the guy in the tan JSLIST suit is the SOCOM operator and the two guys in woodland camo are Korean special forces. The K2 assault rifles should have been my first clue.

The SOCOM operator has green vinyl overboots and rubber gloves, all legit chemical protective gear. He's wearing the standard JSLIST suit, not wearing the special SOCOM JSLIST suit, without the parka. They wanted a little more freedom in their head movement, but maybe they're saving those for the real deal. But you see the gap between the parka and the mask where the parka has "puckered" open? I never liked the idea of getting rid of the hoods and relying on tightening the parka around the M40 mask's rim. Just not secure enough for me, but the Marine Corps didn't ask me when they were the program managers for the JSLIST.

But the Koreans... wow. The guy in the center is wearing "fishtail" protective boots, which the US Army declared obsolete at least a decade ago. They are incredibly hard to wear and run across rough terrain. Based on the mixed top and bottom of the Korean operators, I'm not sure they are using protective suits at all - may be just standard combat uniform, definitely leather gloves though. The ROK is much closer to real chemical warfare agents than you or I will ever be, and I just expected a higher standard from them. Ah well.

Russian Chem Demil

With some fanfare, the long-awaited opening of the Russian chemical disposal facility at Shchuchye is finally taking place - after a $1 billion US investment into its building. It's taken way too long (talks were initiated in 1996), confounded by Russian bureaucracy, anti-incineration foes, US congressional foot-dragging, and yes, even the Russian mafia, but here it is.

The new facility, built with $1 billion in American aid, represents a milestone in a longstanding partnership between the United States and Russia to safeguard and in many cases liquidate enormous quantities of chemical, nuclear and biological weapons manufactured by the Soviet Union.
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The shells and warheads at Shchuchye contain about 5,950 tons of nerve agents, including sarin and VX. To dispose of them, a hole will be drilled into each, and the agents will be drained and mixed with other chemicals to neutralize them. The residue will be solidified in asphalt or a similar material.

While the facility’s formal opening is on Friday, it began preliminary operations in March. Russia ended up allocating roughly $600 million for the project, and other countries contributed as well.

It has taken years to develop the process to eliminate the nerve agents, with the Russians choosing not to incinerate them because of local opposition. It might be five years or more before all the weapons are neutralized.

“It turns out that it is a lot easier to produce chemical weapons than to destroy them,” said Igor V. Rybalchenko, a scientist who is a senior adviser to the Russian government.
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Shchuchye, in fact, has only 14 percent of Russia’s chemical weapons, which are kept at seven sites.But Shchuchye is considered perhaps the most critical location because many of the nerve agents are in shells. The city is close to Kazakhstan, which itself is near Afghanistan.

If you ignore the inflated hype in the article about the "deadliness" of one chemical artillery round, this isn't a bad article. I'd like to tell Igor there that he's full of crap - it's very easy to destroy chemical weapons, and incineration works fine. If you want to generate millions of gallons of liquid waste instead of much less solid waste, hey, it's your country. Russia does have six other chemical weapons disposal sites already running, but off the top of my head, I don't know if they are incineration-based or neutralization sites. It's not as if they have a nice web site with all the information as the US Army does here. But no, they're not going to make the 2012 deadline either.

Myths About WMD Terrorism

It's not often when I see an article about WMD terrorism that actually makes sense. Even rarer when I see a layperson write the article, so I have to point out this National Defense magazine article by Sandra Erwin and Stew Magnuson.

