Monday Morning Headlines & Alice doesn’t live here anymore
FROM THE DESK OF CLEARANCEJOBS.COM
1. Your clearance and you. Editor Lindy Kyzer explains, “For cleared job seekers, the question frequently arises – will the security clearance I already have transfer to my next position? Because a security clearance is attached to a position and not a person, it doesn’t exactly ‘transfer,’ but your next company should be able to easily reinstate the clearance.”
2. Jobs Afghanistan—Spy City. Contributor David Brown explains, “What’s it like for a contractor living in Kabul? According to one (jaded) writer who works there, ‘it is here that the wild, wild West has come back to life, where ‘cowboys and Indians’ fight to excise a toll of blood from one another, and with enough saloons, reckless partying, and live-for-today justified debauchery to fill endless Louis L’Amour books.’”
THE FORCE AND THE FIGHT
1. Bo Bergdahl—coming home amid conflict. AP’s Lolita C. Baldor and Calvin Woodward report, “Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl can expect a buoyant homecoming after five years in Taliban hands, but those in the government who worked for his release face mounting questions over the prisoner swap that won his freedom. Even in the first hours of Bergdahl’s handoff to U.S. special forces in eastern Afghanistan, it was clear this would not be an uncomplicated yellow-ribbon celebration. Five terrorist suspects also walked free, stirring a debate in Washington over whether the exchange will heighten the risk of other Americans being snatched as bargaining chips and whether the released detainees—several senior Taliban figures among them—would find their way back to the fight.” See also, SecDef on Bergdahl and “Republicans question U.S. prisoner swap with Taliban.”
2. Shinseki’s fall. DefenseOne.Com contributor James Kitfield reports, “In the end Shinseki was undone by his attempts to scale twin peaks of American dysfunction: a VA health system overwhelmed by veterans wounded and damaged by more than a decade of war, and Washington’s hyper-partisan politics on the issue of health care. As a retired four-star general and former soldier, he also knew that responsibility ultimately rests with the commander at the top, and Shinseki had no ready answer to the question posed by the scandal . . . .”
3. Defense budget—a perfect game. DefenseNews.Com’s John T. Bennett reports, “The US defense sector is having a remarkable year on Capitol Hill. In fact, it is batting 1.000 so far, with three of four congressional defense panels protecting weapon programs and adding funds to buy platforms the military didn’t even request. Despite months of dire warnings and gloomy rhetoric about the ramifications of new rounds of across-the-board cuts, the House Appropriations Committee Defense (HAC-D) subcommittee on May 30 approved a 2015 Pentagon spending bill that would give the Defense Department $570.4 billion. It would add funds for fighter jets, electronic-attack planes and maintain 11 aircraft carriers.”
4. Hard fight in Benghazi. Heavy fighting is ongoing in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi, apparently between the armed group Ansar al-Shariah and irregular forces loyal to Khalifa Haftar, a former army general. Witnesses said on Monday that gunfire, which began the day before, could be heard across the city, particularly coming from a special forces army base in a western suburb of Benghazi. News agencies reported that at least seven people have died and about a dozen have been wounded in the fighting. Haftar is campaigning to rid Libya of fighters that he says the government has failed to control.”
CONTRACT WATCH
1. Curtiss-Wright Global Hawk upgrades. MilitaryAerospace.Com Editor John Keller reports, “Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designers at the Northrop Grumman Corp. Aerospace Systems sector in Rancho Bernardo, Calif., needed avionics flight computers for planned upgrades to the company’s Global Hawk long-endurance high-altitude military drones. They found their solution from the Curtiss-Wright Corp. Defense Solutions Division in Ashburn, Va. . . . Curtiss-Wright should finish the work by December 2014.”
2. Big contract wins in Pennsylvania. Tribune-Democrat.Com’s Dave Sutor rolls it up: “Deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars to local companies were announced during Showcase for Commerce on Friday. Martin-Baker America, L.R. Kimball, JWF Defense Systems, Kongsberg Protech Systems and Concurrent Technologies Corp. all recently signed major contracts. . . . Concurrent Technologies Corp. announced the most deals.”
