Afghanistan rioters injure 7 U.S. soldiers

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Feb 272012

Afghanistan rioters injure 7 U.S. soldiers

Crowds in Kunduz province angry over Koran burnings throw grenades. At Jalalabad airport, a car bomb kills up to nine Afghan civilians and security personnel.

Los Angeles Times

By Aimal Yaqubi

February 26, 2012

The scope of the protests over the burning of Korans at a U.S. base appeared to be narrowing after President Hamid Karzai went on national television and appealed for calm. (S. Sabawoon, European Pressphoto Agency / February 26, 2012)

Reporting from Kabul, Afghanistan —

Afghans rioting over the burning of Korans at a U.S. military installation hurled grenades at an American base in northern Afghanistan on Sunday, injuring at least seven American soldiers, Afghan officials said. Early Monday, a car bomb exploded outside the main airport in eastern Afghanistan, killing up to nine people, according to provincial police.

No Americans were killed or injured in the blast on the outskirts of Jalalabad, whose airport also is home to a Western military base, an official with the international coalition said. The dead were Afghan civilians and security personnel, said police spokesman Hazrat Mohammad Zamari.

The grenade attack Sunday in Kunduz province, in the country’s north, came on the sixth day of protests over Korans being sent, apparently by accident, to the trash incinerator at a base north of the Afghan capital. The violence has left nearly 40 people dead, including four American service members, but the scope of the protests appeared to be narrowing after President Hamid Karzai went on national television and appealed for calm.

Officials in Kunduz province blamed “agitators” sheltering among the crowd of protesters for the grenade attack in the Imam Sahib district. In the past, insurgents have used large-scale demonstrations to slip gunmen into crowds.

Meanwhile, the Afghan Interior Ministry acknowledged Sunday that one of its workers was the key suspect in the deaths of two American military officers who were gunned down at their desks in a tightly guarded command-and-control center a day earlier.

That attack on Saturday prompted the commander of the NATO force in Afghanistan, U.S. Gen. John R. Allen, to take the unprecedented step of immediately pulling Western military advisors out of Afghan government ministries. The incident called into question Western willingness to continue training and advising Afghan troops and government bodies amid an unrelenting spate of turncoat shootings.

The suspect remained at large, the ministry said in a statement, adding that “serious efforts by Afghan security forces are underway to capture him.”

For the North Atlantic Treaty Organization force, the attack was particularly worrisome because it involved an individual with access to highly sensitive information. Afghan officials said the suspect was a 25-year-old intelligence officer who had obtained the code needed to enter the restricted area where the two U.S. officers were working. Officials said the two were shot in the back of the head.

U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker said Sunday in a television interview that the outbreak of violence and the resulting American deaths should not lead to any precipitous decisions about the pace of the drawdown of Western troops.

“This is not the time to decide that we’re done here,” the ambassador told CNN.

“We have got to redouble our efforts. We’ve got to create a situation in which Al Qaeda is not coming back.”

Yaqubi is a special correspondent.

Obama apologizes to Karzai for unintentional Koran burning

Direct Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-afghan-koran-protests-20120227,0,5463678.story

Potent Sting Is Prepared in the Belly of a Warship

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Jan 282012

The New York Times

North Arabian Sea Journal

By C. J. CHIVERS

January 25, 2012

Potent Sting Is Prepared in the Belly of a Warship

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

An ordnance handler assembles a 500-pound training bomb aboard the Stennis.

ABOARD THE U.S.S. JOHN C. STENNIS, in the North Arabian Sea — Depending on who describes it, a nuclear aircraft carrier can be any number of things: an instrument of national will, a nemesis to be threatened and watched, a fast-moving and wide-ranging city at sea.

When you are aboard one, though, a carrier is an immense warren of spaces and passageways between bulkheads, each with a purpose. There are galleys and offices, stores and workshops, clinics and weight rooms, a barber shop, a recycling center, machine rooms, nuclear reactors and more.

And here was the room that gives the ship its sting: the primary bomb-assembly magazine.

On this night, 17 sailors had climbed through a small circular scuttle on the mess deck and then descended, handhold by foothold, deep below the water line to a space that few sailors see. Nine levels below the flight deck, behind a heavy locked door, in a large, brightly lighted room arrayed with firefighting sprinklers, a dozen BLU-111 bomb bodies rested on metal pallets on the nonskid floor.

It was late, and much of the ship’s crew was asleep. The carrier vibrated as its four screws cut through the dark sea off Pakistan’s southwestern coast.

Several sailors in red shirts took positions near a metal rack topped with rollers. Others carried large metal fins. Still more pried open boxes holding switches and fuzes. Three sailors lifted the first bomb body with an electric hoist, moving it toward what would soon become an assembly line.

A bomb-building session had begun.

American Navy officers have a line they repeat passionately and often: A nuclear-powered aircraft carrier is an imposing and versatile manifestation of the United States’ power. A ship like the Stennis, they say, which was sending aircraft on missions over Iraq one day and over Afghanistan 36 hours later, allows Washington to project influence, unrestricted by borders or basing rights.

To that, Chief Petty Officer Jaime L. Evock, 33, added her own line.

She was watching over the sailors in the red shirts, the uniform that signifies ordnance handlers. They were putting together the parts that allow a carrier and its aircraft to reach inside another country and kill.

Whatever anyone thinks of air power, without munitions and the people who know them, she said, “this ship would just be a floating airport.”

There was something to this. At the end of the long chain of events that puts a carrier near a coastline and Navy strike fighters within range of a ground target, beyond the release point where the aircraft lets go of its ordnance, the final act lies with each missile or bomb descending through the air — which depends on the sailors who assembled it here.

On this night, the red shirts were handling a familiar staple. Each BLU-111 in the stack was a central part of a basic weapon of Western air-to-ground warfare — the general-purpose 500-pound bomb. Each contained 180 pounds of PBXN high explosive within an aerodynamic steel shell.

