We’re still celebrating squirrel month – 30 full days of Secret Squirrel festivities! If you’re not already, follow @SecretSquirrel on Twitter! If you follow him this month and send a selfie in front of one of our D.C. metro billboards, we’ll send you a $5 coffee card! Just 10 days left to participate!
FROM THE DESK OF CLEARANCEJOBS.COM
1. Encyclopedia of secrets. Contributor Charles Simmins reports, “In the last decade, the intelligence community and the people who oversee it for the American people have been engaged in a low-level conflict. At the heart of the fight, for all agencies, the Congress and the Administration, is the question ‘Who needs to know which programs and actions are being taken by any given intelligence organization?’”
2. Military iconography. Contributor David Brown offers, “When it comes to the use of symbols, poets have nothing on military service members. Perhaps the most creative and well-known uses of military symbolism can be found on unit patches and insignia. Here are eight military unit insignia and their meanings. . . .”
THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT
1. Asian pivot. Defense Media Activity reports, “The United States, South Korea and Japan [Friday] concluded what a joint statement called a ‘productive and substantive’ two-day security meeting . . . . The officials reaffirmed that their governments will not accept North Korea as a nuclear-armed state, and agreed to closely coordinate to deter North Korean provocations, the joint statement said. Each side welcomed the cooperation enabled by a document called the ‘Trilateral Information Sharing Arrangement Concerning the Nuclear and Missile Threats Posed by North Korea,’ the statement said, noting that the three countries decided to continue working-level consultations for effective implementation of the arrangement for sharing information on North Korean nuclear and missile threats.” See also, “Beijing’s Fait Accompli in the South China Sea.” Watch, “Diplomatic Access: Japan.”
2. Iran reaches for Afghanistan. Afghan Zariza reports, “At a time when the Islamic State (IS) group has expanded its network and made inroads into Afghanistan, Iran has offered to join its neighbor in the coordinated fight against terrorism. Hassan Rouhani, President of Iran, said Iran and Afghanistan share strong ties and both the neighboring countries must join hands to defeat Islamic State and other terrorist groups operating in the region. President Rouhani made the remarks while addressing a joint press conference with President Ashraf Ghani in Tehran on Sunday.” See also, “Iran: Next Battleground for Arms Deals?”
3. Special Operations Forces Liaison Elements (SOFLE). Breaking Defense’s Richard Whittle reports, “A soufflé is fluffy but a SOFLE – a brand new military acronym that stands for Special Operations Forces Liaison Element — is sinewy and powerful. . . . The SOFLE is a novel concept that does away with the tried but abandoned idea of keeping a full Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command (MARSOC) company aboard an ARG ship waiting for something to happen. ‘There was too much work to do on the ground to keep those guys on the ship waiting for something to happen’ . . . .”
4. Greatest Generation reconciliation. AP’s Eric Talmadge reports, “Both the 18-year-old U.S. Marine and the 17-year-old Okinawan schoolgirl had known the enemy only from the virulent propaganda they had been fed. When they finally met their foes in the closing months of World War II, in separate, back-to-back battles hundreds of miles apart, it was on the most terrifying terms. And in the 70 years since, it has been difficult to reconcile the hatred of the past with the peace of the present. Here are their stories, as told to The Associated Press on Iwo Jima and the island of Okinawa . . . .”
CONTRACT WATCH
1. Run on Virginia-class subs. DoD Buzz’s Kris Osborn reports, “The Navy is investigating the prospect of building three new Virginia-class attack submarines per year instead of two in order to boost the size of the fleet as more Los Angeles-class submarines retire. . . . Virginia-class submarines are built by a cooperative arrangement between the Navy and Electric Boat, a subsidiary of General Dynamics and Newport News Shipbuilding, a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries. Each industry partner constructs portions, or ‘modules,’ of the submarines which are then melded together to make a complete vessel . . . .”
