Subject: 10 MAR 14 CHINFO CLIPS
From: "CHINFO NEWS CLIPS" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 06:20:47 -0400

On This Day In The Navy:
1948: First use of jets assigned to operational squadron (VF-5A) on board a carrier (Boxer).

TOP STORIES:
1.	Obama To Meet Leader Of Ukraine
(WASHINGTON POST 10 MAR 14) ... Anthony Faiola and Carol Morello
KIEV, Ukraine – The head of Ukraine’s new pro-Western government will meet with President Obama this week, the White House announced Sunday, as a defiant Russia took further steps to consolidate its hold on the Crimean Peninsula.

2.	Japan, U.S. Differ On China In Talks On 'Grey Zone' Military Threats
(REUTERS 10 MAR 14) ... Nobuhiro Kubo, Linda Sieg and Phil Stewart
TOKYO/WASHINGTON – As Japan and the United States start talks on how to respond to armed incidents that fall short of a full-scale attack on Japan, officials in Tokyo worry that their ally is reluctant to send China a strong message of deterrence.

3.	Search For Jet Compounds The Mystery
(NEW YORK TIMES 10 MAR 14) ... Thomas Fuller
SEPANG, Malaysia – More than 48 hours after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished, the mysteries over its fate have only multiplied.

VCNO:
4.	VCNO Announces Further Flag Officer Adjustments
(SEAPOWER 07 MAR 14)
WASHINGTON – Vice Chief of Naval Operations (VCNO) ADM Mark E. Ferguson III announced in a March 7 release the next phase of flag officer billet adjustments, projected to bring the Navy into compliance with guidance from the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

5.	VCNO Announces Further Flag Officer Adjustments
(NAVY LIVE BLOG 07 MAR 14) ... Admiral Mark Ferguson
Shipmates, I want to take a few moments to provide context on my recent announcement to adjust Navy flag officer billets to align with statutory and Office of the Secretary of Defense policy.

UKRAINE:
6.	A Defiant Putin Endorses Crimean Bid To Secede
Kremlin-Backed Official Says Region Could Become Part of Russia Later This Month
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 10 MAR 14) ... Lukas I. Alpert
MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin threw his support Sunday behind Crimea's move to secede from Ukraine, defying Western threats of sanctions, as a Kremlin-backed official said the region could join Russia as soon as this month.

7.	House Republicans Balk At Wording In Obama Emergency Aid Package For Ukraine
(NEW YORK TIMES 10 MAR 14) ... Jonathan Weisman
WASHINGTON – An emergency aid package for the beleaguered Ukrainian government has become entangled in a partisan dispute over the International Monetary Fund, with House Republicans resisting President Obama’s personal pleas to extend the reach of a Ukraine rescue plan by including long-sought changes to the fund’s structure.

8.	Russian's Comments Rile Latvia
Comments Seen As Russia's Attempt to Keep Latvians Within its Sphere
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 10 MAR 14) ... Juris Kaža
RIGA, Latvia – Russian Ambassador Aleksandr Veshnyakov created a new wave of concern in Latvia with recent remarks saying it may soon become easier for ethnic Russians in Latvia to obtain Russian citizenship.

9.	Blocked By Sunken Russian Ships, Ukraine's Navy Stays Defiant
(AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE 09 MAR 14) ... Katherine Haddon
MYRNY – Russia has deliberately sunk three of its own ships to block Ukrainian navy vessels entering a lake off the Black Sea, officers say, highlighting Moscow's determination to wear down the morale of Kiev's forces in Crimea.

CONGRESS / BUDGET:
10.	U.S. Navy Budget Plan: Major Questions Abound
(DEFENSE NEWS 09 MAR 14) ... Christopher P. Cavas
WASHINGTON – The carrier is out. The carrier is in. The carrier is in, but only if money goes up.

11.	Interview With Robert Hale, Pentagon Comptroller
(DEFENSE NEWS 10 MAR 14)
Outgoing Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale last week unveiled his final Pentagon budget plan, and soon will retire. He leaves behind what he calls “uncertainty” with further across-the-board cuts pending via sequestration. Hale oversaw a 2015 budget process that has left many in Washington and the defense sector confused. For instance, the future years defense plan (FYDP) is incomplete, with senior officials sending conflicting messages last week about just how the $115 billion it calls for above spending caps etched into law would be spent.

ASIA – PACIFIC:
12.	Searchers Find Debris That Could Be From Missing Jet
(USA TODAY 10 MAR 14) ... Calum MacLeod, Thomas Maresca and John Bacon
Six planes and seven ships from Vietnam have been unable to find an object spotted by a low-flying plane on Sunday afternoon that could be a piece of the Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared early Saturday, authorities said.

13.	Four U.S. Navy Aegis Ships Arrive In S. Korea For Foal Eagle Exercise
(YONHAP NEWS AGENCY (S.KOREA) 10 MAR 14) ... Kim Eun-jung
SEOUL – Four U.S. Navy Aegis ships arrived in three ports of South Korea on Saturday to participate in the Foal Eagle combat field training to enhance their joint military readiness, according to the U.S. Navy's website.

14.	Philippines 'Won't Rush Defense Accord' For Obama Visit
(AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE 09 MAR 14)
MANILA – The Philippines said Saturday it would not rush to complete a defense accord with the United States just so it can be sealed by the time President Barack Obama visits next month.

MIDEAST:
15.	Iranian Foreign Minister Questions Western Commitment To Nuclear Deal
Javad Zarif Says Target Date Still Reachable
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 10 MAR 14) ... Laurence Norman
TEHRAN, Iran – The Iranian foreign minister raised doubts about the West's commitment to resolving the nuclear standoff in a pointed message to visiting European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.

16.	Israel Says Long-Range Rockets Aboard 'Iran Arms Ship'
(AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE 09 MAR 14) ... Jack Guez
EILAT – Israel said Sunday it had found 40 long-range rockets aboard a ship it intercepted in the Red Sea, charging that it carried weapons sent by Iran to Gaza Strip militants.

17.	Beirut Suburbs Pay The Price For Link To Syria War
(WASHINGTON POST 10 MAR 14) ... Loveday Morris
BEIRUT – At a small, family-operated firm selling building materials in Beirut’s southern suburbs, sales are picking up. But it’s not new construction that’s fueling business. It’s a run on sandbags for protection from car bombings.

AFGHANISTAN:
18.	Afghan Vice President's Death Shakes Up Political Field
Death of Key Power Broker Comes Less Than a Month Before Elections
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 10 MAR 14) ... Yaroslav Trofimov and Ehsanullah Amiri
KABUL – One of Afghanistan's most influential power brokers, First Vice President Mohammed Qasim Fahim, died Sunday, altering the country's political landscape ahead of presidential elections next month.

AFRICA:
19.	Battle Of The High Seas: On Patrol With NATO's Pirate-Catchers Off The Horn Of Africa
(THE INDEPENDENT (UK) 09 MAR 14) ... Leo Cendrowicz
The Somali pirate drama is over in seconds: a helicopter swoops into view and hovers over the hijacked vessel, four hooded marines slide down ropes, the hostiles are overpowered, and the ship’s hostages released. Or at least, that is what NATO is rehearsing as it polices the world's busiest shipping lane and its most dangerous waters, the sea around the Horn of Africa.

AVIATION:
20.	Air Boss’ Talks Progress On F-35C, P-8
(NAVY TIMES 17 MAR 14) ... Mark D. Faram
SAN DIEGO – Naval aviation is zooming into its second century by harnessing technological revolutions – from unmanned carrier planes to the electromagnetic catapults that will one day fling them from the decks of Ford-class supercarriers.

SHIPBUILDING:
21.	Lawmaker Strives To Keep Focus On Shipbuilding
(DEFENSE NEWS 10 MAR 14) ... Christopher P. Cavas and John T. Bennett
WASHINGTON – Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., could be called the U.S. House’s dean of Navy shipbuilding, and he is attempting to become its top Asia-Pacific strategist. What’s more, most insiders put him on the shortlist for possible successors to retiring House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif. Forbes is chairman of the committee’s seapower subcommittee.

22.	Newport News Shipbuilding: Carrier Funding Prompts Head Scratching
(NEWPORT NEWS DAILY PRESS 08 MAR 14) ... Hugh Lessig
This week's rollout of the Defense Department budget prompted as many questions as answers about the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet and the status of future big-ticket jobs at Newport News Shipbuilding.

23.	How The New Military Budget Affects Navy Warships
(NORFOLK VIRGINIAN-PILOT 10 MAR 14) ... Kate Wiltrout
President Barack Obama's proposed budget, rolled out on Tuesday, could have major long-term effects on the warships that call Norfolk home – and the shipyards that build and maintain them. The Navy today has 283 warships, about 60 of them homeported here.

INFRASTRUCTURE / INSTALLATIONS:
24.	Officials: $414M Impact, 'Bright' Future At Shipyard
(PORTSMOUTH (NH) HERALD 08 MAR 14) ... Deborah McDermott
PORTSMOUTH – In 2013, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard contributed $414.3 million in local civilian payroll into the Seacoast economy and hired 161 new employees. In addition, more than $250 million in construction projects have taken place at the yard in the last two years alone.

25.	Navy Still Working On Finding The Cause Of Red Hill Fuel Leak
(HONOLULU STAR-ADVERTISER 08 MAR 14) ... William Cole
The Navy hasn't yet gotten to the bottom of a leak at the Red Hill fuel farm that is believed to have dumped up to 27,000 gallons of JP-8 aviation fuel into concrete containment surrounding the leaky steel liner.

SEXUAL ASSAULT:
26.	Troops In Key Posts May Be Rechecked For Sex Offenses
(USA TODAY 08 MAR 14) ... Tom Vanden Brook
WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has discussed with Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy leaders an Army review that disqualified 588 soldiers from posts as sexual assault counselors and whether those services should follow the Army's lead.

27.	USS Germantown Captain Relieved Of Duty
(STARS AND STRIPES 10 MAR 14) ... Matthew M. Burke
SASEBO NAVAL BASE, Japan – The captain of the USS Germantown has been relieved of command for failure to use good judgment and uphold standards in relation to a sexual assault investigation involving one of the ship’s top sailors, Navy officials said Monday.

28.	Emails Show Shared Concern Of False Testimony In Army Sexual Assault Case
(NEW YORK TIMES 10 MAR 14) ... Richard A. Oppel Jr.
Lawyers defending Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair on sexual assault charges are renewing claims that the case against him has been tainted by the influence of senior officials in the Pentagon, citing emails that military prosecutors turned over during the weekend.

PERSONNEL:
29.	New Rules Would Make Sailors Pay 25% Of Off-Duty Tuition Costs
(NAVY TIMES 17 MAR 14) ... Mark D. Faram
You’re likely to start footing more of the bill for your off-duty college classes starting this fall.

30.	CNP’s Worldwide All-Hands Call
5 things every sailor should know about
(NAVY TIMES 17 MAR 14)
A day after the new budget for the next fiscal year was unveiled, the Navy’s manpower boss spoke about upcoming programs, perks that sailors can take advantage of and the Navy’s manning outlook.

31.	These Are The Pentagon’s Ideas For Reforming Retirement Benefits
(GOVERNMENT EXECUTIVE 09 MAR 14) ... Eric Katz
The Defense Department has outlined several possibilities for overhauling retirement benefits for military personnel, which could provide more cash up front to service members but limit overall compensation.

32.	Submarine Connecticut XO Relieved
(NAVY TIMES 09 MAR 14) ... Mark D. Faram
The executive officer of the Bremerton, Wash.- based fast attack submarine Connecticut was relieved March 8 due to a loss of confidence.

SECURITY CLEARANCES:
33.	U.S. Network To Scan Workers With Secret Clearances
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 10 MAR 14) ... Stephen Braun
WASHINGTON – U.S. intelligence officials are planning a sweeping system of electronic monitoring that would tap into government, financial and other databases to scan the behavior of many of the 5 million federal employees with secret clearances, current and former officials told The Associated Press.

COMMENTARY:
34.	Defunding Defense
(WASHINGTON POST 10 MAR 14) ... Robert J. Samuelson
The crisis in Ukraine reminds us that the future is unpredictable, that wars routinely involve miscalculation and that brute force – boots on the ground, bombs in the air – counts. None of these obvious lessons seems to have made much impression in Washington, where the Obama administration and Congress continue their policy of defunding defense and reducing the United States’ military power.

35.	A Defense Budget Based On Hope
(WASHINGTON POST 09 MAR 14) ... Editorial
If, as the Obama administration is convinced, the United States will no longer conduct “long and large stability operations” in foreign countries, then the defense budget it has proposed for next year makes some logical choices. Troop strength, particularly in the Army, is being cut – to the lowest level since before World War II – so that money can be spent on new technology, cyber operations and special operations forces, which will be expanded.

36.	China’s Disturbing Defense Budget
(NEW YORK TIMES 10 MAR 14) ... Editorial
China is causing new anxieties in Asia with a defense budget for 2014 that totals $132 billion, up 12.2 percent over the previous year. These numbers should not be used as an excuse to ratchet up America’s military spending. But they do raise legitimate concerns about China’s motives that Beijing should seek to dispel, especially at a time when regional tensions are rising.

37.	America's Non-Pivot To Asia
U.S. friends and foes know that entitlement spending inevitably draws from defense.
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 09 MAR 14) ... Editorial
Anyone worried about how the Obama Administration's budget priorities thwart American strategy abroad got another sleepless night last week. First a senior Pentagon official let slip that because of budget constraints America's high-profile pivot to Asia "is being looked at again, because candidly it can't happen." Then China announced another double-digit increase in annual defense spending, this time of 12.2%.

38.	How To Put Military Pressure On Russia
NATO now has reason to station nuclear forces in front-line member states.
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 10 MAR 14) ... Jim Thomas
Russia's seizure of Crimea should be a wake-up call for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The absence of serious thinking about NATO's territorial defense mission – its raison d'être – and the weakness its 28 member nations have shown since the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia have proven catnip for Vladimir Putin.

39.	Why Poland Cares So Much About Ukraine
(NEW YORK TIMES 10 MAR 14) ... Padraic Kenney
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – An old train route south from the eastern Polish city of Przemysl passes through Ukrainian territory, then back into Poland. The tracks are a relic of the prewar past, when this was all Polish territory, before the Soviet Union “liberated” western Ukraine in 1939 from Poland and incorporated it into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

40.	Military Sexual-Assault Legislation Divides Women Senators
Sen. McCaskill’s military sexual-assault bill is meatier than advertised
 ... WASHINGTON POST 09 MAR 14 Melinda Henneberger
Sen. Claire McCaskill’s bill to overhaul – yes, overhaul – the way sexualassault cases are handled in the military has routinely been described as more modest, conservative, watered-down and incremental than her Senate colleague Kirsten Gillibrand’s measure.

 

TOP STORIES:
1.	Obama To Meet Leader Of Ukraine
(WASHINGTON POST 10 MAR 14) ... Anthony Faiola and Carol Morello
 
KIEV, Ukraine – The head of Ukraine’s new pro-Western government will meet with President Obama this week, the White House announced Sunday, as a defiant Russia took further steps to consolidate its hold on the Crimean Peninsula.
The announcement of Wednesday’s meeting in Washington with Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk came as pro-Russian forces extended their reach in Crimea, surrounding a border post in the far west and blocking Ukrainian TV broadcasts to the heavily Russian-speaking region, which lies more than 400 miles southeast of the Ukrainian capital. There were reports of more troop movements into Crimea, with officials in Kiev estimating that 18,000 pro-Russian forces had fanned out across the region, which is about the size of Massachusetts.
A whirlwind of diplomacy continued Sunday – with Russian President Vladimir Putin speaking to German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron – but there was no sign that Putin was willing to budge.
The Yatsenyuk visit was announced Sunday by Tony Blinken, Obama’s deputy national security adviser. “What we’ve seen is the president mobilizing the international community in support of Ukraine to isolate Russia for its actions in Ukraine, and to reassure our allies and partners,” Blinken said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Raising concerns of unrest beyond Crimea, local news media and Russia’s Interfax news agency reported that hundreds of activists brandishing Russian flags had broken into a government building in the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk. They reportedly forced the mayor to write a resignation letter and raised the Russian flag over the building. The incursion occurred two days after a similar protest in the eastern city of Donetsk was put down by authorities loyal to the new government in Kiev.
But Crimea remained the core of concern. According to a spokeswoman for the Ukrainian coast guard, most Ukrainian broadcasts in the region were jammed beginning mid-afternoon Sunday. The only Ukrainian TV programming that could be seen by a reporter in Sevastopol was on two channels, one showing movies and the other soccer.
On Sunday, Sevastopol – home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet – was awash in Russian flags as the rest of Ukraine was celebrating the 200th birthday of national hero and poet Taras Shevchenko. Matrons walking down the street in woolen coats and sensible shoes had Russian flag ribbons tied to the straps of their purses. Children skated through squares wearing armbands with the tricolor stripes of the Russian flag.
Some of those who tried to show their Ukrainian pride paid a price. Several people at a pro-Ukrainian rally were beaten up by pro-Russian activists, said Dima Belotserkovets, a pro-Ukrainian activist. He said he and others were kicked and punched until police eventually came to their rescue. Ten pro-Ukrainian activists were detained but later released, he said. At least one other was still in the hospital, Belotserkovets said, and one was unaccounted for.
Putin Defends Referendum
Russia held out a financial carrot to Crimea, offering 40 billion rubles ($1.1 billion) in support if the peninsula voted in favor of joining Russia in a March 16 referendum. That vote was called by pro-Russian lawmakers who seized control of Crimea’s parliament on Feb. 27.
In a phone call with Putin, Merkel called the planned referendum “illegal” and urged Putin to de-escalate the situation, according to a German government spokesman. Blinken said Sunday that if the vote favors annexing Crimea to Russia, “we won’t recognize it, and most of the world won’t either.”
Putin also spoke with Cameron, who continued a push for the Russian leader to support a contact group that could arrange direct talks between him and the new government in Kiev, according to a spokeswoman at the British prime minister’s office.
But the Kremlin’s news service said Putin stressed that “the steps being taken by the legitimate Crimean authorities are based on international law and aim to protect the legitimate interests of the population of the Crimea.”
There were no reports of shots fired when Russian forces encircled the Chernomorskoye border post in western Crimea, but about 30 Ukrainian personnel were trapped inside, according to reports from the Reuters news agency and Ukrainian television. It was the 11th Ukrainian base to be surrounded by Russian forces since they moved into the region Feb. 28.
Tension At Military Bases
On Sunday, Ukrainian military bases around Sevastopol were tense but largely quiet, with commanders saying that they were trying to avoid responding to provocations.
At one isolated base a half-hour outside Sevastopol, a sign taped to the gate read “Thank you for staying faithful to your oath.” Outside the gate, a half-dozen men in uniforms – part of the pro-Russian “self-defense forces” – milled around.
“They say they are here to defend us from ‘terrorist attacks,’” said Col. Andrei Ivanchenko, the Ukrainian base commander, using his fingers to draw air quotes around the words. “They don’t talk to us. But they are peaceful.”
Ivanchenko said the self-defense units report to a commander in the Russian military, a colonel who had come to the base four days earlier and told the Ukrainians to disarm. Ivanchenko said Russian troops stayed outside the facility, with snipers posted on nearby rooftops.
He said the base had been receiving food and calls of support from civilians. Pointing to a Ukrainian flag flying on a pole at the base entrance, he said morale among those inside was “as high as that banner.”
No Russian or self-defense troops were visible at a nearby Ukrainian air force base that was stormed Friday night by Russian troops. But Lt. Col. Andrei Aladashvili, the base commander, said the installation was under the constant observation of Russians stationed on nearby rooftops and in apartment buildings.
About 50 people were inside the base, he said, half of them women. All the weapons in the facility had been removed and sent to an arsenal, he said, to avoid any incident.
“Our main task is not to use our weapons, not to have any victims,” he said. “We must not react to any provocation. That is the most important thing.”
Aladashvili described a harrowing attack on the base Friday night, when a Russian military truck tried to ram through the front gate about 7:30 p.m. and Russian soldiers scrambled over the low walls surrounding the facility. The Ukrainian troops on the base lined up just inside the gate, he said, forming a human shield to defend their facility. The Russian soldiers threatened to shoot them in the backs if they did not move, Aladashvili said.
The standoff continued for five hours while Russian and Ukrainian commanders negotiated over the phone, and, eventually, the Russians left at 12:30 a.m. Saturday, Aladashvili said.
Morello reported from Sevastopol. Isabel Gorst in Moscow and Philip Rucker in Washington contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/russian-forces-tighten-grip-in-crimea/2014/03/09/3132d41c-f829-4999-93cb-2b503c8d6072_story.html
 
Return to Index

2.	Japan, U.S. Differ On China In Talks On 'Grey Zone' Military Threats
(REUTERS 10 MAR 14) ... Nobuhiro Kubo, Linda Sieg and Phil Stewart
 