By itself, though, a bomb body is all but useless. That is where Chief Evock and her team came in: Their task was to carefully attach the components that made them live weapons. Think of a late-night game of Mr. Potato Head on the high seas.

Depending on the particular fins, fuzes and guidance packages that are attached, a BLU-111 can turn into a smart bomb guided by laser or GPS, or any of several kinds of “dumb” bombs, or an undersea mine. The weapon can be configured to penetrate a bunker, or to burrow into the dirt before bursting, thereby reducing the amount of lethal shrapnel and the intensity of the blast wave, to reduce the risk to noncombatants or unwanted damage to property. On this night Chief Evock’s team was filling orders from the carrier’s F/A-18 squadrons for a dozen unguided high-explosive bombs. Between flights to Afghanistan, air crews use these for training runs to maintain their qualifications.

The necessary parts had been carried here from a network of feeder magazines spread through the ship. Petty Officer Second Class Shawn M. Scheffler, 26, walked along the rack of parts as sailors called out lot numbers, compiling what is called a build sheet for each bomb.

For those expecting jangled nerves and beads of sweat as sailors handle explosives, this was the wrong place. Until assembled, released and armed, these bombs are stable. The red shirts worked methodically, with practiced precision and without the dramatic flair seen in “The Hurt Locker,” which covered the handling of explosives of a different sort.

Once the rear fuzes were inserted and set and the fins attached and tightened down, each bomb was ready to be rolled by cart to an elevator that would carry it up to the flight deck. Up there the bombs would be guarded in an area called the bomb farm, waiting to be fitted to aircraft.

The first of the bombs this night were ready in perhaps 10 minutes. Petty Officer First Class Joshua J. Austring, 28, roamed the line, ensuring that the components were tightened to the correct torque.

“Numerous things can go wrong,” he said. “We want to make sure that when the pilots are out there for the Marines, and the Marines ask for something to be dropped, that it is going to work.”

Throughout the process, the petty officers kept records, documenting each step in the assembly; the record sheets will follow each bomb to an aircraft, and through its eventual use.

If a weapon does not function properly, they said, the information on the sheets can be shared with explosive ordnance disposal teams on the ground to help make an unexploded bomb safe. They can also be used to identify mistakes by the red shirts. “If there is a dud, it comes back to me,” Petty Officer Scheffler said.

The sheets are also used when a bomb is flown on a sortie but not dropped; it is returned to this space to be disassembled and all the components accounted for.

Behind Petty Officer Scheffler was the handiwork of previous shifts: bombs to be guided by laser, bombs with GPS antennas in their tails, bombs to explode on impact or in midair.

The Stennis was wrapping up its tour in the Middle East and the Arabian Sea. Soon it would hand off responsibility for providing air support in Afghanistan to another carrier steaming its way.

The red shirts this night did not yet know it, but none of the bombs they assembled would be dropped in Afghanistan, where the use of air-to-ground force has declined as the conditions and tactics on the ground have changed. They would soon be broken back down and the parts checked and stored, and the Stennis’s bow pointed east, toward home.

Direct Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/world/middleeast/on-aircraft-carrier-stennis-sailors-9-decks-down-build-the-bombs.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22

Video Inflames a Delicate Moment for U.S. in Afghanistan

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Jan 142012

Video Inflames a Delicate Moment for U.S. in Afghanistan

The New York Times

By GRAHAM BOWLEY and MATTHEW ROSENBERG

January 12, 2012

KABUL, Afghanistan —

A video showing four United States Marines urinating on three dead Taliban fighters provoked anger and condemnation on Thursday in Afghanistan and around the world, raising fears in Washington that the images could incite anti-American sentiment at a particularly delicate moment in the decade-old Afghan war.

A still image from a video posted online that appeared to show Marines urinating on dead bodies.

Video Spreads Anger in Afghanistan

Video: Afghans Shocked at Marine Video

Against Odds, Path Opens Up for U.S.-Taliban Talks (January 12, 2012)

The Obama administration is struggling to keep the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, on its side as it carefully tries to open talks with the Taliban. Yet the video showing such a desecration — a possible war crime — is likely to weaken the American position with both. The Taliban and Mr. Karzai each pointed to the images as evidence of American brutality, a message with broad appeal in Afghanistan, where word of the video was slowly spreading on Thursday.

Senior military officials in Kabul and at the Pentagon confirmed that the video was authentic and that they had identified the Marines as members of the Third Battalion, Second Marines, which completed a tour of Afghanistan this fall before returning to its base at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The officials did not release the Marines’ names but said one wore a corporal’s uniform.

Pentagon officials said the video had been made between March and September 2011, when the Marine battalion was stationed in Helmand Province, a strategic Taliban heartland and a center of the opium poppy trade. The officials said that they did not know the precise location shown in the video but that it had probably been made in the northern part of the province, where the battalion had been operating. Seven of the approximately 1,000 Marines in the battalion were killed during the seven-month deployment.

Pentagon officials said that as far as they knew, all four Marines were still on active duty.

Even before the authenticity of the video had been confirmed, expressions of outrage and contrition by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and other top officials left no doubt that they regarded it as real.

Aware of the inflammatory potential, Mr. Panetta telephoned Mr. Karzai to assure him that an investigation was under way and that those responsible would be punished. Mr. Panetta told the Afghan leader that “the conduct depicted in the footage is utterly deplorable, and that it does not reflect the standards or values American troops are sworn to uphold,” said George Little, the Pentagon spokesman.

The video showed the four Marines, in their distinctive sand-colored camouflage, urinating over the three bodies — one covered in blood. One Marine says, “Have a great day, buddy.”

