ON THE FIGHT
Storied Army colonel, Erik Kurilla, has been nominated for his first star, ascending to the general and flag officer ranks. Colonel Kurilla is currently serving as a top deputy to Lieutenant General Votel, commander of Joint Special Operations Command, United States Special Operations Command.
From John Vandiver, Stars & Stripes: NATO’s special operations community took up residence Wednesday in a new headquarters in Mons, Belgium, a $19 million facility expected to bolster how special forces from across the alliance plan for missions from Afghanistan to the Horn of Africa. “I look for NATO Special Operations Headquarters to be the centerpiece of our ability to conduct special operations in this 21st century,” said Adm. James Stavridis, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, according to comments provided by his Public Affairs office during the official opening of the headquarters.
During Wednesday’s opening ceremony, which also was attended by NATO Special Operations Headquarters commander Lt. Gen. Frank Kisner, Stavridis said the headquarters should serve as a hub for ideas. “To achieve security in the 21st century, we have to connect. We must connect defense, diplomacy, development and law enforcement … all the agencies of government,” Stavridis said. “This must be a venue for ideas about what we use to accomplish our missions.”
Walter Pincus asks, "how do we determine who is and isn’t ‘al-Qa’ida’?"
ON THE FORCE
Charles Krauthammer seems to think Susan Rice has a good chance of being tapped for Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs.
Meanwhile, former Nebraska Republican senator and Vietnam veteran Chuck Hagel has taken the top spot on the Obama administration’s shortlist of candidates to replace Defense Secretary Leon Panetta at the Pentagon, according to news reports.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta signed an official deployment order on Friday to send 400 American military personnel and two Patriot air defense batteries to Turkey as its cross-border tensions intensify with Syria, where loyalist forces have increasingly resorted to aerial attacks, including use of ballistic missiles, to fight a spreading insurgency.
ON TECH
The U.S. Army Medical Command (MEDCOM) will begin full deployment of the Defense Enterprise Email (DEE) service provided by the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) beginning Jan. 7, 2013, according to an article published on the www.army.mil website. All MEDCOM personnel will migrate to enterprise email by March 31, 2013. The transition is being done in partnership with DISA, Army Network Enterprise Technology Command (NETCOM) and the Army CIO/G6 office. "Enterprise email generates enormous capacity for Army Medicine,” said Lt. Gen. Patricia Horoho, the surgeon general and commanding general of MEDCOM, in the Army article. “This service optimizes our ability to globally communicate within the Department of Defense and with our federal, state and host nation partners." This cloud-based service delivers Common Access Card-enabled email on-demand through the Internet on myriad computing devices and operating systems.
ON SECRECY – OR LACK THEREOF
With Syrian rebel forces gaining in strength, elite units loyal to Bashar Assad received a frightening order a few weeks ago: begin preparations that could lead to the use of chemical weapons. There was evidently no order to actually execute a chemical attack, which would be the first deadly gassing in the Mideast in almost 25 years. Nor is it clear who gave the order to prep the chemical stocks. But new information is emerging about why the U.S. government recently warned Assad against using his unconventional arsenal.
The Senate Intelligence Committee on Thursday approved a highly critical, classified report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program, the most comprehensive review of the brutal treatment of Qaeda prisoners in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. After the committee voted 9 to 6 in a closed meeting, mostly along party lines, the Democratic chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, issued a statement saying the long-awaited 6,000-page report “uncovers startling details about the C.I.A. detention and interrogation program and raises critical questions about intelligence operations and oversight.” “I strongly believe that the creation of long-term, clandestine ‘black sites’ and the use of so-called enhanced-interrogation techniques were terrible mistakes,” Ms. Feinstein said, referring to the agency’s secret overseas prisons and coercive methods, including waterboarding, widely condemned as torture. “The majority of the committee agrees,” she said. She said the report, with 20 official conclusions and 35,000 footnotes, “includes details of each detainee in C.I.A. custody, the conditions under which they were detained, how they were interrogated, the intelligence they actually provided and the accuracy — or inaccuracy — of C.I.A. descriptions about the program to the White House, Department of Justice, Congress and others.”
When a former senior White House official describes a nationwide surveillance effort as “breathtaking,” you know civil liberties activists are preparing for a fight. The Wall Street Journal reported today that the little-known National Counterterrorism Center, based in an unmarked building in McLean, Va., has been granted sweeping new authority to store and monitor massive datasets about innocent Americans. After internal wrangling over privacy and civil liberties issues, the Justice Department reportedly signed off on controversial new guidelines earlier this year. The guidelines allow the NCTC, for the first time, to keep data about innocent U.S. citizens for up to five years, using “predictive pattern-matching,” to analyze it for suspicious patterns of behavior. The data the counterterrorism center has access to, according to the Journal, includes “entire government databases—flight records, casino-employee lists, the names of Americans hosting foreign-exchange students and many others.”
Those of you who frequent the west side of Route 7 might have noticed there has been a noticeable change over the past month. Where temporary construction fence screening and cranes used to be, now stands a fully developed, at least externally, retail project that looks ready to open. It’s been a while since we checked back in with Tysons West.
Robert Caruso is a veteran of the United States Navy, and has worked for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, Business Transformation Agency and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