• Myth #1: U.S. Medical Excellence Extends to Disaster Response. Just-in-time delivery of medicine and supplies means that hospitals don’t find it profitable to stockpile essential items such as vaccines. Because of shortages of nurses and doctors, such institutions may already be understaffed. It can also be assumed that many of these emergency workers will fall victim to the disasters that they are expected to respond to.  
• Myth #2: Big-Budget Technology Is Needed to Counter Biological Terrorism. Michael Pantella, associate director for infectious disease at the University of Iowa Hygienic Laboratory, said that the approach to combating a biological attack should be the same as any infectious disease. It will fall on the public health system to mitigate the effects of a biological weapon. If antibiotics are stockpiled in sufficient numbers, and federally funded laboratories can quickly identify the pathogen, the public health system should be able to respond, he said.
• Myth #3: Smuggled Nukes Easily Can Be Detected at U.S. Entry Ports. Both the number of detectors that are being deployed and their efficacy are “overhyped,” said Charles Blair, director of the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies in San Jose, Calif. ... detecting nuclear materials is tough under any circumstance, said Evan Montgomery, research fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C. 
• Myth #4: If the U.S. Were the Victim of a Nuclear Attack, It Would Immediately Retaliate. Unless the weapon is delivered by a missile, immediate retaliation is not realistic, experts said. It could take weeks or months to figure out where the nuclear materials came from or how the explosive device was built.
• Myth #5: Terrorists Can Download Nuclear Bomb Recipes From the Internet. There are widespread misconceptions about what it really takes to achieve a nuclear explosion, said [Charles] Blair. The main problem is not the design of the weapon but obtaining the necessary fissile material, he said. “It would be akin to having the blueprint for how to make a handgun, but there are no bullets on the face of the Earth and you have no idea how to make them.”
• Myth #6: Liquefied Natural Gas Ships Are Ticking Time Bombs. Stephen Flynn, senior fellow for counterterrorism and national security studies at the Council of Foreign Relations, noted, “There is no explosion or ‘mushroom cloud’ associated with an LNG fire.  Because it is stored at such an incredibly cold temperature, it is difficult to ignite liquefied natural gas. It must first spill out of the hull and turn into a vapor.  Once the gas does ignite, it burns very hot but the range of the fire would be contained to under one-half a mile.”
• Myth #7: Nerve Gasses Are Terrorists’ Chemical Weapons of Choice. Aum purposefully recruited alienated chemistry and engineering students from top universities and set them to work creating weapons of mass destruction. ... Islamic terrorists in ungoverned territories, given the ability to find technical experts and the funding, could duplicate Aum Shinrikyo’s “success,” but would still have to smuggle the volatile substances in large containers to their intended target. As many counterterrorism experts have pointed out, the 9/11 masterminds did not have to smuggle any weapons into the United States to carry out their plot. They used what was on hand.

Okay, so it's not the most brilliantly analytical article, but it's certainly refreshing to see something other than "WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE FROM TERRORIST NUKES AND NERVE GAS!!! - unless the US government buys into my concept/equipment..."

SOCOM Has No CBRN Training

Wired's Danger Room featured this photo in a story about SOCOM training to do WMD elimination missions for North Korea. The Army Times article about the training is here.

Among the more complex missions during the exercise was an operation to secure a suspected chemical weapons lab. The operation required extensive planning and coordination of air and land assets of the Korean and American militaries.

The operation took less than 12 hours to execute, and began with a several-kilometer foot movement through the Chiri Mountain range, among the tallest on the Korean peninsula. After reaching the site and establishing an observation position, a separate element linked up with vehicles that rapidly escorted the assault and CBRN, or chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear, teams into position.

After the Korean and American operators secured the site, the CBRN team moved in to assess the fictional WMD threat. The assessment team completed their work at the site and boarded an inbound Chinook helicopter that landed adjacent to their location. A short flight later, the CBRN team boarded a waiting C-130 Hercules aircraft for a longer flight to another destination to treat simulated casualties. The C-130 used in the training was outfitted with special equipment to transport individuals who were exposed to chemical or biological hazards. The team landed and was treated by waiting medics.

Staff Sgt. Matthew Henson, the Chemical Reconnaissance Detachment sergeant in charge of the team that assessed the WMD site, said the training was "very good" and "very realistic."

Yeah, realistic if you're an infantry man who doesn't think that CB warfare agents are all that. Note in the photo - this is what I call "infantry MOPP" - when they wear masks but no hoods to protect their heads or necks, wear liquid absorbent leather gloves and leather combat boots instead of impermeable rubber gloves and boots. That's not realistic, that's a cop-out to minimize the heat stress from running around in protective gear.

The one thing that infantry guys never wanted to do is to train for combat operations realistically with full protective gear. They just don't like it, and I don't blame them. But "it is what it is" and if you're serious about charging into a CB weapons lab and blowing things up, maybe you ought to wear all the right gear. You assholes. And by the way, love the "technical charts" on the wall.