The Taliban initially indicated that the video would not undermine the push toward talks, saying that they saw it as just more evidence of what they said was American brutality and arrogance.

But later on Thursday, in an official statement, the Taliban dropped references to the talks and emphasized the brutality message. “We strongly condemn the inhuman act of wild American soldiers, as ever, and consider this act in contradiction with all human and ethical norms,” the statement said.

Mr. Karzai said that he was deeply disturbed and that he had asked the Americans to punish the perpetrators severely. “This act by American soldiers is simply inhuman and condemnable in the strongest possible terms,” he said.

American officials reacted remorsefully throughout the day on Thursday in their damage-control effort. The American-led coalition in Afghanistan and the United States Embassy in Kabul offered separate condemnations. Coalition officials said in a statement that the behavior displayed in the video “dishonors the sacrifices and core values of every service member representing the 50 nations of the coalition.”

Mrs. Clinton expressed what she called “total dismay.”

“It is absolutely inconsistent with American values and the standards we expect from our military personnel,” she said in Washington, adding that anyone involved “must be held fully accountable.”

Mr. Panetta said in Washington that he had ordered the Marines and Gen. John R. Allen, a Marine Corps officer who commands coalition forces in Afghanistan, to investigate immediately.

The video, posted on public video-sharing Web sites including LiveLeak and YouTube, began ricocheting around international news Web sites on Wednesday.

Whether the American condemnations will mollify the anger of Afghans remains unclear. But for those who had seen the video, the images appeared to deepen their dislike of the United States, which is widely seen as an occupier here.

“The Taliban sometimes commit such harsh acts, but it was enough just to kill them and not to degrade or humiliate their dead bodies,” said Jawad, a university student in Kabul who gave only one name.

Hajji Ahmad Fareed, a former member of Parliament, said the images confirmed to him that America was against Islam. The Americans “will never be friends with us and never bring peace,” he said. Americans have urinated “on our holy Koran,” he said, and have now done so “on the bodies of our Muslims.”

Mr. Fareed was referring to an erroneous report in Newsweek in 2005 that American soldiers at the prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, had thrown a Koran into a toilet. The report prompted protests and riots in many parts of the Muslim world. The worst was in Afghanistan, where at least 17 people were killed.

Last year, protests erupted in Afghanistan over the burning of a Koran at a Florida church. Several people were killed, including seven United Nations staff members in Mazar-i-Sharif.

American officials in Afghanistan have also struggled to overcome the fallout from a rogue group of American soldiers who in 2010 killed three Afghan civilians for sport in a series of crimes. The soldier accused of being the ringleader of the group, whose members patrolled roads and small villages near Kandahar, was convicted of three counts of murder by an American military panel in November.

The actions of the Marines in the video could amount to a violation of the Geneva Conventions, which require that the bodies of those killed in war be treated honorably.

While the images largely dominated the news in Afghanistan on Thursday, the Taliban’s campaign of assassinations continued when a suicide car bomber killed the governor of a district in the southern province of Kandahar.

The district governor, Said Fazluddin Agha, was riding home after work when his armored vehicle was hit by an attacker in a Suzuki packed with explosives, said Zalmai Ayoubi, a spokesman for the governor of Kandahar. Two of his sons were also killed, and nine police officers and one civilian were wounded. Mr. Agha was the target of an assassination attempt two years ago.

Correction: January 12, 2012

An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the U.S. Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta.

Reporting was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller and John H. Cushman Jr. from Washington; Sangar Rahimi, Sharifullah Sahak and Jawad Sukhanyar from Kabul; an employee of The New York Times from Kandahar, Afghanistan; and J. David Goodman from New York.

Direct Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/13/world/asia/video-said-to-show-marines-urinating-on-taliban-corpses.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22

THE NEXT WAR: Panetta to Offer Strategy for Cutting Military Budget

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Jan 032012

The Next War

Panetta to Offer Strategy for Cutting Military Budget

The New York Times

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and THOM SHANKER

January 2, 2012

WASHINGTON —

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is set this week to reveal his strategy that will guide the Pentagon in cutting hundreds of billions of dollars from its budget, and with it the Obama administration’s vision of the military that the United States needs to meet 21st-century threats, according to senior officials.

Air Force, via European Pressphoto Agency

Reductions are expected in the program for the F-35 fighter jet.

The Next War

Balancing Needs and Costs

This is the third article in a series that is examining the American military and the decisions confronting it in a new age of austerity.

Andrea Bruce for The New York Times

Kentucky National Guard troops in Baghdad.

In a shift of doctrine driven by fiscal reality and a deal last summer that kept the United States from defaulting on its debts, Mr. Panetta is expected to outline plans for carefully shrinking the military — and in so doing make it clear that the Pentagon will not maintain the ability to fight two sustained ground wars at once.

Instead, he will say that the military will be large enough to fight and win one major conflict, while also being able to “spoil” a second adversary’s ambitions in another part of the world while conducting a number of other smaller operations, like providing disaster relief or enforcing a no-flight zone.

Pentagon officials, in the meantime, are in final deliberations about potential cuts to virtually every important area of military spending: the nuclear arsenal, warships, combat aircraft, salaries, and retirement and health benefits. With the war in Iraq over and the one in Afghanistan winding down, Mr. Panetta is weighing how significantly to shrink America’s ground forces.

There is broad agreement on the left, right and center that $450 billion in cuts over a decade — the amount that the White House and Pentagon agreed to last summer — is acceptable. That is about 8 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget. But there is intense debate about an additional $500 billion in cuts that may have to be made if Congress follows through with deeper reductions.

Mr. Panetta and defense hawks say a reduction of $1 trillion, about 17 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget, would be ruinous to national security. Democrats and a few Republicans say that it would be painful but manageable; they add that there were steeper military cuts after the Cold War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

“Even at a trillion dollars, this is a shallower build-down than any of the last three we’ve done,” said Gordon Adams, who oversaw military budgets in the Clinton White House and is now a fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington. “It would still be the world’s most dominant military. We would be in an arms race with ourselves.”

