FROM THE DESK OF CLEARANCEJOBS.COM
1. Interviewing the Veteran – make the most of a great opportunity. Contributor Janet Farley explains, “Unless you are a veteran yourself or you have an intimate understanding of what it is like to serve in uniform, making the military to civilian skill set connection can be challenging both for you and for the job-seeking veteran.”
2. Hiring Vets and the Disabled – new rules and requirements. Editor Lindy Kyzer interprets the possibilities: “Earlier this week the Department of Labor announced two new final rules to improve the hiring of veterans and people with disabilities. Both rule changes update laws requiring federal contractors and subcontractors to hire veterans and people with disabilities.”
THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT
1. “Revenge [their] foul and most unnatural murder.” Compelled to act, POTUS and his team are working to determine the best course of action.
a. What we know, what matters, and what it’s about. SecState’s full remarks – a hell of a speech: “History is full of leaders who have warned against inaction, indifference and especially against silence when it mattered most.”
b. Aljazeera.Com reports, “President Barack Obama later said the US was considering a ‘limited narrow act’ in response to the attack, which posed “a challenge to the world’. Kerry made clear Washington would not be swayed from acting either by the opinions of other states . . . . French President Francois Hollande told the daily Le Monde he still supported taking ‘firm’ punitive action over an attack he said had caused “irreparable” harm to the Syrian people. . . .”
c. AP’s Lara Jakes reports, “President Barack Obama is poised to become the first U.S. leader in three decades to attack a foreign nation without mustering broad international support or acting in direct defense of Americans.”
d. Syria rips down the center of UK politics. TheGuardian.Com reports, “David Cameron accused Ed Miliband of siding with Russia and letting down the United States over Syria in an acrimonious phone call made between the leaders a day before the Commons votes against intervention in Syria, according to Labour sources. . . . When Miliband made it clear in the call he would not support the government motion without more conditions, an exasperated Cameron accused him of ‘letting down America’ and ‘siding with [Sergei] Lavrov’, the Russian foreign minister, and an ally of Assad.” Won’t get fooled again.
e. Retaliation – part of the equation. Time’s Mark Thompson examines the range of steps Syria could take in response to a strike: “There’s always the danger Assad — or his allies — could respond to Washington’s retaliation by retaliating themselves. . . . Military experts agree. Once the shooting starts, anything can happen in the fog of war. . . . as Obama prepares to roll the dice, he’d do well to remember something else Dempsey, his top military adviser, said in that letter to Levin last month. “We must anticipate and be prepared for the unintended consequences of our action,” the general wrote. “Should the regime’s institutions collapse in the absence of a viable opposition, we could inadvertently empower extremists or unleash the very chemical weapons we seek to control.”
f. Ghosts of Iraq. McClatchyDC.Com reports, “Support for military action would jump, according to polls, if it was proven the Syrian regime used chemical weapons on its own people. But even that boost wouldn’t fully erase the deep skepticism. ‘No question people would have a highly negative reaction to the use of chemical weapons. But there is just limited support for involvement in the Middle East and in Syria’ . . . .”
g. UN Inspectors out of the way. Reuters reports, “The 20-member team, including experts from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, have been into the rebel-held areas in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus three times, taking blood and tissue samples from victims. They also took samples of soil, clothing and rocket fragments.
3. Taliban step up as NATO steps out. AP’s Mir Wais Khan reports, “A suicide bomber detonated his explosives near a police checkpoint and a bank in southern Afghanistan on Saturday, one of two attacks in the heartland of the insurgency that killed 18 people over 24 hours. Separately, a NATO service member was killed by insurgents in the country’s east . . . . Taliban fighters have escalated their activity as U.S.-led foreign forces reduce their presence in the country, having handed over primary responsibility for security to Afghan troops.” Also in Afghanistan, a new intel chief: “former NDS chief Rahmatullah Nabeel has been introduced as the acting head of the intelligence department.”
4. U.S. drone kills Kaid al Dhahab, head of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. LongWarJournal.Org’s Bill Roggio reports, “The CIA-operated, remotely piloted Predators or the more deadly Reapers killed Kaid and the two other fighters this morning as they were traveling in a vehicle in the village of Manasseh in Baydah, tribal sources and officials told AFP. Mohammed Albasha, Yemen’s official spokesman in Washington, confirmed Kaid’s death in a statement on Twitter.”
5. Joint Light Tactical Vehicle hits the road. DefenseMediaNetwork.Com reports, “The U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps have taken delivery of all 66 Joint Light Tactical Vehicles (JLTVs) prototypes, so that a planned 14 months of full-scale testing can begin as scheduled next week. JLTV testing will take place at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md. and Yuma Proving Ground, Ariz. Oshkosh Defense, AM General, and Lockheed Martin each delivered 22 vehicles and six trailers. The beginning of full-scale testing marks a significant milestone in the JLTV program, which has already seen some initial testing during the current research and development program.”
