Subject: 01 APR 14 CHINFO CLIPS
From: "CHINFO NEWS CLIPS" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Apr 2014 06:02:26 -0400

On This Day In The Navy:
1945: Over 1200 Navy ships and Army troops begin invasion of Okinawa.

TOP STORIES:
1.	Russia Signals It Will Withdraw Troops From Ukraine Border
Vladimir Putin Says He Had 'Ordered a Partial Withdrawal' of Forces
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 01 APR 14) ... Anton Troianovski and Lukas I. Alpert
Russia signaled on Monday it was pulling some troops away from its border with Ukraine, a move that met with skepticism in the West but could represent the Kremlin's first notable concession after weeks of frantic diplomacy by the U.S. and Europe.

2.	After Trading Fire, North And South Korea Trade Insults
(NEW YORK TIMES 01 APR 14) ... Choe Sang-Hun
SEOUL, South Korea – A day after exchanging artillery fire across their disputed sea border, North and South Korea hurled insults at each other on Tuesday, with the North rejecting an ambitious overture from the South’s president, Park Geun-hye.

3.	Malaysia Changes Last Words From Missing Plane, Hunt Goes On
(REUTERS 01 APR 14) ... Stuart Grudgings and Matt Siegel
KUALA LUMPUR/PERTH – The last words from the cockpit of a missing Malaysian jet were a standard "Good night Malaysian three seven zero,” Malaysian authorities said, changing their account of the critical last communication from a more casual "All right, good night."

EUROPE:
4.	Russia Pulls Back A Battalion From Ukraine Border
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 31 MAR 14) ... Laura Mills and Vladimir Isachenkov
SIMFEROPOL, Crimea – Russia said Monday it was pulling a battalion of several hundred troops away from the Ukrainian border but kept tens of thousands in place, prompting a worried response from the Kiev government about what the U.S. warned was still a "tremendous buildup."

5.	NATO Plans More Support For East Europeans Worried By Crimea
(REUTERS 01 APR 14) ... Adrian Croft
BRUSSELS – NATO will decide new steps on Tuesday to reinforce eastern European countries worried by Russia's annexation of Crimea, and on how to bolster Ukraine's armed forces.

ASIA – PACIFIC:
6.	Poor Coordination Led To Flawed Search For Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
The Search Area Shifted Abruptly on Friday After Authorities More Fully Merged Two Investigative Strands
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 01 APR 14) ... Andy Pasztor and Jon Ostrower
Lapses in coordination among countries and companies trying to find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 led to three days of searches in an area hundreds of miles from where investigators now believe the plane is likely to have gone down, people familiar with the matter said.

7.	China Snubs Japan Over International Warship Gathering
(AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE 31 MAR 14)
TOKYO – Japan’s navy has not been invited to join an international flotilla of warships taking part in a ceremonial event in China, an official said Monday, the latest snub in a row between Asia’s two largest economies.

8.	N. Korea Prepares Missile Launch, But No Imminent Sign Of Atomic Test
(YONHAP NEWS AGENCY (S.KOREA) 01 APR 14) ... Kim Eun-jung
SEOUL –North Korea has imposed a no-sail zone in the East Sea for domestic vessels in a move seen as preparations for additional missile launches, military officials said Tuesday, though Pyongyang has not shown any imminent sign of a nuclear test.

9.	Beijing And Manila In Dispute Over Reef
(NEW YORK TIMES 31 MAR 14) ... Jane Perlez
BEIJING – China accused the Philippines on Monday of illegally occupying Chinese territory after a Filipino vessel outmaneuvered the Chinese Coast Guard and resupplied a ship that has been stranded for 15 years on the Second Thomas Shoal, a tiny reef in the South China Sea.

10.	Old U.S. Ship Home To Filipinos In China Standoff
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 31 MAR 14) ... Jim Gomez
ABOARD BRP SIERRA MADRE, Spratly Islands – On board the crumbling carcass of this World War II-era warship, Filipino marine 1st Lt. Mike Pelotera and his eight men make their way to a mid-level deck to raise the Philippine flag up a leaning pole and then salute it. Across the calm, turquoise waters, two Chinese coast guard ships lurk, looking on.

11.	Japan Relaxes Arms Export Regime To Fortify Defense
(REUTERS 01 APR 14) ... Kiyoshi Takenaka and Nobuhiro Kubo
TOKYO – Japan eased its weapons export restrictions on Tuesday in the first major overhaul of arms transfer policy in nearly half a century, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeks to fortify ties with allies and bolster the domestic defense industry.