TOKYO/WASHINGTON – As Japan and the United States start talks on how to respond to armed incidents that fall short of a full-scale attack on Japan, officials in Tokyo worry that their ally is reluctant to send China a strong message of deterrence.
Military officials meet this week in Hawaii to review bilateral defense guidelines for the first time in 17 years. Tokyo hopes to zero in on specific perceived threats, notably China's claims to Japanese-held islands in the East China Sea, while Washington is emphasizing broader discussions, officials on both sides say.
Washington takes no position on the sovereignty of the islands, called the Senkaku by Japan and the Diaoyu by China, but recognizes that Japan administers them and says they fall under the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, which obligates America to come to Japan's defense.
But even as Asia-Pacific security tensions mount, U.S. officials have made clear they do not want to get pulled into a conflict between the world's second- and third-biggest economies.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government is alarmed at China's rapid military buildup. Beijing in turn accuses Tokyo of being a regional threat, citing Abe's more nationalist stance, his reversal of years of falling military spending and his visit to a shrine that Asian countries see as glorifying Japan's wartime past.
"Japan wants to prioritize discussions on China and clarify the respective U.S. and Japanese roles in the event of a 'grey zone' incident," said a Japanese government official, referring to less than full-scale, systematic military attacks backed by a state but still representing a threat to Japan's security.
Tokyo wants Washington to join in drafting scenarios for how the two allies would respond in specific cases, he said.
But Washington is worried about provoking China by being too specific, say Japanese officials and experts.
"The United States is certainly ambivalent about this because they think it would drag them into a confrontation and possibly a conflict with China," said Narushige Michishita, who was a national security adviser to the government of Junichiro Koizumi from 2004-2006.
A U.S. defense official rejected the idea that Washington worries about antagonizing China but stressed that the guideline review is a broad exercise, including the Korean peninsula and global contingencies.
"There is a tendency to distil all this back to the Senkaku islands," the official said. "It's not about any particular contingency. It's about making the U.S.-Japan alliance more flexible and responsive to a security environment that's not as black and white as we were thinking about in 1997."
Singling out China, the official said, is "too simplistic a narrative.”
Grey Zone
Underlying Tokyo's concerns are worries that Washington might one day be unable or unwilling to defend Japan, despite President Barack Obama's strategic "pivot" toward the Asia-Pacific region. This fear is adding momentum to Abe's drive to beef up Japan's forces while loosening constitutional limits on military actions overseas.
If Washington does not get involved in specifically addressing the China threat, "it would undermine the credibility of the alliance and might end up encouraging China to be bolder," said Michishita, a professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo.
"U.S. policy makers will have to walk a thin line and try to strike a balance between maintaining credibility and deterrence, and preventing excessive involvement in the situation."
High on the agenda in Hawaii will be "grey zone" incidents. Japanese government officials offer such hypothetical examples as a landing of Chinese special forces disguised as fishermen on the disputed islands.
When the guidelines were last updated in 1997, North Korea's missile and nuclear programs were seen as the biggest threat. Japan was less nervous then about China's military expansion, and issues such as cyber-warfare barely existed.
The old guidelines "are too binary," said the U.S. official. "We're either in peacetime or we're on full contingency." This is "far too inflexible and rigid a framework" for today's threats, the official said.
Tokyo's strategic planners have become increasingly concerned about grey-zone incidents since Sino-Japanese tensions over the tiny uninhabited islands increased in 2012. Japanese and Chinese vessels and aircraft regularly play cat-and-mouse in the disputed areas, with Tokyo often scrambling fighter jets against what it says are incursions of its air and sea territory.
China's Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Saturday there was "no room for compromise" with Japan on questions of history and disputed territory, "each inch" of which it would defend from its Asian neighbor.
Dysfunctional Deterrence
The guidelines to update the U.S.-Japanese defense alliance, agreed to in October, coincides with Abe's push to bolster Japan's military and ease the constraints of the post-war, pacifist constitution on the country's armed forces. That includes his plan to lift a self-imposed ban on giving military aid to an ally under attack.
The update, which the two sides aim to wrap up by the end of the year, also follows years of Washington urging Japan to take on a bigger role in the alliance, the core of Tokyo's post-war security policy.
But American voters are weary of foreign wars after Iraq and Afghanistan and wary of being entangled in any new conflicts, experts say.
"U.S. public opinion is more negative toward involvement in foreign wars than even during the Vietnam War," said former senior Japanese diplomat Yoshiji Nogami, now president of the Japan Institute of International Affairs. "If the alliance is firm, then the chance of (America) being drawn in will be less, but this point is not fully understood by ordinary Americans."
Japan has its own headaches over grey-zone incidents. Government officials and many security experts say the authorities must close loopholes between situations where only Japan's Coast Guard and police can act and those where the military can be mobilized.
Examples, Abe recently told parliament, could include a foreign submarine lurking in Japanese waters despite repeated warnings to surface and identify itself or leave, and aggression against remote islands to which police or the Coast Guard could not promptly respond.
"A legal gap like that at a time when the security environment surrounding our country is getting tougher would render deterrence ... dysfunctional and put the people in grave danger," Abe said. A panel of Japanese security experts is expected to recommend revising laws to close that gap.
Washington wants to know how far Japan's military "can expand its roles, missions and capability," said another Japanese official.
U.S. involvement in grey-zone incidents could include intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, the U.S. official said. The guideline review will likely focus in part on strengthening cooperation in those areas, as well as "maritime domain awareness ... early on, possibly in a grey-zone kind of situation," he said.
That would be a more likely outcome than more direct military action by U.S. forces, said ex-diplomat Nogami.
Where grey-zone tensions are rising, joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance are vital, he said. "The reason that is needed is to prevent the grey zone from becoming black."
Writing by Linda Sieg; Editing by William Mallard and Jeremy Laurence.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/10/us-japan-china-defence-idUSBREA280RD20140310
 
Return to Index

3.	Search For Jet Compounds The Mystery
(NEW YORK TIMES 10 MAR 14) ... Thomas Fuller
 
SEPANG, Malaysia – More than 48 hours after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished, the mysteries over its fate have only multiplied.
The Beijing-bound plane made no distress call, officials said, and the Malaysian authorities suggested it might have even begun to turn back to Kuala Lumpur midflight before it disappeared. Despite an intensive international search in the waters along its scheduled route, there were no confirmed sightings of the plane’s wreckage. And electronic booking records showed that the two passengers who were traveling on stolen passports bought their tickets from the same Thai travel agency.
The seeming security lapse, which Interpol publicly criticized, might have had nothing to do with what happened to the jet and its 239 passengers and crew. Investigators said they were ruling nothing out, including a catastrophic mechanical failure, pilot error, or both.
But by late Sunday, the lack of answers – or even many clues – to the plane’s disappearance added to the misery of family members left behind.
With Malaysian officials refusing to release many details of their investigation and sometimes presenting conflicting information, the families and friends of victims became increasingly frustrated.
One woman in Beijing collapsed in tears Sunday night in the hotel ballroom where passengers’ relatives were waiting for news. “Why won’t anyone tell us anything?” she wailed.
The many unknowns also frustrated international security experts attempting to determine whether security breaches might have led to tragedy.
Ronald K. Noble, the secretary general of the International Criminal Police Organization, or Interpol, said, “It is clearly of great concern that any passenger was able to board an international flight using a stolen passport listed in Interpol’s databases.”
“This is a situation we had hoped never to see,” he said, adding that too few countries systematically screen travelers with Interpol’s Stolen and Lost Travel Documents database set up after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. “For years, Interpol has asked, ‘Why should countries wait for a tragedy to put prudent security measures in place at borders and boarding gates?’“
A senior American law enforcement official, who has received classified briefings on the global investigation, said that the authorities had not ruled out terrorism in the plane’s disappearance, but that there had been no public claims of responsibility or electronic intercepts of extremists discussing details of any bombing or attack.
“We’re not seeing or hearing anyone claiming anything about this,” the official said.
By early Monday, the search effort had yet to confirm where the plane might have gone down, even as military aircraft and a flotilla of ships from a half-dozen nations, including China, Malaysia, Vietnam and the United States, searched the waters south of Vietnam.
On Sunday, Vietnamese media reported that rescuers had found a yellow object they thought might be part of the aircraft. But the news media later said it turned out to be a coral reef.
Azharuddin Abdul Rahman, the Malaysian civil aviation chief, said samples from an oil slick discovered in the waters had been collected and were being tested to determine if they had come from the plane.
The flight left the international airport in Sepang, outside Kuala Lumpur, at 12:41 a.m. on Saturday and vanished less than an hour later as it appeared to be cruising at 35,000 feet in calm weather. More details emerged Sunday about the two passengers listed on the manifest using names from an Austrian and an Italian passport reported stolen in Thailand, one in 2012 and the other in 2013. According to electronic booking records, each man bought a one-way ticket on Thursday from a travel agency in a shopping mall in the Thai beach resort of Pattaya. A woman who answered the phone at the agency said she was too busy to talk.
Both men were scheduled to pass through Beijing and continue to Amsterdam before traveling to different cities, Frankfurt and Copenhagen, according to the records.
The senior American law enforcement official confirmed Sunday that Thai officials were investigating a “passport ring” operating on the resort island of Phuket, where both passports were stolen.
Although the official said identifying the two passengers is a top priority for investigators, he noted that false documents were also routinely used in the region by drug smugglers.
Security experts in Asia differed on the significance of the two stolen passports.
Xu Ke, a lecturer at the Zhejiang Police College in eastern China who studies aviation safety and hijackings, said the two men might have been illegal migrants. “There are many cases of falsified and counterfeit passports and visas for illegal migration that our public security comes across, even several cases every day,” he said.
But Steve Vickers, the chief executive of a Hong Kong-based security consulting company that specializes in risk mitigation and corporate intelligence in Asia, said the presence of at least two travelers with stolen passports aboard a single jet was rare.
“It is fairly unusual to have more than one person flying on a flight with a stolen passport,” said Mr. Vickers, who publicly warned a month ago that stolen airport passes and other identity documents in Asia merited a crackdown. “The future of this investigation lies in who really checked in.”
Mr. Azharuddin said investigators were reviewing video footage of the passengers in question. Malaysian officials also said five ticketed passengers failed to board the flight but said that their luggage was removed from the plane before it took off.
Vahid Motevalli, an aviation expert at Tennessee Tech University, in Cookeville, said that since the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, verifying the identity of passengers had become fundamental.
The Interpol database of stolen passports is considered crucial because it would otherwise be difficult for airline agents to spot well-altered passports.
As they tried to deflect questions about seemingly lax security, Malaysian officials emphasized that their priority was locating the aircraft. They said they had reviewed military radar records and raised the possibility that the aircraft had tried to turn back just before contact with ground controllers was lost.
Gen. Rodzali Daud, the commander of the Royal Malaysian Air Force, said that the authorities were “baffled” by the lack of any distress signals from the aircraft and that a closer look at military radar might have indicated a deviation from the flight path.
But Mikael Robertsson, the co-chairman of Flightradar24, a Stockholm-based service that tracks the majority of the world’s passenger jets, said data gathered by separate civilian receivers in the region did not appear to show the jet turning around.
For now, such conflicting reports seemed to increase tensions.
Prime Minister Najib Razak of Malaysia was quoted saying in the newspaper The Star, that Malaysia would “review all security protocols and, if needed, we will enhance them.”
But Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, appeared to flash impatience Sunday in a phone call reported on the ministry’s website.
“The Malaysia Airlines flight has been missing for close to 40 hours,” he was quoted as telling his Malaysian counterpart. “The Chinese government is treating this very seriously.” He asked that Malaysia “constantly” provide updates on the situation.
As of Monday morning, Malaysia Airlines had not eliminated MH370 from its list of regularly scheduled flight numbers. The airline is still selling tickets on its website for a flight with the same number to Beijing on Wednesday morning, departure 12:35 a.m., scheduled arrival 6:30 a.m.
Reporting was contributed by Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher from Hong Kong; Edward Wong and Andrew Jacobs from Beijing; Poypiti Amatatham from Bangkok; and Eric Schmitt and Matthew L. Wald from Washington. Bree Feng, Mia Li and Amy Qin contributed research from Beijing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-flight.html
 
Return to Index

VCNO:
4.	VCNO Announces Further Flag Officer Adjustments
(SEAPOWER 07 MAR 14)
 
WASHINGTON – Vice Chief of Naval Operations (VCNO) ADM Mark E. Ferguson III announced in a March 7 release the next phase of flag officer billet adjustments, projected to bring the Navy into compliance with guidance from the Office of the Secretary of Defense.
The adjustments are in addition to the reduction of 35 Navy flag officer positions announced in August 2013.
The phased reduction, elimination or consolidation of flag officer billets is scheduled to be complete by March 2016 and will occur as the officers effect permanent change of station moves or retire. This plan will allow for 151 flag officers to fill Navy-specific billets and 64 Navy flag officers to fill existing requirements for joint billets.
“The overall flag billet plan balances these adjustments across officer communities, including Line, Restricted Line and Staff Corps. It also enables the Navy to provide more stability and predictability in the flag officer promotion process while meeting statutory requirements,” Ferguson said.
Specific billets affected by this plan include:
Eliminations
•	Deputy Chief of the Navy Reserve. The current billet is filled by an active-duty Rear Admiral (lower half).
•	Director of Intelligence Operations (N2/N6I). The current billet is filled by an active-duty Rear Admiral (lower half).
•	Director, Maritime Headquarters, U.S. Fleet Forces Command. The current billet is filled by an active-duty Rear Admiral (lower half).
Shift from Active Duty to Reserves
•	Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command/U.S. 4th Fleet, will transition from an active-duty Rear Admiral (upper half) to a recalled Reservist of the same rank.
•	Commander, Naval Supply Systems Command for Global Logistics Support, will transition from an active-duty Rear Admiral (lower half) to a recalled Reservist of the same rank.
Increase in Seniority
•	Commander, Navy Cyber Command, will increase in seniority from a Rear Admiral (lower half) to a Rear Admiral (upper half). The command also will become Information Dominance Forces Command, the Echelon II type commander for the Information Dominance Corps.
•	Program Executive Officer for Air Anti-Submarine Warfare, Assault and Special Mission Programs, will increase in seniority from a Rear Admiral (lower half) to a Rear Admiral (upper half). This increase in seniority is commensurate with the scope of responsibility for the billet and helps balance the acquisition corps billet structure.
Billet shift
•	Commander, Navy Air and Missile Defense Command, a Rear Admiral (lower half), will shift to a new command, the Navy Surface Warfare Development Command and remain at the same rank.
Merger and Elimination
•	Oceanographer of the Navy; Navigator of the Navy; and Director, Space and Maritime Domain Awareness (OPNAV N2/N6E), previously commanded by a Rear Admiral (upper half), will merge with Commander, Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command. The new billet will be filled by a U.S. Navy Rear Admiral (lower half). The billet will be located at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
“Our goal remains to operate more efficiently and effectively while strengthening our warfighting capabilities,” Ferguson said. “Shifting two billets to the Reserve force recognizes their significant contribution to combat operations, their operational expertise and their integrated service with the active-duty component. As warfare requirements evolve, we will continue to assess our flag officer billet structure while seeking opportunities to further integrate our Reserve and active-duty components.”
http://www.seapowermagazine.org/stories/20140307-flags.html
 
Return to Index

5.	VCNO Announces Further Flag Officer Adjustments
(NAVY LIVE BLOG 07 MAR 14) ... Admiral Mark Ferguson
 
Shipmates, I want to take a few moments to provide context on my recent announcement to adjust Navy flag officer billets to align with statutory and Office of the Secretary of Defense policy.
Earlier this year, I announced the initial 35 flag officer billets scheduled for elimination. The latest round of changes reduces, eliminates, or consolidates additional flag officer billets. All of these changes will be phased as incumbent officers transfer or retire. But this doesn’t mean the office or command will be entirely eliminated. The billet will either be merged with another flag officer, downgraded to an O6 position, shifted to a civilian position, or filled by a recalled reservist.
What does this do for the Navy in the long run? It reduces the number of active duty flag officers while maintaining flag leadership in our most critical positions. It also reverses growth in the flag community that occurred over the last 13 years. Our goal remains to operate more efficiently and effectively while strengthening our warfighting capabilities.
These changes are scheduled to be implemented by March 2016. When complete, the Navy will be allocated 151 flag officers for Navy-specific billets and 64 Navy flag officers for joint billets.
The overall Flag billet plan balances these adjustments across all officer communities, including Line, Restricted Line and Staff Corps. It also enables the Navy to provide more stability and predictability in the flag officer promotion process while meeting statutory requirements.
While some flag officer billets are being disestablished, phased out, or downgraded to O6 billets, other flag officer billets are being established or upgraded to meet new requirements. This plan establishes a new Navy Surface Warfare Development Command and upgrades Commander, Navy Cyber Command to a two-star billet. The latter will lead a newly established Information Dominance Forces Command, the Echelon II type commander for the Information Dominance Corps. It also upgrades PEO Air Anti-Submarine Warfare, Assault and Special Mission Programs (PEO-A) to a two-star position that is more in line with the scope of responsibility for the billet and helps balance the acquisition corps billet structure.
We are also shifting two billets to be filled by recalled Reservists. Commander, U.S. Naval Forces Southern Command/U.S. 4th Fleet will transition from an active duty Rear Adm. (upper half) to a recalled reservist of the same rank; and Commander, Naval Supply Systems Command for Global Logistics Support will transition from an active duty Rear Adm. (lower half) to a recalled reservist of the same rank.
Shifting these two flag billets to the Reserve Force is a reflection of their significant contribution to combat operations, their operational expertise, and their integrated service with the active duty component.
As warfare requirements evolve, we will continue to assess our flag officer billet structure while seeking opportunities to further integrate our Reserve and Active Duty components.
Admiral Mark Ferguson is Vice Chief of Naval Operations.
http://navylive.dodlive.mil/2014/03/07/vcno-announces-further-flag-officer-adjustments/
 
Return to Index

UKRAINE:
6.	A Defiant Putin Endorses Crimean Bid To Secede
Kremlin-Backed Official Says Region Could Become Part of Russia Later This Month
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 10 MAR 14) ... Lukas I. Alpert
 
MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin threw his support Sunday behind Crimea's move to secede from Ukraine, defying Western threats of sanctions, as a Kremlin-backed official said the region could join Russia as soon as this month.
The White House, meanwhile, said President Barack Obama would meet the newly appointed Ukrainian prime minister in Washington on Wednesday and warned that further steps toward Russian annexing Crimea would lead to more economic and diplomatic pressure on Moscow.
But in calls with German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron on Sunday, Mr. Putin showed no sign of giving ground. While the West has said Russia's occupation of Crimea and the region's secession referendum, which is scheduled for Sunday, violate international law, Mr. Putin called the planned vote legitimate.
"The steps taken by the legitimate leadership of Crimea are based on the norms of international law and aim to ensure the legal interests of the population of the peninsula," Mr. Putin said Sunday in the calls, according to a statement from the Kremlin.
Mr. Putin didn't say whether Russia intended to annex Crimea if the referendum to leave Ukraine and join Russia passes. But a Kremlin-backed leader in Crimea said the region could become part of Russia by the end of March if the vote succeeds.
Russia's Parliament has been fast-tracking a bill to speed up the process for Russia to absorb a foreign territory and issue Russian passports. A member of Russia's Parliament said Sunday it stood ready to provide the region with 40 billion rubles ($1.1 billion) for infrastructure development if it becomes part of the country, as Crimea relies largely on Ukraine for its water and electricity.
Tony Blinken, Mr. Obama's deputy national security adviser, said an annexation of Crimea violated international law and would never be recognized.
"If there is an annexation of Crimea, a referendum that moves Crimea from Ukraine to Russia, we won't recognize it, nor will most of the world," he told CNN. "The pressure that we've already exerted in coordination with our partners and allies will go up."
He pointed to steep declines in the Russian ruble and Russia's stock markets last week as a result of international pressure and as proof that Russia was already paying a cost. The ruble has recovered some from the steep losses in recent days, however, and the stock-market losses have had little broader economic impact.
In an address to thousands gathered in central Kiev to celebrate the 200th birthday of Ukrainian nationalist writer Taras Shevchenko, the country's new prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, vowed to protect Ukraine's interests in Crimea but said it would achieve its goals diplomatically.
"This is our land," he told the crowd. "Our fathers and grandfathers have spilled their blood for this land. And we won't budge a single centimeter from Ukrainian land. Let Russia and its president know this."
Russia has increasingly pushed back at the threat of sanctions. On Saturday, Russia state news agencies reported the country's defense ministry may stop fulfilling arms-treaty commitments and block U.S. military inspections of its nuclear weapons in response to a move in Washington to suspend military cooperation with Moscow.
In an article in the state newspaper Rossiskaya Gazeta, Kirill Barsky, Russia's special envoy to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization suggested that Russia was prepared to face down any sanctions, noting that similar measures taken against China following the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989 proved ineffective and that China's economy surged soon after.
The situation on the ground in Crimea grew more tense over the weekend. Russian troops and locals continued to besiege Ukrainian military bases in Crimea, halting delivery of food and supplies to some of them. On Sunday in Sevastopol, violence flared when a small crowd of Ukrainians gathered to celebrate Mr. Shevchenko's birthday. They were met by pro-Russian demonstrators who attacked men providing security for the event, punching and kicking them and beating one man with a whip.
The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said warning shots were fired as its military observer team attempted to enter the region Saturday and were stopped at an armed checkpoint. On Friday, the group issued a statement condemning reports of harassment and violence against reporters in region.Poland decided to evacuate its consulate in Crimea "because of continuing disturbances by Russian forces," the country's foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, said Saturday.
On Sunday, there were signs of unrest in some eastern Ukrainian cities where Russian speakers are in the majority. In Luhansk, local media reported that a mob of several hundred protesters bearing Russian flags stormed the local government building and forced the new governor appointed by Kiev to sign a letter of resignation.
In the eastern industrial of Donetsk, boxer-turned-politician Vitali Klitschko who plans to run for president in Ukrainian elections on May 25, was forced to cancel a rally after a group of about 5,000 pro-Russian protesters gathered in the city's main square and had minor skirmishes with a pro-Kiev group.
Meanwhile, Sergei Aksyonov, the new Russian-backed leader in Crimea, issued a televised appeal to residents in other regions in Ukraine's south and east, calling on them to defy the new government in Kiev and hold their own votes on secession. He offered the support of the new Crimean government, as well as its "self-defense forces," referring to what Western officials say are Russian troops deployed in Crimea.
Alan Cullison, Alexander Kolyandr and Carol E. Lee contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304020104579428981865357124
 
Return to Index

7.	House Republicans Balk At Wording In Obama Emergency Aid Package For Ukraine
(NEW YORK TIMES 10 MAR 14) ... Jonathan Weisman
 
WASHINGTON – An emergency aid package for the beleaguered Ukrainian government has become entangled in a partisan dispute over the International Monetary Fund, with House Republicans resisting President Obama’s personal pleas to extend the reach of a Ukraine rescue plan by including long-sought changes to the fund’s structure.
The administration already has pledged $1 billion in United States loan guarantees to the government in Kiev, and the House responded quickly, approving an aid package on Thursday with overwhelming support from both parties. But House Republicans rebuffed the president on a request to include language that would extend a separate billion-dollar package of loans from the fund to $1.6 billion by expanding loan limits for countries like Ukraine.
A draft aid plan pending before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee does include the language. If it remains, House, Senate and White House negotiators will square off this week, as the government in Kiev teeters on the brink of a default. Adding to that tension, Congress intends to be on recess the following week.
“There’s been a lot of talk in Congress about these issues,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday. “Once again, I’m calling on Congress to follow up on these words with action, specifically to support the IMF’s capacity to lend resources to Ukraine and to provide American assistance for the Ukrainian government so that they can weather this storm.”
The IMF issue dates back to 2010, when Mr. Obama helped negotiate a “rebalancing” of influence at the fund, granting emerging powers like China, India and Brazil more power and expanding the borrowing quotas of countries like Ukraine. Since then, every nation that needed to approve the changes has done so but one, the United States, and without Washington’s approval, the changes are stuck.
Under the changes, the United States would shift $63 billion from the IMF’s tightly controlled crisis fund to its general accounts, where a newly rebalanced board of directors would have more control and where countries participating in the fund would get more generous loan limits. Under a complicated system of formulas, Ukraine’s limits would rise about 60 percent, said Edwin M. Truman, a former Obama Treasury official now with the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
In recent months, Democratic and Republican finance heavyweights have joined the administration’s pressure campaign, including Robert B. Zoellick, a former World Bank president and deputy secretary of state in President George W. Bush’s administration; two Bush Treasury secretaries, Henry M. Paulson Jr. and John W. Snow; and Nicholas F. Brady, a Treasury secretary in the administration of the first President Bush.
But House Republicans have balked, fearing a loss of American influence and more taxpayer exposure as loan limits rise. Influential Republicans such as Representative Jeb Hensarling of Texas, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, have expressed strong philosophical opposition to American support for international lending institutions that they say are using American taxpayers’ money to bail out irresponsible countries.
“Regardless of the wisdom, many Americans now rightfully question our ability to continue supporting multilateral financial institutions like the IMF,” Mr. Hensarling told Treasury Secretary Jacob J. Lew in December during the administration’s last push for the new IMF language.
Michael Steel, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner, said the fund “already has the authority and resources” it needed to act in Ukraine. “The White House is trying to use this crisis to press for a separate and unrelated policy they have long pursued,” Mr. Steel said.
Last month, Russia tried to use this intransigence in Congress as a wedge in the international community. At a gathering of finance ministers in Australia, the Russian finance minister, Anton Siluanov, suggested that the IMF move forward with the changes without the United States, and end Washington’s veto authority at the fund.
At the same gathering, Mr. Lew found himself at once cajoling allies to go to Ukraine’s aid and trying to explain why the United States had failed to approve the fund changes it had negotiated, said Mr. Truman, the former Treasury official.
“On the one hand we want the fund to be there,” Mr. Truman said. “We leverage money from other countries to make sure it is strong and available. At the same time we see no merit in passing the legislation that we promised.”
To administration officials, the Ukraine crisis has made the need for the fund changes tangible. In January, Mr. Lew pressed hard to include the IMF language in a $1 trillion spending bill for the current fiscal year. Republicans countered with demands that the administration would not accept, including a delay or suspension of proposed new regulations governing the political activities of tax-exempt organizations.
In the past days, administration officials and their allies have ramped up again. Senior White House officials reached out to Mr. Boehner last week, pressing the case that with the changes, Ukraine’s $1 billion loan package would expand to $1.6 billion. American credibility at the fund, battered by the delay, could also be restored.
“At a time when the U.S. is at the forefront of international calls in urging the fund to play a central and active first responder role in Ukraine, it is imperative that we secure passage of IMF legislation now,” Mr. Lew told the House Ways and Means Committee on Thursday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/world/europe/house-republicans-balk-at-wording-in-obama-emergency-aid-package.html
 
