Top Tuesday & April Fool Top 100
FROM THE DESK OF CLEARANCEJOBS.COM
1. Facebook’s future: UAVs, satellites, lasers. Contributor Marc Selinger explains, “Facebook announced it is building a team of engineers to explore using unmanned aircraft, satellites and lasers to expand Internet access across the globe. Facebook said March 27 that aerospace technology could be useful in places where more conventional means of communication, such as cell phone towers and fiber optic cables, are impractical.”
2. Big IT Ideas: $6 billion in 5 years. Editor Lindy Kyzer reports, “This RFP provides contractors with a good deal of opportunity to sell hardware and software, to provide installation and system maintenance services and to provide integration services with legacy systems. There is a lot of money available. With DIA as the lead agency, the need for contractors with security clearances will be integral to winning any of the bids.”
THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT
1. Battlefield Iraq—Anbar. AP’s Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sameer N. Yacoub report from Ramadi, “In Fallujah, history is repeating itself. A decade ago the Islamic State’s jihadi predecessors took a high-profile role in defending the city against U.S. forces in the biggest battle of the Iraq War, boosting the group’s profile and allowing it eventually to eclipse other insurgent groups.” See also, “ISIS parades on outskirts of Baghdad.”
2. More Syrian Army success. Aljazeera.Com reports, “Syrian army troops have recaptured a key position in coastal Latakia province . . . . After a series of rebel losses in Damascus province, the opposition has shifted its focus to Latakia, where the army and pro-government militias have rallied to defend the area.”
3. Farwelling General Alexander. American Forces Press Service’s Jim Garamone reports, “Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has paid tribute to retiring Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander, who is stepping down as head of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, crediting him with leading key assets in the intelligence community through one of the most challenging periods in history. . . . Hagel credited Alexander with working to protect the nation at a time when the NSA has faced controversy for its surveillance programs leaked by former contractor Edward Snowden.”
4. Drone wars—North Korea’s bid, perhaps. Reuters reports, “An unmanned drone crashed on a South Korean island near a disputed maritime border with North Korea . . . . The South Korean military was trying to verify where the drone had come from and what its purpose might have been, and was also looking into any possible link to North Korea’s espionage operations . . . . North Korea released TV footage last year of practice drones that had been modified to crash into pre-determined targets but it is not believed to operate drones capable of air strikes or long-range surveillance flights.” For more on the North Korean shots, see DefenseOne.Com’s “North Korea Fires Hundreds of Artillery Rounds at South, Defying U.N.”
CONTRACT WATCH
1. Pentagon’s Better Buying Power. DefenseNews.Com’s Marcus Weisgerber reports, “The Pentagon improved its buying power on 51 of its 80 programs in 2013, resulting in $23 billion of procurement savings . . . . The Pentagon, under then-acquisition chief Ashton Carter, launched the Better Buying Power initiative in 2010 in an effort to get DoD more bang for its buck. Frank Kendall, the current DoD acquisition chief, updated the Better Buying Power guidance in 2012 and formalized many of the Better Buying Power initiatives in guidance late last year.”
2. Weapon spending increases. Also from Weisgerber, contributing to FederalTimes.Com, “The Pentagon’s five-year projections for procurement spending on its 63 major weapons programs, submitted to Congress this month, has turned more positive than last year’s spending forecast, according to an analysis of the US Defense Department’s 63 top weapons programs . . . . funding for space-related efforts is projected to increase the most, showing a 4 percent average annual growth rate through the next five years . . . .”
TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY
1. NSA’s Cloak of Invisibility. AmericanFreedom.Com’s April Phouls reports, “NSA has confirmed that it has the technology allowing complete invisibility of both man and machine. An NSA source, unnamed for anonymity, indicated that the technology has been employed for over two years now, giving NSA snoops unfettered access to the West Wing, the halls of Congress, and even private homes.”
2. Cyberwar—the Un-Strategy. FierceGovernmentIT.Com contributor David Perera reports, “Anyone lamenting today’s lack of a cyber war grand strategist—someone ‘with great vision who will declare to the world what great power lies therein’—overlooks the properties of cyberspace . . . . the prospect for offensive operations in cyberspace inducing countries to stop fighting without having been defeated or threatened on a physical battlefield are ‘not terribly convincing.’” Read the Rand report, “Why Cyber War Will Not and Should Not Have Its Grand Strategist.”
3. Mystery ‘craft. AviationWeek.Com’s Bill Sweetman reports, “The identity of what appears to be a blended wing-body aircraft type photographed over Amarillo, Texas, on March 10 remains uncertain, with the U.S. Air Force declining any comment on the aircraft. . . . An Air Force representative in Washington responded to queries about the aircraft, and about flight activities at that time and place, with the statement ‘I have nothing for you,’ a phrase long associated with responses to queries about classified programs and operations.”
4. Privacy is dead—Long live Privacy! Wired.Com contributor Nathan Jurgenson explains, “We think of privacy and publicity as being in conflict. Instead, like the fan dance, they’re a mutually reinforcing system. Yes, we’re more public than ever, with all the unevenly distributed harms and benefits that follow. But we can’t do justice to that shift unless we drop the hyperbolic notion that privacy is in its death throes. If we want to understand privacy in the digital era, we need to recognize that publicity doesn’t kill it. Rather, publicity depends on privacy—and vice versa.”
POTOMAC TWO-STEP
1. Another one bites the dust: “House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp said Monday he won’t seek re-election this year after serving 12 terms in the House. . . . Boehner, who like Camp was elected to the House in 1990, called the Michigan lawmaker ‘a leader in the fight to increase economic growth.’ . . . But Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Chairman Steve Israel of New York took another position, saying that ‘yet another senior Republican committee chairman is abandoning John Boehner and his toxic Republican Congress. Camp is the fourth member of the Michigan congressional delegation to say they will step down when their current term expires in January . . . .”
2. Gotta have faith: “President Obama continues to have ‘faith’ in the Secret Service and confidence in its director, a spokesman said after agents accused of drinking to excess were sent home from the president’s trip to Europe. . . . Earlier this month, a Secret Service agent passed out drunk in the hallway of a Dutch hotel where the president would later stay. He and two other agents were subsequently sent home and suspended. The incident is the second major embarrassment for the agency during the president’s tenure, following an alcohol and prostitution scandal two years ago ahead of a presidential trip to Colombia.”
OPINIONS EVERYONE HAS
1. “The Certainty of Donald Rumsfeld (Part 3).” New York Times’ contributor Errol Morris explains, “Believing is seeing. We see what we are prepared to see. The problem was not an absence of evidence. There was a glut of evidence. The problem was how to interpret it, how to see it.”
2. “On Ukraine, Obama’s Munich Moment.” Time contributor Garry Kasparov argues, “Should Putin be allowed to keep Crimea and redraw the map of Europe so easily, he will be rooted even more deeply in power in Russia and continue to be a threat and destabilizing force in the region. Putin must be contained and Crimea must not be abandoned. Obama must state publicly that Ukrainian sovereign territory is non-negotiable, starting with Crimea.”
3. “Putin’s action is no surprise.” Reuters contributor Nader Mousavizadeh argues, “What we now have to recognize is that those tools of 21st globalization are acting as the very enablers of an archipelago world of fracturing power and identity. . . . The Kremlin is not alone among non-Western governments in planning for a contest of power and security defined far more by global divergence than convergence. It’s time the West started doing the same — and then avoid finding itself quite so often in the role of a startled bystander to global events.”
THE FUNNIES
1. Best defense.
2. April Fool.
3. Party on Garth.
