FROM THE DESK OF CLEARANCE JOBS.COM
1. Bouncing off the satellites. This Christmas, don’t buy your betrothed a lousy star, but a satellite, instead. Contributor John Holst explains how: “Did you know how to buy a satellite? Well, maybe not buy, but you can task a satellite by purchasing an image from a commercial imagery products company. Hot and fresh images from their satellite constellation–just bring money! Welcome to the world of imagery satellite tasking and the more murky aspects of satellite tasking requirements/collection management.” And, while you’re figuring all that out, listen to some Bouncing Off the Satellites.
2. The bouncing baby Bill. Contributor Marc Selinger walks us through the numbers: “Cybersecurity, missile defense and the F-35 fighter jet are among the areas highlighted in a bipartisan defense policy measure unveiled by leaders of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees late Dec. 9. Formally known as the fiscal 2014 National Defense Authorization Act, the bill is a compromise between separate House and Senate versions. It heads to the full House and Senate and then President Obama for final approval.”
THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT
1. Islamist spoiling aid to Free Syrian Army. Reuters’ Dasha Afanasieva and Humeyra Ppamuk report on al Qaeda in Syria, “The United States and Britain suspended non-lethal aid to northern Syria after Islamist fighters seized Western-backed rebel weapons warehouses, highlighting fears that supplies could end up in the wrong hands. The rebel Free Syrian Army fighting President Bashar al-Assad said the U.S. and British moves were rushed and mistaken. ‘We hope our friends will rethink and wait for a few days when things will be clearer,’ FSA spokesman Louay Meqdad said. . . . The suspension underlines a crisis for the FSA leadership, which needs international backing to reinforce its credibility and to stop its fighters joining al Qaeda-backed Islamist militants who now dominate the war with Assad.” LongWarJournal.Org’s Bill Roggio and Lisa Lundquist add to the concern: “The Ahrar al Sham Islamic Movement, one of six units of the newly formed Islamic Front, conducted a joint raid with al Qaeda’s two official branches in Syria against Hezbollah and pro-Assad militias. Ahrar al Sham also was involved in the recent takeover of a large cache of weapons and munitions owned by the Free Syrian Army. . . . The Islamic Front has recently seized bases and warehouses in northern Syria near the border with Turkey that were used by the Free Syria Army to store and distribute weapons, ammunition, supplies, and aid sent by the US and Western and Arab countries.”
2. In Iran, Republican Guards critique Rouhani. Aljazeera.Com reports, “The commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard forces has said that his country has been influenced by the West, in an apparent criticism of the government of Hassan Rouhani, the country’s recently elected moderate president. Major General Mohammad Jafari’s comments are some of the sharpest to be made by a senior official in public since Rouhani took office in August, pledging to improve Iran’s relations with regional countries and the West.”
3. NATO’s Afghanistan losses continue for 2013. Khaama.Com reports, “A NATO service member was killed following an improvised explosive device (IED) explosion in southern Afghanistan on Wednesday. . . . At least 148 NATO service members including 118 US troops, 8 British troops and 22 soldiers from the other NATO member countries have been killed in Afghanistan since the beginning of 2013. NATO troops casualties have considerably decreased as the Afghan national security forces have taken combat lead from the coalition security forces. At least 402 NATO service members including 310 American troops, 44 British troops and 48 soldiers from the other NATO member countries were killed in 2012, according to icasualties.org, which tracks NATO troops casualties in Afghanistan.” Also in Afghanistan, a blast near the U.S. embassy was an accident.
4. Composing Karzai’s legacy – why he did what he did. Khaama.Com contributor Ahmad Shah Katawazai explains, “President Karzai perhaps wants to be remembered as a patriot Afghan leader rather than a foreign puppet. His egoistic nature compels him to leave a name in the history of a figure that thought and worked for the greater interest of his people, by standing against and not allowing a major power like the United States to raid their houses or reach an agreement with them without the condition of bringing peace.”
5. U.S. Air Force’s budget woes. American Forces Press Service’s Amaani Lyle reports, “With sequestration cemented as law into the foreseeable future, the Air Force’s top officer today discussed some tough choices the service faces as its leaders try to pare $12 billion from the budget. In the final session of the Joint Chiefs of Staff series at the American Enterprise Institute here, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III outlined the Air Force’s core missions with a focus on balancing capability, capacity and readiness. The Air Force is entangled in a ‘ready today’ versus ‘modern tomorrow’ challenge, Welsh said, while delivering air and space superiority, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, rapid global mobility, global strike and command and control. ‘These five missions haven’t changed at all,’ the general said. ‘This is still the core of what we are expected to provide our combatant commanders worldwide, . . . [but] the way we’ve done it has changed pretty dramatically in some areas over the years.’”
6. Is war between China and Japan a possibility? TheDiplomat.Com’s Ankit Panda explains, “First, China and Japan both know that there is an actual probability distribution of the likely outcomes of the war. They don’t know what the actual distribution is, but they can estimate what is likely in terms of the costs and outcomes of going to war. For example, Japan can predict that it would suffer relatively low naval losses and would strengthen its administrative control of the islands; China could predict the same outcome, or it could interpret things in its favor. In essence, they acknowledge that war is predictable in its unpredictability.”