Many who are more worried about cuts, including Mr. Panetta, acknowledge that Pentagon personnel costs are unsustainable and that generous retirement benefits may have to be scaled back to save crucial weapons programs.

“If we allow the current trend to continue,” said Arnold L. Punaro, a consultant on a Pentagon advisory group, the Defense Business Board, who has pushed for changes in the military retirement system, “we’re going to turn the Department of Defense into a benefits company that occasionally kills a terrorist.”

Mr. Panetta will outline the strategy guiding his spending plans at a news conference this week, and the specific cuts — for now, the Pentagon has prepared about $260 billion in cuts for the next five years — will be detailed in the president’s annual budget submission to Congress, where they will be debated and almost certainly amended before approval. Although the proposals look to budget cuts over a decade, any future president can decide to propose an alternative spending plan to Congress.

The looming cuts inevitably force decisions on the scope and future of the American military. If, say, the Pentagon saves $7 billion over a decade by reducing the number of aircraft carriers to 10 from 11, would there be sufficient forces in the Pacific to counter an increasingly bold China? If the Pentagon saves nearly $150 billion in the next 10 years by shrinking the Army to, say, 483,000 troops from 570,000, would America be prepared for a grinding, lengthy ground war in Asia?

What about saving more than $100 billion in health care cutbacks for working-age military retirees? Would that break a promise to those who risked their lives for the country?

The calculations exclude the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which will go down over the next decade. Even after the winding down of the wars and the potential $1 trillion in cuts over the next decade, the Pentagon’s annual budget, now $530 billion, would shrink to $472 billion in 2013, or about the size of the budget in 2007.

It is also important to remember that Mr. Panetta, a former White House budget chief, understands budget politics like few other defense secretaries. When he sent a dire letter to Capitol Hill late last year that held out the prospect of huge reductions in some of Congress’s favorite weapons programs, analysts saw it as a classic tactic to rouse the Hill to his side.

Kin Cheung/Associated Press

The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson, anchored in Hong Kong.

The Next War

Balancing Needs and Costs

This is the third article in a series that is examining the American military and the decisions confronting it in a new age of austerity.

Panetta’s Pentagon, Without the Blank Check (October 24, 2011)
The Next War: Costly Aircraft Suggests Cuts Won’t Be Easy (November 20, 2011)

They noted that Mr. Panetta did not cite the $100 billion that the previous defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, said could be saved by reducing the number of contractors, cutting overhead, consolidating technology and limiting spending in the executive offices of the Pentagon.

“Talking about business practices doesn’t sound the alarm bells,” said Travis Sharp, a defense budget specialist at the Center for a New American Security, a defense policy research institution.

Here is a look at other areas for reductions:

Military benefits and salaries, although politically difficult to cut, are first in the line of sight of many defense budget analysts. Scaling back the Pentagon’s health care and retirement systems and capping raises would yield hundreds of billions of dollars in projected savings over the next decade.

As it stands now, the Pentagon spends $181 billion each year, nearly a third of its base budget, on military personnel costs: $107 billion for salaries and allowances, $50 billion for health care and $24 billion in retirement pay.

One independent analyst, Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan policy and research group in Washington, has calculated that if military personnel costs continue rising at the rate they have over the past decade, and overall Pentagon spending does not increase, by 2039 the entire defense budget would be consumed by personnel costs.

Most of Washington’s “cut lists” recommend increases in fees for beneficiaries in the Pentagon’s health insurance, Tricare. But the higher fees would affect only working-age retirees and not active-duty personnel, who do not pay for health care.

Other proposals call for capping increases in military salaries, which have had double-digit increases since the Sept. 11 attacks, often because Congress gave the troops raises beyond those requested by the Pentagon.

The chief target for weapons cuts is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, one of the most expensive weapons program in history. The Pentagon has plans to spend nearly $400 billion to buy 2,500 of the stealth jets through 2035, but reductions are expected.

The debate centers on how necessary the advanced stealth fighter really is and whether missions could be carried out with the less expensive F-16s. The main advantage of the F-35 is its ability to evade radar systems, making it difficult to shoot down — an attribute that is important only if the United States anticipates a war with another technologically advanced military.

“It would matter some with Iran, it would matter a lot with China,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution and the author of a recent book, “The Wounded Giant: America’s Armed Forces in an Age of Austerity.”

Nowhere is balancing budget and strategy more challenging than in deciding how large a ground combat force the nation needs and can afford. The Army chief of staff, Gen. Ray Odierno, the former commander in Iraq, points out that the Army had 480,000 people in uniform before the Sept. 11 attacks, and at that number was supposed to be able to fight two wars at once.

But the Army proved to be too small to sustain the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and was increased to its current size of 570,000. The Army is now set to drop to 520,000 soldiers, beginning in 2015, although few expect that to be the floor. The reality is that the United States may not be able to afford waging two wars at once.

“That said, there are certain risks with falling off the two-war posture,” said Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., a military expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “You may risk losing the confidence of some allies, and you may risk emboldening your adversaries. But at the end of the day, a strategy of bluffing, or asserting that you have a capability that you don’t, is probably the worst posture of all.”

Studies by the Center for a New American Security, the Sustainable Defense Task Force and the Cato Institute, which represent a spectrum of views on defense spending, estimate that the savings from cutting the ground force could range from $41 billion by reducing the Army to 482,400 and the Marine Corps to 175,000 (from its present size of 202,000) all the way up to $387 billion if the Army drops to 360,000 and the Marines to 145,000. The final numbers will make it clear that the United States could not carry out lengthy stability and nation-building efforts, like those ordered for Afghanistan and Iraq, without a huge mobilization of the National Guard and the Reserves.