TECH, PRIVACY, & SECRECY
1. Facial recognition—NSA’s family album. VentureBeat.Com’s Harrison Weber reports, “The National Security Agency collects millions of images as part of its facial recognition program, top-secret documents show. The images are reportedly collected through exploited emails, text messages, social media, and videoconferences. The NSA believes its facial recognition program packs ‘tremendous untapped potential,’ according to leaked slides . . . .”
2. France—cybercrime central. FierceGovernmentIT.Com’s Molly Bernhart Walker reports, “[Former SecDef Robert] Gates says at least 12 countries are stealing intellectual property, particularly for technology, through cyber espionage. But French hackers take a more hands on approach. ‘French intelligence services have been breaking into the hotel rooms of American businessmen and surreptitiously downloading their laptops—if they felt the laptops had technological information or competitive information that would be useful for French companies,’ said Gates.”
3. Tech love—what was best in May. Wired.Com’s Gadget Lab Staff explains, “This is the gear we want to take everywhere. This is the stuff we want to cook breakfast for. These are the things we love.”
POTOMAC TWO-STEP
1. Gibson in the crosshairs: “House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Jeff Miller warned Friday that Congress will intensify its scrutiny of the VA despite the resignation of Secretary Eric Shinseki. The Florida Republican said ‘there will be no honeymoon period’ for acting Secretary Sloan D. Gibson. Miller said he would push Gibson to rid the VA of the senior-level officials he believes are responsible for mismanagement. ‘Sloan Gibson is a fine man, and I think he’s capable of handling the job,’ Miller said. ‘But my comment to him will be the same: If your people lie to you, you will not be able to make the changes necessary to transform the agency.’”
2. Foreign Policy, in brief: “The West Wing has a preferred, authorized distillation of the president’s foreign-policy doctrine: ‘Don’t do stupid sh—.’ The phrase has appeared in The New York Times three times in the past four days. So, if the White House’s aim was to get the phrase in circulation, mission accomplished! The phrase . . . appeared in the Los Angeles Times at the end of Obama’s Asia trip this spring, was reprised in the lead story of Thursday’s New York Times. But the West Wing hit the jackpot Sunday when it was used twice in The New York Times—once in the news columns, and once in a column by Thomas L. Friedman, who had been part of an off-the-record roundtable with Obama on Tuesday.”
OPINIONS EVERYONE HAS
1. “Obama’s values-free foreign policy.” Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt argues, “A values-free foreign policy isn’t sustainable for most Americans, and if another humanitarian crisis confronts the president in the next 30 months, I doubt it will be sustainable for him.”
2. “A risky Afghan endgame.” Aljazeera.Com contributor Omar Samad argues, “Obviously, Afghans need to take responsibility and be in the driver’s seat. But the country is a few years off from being entirely on its own. This is not the time to make an error in calculation with the timetable or the level and scope of engagement. To avoid being trapped by a strategic miscalculation or a defeatist narrative, or basing it purely on one’s own electoral cycles, there is a need to remain smartly engaged for as long as the strategic imperative exists. Only then can one safely claim to be bringing the war to a ‘responsible end’.”
3. “What Does Putin Want?” MUST READ DefenseOne.Com contributor David Frum argues, “Despite the careless analogies offered in the first hours of the Crimea crisis, Putin isn’t Hitler. He’s a combination of Tony Soprano and one of the backup dancers for the Village People, posing as a Siberian tough guy to compensate for the aching weakness of his country and his position in it. Here is the scariest possibility of all: an increasingly precarious and spooked Vladimir Putin—a leader who cannot afford a confrontation with the West—may yet, through his own need for domestic image management, tumble his country and the world into the widest crisis since the end of the Cold War.”
THE FUNNIES
1. Puppy love.
2. Military hazing.
3. Foreign policy.