2. Single-board military grade computers announced. Military & Aerospace Electronics Editor John Keller reports, “Aitech Defense Systems Inc. in Chatsworth, Calif., is introducing the enhanced C111 and C112 Freescale T4-based single-slot 6U VME and VPX single-board computers for military, industrial, and high-end commercial applications. The embedded computing boards have the new low-power, multi-core, multi-processor T4080 QorIQ with AltiVec technology, which enhances computing performance and optimizes energy efficiency for lower power, high-end, floating point computing applications.”
TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY
1. Robot Terrorists. Defense One contributor Marc Goodman reports, “[I]n this day and age, we not only have to worry about drones themselves being hacked. Terrorists are turning to robots as weapons, and they aren’t limited to consumer-grade UAVs with small payloads. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorists have deployed VBIEDs (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices), commonly known as car bombs, to destroy multiple buildings and rock entire neighborhoods, with some vehicles’ containing up to seven thousand pounds of explosives.” See also, “Growing worries about proliferation of ‘killer robots’” and “We just can’t stop building robots that look like humans.”
2. Growing cyberwarriors. The Christian Science Monitor’s Sara Sorcher reports, “Dozens of people hunkered over computers. Attacking their rivals, they defaced websites, deployed malware, and fired off phishing e-mails to breach internal networks. Their desks were strewn with candy, Goldfish crackers, mugs of coffee, and masses of tangled wires. They’re some of the best hackers the National Security Agency has to offer. And they were battling against an unusual digital foe: Students at the US military academies.”
3. Launching unmanned subs. Military & Aerospace Electronics Editor John Keller reports, “A U.S. Navy-developed large unmanned submarine, which is designed carry a wide range of sensor and weapons payloads, or to serve as a mothership for other unmanned submersibles, is ready for tests in the open ocean. Officials of the Office of Naval Research in Arlington, Va., say the Large Displacement Unmanned Undersea Vehicle-Innovative Naval Prototype (LDUUV-INP) is expected to make an ocean voyage off the coast of California next year. The LDUUV Innovative Naval Prototype (LDUUV INP) project, will develop a large unmanned underwater vehicle (UUV) able to conduct missions longer than 70 days in open ocean and coastal waters.”
POTOMAC TWO-STEP
1. Tortoise v Hare. “Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley said Sunday that he was “very seriously” thinking about entering the 2016 Democratic presidential primary and indicated that he would try to run to the left of frontrunner Hillary Clinton on social issues if he did. . . . He would be an extreme longshot if he entered the race, as Clinton is far ahead of all potential rivals in current polls. Others expected to enter the race include former Sens. Jim Webb of Virginia and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island as well as Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.”
2. Cruz missile. “Appealing to New Hampshire’s powerful gun culture, Sen. Ted Cruz said Sunday that he’s ‘pressing’ Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain to hold hearings on whether soldiers should be allowed to carry their own concealed firearms onto military bases. ‘I am very concerned about that policy,’ the Texas senator told 120 gun owners at a hunting club here, before taking a trip to a firing range for some target practice. ‘I think it’s very important to have a public discussion about why we’re denying our soldiers the ability to exercise their Second Amendment rights.’”
OPINIONS EVERYONE HAS
1. “Obama’s Unforgivable Betrayal.” US News contributor Mortimer B. Zuckerman argues, “On almost every key issue, the Iranians won the day as the Obama administration folded. The entire infrastructure of the Iranian nuclear weapons program remains intact.”
2. “Putting Libya back together again.” Christian Science Monitor’s Editorial Board argues, “Libya’s conflict has reached a point of despair for all rather than a defeat for one side. In such a situation, a negotiator’s patient task is to channel the mutual cry for relief into a common hope and a shared vision.”
3. “No, the 1998 Iraq Bombing Campaign Isn’t a Model To Strike Iran.” Defense One contributor Micah Zenko argues, “Operation Desert Fox is a poor historical analogy for thinking about bombing Iran’s nuclear program. This is because the 1998 limited military operation had little to do with Iraq’s WMD program, and everything to do with punishing Saddam Hussein.”
THE FUNNIES
1. Petaluma?
2. Trick questions.
3. Bad for business.
