FROM THE DESK OF CLEARANCEJOBS.COM
1. Can you hack it as a cyber professional? Get it? Hack it; cyber . . . hackers . . . . Contributor Diana Rodriguez advises, “Cyber security is one of the most sought after careers in the employment market right now, and more and more positions open up each month. Job seekers are left wondering how to prepare for a career in cyber security, however, given the relative immaturity of the field and the fact that nontraditional career paths are common. The reality is that not everyone can hack it as a cyber pro. The reason cyber experts are in demand is that they must possess the right blend of skills and certifications.”
2. Part III: “Impact of Sequestration on Program Management and Project Quality.” Contributor Jillian Hamilton’s sequestration hat trick concludes: “Quality management should be in the DNA of your project or you will quickly find yourself with less and less work. From the project onset, develop your quality management plan and follow it throughout the project lifecycle. A simple search will yield free templates if you’re unsure where to begin. Be sure to engage your client throughout the process and schedule sign-offs on interim deliverables. If a client wants “minor changes” late in the project lifecycle, it can result in a major redesign. Re-work is costly and impacts the schedule, but it also creates a lot of potential variables that impact the quality of the deliverable. Sequestration may impact the schedule and cost, but don’t skimp on internal project reviews.”
THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT
1. Egypt: al Qaeda’s next target. LongWarJournal.Org’s David Barnett reports, “In a message released by al Qaeda’s As Sahab on Dec. 7, Muhammad bin Mahmoud Rabie al Bahtiyti, an al Qaeda official, said the group is following current events in Egypt, even though it is ‘away from them.’ . . . According to al Bahtiyti, force is necessary to ensure sharia-based governance is brought about. ‘The reality about which there is no doubt, is that falsehood will not be removed and will not go away except with force and with power,’ al Bahtiyti’s message said.”
2. Karzai to U.S. – stop acting like a bunch of colonists. Khaama.Com reports, “Afghan president Hamid Karzai has accused Washington of behaving like a colonial power and criticized US officials to pressure the Afghan government for signing the bilateral security agreement. Karzai said that the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, James Dobbins has said that there would be no peace in Afghanistan if the pact between Kabul and Washington is not signed. . . . The remarks by president Hamid Karzai comes as tensions between Kabul and Washington remains unresolved to finalize the pact by the end of the year.” Also, in Afghanistan, Afghanistan accuses Pakistan of shelling Khost.
3. Troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 seems assured. Reuters’ Missy Ryan reports, “The Obama administration is ‘nowhere near’ deciding to pull out all troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2014, a top U.S. official said on Tuesday, despite mounting frustration President Hamid Karzai has not signed a security deal allowing the military to remain there after next year. “I have no doubt that the (bilateral security agreement with Afghanistan) ultimately will be concluded,” Ambassador James Dobbins, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. While Dobbins said that an ongoing delay to finalizing the deal – which U.S. officials had hoped Karzai would sign weeks ago – would impose “damages and costs” on Afghans, he said the Obama administration was not on the verge of abandoning its effort to extend its troop presence.”
4. Nairobi or New York, “a mall is a mall is a mall.” TheDailyBeast.Com contributor Christopher Dickey reports that “as we head to the ones in the United States en masse this Christmas season, the lessons learned from the slaughter in Nairobi are haunting the police and private security companies all over America. It was just so damned easy for the killers in Kenya to do their job. There were only four of them and it appears very likely they escaped alive. That’s the conclusion of a confidential report being presented today to private security personnel in the New York area by the NYPD. The author of the presentation, a veteran on the force who spoke to me on condition that I not use his name, warns that the example of Nairobi ‘is simple, its effective and easy to copy.’”
CONTRACT WATCH
1. Pentagon’s helo contracting complications. Reuters’ Warren Strobel and Brian Grow report, “After almost four years of allegations that two related helicopter companies in Lithuania and Russia were doing substandard work and should be banned from new contracts, the Pentagon continued to give them business, according to interviews and documents seen by Reuters. As recently as last month, an Army planning document shows, the service was weighing contracting helicopter overhauls from the firms, which have been the subject of multiple internal warnings and two Defense Department Inspector General reports.”
2. Beware the ides of March. AviationWeek.Com’s Amy Butler explains, “F/A-18 E/F manufacturer Boeing has until roughly March to decide whether to put its own funding toward continuing production of the Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler aircraft without further U.S. Navy orders, says Mike Gibbons, the company’s Super Hornet vice president. The last Super Hornet/Growlers on order are expected to roll off the production line in 2016; the supply chain has a roughly two-year cycle. Though interested in considering more buys, the Navy thus far has been noncommittal. Company officials are hoping to see an indication in the fiscal year 2015 budget, expected to go to Congress in February, to avoid wasting company funds on the St. Louis production line.”
