Humph Day Highlights & Farewell Bacall
FROM THE DESK OF CLEARANCEJOBS.COM
1. Top 5 skills. Contributor Tranette Ledford offers, “This year’s job market for cleared professionals is more stable over last year, pushing a handful of IT fields to the top of the list of high-paying skills. Cleared veterans interested in better than average salaries may want to update their resumes to ensure their skills and training match what hiring managers are looking for to fill openings in the second half of 2014.”
2. Drones for Vets. Also from Tranette Ledford, “The job market for unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) is taking off, opening new career paths for cleared veterans interested in drone operator jobs and in associated positions. . . . When it comes to landing these jobs, cleared veterans will find themselves at the center of hiring managers’ attention. . . . And since most of the current positions and many of those coming down the line will be government-based and defense contractor-based, cleared veterans with UAS degrees will have a definite edge.”
THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT
1. Mission creep (?) in Iraq. Reuters’ Michael Gregory and Ahmed Rasheed report from Baghdad, “Iraq’s new prime minister-designate won swift endorsements from uneasy mutual allies the United States and Iran on Tuesday as he called on political leaders to end crippling feuds that have let jihadists seize a third of the country. . . . The United States sent about 130 additional military personnel to northern Iraq on Tuesday . . . The soldiers will develop options for helping Iraqi civilians trapped on Mount Sinjar by Islamic State fighters . . . . Since June the United States has sent about 700 military personnel to Iraq to protect U.S. diplomats there and take stock of Iraq’s military capacity.” See also, “Iraq’s prime minister seems increasingly isolated” and “Iraq’s Shia divided over new PM nomination.”
2. Kurds want more (Baghdad doesn’t). Aljazeera.Com reports, “Kurdish officials in Iraq have demanded that the US sustain and expand its aerial bombing campaign in order to help them stave off advances made by the Islamic State group. . . . ‘For the air strikes to be really fruitful in a way that can somewhat turn the tide of the conflict, they need to continue long enough,’ said Dler Mustafa Hassan, deputy chairman of the committee of Peshmerga affairs in the Kurdish parliament. . . . Hassan added that the US should extend its aerial cover to include areas near the Kirkuk and Diyala provinces. Both areas are highly disputed, as both the KRG and Iraq’s central government in Baghdad claim them as their own. But US military action has also raised some opposition in Baghdad.” See also, “130 Advisers Heading To Northern Iraq” and “Hagel at Pendleton: 130 more.”
3. No strategy for ISIS. DefenseOne.Com contributor Janine Davidson reports, “President Obama’s recent military action in northern Iraq to protect American personnel and provide humanitarian aid to civilians besieged by Islamic State (IS) forces has likely achieved its limited tactical effects. Airstrikes have restricted IS’s freedom of maneuver on the ground, and provided a bit of space for Kurdish Peshmerga forces, who appear to be the last best hope to face IS on the ground. Still, as Pentagon officials have made clear, none of this will have a strategic effect on the well-armed and increasingly well-funded IS forces.”
4. Security in Afghanistan dwindling. Khaama.Com reports, “The recent increase in armed conflict and civilian casualties’ makes 2014 the most violent year post the Taliban era. . . . Analyzing the status-quo, experts suggest that security and political situation has got worse in the last few years due to frequent suicide attacks, insurgent activities across the country and fragile economy; however it’s not only the security and economic issues that make the situation of the country more fragile and conflict prone but also the ongoing troubled political situation and rivalry between the two candidates is adding up more into chaos than stability.”
5. Bringing the fight to the U.S. Christian Science Monitor’s Anna Mulrine warns, “As the Islamic State gains ground and enlarges its pool of foreign fighter recruits, it is increasingly likely to attack on American soil as well. That has been the warning coming from some lawmakers and defense analysts this week, who argue that the United States has de facto declared war on the Islamic State by launching air strikes against IS positions, and now it must steel itself for foreign militants to bring the fight to the US. ‘Mr. President, be honest with the threat we face,’ Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) of South Carolina warned . . . . ‘They are coming.’”
CONTRACT WATCH
1. Future helo firms. DoDBuzz.Com’s Brendan McGarry reports, “The U.S. Army has picked two industry teams to move forward with development of futuristic rotorcraft, signaling it plans to pursue both coaxial and tilt-rotor designs for now, the companies announced on Tuesday. The service selected a team led by Sikorsky Aircraft Corp., part of United Technologies Corp., and Boeing Co. to build a helicopter for the first phase of the Joint Multi-Role technology demonstrator program, according to a statement. The firms partnered to develop the SB>1 Defiant, a medium-lift chopper based on Sikorsky’s X2 coaxial design and expected to fly for the first time in 2017.”