Return to Index

8.	Russian's Comments Rile Latvia
Comments Seen As Russia's Attempt to Keep Latvians Within its Sphere
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 10 MAR 14) ... Juris Kaža
 
RIGA, Latvia – Russian Ambassador Aleksandr Veshnyakov created a new wave of concern in Latvia with recent remarks saying it may soon become easier for ethnic Russians in Latvia to obtain Russian citizenship.
Mr. Veshnyakov told Latvian Radio 4, a Russian-language public broadcasting channel, that proposed legislation in Russia would allow granting Russian citizenship to ethnic Russians in Latvia to "save the Latvian noncitizens out of poverty by giving them citizenship and a pension without having to stay in Russia." Russians constitute 27.6% of Latvia's population of 2 million, the largest ethnic group among the minorities living in Latvia.
The comments come as many in the three Baltic nations – part of the former Soviet Union – have expressed fears about being the target of possible Russian expansionism. Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia – all members of NATO and the European Union – have been working to forge economic ties with Europe by joining the euro zone while also scrambling to lessen dependence on Russian energy.
Russia has justified its moves in Ukraine as a defense of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. Moscow has complained about Latvia's alleged mistreatment of ethnic Russians there.
The government in Moscow has approved legal changes that would radically ease the process of obtaining Russian passports for Russian speakers in other former Soviet republics.
President Barack Obama discussed the situation in Ukraine with Baltic leaders in recent days following comments made by Baltic leaders severely critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin. The U.S. has committed fighter jets in Lithuania to reassure allies.
Latvia's former Minister of Defense, Artis Pabriks, who referred to Mr. Veshnyakov's remarks in a tweet on his Twitter account, told The Wall Street Journal Sunday that Mr. Veshnyakov's offer of social security and pensions was unnecessary, as Russia and Latvia had signed treaties that ensured that each other's citizens would receive their pensions in either country. Mr. Pabriks suggested the Russian diplomat was apparently trying to lure or keep some Latvian residents under Russia's political influence and in the Russian "information sphere."
According to the English-language website of the Pension Fund of the Russian Federation, the average old-age pension in February was 11,400 rubles, or $312.88 a month. In Latvia, the average old-age pension is EUR277, or $384.
Mr. Pabriks said that Mr. Veshnakov's remarks could also be seen as a slap at EU social security and living standards before an audience of poorly informed Russian speakers.
A member of Prime Minister Laimdota Straujuma's Unity Party, Mr. Pabriks also said he was worried by Russia's vague promises of aid and support for "compatriots" abroad.
"What do they mean? By language, ethnicity, ancestry?" Mr. Pabriks asked, noting that this concept was being used to justify Russia's intervention in Crimea.
The Russian Ambassador spoke on Latvian radio last Friday, a few days after he said on a Latvian television Russian-language program that Russia wouldn't respond to calls by Russians in Latvia for military intervention if the situation were similar to Ukraine. "Don't fantasize. This wouldn't happen," Mr. Veshnyakov is quoted as saying.
Separately, The Russian Union of Latvia, formerly the For Human Rights in a United Latvia (PCTVL) party, which lost its place in the Latvian parliament in the 2010 elections, has called for a march in support of Crimea as part of Russia Monday in downtown Riga, which is Latvia's capitol.
In a Facebook post, the party, seen as pro-Russian, calls for an afternoon local march from the French Embassy to the German Embassy and culminating at a building housing European Union (EU) offices, called the "EU House."
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304020104579429332129542004
 
Return to Index

9.	Blocked By Sunken Russian Ships, Ukraine's Navy Stays Defiant
(AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE 09 MAR 14) ... Katherine Haddon
 
MYRNY – Russia has deliberately sunk three of its own ships to block Ukrainian navy vessels entering a lake off the Black Sea, officers say, highlighting Moscow's determination to wear down the morale of Kiev's forces in Crimea.
The Ochakov -- a Soviet-era warship decommissioned in 2011 and set to be sold for scrap -- was towed to the entrance to Lake Donuzlav on Crimea's western coast from the Russian base at Sevastopol on Thursday and blown up.
It capsized and, along with two smaller Russian vessels, is now blocking the narrow gap between two spits of land, its hull beaten by rough Black Sea waves.
Ukraine's navy has limited resources and suffered a major blow last week when its chief Denis Berezovsky switched allegiance to the pro-Russian Crimean authorities and a new chief was appointed.
But officers at a base near where the Russians sank the ship have no doubt what the Russians were trying to do and insist they will not be shaken by the tactics.
"It is blocked so we cannot get out," said Captain Viktor Shmyganovsky, second-in-command at the base in Novoozerne, one of the four biggest in Crimea.
"If it wasn't blocked, we could have taken our ships to Odessa and it would stop them being seized by Russian forces. We would be more powerful in alliance with ships in Odessa."
Ukraine's navy headquarters is in Sevastopol, where Russia's Black Sea Fleet was founded under Imperial Russia 230 years ago, but is currently barricaded by pro-Russian militants.
Odessa, further round the coast into Ukraine and the country's largest port, offers a safer option amid the current military situation in Crimea, a semi-autonomous region of Ukraine where pro-Russian forces have seized control.
'Loyal To Ukraine'
The Novoozerne base -- built by the Soviets in 1976 and dotted with decorative Cold War missiles and communications equipment -- flies the Ukrainian flag prominently and is protected by a handful of troops armed with Kalashnikovs.
While Ukrainian officers would not disclose exactly how many men are based there, it is thought to be in the dozens.
After the ships were blown up, the commander of Russia's Black Sea fleet, Admiral Alexander Vitko, came to the base trying to get them to switch sides, said Shmyganovsky.
"He wanted us to swear for the Russian people. Members of the navy gave an honourable answer to the admiral -- Ukraine's soldiers will remain faithful to Ukraine's people," the small, neatly-dressed officer added.
"A few military helicopters and planes were sent here (after the ships were sunk) and they were trying to break down our morale."
Officers at the base declined to confirm how many Ukrainian ships were currently in Lake Donuzlav, while hinting at submarine capability.
But Ukraine's navy is around a tenth of the size of Russia's and suffers from "inadequate finances,” according to London-based military affairs think-tank the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS).
Ukraine only has one, Soviet-built submarine which it is currently trying to restore to "service condition after over a decade of inactivity," it adds.
Despite the odds stacking up against them, the Ukrainian navy is determined to stand its ground to the end in this storied naval territory, said Shmyganovsky.
"From history, we know that those who cannot use political means resort to weapons instead. An admiral once said Sevastopol never gives up and we can say the same about other Ukrainian navy units," he added.
"As you know, no Ukrainian navy units have put down their weapons except Admiral Berezovksy. None of the others swore for the Crimean or Russian people. We're staying loyal to the Ukrainian people."
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5h1lf3zjWdXQu6YOmxILbF7N4lDKA
 
Return to Index

CONGRESS / BUDGET:
10.	U.S. Navy Budget Plan: Major Questions Abound
(DEFENSE NEWS 09 MAR 14) ... Christopher P. Cavas
 
WASHINGTON – The carrier is out. The carrier is in. The carrier is in, but only if money goes up.
More planes are back in – well, sort of, but we’ll have to see. The new buying plan for littoral combat ships is – not yet decided on. The plan for laying up and modernizing half the fleet’s cruisers is almost ready but – not quite yet. New rules for counting the battle force are – not quite there, either.
The once-orderly, sequential process of formulating each year’s Pentagon budget request is a thing of the past, shot to pieces by congressional budget chaos, White House indecision and leadership issues within the Pentagon. The U.S. Navy – along with the Air Force and Army – while not bereft of blame, is often left to ponder the intent of the directions it receives from on high.
As a result, while the budget submitted to Congress on March 4 contains thousands of incredibly detailed line items, some of the biggest issues remain to be decided, even as the service’s leadership prepares to head to Capitol Hill to face questions from lawmakers, many shaking their heads at the last-minute nature of many key decisions.
At the top of the questions facing the Navy is the future of the aircraft carrier George Washington. The budget request eliminated funds for a scheduled $3.5 billion, three-and-a-half-year refueling overhaul that would start in 2016. This would mean permanently decommissioning the ship, part of a plan to reduce the 11-carrier fleet by one and cut one of 10 carrier air wings.
The carrier is a centerpiece of a wider fight between the White House and Congress over the future of mandated budget reductions – an issue known as the sequester.
Should there be no changes in the sequester rules, the Navy has told Congress, the ship and its wing will go. If lawmakers agree to lift budget caps starting in 2016, the ship can stay.
Should funding be restored, a slight delay in the overhaul is likely, possibly pushing the work into 2017.
The situation was further clouded March 5 by an internal Pentagon memo to the service chiefs from Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Christine Fox. It directed the Navy to “program for 11 carrier strike groups and the appropriate number of associated air wings, including the refueling and overhaul” of the George Washington.
That contradicted testimony that same day by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, when he told Congress the inactivation was going ahead unless budget caps were lifted.
The Fox memo confused Navy officials and Hill people alike.
Fox’s memo was “not very helpful,” one congressional staffer said. “It added to the confusion rather than clarifying the situation.”
Other key budget-related questions are abundant with the Navy’s 2015 submission.
Littoral Combat Ship
The Navy restructured the LCS procurement plan from four ships each in 2015 and 2016, and two thereafter, to three per year starting in 2015 – part of a newly directed scheme to examine LCS alternatives after 32 ships. The three-per-year laydown, however, breaks the last ship of 10-ship block buys awarded to each of the two building teams, meaning that one ship will need some sort of contract modification.
It also is not yet clear how the Navy wants to parse out three ships per year between the teams, led by Lockheed Martin and Austal USA, or whether the dual-design purchase plan will go forward.
Congress already is frustrated at the lack of answers to these questions, even though the new scheme was only agreed upon weeks ago.
“The Navy is in the process of reviewing a range of potential options for the FY 2016 ship procurement,” Lt. Caroline Hutcheson, a Navy spokeswoman, said March 7. “A number of reviews within Navy and [Office of the Secretary of Defense] are planned over the next year to determine the acquisition strategy prior to release of a request for proposal and subsequent award.”
MH-60R Helicopters
An even larger contracting problem could affect the service’s decision to zero out plans to buy 29 Sikorsky MH-60R helicopters in 2016 – the last year of a multiyear procurement (MYP) contract.
The surprise reduction is being tied by the service to cuts in the LCS buys and the air wing cut. But the numbers don’t really add up – four aircraft normally are assigned to a deployed air wing, while it might be presumed that the small surface combatant that follows LCS would also use the helo.
“The MYP cancellation is not official,” a Navy official said. “Any decision to cancel the MYP for MH-60R will be done during the FY16 budget cycle. [The 2015 budget] does not cancel the MYP, and includes the necessary advanced procurement for FY16 necessary to maintain the MYP contract.”
Should the helicopter not be ordered, an industry source said, considerable penalties would be paid to Sikorsky and systems integrator Lockheed Martin – possibly nearly equaling the $41 million cost of a delivered aircraft.
Battle Force And Cruisers
New rules about which ships qualify to be counted as fleet battle forces assets also were expected to have been issued by the time of the budget submission.
The rules will count deployable ships, including vessels such as forward-deployed patrol craft and minesweepers, but not units of those types that do not regularly deploy beyond U.S. waters.
The Navy’s two hospital ships also will be counted, as they support “soft” missions. Overall, the new rules would change the current 283-ship fleet to 291 ships.
As of March 7, the new rules had not been signed out by Navy Secretary Ray Mabus. Planners had expected they would count, however, and budget briefing documents on March 4 referred to a 291-ship fleet.
Also still to be finalized is the fleet’s plan to “lay up” and modernize 11 Ticonderoga-class cruisers – a touchy issue on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers flatly rejected an earlier Navy request to decommission seven ships. Congress is eager to hear the plan, including a timeline for inactivating and overhauling 11 ships, how their crews would be assigned, and how much money the project will cost.
Navy officials had expected to finalize the scheme in advance of the budget submission, but it remains a work in progress, guided by Fleet Forces Command.
The service is assuring the Hill, however, that it has every intention to keep the cruisers going.
“The Navy has no intent to decommission these ships, and we continue to work our phased modernization plan,” the Navy official said.
Funding Options
Further clouding the budget picture is the pending release of the White House’s Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative (OGSI), a $26 billion additional funding request expected to be sent to Congress in the near future. The OGSI will seek to restore a number of budget-reduction cuts made in the Pentagon’s base budget request.
More Navy aircraft are likely to be included in the OGSI request, including P-8A Poseidons, E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes, C-40 Clippers and RQ-21A Blackjack unmanned air systems. The request is not expected to restore the MH-60R helicopter cuts.
Discussions about what would go into the OGSI continued March 7.
Other options to restore some of the budget cuts include listing programs on an unfunded requirements list requested by Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Reviving a practice that ended in 2012, each of the services is expected to compile such a list.
As with the OSGI, discussions continued March 7 about what items would be included on the Navy’s unfunded list. The list is expected to include readiness and maintenance funding and restoration of the George Washington’s refueling overhaul.
According to a knowledgeable Pentagon source, the list could also include EA-18G Growler electronic attack aircraft. The Navy concluded its Growler buys in 2014, along with all other variants of the F/A-18 Super Hornet, but Congress added $75 million in the ’14 bill to support advanced procurement for 22 aircraft.
While there is not an existing requirement for more aircraft, additional Growler buys would allow five-plane squadrons to grow to seven each, giving improved electronic attack capabilities in an anti-access/area-denial combat environment.
The move would also allow Boeing and Northrop Grumman to keep open Growler production lines at least another year, giving the firms more of a chance to seal a foreign military sales deal.
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140309/DEFREG02/303090012
 
Return to Index

11.	Interview With Robert Hale, Pentagon Comptroller
(DEFENSE NEWS 10 MAR 14)
 
Outgoing Pentagon Comptroller Robert Hale last week unveiled his final Pentagon budget plan, and soon will retire. He leaves behind what he calls “uncertainty” with further across-the-board cuts pending via sequestration. Hale oversaw a 2015 budget process that has left many in Washington and the defense sector confused. For instance, the future years defense plan (FYDP) is incomplete, with senior officials sending conflicting messages last week about just how the $115 billion it calls for above spending caps etched into law would be spent.
Hale sat down with Defense News on March 6, saying that if Congress opts against raising the caps to give the military the extra $115 billion it wants through 2019, drastic and controversial moves will be implemented. That list includes taking an aircraft carrier out of the fleet, Hale said. It also would force ground-force cuts, trimming the Army to 420,000 active-duty soldiers and the Marine Corps to 175,000 members. There appears to be little support on Capitol Hill for those moves, but as Hale said, all indications are that lawmakers will keep the spending caps in place for fiscal 2016.
Q. One of the things that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said is that he wanted to minimize the impact on troop reductions. He said that if the Pentagon got this extra $115 billion across the five-year budget that it wanted, those were the priorities that it would try to underwrite. And then the budget released didn’t have any of those priorities. Why not fund those priorities?
A. Well, let me start by saying that in 2015, the only thing for which Congress will appropriate money, we have fully funded our preferred priorities. The Army, it’ll be around 490,000 [soldiers], well above 440,000 to 450,000 in ’15.
The Marine Corps, 182,000.
There’s enough money in there to preserve our options to maintain 11 carriers and 10 wings. So in some ways, I think, this whole issue of disconnect is a bit of a mountain out of a molehill and may even obscure the important debate over the broader budget.
But let me try to answer your question. We don’t know what Congress is going to do. We face massive uncertainty. [Congress] could appropriate at the sequester level, a reasonable chance they could, I hope, appropriate at the $115 billion above. For a few categories, we felt we needed the time to plan and so we hedged, if you will, from a planning standpoint.
If we judge, and we have some indication that Congress is going to appropriate at those higher levels, we will reverse those and stay at our preferred levels. We’ll stay at 11 carriers. We’ll leave the Army at 440,000 to 450,000. That will require that we look again at our five-year plan, probably do some trims and procurement, maybe some in O&M [operations and maintenance], but protect the most readiness-related parts of O&M and find the funds to preserve that force structure.
Q. We understood that you originally built a budget to full sequester level, but the White House gave you a little bit more money and you put it not against people, but against readiness and modernization. But when those plans were presented to the White House, they told you to keep higher force numbers and the 11th carrier. Is that why the five-year budget plan has been delayed?
A. We had extensive discussions with the White House and OMB [Office of Management and Budget] over a wide variety of issues, to include the ones that you’ve mentioned. But I’ll say, we reached accommodations with them and are in agreement with them. Secretary Hagel is fully comfortable with this plan, and so is the White House. It’s part of the president’s budget. But the reason that we left those few categories – Army end strength, Marine Corps end strength and the carrier, I would call it prudent planning. We need to get started.
These are hard things to plan. You don’t decommission a carrier without a fair amount of planning.
And the reason we left them in there is to give ourselves time and maybe even force ourselves to plan because we may have to do it.
Q. When are we going to see the five-year budget plan? Has that been delayed as you reworked the plan?
A. No, it’s not delayed. We send it up about a month after, it’s classified. The details are classified.
Now we’ve given out a lot of it and we’ll continue to provide summaries of it.
Q. When you look to buy back those troops and to buy back the carrier and to make the changes to the plan that you’ve already built, how much money are you talking about, specifically? We hear the number is about $15 billion.
A. We’ll make the decisions in what we call the [program objective memorandum] ’16 process, which is already started in the services, but it will get serious [in the] late summer and fall. All we have are real rough planning figures. Fifteen [billion] is one of them. It could be higher or lower.
That’s over the five years. I think it leads me to believe and my colleagues that we can do this if we want to make some trims in other procurement plans and some, hopefully, non-readiness-related O&M. I believe we can do it.
Q. Last year, you asked for about $80 billion for overseas contingency operations (OCO). This year, you have a $79 billion placeholder that’s applied to it.
At what point are you going to know how much money you’re going to need in this critical drawdown year in Afghanistan?
A. We asked for $79 [billion].
Congress actually appropriated $85 billion [for 2014]. The placeholder is based on last year’s request. We won’t know until conditions permit the president to make a decision on the enduring presence. After that happens, we need probably at least two months to put together a remarkably complex budget, bigger than most federal agencies other than defense. So we’re probably a ways out from having a formal budget amendment.
Q. You did a study looking at what are base budget items that have been moved into OCO and vice versa. We hear that $34.7 billion was the number. What are you doing to move as much of those base budget items that exist in the supplemental into the base budget?
A. Well, this is a problem. I mean, there is some money in there. I think that $34.7 billion sounds way high. But I’m not prepared to give you a number. And the reason I’m not is I don’t know what forces are coming out. And some of the forces that are in Afghanistan may be taken out of the force. So even though some of their depot maintenance and training money is in OCO, we may not need to have those funds back in the base budget. But it’s not trivial, and it is an issue we need to confront.
Q. This is one of the most confusing rollouts that we’ve seen. And even in your testimony up on Capitol Hill, there were lawmakers who were scratching their heads. Why is it so confusing?
A. We have one budget, as always. But there are alternatives that we’re presenting. For example, in fiscal ’15, we have a budget at $496 billion, but there’s the Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative – a government-wide initiative. We’re asking for an extra $26 billion. In the out years, we have one budget, but it’s above the sequester levels and we promised the Congress that we’ll tell them what happens at the sequester levels so there’s kind of an alternative there. It does make it confusing.
I think we can explain it. We need a little more time. It may take more than one briefing. But I believe we can get beyond it, at least, I certainly hope so. And then we can have a debate over the real priorities in this budget.
Q. The Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative includes $26 billion for you in ’15. What does it mean, how do you get it, and where does that money come from?
A. First off, we’re budgeting at $496 billion, which is consistent with the cap. So it’s the Murray-Ryan deal. That’s the formal budget. But along with the formal budget, OMB has submitted – and if you look in the tables of the budget, you’ll see it identified separately – is added dollars for the Opportunity, Growth and Security Initiative; $56 overall, $26 [billion] for us. Just briefly, about 40 percent goes for readiness, near-term readiness enhancements, about 40 percent for modernization, about 10 to 20 percent for base sustainment.
OMB’s got the lead here in terms of next steps. But in order to appropriate those funds, Congress will have to modify the Budget Control Act caps and raise them for us by $26 billion, and presumably analogously, for other agencies. You know, I don’t have the sense they’re inclined to do that. I hope so, because we strongly support it. We need the readiness dollars. It would mitigate near-term readiness risk. But I think it may be a long shot.
Q. On pay and benefits reform, that’s something that is critical to your budget. But that’s an emotional issue, and there are a lot of members who oppose it. There was a modest cost of living adjustment cut, but that was immediately rescinded by Congress.
What case can you make to Congress to drive members to reconsider?
A. The way we like to put this is, we’re trying to free up money to provide training and maintenance. And there’s a quality of life aspect that the pay takes care of.
There’s a quality of service aspect, that we want to have these people well-trained and well-equipped if they have to go into harm’s way. So that’s the main reason we’re doing this. We are committed to sustaining the all-volunteer force. And we have benchmarks that suggest that we could modestly slow the growth in compensation and still recruit and retain enough really high-quality people, even though it’s a very demanding profession.
I’ve said before and I’ll say again: If we’re wrong and we’ve gone too far, we’ll fix it. And certainly, Congress will be willing to let us raise pay.
 