3. In Afghanistan, another $500 million flushed down the proverbial toilet. TheDailyBeast.Com’s Hanqing Chen reports, “The most recent evidence of mismanagement emerged during Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction John Sopko’s recent visit when he found 16 C27A aircrafts waiting to be destroyed at the Kabul International Airport. Part of a 486 million dollar U.S. program to provide refurbished aircrafts for Afghan Security Forces, these planes are the latest in a long line of U.S.-funded equipment that never made it into the hands of Afghan forces before landing in line for disposal. . . . The U.S. Air Force initially contracted Italian company Finmeccanica to refurbish C27A transport planes for Afghan forces’ use in 2008. The transports were originally intended to make up about 15 percent of a 105-aircraft Afghan Air Force that would carry top Afghan civilian officials and allow combat troops conduct medical evacuations. However, according to Lieutenant General Charles Davis, a military acquisition official, the Italian made-planes proved inadequate for the hot and dusty environment in Afghanistan.”
TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY
1. NASA’s DARPA Challenge Robot: Valkyrie. Gizmodo.Com’s Adam Clark Estes reports, “This 6-foot tall, 275-pound humanoid robot is built for disaster. Valkyrie’s two cannon-like arms are interchangeable, and its legs are designed to walk over rough, uneven terrain. It’s equipped with cameras on its head, body, forearms, knees, and feet, not to mention with additional LIDAR and sonar units. While it operates via remote right now, the ultimate goal is to make Valkyrie as autonomous as possible. It’s hard not to see that glowing circle in the center of its chest and not think about Iron Man.”
2. Spy eye in the sky is getting bigger and bigger. Wired.Com’s Allen McDuffie reports, “Darpa’s Membrane Optical Imager for Real-Time Exploitation (MOIRE) program redesigns the traditional glass telescope into an orbital telescope that’s bigger and lighter than previous imaging satellites, making it easier to spy on larger areas and for longer periods of time. Launched as a tightly packed cluster of petals 20 feet in diameter, MOIRE stretches to 68 feet across once it reaches 22,000 miles above the earth. From orbit, MOIRE could view approximately 40 percent of the earth’s surface at once while recording high resolution images and video, making it the ultimate spying satellite (Darpa notes that it could also be beneficial in weather forecasting and disaster response).”
3. “To improve the U.S. military, shrink it.” WaPo contributor Tom Ricks argues, “Want a better U.S. military? Make it smaller. The bigger the military, the more time it must spend taking care of itself and maintaining its structure as it is, instead of changing with the times. And changing is what the U.S. military must begin to do as it recovers from the past decade’s two wars.”
POTOMAC TWO-STEP
1. For Christmas, a bouncing, baby budget midwifed by Presidential aspirations: “A bipartisan budget deal announced in the U.S. Congress on Tuesday, while modest in its spending cuts, would end nearly three years of partisan stand-offs between Democrats and Republicans that culminated in October with a partial government shutdown. . . . Ryan, the Republican Party’s 2012 failed vice presidential candidate who has his eye on either a 2016 presidential campaign or potentially a House leadership job, wasted no time in trying to blunt criticisms of the pact, especially from fellow conservatives.”
2. Too much attention is not enough: “It seems former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has done more than open the world’s eyes to its surveillance techniques. He’s also severely impacted the agency’s company culture, turning it into a beaten-down group of people who are already on the job hunt. But it’s not all Snowden’s fault. It seems that agency’s workers feel slighted by President Barack Obama, who has yet to visit and reinstate confidence in the NSA’s employees.”
OPINIONS EVERYONE HAS
1. “Keeping the Peace in Asia.” USNews.Com contributor Aki Peritz argues, “The situation underscores why the U.S. needs to maintain a robust naval and air force presence in Asia: because it keeps all the regional powers — rising, declining or otherwise — from escalating a crisis into a conflagration. Treaties and trade help ameliorate the jagged regional political dynamics, but American hard power on the seas and in the air is what keeps tensions from rising to a fever pitch.”
2. “Piling on the Murray-Ryan budget deal.” Los Angeles Times contributor Doyle McManus argues, “The deal isn’t a grand bargain — at best it’s a mini-bargain. All the Murray-Ryan deal would do, in essence, is split the difference between House and Senate spending proposals, give federal agencies a little more flexibility to adjust to the budget cuts imposed by the sequester, and — the main thing — avoid the prospect of another government shutdown on Jan. 15.”
3. “Thoughts on a 12-year war from one who’s in it.” Los Angeles Daily News contributor Lt. Angela Laurance, U.S. Navy, explains, “Twelve years ago, Afghanistan was considered the ‘good war’ with a just cause, the one everyone could stand behind. It had clear links to 9/11 attacks and was popular at first. Iraq, in contrast, did not have clear links to 9/11 and was justified on faulty intelligence which was discovered later. Because of this, Iraq generated a lot of attention and outrage, causing heated debates and political conversations – all while Afghanistan efforts fell into the shadows. Since, the war on the Afghan front has gone from hidden in the shadows, to war fatigue, to numbness. It has too long been forgotten. It’s led to exhaustion and confusion.”
THE FUNNIES
1. Building an army.
2. Office drones.
3. Shaky hands.
