Visiting Cairo, Taliban Teams with AQ in Syria, and Snowden’s Ace-in-the-hole

FROM THE DESK OF CLEARANCEJOBS.COM

1. Collective suffering. Whether you are a WG, GS, or contractor, the sequestration furlough can reach out and touch you and your family. Editor Lindy Kyzer explains how: “We’ve had feedback from a number of contract employees that they have already faced mandatory furloughs within their company – days or weeks of unpaid leave as a result of reductions in contracts or other company belt-tightening.”

2. IT security wizards in demand. Contributor Chandler Harris signals from Silicon Valley: “the cyber security industry isn’t attracting enough staff of sufficient quality to meet . . . demands, which is putting a strain on current professionals in the industry. IT security jobs remain in demand, but qualified professionals are in short supply.”

THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT

1. ‘Zero option’ encourages militancy in Afghanistan and worries the Afghan senatorial body, the Mesherano Jirga. Well-respected Afghan spy chief Amrullah Saleh responds to the Administration’s pull-out proposals. Khaama Press’s Ghanizada reports, “Former Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh strongly criticized the announcement of ‘zero option’ by United States. ‘Washington is seeking excuses to sign a bilateral security agreement with Afghanistan. Washington should not propose the ‘zero option’ if it is serious to sign a bilateral security agreement by criticizing Hamid Karzai who will be in service only for another nine months.’” . . . “The senators warned that complete withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan will spark a national tragedy which will lead civil war in the country. They hoped that the Afghan government and Washington will reach to an agreement regarding the presence of US troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014.” See also, militants escape, and militants infiltrate. Read more about the rather incredible Amrullah Saleh (the former intel chief we should hope is Afghanistan’s next president . . . and, he doesn’t have his own biographer).

2. In Syria, Pakistani Taliban fill the gap and build ties with AQ leadership, but opposing ideologies are causing friction. As previously reported in LongWarJournal.Org, Reuters’ Maria Golovnina and Jibran Ahmad pick up on the story, “The Pakistani Taliban have set up camps and sent hundreds of men to Syria to fight alongside rebels opposed to President Bashar al-Assad, militants said on Sunday, in a strategy aimed at cementing ties with al Qaeda’s central leadership. . . . Tensions erupted again on Thursday when an al-Qaeda linked militant group assassinated one of Free Syrian Army’s top commanders after a dispute in the port city of Latakia.” See also Bill Roggio’s July 12 posting in The Long War Journal, “Pakistani Taliban establish ‘base’ inside Syria.”

3. Egypt’s CINC explains the logic of the Morsi coup d’état. Sarah El Deeb and Aya Batrawy report from Cairo in the AP, “Egypt’s military chief sought to justify his decision to remove Mohmmed Morsi from office, saying Sunday in a televised speech that the Islamist leader had violated his popular mandate and antagonized state institutions.” Interesting. In the United States, that kind of behavior gets you four more years. See also, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State William Burns, “The first senior U.S. official to visit Egypt since the army toppled the country’s elected president will hold high-level talks on Monday in Cairo, where thousands of supporters of the ousted Islamist leader are expected to take to the streets,” but Islamists rebuff even the suggestion that they meet with the U.S. rep.

4. In the bullpen for Secretary of Homeland Security. Joe Lieberman and Senator Susan Collins, among others, are warming up their arms, reports GovExec.Com’s Susan Sorcher: “While White House press secretary Jay Carney said he had no names to offer, given Napolitano will stay in her job until early September, that did not stop the guesswork. Here are some of the names floated by Capitol Hill sources who work on security issues . . . .” Personally, my money is on Susan Collins. Take a look at DefenseMediaNetwork.Com’s predictions from 2012.

5. Military medicine’s efforts to save our wounded warriors. DefenseMediaNetwork.Com’s J.R. Wilson reviews some of the “new treatments for facial trauma” that are a product of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan: “injuries include severe burns, fractures of the eye sockets, jaws and cheekbones, damage to or loss of eyes, ears, lips, teeth – often in combination and sometimes resulting in catastrophic damage to the face and underlying structures. . . . Military and civilian medical personnel – from dentists to reconstructive surgeons – have worked throughout the years since 9/11 to not only save the lives of those suffering combat facial trauma, but to rebuild/replace the damaged areas in ways never before considered possible. The breakthrough techniques involved range from using 3-D printers to make replacement structures or scaffolds identical in size and shape to the originals, to performing full-face transplants.” Thanks, guys.

CONTRACT WATCH

1. DLA shells out $23.3 million to store fuel. The Department of Defense announced Friday, “NuStar Terminals Operations Partnership L.P.,* San Antonio, Texas, has been awarded a maximum $23,347,060 firm-fixed-price contract. The contract is a five-year base with one five-year option period for a commercial contractor-owned, contractor-operated fuel storage terminal and services to receive, store, and ship government owned petroleum products. Location of performance is Texas and Washington with a July 11, 2018 performance completion date.”