Return to Index

ASIA – PACIFIC:
12.	Searchers Find Debris That Could Be From Missing Jet
(USA TODAY 10 MAR 14) ... Calum MacLeod, Thomas Maresca and John Bacon
 
Six planes and seven ships from Vietnam have been unable to find an object spotted by a low-flying plane on Sunday afternoon that could be a piece of the Beijing-bound Malaysia Airlines jet that disappeared early Saturday, authorities said.
Doan Huu Gia, the chief of Vietnam's search and rescue coordination center, said the search for the rectangular piece of debris has proved unsuccessful.
Vietnamese officials said they believe the object is one of the plane's doors, according to local news media reports.
Vietnam civil administration chief Pham Viet Dung said search teams from several countries were sending boats to the area about 56 miles south of Tho Chu island, in an area where an oil slick was spotted Saturday. Authorities said earlier that they had spotted an object in the area that turned out not to be from the plane.
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 vanished early Saturday with 239 people aboard, two hours into a scheduled six-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur. A Malaysian official said Sunday the plane may have tried to return before disappearing.
Air force chief Rodzali Daud said military radar indicated the flight "may have made a turn back," but he did not say how far it got. "We are trying to make sense of this," Daud said.
Military ships and aircraft from a half-dozen nations continued searching for the Boeing 777 on Sunday. The U.S. Navy has provided the USS Pinckney, a guided-missile destroyer that carries two MH-60R helicopters, and a P-3C Orion with long-range search, radar and communications capabilities.
"Our thoughts and prayers go out to all of those affected by this tragic event," the Navy said in a statement.
Reuters, citing what it called a senior source involved in the investigation, said the probe is focusing on the possibility that the plane disintegrated in the air.
"The fact that we are unable to find any debris so far appears to indicate that the aircraft is likely to have disintegrated at around 35,000 feet," said the source, who is involved in the investigations in Malaysia.
Malaysia Airlines has been telling relatives "to expect the worst," spokesman Ignatius Ong said.
An international team was investigating the crash. American experts include accident investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board and technical experts from the Federal Aviation Administration and Boeing, the NTSB said in a statement.
Authorities were investigating the possibility of terrorism after discovering that two passengers apparently had been flying with stolen passports. Interpol, the France-based international policing agency, confirmed Sunday that the Italian and Austrian passports had been entered into its database after they were reported stolen in 2012 and 2013.
No country had checked the passports with Interpol since the thefts, both of which took place in Thailand, the agency said, adding that it was reviewing the passports of everyone listed on the flight manifest.
"Whilst it is too soon to speculate about any connection between these stolen passports and the missing plane, it is clearly of great concern that any passenger was able to board an international flight using a stolen passport listed in Interpol's databases," said Interpol Secretary-General Ronald Noble.
The Italian Foreign Ministry said Luigi Maraldi, an Italian national, reported his passport stolen last August. Austrian officials said Christian Kozel's passport was stolen in 2012. Both names were ticketed to continue from Beijing to destinations in Europe and thus did not need visas for China.
Malaysian Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein said authorities are looking at four possible cases of suspect identities and had contacted the FBI and other intelligence agencies. "We do not want to target only the four," Hussein said. "We are investigating the whole passenger manifest. We are looking at all possibilities."
When the plane is found, the airline will set up a command center either in Malaysia's Kota Bharu or in Vietnam, depending on its location. A response control center will be activated as close as possible to the incident area, Ong said.
The airline plans to send two family members for each missing passenger to the command center. The airline is working with Chinese authorities to get passports for relatives who lack them, and with the Malaysian Embassy in Beijing to get entry visas for Malaysia.
The first flight will be Monday for relatives who want to travel to Kuala Lumpur, and arrangements will continue for those who decide to wait in Beijing, Ong said.
The 11-year-old jet was last inspected 10 days ago and found in "proper condition," airline officials said. The lack of a distress signal from the pilots "suggests something very sudden and very violent happened," said William Waldock, who teaches accident investigation at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz.
Weather was not believed to be a factor. Light rain and snow was falling over South and Central China, but it was well below the aircraft's last known altitude of 35,000 feet.
However the flight disappeared, the mother of Philip Wood, one of three Americans on board, was resigned that he was gone.
"You want to know how it feels to lose a son at the age of 50? It's devastating,” Sandra Wood said. She saw her son, an IBM executive who worked in Malaysia, a week ago.
Freescale Semiconductor, an Austin-based tech company, said 20 employees from China and Malaysia were aboard. "Our thoughts and prayers are with those affected by this tragic event," CEO Gregg Lowe said.
Subang Air Traffic Control lost contact with the flight at 2:40 a.m. local time (1:40 p.m. ET Friday). It was scheduled to land in Beijing at 6:30 a.m. local time. The last radar signal was received as the aircraft approached Vietnam airspace near the Ca Mau province.
The twin-engine jet was carrying 227 passengers and 12 crewmembers. They're from 14 countries, including 153 from China, 38 from Malaysia, seven from Indonesia, six from Australia, five from India, three from France, two each from New Zealand, Ukraine and Canada and sole travelers from Russia, Italy, Taiwan, Austria and the Netherlands. Besides Wood, the other Americans on the manifest are young children – Nicole Meng, 4, and Yan Zhang, 2.
Malaysia Airlines CEO Ahmad Juahari Yahya said the company is working with emergency responders. "Our thoughts and prayers are with all affected passengers and crew and their family members," Yahya said.
The flight had seasoned pilots, according to the airline. Capt. Zaharie Ahman Shah, 53, of Malaysia has 18,365 flight hours and has been with the airline since 1981. First Officer Fariq Ab Hamid, 27, also of Malaysia, has 2,763 flight hours.
Boeing 777s have a strong safety record. Since their 1995 debut, they've been in only two major accidents.
The worst was last July, when an Asiana Airlines Boeing 777-200 with 291 passengers and 16 crew crashed on landing at San Francisco International Airport. Three passengers were killed, one by a fire rescue truck. There were serious injuries to 48 passengers. Pilot error is being investigated.
The search for the Malaysia Air flight comes amid one of the safer stretches of commercial aviation. In the USA, 2012 was the industry's safest year since the dawn of the jet age. The last major airline disaster was in 2009, when an Air France Airbus 330 crashed during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew.
Malaysia Air's last air fatalities were in 1995, when a flight crashed near Tawau, Malaysia, killing 34.
MacLeod reported from Beijing, Maresca from Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Contributing: Kim Hjelmgaard in London, Melanie Eversley in New York, Donna Leinwand Leger in Washington, Allison Gray, Doyle Rice and Gary Strauss in McLean, Va., Michael Winter in Oakland; the Associated Press.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2014/03/09/search-efforts-for-missing-malaysia-flight-futile-so-far/6221949/
 
Return to Index

13.	Four U.S. Navy Aegis Ships Arrive In S. Korea For Foal Eagle Exercise
(YONHAP NEWS AGENCY (S.KOREA) 10 MAR 14) ... Kim Eun-jung
 
SEOUL – Four U.S. Navy Aegis ships arrived in three ports of South Korea on Saturday to participate in the Foal Eagle combat field training to enhance their joint military readiness, according to the U.S. Navy's website.
Two Aegis guided-missile destroyers, USS Curtis Wilbur (DDG 54) and USS Lassen (DDG 82), arrived at the western port of Pyeongtaek, just south of Seoul, while the other two – USS Lake Erie (CG 70) and USS Howard (DDG 83) – reached their respective destinations of Mokpo on the southwest coast and Donghae on the east coast.
The Foal Eagle exercise began on Feb. 24 to practice training scenarios, carrying out a set of ground, air, naval, expeditionary and special operations across South Korea. The routing drills involving 7,500 American troops, including 5,100 from abroad, run through April 18.
"As navies, we achieve readiness and enhance teamwork by spending time at sea together," said Rear Adm. Lisa Franchetti, commander of U.S. Naval Forces Korea. "That is why we are active year round in conducting routine exercises together like Foal Eagle with our Republic of Korea navy counterparts."
The training incorporates scenarios such as gunnery exercises, communication drills, dynamic ship maneuvers, logistical rehearsals and liaison officer exchanges with the South Korean counterparts, the U.S. Navy said.
It is rare for four Aegis ships to visit major ports of South Korea at the same time, especially with the massive, 9,600-ton USS Lake Erie entering the Mokpo port, which features relatively shallow waters than other naval bases, according to military officials.
"U.S. 7th Navy ships' making port visits to an ally's naval base is one of the important exercises," a South Korean Navy official said, asking for anonymity as he is not authorized to talk to media. "As naval ships transport military equipment in times of war, they have to figure out the necessary ocean surface topography in advance."
Last week, a nuclear-powered U.S. submarine and the U.S. 7th Fleet commandship, forward deployed from Japan's Yokosuka base, arrived in the southeastern port city of Busan to jointly conduct maritime operations in waters surrounding the Korean Peninsula.
The ships' arrival comes shortly after North Korea fired off several short-range missiles and rockets with varying ranges from its southeastern coast as a show of force against joint South Korea-U.S. drills. The communist regime denounced the joint exercise as a "war rehearsal" and claimed its missile drills were held for "self-defense" purposes.
Separate from the Foal Eagle, South Korea and the U.S. carried out a computer-simulated exercise called Key Resolve from Feb. 24-March 6, involving some 10,000 South Korean troops and 5,200 U.S. forces.
About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea to help deter North Korean aggression, as the Korean War ended in a truce, without a peace treaty.
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/news/2014/03/10/0200000000AEN20140310001800315.html
 
Return to Index

14.	Philippines 'Won't Rush Defense Accord' For Obama Visit
(AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE 09 MAR 14)
 
MANILA – The Philippines said Saturday it would not rush to complete a defense accord with the United States just so it can be sealed by the time President Barack Obama visits next month.
President Benigno Aquino’s spokesman Herminio Coloma said there was no timetable to complete the agreement which would allow more U.S. troops and equipment access to the Philippines.
The agreement, which the two close allies have been discussing for several years, is seen as part of a Philippine effort to counter China’s aggressive moves to back its claims to most of the South China Sea.
Asked by reporters if the accord would be completed before Obama’s visit, Coloma said, “the government’s priority is not with a timetable or with rushing something.”
“In our view, it is not deadlines but the quality and content of the agreement that is more worthy of attention,” he added.
Coloma also hailed the just-concluded Philippine-U.S. bilateral strategic dialogue in Washington where both sides expressed concern for “recent developments” in the South China Sea as well as the need to respect international law and freedom of navigation in those waters.
“The outcome of the dialogue affirms the principles underpinning the strategic partnership between the two countries,” he said.
Many observers believed the agreement would be completed ahead of Obama’s visit to the Philippines as part of an Asian tour in April.
The Philippines has been hoping for increased U.S. assistance for its poorly-equipped military amid growing territorial tensions with China.
China claims virtually all of the South China Sea, a major shipping lane that is also a rich fishing ground and is believed to sit on vast mineral resources.
The Philippines along with Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam all have competing claims to parts of the South China Sea.
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140309/DEFREG03/303090011
 
Return to Index

MIDEAST:
15.	Iranian Foreign Minister Questions Western Commitment To Nuclear Deal
Javad Zarif Says Target Date Still Reachable
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 10 MAR 14) ... Laurence Norman
 
TEHRAN, Iran – The Iranian foreign minister raised doubts about the West's commitment to resolving the nuclear standoff in a pointed message to visiting European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
Baroness Ashton met on Sunday with President Hasan Rouhani, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, Ali Larijani, the powerful speaker of the parliament, and Ali Akbar Velayati, a top adviser to Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It was her first visit to the country and one of the highest-profile visits by a Western official since nuclear talks advanced late last year.
The talks covered a range of issues from Iran's disputed nuclear program to the conflict in Syria, human rights and Afghanistan.
After lengthy talks, Mr. Zarif publicly questioned the West's commitment to a full nuclear deal and about whether an interim deal reached in November was being properly implemented.
"It is up to the other side [to] come to the negotiating table with a desire, decision and commitment to reach a mutually acceptable agreement," he said.
The optimism over November's interim deal has dimmed somewhat recently as Iran criticized Western moves to safeguard its sanctions regime. Tehran has also questioned the form in which the U.S. is unfreezing Iranian oil revenues previously locked up in foreign accounts, said people involved in talks.
Western officials have expressed concerns about some of the red lines Iranian officials have put down about curtailing its nuclear program, such as insisting there will be no discussion of the country's ballistic missile program.
Baroness Ashton said "there's no guarantee we'll succeed" in the talks set to resume in Vienna March 18.
For Baroness Ashton, the trip was a balancing act. As chairwoman of the six powers who negotiate with Iran on the nuclear issue, she has come to know Mr. Zarif well and was eager to broaden the bloc's dialogue with Tehran.
However, Iran's widely criticized human-rights record, its continued support for Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria and the significant challenges ahead in the nuclear talks have made many Western capitals wary about a real thaw.
Iran denies Western suspicions that it is seeking nuclear weapons, insisting its nuclear activities are for purely peaceful purposes.
European policy makers and businesses are under pressure from Washington, which is concerned about any loosening of international sanctions at this stage.
Baroness Ashton told a small group of reporters after her talks that she was reassured by the common message that Iran is determined to advance in the nuclear talks.
"What I sensed was support for what is going on, a desire to see us make progress."
On Syria, she steered clear of deep differences on what caused the conflict and pressed Tehran to help ease the humanitarian situation.
"Syria was a subject in every meeting," she said. "We focused on humanitarian aid and support, recognizing that there is a role Iran can certainly play in helping us to get the aid in," she said.
She said she also discussed human rights with Mr. Zarif and Mr. Rouhani and said the EU must now look at the most effective form of promoting a serious dialogue that can make a real difference.
Baroness Ashton met on Saturday with six women activists, including human-rights lawyer Narges Mohammadi, who has faced multiple jail sentences.
The trip comes at a time of flux in Iran. November's interim nuclear deal, which allowed modest easing of sanctions, has injected some fresh confidence into the economy.
That confidence was evident this weekend, when the approach of Iran's new year holiday drew throngs of shoppers to the bazaars and shopping malls of affluent northern Tehran.
The outreach to the West, which started after Mr. Rouhani took office last August, has revived hopes Tehran could eventually allow genuine political and economic change.
Iranian media quoted Mr. Rouhani welcoming Baroness Ashton's visit, which has been top news here – hailed as a fresh marker in Iran's efforts to shake off political isolation.
"The two sides have a lot of common interests, goals and grounds for cooperation," Mr. Rouhani was quoted saying.
However there were fresh reminders of how delicate ties remain. The trip produced no concrete outcomes with the idea of a permanent EU mission in Tehran not even broached.
The stakes in reaching a permanent nuclear deal by the July target date were clear. Baroness Ashton said without that, relations cannot be transformed.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303795904579428542357794708
 
Return to Index

16.	Israel Says Long-Range Rockets Aboard 'Iran Arms Ship'
(AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE 09 MAR 14) ... Jack Guez
 
EILAT – Israel said Sunday it had found 40 long-range rockets aboard a ship it intercepted in the Red Sea, charging that it carried weapons sent by Iran to Gaza Strip militants.
A statement from the Israeli military said the M-302 rockets with a range of 160 kilometres (100 miles) were found in containers offloaded from the Panamanian-flagged Klos-C.
The vessel was intercepted by Israeli naval commandos on the high seas on Wednesday between Sudan and Eritrea and escorted to the Red Sea port of Eilat by two warships.
It arrived late on Saturday and was inspected and unloaded on Sunday in an operation dubbed "Full Disclosure.”
A statement said security forces searching the Klos-C had found "40 rockets (type M-302), up to the range of 160 kilometres, 181 122mm mortar shells, approximately 400,000 7.62-calibre rounds.”
It said the unloading and inspection of containers was carried out by a combined task-force including the Israeli Navy, the Combat Engineering Corps and the Ordnance Corps.
"Each one of these rockets poses a threat to the safety of the citizens of Israel -? each bullet and each rocket that was discovered had an Israeli address," army chief Lieutenant General Benny Gantz told sailors who took part in the operation.
"Our efforts in preventing the proliferation of weapons and the supply of critical components with strategic influence over the region is not over," Gantz said.
"There are many other missions ahead of us."
Iran has flatly denied any involvement with the shipment, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday accused the Islamic republic of "brazenly lying.”
The premier and Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon are due to attend a news conference in Eilat on Monday at which the weaponry will be put on display.
Public radio said ambassadors and military attaches would also be there to see the equipment "to prove to the world that Iran sends military aid to terrorist groups active in the Gaza Strip.”
'Iran Brazenly Lying'
Netanyahu accused Tehran of "brazenly lying" over its involvement in the shipment, in remarks he said were directed at EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton who is in Iran.
"I'd like to ask her if she asked her Iranian hosts about the delivery of weapons to the terror groups, and if she didn't, why not?" he said at the weekly cabinet meeting.
"Nobody has the right to ignore the real, murderous actions of the regime in Tehran," he added.
Ashton's visit, the first by a EU foreign affairs chief since 2008, comes after Iran signed a preliminary deal in November with world powers under which it agreed to curb its disputed nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief.
Israel was harshly critical of the interim nuclear agreement with Iran and is pushing hard for world powers to keep a series of crippling economic sanctions in place.
The West and Israel have long suspected Iran of using its nuclear energy programme as a cover for developing atomic weapons, a charge Iran denies.
Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Friday rejected the Israeli allegation of Tehran's involvement in the weapons shipment.
The ship's seizure coincided with a high-profile trip to the U.S. by Netanyahu.
"Netanyahu is in Washington... and all of a sudden as a godsend, they capture a ship from Iran with missiles. Just a coincidence?" Zarif said in Jakarta, adding that "it is a lie.”
If fired from Gaza, rockets with a range of 160 kilometres could easily reach Israel's commercial capital Tel Aviv.
Netanyahu told public radio Israel would not hesitate to stage further interceptions of weapons shipments.
"We are going to prove that Iran organises secret operations to arm terrorist groups in Gaza," he said.
The Islamist Hamas movement ruling Gaza, as well as the militant group Islamic Jihad, have denied they are linked to the weapons shipment.
And Sudan, where Israel said the weapons were to be offloaded before being shipped overland to Gaza via Egypt's restive Sinai Peninsula, has also denied any involvement.
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iGqeUmp6cZcazahu-ZmMZ8MLFOKA
 
Return to Index

17.	Beirut Suburbs Pay The Price For Link To Syria War
(WASHINGTON POST 10 MAR 14) ... Loveday Morris
 
BEIRUT – At a small, family-operated firm selling building materials in Beirut’s southern suburbs, sales are picking up. But it’s not new construction that’s fueling business. It’s a run on sandbags for protection from car bombings.
Piled high on sidewalks outside banks and cafes in the Haret Hreik neighborhood, the sacks of grit serve as daily reminders of the price that residents of this Hezbollah stronghold are paying for the Shiite movement’s military support of President Bashar al-Assad in next-door Syria. One restaurant has gone a step further, erecting a thick concrete blast wall.
Lebanon has seen a spike in suicide bombings this year, with seven attacks since Jan. 1. Three occurred in the southern suburbs known as the Dahiyeh, now a major target of Sunni extremist groups. The al-Qaeda-linked groups Jabhat al-Nusra and Abdullah Azzam Brigades, as well as the much-feared Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, have asserted responsibility for the bulk of the bombings, calling for Hezbollah to pull its militants out of Syria.
Residents are bracing for more retaliatory attacks as Hezbollah enters another major battle in the Syrian civil war, backing Assad’s forces as they try to secure the border town of Yabroud.
For Ahmed Sharif Addin, owner of the building materials company, it means business, even if it’s a service he says he would rather not have to provide. He said he sells about 300 sandbags a day and as many as 1,000 a day right after a bombing.
“There’s a lot of demand,” he said. “People are scared.”
Committed To Assad
Much of Haret Hreik was reduced to rubble in air raids during the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war but has since been rebuilt. Now the community is again under siege.
Businesses are suffering as residents avoid spending time in the streets. Parents say they use back roads to drive their children to school, away from main thoroughfares that could be targets. The suburbs’ outskirts, meanwhile, are plagued with traffic jams caused by vehicle searches at Lebanese army and Hezbollah checkpoints.
“It’s a constant feeling of fear,” said Ali Zaitar, 32, who works in a paint store next to a pockmarked dip in al-Arid Street, the scar of a Jan. 2 car bombing. Another explosion later that month occurred about 50 yards away. “This isn’t a life, it’s misery,” Zaitar said.
The Haret Hreik municipal government, which has spent $150,000 on security measures such as concrete blast barriers since the first bombing here in July, has encouraged businesses to hide sandbags behind advertising boards to lessen the “psychological impact” on residents.
“If the aim of these bombings is to terrorize this population, I believe they have succeeded in doing so,” said Imad Salamey, a politics professor at the Lebanese American University.
Although the attacks may be chipping away at Hezbollah’s support base, they are unlikely to have much impact on restraining its military activities over the border, analysts say. Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah has vowed that his fighters will remain in Syria for as long as necessary.
In recent weeks, Hezbollah militants and Syrian army troops have encircled Yabroud, a town few miles across the border, as the Syrian air force has launched a fierce bombing campaign.
As operations in the area escalate, so do funerals in the southern suburbs. Three slain Hezbollah soldiers were buried last week, residents said.
Hezbollah says its operations in Syria are necessary to keep Lebanon secure, and its deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, has said that Yabroud is the source of many of the explosives-packed vehicles that target Beirut. But the car bombings began in Beirut only last year, after Hezbollah announced its military support for Assad.
The violent backlash to that support has undercut Hezbollah’s political reputation as the “protector” of Lebanon’s Shiites, analysts say. Overstretched in Syria, its fighters have not responded to attacks from their traditional enemy, Israel.
Last month, after Israel bombed a Hezbollah position in Lebanon for the first time since 2006, the group said it would “choose the right time and place” to respond – a muted threat that suggested it did not plan to attack immediately.
On Wednesday, the Israeli army said it had shot two Hezbollah militants who were trying to plant a bomb on the border between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Hezbollah has not responded.
‘We Are With You’
In Haret Hreik, a neighborhood where emotional ties to Hezbollah run deep, leaving is seen as disloyal. Nonetheless, some families are relocating. Residents said that four or five have moved from al-Arid Street to elsewhere in Lebanon and that others would if they could afford it.
Hussein Mortada, 40, owner of a coffee shop, said he is trying to move to Canada, where his wife has relatives. With business down 80 percent this year, he has attempted to lure customers back by investing in $3,000 worth of sandbags, shatterproof window coating and potted plants on the street to prevent potential car bombers from parking there.
He hadn’t bothered with such measures at his cafe, a few miles away from the coffee shop at the epicenter of attacks. The cafe was hit when two suicide bombers struck Feb. 19.
“We try, but if someone is determined to kill himself, what can we do?” Mortada said.
The residents of Beirut’s southern suburbs are no strangers to the human toll of Hezbollah’s wars, and many remain resolute.
“Regardless, we are with them 100 percent,” said Abu Haider, a 43-year-old shop worker.
Above the sandbags on al-Arid Street, a banner showed a picture of a smiling Nasrallah and words that echoed Haider’s sentiment.
“Your smile revives the spirits,” it read. “We are with you, wherever you go.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/beiruts-southern-suburbs-become-targets-as-syrian-war-crosses-border/2014/03/09/953dbc60-a454-11e3-b865-38b254d92063_story.html
 
Return to Index

AFGHANISTAN:
18.	Afghan Vice President's Death Shakes Up Political Field
Death of Key Power Broker Comes Less Than a Month Before Elections
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 10 MAR 14) ... Yaroslav Trofimov and Ehsanullah Amiri
 