MIDEAST:
12.	Converging Interests May Lead To Cooperation Between Israel And Gulf States
(NEW YORK TIMES 01 APR 14) ... Helene Cooper
JERUSALEM – Looking for a potential bright spot in the roiling upheaval of the Middle East, American and Israeli officials meeting in Jerusalem on Monday held out the hope of growing security cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf.

AFGHANISTAN:
13.	U.S. Seeking Buyers For Old Military Equipment
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 31 MAR 14) ... Kathy Gannon
KABUL, Afghanistan – The United States is trying to sell or dispose of billions of dollars in military hardware, including sophisticated and highly specialized mine resistant vehicles as it packs up to leave Afghanistan after 13 years of war, officials said Monday.

ARCTIC:
14.	Ice Exercise 2014 Demobilizes Ice Camp Nautilus And Shifts To Next Phase
(NAVY LIVE BLOG 31 MAR 14) ... Larry Estrada
Preparing USS New Mexico (SSN 779) and USS Hampton (SSN 767) started in late 2013 with the installation of specially designed sensors by the Arctic Submarine Laboratory and training for the unique challenges and procedures required to transit and operate in the Arctic.

AVIATION:
15.	U.S. GAO Sees $11.5 Billion Drop In Acquisition Cost Of Lockheed F-35
(REUTERS 01 APR 14)
WASHINGTON – The estimated acquisition cost of Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 fighter jet program dropped $11.5 billion over the past year, the congressional Government Accountability Office reported Monday in its annual report on U.S. arms programs.

16.	Boeing Backers Launch Growler Gambit
(POLITICO 31 MAR 14) ... Austin Wright
Boeing’s backers in Congress are kicking off a campaign to save one of the company’s fighter jet programs, an effort complete with behind-the-scenes lobbying and public petitions – and one that could face resistance from rival aerospace giant Lockheed Martin.

AIRCRAFT CARRIERS:
17.	How To Keep An Aircraft Carrier: The Navy's $7 Billion Problem
(DEFENSE DAILY 31 MAR 14) ... Megan Eckstein
Congress wants the Navy to keep 11 aircraft carriers in its fleet. The Navy wants to keep 11. Law dictates that the Navy keep 11. And yet, the Navy’s budget plans – assuming that sequestration remains the law of the land – does not include funding to refuel the USS George Washington (CVN-73), instead defueling and inactivating the flattop.

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE:
18.	Pentagon Aiding Allies On Cybersecurity In Gulf To Asia
(BLOOMBERG NEWS 31 MAR 14) ... Gopal Ratnam
The Pentagon is working with a dozen countries, including allies in the Persian Gulf region and east Asia, to bolster the cybersecurity of their militaries and build a collective defense against attacks.

19.	Hagel Acts To Improve POW-MIA Accounting Effort
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 31 MAR 14) ... Robert Burns
WASHINGTON – In a bid to improve the government's accounting for missing U.S. war dead, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Monday he is establishing a new Pentagon agency with more focused authority and innovative approaches.

CONGRESS / BUDGET:
20.	Commissary Cuts Could Hurt MWR Programs
(NAVY TIMES 07 APR 14) ... Karen Jowers
Proposed cuts in commissary funding not only would drive shoppers away because their grocery prices would rise, but also could have a “devastating” ripple effect on base morale, welfare and recreation programs, advocates said.

SEXUAL ASSAULT:
21.	April Is Sexual Assault Awareness Month
(NAVY LIVE BLOG 31 MAR 14) ... Rear Adm. Sean Buck
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, recognized around the world each year – both in civilian society as well as within many militaries of our partner nations.

PERSONNEL:
22.	Hagel Supports Review Of On-Base Tobacco Sales
(NAVY TIMES 31 MAR 14) ... Andrew Tilghman
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Monday that he supports a forcewide review of tobacco use and sales on military installations.

23.	Caregivers For Post-9/11 Veterans Face Hurdles
(USA TODAY 01 APR 14) ... Gregg Zoroya
An estimated 1.1 million Americans provide care for ailing or disabled veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, including parents and spouses whose cumulative efforts save taxpayers $3billion each year, according to a RAND Corp. study released Monday.

INFRASTRUCTURE / INSTALLATIONS:
24.	Navy Bases Tighten Truck Driver Screening
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 31 MAR 14) ... Brock Vergakis
NORFOLK, Va. – An on-base shooting that left one sailor dead has prompted the Navy to begin prohibiting delivery drivers who have a felony conviction in the past 10 years from coming onto any of its bases from North Carolina to Maine, officials said Monday.