CONTRACT WATCH
1. Winning government contracts as a small business. NextGov.Com describes the EZ way to succeed: “One effort to improve this system is RFP-EZ, a Small Business Administration website that aims to match some low-cost technology projects with qualified companies that might not otherwise get them. . . . The site was designed to reduce the government’s grunt work on small technology contracts while opening federal work to small, innovative startups in Web design, data sharing and open source technologies.”
2. Boeing tempts U.S. Navy with Super Hornet upgrades. AviationWeek.Com’s Amy Butler reports, “With 25 hr. of flight time on new, stealthy F/A-18 fuel tanks and more trials planned, Boeing is now focusing its demonstration and marketing efforts for a host of Super Hornet upgrades toward the U.S. Navy customer, a major reversal. . . . Despite funding pressure in the Defense Department, the Navy appears to be on board with the concept, though funding has yet to emerge. The service is allowing Boeing to lease one of its new Super Hornets for demonstration flights and requesting some specific design tweaks — such as improved fuel load in stealthy fuel tanks. Industry officials on the Super Hornet industry team suggest funding could come as early as the 2016 budget, which will be crafted next summer.”
TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY
1. Clapper to release transparency reports. VentureBeat.Com’s Meghan Kelly reports, “The United States government announced today that it will now release its own form of a transparency report, which is expected to debut later this fall. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper announced the change on his office’s Tumblr blog, saying that the decision came naturally after President Barack Obama ordered the declassification of as much intelligence information as possible. The transparency report will include total numbers for national security letters, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) business records requests, FISA pen register/trap and trace requests, and ‘FISA orders based on probably cause.’”
2. The Personal Computer – so yesterday. TheGuardian.Com announces, “The PC boom is over, and the business will never regain the peaks that it saw in 2011 when more than 359m were shipped worldwide, says research company IDC. In a downward revision of its forecast for this year’s PC business, it says that total shipments will fall by 9.7% compared to 2012, and will continue to drift down at least until 2017. The culprits are smartphones, especially in emerging markets, and tablets, together with economic woes both in the west and some emerging markets.”
3. Assange wearing out his welcome. Ecuador says, “Cut it out!” TheGuardian.Com reports, “Julian Assange has been told to stop using the Ecuadorean embassy in London to poke fun at Australian politicians as part of his Senate election bid . . . . Tensions between Assange and his Ecuadorean hosts were heightened during the Snowden affair, with diplomats saying that they felt that the WikiLeaks founder was trying to steal the limelight.”
POTOMAC TWO-STEP
1. Strange bedfellows, perhaps. As POTUS deliberates, Republicans stand beside him. TheDailyBeast.Com reports that “the White House’s signal that it is willing to bomb Syria without approval from the U.N. Security Council and even its closest ally has also earned it new friends who worked for the president he succeeded. . . . Many former officials from the George W. Bush administration have discovered new respect for Obama’s recent embrace of American unilateralism after the suspected chemical-weapons attack last week in a suburb of Damascus.”
2. Stoners – dancing on a tight rope, dude. Writing complex memos for Dead Heads to decipher is just good entertainment: “What [Holder] did . . . was to speak in code . . . . the federal government has always left it to the states and local law-enforcement agencies to handle the small stuff, of small-time possession ‘for personal use on private property.’ In other words, it’s not some big policy shift to continue to let the states decide whether to prosecute—or legalize—getting high in your own house. Same goes for the use of medicinal marijuana—supposedly. But the memo also goes so far as to say the size of a grow operation or other cannabis business should no longer by itself influence whether the feds get involved, at least in these states.” So, let’s dance!
OPINIONS EVERYONE HAS
1. Syria as Western hypocrisy. Aljazeera.Com contributor Tarak Barkawi argues, “Of course the hypocrisy is extraordinary. The United States has apparently rediscovered the significance of the ethics and laws of war, but in Syria – not Guantanamo. The US snoops on the world’s email and does nearly nothing about a bloody coup in Egypt but tells us we should all be especially shocked about a few hundred deaths from a chemical attack in Syria.”
2. “Has Iraq shackled American power?” Reuters contributor David Rhode argues, “The risks are high but President Barack Obama should follow Cameron’s example. Obama should allow the U.N. inspectors to complete their work, unveil any U.S. evidence of Syrian government involvement in chemical attacks and give Congress an opportunity to vote on the use of force.”
3. Destroying the village to save the village. WaPo contributor Steven A. Cook argues, “The missile strikes the White House is contemplating would advance Syria’s dissolution. . . . Syria has no obvious successor states, meaning there would be violence and instability in the heart of the Middle East for many years to come.”
4. Can’t go it alone. USNews.Com contributor Mercedes Schlapp argues that “the Syrian civil war is complicated and messy. One is unable separate the good guys from the bad guys. They are both guilty of horrific war atrocities, and tragically innocent people are being brutally murdered every day. We can stand by and watch as thousands more continue to die or take some sort of action. However, limited military intervention without international support is not enough to change the course of the Syrian civil war.”
THE FUNNIES
1. Minimum wage.