KABUL – One of Afghanistan's most influential power brokers, First Vice President Mohammed Qasim Fahim, died Sunday, altering the country's political landscape ahead of presidential elections next month.
A leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, Marshal Fahim played a major role in President Hamid Karzai's administration, especially in overseeing the country's security establishment. Mr. Fahim, who was in his late 50s, had long suffered from diabetes, but the exact cause of his death wasn't released.
"His death today is a big loss for the people of Afghanistan," said former Afghan intelligence chief Amrullah Saleh, also a former Northern Alliance commander. "We should work together and make sure that his absence does not destabilize the country."
It isn't clear how Mr. Fahim's death could affect the April 5 presidential poll, which, if successful, would mark the first democratic transfer of power in Afghan history. The constitution prohibits Mr. Karzai from running for a third term.
Mr. Fahim didn't openly endorse any candidates vying to succeed Mr. Karzai, even though he was believed by many Afghan officials to be tacitly backing former foreign minister Abdullah Abdullah, also a former Northern Alliance leader. With a network of loyalists spread through the Afghan government and security forces, Mr. Fahim, an ethnic Tajik, had the power to significantly influence the election's outcome.
"He was a very strong figure in brokering the entire political spectrum of Afghanistan. He was also someone who had a strong influence on President Karzai, especially about people who should be chosen for senior positions in the Afghan government," said Waliullah Rahmani, director of the Kabul Center for Strategic Studies, a think tank. "I think now there will be a power struggle between various Tajik figures close to President Karzai."
Under the Afghan constitution, there are two vice presidents, and Mr. Karzai, an ethnic Pashtun, had a Tajik first vice president and a Hazara second vice president during both of his terms in office. When a vice president dies, a replacement must be named by the president and approved by the parliament.
Though the presidential election is scheduled in less than a month, it is likely to require a runoff, and vote-counting may drag on into late summer, Afghan officials say. Mr. Karzai and his administration would remain in power until the new president is inaugurated.
The Afghan president declared a three-day period of national mourning after Mr. Fahim's death. As the news spread in Kabul, government officials, presidential candidates and other dignitaries flocked to the late vice president's home to pay respects, as security forces cordoned off the area.
Known for his love of the sport of buzkashi, in which horse-mounted players jostle for a dead goat's carcass, Mr. Fahim was the military commander of the Northern Alliance forces that overthrew the Taliban regime with American help in 2001. Like all civil war-era commanders, he was accused of perpetrating human-rights abuses.
Mr. Fahim, by far the most prominent ethnic Tajik in Mr. Karzai's administration, stayed close to the Afghan president even as many other Tajik former Northern Alliance leaders peeled off, switching to outright opposition.
"He was a supporter of national unity, a patriot and a servant of this soil," Mr. Karzai said in a televised address on Sunday.
As Mr. Karzai increasingly drifted away from the U.S. in recent years, Mr. Fahim also became a valuable interlocutor for American officials, arguing for continued U.S. military presence and aid.
Habib Khan Totakhil and Nathan Hodge contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303795904579428492331919908
 
Return to Index

AFRICA:
19.	Battle Of The High Seas: On Patrol With NATO's Pirate-Catchers Off The Horn Of Africa
(THE INDEPENDENT (UK) 09 MAR 14) ... Leo Cendrowicz
 
The Somali pirate drama is over in seconds: a helicopter swoops into view and hovers over the hijacked vessel, four hooded marines slide down ropes, the hostiles are overpowered, and the ship’s hostages released. Or at least, that is what NATO is rehearsing as it polices the world's busiest shipping lane and its most dangerous waters, the sea around the Horn of Africa.
This particular drill takes place on the deck of the Álvaro de Bazán, a 5,800-tonne, 147-metre Spanish frigate patrolling the Red Sea, while the pirates are merely other crew on the vessel. But such exercises are repeated almost daily to keep the crew sharp for actual encounters with the pirates who still threaten the trillion-dollar shipping that passes near the Somali coast.
“We prepare as much as we can for any situation in these waters,” says Paul Meacher, a 35-year-old lieutenant commander from Hampshire. “Fighting piracy is maritime security, not shock and awe warfare, so you have to adapt and use different techniques to deal with the challenge. It’s low intensity, but still high risk.”
Meacher is the only British member of the Álvaro de Bazán’s 250-strong crew, acting as the staff operations officer for the NATO anti-piracy fleet. Like almost everyone else on board, he refers to Captain Phillips, last year’s Tom Hanks movie about how the freighter Maersk Alabama was hijacked by four ragtag Somalis in 2009. A still from the 2013 film 'Captain Phillips' A still from the 2013 film 'Captain Phillips'
Patrols by around 14 vessels from NATO, the European Union and other countries have helped drive down piracy since then, but there are still attacks nearly every week in the area. “We don’t take anything for granted,” says Meacher. “It’s a bit like being a policemen: just because crime has fallen doesn’t mean you stop going on the beat.”
Some 90 per cent of all global trade by volume is shipped by sea, and about half of that passes through the Indian Ocean, including one-third of Europe's oil supplies. More than 22,000 cargo ships travel through the choke point at Bab-el-Mandeb, the so-called Gate of Grief, the strait between Yemen and Djibouti that links the Red Sea and the Suez Canal to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean. But the NATO forces operate from the Persian Gulf to the Seychelles in the south and the Maldives in the east, covering an area greater than 2 million square miles or the size of Western Europe. And they are acutely aware of overstretch.
But this is the sort of challenge that NATO is increasingly addressing. NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen argues that as the alliance shifts gears in the post-Afghanistan era, it is dealing with non-state threats like thwarting desperadoes in speedboats.
So NATO’s counter piracy task force is now using new methods to find the pirate scourge: the patrols use a variety of measures to verify the activity of shipping off the coast of Somalia, separating out legitimate maritime traffic from suspected pirate vessels, and in many cases escorting ships through the most tricky passages.
There is an array of dazzling technologies at the task force’s disposal, from stealth technology to avoid enemy radar, ballistic missiles that could sink an aircraft carrier, sniper rifles that have an effective range of three miles, and infrared cameras that can see figures from seven miles away. They also have AWACS surveillance planes, use Mercury, a secure internet-based communication system set up by the British, while unmanned drones are used to spot pirate camps.
Álvaro de Bazán, the flagship of NATO’s anti-piracy mission, can send teams to pre-emptively board a suspect vessel, and even use force to stop them. The task force commander, Rear-Admiral Eugenio Diaz De Rio, based on the Álvaro de Bazán, echoes the mantra that counter-piracy is now to be part of NATO’s portfolio of activities. “We need to do this to protect our trade,” he says. ”And we have faced tough challenges, including coordination with non-NATO vessels as well as the huge area of operations we have to police.”
Other factors have helped curb piracy. The spread of ‘best management practices’, has given simple but often crucial advice for captains sailing at-risk areas, like maintaining high cruising speeds (pirates have never successfully taken a ship traveling faster than 18 knots), building citadels to protect the crew and fitting razor wire along a ship’s side. Private armed security guards are another cause, with shipping companies overcoming their qualms that they would escalate violence. They have proved a powerful deterrent and not a single vessel with guards – mostly British former Royal Marines – has been boarded.
But it is the presence of the NATO fleet – bolstered by the flotillas from the EU and other navies – that has been most imposing. “It shows that increasingly, NATO isn't asked to take on conventional military challenges but will have to develop new capabilities, partnerships, doctrine, and strategy for coping with difficult asymmetric challenges,” says Julianne Smith, a fellow at Chatham House. “And despite declining defense budgets, NATO can successfully adapt to the security challenges of the 21st century.”
There are still many would-be pirates. They are often teenagers in flip-flops, but they use satellite phones and GPS to communicate, and are also heavily armed with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s. Their speedboats, or skiffs, approach the vessels and with grappling hooks and irons – some of which are even rocket-propelled – they climb aboard using ropes and ladders. The pirates treat the ship, its cargo and its crew as hostages and hold them for ransom for anything up to $7 million – a fortune in Somalia where there are no jobs and almost half the population needs food aid after 17 years of non-stop conflict.
And the pirates have adapted to the naval presence. Now that high-value ships sail much farther from the coast, the pirates have learnt to roam farther by using ‘mother ships’ – powerful deep-sea fishing vessels seized earlier – as floating bases for their speed boats or skiffs. The mother ships allow the pirates to stay at sea for more than a month at a time. While the average distance for an attack in 2005 was 109km away from the coast, by 2012 this figure had risen to 746km. They are also still holding more than 70 sailors hostage.
This is why everyone in the anti-piracy effort is cautious about recent figures from International Maritime Bureau (IMB), a body that fights shipping crime, showing that piracy at sea is at its lowest level in six years. The IMB says there were only 15 declared incidents off Somalia last year – around 19 per cent of all attacks worldwide – down from 75 in 2012, and 237 in 2011. But Pottengal Mukundan, IMB's director warns that the pirates are biding their time. “Pirates continue to operate and the situation off the Horn of Africa can quickly change,” he says. “But actions such as aerial surveillance, the interdiction and disarming of pirate vessels and the detention of suspected pirates can only be done by the naval vessels.”
There is also consensus that the seas will need policing as long as the underlying causes of piracy remain. Somalia is still a failed state, a chaotic, impoverished, lawless land that is chronically insecure and now increasingly prey to Islamic terrorism (the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi last year was the work of Somalia-based Islamist militant group al-Shabab).
On the Álvaro de Bazán, Paul Meacher reels off the ships many smart counter-piracy activities, but admits that a long-term solution will have to involve reconstruction in Somalia, including building up a functioning government with coastguards, courts and prisons. That is beyond NATO’s remit, so for the moment the fleet in the Red Sea still patrolling its beat. “The threat of piracy remains, and we can’t leave our guard down,” Meacher says. “But we have shown we have what it takes to adapt to new missions in theatres far from home.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/battle-of-the-high-seas-on-patrol-with-natos-piratecatchers-off-the-horn-of-africa-9180230.html
 
Return to Index

AVIATION:
20.	Air Boss’ Talks Progress On F-35C, P-8
(NAVY TIMES 17 MAR 14) ... Mark D. Faram
 
SAN DIEGO – Naval aviation is zooming into its second century by harnessing technological revolutions – from unmanned carrier planes to the electromagnetic catapults that will one day fling them from the decks of Ford-class supercarriers.
Developing these future systems while overseeing the world’s finest sea-based air force falls to the Navy’s “Air Boss” – Vice Adm. David Buss.
Buss, who heads Naval Air Forces, discussed these developments in a wide-ranging interview Feb. 18 at his Naval Air Station North Island, Calif., headquarters.
Questions and answers have been edited for brevity.
Q. What is the status of the Prowler-to-Growler transition?
A. The Marines will still fly the EA-6B Prowler for the foreseeable future; they won’t sundown probably until the mid-2020s.
For the Navy, we’ve completed the transition for all our expeditionary Prowler squadrons, so all three.
The last Navy Prowler squadron just left on deployment with [Carrier Air Wing] 8 and the George H.W. Bush strike group. This will be the last one and by the middle of 2015, roughly this time next year, we’ll have sundowned Navy EA-6Bs, so the last two squadrons will now transition into Growlers. This transition has gone very well. We haven’t even begun to scratch the surface on what the EA-18G will be able to do for us in the future.
Q. F-35C – Officials have said the tailhook issues have been worked out. But there’s still uncertainty about the jet’s future. What’s the long-term future of this program?
A. We are gaining momentum on the program. I really believe that the Navy is the beneficiary of being the third service in line for an initial operating capability with this airplane.
The Air Force and Marines have plowed some significant ground in front of us with the F-35A and B models.
We have formally stood up this past October [Strike Fighter Squadron] 101, the F-35C replacement training squadron, at Eglin Air Force Base [Fla.]. We’ve got three jets down there now, and the fourth one is due to arrive soon.
Later on this year, we’ll take that aircraft to sea to test it in the difficult environment on board the USS Nimitz, and we’ll learn a lot from that.
All the indications I’ve seen with the tailhook design right now are very positive.
The other pacing item is the software development. ... [I’m] cautiously optimistic with the software development. Quite frankly, there’s still a lot of work that Lockheed Martin needs to do with testing that software.
Q. Last year, officials announced the first fleet of F-35 squadrons will be on the West Coast – have you figured out where?
A. There’s Option 1 and Option 2, and I don’t think we’re at liberty to disclose yet where we think we’ll end up. We’re still waiting; there’s environmental impact studies that are being wrapped up. Obviously, we’re not going to show up at a brand-new base.
This is part of the rebalancing to the Pacific, to the extent that we can bring a new capability to the Pacific theater first in the future, we are doing our darn best to make that happen, and F-35C is a good example.
Q. The debate rages on about whether we should build F-35Cs or just build more Hornets – where do you stand?
A. As I look into the future, for quite some time, F/A-18E and F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers will be working side by side for carrier strike groups – obviously enabled by E-2D [Hawkeyes] playing as the quarterback of the fleet. But the center of mass for naval aviation sensors and weapons employment and the ability to carry weapons with some reach to them will be F-35s and Super Hornets working side by side, supported by Growlers.
Q. But many are calling for truncating the F-35 and buying more F/A-18 Super Hornets. Would you support that?
A. There’s still an awful lot of development that has to happen for the F-35C for it to be a viable and integral participant in our strike group operations of the future. But it’s an airplane we need in the fleet. I needed it yesterday, quite frankly.
We’ll learn a lot when we get it out there and start operating it in the test community and then in the fleet. I think we’re going to look for options to have perhaps a more tailored carrier air wing mix-and-match in the future.
Q. Speaking of future capability, the aircraft carrier Gerald R. Ford is in the water. How soon will she go to sea?
A. We’re building the crew. The captain’s already back there and at last count, we’ve got about 500 members of the crew coming together and starting to train and take responsibility for spaces onboard the ship. She’ll be ready to go to sea when sea trials are scheduled, I think at the tail end of 2015 or the early part of 2016.
She’s making very good progress. Obviously the first thing is to take her out for builders trials. After that, the crew gets her hands on her for sea trials. Then we can get her to the fleet and start workups for a first deployment.
Q. How about JFK? When will you lay her down?
A. The laydown at Newport News [Shipbuilding] is very unique. They have two dry docks that can take a carrier there. One is the new construction dry dock, which Ford is still in. And at some point later on this year, she’ll be moved from the dry dock down to the outfitting pier. The other dry dock is the refueling dry dock; that’s where Lincoln is right now.
We need to move Ford to the outfitting pier and then they’ll empty the dry dock and start the construction of the John F. Kennedy. But major hull sections are already in place, and the prefabrication work continues for John F. Kennedy.
Q. The first P-8 Poseidon squadron is on deployment and the second one is spinning up, although they are only doing basic missions. What have you learned so far?
A. [Patrol Squadron] 16 is on deployment now in Kadena [Air Base on Okinawa]. They got there in early December and are about 21⁄ 2 months into a scheduled six-month deployment, and all the reports I’m getting back from 7th Fleet are very positive.
I would remind everybody that we’re still early on [in the process]. These are low-rate initial production aircraft. As we have with F-35, these aircraft don’t have the full combat capability that we will eventually get in P-8. It’s the core load in the mission computers and the weapons load and release capabilities – high level [anti-submarine warfare] capability. It’s things that are being developed.
It’s a little bit like comparing apples and oranges, making side-by-side comparisons with a P-3 squadron andVP-16 because of the type of aircraft they’re flying. But I will say they are exceeding expectations. They are involved every single day in missions.
Q. You say it’s exceeding expectations, though it’s really just doing the same mission as the P-3, correct? And it hasn’t begun to take tougher missions. Can you discuss that?
A. Given the capabilities the aircraft currently has and knowing that we’re going to continue to expand on that as we go into full-rate production with weapons release and sensors and so forth, we’ll continue to grow the aircraft. But based on what was delivered to VP-16 and what we trained to do and what they’re actually performing on missions in theater, they’re exceeding the expectations we had.
This is how the P-3 community has operated for many years. They deploy to a hub and then they spoke out from there with detachments, and we will do that again with P-8 as well.
Q. Where is the MQ-4C Triton unmanned vehicle, which was designed to operate with the P-8?
A. That’s a little more difficult to pin down. We’ve been flying Triton as [a Broad Area Maritime Surveillance- Demonstration aircraft] over in 5th Fleet for a number of years. It was a great concept where we took a demonstrator and gave it to a fleet commander and said, “See what you can do with this thing.” Once it got over there, we never got it back. That’s not a bad thing.
So Triton, just in the last few months, has gotten into its more formal test program.
I don’t see any hiccups with that program at all. Once we get through with the test program, we’ll start to build. I think we’re about a year away from deploying Triton and deploying it side-by-side with P-8.
 
Return to Index

SHIPBUILDING:
21.	Lawmaker Strives To Keep Focus On Shipbuilding
(DEFENSE NEWS 10 MAR 14) ... Christopher P. Cavas and John T. Bennett
 
WASHINGTON – Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., could be called the U.S. House’s dean of Navy shipbuilding, and he is attempting to become its top Asia-Pacific strategist. What’s more, most insiders put him on the shortlist for possible successors to retiring House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Buck McKeon, R-Calif. Forbes is chairman of the committee’s seapower subcommittee.
On that topic, Forbes was complimentary of his likely rivals for the panel’s gavel. “It really is kind of the team effort. It doesn’t matter who is sitting in the chair and who has got the gavel, I don’t think.”
He spoke with Defense News on March 5, one day after the Defense Department released its fiscal 2015 budget and latest quadrennial defense review (QDR).
Q. What are your thoughts on the Pentagon’s 2015 budget request and then the QDR? What are the strong suits of both and the weaknesses?
A. It’s like the baby with the bathwater.
Don’t throw it out. There are some positive things in the QDR, but they are mostly nomenclature. The way I’ve characterized it, it’s kind of like they turned the ship in the right direction, but they just don’t have a propulsion system to get it where it needs to go. They haven’t given it any capabilities. So, if you look, they at least do recognize the importance of the Asia-Pacific area. They recognize the importance of doing things with munitions and how important that’s going to be. They recognize the role seapower is going to play in the next decade. The problem is, when you link that with the budget, there are no capabilities that are driving that, at least not adequate capabilities.
Q. Speaking of capabilities, they cost money. How much is enough?
A. Well, nobody can answer that question right now, because they haven’t asked the question that I think is important to ask.
This was a fair question that was set forth by [House Armed Services Committee Ranking Member Rep. Adam Smith]: We should be only focused on the dollars that have been set forth by Congress in how we allocate those dollars. We shouldn’t ask other questions outside of that. I just refuse that limitation. I think it’s vitally important for us to be asking ‘what does it take to defend The United States of America?’ Now, after you’ve asked that question, I can come close to telling you the dollars and cents that are behind there, but the world has a vote in this thing. And basically when you start asking the question, I can’t just come up and say, OK, I only need five aircraft carriers, because that’s all I want to spend. That’s a ludicrous thing for me to say. I have to say, how many carriers does it take to defend this country? Then if I can’t get there, at least I have put on the table what we need to defend the country, so we start asking two questions. One, what can we afford to spend?
Fair question, you know how much do we want to spend, but the other corollary is what is the risk to the United States of America if we don’t spend those dollars?
Q. So $500 billion per year is, to you, not enough?
A. No, no. You cannot spend your way into national security, but at the same time, you can’t get it on the cheap. When you say how much is enough, I can tell you cutting 11 cruisers out, by any analysis I know, that’s not enough. There are huge gaps when we won’t have a carrier out there.
That is dangerous when you look at every one of our contingency scenarios.
Q. In the Navy budget, the only area that went up is research and development. Would you recommend, though, stripping money out of R&D for new weapons?
A. Well I think the R&D is part of that new weapons capability. Here is what I am arguing: We should be asking the question.
We should be saying, OK, next decade, where is our [biggest] vulnerability? [An admiral said] if you’re looking at where you put your dollars in defense budget, you need it where it has the most consequence and the most impact. In the next decade, that is going to probably be in the seapower and projection forces. If that is true, and I’m just saying we should at least be asking the question.
Q. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel gives his budget preview and the mainstream media focused on the size of the Army. It was all about the troop strength. There doesn’t seem to be much of an awareness of the Navy, of sea power. What can you do about it?
A. Well, the public wasn’t interested in sequestration when it first came out. When I’m giving a speech somewhere, and I tell somebody the Chinese, in eight years, will have 80-plus submarines versus our 32, that resonates, and they understand.
Q. That’s the outside game. There’s also an inside game. Conservative members of your party played a major role in setting spending caps. How do you convince them to support raising defense caps?
A. What we’ve been trying to get across to anybody that writes about this, thinks about this and has their livelihood dependent upon this, is the first step is not to use their terminology of settling. You know, what frightens me the most is these people that are going around saying, “Well, this is the number. We just have to live with this number.” It is a self-defeating mentality. So the first thing I’m saying is, don’t let that hemorrhaging keep going. Second thing is: I’m trying to tell people they’ve got to have an organization across the country. I think you’re going to have to have an overlay where all of these guys stop just worrying about their own lanes, be it subs or carriers or this aircraft or that aircraft. I think what it’s going to take is us doing some truly intellectual pushback to try to have a fair debate.
Q. On the remaining defense sequestration cuts, if Republicans take control of the Senate – and keep the House – would the party push legislation to turn off the remaining defense cuts?
A. I know they could. The question is not whether they could. It’s whether they would. And look, you know I’m going to be the first one to tell you that we kind of need a consensus of leadership in the Republican Party. We used to be the party of defense. We need to become the party of defense again. The reason is not for political reasons; it’s because the national defense of this country is going to depend on one party taking that lead. So, we certainly could do that. A lot of that depends on the mix in the Senate.
Q. Will you be campaigning for Republican Senate candidates?
A. Probably not. What I will be doing is talking about these defense issues, and whomever wants to embrace those, I will say they’re doing the right thing. If they don’t embrace them, I will say they’re doing the wrong thing.
Q. Do you think the White House is playing politics with aircraft carrier cut threats?
A. No, no, that’s all money. I think its dangerous politics for them to play. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know when you walk in the room and you’re looking at dollars and carriers, it’s a pretty big thing to put on the table. Pacific Command chief Adm. Samuel Locklear says, “I don’t have enough now. I can’t get by with less carriers.”
Q. Where is the aviation lobby, especially retirees, in all of this though?
A. The retired guys haven’t done it with the Navy very much. I mean, really if you look at some of these organizations that really should have been pounding this table, I mean, I’m not pointing fingers, but they just haven’t done it. I don’t want you to think that the fact that I’m talking carriers and cruisers means that we haven’t had a couple of meetings on F-35, because we have. We [also] haven’t talked a lot about munitions. Most of these guys will tell you it doesn’t do them any good to have great platforms out there if I don’t have anything to fire from the platform.
Q. All their missiles have gone off the budget.
A. That’s right, and they are really, really worried about that. That is a valid concern for them. Here is the problem with planes when we drop back our buys, what happens is our allies drop back their buys. It’s not because they made a conscious decision out there and said, oh, OK, we don’t need them anymore. It’s just because if the United States drops four F-35s, they are dropped by everybody else. When I say dropped, I mean pushed to the right.
They’re still going to get them, same thing.
But what that does is increases the cost, obviously for all those items. That is a debate and a discussion we need to be having, but don’t think just because I haven’t talked about that that it is not ongoing. It’s just I haven’t seen the retired folks come up on any of these issues and really be leading the charge and pounding.
Q. This is the first budget since the late ’70s with no F/A-18 of any variant on request. That is planned. That leaves eventually after 2016 the country with only one fighter manufacturer after we had dozens for decades. Would you favor keeping the 18 line open and why?
A. When you say would I favor it, I think it would be better for me to say, I would be open to it. Here’s the reason. There is no question that we’ve got to have those fifth-generation [F-35s]. The Air Force chief will say point blank, unequivocally, if I have a fifth-generation plane going against a fourth-generation plane, the fourth-generation plane dies. It doesn’t matter who is the pilot. So it is vitally important if we are going to hang onto air dominance that we have the fifth-generation planes. So if it is between getting fifth-generation planes and not getting fifth-generation planes, that’s a different ballgame.
But am I concerned about production lines? I’m incredibly concerned about production lines. It goes to the whole industrial base question.
Q. Former secretaries of state from both parties say the situation with Russia in Ukraine likely will be a long play. Can the Pentagon carry out the pivot to Asia with new tensions in Eastern Europe?
A. We’re not doing the pivot now. I have not had anybody in uniform shut that door and say, “Yeah, we have got the capabilities we need to do that shift.” I wish I could say yes. I just can’t in good conscious tell you that I feel like we are making that shift. If you’re not doing one, I don’t think you can do two [pivots]. But I think what it at least tells us is this, if nothing else: Our curve lines are headed in the wrong direction.
 