Merging the National and Homeland Security Councils

The Washington Post reports that President Obama is moving forward with the concept of merging the National Security Council and the Homeland Security Council.

President Obama announced yesterday that he will merge the staffs of the Homeland Security Council and the National Security Council to speed up and unify security policymaking inside the White House. [see WH announcement here]

The combined national security staff, about 240 people, will report to national security adviser James L. Jones.

The White House also will add new offices for cybersecurity, for terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction, and for "resilience" -- a national security directorate aimed at preparedness and response for a domestic WMD attack, pandemic or natural catastrophe, officials said.

"The challenges of the 21st century are increasingly unconventional and transnational, and therefore demand a response that effectively integrates all aspects of American power," Obama said in a statement.

This is a good thing. The HSC was too understaffed to seriously look at international terrorism and the many homeland security issues that require address, and the NSC was too overworked (or overburdened with Middle East concerns) to seriously address the military aspects of homeland defense. Homeland security is a national security issue, and I don't think you lose anything in this merger. No one is suggesting that homeland security is a lesser priority; this just is a more efficient way of merging it into the broader landscape of national security policy. I can think of more than a few WMD terrorism issues that will benefit from this merger, if (and this is a big if) the new staffers can think clearly about the threat and the costs/benefits of particular approaches to planning for and responding to WMD terrorism.

Also see these posts at the Homeland Security Watch.

What the General Meant to Say

A UK Telegraph reporter misinterpreted what General George Casey, Chief of Staff of the Army, was trying to say in his discussion about Army force levels and deployments in the Middle East. I don't think Casey was trying to say that we're going to be in Iraq for another decade, but no one in the new administration has really laid out a change in strategy for Afghanistan.

Gen George Casey said the world remained “dangerous and unpredictable”, and the Pentagon must plan for extended US combat and stability operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan that could deploy 50,000 US military personnel for a decade.

"Global trends are pushing in the wrong direction," Gen Casey said. "They fundamentally will change how the army works."

His planning envisioned combat troops in Iraq and Afghanistan for a decade as part of a sustained American commitment to fighting extremism and terrorism in the Middle East.
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Emphasising [sic] he was not a policy maker, he was adamant he did not intend to contradict Obama administration policy, which is to bring US combat forces home from Iraq in 2010. The US and Iraq have agreed that all American forces would leave by 2012.
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He said his could foresee ten combat brigades plus command and support forces committed to the two wars. Brigades tend to number three to five thousand.

He also said the US had to be careful about what assets get deployed to Afghanistan. "Anything you put in there would be in there for a decade," he said.

When he said "assets," I believe he meant building infrastructure, transporting heavy equipment, and bringing in material in addition to personnel. It would be a significant investment to move anything to Afghanistan, given the tenuous logistics infrastructure there. Casey has a point here, that there has been no change in orders so the Army will continue to act as if the Bush administration's strategy - such that it is - is still in effect. That's not a good thing. And as SecDef Gates notes, the American patience for this endless adventure is growing short.

The sooner that the Obama administration lays out its new strategy to get us out of Afghanistan, the better. Enough of these attempts to craft Afghanistan into a democracy - it ain't gonna happen. We smacked down the Taliban and al Qaeda, time to pull out and contain the threat from outside that country. We can better stabilize Pakistan if we weren't based in Afghanistan, causing civilian casualties from bombings and fueling resentment in both countries against us. Hat tip to Ray for the article!

UPDATE: The Associated Press seem to be operating under the same confusion.

Academics Discuss War

Check out these short articles in the May/June Stanford magazine discussing the "Lessons of War." I liked this observation by Martha Crenshaw:

Using data covering 1970 to 2004, they compared attacks on the United States to attacks on non-U.S. targets by the same anti-American groups. Crenshaw says other studies either excluded domestic attacks entirely or used data only from 1997 on. Working from a new database that aggregated domestic and transnational terrorist attacks, START examined anti-U.S. and non-U.S. attack patterns of groups identified by both the State Department and the National Counterterrorism Center as especially dangerous to the United States.