25.	Civilian Guard On Leave As Navy Boosts Base Security
(NORFOLK VIRGINIAN-PILOT 01 APR 14) ... Lauren King
NORFOLK – A civilian police officer has been placed on leave, and the Navy is boosting security measures at bases from Virginia to Maine after last week's shooting aboard the destroyer Mahan.

26.	Naval Base Kitsap's Lockdown Lifted; No Proof Shots Fired
(NAVY TIMES 31 MAR 14)
Law enforcement officials at Naval Base Kitsap, Bangor, sounded the all clear after an investigators failed to uncover evidence that shots had been fired near the base, Navy officials said Monday afternoon.

COMMENTARY:
27.	The U.S. Should Not Be Shutting Out Ukraine
(WASHINGTON POST 01 APR 14) ... Editorial
The Obama administration insists that it won’t negotiate the future of Ukraine with Russia over the heads of the Ukrainians. But something very much like that has appeared to be happening since Vladimir Putin telephoned President Obama on Friday.

28.	When Sanctions Aren't Enough
If NATO wants to stanch Russian adventurism in Eastern Europe, it needs a comprehensive security plan (and fast).
(FOREIGN POLICY 31 MAR 14) ... William B. Taylor, John E. Herbst and Steven Pifer
It should be clear now that the West has a Russian security problem. Twice in the last six years, the Kremlin has seized territory in a neighboring country on the grounds of protecting minorities or ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. In each instance, the rejoinder from the West proved to be inadequate. Now, this threat demands a broad response that goes beyond the steps taken to date, that will deter the Kremlin from further aggression.

29.	The Naïveté Of Distance
The befuddled response to Russia's Crimea takeover shows that America needs a refresher on how the rest of the world actually thinks and works.
(FOREIGN POLICY 31 MAR 14) ... Aaron David Miller
The Ukraine crisis has made it clear that there are some crucial facts about world history and geography that Americans don't really understand. As the world digests Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggressive moves and ponders future ones by Russia or other smaller powers, here are a few things about these two profoundly important forces – or more specifically, the U.S. relationship to them – that Americans need to keep in mind. Grasping them is, in a word, critical.

30.	The U.S. Navy And The Pivot: Less Means Less
Given resource constraints, the U.S. Navy may need to execute a pivot of its own.
(THE DIPLOMAT 31 MAR 14) ... William Kyle
Five years of Obama administration foreign policy are in the history books as the world continues to move beyond the era of the Global War on Terror. While the jury is still out regarding the ultimate impact of his post-GWOT redirection of American foreign policy, U.S. President Barack Obama’s initiatives since 2011 have clearly been designed to steer American policy in a profoundly Pacific direction. This shift has direct consequences for the U. S. Navy in the so-called “Pacific Century.”

31.	Will Presidential Elections Bring Stability To Afghanistan?
Expert roundup interviews
(CFR.ORG 31 MAR 14) ... Zachary Laub
Afghans will choose among eleven contenders for the presidency on April 5. The stakes are high: The election promises to bring Afghanistan's "first peaceful and democratic transfer of executive power," writes Andrew Wilder of the U.S. Institute of Peace. But some degree of fraud is inevitable, and after the votes have been cast, backroom dealing may sway the outcome, says Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network.

32.	Congress, Pentagon Battle Over Budget
Congress, Pentagon at odds in budget talks; it’s military’s needs vs. lawmakers’ home front
(WASHINGTON POST 01 APR 14) ... Walter Pincus
Defense Department officials and Congress continue to disagree on how to save money in the fiscal 2015 defense budget.

33.	The Things She Carried
(NEW YORK TIMES 01 APR 14) ... Cara Hoffman
The injury wasn’t new, and neither was the insult. Rebecca, a combat veteran of two tours of duty, had been waiting at the V.A. hospital for close to an hour when the office manager asked if she was there to pick up her husband.

34.	U.S. Navy Takes ‘One Giant Leap’ With New Research Vessel
(NAVY LIVE BLOG 31 MAR 14) ... Tim Schnoor
It’s a great day for the U.S. Navy and the ocean science community – I just witnessed the christening of the Navy’s newest research vessel at the Dakota Creek Industries shipyard in Anacortes, Washington, about 70 miles north of Seattle.

35.	Chief Petty Officers Celebrate 121 Years Of Excellence
(NAVY LIVE BLOG 31 MAR 14) ... Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Mike Stevens
As the master chief petty officer of the Navy, I get the chance to talk with chief petty officers from all across the world. As I travel throughout the fleet, it is evident that chiefs are doing great things. Their Sailors are a reflection of their amazing work. Established on April 1, 1893, chiefs have led each Sailor in their charge.

