Fort Hood Shooting, Invisibility Cloaks, and the Kevlar Ceiling

FROM THE DESK OF CLEARANCEJOBS.COM

1. Breaking the Kevlar Ceiling. Contributor Jillian Hamilton explains, “Regardless of gender, magic can happen when egos are checked at the door, sleeves are rolled up and leaders approach problems with honesty and authenticity.”

2. Recruiting women in Defense. Also from Hamilton, “Recruiting women for heavily male dominated fields or companies can be challenging. It is about finding the right individual for a job, but when diversity is desired, it is important to understand how to meet the recruiting challenge.”

THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT

1. Fort Hood Shooting. Reuter’s Lisa Maria Garza reports from Fort Hood, “A U.S. soldier with mental health issues shot dead three people and injured at least 16 on Wednesday before shooting himself at an army base in Fort Hood, Texas, the site of another deadly rampage in 2009 . . . . The soldier, who was being treated for depression and anxiety, went to two buildings on the base and opened fire before he was confronted by military police.”

2. Afghanistan elections. DefenseOne.Com’s Stephanie Gaskell reports, “U.S. military officials have been laser-focused on this weekend’s election, while continuing to send home thousands of American troops. . . . U.S. and NATO forces have been helping Afghans deliver ballots and election materials, but there will be very little American presence on the day of the election. Afghans are in the lead . . . and the U.S. doesn’t want to be seen as influencing the vote.” Also, MRAPs to Pakistan.

3. Pulling a McArthur—Amos warns Washington. WashingtonExaminer.Com’s Paul Bedard reports, “The commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps is warning Washington that there ‘will be no peace dividend’ from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan, and he’s cautioning against a hasty retreat from the country the marines have secured in time for this weekend’s presidential election. ‘We can’t afford to simply pack up and go home,’ said Gen. James F. Amos.”

4. One million refugees—from Syria to Lebanon. Aljazeera.Com reports, “The number of Syrian refugees registered in Lebanon has exceeded one million, in what the UN refugee agency calls a ‘devastating milestone’ for a small country with depleted resources and brewing sectarian tension. Refugees from Syria, half of them children, now equal a quarter of Lebanon’s resident population . . . . ‘The Lebanese people have shown striking generosity, but are struggling to cope’ . . . .”

5. Assassination attempt in Pakistan—Musharraf. Time’s David Stout reports, “Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf narrowly dodged an assassination attempt on Thursday when a bomb exploded minutes before his convoy was due to pass by in Islamabad. . . . The former military dictator, who ruled the country with an iron fist from 1999 to 2008, has been facing myriad legal troubles, including charges of high treason, since he returned to Pakistan last year.”

CONTRACT WATCH

1. Contracting urgency exceptions. GovExec.Com’s Charles S. Clark reports, “Three agencies working in war-torn Afghanistan and Iraq have rightly taken advantage of urgency exceptions that allow single-source contracting, the Government Accountability Office found. Auditors did, however, fault managers for failing to post accurate procurement data in some instances.”

2. Blackberry—just can’t go away. FederalTimes.Com’s Amber Corrin reports, “Government stalwart mobility provider BlackBerry got some additional leverage on March 27 in the form of full operational capacity for its BlackBerry 10 to run on Defense Department networks. The FOC designation comes from the Defense Information Systems Agency, which is overseeing much of DoD’s push toward mobility. BlackBerry is the first mobile provider to receive FOC, and it follows the August announcement of authority to operate its BlackBerry Z10 and Q10 smartphones with BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 management solution.”

TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY

1. Torture transparency. AP’s Bradley Klapper and Stephen Braun report, “The Senate Intelligence Committee’s expected vote to approve declassifying part of a secret report on Bush-era interrogations of terrorism suspects puts the onus on the CIA and a reluctant White House to speed the release of one of the most definitive accounts about the government’s actions after the 9/11 attacks.”

2. Invisibility cloaks—no April Fools. DefenseOne.Com’s Patrick Tucker reports, “Researchers are one step closer to creating shields that could render parked tanks and aircraft virtually invisible. Debashis Chanda of the University of Central Florida and his fellow researchers have developed a technique to much more quickly create the ‘metamaterials’ with the potential to bend light rays around objects, creating, in effect, invisibility.”

3. Let freedom tweet! Also from AP, Desmond Butler, Jack Gillum, and Alberto Arce report, “In July 2010, Joe McSpedon, a U.S. government official, flew to Barcelona to put the final touches on a secret plan to build a social media project aimed at undermining Cuba’s communist government. McSpedon and his team of high-tech contractors had come in from Costa Rica and Nicaragua, Washington and Denver. Their mission: to launch a messaging network that could reach hundreds of thousands of Cubans.”

POTOMAC TWO-STEP

1. UFO Dreams: “Bill Clinton says we may not be alone. During an appearance on ABC’s ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’ Wednesday, the 42nd president was pressed by host Jimmy Kimmel about whether he saw any classified information while in office proving the existence of aliens. While Clinton said he had “all the Roswell papers reviewed’ and found no clear evidence that aliens exist, he also said he wouldn’t be shocked if intelligent life exists outside our planet or even if extraterrestrials one day visit Earth.”

2. Watergate reverb. “The Supreme Court’s decision this week striking down cumulative caps on individual hard-dollar donations was yet another blow to the post-Watergate finance regime that has sought for decades – with only the most modest success – to banish special interests from the political process. Former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste said the state of play for money in politics is ‘certainly’ as bad as it has ever been. If Nixon’s lieutenants maintained a $350,000 political slush fund that outraged the nation, that money is a drop in the bucket compared with the tens of millions spent these days through groups that face no contribution limits and do not disclose their donors.”

OPINIONS EVERYONE HAS

1. “Give Afghanistan a Chance.” USNews.Com contributor Patrick Christy argues, “The path forward will not be easy, but the United States still has core national security interests in seeing Afghanistan genuinely prosper. Ensuring that Afghanistan holds free and fair presidential elections and then finalizing a post-2014 bilateral security agreement between Washington and Kabul thus could give the Afghan people real chance to succeed.”

2. “The news bubble around Vladimir Putin.” Christian Science Monitor contributor John Yemma argues, “Ukraine, Kosovo, Germany, and the trauma of invasions by Napoleon and Hitler, Tatars and Mongols are in the forefront of Russia’s historical memory. Mr. Putin’s media have tapped into that. What started as a slant on the news to justify Russian foreign policy, however, may have infected the Russian leader’s worldview.”

3. “NATO Expansion Will Put Russia in Its Place.” DefenseOne.Com contributor Michael J. Quigley argues, “It is time to regain the upper hand with Russia by setting key regional partners in Eastern Europe on the path to membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization alliance.”