Their investigation revealed that more than 96 percent of the 16,000-plus attacks over the 25-year period focused on non-U.S. targets. “Not only did these groups that were considered threatening rarely attack the U.S., and almost never at home, but more than 90 percent of their non-U.S. attacks were domestic,” the START authors write in their January 2009 article, “Trajectories of Terrorism: Attack Patterns of Foreign Groups That Have Targeted The United States, 1970 to 2004.”

In an earlier article Crenshaw recalled a State Department claim that a third of all terrorist attacks worldwide targeted the United States. In their new article, she and her co-authors revisit that point and another that argued that most foreign victims of transnational terrorism have been U.S. nationals—a conclusion, they say, that can only be drawn by leaving local attacks out of the equation.

The big picture was missing. “This puts a different face on the whole threat,” she says. “It’s not a bunch of people out there attacking us.”

Terrorism isn't the existential threat to the United States that fearmongers claim. Our society is too large and too resilient to be defeated by terrorist groups. The sooner our policy makers act on good data instead of "gut checks," the better and more efficient our government will operate. Same for our military - we need to be able to fight in conventional and irregular conflicts, but we better build a military that's ready for the most probable threats, not the made-up fantasies of neocons.

Let me add a quick note. This is not to say that our military shouldn't be prepared to address fourth-generation warfare/irregular combat operations such as the current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But we ought to go into the discussion with our eyes wide open and without preconceived ideas about the "global threat" of terrorism and the vulnerabilities of the homeland.

Terminator Salvation Review

I haven't seen the new Terminator film yet, but I'm very discouraged based on the reviews to date. Interesting how this reviewer notes that the other Terminator films were "R" rated, this one is "PG-13"  - why? to get the kiddies in? Disappointing. I'll see it sooner or later.

Saw the new Star Trek film over the weekend - it's amazing what directors can get away with when they use the phrase "alternative reality." Is it so hard to make quality action films? Do the egos of directors, writers and producers get in the way of good writing?

This Is Supposed to be Alarming?

The Defense Department released a fact sheet that between 5 and 14 percent of more than 530 Gitmo detainees have gone to fighting with the insurgents against US and coalition forces after being released.

About 240 detainees are currently held at Guantanamo. According to an unclassified fact sheet released today by the Pentagon, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported 14 percent of former Guantanamo detainees confirmed or suspected of reengaging in terrorist activities.

“Of the more than 530 Guantanamo detainees transferred from Department of Defense custody at Guantanamo Bay, 27 were confirmed and 47 were suspected of reengaging in terrorist activity,” the fact sheet states. The report is based on information available as of mid-March.

Some former Guantanamo detainees, the report said, “are known to have reengaged in terrorist activity associated with the al-Qaida network, and have been arrested for reengaging in terrorist activities including facilitating the travel of terrorists into war zones, providing funds to al-Qaida, and supporting and associating with known terrorists.”

All I can say is, I'm surprised the numbers were so low. If I were kidnapped and transported to Gitmo, tortured repeatedly, held without charges or access to a lawyer, didn't see my family for years, I would be of a mind to get some serious payback. If all we see is a few detainees going bad, then it means that most of them decided to go back to normal lives despite their mistreatment. Even more reason why we need to stop the fearmongering, as SecDef Gates says, and resolve this issue.

A Failure to Communicate

SHORTER Blumenthal/Kagan: "Diplomacy doesn't work with North Korea. We need to 'impose' democracy on its leaders."

It's amazing how some neocons are so blindly ignorant of how their theory of imposing democracy on unwilling states has failed in so many ways. You guys really need to come up with a new idea. Or better yet, keep yammering and prove the point that you're mindless idiots.

Cheney's Gitmo "Terrorists"

Former vice president Dick Cheney has a long record of proposing harsh methods for suspected terrorists and for running the military commissions at Gitmo. Obviously he thinks he's right and isn't going to change his mind now. The Washington Post reveals the history of one of those dangerous detainees who was recently released in France.

Boumediene, who at the time was an aid worker with the Red Crescent, was arrested in Bosnia in October 2001 along with five other Algerians accused of plotting to blow up the U.S. and British embassies in Sarajevo, charges that were later withdrawn. In January 2002, the six were turned over to U.S. officials and flown to Guantanamo, despite rulings by several Bosnian courts that there was no reason to deport them.