Return to Index

22.	Newport News Shipbuilding: Carrier Funding Prompts Head Scratching
(NEWPORT NEWS DAILY PRESS 08 MAR 14) ... Hugh Lessig
 
This week's rollout of the Defense Department budget prompted as many questions as answers about the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet and the status of future big-ticket jobs at Newport News Shipbuilding.
The confusion stemmed from lawmakers, analysts and journalists trying to square what Pentagon officials said in briefings with actual budget documents.
Bottom line: Defense officials want to maintain the carrier fleet at 11. But whether it stays there or drops to 10 – a move that could ripple through the economy of Hampton Roads – depends on what signal the Pentagon gets from Congress about future spending levels.
What will a congressional "signal" look like? For the moment, no one seems to know.
The budget rollout began last week when Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel briefed reporters and followed up with visits to Fort Eustis in Newport News and Langley Air Force Base in Hampton.
He described the fiscal year 2015 budget and an accompanying document that projects spending five years into the future. Congress votes on the 2015 budget, not the five-year plan.
Hagel said the 2015 budget maintains the 11-carrier fleet, but notes that the USS George Washington is due at the Newport News shipyard in 2016 for a refueling and overhaul that would give it another 25 years of service.
The refueling can't happen if budget cuts return in 2016 under the process known as sequestration, Hagel said. The Navy would have to retire the George Washington, not refuel it. That would mean less business for the Newport News shipyard, not to mention implications for national security and additional stress on the fleet and military families with one less carrier.
The discussion started getting complicated when it moved toward that five-year spending plan.
That five-year plan showed an extra $116 billion above sequestration levels for 2016-19. Hagel said the Navy could maintain an 11-carrier fleet "with the spending levels in the president's budget plan." So many people simply connected those two dots: If the $116 billion gets included, the U.S. keeps 11 carriers and maintains higher troop levels.
However, when the actual budget was unveiled this week, analyst Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments noticed what he called a "disconnect." The $116 billion didn't fund the refueling or several other major issues, such as keeping troop strength at certain levels.
The department would need even more money to accomplish those tasks – or it would have to cut funding elsewhere.
"They didn't put it toward the refueling, but they said they did," Harrison said.
What the $116 billion pays for is not yet clear. Details of the five-year plan haven't been released. But it sparked a round of questions when Hagel and his top deputies testified before Congress. Sen. Tim Kaine was among those left scratching his head.
Kaine told Hagel he was a "a bit confused" about how the president's budget, if enacted, would fund the refueling of the George Washington. Hagel's response veered in a slightly different direction.
The Defense Department had to assume sequestration would return in 2016 because that's current law. If Congress indicates it will free up more money, the Pentagon can plan for 11 carriers and higher troop levels.
"I understand the confusion on how we did it and why we did it," Hagel told Kaine.
Pentagon comptroller Bob Hale said this was not a disconnect. It was prudent planning. It takes time to plan for changes in troop strength and aircraft carrier levels. So for the moment, the department must assume that sequestration will happen. If Congress indicates otherwise, the Pentagon can replan accordingly.
"There's an important 'if' there," Hale said. "We have to have some indication from Congress that you're going to appropriate."
Kaine said that was concerning.
"Your indication of 'give us an indication' – I'm wondering precisely what kind of indication would be sufficient, given that we've just done a budget within the last two months and we are not likely to return to one soon," Kaine said.
He didn't get an immediate answer, but the question came up again Friday at a briefing with Rear Adm. John Kirby, a Pentagon spokesman.
"The form that the signal takes is a lot less important than the timing of it," Kirby said. "The sooner we can get a firm indication that sequestration no longer remains the law of the land, the better. We'd like to get that signal as soon as possible."
Pressed further, Kirby said, "I don't know whether there's a big difference between a signal and indication. We're less concerned if it's an email, a phone call or a formal letter as to getting it as soon as possible."
Kaine brought up another point: It's true that sequestration in 2016 is the law unless Congress changes it, but the 11-carrier fleet is also required by statute. It's not just a policy. The Navy can't simply drop to 10 carriers without legislative approval.
Hagel agreed, and said "if we don't have the resources, there will be further cuts somewhere."
At week's end, the lack of clarity was apparent in several corners, including Politico's Morning Defense blog, an authoritative source. It read in part:
"Has this week left you utterly confused? If so, you're not alone. Last week, we were told things about the Pentagon budget, only to find out this week, some of them aren't exactly true ... or only exist as aspirational goals versus what's actually on paper."
http://www.dailypress.com/news/military/dp-nws-carrier-fuzzy-math-20140307,0,5256805.story
 
Return to Index

23.	How The New Military Budget Affects Navy Warships
(NORFOLK VIRGINIAN-PILOT 10 MAR 14) ... Kate Wiltrout
 
President Barack Obama's proposed budget, rolled out on Tuesday, could have major long-term effects on the warships that call Norfolk home – and the shipyards that build and maintain them. The Navy today has 283 warships, about 60 of them homeported here.
As the military shrinks after a decade of war and faces mandatory cutbacks under sequestration, the budget proposal signals which ships the Pentagon considers most vital. Here's a guide to some of the basic takeaways:
LITTORAL COMBAT SHIPS
The budget proposal calls for $1.4 billion to buy three of these ships. But because of concerns about their protection and firepower, it calls for ending the program after 32 ships, instead of 52.
Function: Fast and adaptable, littoral combat ships are designed for coastal waters and a minimal crew. Capabilities include mine sweeping and anti-submarine warfare.
Size: One version is 388 feet long. The other is 419 feet.
Crew: About 50.
Drawbacks: Unlikely to survive high-intensity combat.
Where they’re built: Marinette, Wis., and Mobile, Ala.
Cost: $360 million-$700 million.
How many: Three, with none based in Norfolk. One more has been delivered to the Navy. A dozen others are in preproduction or are under construction.
FRIGATES
The budget proposes decommissioning 10 frigates, including seven used by the Navy Reserve.
Function: Frigates escort and protect other vessels – including warships and replenishment and merchant ships – against air and submarine attack.
Size: 445 feet long with a crew of about 200.
Drawbacks: They lack the capability to withstand high-tech weapons and have limited capacity for modernization.
Where they’re built: No longer under construction.
How many: 17, with three based in Norfolk.
DESTROYERS
The budget proposal calls for spending $2.8 billion for two additional destroyers.
Function: Destroyers are guided missile warships with a variety of missions, including supporting carrier strike groups and surface strike groups. They're also tapped to provide ballistic missile defense in the Mediterranean.
Size: 510 feet long with a crew of 276.
Drawbacks: They are often tasked with missions that could be better accomplished by smaller ships.
Where they’re built: Mississippi and Maine.
How many: 62 with 23 in Norfolk; four under construction; two more have money appropriated.
CRUISERS
Half of the Navy's 22 guided missile cruisers would be temporarily decommissioned to save $4 billion, with the savings used to modernize the ships over time and bring them back to service.
Function: Similar to destroyers, cruisers are equipped with guided missiles and are primarily used to protect aircraft carrier strike groups from air attacks. They're also used in ballistic missile defense.
Size: 567 feet long with a crew of about 330.
Drawbacks: Only half of the Navy's aging fleet has received upgrades needed to reach the ship's projected 35-year service life.
Where they’re built: No longer under construction.
How many: 22, with six in Norfolk.
SUBMARINES
As part of a multiyear program, the Navy would purchase two Virginia class submarines in 2015. The subs are a joint project between Newport News Shipbuilding and Electric Boat in Groton, Conn.
Function: Attack submarines, loaded with Tomahawk cruise missiles, are designed to find and destroy enemy submarines and surface ships. They also gather intelligence and engage in mine warfare.
Los Angeles class
Size: 360 feet long with a crew of about 140.
Drawbacks: 14 were retired halfway through their expected service life instead of being refueled.
Where they’re built: No longer under construction.
Cost: approximately $900 million.
How many: 40, with seven based in Norfolk.
Virginia class
Size: 377 feet with a crew of about 130.
Drawbacks: Cost.
Where they’re built: Newport News and Groton, Conn.
Cost: $2.7 billion.
How many: 10, with none based in Norfolk. The Navy plans to buy at least 31.
AIRCRAFT CARRIERS
The budget keeps intact an 11-carrier fleet in 2015. It includes $123 million for continued work on the carrier Gerald R. Ford at Newport News Shipbuilding. It calls for spending $1.3 billion for the design and construction of the John F. Kennedy. It defers a decision on the planned 2016 refueling of the George Washington – seen above in 2003 – which could be decommissioned instead.
Function: Aircraft carriers support and operate planes that can attack targets in the air, at sea and ashore. They allow U.S. forces to project power in distant places, for sustained periods.
Nimitz class
Size: 1,092 feet.
Drawbacks: Cost.
Where they’re built: Newport News.
Cost: The Bush cost $6.2 billion.
How many: 10, with five based in Norfolk.
Ford class
Size: 1,092 feet.
Drawbacks: Cost.
Where they’re built: The first ship, the Gerald Ford, is under construction in Newport News. It is expected to be finished in 2016.
Cost: Estimated at $12 billion.
How many: Plans are under way for a second, the John F. Kennedy.
Compiled by Corinne Reilly, Mike Hixenbaugh and Kate Wiltrout.
http://hamptonroads.com/2014/03/how-new-military-budget-affects-navy-warships
 
Return to Index

INFRASTRUCTURE / INSTALLATIONS:
24.	Officials: $414M Impact, 'Bright' Future At Shipyard
(PORTSMOUTH (NH) HERALD 08 MAR 14) ... Deborah McDermott
 
PORTSMOUTH – In 2013, the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard contributed $414.3 million in local civilian payroll into the Seacoast economy and hired 161 new employees. In addition, more than $250 million in construction projects have taken place at the yard in the last two years alone.
This information was released Friday as part of the Seacoast Shipyard Association's annual economic impact report.
The payroll was a decrease of about $7 million from 2012, when $421.8 million was spent. The decline was attributed to sequestration and the federal government's across-the-board spending cuts.
SSA members said the future of the shipyard looks bright – barring any unforeseen move by the Pentagon to place it on a Base Realignment and Closure list.
"Budget aside, unknowns aside, the shipyard is thriving," said Paul O'Connor, president of the Metal Trades Council at the yard and an officer of the Seacoast Shipyard Association. "We have 10 years of work ahead of us, we're hiring a robust young work force eager to learn, and our future looks bright."
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has again asked Congress to form a BRAC commission, for the third time in recent years. Many members of Congress are balking, telling Hagel to look at overseas bases first.
The shipyard was on the Navy's BRAC list in 2005, but was ultimately removed by the commission.
The SSA annual report continues to show robust economic health generated from shipyard spending.
According to the SSA annual report, military members working at the shipyard in 2013 – mostly crew members of submarines at the yard for overhaul – were paid $41 million.
Of the civilian workers, the most, 431 people, come from the Sanford/Springvale area of Maine, followed by Kittery/Kittery Point, Maine, Rochester, South Berwick and Berwick, Maine, and Dover and Portsmouth.
Construction work, which is awarded to local and regional contractors, was calculated at $129.1 million in 2013. In 2012, construction accounted for $158 million. Over the two years, that amounts to $277 million.
"If you haven't been to the shipyard in the past five years, you might not recognize it," said O'Connor. Most of the work is being paid for through the Navy's energy efficiency program.
O'Connor emphasized that the yard work force is working more efficiently and productively than it ever has. The yard has introduced "lean manufacturing" techniques, in which all employees' voices are recognized, O'Connor said.
"The Navy sees the shipyard as the thinkers, the innovators," said O'Connor. "Today, we're doing things we couldn't imagine in 2005 because of our relationship with labor and management and our efficiency."
The fact that the shipyard does its work on time and on budget will be the linchpin by which it is judged if a BRAC commission is formed, he said.
A commission will not consider the regional economy, only a facility's importance to national security, O'Connor said.
The SSA was pivotal in rallying forces during the 2005 BRAC process, and Neil Rolde of York, chairman of the SSA, said its members stand ready to do so again if needed.
He said the SSA board will be meeting with staff of the Maine and New Hampshire congressional delegations in the near future.
"Things are happening so fast in Washington right now, it's time for us to meet with them so we at least have a good idea where we stand," he said.
For his part, O'Connor said, "nothing makes me believe that it could not happen again. Just because we're doing our job doesn't mean we're BRAC-proof. I don't have confidence (in the process)."
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20140308-NEWS-403080306
 
Return to Index

25.	Navy Still Working On Finding The Cause Of Red Hill Fuel Leak
(HONOLULU STAR-ADVERTISER 08 MAR 14) ... William Cole
 
The Navy hasn't yet gotten to the bottom of a leak at the Red Hill fuel farm that is believed to have dumped up to 27,000 gallons of JP-8 aviation fuel into concrete containment surrounding the leaky steel liner.
Tank 5 had just been repaired and refilled when the leak was detected Jan. 13.
Capt. Mike Williamson, commander of Naval Facilities Engineering Command Hawaii, told state lawmakers Friday that preparations are underway to make the giant tank "gas-free" so personnel can enter it and determine the cause of the leak.
That work plan has visual inspections beginning in mid- to late April, he said.
State Sen. Mike Gabbard (D, Kapolei-Makakilo), chairman of the Senate Energy and Environment Committee, and members of five other House and Senate committees asked the Navy, Department of Health and Board of Water Supply to answer questions after the recent spill drew renewed attention to the underground fuel farm, which was built in secrecy during World War II and is still deemed a critical Navy facility today. The committees held a joint informational briefing Friday at the state Capitol.
Lt. Cmdr. Angela Watson, fuels director at the Fleet Logistics Center Pearl Harbor, said fuel is believed to have leaked through the 21⁄2- to 4-foot-thick concrete containment and created a "damp" spot on the wall.
Watson said there was a spike in fuel detection in the soil monitoring beneath the tank, but the Navy had not seen any fuel products in the nearest groundwater monitoring well.
"It (the fuel) is likely within the concrete surrounding the tank," Watson said.
She also said there was no indication fuel has "moved beyond the direct vicinity of the tank."
Navy reports revealed multiple fuel leaks of many thousands of gallons over some seven decades from the 20 giant underground storage tanks, which are each 250 feet tall and 100 feet wide.
Aloha Tower would easily fit into each of the tanks.
A Navy well was dug about 3,000 feet downhill from the fuel farm, and includes a water tunnel extending across the water table to within 1,560 feet of the facility, one of the Navy reports said.
The Board of Water Supply Halawa Shaft is about 5,000 feet northwest of Red Hill.
The Navy said drinking water drawn from the area is safe.
"To date we have not found any free products, any free petroleum, in any of the monitoring wells," Williamson said.
Gary Gill, deputy director for environmental health with the state Health Department, said the Navy, in a 1998 study, estimated that as much as 1.2 million gallons of fuel had leaked from the Red Hill tanks to that point, and that 19 of the 20 tanks had leaked.
Some legislators questioned the longevity of Red Hill and suggested that the Defense Department should plan for closure or complete renovation of the now 71-year-old tanks.
"I know the Navy is considering various options for retrofitting these tanks – relining them or building tanks within tanks, all of these things are in play," Gill said.
Watson said studies are continuing to determine "what the long-term solution is for those tanks."
She added that the maintenance cycle the tanks undergo does upgrade the tanks. In some cases, additional steel is welded in place to increase the thickness of the steel walls.
Williamson noted that the repairs are similar to the modernization of an old Navy ship.
"Then you retire those ships from the fleet," said Rep. Cynthia Thielen (R, Kaneohe-Kailua).
Williamson responded that when the tanks are retrofitted, they are repaired to a standard that allows them to remain in service for another 20 years.
But Tank 5 was just repaired and it leaked, Thielen pointed out.
"So one of the tanks that you are retrofitting and doing all of that, had a release, which makes me feel that maybe one ought to look at retiring the fleet or at least starting the dialogue, because that's not a (federal) budget item that happens overnight," Thielen said.
The Navy's Watson said there are no other indications of leaks from the Red Hill tanks in the past 20 years.
She was asked whether the contractor that made the Tank 5 repairs, the Willbros Group, damaged the tank. "I am uncertain," Watson said.
Historically, at least some of the fuel that's been stored at Red Hill "has found its way down into the groundwater below the tanks," Gill said.
The Health Department did notify the public recently that "very low" levels of lead and other chemicals were detected in the Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam water system.
The lead levels were within federal and state compliance levels for drinking water, the Health Department said.
Officials said those chemicals were not from the recent fuel spill.
Fifteen tanks are still operating, two are retired and three are always in a maintenance cycle.
Over the past 20 years, the Navy has made "significant upgrades" to the Red Hill tank complex, it said.
That includes the fuel vapor monitors, groundwater monitoring wells and an "inventory accounting control system" that tracks tank levels to one-sixteenth of an inch.
Watson said when a tank is refilled, some fuel settling occurs, but when the fuel was discovered dropping as much as it did, "that is when we were alarmed."
http://www.staradvertiser.com/newspremium/20140308_Navy_still_working_on_finding__the_cause_of_Red_Hill_fuel_leak.html
 
Return to Index

SEXUAL ASSAULT:
26.	Troops In Key Posts May Be Rechecked For Sex Offenses
(USA TODAY 08 MAR 14) ... Tom Vanden Brook
 
WASHINGTON – Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has discussed with Air Force, Marine Corps and Navy leaders an Army review that disqualified 588 soldiers from posts as sexual assault counselors and whether those services should follow the Army's lead.
Hagel's request stopped short of a directive to re-screen those troops. The Navy disqualified five sailors, while the Marine Corps and Air Force had no suspensions. USA TODAY reported last week that the Army suspended its soldiers for offenses ranging from sexual assault to child abuse and drunken driving. It is seeking to kick 79 of those soldiers from its ranks entirely; the others have been reassigned.
Rear Adm. John Kirby, Hagel's spokesman, said Hagel "has discussed the Army's results with the other services and solicited their views about whether or not they should follow suit."
Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., told Hagel during a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Thursday that it appeared the other services used different criteria than the Army in screening its troops. She pressed him on whether he would issue a new directive, calling on the other services to follow the Army's path.
Speier said she learned of the Army's move to suspend its soldiers from the news story and asked that the results of a new review be made public.
In May, Hagel issued a broad order to the services telling them to "review the credentials and qualifications" of sexual assault counselors, victim advocates and recruiters to ensure they met applicable standards.
Army Secretary John McHugh expanded Hagel's order, calling for a "comprehensive review" that also included drill instructors and sergeants conducting advanced individual training, according to a memo. In all, the Army examined records of more than 20,000 soldiers for fitness in handling sensitive posts.
The last year has seen major changes in the way the military handles sexual assault in its ranks. The Pentagon's own reporting in May found that incidents of unwanted sexual contact reported by troops had spiked by more than one-third from 2010 to 2012.
High-profile sexual assault allegations fueled calls for sweeping changes. The arrest and trial of an Air Force officer in charge of sexual assault prevention programs who was accused of drunkenly groping a woman outside a bar is emblematic of the incidents. The officer was later acquitted of sexual assault charges.
On Thursday, a measure to strip commanders of the authority to decide whether sexual assault allegations go to trial died in the Senate because it fell five votes short of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster. It was the most radical approach to overhauling the military justice system in the past year, and several others were passed, including one that prevents commanders from overturning jury convictions and another that assigns special counsel to those bringing complaints.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/03/08/defense-secretary-chuck-hagel-military-sexual-assault/6182519/
 
Return to Index

27.	USS Germantown Captain Relieved Of Duty
(STARS AND STRIPES 10 MAR 14) ... Matthew M. Burke
 
SASEBO NAVAL BASE, Japan – The captain of the USS Germantown has been relieved of command for failure to use good judgment and uphold standards in relation to a sexual assault investigation involving one of the ship’s top sailors, Navy officials said Monday.
Cmdr. Jason Leach was removed Friday by Amphibious Force Seventh Fleet commander Rear Adm. Hugh Wetherald, who lost confidence in his ability to command, according to a Navy statement. The relief was the result of a poor command climate onboard the Whidbey Island-class dock landing ship.
The command investigation that led to Leach’s firing was triggered by a Naval Criminal Investigative Service investigation into sexual assault allegations against former Command Master Chief Petty Officer Jesus Galura. Galura has been removed from his duties onboard the ship.
“While the relief was not related to a single incident, it was based on preliminary findings from the NCIS and the command climate investigation, which concluded that Cmdr. Leach failed to use the good judgment expected of leaders in the Navy and uphold standards,” Amphibious Force Seventh Fleet spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Brian Wierzbicki wrote in a statement to Stars and Stripes. “I can’t get into specifics, but we expect leaders to maintain professional relationships between the wardroom and Chief’s Mess, set and keep the bar on standards high and not tolerate any decreases in professionalism.”
There are no plans for disciplinary action against Leach, who has been reassigned to the staff of Expeditionary Strike Group Seven in Sasebo, the statement said. The current Deputy Commodore of Amphibious Squadron Eleven, Capt. Marvin Thompson, has been tapped as the Germantown’s commanding officer until a permanent replacement is identified. Thompson is the former commanding officer of the USS Harpers Ferry and CTF-76 Deputy Chief of Staff.
http://www.stripes.com/news/uss-germantown-captain-relieved-of-duty-1.272136
 
Return to Index

28.	Emails Show Shared Concern Of False Testimony In Army Sexual Assault Case
(NEW YORK TIMES 10 MAR 14) ... Richard A. Oppel Jr.
 