2. Third time is not the charm when you’re landing Northrop Grumman’s Unmanned Combat Air System (UCAS). AviationWeek.Com’s Amy Butler reports, “The U.S. Navy’s third attempt to land the X-47B onboard the USS George H.W. Bush off the Virginia coast on July 10 — following the first-ever landing of the stealthy, tailless unmanned aircraft on the carrier earlier that day — resulted in a divert to its backup airfield at Wallops Island, Va.” No worries, no worries: “’Nothing went wrong with the aircraft. In fact, everything went right.’”

TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY

1. Snowden – a “ticking time bomb” the United States is hard-pressed to apprehend. AP’s Jenny Barchfield reports from Rio de Janeiro, “disclosure of the information in the documents [that Snowden maintains] ‘would allow somebody who read them to know exactly how the NSA does what it does, which would in turn allow them to evade that surveillance or replicate it.’” In response, Reuters reports, “A key congressional Republican said on Sunday that the Obama administration must step up efforts and exert ‘any and all pressure’ on Russia to get it to hand over Edward Snowden, the former U.S. spy agency contractor turned fugitive leaker. . . . the Russians are ‘making a mockery’ of U.S. foreign policy, and, ‘I’m sure every day, they’re extracting more and more information from this man.’”

2. Get your office’s 3D printer, now. VentureBeat.Com contributor Ricardo Belton reports on NASA’s successful application of the previously just neat-o technology. “In a watershed move, NASA has successfully tested a rocket part created via 3D printer, a move that shows how important the technology will be to its operations one day,” Belton writes. “Tested at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, the 3D printed part — the uber-complicated rocket injector– was created via selective laser sintering, an additive manufacturing process that uses high-powered lasers to melt metallic powders into 3D structures.”

3. Silkworms – just wait until DARPA (and Hermes) hears about this. Wired.Com contributor Joseph Flaherty reports on the advantages of using computer guided silkworms – computer guided silkworms – for structural engineering (sort of the cloistered monks of 3D printing): “The concept of using silkworms for structural engineering, however strange, has a number of benefits. ‘The silkworm embodies everything an additive fabrication system currently lacks,’ says Oxman. ‘It jets a structural material with superior function-specific variable properties; it’s small in size and mobile in movement; and it can spin, rather than print, non-homogeneous fibrous structures without waste. In more than one way, a silkworm is a sophisticated multi-material, multi-axis 3-D printer.’ Most 3-D printers today would have difficulty printing something larger than the steering wheel of a car, but with a little help, these ‘MakerBugs’ can build structures the size of small houses.”

4. Worth a look – Obama’s Matrix. The Guardian reports extensively on what it calls “Obama’s secret kill list.” Ian Cobain writes, “The disposition matrix is a complex grid of suspected terrorists to be traced then targeted in drone strikes or captured and interrogated. And the British government appears to be colluding in it.” I’m not sure this is surprising, really, but better have a seat to read this one.

POTOMAC TWO-STEP

1. Dancing across the tightrope. POTUS joins Nik Wallenda on the high wire. Reuters’ Mark Felsenthal covers the show: “Obama called for calm as activists outraged by the verdict planned rallies and urged the administration to pursue civil rights charges against Zimmerman. On the other side, Republicans said he inflamed tensions by wading into the issue in 2012, when he said, ‘If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.’”

2. He-man Woman Hater’s Club? Not likely. Time’s Zeke Miller reports, “The group, which fundraises and advocates for Democratic women candidates and is actively involved in preparing for a possible Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, is firing one of the first shots of the 2016 cycle, aiming to brand the Florida Republican and likely contender as ‘the most anti-women, anti-family candidate of the GOP field.’” Sooooooo, is “anti-family” pro- or con- abortion. I’m really getting confused here.

OPINIONS EVERYONE HAS

1. Dancing through a minefield. TheDailyBeast.Com’s Michael Tomasky examines the sensitivities associated with being a black president in a race-charged world. “the cruel paradox that the country’s first black president can’t really talk about race. . . . To me, and to many millions of Americans, such a testimony from the president of the United States would have been powerful stuff. And it surely would have led millions of decent and empathetic white Americans to think hard, maybe for the first time, about some of the things they don’t have to worry about that black parents have to consider every time their child walks out the door.”

2. High tech does not necessarily mean high jobless rates, or so argues WaPo’s Rob Samuelson: “It’s a stretch to see digital technologies as a major source of today’s unemployment. In the recession, the economy lost 8.7 million jobs. Most were non-digital, concentrated in construction, finance, retailing and manufacturing. What seems less dubious is that, in a permanently sluggish economy, firms might favor digital investments that shave costs and sustain profits.”

3. Bridging online and offline in popular uprising. Aljazeera contributor Ramesh Srinivasan analyzes the tech side of the uprising in Egypt: “Instead of staying within the walled gardens of Twitter or filter bubbles of Facebook, activists have now turned to a new powerful strategy: bridging the offline and online. The online world has always supported communication between activists and youth of different stripes and today features increased hacking, leaking and misinformation between political adversaries.”