U.S. interest was high because one of the six Algerians, Belkacem Bensayah, was accused by U.S. investigators of being an al-Qaeda operative in Bosnia. Moreover, Bosnian police had discovered a piece of paper in Bensayah's home with a handwritten number and a name that corresponded to that of a senior al-Qaeda leader in Afghanistan.
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Boumediene said he was interrogated more than 120 times during his stay in Guantanamo's Camp Delta, mostly about Arabs and other foreign Muslims in Bosnia. "At first I thought they were honest, and when I explained they would see I was innocent and would release me," he recalled. "But after the first two years or so, I realized they were not straight. So I stopped cooperating."

During one 16-day period in February 2003, he said, the interrogations went on day and night, sometimes with tactics such as lifting him roughly from the chair where he was strapped, so the shackles dug into his flesh. The interrogators, some dressed in military uniforms and others in civilian clothes, were assisted by Arabic interpreters who seemed mostly to be from Egypt and Lebanon, he recalled, and later included a few Moroccans and Iraqis.

"They were dogs," Boumediene said of the foreign interpreters, in his only show of anger. "They were dogs. They often started doing the interrogations themselves. They would tell the interrogators they could get more information." 

This is one of the men that the Republican politicians are so afraid of placing in a prison in the United States. I am sure that there are a few dozen insurgents who are legitimate detainees, but again, who are we kidding? They aren't supermen. They aren't any worse than the degenerates in our prison system or the few hundred terrorists already in prisons within the United States.

We need to get these detainees through a civil court system and decide whether they ought to be in prison or released. If the United States unfairly detained innocent people such as Boumediene, it ought to admit it and give him just compensation in addition to a plane ticket to go anywhere he wants. This shameful blot on America's reputation needs to be cleaned up, and by the way, restarting military commissions isn't the way, President Obama.

Mullen: Close Gitmo

Adm. Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, continues to press the case that the US government needs to close Gitmo, if for no other reason to stop giving terrorists ammunition for recruiting.

"Well, the concern I've had about Guantanamo in these wars is it has been a symbol -- and one which has been a recruiting symbol for those extremists and jihadists who would fight us. ... That's at the heart of the concern for Guantanamo's continued existence," Mullen said on ABC's "This Week."

"Well, I've advocated for a long time now that it needs to be closed. President Obama made a decision very early after his inauguration to do that by next January. And we're all working very hard to meet that deadline," Mullen added.

And of course, the Republican politicians continue to insist that the US government continue to give the terrorists a major propaganda tool.

Republican Senator Jon Kyl, speaking on "Fox News Sunday," embraced Cheney's view. "I think it's palpably false to suggest that the existence of Gitmo created terrorists. And yet the president gets away with (saying) that," Kyl said.
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"I don't know why it is better to have somebody in a so-called super max facility in, say, Colorado, than it is to keep them in Guantanamo, a state of the art facility that we built not too long ago for the explicit purpose of holding these people. There's nothing wrong with the prison at Gitmo," Kyl said.

Honestly, you have to wonder if their brains recoil at the stupidity of their mouths' comments. The Repubs have to admit that super-max prisons in the United States could certainly do the job, but... Gitmo is just as good? You know, except for those images of US soldiers pushing detainees around and the stories of abuse in the whole rendition thing. But not all Republicans think like this, thank goodness. We need to resolve this issue of detainees who haven't been to trial, and soon. We need more moderate Republicans like Colin Powell to beat people like Kyl with a very large board and make them understand what a loser proposition - keeping Gitmo open - this is.

Not Appropriate

Last Friday, President Obama gave the commencement address to the graduating class of the Naval Academy. As the graduates trooped by, one guy just had to have a chest bump with his commander-in-chief. Others got hugs.

Really? A chest bump? I didn't like it when Bush did a chest bump with an Air Force graduate, and I don't like it now. There ought to be a bit more gravitas when you meet the president, I think. Maybe I'm too stuffy.