The size of the military is determined not only to win wars, but also to deter adversaries from starting hostilities. That underpins the American rationale for maintaining a combat presence at overseas bases and for conducting regular air and sea patrols around the globe. With austerity looming, those, too, might be curtailed to save money.

Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, advocates saving $69.5 billion over 10 years by reducing by one-third the number of American military personnel stationed in Europe and Asia

“This option would leave plenty of military capability by maintaining strategic air bases and naval ports to provide logistics links,” Mr. Coburn wrote in a report on his budget proposals. Many Congressional budget experts also see ways to save billions of dollars by consolidating Defense Department facilities, schools and installations.

One of the largest expenses the Pentagon faces is to replace its aging strategic nuclear forces. While America’s nuclear warheads are relatively inexpensive to maintain on a day-to-day basis, all three legs of the nuclear triad that deliver the punch — submarines, bombers and ground-based missiles — are reaching the end of their service life at just about the same time.

“The world has changed,” said Stephen W. Young, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear watchdog group. “The United States can be more than secure with a far smaller arsenal than what we currently have.”

Direct Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/us/pentagon-to-present-vision-of-reduced-military.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2

Iran tricked U.S. spy drone into landing in country, report says

Articles of Interest, Crimes & Criminal Activity (Organized Crime, Narcotics, Predators, Cyber Crime, Cyber Stalking, UnSolved), National security, Terrorism, Cyber Terrorism & Related Crimes, Technology & Digital Security, U.S. MARINES & Military No Responses »

Jan 022012

Iran tricked U.S. spy drone into landing in country, report says

Electronic warfare experts used GPS spoofing techniques to snag drone, Christian Science Monitor says

Computer World

By Jaikumar Vijayan

December 16, 2011

Computerworld –

The U.S. RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone that was recently captured and displayed by Iranian authorities may have been tricked into landing in that country after being electronically ambushed.

An unconfirmed report in the Christian Science Monitor Thursday quotes an unnamed Iranian engineer as saying that electronic warfare experts in the country were able to cut off the drone’s communications links and reconfigure its GPS coordinates to trick it into landing in Iran.

The engineer was described as someone working for an Iranian team that is engaged in trying to glean information from the drone.

The techniques used to attack the drone were developed by reverse-engineering older U.S. drones that were either captured or shot down in recent years, the engineer is quoted as saying in the Monitor report. The attack also took advantage of weaknesses in the drone’s navigation system to spoof its landing coordinates and bring it down on Iranian territory.

“The GPS navigation is the weakest point,” the Iranian engineer is quoted as telling the Monitor. “By putting noise [jamming] on the communications, you force the bird into autopilot. This is where the bird loses its brain.”

According to the Monitor, the GPS spoofing techniques fooled the drone into “landing” at a U.S. military base in Kandahar, Afghanistan, while it was actually landing inside Iran. The drone apparently landed precisely where the Iranians wanted it to without their having to crack remote-control signals and communications from the drone’s control center.

The Jane’s website describes the RQ-170 Sentinel as an unmanned aerial vehicle manufactured by Lockheed Martin for the U.S. Air Force.

The Air Force acknowledged the existence of the drone in December 2009. However, it appears to have been around since at least 2007 based on unofficial photographs of the vehicle taken in Kandahar, according to Jane’s.

Ira Winkler, president of the Internet Security Advisors Group and a Computerworld columnist, said the attack as described sounds plausible. “I saw other reports saying that there was a known vulnerability,” that was exploited, Winkler said. “However there are a couple of things to consider that might not involve direct hacking of the drones.

“For example, if you know where a drone is, and you can beam a stronger GPS signal at the drone than it would get from a satellite, it would pick up the fake signal and think it is somewhere else. If signals arent encrypted, the people with the strongest transmitter win,” he said.

If the drone was captured as described, it wouldn’t be the first time that a U.S. drone has been attacked in a similar fashion.

Two years ago, militants in Iraq and Afghanistan intercepted live video feeds from unmanned U.S. Predator drones using $26 off-the-shelf software called SkyGrabber made by a Russian company.

While there was little evidence that militants were able to gain control of the drones, the interception could have given them vital information on targets under U.S. surveillance. In that case, U.S. officials apparently knew about the possibility of such interception for years but did little to encrypt the data streams.

Jaikumar Vijayan covers data security and privacy issues, financial services security and e-voting for Computerworld.

Direct Link: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222728/Iran_tricked_U.S._spy_drone_into_landing_in_country_report_says?taxonomyId=82

British troops assist in £18m heroin bust in Afghanistan

Dec 082011

British troops assist in £18m heroin bust in Afghanistan
Daily Mirror / UK
by Chris Hughes
7/12/2011

A view of the Afghanistan landscape as seen from a British Royal Air Force aircraft (Pic: AP)

HEROIN worth nearly £18million and a huge arsenal of deadly weapons have been seized in Afghanistan by security forces.

Afghan cops assisted by British troops found 385lb of wet opium – the main ingredient in the drug – at a suspected Taliban operative’s home.

Two machine guns, a rocket propelled grenade launcher, a number of AK-47 rifles, two pistols and bomb-making gear were also discovered.
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Lt Paul Charlesworth, 24, of First Battalion Princess of Wales’ Royal Regiment, said: “We quickly realised this was a really significant find.

“This is the largest drugs haul that I’ve ever been involved in and the biggest that the international security assistance force has been involved in since we arrived.”

The swoop took place at a man’s home in Gereshk, Nahr-e-Saraj, where British troops are advising local police in how to work crime scenes and handle potential evidence.

It is feared that the drugs, worth up to £46,000 a pound on British streets, could have been used to buy arms for terrorists to attack NATO forces.