2. Lockheed’s $60 million anti-sub warfare systems. MilitaryAerospace.Com Editor John Keller reports, “Undersea warfare experts at the Lockheed Martin Corp. Mission Systems and Training (MS2) segment in Manassas, Va., will provide the U.S. Navy with 2014’s allotment of AN/SQQ-89A(V)15 anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems for surface ships under terms of a $59.7 million contract modification . . . . The AN/SQQ-89A(V)15 is an undersea combat system designed to search, detect, classify, localize, and track underwater contacts, and to attack or avoid enemy submarines, floating, tethered, or bottom-attacked mines, and torpedoes. This contract combines purchases for the U.S. Navy and the government of Japan.”
TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY
1. Battling hackers. USNews.Com’s Tom Risen reports, “To counter well-connected hackers, the FBI and other agencies have been treating them like ‘a new kind of organized crime’ by chasing, researching and recruiting them with methods similar to those used against the Mafia . . . . The FBI spent years building successful cases against the Mafia in the U.S. by studying the culture of that community, sharing information on crime rings with other law enforcement agencies and by gaining information directly from the crime groups through undercover agents or protected informants. Similar efforts can help agencies understand and prosecute international hacker groups . . . .”
2. Railguns—how they work. Wired.Com’s Rhett Allain explains, “The device is simple in design. You have two parallel rails (thus called a railgun) and a moveable projectile that is also like a wire. An electric current goes down one wire, across the projectile and then back down the other rail. In between the two parallel rails, both of the magnetic fields due to the rails points in the same direction and make a stronger magnetic field. This magnetic field then pushes on the projectile with the current running through it to propel it out of the railgun. Boom. A projectile.”
3. Navy’s RoboSub competition. AFCEA.Org’s George Seffers reports, “Systems entered in the U.S. Navy’s 17th annual RoboSub competition . . . are far more sophisticated than the toys that competed in the first competition, which was launched in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. . . . The first ever competition included four teams whose systems were challenged to navigate in a straight line. Now, to complete the course, the robosubs are required to go through underwater gates, navigate a winding course, recognize different colored buoys and pick up objects.”
POTOMAC TWO-STEP
1. She’s a hugger! “Hillary wants to hug it out with President Obama. After a much-noted spat with Obama’s supporters over foreign policy differences, Clinton called the President Tuesday to cool things down, a spokesman for the former Secretary of State said. While the two have ‘honest differences’ over foreign policy, those differences do not eclipse their broad agreement on most issues, Clinton spokesman Nick Merrill said in a statement Tuesday. ‘Like any two friends who have to deal with the public eye, she looks forward to hugging it out when she they see each other tomorrow night,’ he said. Clinton and Obama were scheduled to cross paths at a gathering Wednesday night on Martha’s Vineyard. Merrill’s statement is an effort to tamp down an escalating foreign policy feud between the Clinton and Obama camps.”
2. Fox’s booty battle: “The debate over first lady Michelle Obama’s war on fat and campaign for healthy kiddy diets has reached, well, a new low. ‘How well can she be eating? She needs to drop a few,’ said Fox News contributor and psychiatrist Keith Ablow. As some members on the cable network’s show ‘Outnumbered’ Tuesday gasped and Lisa Kennedy Montgomery offered, ‘I like her booty,’ he suggested that the first lady is too fat to preach diet and that she’s not eating what children in schools are being offered under the first lady’s guidelines. Instead, Ablow suggested that the lean president should be the one talking diet and nutrition.”
OPINIONS EVERYONE HAS
1. “Putin’s already paying dearly for Ukraine – and looks willing to sacrifice much more.” Reuters contributor William Pomeranz argues, “Putin is more popular according to Russian public opinion polls than he has ever been during his 14 years in office. He has achieved this success, however, by undermining the very institutions, both domestic and international, that facilitated his consolidation of power. He is more powerful—yet more exposed—than at any time during his presidency.”
2. “The Strongmen Cometh.” USNews.Com contributors Mathew Burrows and Jonathan Paris argue, “For all the regimes, authoritarianism may seem a good and fortuitous fix to the chaos they had a hand in creating. Equally understandable is the Western policy of detachment — who in their right mind would want to wade in? However, the cycle of violence in Syria and Iraq is not near to winding down. As with similar imbroglios like the Yugoslav breakup, greater Western involvement is inevitable if a much worse outcome is to be avoided. Early recognition and action could increase the chances of avoiding the kind of heavy lifting that was involved in Bosnia.”
3. “A sobering assessment on U.S. military’s future.” MilitaryAerospace.Com Editor John Keller argues that it “sounds like the U.S. military across the board is long overdue for a sustained period of revitalization—something that has been severely lacking during the current administration. Still, the problems are much bigger and more complicated than simply writing larger checks. The U.S. government is deeper in debt that it’s ever been, and the nation’s political resolve to bolster and renew its military forces is in question.”
THE FUNNIES
1. Before iPods.
3. Hackers.