CONTRACT WATCH
1. Federal Contractors: breaking the law, breaking the law, breaking the law. GovExec.Com reports, “As many as 30 percent of the companies hit with the highest penalties for labor law violations are federal contractors, a year-long Senate committee investigation unveiled Wednesday found. . . . The companies, which taken together employ about 26 million workers, work primarily in services such as cleaning, security, and construction. In addition to the safety violations, 32 violated the Labor Department Wage and Hour Division’s back-wage assessment. Thirty-five companies violated both safety and wage laws.”
2. Army – outsourcing ISR. C4ISRNet.Com’s Michael Peck reports, “The Army is looking to outsource its ISR video efforts. In a request for information, the Army’s Technology Applications Office said contractors would support standard definition, high-definition and full-motion video, as well as signals intelligence and measurement and signature intelligence. The focus would be on supporting command and control, and ensuring distribution of video throughout the government’s C4I enterprise. . . . Contractors must also be capable of delivering video imagery to SOF units.”
TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY
1. Their master’s voice – drones that listen, and look. Offiziere.ch reports, “Sending commands to a single hovering drone is one thing, but now one group of researchers is experimenting with a swarm of drones that recognize their masters by voice and face. The quadrotor drones seen above use both voice detection and facial recognition–voice to receive commands and face recognition to recognize when they’re being spoken to. This allows a controller to activate a group of three drones and order them to takeoff and land simply by speaking. The researchers–based at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada–believe that ‘face engagement could be an effective communication channel for human-robot interaction’ . . . .”
2. Something new – evidence-based thinking in government. NextGov.Com’s John Kamensky reports, “In addition to programmatic initiatives using evidence and rigorous evaluation to make funding decisions, OMB and agencies are undertaking a series of initiatives to build or expand the skills and capabilities of staff to be more evidence- and evaluation-based in their decision making. In some cases, this requires money; but in many other cases it is a change in how existing work is done.”
3. Navy’s shootin’ irons. Wired.Com’s Allen McDuffie on Raytheon’s new revolver: “The Navy may have a new line of defense against a changing threat environment after the successful missile firing from a new multi-role launcher in development. In a recent round of tests announced Tuesday, Chemring Countermeasures and Raytheon Missile Systems say they have successfully fired a Raytheon-Lockheed Martin Javelin missile from a prototype multi-role Centurion launcher during testing at the Defence Training Estate on Salisbury Plain in England, where it was able to hit a static target.”
POTOMAC TWO-STEP
1. Congress’s new low: stare into the mirror. “People don’t like Congress. More than ever. Gallup reported Thursday that Congress’ approval rating averaged 14 percent this year, the lowest in the poll’s 39 year history of asking. ‘Americans’ low evaluations of Congress appear to be a ‘new normal,’ a Gallup analysis said, noting that in each of the last four years, the average rating has been below 20 percent. ‘The Founders set up Congress to be an extension of the American public itself, with elected representatives sent to the nation’s capital to do the people’s bidding. Americans’ approval of the job Congress is doing has never been extremely high on any consistent basis in recent decades, but over the past several years, it has reached new lows,’ Gallup reported.” [So, if Congress is “an extension of the American public itself,” the polls are really saying that we don’t like ourselves.]
2. PED XING: “On Wednesday morning, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) announced that he was suspending his chief of staff, Ryan Loskarn, who was being investigated by law enforcement for ‘allegations involving child pornography.’ In a release, Alexander, a two-term senator who previously served as the Volunteer State’s governor, said ‘I am stunned, surprised and disappointed.’ The Tennessee Republican said his office was cooperating fully and that Loskarn would be placed on unpaid administrative leave. Loskarn joined Alexander’s office in 2011 after serving as a staff director for the Senate Republican Conference. In an article at the time, Roll Call described him as ‘one of the Senate GOP’s top strategists and aides.’”
OPINIONS EVERYONE HAS
1. “Newtonian physics and international politics.” UPI.Com contributor Harlan Ullman argues, “The national security organization never was and is not designed to handle multi-crises. Compounding these limitations, each of the major departments is already overloaded with responsibilities. Defense faces massive cuts. Scandals from corrupt companies to sexual abuses demand valuable executive time when many senior positions are vacant. Finding a permanent replacement for the job of deputy secretary is still a work in progress. The intelligence community is still reeling from the National Security Agency/Edward Snowden revelations. And the State Department suffers from the same tyranny of time and limited executive attention.”
2. “Hamba kahle, Madiba: The greatest disservice to Mandela is to reduce his life to a fairy tale.” Aljazeera.Com contributor Firoze Manji argues, “Mythologies about great people, whether they portray them as saints or as villains, are idealised representations, and as such, fundamentally reactionary. Mythologies are the sustenance of all forms of fundamentalism, whether religious or ideological. The contributions of great people are frequently reduced to a few simple ‘truths’, truths that are based on the denial of uncomfortable aspects of their stories, and thus ironically based also on lies. The process of mythologising represents a contestation between symbolism and mythology. The greatest disservice that we could pay to Mandela is to allow the complexity, courage and humanity of his long life to be reduced to a fairy tale.
3. “What the Ryan-Murray Budget Deal Really Means.” Christian Science Monitor’s Editorial Board argues, “The latest budget deal in Washington teaches at least one lesson about a key virtue of constitutional democracy: To balance conflicting ideas, elected leaders must first build up trust between a small group of people who can then come up with a moderate agreement that tempers the excesses of each side. . . . The details of their agreement matter less than the political lesson: Government must be restructured to force leaders to negotiate with trust, seek incremental progress, and weave differing values into a compromise for the common good.” [Those CSM people are so damn even-handed. How about a little partisanship, people?]