Police and military uniforms also found could have been used in ambushes. The man will now be prosecuted in Afghanistan.

Cpt Stuart Barker, 45, said: “This is a victory for joined-up police work. It shows how working together can produce a find which shows the connection between drugs and violence and insecurity.”

Direct Link: http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/12/07/british-troops-assist-in-18m-heroin-bust-in-afghanistan-115875-23615617/#ixzz1fyTYQDRe

After Duty, Dogs Suffer Like Soldiers

Articles of Interest, National security, Terrorism, Cyber Terrorism & Related Crimes, U.S. MARINES & Military No Responses »

Dec 022011

After Duty, Dogs Suffer Like Soldiers
The New York Times
By: Bryce Harper
December 1, 2011

Dereck Stevens bonds with his military working dog before a practice drill at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. More Photos »
By JAMES DAO

SAN ANTONIO — The call came into the behavior specialists here from a doctor in Afghanistan. His patient had just been through a firefight and now was cowering under a cot, refusing to come out.

The Dogs of War

At War Blog: As Soldiers Leave Iraq, Bomb-Sniffing Dogs Stay (December 1, 2011)

Apparently even the chew toys hadn’t worked.

Post-traumatic stress disorder, thought Dr. Walter F. Burghardt Jr., chief of behavioral medicine at the Daniel E. Holland Military Working Dog Hospital at Lackland Air Force Base. Specifically, canine PTSD.

If anyone needed evidence of the frontline role played by dogs in war these days, here is the latest: the four-legged, wet-nosed troops used to sniff out mines, track down enemy fighters and clear buildings are struggling with the mental strains of combat nearly as much as their human counterparts.

By some estimates, more than 5 percent of the approximately 650 military dogs deployed by American combat forces are developing canine PTSD. Of those, about half are likely to be retired from service, Dr. Burghardt said.

Though veterinarians have long diagnosed behavioral problems in animals, the concept of canine PTSD is only about 18 months old, and still being debated. But it has gained vogue among military veterinarians, who have been seeing patterns of troubling behavior among dogs exposed to explosions, gunfire and other combat-related violence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Like humans with the analogous disorder, different dogs show different symptoms. Some become hyper-vigilant. Others avoid buildings or work areas that they had previously been comfortable in. Some undergo sharp changes in temperament, becoming unusually aggressive with their handlers, or clingy and timid. Most crucially, many stop doing the tasks they were trained to perform.

“If the dog is trained to find improvised explosives and it looks like it’s working, but isn’t, it’s not just the dog that’s at risk,” Dr. Burghardt said. “This is a human health issue as well.”

That the military is taking a serious interest in canine PTSD underscores the importance of working dogs in the current wars. Once used primarily as furry sentries, military dogs — most are German shepherds, followed by Belgian Malinois and Labrador retrievers — have branched out into an array of specialized tasks.

They are widely considered the most effective tools for detecting the improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, frequently used in Afghanistan. Typically made from fertilizer and chemicals, and containing little or no metal, those buried bombs can be nearly impossible to find with standard mine-sweeping instruments. In the past three years, I.E.D.’s have become the major cause of casualties in Afghanistan.

The Marine Corps also has begun using specially trained dogs to track Taliban fighters and bomb-makers. And Special Operations commandos train their own dogs to accompany elite teams on secret missions like the Navy SEAL raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Across all the forces, more than 50 military dogs have been killed since 2005.

The number of working dogs on active duty has risen to 2,700, from 1,800 in 2001, and the training school headquartered here at Lackland has gotten busy, preparing about 500 dogs a year. So has the Holland hospital, the Pentagon’s canine version of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Dr. Burghardt, a lanky 59-year-old who retired last year from the Air Force as a colonel, rarely sees his PTSD patients in the flesh. Consultations with veterinarians in the field are generally done by phone, e-mail or Skype, and often involve video documentation.

In a series of videos that Dr. Burghardt uses to train veterinarians to spot canine PTSD, one shepherd barks wildly at the sound of gunfire that it had once tolerated in silence. Another can be seen confidently inspecting the interior of cars but then refusing to go inside a bus or a building. Another sits listlessly on a barrier wall, then after finally responding to its handler’s summons, runs away from a group of Afghan soldiers.

In each case, Dr. Burghardt theorizes, the dogs were using an object, vehicle or person as a “cue” for some violence they had witnessed. “If you want to put doggy thoughts into their heads,” he said, “the dog is thinking: when I see this kind of individual, things go boom, and I’m distressed.”

Treatment can be tricky. Since the patient cannot explain what is wrong, veterinarians and handlers must make educated guesses about the traumatizing events. Care can be as simple as taking a dog off patrol and giving it lots of exercise, playtime and gentle obedience training.

More serious cases will receive what Dr. Burghardt calls “desensitization counterconditioning,” which entails exposing the dog at a safe distance to a sight or sound that might set off a reaction — a gunshot, a loud bang or a vehicle, for instance. If the dog does not react, it is rewarded, and the trigger — “the spider in a glass box,” Dr. Burghardt calls it — is moved progressively closer.

Gina, a shepherd with PTSD who was the subject of news articles last year, was successfully treated with desensitization and has been cleared to deploy again, said Tech. Sgt. Amanda Callahan, a spokeswoman at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado.

Some dogs are also treated with the same medications used to fight panic attacks in humans. Dr. Burghardt asserts that medications seem particularly effective when administered soon after traumatizing events. The Labrador retriever that cowered under a cot after a firefight, for instance, was given Xanax, an anti-anxiety drug, and within days was working well again.

Dogs that do not recover quickly are returned to their home bases for longer-term treatment. But if they continue to show symptoms after three months, they are usually retired or transferred to different duties, Dr. Burghardt said.