Mr. President? Don't be the nerd who wants to be as well-liked as the jock who was the class president. Bring some dignity to the position.

North Korea Gets It Right

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. That seems to be the spirit of North Korea's nuclear weapons program, as it conducted a second nuclear underground test today. This time, the yield is estimated to be in the 10-20 kiloton range, a more respectable show than the first underground test.

“The suddenness of the nuclear test shows North Korea following military, not diplomatic logic,” said Hideshi Takesada, a professor specializing in Korean issues at Japan’s National Institute for Defense Studies. “They’re showing their nuclear strategies are being finalized. They want to be acknowledged as a nuclear power.”

Russia’s Defense Ministry said the underground detonation occurred at 9:54 a.m. in the northern city of Kilchu and had a yield of between 10 and 20 kilotons. If verified, the result would dwarf that of North Korea’s first nuclear blast in October 2006, which had a yield of less than one kiloton, according to the office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence.

The atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan on Aug. 6, 1945, which killed an estimated 140,000 people, had an estimated yield of 15 kilotons.

“The current nuclear test was safely conducted on a new higher level in terms of its explosive power and technology,” North Korea’s official Korean Central News Agency said in a statement.

There is some speculation that the test may be an indication that Kim Jong Il is afraid of dying and leaving the next ruler - probably one of his three sons - without a strong bargaining chip to use against the West. Predictably, there is a flurry of harsh condemnation against North Korea for its actions. Yes, I am sure that there was no way anyone could have predicted that North Korea would resume its nuclear tests after going back and forth (seven times?) on negotiations for the last few decades. Gary Samore, our WMD czar, seems to be fixated on addressing Iran's nascent nuclear program - maybe he ought to worry more about the one that already exists.

Also see Spencer Ackerman's Attackerman guest blogger sgwhiteinfla's great post about Iran's nuclear program. I don't have any evidence that Iran is definatively driving toward developing a nuclear weapons capability, but my "gut feeling" is that they are. They're just not in any hurry to get there, and the leadership there probably enjoys the attention they get. Sure, we need to engage Iran on this issue, but we really don't need the threats and it isn't something we have to solve immediately. There are other more urgent crises.

UPDATE: Estimates are that the bomb was smaller, 4-6 kT maybe.

In Remembrance

Casual Fridays

Today the crew of the shuttle Atlantis was supposed to come home after a very successful mission repairing the Hubble telescope. I wanted to take a moment to acknowledge their great work.

Just a few days ago the Hubble had a single major scientific instrument, a 16-year-old camera. It also had an aiming device that freelanced a little bit of science in its spare time. Everything else was kaput. The most advanced camera had been dead for two years, and the spectrograph dead for nearly five.

Now the Hubble has four new or rejuvenated scientific instruments. Plus new batteries. New gyros. A new computer. The upgraded telescope has vision so keen it can peer back through time to when the very first, ungainly galaxies were pulling themselves together. It will study the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars. It will look for tendrils of dark matter wriggling through the intergalactic void.

"We have a brand-new observatory with full capability that will be more productive than ever in its scientific lifetime," said Jon Morse, head of astrophysics for NASA.

The billions we spend at NASA to retain this world-class capability to march through space is a minimal investment. We ought to take some pride in this world-class expertise that we've developed. Ad Astra, bitches!

That Word Does Not Mean What You Think It Means

The FBI continues its blatant misuse of the term "weapons of mass destruction."

The Federal Bureau of Investigation and New York City officials have arrested four men who allegedly planned terrorist attacks against Jewish and military targets.

The arrests, which took place late Wednesday in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, were made after the men were said to have placed FBI-altered bombs outside a synagogue and Jewish community center. The police, using an 18-wheel truck, blocked their getaway and then apprehended the unarmed suspects.
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In late April, Cromitie and David Williams are alleged to have purchased a 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol for use during the planned attacks. Then, in early May, the complaint says, Cromitie, David Williams, and Mr. Payen drove with the informant toward Stamford, Conn., to obtain what they thought would be a surface-to-air guided missile and three improvised explosive devices containing 30 pounds of C-4 plastic explosives. Both had been neutralized by the FBI.
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The men are now charged with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction and conspiracy to acquire and use antiaircraft missiles. The maximum penalty for both charges is life in prison.