Lawyers defending Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair on sexual assault charges are renewing claims that the case against him has been tainted by the influence of senior officials in the Pentagon, citing emails that military prosecutors turned over during the weekend.
The emails show that fears that General Sinclair’s chief accuser might have testified untruthfully at a hearing in January were discussed among a number of senior officers at Fort Bragg, N.C., and were not limited to just the former lead prosecutor, who quit the case last month.
The decision by the prosecutor, Lt. Col. William Helixon, to resign from the case after he failed to persuade his superiors to dismiss the most serious charges – and the public disclosure of their disagreement – had thrown the prosecution into turmoil.
That culminated in a hearing last week at Fort Bragg before the start of the court-martial, where Army officials testified that Colonel Helixon was under extraordinary stress from health and personal issues when he had expressed misgivings about the chief prosecution witness, and at one point was even acting irrationally and was suicidal.
But documents that defense lawyers made available to a reporter on Sunday indicated that the most senior Army lawyer at Fort Bragg had also raised immediate concerns with his commanding officer about the accuser’s testimony in January, which was about her finding an old iPhone that contained messages between herself and General Sinclair.
“It is possible that she was not truthful,” Col. Michael Lacey, the senior military lawyer at Fort Bragg’s XVIII Airborne Corps, wrote to the Corps commanding officer, Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson, in an email early the morning after the accuser’s Jan. 7 testimony.
The conflict between her description of discovering the phone, and what forensic analysis indicated, “brings her credibility into question,” Colonel Lacey wrote.
The court-martial proceedings against General Sinclair began last week at Fort Bragg, after the general pleaded guilty to a handful of lesser charges, in hopes of narrowing the trial to focus on the credibility of his chief accuser, with whom the general has acknowledged having a three-year extramarital affair. The court-martial is scheduled to resume on Monday.
Army prosecutors have said that they do not question the woman’s account of sexual assault by General Sinclair, 51, who is accused of forcing his former lover, a junior officer, to perform oral sex, and threatening to kill her and her family if she revealed their affair.
A separate email disclosed over the weekend shows that another Army lawyer at Fort Bragg advising the top commander at the base about the court-martial solicited input about the case in December from one of the Army’s top lawyers at the Pentagon.
The email was sent Dec. 16 by Lt. Col. James Bagwell, chief of military justice at Fort Bragg – who defense lawyers said at the time was also serving as the base’s acting staff judge advocate – to Brig. Gen. Paul Wilson, then a colonel, who is a senior officer at the Judge Advocate General’s Corps at Army headquarters at the Pentagon.
The email detailed General Sinclair’s offer to plead guilty to charges including adultery and conduct unbecoming an officer and to retire at a reduced rank, if the military agreed to drop the most serious charges of sexual assault. It was sent days after the general’s chief accuser revealed to prosecutors that she had found the old iPhone.
“Sir: Lot has been happening on this case over the past week – virtually none of it good for Govt,” Colonel Bagwell wrote. “I was wondering if I get your thoughts/opinion on the latest attached OTP” from General Sinclair, he wrote, using the military acronym for “offer to plead.”
In the email, Colonel Bagwell appeared to endorse the concept of a plea bargain with General Sinclair. “For my part it’s 90% there,” he wrote, referring to the plea offer.
None of the new emails showed whether General Wilson responded, or if he did, whether he argued the plea agreement should be rejected, as it was the next month.
But lawyers for General Sinclair believe it is the latest evidence that suggests the Pentagon has improperly influenced the prosecution, and on Sunday night they submitted a new motion with the military court at Fort Bragg complaining of “unlawful command influence.” The military judge hearing the case has rejected several previous motions seeking dismissal of charges based on allegations of improper influence.
General Sinclair, former deputy commander of American forces in southern Afghanistan, has long conceded an affair with his chief accuser, now a 34-year-old captain, but his lawyers have denied the sexual assault charges, claiming the woman fabricated the allegations to avoid prosecution for adultery, which is punishable under military law.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/us/emails-show-shared-concern-of-false-testimony-in-army-sexual-assault-case.html
 
Return to Index

PERSONNEL:
29.	New Rules Would Make Sailors Pay 25% Of Off-Duty Tuition Costs
(NAVY TIMES 17 MAR 14) ... Mark D. Faram
 
You’re likely to start footing more of the bill for your off-duty college classes starting this fall.
The Navy is developing a proposal for sailors to pay for25percent of their tuition costs under changes to tuition assistance eligibility that would begin in fiscal year 2015.
The primary reason for the rule change is a proposed $24 million cut in the Navy’s tuition assistance budget in fiscal 2015, but officials say sailors fronting more money may be more likely to finish their degrees. They also want to encourage sailors to use their Post 9/11GI Bill benefits.
Infiscal2014, the Navy expects to spend $86 million, roughly the same as spent in fiscal 2013. But if approved, the Navy’s TA budget would drop in fiscal 2015 to just$65 million.
The Navy now pays 100 percent of a sailor’s college tuition up to 16 credit hours each fiscal year – a maximum benefit of $4,000, at $250 per credit hour.
The proposal still needs to get the OK from the Pentagon.
“For FY’ 15 we are proposing a 75-25 [percent] split for TA, continuing our commitment to afford sailors an opportunity to pursue their education goals,” said Lt. Cmdr. Chris Servello, spokesman for the chief of naval personnel. “Having ‘skin in the game’ provides added incentive to stay focused and aligned with their education plans.”
But that’s the only proposed change, officials say. All other existing TA “business rules” would stay the same, including credit hour and monetary caps, and limits to who can get TA dollars.
For example, sailors at their initial duty stations aren’t allowed to use TA until they have a year on board.
But there is some good news: there’s an unexpected pile of TA money available right now.
Use Or Lose
The 75-25 split would return the Navy to how it handled TA in 2000.
Under the old plan, the Navy funded three-quarters of the Defense Department’s $4,500 limit. Since then, it has funded all of the currently allowed $4,000,16-credit cap.
This plan almost returned a year ago as part of the sequestration cuts, when the other services suspended TA funding and the Navy asked to revert to the 75-25 split. But those plans were blocked by Congress and shelved. Until now. The proposal would kick in starting Oct. 1, if approved.
The Navy’s current program remains in effect, and to date, the service has only spent $39 million of its $86 million budget – well below their historic use rates from the past few years – due to declining use for the first time in years.
“We use historical ‘burn rates’ as a guide for allocating TA funding throughout the year,” said Ernest D’Antonio, head of Navy voluntary education programs at the Center for Personal and Professional Development.
Based on those rates, officials estimate they’ve spent $6millionless than they had at this time last year.
“We think a variety of things influenced our being below the TA budget right now,” said Lt. Cmdr. Mark Wadsworth, who leads the team tracking Navy TA spending. “Our execution rate dropped in October with the government shutdown, and that’s carried through the year,” he said. “The usage rate steadily increased in November and December, but then it dropped back down in January, probably due to uncertainty with the federal budget.”
To date, 25,000 sailors have used the benefit, which the Navy normally allots on a quarterly basis. In past years, demand has been so great that a quarter’s funds have run out before the quarter did, and some sailors were told to reapply later.
But use hasn’t rebounded since January, and the service finds itself in unfamiliar territory, rolling over unused credits from one quarter to another.
There’s a limit to how far they can roll the funds.
“Although we have funding now,” Wadsworth said, “sailors need to understand that their education benefits reset each year, and unused amounts don’t carry over [between fiscal years].”
 
Return to Index

30.	CNP’s Worldwide All-Hands Call
5 things every sailor should know about
(NAVY TIMES 17 MAR 14)
 
A day after the new budget for the next fiscal year was unveiled, the Navy’s manpower boss spoke about upcoming programs, perks that sailors can take advantage of and the Navy’s manning outlook.
“I think what we’re seeing ... across the next five years indicates to all of us that we’re pretty stable in terms of personnel,” said Vice Adm. Bill Moran, the chief of naval personnel, in a March 5 all-hands call streamed online. “I think the future is really bright for those who want to continue to serve in the Navy.”
Many of the questions reflected the anxiety felt among sailors as they see other services drawing down. Moran repeated that he didn’t see any cuts to Navy end strength coming soon.
Sailors also asked about pay raises and the length of deployments, among other topics. What you need to know:
1. Sexual Assault Prevention Training.
Moran said he thought the “Navy way” of professional training – PowerPoint slides in a room full of sailors who may be drowsy or bored – wasn’t adequate for addressing sexual assault. Moran said the service was planning to roll out small group discussions based on a pilot program at Recruit Training Command Great Lakes, Ill. “We’re taking that training, which is pretty darn effective at Great Lakes, which is that smaller, peer-to-peer training, and we’re moving that to the waterfront as well,” he said.
“Those are smaller opportunities where you get to sit down with peers and have a conversation.”
2. Deployment Lengths.
Several sailors asked why the Navy was extending the length of deployments. Ballistic- missile defense ships and aircraft carriers routinely deploy now for eight months or longer.
Long-term, the Navy is working to keep deployments to 6 1⁄ 2 or seven months, Moran said, while cautioning that some ships still will face long deployments.
“We’re just going to have to ebb and flow over the next couple of years as we get the maintenance and modernization levels back up,” Moran said. “Then we can reset the deployment cycle.”
3. Tuition Assistance.
Fleet Master Chief (AW/SW) April Beldo, the top sailor at CNP who also answered questions, stressed that TA would be 100 percent for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends Sept. 31. But Beldo said there was a good possibility that the Navy would go to the 75 percent rate at the beginning of 2015. (More on TA, Page 20) Moran encouraged sailors who wanted to participate in the program to jump on it.
“We’ve got cash, folks.” he said.
“I’ve got cash to give you, and we’re not eating into the cash at the rate we expected.”
4. Sea Pay Boost.
Moran said Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has signed the career sea pay raise, which is 25 percent across the board, and that sailors would start seeing the increase within about 60 days. (New sea pay chart, Page 19) “As soon as we can get [Defense Finance and Accounting Services] to update all the pay tables, which is a process and a process that takes some time, ... we think we can start improving the pay of anyone who is on career sea pay today,” Moran said.
5. Flame-Resistant Coveralls.
One sailor asked how long it’ll take to get a pair of the flame-resistant coveralls being issued to the fleet.
Moran said that coveralls were already getting to ships that were deploying in the near term but that the rest of the fleet would get them over the next year.
Each fleet sailor will get three sets, free of charge.
 
Return to Index

31.	These Are The Pentagon’s Ideas For Reforming Retirement Benefits
(GOVERNMENT EXECUTIVE 09 MAR 14) ... Eric Katz
 
The Defense Department has outlined several possibilities for overhauling retirement benefits for military personnel, which could provide more cash up front to service members but limit overall compensation.
The ideas, which Pentagon officials stressed were not recommendations or suggestions, would provide some benefits to military personnel earlier in their careers rather than exclusively upon retirement, as the system is structured currently. The Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization Commission – a panel made up of nine appointed officials – is reviewing retirement packages, and this report serves as the Pentagon’s guidance to the commission.
The report contains “concepts for the commission to consider,” said Lt. Cmdr. Nathan Christensen, a Pentagon spokesman. “They could use everything. They could take none of it.”
Congress must approve any changes to military benefits.
The paper proposed creating a defined contribution benefit in which Defense would begin paying into a service member’s Thrift Savings Plan after two years of service. The department would contribute 5 percent of the member’s salary into the account; the member would not have to contribute anything, though he could choose to do so.
Military personnel now can participate in the TSP, though they must make their own paycheck-deducted contribution that is then matched by their agency, like any federal employee. About 40 percent of uniformed personnel participate in the current system.
Another possible scenario discussed in the report would create “continuation pay,” essentially a retention lump-sum bonus for enlisted personnel after 12 years of service and for officers at 16 years. The continuation pay would vary depending on service and would be worth between two and six months of pay.
Also under consideration: A lump-sum separation pay for any personnel leaving after 20 years of service. This payment would amount to between one and three years of salary, depending on what other parts of the guidance were enacted.
The Pentagon laid out two distinct models for post-retirement compensation: The first would create a two-tier benefit based on age while the second would keep the single-tier system currently in place. The two-tiered system would produce a reduced benefit for working-age retirees. The multiplier used to calculate annuities would be reduced, so retirees would receive about 25 percent of their “high-three” average – the average annual pay of a service member’s salary during their three highest paid years – until the age of 62. After that point, retirees would receive about 50 percent of their high-three, which is what they currently earn.
If the two-tier system is adopted, military personnel would receive larger lump-sum continuation and separation payments. This Pentagon chart demonstrates what the benefits system might look like for an individual in this system, compared to the current structure:
The single-tier system would create a one-time calculation to determine retirement annuities, and – similar to the current system – would only increase with annual cost-of-living adjustments. The multiplier in this system would be lower than currently structured, and retirees would only receive about 35 percent of their high-three average earnings.
Reforming benefits to working-age retirees recently proved exceptionally unpopular in Congress. In a budget agreement crafted by Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., Congress authorized a reduction in COLAs to military retirees younger than 62 years old, who often join the civilian workforce before fully retiring. That provision was quickly blasted by both parties, however, and was later repealed.
One major difference between that proposal and the options outlined by the Defense Department is the Pentagon’s plan would grandfather all current retirees and active-duty personnel, while the budget deal did not. Lawmakers were especially critical of that element. Christensen said not grandfathering in that group would “break faith with our members.”
Christensen emphasized that Defense does not endorse any of the propositions, but the department has simply put them forward for the commission’s “consideration and further deliberation.”
“The department looks forward to continuing the dialogue and providing assistance to the commission and Congress in the review and assessment of potential military retirement modernization options,” he said.
President Obama has spoken of needing to bring rising military personnel costs down, and included cuts to military retirees’ health care in his fiscal 2015 budget. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel regularly discusses the necessity of reducing pay and benefits costs at the Pentagon, and Defense Press Secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby said Friday that should include retirement.
In its report, the Pentagon noted it did not treat saving money as its top priority, though it did consider the need to provide “American taxpayers with an efficient system that is fiscally sustainable.” Instead, the report focused primarily on how to best manage and manipulate the military and to ensure a high quality of life for service members and their families.
Any savings would not fully take effect until all personnel are enrolled in the new system. After that time, the government would save between $2 and $4 billion annually, depending on which plan was adopted – a relatively small slice of the Pentagon’s personnel costs.
The effect on individuals also would vary based on which plan was adopted. If a higher multiplier is used in the two-tier system, retirees could actually earn more when including all the additional active-duty and separation payments. E-7s who served 20 years could wind up earning an additional $80,000 in their lifetimes, for example, Defense estimated.
In most scenarios, however, overall compensation would decrease by a similar amount.
http://www.defenseone.com/management/2014/03/these-are-pentagons-ideas-reforming-retirement-benefits/80137/
 
Return to Index

32.	Submarine Connecticut XO Relieved
(NAVY TIMES 09 MAR 14) ... Mark D. Faram
 
The executive officer of the Bremerton, Wash.- based fast attack submarine Connecticut was relieved March 8 due to a loss of confidence.
Lt. Cmdr. Brett J. Sterneckert was relieved by Rear Adm. Phillip G. Sawyer, commander of Pacific Fleet’s submarine force based at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam. Sterneckert was aboard Connecticut since June 2012.
The relief was due to a loss of Sawyer's confidence in Sterneckert’ ability to serve as executive officer, according to spokesman Cmdr. Brook DeWalt.
DeWalt said the loss of confidence was due to job-related issues and not because of personal misconduct. A Naval Criminal Investigation Service investigation into the circumstances of the relief is ongoing.
Sterneckert was administratively reassigned to Submarine Group 9 in Bangor, Wash.
http://www.navytimes.com/article/20140309/NEWS/303090001
 
Return to Index

SECURITY CLEARANCES:
33.	U.S. Network To Scan Workers With Secret Clearances
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 10 MAR 14) ... Stephen Braun
 
WASHINGTON – U.S. intelligence officials are planning a sweeping system of electronic monitoring that would tap into government, financial and other databases to scan the behavior of many of the 5 million federal employees with secret clearances, current and former officials told The Associated Press.
The system is intended to identify rogue agents, corrupt officials and leakers, and draws on a Defense Department model under development for more than a decade, according to officials and documents reviewed by the AP.
Intelligence officials have long wanted a computerized system that could continuously monitor employees, in part to prevent cases similar to former National Security Agency analyst Edward Snowden. His disclosures bared secretive U.S. surveillance operations.
An administration review of the government's security clearance process due this month is expected to support continuous monitoring as part of a package of comprehensive changes.
Privacy advocates and government employee union officials expressed concerns that continuous electronic monitoring could intrude into individuals' private lives, prompt flawed investigations and put sensitive personal data at greater risk. Supporters say the system would have safeguards.
Workers with secret clearances are already required to undergo background checks of their finances and private lives before they are hired and again during periodic re-investigations.
"What we need is a system of continuous evaluation where when someone is in the system and they're cleared initially, then we have a way of monitoring their behavior, both their electronic behavior on the job as well as off the job," Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told Congress last month.
Clapper provided lawmakers with few details but said the proposed system would extend "across the government," drawing on "six or seven data streams." Monitoring of employees at some agencies could begin as early as September and be fully operational across the government by September 2016. The price tag, Clapper conceded, "is going to be costly."
In separate comments last week, retiring NSA Director Keith Alexander said intelligence, Defense and Cyber Command officials are collaborating on "insider threat" planning. Recently declassified federal documents show that the NSA is already conducting electronic monitoring of agency staffers involved in surveillance operations.
Budget documents released this week show the Pentagon requesting nearly $9 million next year for its insider threat-related research.
Current and former officials familiar with the DNI's planning said the monitoring system will collect records from multiple sources of information about employees. They will use private credit agencies, law enforcement databases and threat lists, military and other government records, licenses, data services and public record repositories. During random spot checks, the system's software will sift through the data to spot unusual behavior patterns.
The system could also link to outside databases to flag questionable behavior, said the officials, who spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the plans. Investigators will analyze the information along with data separately collected from social media and, when necessary, polygraph tests, officials said.
The proposed system would mimic monitoring systems already in use by the airline and banking industries, but it most closely draws from a 10-year-old Pentagon research project known as the Automated Continuous Evaluation System, officials said. The ACES program, designed by researchers from the Monterey, Calif.,-based Defense Personnel and Security Research Center and defense contractor Northrop Grumman, has passed several pilot tests but is not yet in full operation.
The ACES project and clearance-related Defense Department research cost more than $84 million over the past decade, documents show.
Gene Barlow Jr., a spokesman for the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, the DNI agency coordinating the system's development, said ACES would be part of the DNI's "continuous evaluation solution." The DNI's system would extend across the executive branch, he said.
Clapper and other senior administration officials cited the ACES program in a February 2010 report laying out the government's plan for improving security clearances. Former Adm. Mike McConnell, who headed the DNI during the Bush administration, was an early proponent of electronic monitoring research.
"If one guy has a Jaguar on a (government) GS-12 salary, that's a red flag," McConnell said.
According to project documents, ACES links to up to 40 databases. While many are government and public data streams already available, ACES also taps into the three major credit agencies - Experian, Equifax and Trans Union.
One former official familiar with ACES said researchers considered adding records from medical and mental health files but due to privacy concerns left that decision unresolved for policy makers.
The government's inability to review information from local police reports, his employer, family and personal health records was cited as a glaring weakness in background checks on computer specialist Aaron Alexis, who fatally shot 12 people at the Washington Navy Yard last September before killing himself.
The Alexis case and the Snowden disclosures raised concerns about the flawed or inadequate work of outside contractors in background checks.
A federal official acknowledged that outside contractors would likely be used to support electronic monitoring. It was not clear whether Northrop Grumman, the company that helped develop ACES, would have a role in its government-wide deployment.
Critics worry about the potential misuse of personal information. Private contractors supporting the monitoring system would have access to sensitive data. Credit agencies and other outside data sources would know the identities of government employees under scrutiny.
"The problem is you're spreading all this private data around to more and more people, both inside and outside," said David Borer, general counsel for the American Federation of Government Employees.
The union represents federal workers with top secret clearances but recently joined in a lawsuit against the government to prevent lower-level employees from being reclassified into jobs requiring clearances.
"As a result of the Snowden disclosures I think we're seeing what an open book workers' lives are becoming," Borer said.
Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Freedom Foundation, a civil liberties group, said workers' free speech, political allegiances and outside activities could be chilled under the threat of constant monitoring. Some workers might face scrutiny because of inaccurate reporting, Tien said.
Officials familiar with the DNI's system said internal guidelines, audits, encryption and other precautions built into the proposal were designed to minimize abuses of private information. A 2007 Homeland Security review of the ACES project concluded that "the system contains security and procedural controls to ensure that data is made available to only those with a legitimate need as defined by the underlying legal authorities."
Congressional officials said the DNI already has sufficient permission under U.S. law to launch the new electronic monitoring on its own, but a bill recently introduced by Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, would provide additional legal support. Collins' bill calls for at least two random computerized reviews every five years for each of the 5 million government workers with a secret clearance.
Intelligence community veterans said electronic monitoring was designed to detect lavish spending and discipline problems that can go undetected during the years between a worker's first background check and re-investigation - every 5 or 10 years, depending on the clearance level.
The Intelligence and National Security Alliance, a consortium of public and private national security interests, called for continuous monitoring in a new report released last week.
Intelligence veterans say rogue agents John Walker, Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen might have been exposed much earlier by such a system.
"We have to be willing to look at indications of behavior," said Joel Brenner, former senior counsel at the NSA and head of counterintelligence for the DNI. Brenner pointed to Hanssen as the sort of "serial rule-breaker" who might have been quickly detected by electronic monitoring.
Brenner cautioned that the success of electronic monitoring depends on those manning its controls. "The system only works well," he said, "if it has thoughtful, educated, careful human beings behind it."
Associated Press writer Jack Gillum contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_EYES_ON_SPIES
 
Return to Index

COMMENTARY:
34.	Defunding Defense
(WASHINGTON POST 10 MAR 14) ... Robert J. Samuelson
 
The crisis in Ukraine reminds us that the future is unpredictable, that wars routinely involve miscalculation and that brute force – boots on the ground, bombs in the air – counts. None of these obvious lessons seems to have made much impression in Washington, where the Obama administration and Congress continue their policy of defunding defense and reducing the United States’ military power.
The administration’s new 2015 budget projections show how sharply the Pentagon shrinks. In nominal dollars (unadjusted for inflation), defense spending stays flat between 2013 and 2024. It’s $626 billion in 2013 and $630 billion in 2024. Adjusted for inflation and population growth, it drops by a quarter. As a share of the federal budget, it falls from 18 percent in 2013 to 11 percent in 2024. Meanwhile, Social Security spending in nominal dollars increases 85 percent to $1.5 trillion by 2024 and Medicare advances 75 percent to $863 billion. The inflation-adjusted gains are also large.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has outlined some program cuts behind the spending declines. The Army drops from a recent peak of 570,000 to 450,000 – the lowest since before World War II – and, possibly, 420,000. The Marine Corps falls 10 percent from its peak to 182,000. The Air Force retires all its A-10 “Warthog” ground-support fighters, as well as its U-2 spy planes. The Navy halts purchases of its Littoral Combat Ships at 32 instead of the planned 52.
The United States has a military for two reasons. One is to deter conflicts. Even if every Pentagon spending cut were desirable – manifestly untrue – their collective size symbolically undermines deterrence. It telegraphs that the United States is retreating, that it is war-weary and reluctant to deploy raw power as an instrument of national policy. President Obama’s undisguised distaste for using the military amplifies the message.
This may embolden potential adversaries and abet miscalculation. The United States’ military retrenchment won’t make China’s leaders less ambitious globally. (China plans a 12 percent increase in military spending for 2014; at that pace, spending would double in six years.) Nor will it dampen Iran’s aggressiveness and promote a negotiated settlement over its nuclear program. Probably the reverse. Diplomacy often fails unless backed by a credible threat of force.
The second reason for a military is to defend national interests – and prevail in conflict. Just what this requires is hard to say, because the nature of war is shifting to include cyberattacks, non-state adversaries and the threat of weapons of mass destruction. “When it comes to predicting the nature and location of our next military engagements,” former defense secretary Robert Gates has noted, “our record [since Vietnam] has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right.”
There are many potential war theaters: Persian Gulf nations, including Iran if the United States bombed its nuclear facilities; the South China Sea; the Korean Peninsula; Pakistan, if theft of its nuclear weapons were threatened. Russia’s aggression in Ukraine raises the prospect that a sizable number of U.S. troops might be stationed in the Baltic nations or Poland. All belong to NATO; all must now feel more threatened by Russia.
The Pentagon has already downgraded its capabilities. It has abandoned its past assumption that it could fight two major wars simultaneously. It has also disavowed any long-lasting counterinsurgency. “Our forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale prolonged stability operations,” says the latest Quadrennial Defense Review. The self-serving premise is that wars can be fought and won quickly, because otherwise budgets don’t work.
All this is a huge gamble. Hagel says that today’s reduced funding creates “added risk” (translation: higher combat deaths, lower odds of success). He warns that a return to “sequestration” (deeper congressionally mandated cuts) would create a “hollow force.”
Defense spending should reflect a strategic vision of the U.S. global role. This would balance Americans’ unwillingness to be the “world’s cop” with the observed truth that, given today’s interconnectedness, distant events can affect vital U.S. interests. In reality, strategy is driven by political expedience and a shortage of cash. It reflects popular disillusion with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It presumes that the world won’t punish the political preferences of America’s leaders. Obama and Democrats won’t sacrifice social spending for defense spending; Republicans won’t admit that higher defense spending requires higher taxes.
The inattention to these developments is stunning. The Post’s main story on the administration’s 2015 budget barely mentioned defense; the same was true of the comparable story in the New York Times. Christine H. Fox, the acting deputy secretary of defense, recently noted that “the world has gotten no less dangerous, turbulent or in need of American leadership. There is no obvious peace dividend as was the case at the end of the Cold War.” But we’re pretending there is – and spending it madly.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-samuelson-defunding-defense/2014/03/09/80ee0dda-a7bc-11e3-b61e-8051b8b52d06_story.html
 