As with humans, there is much debate about treatment, with little research yet to guide veterinarians. Lee Charles Kelley, a dog trainer who writes a blog for Psychology Today called “My Puppy, My Self,” says medications should be used only as a stopgap. “We don’t even know how they work in people,” he said.

In the civilian dog world, a growing number of animal behaviorists seem to be endorsing the concept of canine PTSD, saying it also affects household pets who experience car accidents and even less traumatic events.

Dr. Nicholas H. Dodman, director of the animal behavior clinic at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, said he had written about and treated dogs with PTSD-like symptoms for years — but did not call it PTSD until recently. Asked if the disorder could be cured, Dr. Dodman said probably not.

“It is more management,” he said. “Dogs never forget.”

Direct Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/02/us/more-military-dogs-show-signs-of-combat-stress.html?pagewanted=all

ESSENCE of a MAN… Life after war: Story of a Marine amputee

Articles of Interest, National security, Terrorism, Cyber Terrorism & Related Crimes, U.S. MARINES & Military No Responses »

Nov 142011

United States Marine Corporal Justin Gaerter’s Journey.

Justin Gaertner lost his legs in a 2010 explosion while serving as a Marine in the Afghanistan war. This is the inspiring story of his journey to find independence as he confronts life after war as an amputee.

Justin’s family asks that any donations be directed to the Justin Gaertner Fund, run by the Trinity Mustangs, at P.O. Box 115, New Port Richey, FL 34656.

Checks should be made payable to the Trinity Mustangs, with “Justin Gaertner Fund” on the memo line.

Write Mustangs4Justin@gmail.com or call (813) 358-3550.

Video trailer: Justin’s Gift
http://www.tampabay.com/components/video/justins-gift/1239177580001/2652468001/

Story: Essence of a Man
http://www.tampabay.com/blogs/alleyes/content/justin-gaertner-essence-man

Previous story: Recovery is the next fight for Florida Marine
http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2010/audio_slide_shows/justin_gaertner_marine/

If you want to help:

The Independence Fund
http://www.independencefund.org/

The Wounded Warrior Project
http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/

The Semper Fi Fund
http://semperfifund.org/

The Fisher House Foundation
http://www.fisherhouse.org/

The Yellow Ribbon Fund
http://www.yellowribbonfund.org/

Justin Gaertner: Essence of a Man
3 November

Times photos by Kathleen Flynn / Story by Drew Harwell and Kathleen Flynn

On the day after Thanksgiving, U.S. Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Justin Gaertner, 21, was patrolling for mines in the Marja district of Afghanistan when an improvised bomb, stuffed in a glass jug, exploded beneath his feet.

His legs were decimated. Shrapnel blasted into his abdomen and shredded his left arm.

He was flown to Washington, D.C., where he began what doctors said would be a long and daunting recovery.

Of the 46,000 American troops wounded in a decade of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than 1,200 have lost a limb. All of them face grueling treatments and uncertain futures as they return to life back home.

A graduate of Trinity’s Mitchell High School, Justin had always believed the Marines helped him grow up. But that bomb, in an instant, had reduced him to a child: diminished, dependent, unsure.

For him, adjusting to life without legs was about more than wanting to walk. How could he prove his strength to others, to himself? How could he, for a second time, grow into a man?

Touching Down

Justin Gaertner is standing on a military airstrip when the Boeing 767 jet roars into view.

It is a cool Sunday morning in May, and at this base near the Moreno Valley people have gathered to celebrate the end of deployment. Two companies of Marines are returning home after seven months at war in Afghanistan.

Justin squints into the sunlight, watches the jet get closer. It has been six months since the men on that plane saw him almost die.

Justin is standing on two new prosthetic C-Legs. For months he stormed through physical therapy, training twice a day, learning to balance. He wanted to be here when his buddies got here, to show them how much he has changed.

But now, as the jet wheels closer, he feels scared. He hasn’t had much practice on these legs, and he’s scared he’ll totter and fall. Scared a Marine will lift him clean out of his legs. Scared he’ll look powerless, like he needs their help.

“I don’t have legs,” he says, “and they’re still shaking.”

This is what it’s like to be reborn into a life you’re not prepared for, into a body you can’t understand. This is what it’s like to start over at 21. It is brutal. Exhausting. Numbing. It is feeling cut in half, feeling weak. It is not knowing whether you can ever feel strong again.

Men stream off the jet in single file. Men with machine guns, with buzz cuts, with rolled-up camo sleeves. They see the man with the chrome legs and they smile and hurry over, hugging him with rifles in hand. Justin stands tall and proud. He has seen his brothers home.

It isn’t until an hour later, walking across the Marine base at Camp Pendleton, that Justin falls. Lands hard on the concrete on his ravaged arm, still carved in deep with shrapnel.

He grimaces and squeezes his eyes tight.

Slowly he pushes himself back up. Stands on his rigid legs. Starts walking. These are the wins and pains of growing. This is being alive.

Dreams and Nightmares

Justin and his mother, Jill Dalla Betta, wake up in a cramped hotel room far from home.

They live in the Mologne House, on the campus of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, where Justin gets treatment. Their room is a cubbyhole: Clothes are stacked in the corners, food in a dresser. They have no kitchen, no living room, no privacy. Jill will, per doctor’s orders, stay here with Justin for nine months.

Her job is to do what Justin cannot. She gets his meals. She cleans. She helps him walk up curbs. She ties and zips. She remembers when he forgets.

Justin needs the help but hates that he needs it. He is supposed to be tough, a Marine, in a battalion known as “The Super Breed.” His own man. Instead, he lives with his mother. He feels caged and defined by his flaws.

Angry, he snaps: at his aching, good-for-nothing arm; at his body, for doing too little; at Jill, for doing too much. Her presence reminds him of what he has lost.

“He says, ‘Mom, I did this to protect you and the rest of the family,’ ” Jill says. “I feel like he’s angry at me for what happened.”