Planning to use C4 explosive and a surface-to-air missile should not be called attempts to use a "weapon of mass destruction." If it is, then a lot of US military personnel are in big trouble of violating international arms control agreements. That's a tongue-in-cheek comment - I know that the FBI uses the Title 18 definition of WMDs, where a cherry bomb and a can of gasoline can be called a "WMD." But it's really stupid for them to keep this definition as a justification for arrests - it confuses the dialogue on terrorist CBRN incidents. I'm sure there are more than enough laws on the books to keep these stupid terrorists on ice for a long time without misusing the WMD term.

The DOD Budget - More of the Same

I've run through the FY10 President's Budget that was submitted to Congress - you can get a nice color overview and several documents at the OSD comptroller site. I have to say, I really don't see a lot to distinguish this from former budgets (other than what you've already heard from SecDef Gates). Looking at the breakout of the base funds, there's 35% for military pay and family housing, 30% for operations and readiness, and 35% for modernization. That's pretty much the status quo.

Looking at the service cuts, it's again pretty normal - 27% for the Army, 27% for the Air Force, and 29% for the Navy. Yes, no indication that the Army, doing all the heavy lifting in the Middle East, should get more than the other services. The remaining 17% is defense-wide funds. The overview brief includes a few pages for each service to explain its priorities and strategies. Interesting reading, nothing that will rock your socks off. I suppose you can't expect much more than a few tweaks off of what the Bush administration submitted, at least in this first year and prior to the QDR.

I did notice that the DOD Chem-Bio Defense Program has also submitted its FY10 budget at the OSD comptroller site. The DOD overview says this:

The Department’s Chemical and Biological Defense Program (CBDP) is a key part of a comprehensive national strategy to counter the threat of chemical and biological weapons today and in future years. The CBDP FY 2010 base funding request of $1.6 billion supports consequent management and counter-proliferation. The consequent management provides capabilities to respond to effects of chemical and biological weapons used against forces deployed here and abroad. The CBDP counterproliferation program supports passive defenses tailored to the unique characteristics of the various chemical and biological weapons, including emerging threats. The program provides the U.S. with the ability to mitigate the effects of a Chemical and Biological (CB) attack against deployed forces.

The CBDP funds research, science, and technology based programs in CB capabilities to exploit leading technologies. These superior capabilities will enable U.S. forces to defend against CB threats in future years. This science and technology research provides core capabilities to ensure U.S. advantages, including research into advanced chemical and biological detection systems, advanced materials for improved filtration systems and protection systems, advanced decontaminants, investigations into the environmental fate of chemical warfare agents, advanced information technologies, and medical biological research and chemical defense.

Yadda yadda. I need to drill down into the CB defense items, but on a cursory view, it's not too different either from past budgets (and that's the bad news). The detection programs have about 20% of the funds, the tech base (med and non-med) take up 33%, the individual protection (med and non-med) programs are about 20%, and the rest - decon, colpro, homeland security, info tech, test and eval, and management costs make up the rest. Within the program, there's been a lot of moving money between detection programs (slipped schedules), a few decon programs were axed, individual protection has no future, and TMTI keeps moving all over the map. I don't see any really new capabilities coming out now or in the near future. It's not pretty, but hey, that's normal. The good news is that we haven't lost any funding, it's a bit higher than last year.

I still believe in the importance of the DOD CB Defense Program, but it really shouldn't be so hard to come up with a coherent modernization plan and to keep the programs on track. It's not the Future Combat Systems, for crying out loud. As for those of you who think that we spend too much on chem-bio defense, it's just $1.6 billion. Peanuts. Combine that with the chem demil program (another $1.5 billion), and it's still less than what DOD will spend in FY10 for MRAPs ($4.5 billion). And while you may think that the MRAP funding is more important - I don't - here's the thing. It just shows how fixated DOD leadership gets on near-term shortfalls and shortchanges the force on supposed "catastrophic" and "existential" threats of weapons of mass destruction. End of sermon.

On the positive side, you can always read good things about the DOD CB Defense Program in its shiny, colorful annual report to Congress, just released this month.