Return to Index

35.	A Defense Budget Based On Hope
(WASHINGTON POST 09 MAR 14) ... Editorial
 
If, as the Obama administration is convinced, the United States will no longer conduct “long and large stability operations” in foreign countries, then the defense budget it has proposed for next year makes some logical choices. Troop strength, particularly in the Army, is being cut – to the lowest level since before World War II – so that money can be spent on new technology, cyber operations and special operations forces, which will be expanded.
Weapons systems good for fighting ground wars, like the A-6 attack plane, are being eliminated in favor of strategic systems like the new F-35 plane and development of a new long-range bomber. Funding for missile defense is staying roughly level while the old U-2 spyplane is being grounded.
The Pentagon is also making another run at trimming the excessive personnel and basing costs that are displacing needed spending on troops and readiness as the overall budget decreases. Modest increases to the health-care payments asked of troops and retirees, trims in subsidies for housing and commissaries and another round of base closings all are justified and desperately needed.
Mostly likely, though, Congress won’t agree to those, which brings us to the not-so-rational aspects of the administration plan. It counts not only on politically tough decisions legislators are unlikely to make in an election year, but also on large new increases in defense spending above the level agreed on in the last bipartisan budget deal. For next year’s budget, the administration is hoping Congress will approve $26 billion in extra defense spending over the $496 billion request as part of a $58 billion “opportunity, growth and security initiative.” Since President Obama proposes to fund this in part by closing tax loopholes, its prospects are not good.
Pentagon plans for the following year call for a $35 billion spending increase, to $536 billion. Overall the administration counts on $115 billion in additional funding through 2019 above the levels currently written into the law. What happens if the sequester returns after next year? Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and the service chiefs don’t appear to have a plan, other than to warn of dire consequences.
We don’t disagree with their assessments. As it is, even if the requested budget for next year is fully funded the administration’s ability to pursue its biggest strategic priority – a “pivot” to Asia – will be weakened. The Navy will continue to shrink, with a net loss of five ships, and 11 cruisers will be placed in “reduced operating status” while they are being refurbished. The full 11-group aircraft carrier fleet will be kept but maintenance on one, the George Washington, is being deferred; if the $6 billion cost cannot be found in the next year the ship could be retired.
In sum, the new defense budget is a patch constructed on the hope that funding needed to sustain even this administration’s constrained strategic objectives can be found in future years. And what if Mr. Obama is wrong, and the United States is forced into a large land operation – in Syria, Iran, Korea or maybe Eastern Europe? The chances might be small; but if the worst occurs, the United States will not be ready.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-military-defense-budget-based-on-hope/2014/03/08/4185d6f2-a544-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html
 
Return to Index

36.	China’s Disturbing Defense Budget
(NEW YORK TIMES 10 MAR 14) ... Editorial
 
China is causing new anxieties in Asia with a defense budget for 2014 that totals $132 billion, up 12.2 percent over the previous year. These numbers should not be used as an excuse to ratchet up America’s military spending. But they do raise legitimate concerns about China’s motives that Beijing should seek to dispel, especially at a time when regional tensions are rising.
Although China’s overall economic growth rate has declined, the new defense budget reflects the biggest increase in three years and continues a several-decades-long trend of double-digit increases. Many experts assume that the real total is higher. Even so, the budget is far below that of the United States, which was $526.8 billion for fiscal year 2014 and finances the world’s largest, most expensive and advanced military program. It is reasonable to expect that as the world’s second-largest economy, China, over time, would invest more on defense to protect its security and economic interests.
But the budget increases are not taking place in a vacuum. With its aggressive new approach to the region, China has sowed suspicion among its neighbors, who fear not only economic but military dominance. China is engaged in a dangerous dispute with Japan over the sovereignty of islands administered by Japan in the East China Sea, raising fears that frequent movements around the islands by Chinese military patrols and Japanese fishing vessels could spark a conflict. Last November, China stunned Japan, South Korea and the United States by declaring a new air defense zone over parts of that sea.
China has also been intimidating Southeast Asian nations that oppose its territorial claims in the South China Sea, with its fisheries and reputed oil and gas reserves. While some experts predict that it could be decades before the Chinese military catches up with the United States, China is investing in new systems, including submarines, surface ships and anti-ship ballistic missiles, that could be used to further intimidate neighbors or deny the United States access to Asian waters to defend its allies.
China says the world has nothing to fear, but it could mitigate concerns by explaining why it needs such hefty increases and where the money will be spent, as the United States does. More consultation between the Chinese and American militaries would also be useful. So would a serious effort to resolve the territorial disputes, or at least agree on a code of conduct for managing them.
Meanwhile, Congress should resist the impulse to pump up military spending. The better response is to support President Obama’s policy of expanding America’s economic, political and military engagement in Asia while remaining cleareyed about China’s capabilities.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/opinion/chinas-disturbing-defense-budget.html?
 
Return to Index

37.	America's Non-Pivot To Asia
U.S. friends and foes know that entitlement spending inevitably draws from defense.
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 09 MAR 14) ... Editorial
 
Anyone worried about how the Obama Administration's budget priorities thwart American strategy abroad got another sleepless night last week. First a senior Pentagon official let slip that because of budget constraints America's high-profile pivot to Asia "is being looked at again, because candidly it can't happen." Then China announced another double-digit increase in annual defense spending, this time of 12.2%.
Assistant Defense Secretary Katrina McFarland's statement might have been too candid, and she quickly tried to walk it back. "The rebalance to Asia can and will continue," she said in a follow-up statement. But America's Asian allies and competitors are increasingly aware that her initial remark rings true. They see that President Obama's "nation-building at home" leaves less and less money available for vital strategic interests.
The pivot aims to deter Chinese aggression and reassure U.S. friends by shifting 60% of U.S. naval forces to the Pacific by 2020 (from 50% today) and increasing cooperation among U.S. and partner militaries. Up to 2,500 U.S. Marines will now regularly rotate through northern Australia, and the U.S. Navy has begun basing littoral combat ships in Singapore. U.S. forces will likely gain greater base access in the Philippines, and Washington is shoring up Japanese defenses with new radar and drones.
The problem is that since 2009 the Obama Administration has cut half a trillion dollars from defense. Now it wants to cut the Army to pre-World War II levels. It says it doesn't want to cut the Navy to World War I levels (as sequestration would have required), but 30-year shipbuilding plans are expected to produce fewer than the minimum 306 ships the Navy says it needs to accomplish its missions. That will be a particular handicap in the maritime Asia-Pacific. Assuming the pivot proceeds, Asia in 2020 can expect to see 60% of a smaller U.S. Navy.
Budget woes last year forced the Navy to scrap five ship deployments and to delay deployment of the USS Harry Truman aircraft carrier strike group by six months. Last summer the Navy could deploy only 95 of its 285 ships on average, or 10 fewer than a year before – "a factor," said Chief of Naval Operations Jonathan Greenert, "of the budget limitations."
Whereas America usually has three carrier strike groups and three amphibious ready groups able to respond to emergencies within a week, only one of each is currently available. Meanwhile, deferred maintenance of ships and aircraft has eroded readiness for years to come.
The margin of error is narrowing. Admiral Greenert said last July that the Navy didn't have a single ship operating in the Southern Command, which covers the Caribbean, Central America and South America. Any future operation there would draw forces from elsewhere, including perhaps from Asia. You cannot surge trust," Admiral Greenert has warned Congress, "rather you have to be there, building it every day."
And not merely through port calls and training in Asia, but by cultivating credibility world-wide. Asian leaders can read U.S. budget plans, and they are drawing lessons from the U.S. failure to deter aggression by Syria, Iran and Russia. There is only one U.S. military to respond to the world's threats, and one U.S. reputation as a reliable friend and capable foe.
It's popular in Washington to blame budget woes on the dispute between Congress and the White House over spending, but the real threat to America's defense spending and thus to global security is the Obama Administration's desire to expand the American entitlement state. This inevitably squeezes money from defense. This reality, more than any number of speeches about an illusory pivot, is set to shape America's relations in Asia.
Ms. McFarland's unguarded comment was a gaffe that told the truth. America's friends and adversaries know it, and as that reality unfolds they will begin to recalculate their own military and strategic interests.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303369904579423530847513384
 
Return to Index

38.	How To Put Military Pressure On Russia
NATO now has reason to station nuclear forces in front-line member states.
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 10 MAR 14) ... Jim Thomas
 
Russia's seizure of Crimea should be a wake-up call for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The absence of serious thinking about NATO's territorial defense mission – its raison d'être – and the weakness its 28 member nations have shown since the 2008 Russian invasion of Georgia have proven catnip for Vladimir Putin.
Most of NATO's European members have spent the past two decades rationalizing how they can spend ever-smaller sums on security. And now the U.S. is cutting its defense expenditures while trying to "pivot" its strategic focus to the Asia-Pacific. So it isn't surprising that pundits and government officials have tended to emphasize political and economic suasion for dealing with this latest Russian aggression.
Sanctions, skipping the G-8 summit in Sochi, hitting Russian oligarchs in their pocketbooks, isolating Russia in international forums – all of these options are legitimate responses to Mr. Putin's land grab in the sovereign state of Ukraine. But there is also a need to think about military options.
First, NATO should reconsider its so-called Three Nos from the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act. The Three Nos were shorthand for the NATO allies' joint declaration that they had "no intentions, no plans, and no reason" to station nonstrategic nuclear forces in new member states. But NATO left the door open to future deployments if front-line allies were threatened. While NATO still lacks the intention and plans to station nuclear forces in new member states, such as Poland, it now has more than sufficient reason to do so.
A preliminary step should be making the Polish air force's F-16s capable of carrying both conventional and nuclear weapons so that they could participate in NATO's nuclear mission. That should quickly be followed by site surveys to identify suitable locations for potentially storing nuclear weapons on the territory of front-line allies, including Poland, if relations with Russia further deteriorate.
Second, NATO should reinforce its front-line allies with additional conventional force deployments. The time has come for the U.S. and other NATO allies to consider permanently stationing forces in Poland and Romania as well as the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to back up their words of strategic solidarity. Their mission should be defensively oriented, establishing what military strategists call "anti-access, area denial" zones. (This might include missile defenses to protect major bases in those countries along with anti-air, anti-armor and anti-ship weapons to counter air, land or naval incursions.
Taking these steps in the Baltic states would reduce Russia's temptation to encroach on their sovereignty in the name of "protecting ethnic Russian populations," a pretext it has used in Ukraine. It would also preclude Russia's option of a quick, Crimea-like operation to establish a fait accompli on the ground before NATO can decide to act.
Third, NATO should make it clear that it would seriously consider a future Ukrainian request for indirect military assistance, especially if Russia escalates the crisis in Crimea or deploys its forces into other eastern Ukrainian provinces. NATO could certainly provide overt nonlethal and humanitarian assistance, while the U.S. might even consider covert lethal aid, as in Afghanistan during the 1980s Soviet occupation. This might include short-range precision guided weapons that could be used by resistance forces to attack bases and facilities on Ukrainian territory seized by Russia's forces or its proxies.
It may not be realistic to compel the withdrawal of Russian forces quickly and it is far-fetched to imagine NATO boots on the ground in Ukraine. Nevertheless, it would still be possible to exact a heavy toll on Russia in blood and treasure through a protracted irregular war if it formally annexes Crimea or attempts to occupy other parts of the country.
Fourth, the U.S. and its NATO allies should revisit their self-imposed prohibitions on lethal aid to moderate Syrian opposition groups. In the post-Crimea era, Syria should be viewed through the prism of not only the West's long-term strategic competition with Iran, but also its re-emerging competition with Russia. The defeat of Bashar Assad's murderous regime and with it the potential loss of Russia's naval port at Tartus would represent a heavy tax for Russia's adventurism closer to home.
Lastly, Russia's invasion of Crimea should prompt strategic reappraisals in both Washington and Brussels. The Ukrainian crisis raises fundamental questions about the wisdom of the Obama administration's attempt to "lead from behind" on foreign-policy issues with clear U.S. interests, its pursuit of "global zero" (the elimination of all nuclear weapons world-wide) and most directly its "reset with Russia."
Rather than "reset," the administration would do well to hit the "recall" button on the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review, released March 4, which treated Putin's Russia as an afterthought relative to other global threats, and astonishingly advocated another round of bilateral nuclear-arms reductions at a time of heightened tensions.
Leaders in Washington and Europe have allowed NATO's defenses to deteriorate to the point that Mr. Putin seems to think he can act with impunity. It is past time to start rebuilding those defenses, and Mr. Putin's Ukrainian gambit should be the catalyst.
Mr. Thomas is vice president and director of studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579421660993452026
 
Return to Index

39.	Why Poland Cares So Much About Ukraine
(NEW YORK TIMES 10 MAR 14) ... Padraic Kenney
 
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – An old train route south from the eastern Polish city of Przemysl passes through Ukrainian territory, then back into Poland. The tracks are a relic of the prewar past, when this was all Polish territory, before the Soviet Union “liberated” western Ukraine in 1939 from Poland and incorporated it into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.
In the Communist period, some traveled this loop – no stops allowed – only to get a glimpse of a land then forbidden and inaccessible. But in 1980 and 1981 the brief Soviet excursion became a propaganda jaunt for Poles. Passengers flashed Solidarity signs from opened windows, boasting to their neighbors of the dissident trade union whose rapid growth threatened the Communist monopoly on power in Poland.
Before long, the Soviet regime insisted windows be kept shut on their territory, and eventually their Polish comrades suspended the route. A decade later, his country and Communist rule were gone, and Poles and Ukrainians could get closer than through the grimy window of a lumbering passenger train. But the emotions of that old train route still illuminate the fears and hopes that now make Poland a central player in the sharpest European crisis since 1989.
For the last quarter-century – the first time in modern history – Poles have not faced an existential threat from the East. But within living memory, Poland lost its eastern provinces when Hitler and Stalin carved it up in 1939; in 1945, the loss became permanent in a redrawn Poland that now included former German lands. So invasions, dismemberments and wholesale remappings of nations are not implausible to Poles. The idea that Vladimir V. Putin, Russia’s president, could simply send his troops to occupy and effectively annex territory from Ukraine without real provocation may have seemed fantastical from farther away, but not from Warsaw.
Today, Poland is a member of NATO and can summon its allies to consult when it feels under threat, by invoking Article 4 of the alliance’s treaty, as it did last week. Poland “is threatened in the broad sense of that word,” Gen. Stanislaw Koziej, chief of Poland’s National Security Bureau, explained in an interview. “It is true that today we are not threatened directly by an attack of foreign troops on our territory, but over a longer term we cannot exclude the possibility.” And when Mr. Putin gave a rambling news conference last week that some Westerners thought held reasons for optimism, Poles heard a direct threat to their own country in his accusation that the snipers on Kiev’s Independence Square had been trained in Poland.
Yet before we all dust off our Cold War textbooks and revive their Manichaean pronouncements, we should note that more than just geopolitics changed when the Soviet Union collapsed and the European Union grew eastward. First, naked anti-Russian emotions ceased to be an essential part of Polish rhetoric. Most Poles today are too young to have had required Russian-language classes in grade school. Russia is a difficult trade partner, but not an affront to one’s very Polishness.
A more important theme in Polish thinking has its birth in those signs flashed from train windows decades ago. Poles believe they have a special message, even a special gift, to convey to those around the world who struggle for liberty and civil rights, and especially to Ukraine.
The two nations are drawn together more by a painful past than by common threads. Ukrainian peasants once worked for Polish noblemen. After World War I, the Polish Army helped dash Ukrainians’ brief hopes of independence. World War II brought horrific massacres to both populations, from many directions, and ended with vast ethnic cleansing.
But from this pain came a slow discovery of common ground. Both sides took the idea of “solidarity” to mean a shared struggle against dictatorship.
In the 1980s, Polish and Ukrainian anti-Communists began talking about the darker moments of their nations’ histories, trying to overcome deep mistrust. In 1989, the Polish dissident Adam Michnik was cheered when he addressed the founding congress of Ukraine’s first mass opposition movement. In 2004, during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, Kiev’s streets were full of young Poles alongside Ukrainians.
It seemed then that Ukraine was experiencing the same democratic carnival that Poland and other former Eastern bloc states saw 15 years before. Even when the Orange Revolution ended in political squabbles, Polish fascination with Ukraine persisted. In the European Union, Poland has consistently advocated for Ukraine.
There can be a whiff of condescension in this championing of Ukrainian aspirations, especially when many Ukrainians have encountered Western prosperity working as domestics in Warsaw homes. The Polish online weekly Kultura Liberalna warned recently that Poles were adopting a “postcolonial” attitude to Ukraine. It cautioned that magical thinking about Ukrainian democracy was no substitute for concrete support.
True enough. But Poland’s perspective on Ukraine is from very close up. Poles, too, have seen their territory taken and blood spilled on city squares. They have also seen popular determination and grass-roots organizing lead to democracy. And they see a turn toward Europe as a moral choice, not one that simply brings prosperity and stability.
The idealism of 1989 has been combined with a pragmatic, firmly institutional view of international relations. It makes Poland a formidable player in Europe, and an essential friend to Ukraine.
Padraic Kenney is a professor of history and international studies and the director of the Russian and East European Institute and of the Polish Studies Center in the Indiana University School of Global and International Studies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/opinion/why-poland-cares-so-much-about-ukraine.html
 
Return to Index

40.	Military Sexual-Assault Legislation Divides Women Senators
Sen. McCaskill’s military sexual-assault bill is meatier than advertised
 ... WASHINGTON POST 09 MAR 14 Melinda Henneberger
 
Sen. Claire McCaskill’s bill to overhaul – yes, overhaul – the way sexualassault cases are handled in the military has routinely been described as more modest, conservative, watered-down and incremental than her Senate colleague Kirsten Gillibrand’s measure.
The legislation pushed by Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), which would have taken the prosecution of sex crimes in the military out of the chain of command and put it in the hands of military prosecutors, was narrowly defeated Friday.
McCaskill’s bill is expected to pass Monday, a result widely seen as an affront to victims by a Congress that is still too male and overawed by military commanders to meaningfully challenge them.
But occasionally the first draft of history is written by the losers, and that’s certainly the case for Gillibrand, whose defeat was headlined in The Washington Post as “How Kirsten Gillibrand won by losing.”
McCaskill, meanwhile, has just as clearly lost by winning, with far less attention paid to either her bill or her view.
The supposed nothing-burger of the bill put forth by McCaskill (D-Mo.) would get rid of the “good soldier” defense that takes irrelevant factors such as the service record of the accused into account. In cases where there is a dual jurisdiction because the crime occurred off of a military base, the victim would get a say in whether the case would be handled in a civilian or military court. It would extend protections to students in service academies. And it would require that in every decision on every promotion in the military, that commander’s record on the handling of sexual-assault cases would have to be taken into account.
“The most frustrating thing about this,” McCaskill said in a phone interview Friday, “is the narrative that, ‘Whose side are you on, the victim’s or the commander’s?’ That’s offensive. If I didn’t care so much about this,” she said, she would have let Gillibrand’s bill go to a vote, although convinced that she would be harming the victims.
A former prosecutor, McCaskill said she spent her legal career supporting sexcrime victims at a time few others would. “The guys in my office used to laugh at the cases I’d take to court,” she said. “I took three guys who took a stripper home to court, and got them all three convicted.”
McCaskill says that taking the prosecution of sex crimes in the military out of the chain of command would have resulted in fewer prosecutions, not more, because prosecutors, she said, “get seduced by a win-loss record, and don’t want to take a loser to court.”
Under Gillibrand’s bill, if a prosecutor doesn’t want to take the case to trial, that’s the end of it, whereas under McCaskill’s, if the prosecutor wants to take the case and the commander does not, it’s automatically referred to the civilian secretary of that branch of the service for review. In cases where neither the prosecutor nor the commander wants to bring the case, it’s also referred to the secretary.
McCaskill points out that the military sexual-assault cases in the news would not have been brought if Gillibrand’s bill were law. After an Army captain accused Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair, it was the commander, rather than prosecutors, who insisted that the case go to court.
Similarly, in the case involving the Naval Academy midshipman who three former football players were accused of assaulting, prosecutors initially chose not to take the case – a decision overturned by the commander, instead of the other way around.
The commander decided that the case against two of the players should go forward, but prosecutors later dropped the case against a second player. The case against the one player who will go on trial next week would not have gone forward under Gillibrand’s bill, McCaskill said.
And the kind of brutal public questioning that the woman at the center of that case endured at a preliminary military hearing known as an Article 32 hearing can no longer occur because of changes that Gillibrand and McCaskill pushed for as part of the defense reauthorization agreement at the end of 2013. Now, the victim does not have to appear publicly. The accused, McCaskill said, “still has the right to discovery but through affidavits with their own lawyers.”
McCaskill said she’s been bruised by the pronouncements of other Democratic women in the Senate, especially Gillibrand and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) During Friday’s debate, McCaskill repeatedly said it was important to focus on their many areas of agreement, but Gillibrand wasn’t having it. “This is not an opportunity to congratulate ourselves on the great reforms we’ve done,” she answered pointedly.
But as much as that hurt McCaskill – “I’m a tough cookie, but both Boxer and Gillibrand’s arguments stung” – it was her ally on the bill, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who she seems to have wanted to throttle as he argued with great emotion that taking sex crimes out of the chain of command would be a slap in the face to commanders.
“I tried to walk Lindsey back; I frankly could give a s--- if I hurt the commanders’ feelings, when my focus is on the victims I care about as much as she does,” McCaskill said of Gillibrand, “even if that acknowledgment is not always reciprocated.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/sen-mccaskills-military-sexual-assault-bill-is-meatier-than-advertised/2014/03/09/cdf646b4-a79a-11e3-8d62-419db477a0e6_story.html
 
Return to Index

______________________
If you would rather not receive future communications from Navy Office of Information (CHINFO), please go to http://CHINFO.pr-optout.com/OptOut.aspx?517728x24985x79250x3x1593314x24000x6&Email=rhb%40rspdc.com.
Navy Office of Information (CHINFO), Department of the Navy 1200 Navy Pentagon--Room 4B463, Washington, DC 20350-1200 United State