At night she watches him sleep. Eyes his red-blond hair, his smooth cheeks, his legs that end too soon. She hopes this is all a dream, that she’ll wake up one morning and they’ll both be home. “That’s my baby,” she says. “That’s my boy.”

She wants him to see a counselor, but Justin says there’s nothing wrong. Doctors have asked him to arrange blocks and shapes, asked if he thought someone was trying to steal his soul, asked if he wanted to kill himself. They say he has short-term memory loss, problems focusing and a quick temper. “I don’t get mad very easily,” he says, “but when I do it just kind of — it goes from nothing to a lot real quick.”

Justin does not take pain pills, says they’re for the weak. Doesn’t like sleeping pills either. Asleep, he is haunted by searing nightmares: the death of his fire team leader, the explosion beneath his best friend in the seconds before Justin lost his legs. In the desert of his nightmares he smells the stench of burning flesh.

Awake, he sees spiders on the walls. Feels phantoms shake the bed. Bursts from the shower yelling, “I can smell it! I can smell my flesh burning!” Scares Jill. Scares himself, too.

One night, when Justin can’t sleep, he wakes Jill and tells her to make a bed for him on the floor.

“For what?”

“Just do it.”

She lays out blankets and helps him down.

“Ah,” he says, closing his eyes. “I feel like I’m with my boys again.”

Home Again

Justin sprawls across the living room rug, watching Beverly Hills Chihuahua with his sister, Nicole. She is 6 and home from school. She sits in his wheelchair, eating apple slices.

This afternoon she has brought him a classmate’s crayon drawing (“Fank You for Fighting!”) and wrapped her little arms around his hips. She doesn’t hide her smile. Justin is back from D.C. for two weeks. Since the explosion, this is his first time home.

Justin’s family lives in a manicured suburb called Thousand Oaks. Jill and Larry, his stepfather, have moved Justin into their master bedroom, where his wheelchair fits. In a corner of the room Justin plunks down his bloodied flak jacket, the one he was wearing when he was hit. It’s powdered with desert dust and smells like burnt fertilizer. In the drop pouch rolls a stray grit of shrapnel.

After months on the battlefield, and in a surgical suite, and in a wounded warriors’ gym fenced with prosthetic legs, it feels foreign to be somewhere as ordinary as home. Justin splays out lazily, stretching. He looks like a college kid home for winter break.

Justin is slowly remembering what it feels like to be normal. To be neither a victim nor a hero, but to be a man. It’s a challenge unlike relearning to stand or walk or grip. No workout regimen, no laser surgery, no prosthetic can make you the person you used to be.

He says he appreciates things in a way he never did. Talks of his past like a gift. “I’ve done more in the past four months,” he said, “than I have my whole life.”

Justin swims in the backyard pool, kicking his nubs for laughs. Tickles Nicole’s feet and blows in her ear and drags her giggling across the rug. Justin’s 12-year-old brother, Larry Jr., stiltwalks with Justin’s crutches, wobbling through the living room, as Justin gives him pointers. “When you think you’re going to fall,” he tells him, “try and maintain your balance. That’s pretty much what we have to do. It’s a balancing act the whole time.”

At night, when Justin wheels to bed, Nicole bear-hugs his prosthetic legs. Each is as tall as she is, and heavy with electronics, yet she teeters to the dining room to plug them in. She makes it a nightly ritual for the rest of Justin’s stay. It’s the only thing she can do to help her brother walk.

Tranquility Hall

Justin is in his wheelchair, pumping his fist, at a makeshift DJ booth he built in his living room.

It is late one Saturday night in August, and Justin is throwing a party with a few Marine buddies from down the hall. Dance music booms from a loudspeaker as Tyler Southern, a triple amputee from Jacksonville, sings and laughs . Justin is in his element, relaxed yet ecstatic. This is the place he can now call home.

It has been a few days since his mother flew back home to Trinity and Justin moved into a Walter Reed building called Tranquility Hall with his friend Matias Ferreira. This is Justin’s next step of treatment. True independence, living on his own.

When they moved in, the newly liberated Justin and Matias took pictures of their first home-cooked meals: a dinner of bow-tie pasta and Italian sausage, a breakfast of waffles and microwave bacon. They spent nearly $2,000 at Bed Bath & Beyond, buying a black satin comforter set, patterned pillows and glasses for margaritas. On the windowsill, for ambience, they lit a few votive candles.

Justin’s days are packed. He rides a handcycle and is relearning to drive. He is taking classes in algebra and public speaking, with hopes of becoming a physical therapist. He has gone skydiving and water skiing and running on prosthetic legs. He is already thinking of his next event for after Thanksgiving: an “alive party,” with pizza and chicken wings, to celebrate a year reborn.

But for tonight, Justin is absorbed in his headphones, queueing the next upbeat song on his MacBook Pro. A trumpet and tuba player in grade school, he felt his love for jazz and music theory lapse across three deployments. Now, playing with the rhythm, he feels it coming back.

He’s finding he likes the simple things: playing music, living on his own, standing on his prosthetic legs and looking people in the eyes.

“Feeling normal,” he says. “That’s what I like.”

But now, as the music booms, Justin and Tyler — 20-somethings, after all — decide to do something a little abnormal. Justin drops onto the floor, rolls onto his shoulders and kicks his legs into the air. He does a headstand.

The blood rushes to his head, and the world is upside down. The music keeps a beat.

View our Special Report about Justin Gaertner, including a video. Drew Harwell can be reached at (727) 445-4170 or dharwell@sptimes.com. Kathleen Flynn can be reached at kflynn@sptimes.com. Times researcher Natalie Watson contributed to this report.

Direct Link: http://www.tampabay.com/specials/2011/reports/story-of-marine-justin-gaertner/