 

TOP STORIES:
1.	Russia Signals It Will Withdraw Troops From Ukraine Border
Vladimir Putin Says He Had 'Ordered a Partial Withdrawal' of Forces
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 01 APR 14) ... Anton Troianovski and Lukas I. Alpert
 
Russia signaled on Monday it was pulling some troops away from its border with Ukraine, a move that met with skepticism in the West but could represent the Kremlin's first notable concession after weeks of frantic diplomacy by the U.S. and Europe.
It remained unclear just how many troops Russia was withdrawing. The German government said President Vladimir Putin told Chancellor Angela Merkel by phone that he had "ordered a partial withdrawal" of military forces massing along Ukraine's eastern border.
Russia's Defense Ministry said an infantry battalion – a relatively small number of troops – had been ordered to return from a position near Ukraine to their base some 800 miles to the east. Ukrainian officials said as many as 20,000 Russian troops had apparently been moved back from the border in recent days, but that some 40,000 remained.
U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said he couldn't confirm whether Russian forces were pulling troops back. "There is still a tremendous buildup of Russian forces on that border," Mr. Hagel said.
Last week Western officials said Russian military forces were seen massing along the Ukraine border, prompting fears that the Kremlin was preparing for another incursion into the territory of its largest western neighbor. The ensuing military campaign would likely be more deadly than the practically bloodless takeover of Crimea, the pro-Russian region of Ukraine that Russia occupied and annexed in recent weeks.
But the troop movements disclosed Monday appeared to reinforce suspicions among Western diplomats that Mr. Putin was hoping to use the positioning of his military forces as a bargaining chip in his bid to prevent Ukraine from drifting into the West's orbit.
In an hourlong phone call Friday that the Kremlin initiated, President Barack Obama urged Mr. Putin to stop his troop buildup. Secretary of State John Kerry said after a meeting in Paris with his Russian counterpart Sunday that "any real progress in Ukraine must include a pullback of the very large Russian force that is currently amassing along Ukraine's border."
Russian officials have said they have no intention of invading Ukraine, but say they retain the right to protect ethnic Russians who live in the eastern half of the country. In return for easing military tensions, Moscow appears to be pushing harder on the diplomatic front in its bid to influence Ukraine's future.
In his meeting with Mr. Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov urged a constitutional overhaul in Ukraine in which the provinces would have greater autonomy from the government in Kiev. U.S. and Ukrainian officials say they worry such a formula could provide the Kremlin with a virtual veto over Kiev's political system.
Despite Russian assurances, Western officials warned on Monday that the military threat to Ukraine had by no means passed.
"We are not yet seeing the type of activity that would lead us to believe that a significant withdrawal is in progress," a North Atlantic Treaty Organization spokesman said.
In Berlin, German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said that Mr. Putin's argument that he had a duty to protect Russian minorities abroad mirrored Adolf Hitler's pretext in the 1930s for invading the Sudetenland, a largely German-speaking region of Czechoslovakia, in October 1938.
"Those are the methods that Hitler has applied in the Sudetenland," Mr. Schäuble said during a question-and-answer session with schoolchildren, according to people in the audience. "We know all about that from history."
His comments jar with Chancellor Merkel's finely calibrated approach to Moscow since the outbreak of the crisis in Ukraine. The chancellor has gradually ramped up her criticism of Russia while eschewing harsh rhetoric and stressing the need for dialogue.A spokesman for the German Finance Ministry confirmed his comment but said Mr. Schäuble made clear he wasn't "comparing Russia in any way with the Third Reich."
Ukrainian officials said some of the troop movement appeared to be the routine rotation of draftees who had reached the end of their service. Russian officials declined to comment beyond the official report on the battalion returning to base. That report included no details on the number of troops involved.
Asked about Ukraine's request for additional military supplies, Mr. Hagel noted that the food rations promised by the U.S. have arrived and the government is continuing to discuss Kiev's requests. He said aid to Ukraine would also be discussed at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers this week.
While Western leaders appeared focused on eastern Ukraine, Moscow moved to further cement its hold on Crimea. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev became the highest-level Russian official to visit the region since the disputed March referendum vote to join Russia and announced a series of programs aimed at swiftly incorporating the territory into Russia's economy and infrastructure.
At a cabinet meeting held in the regional capital of Simferopol on Monday, Mr. Medvedev announced the creation of a new ministry for Crimean affairs.
"The development of Crimea and Sevastopol has become a state priority for us," he said. "Every deputy prime minister, every minister is fully responsible for the Crimean situation within the areas under their command."
His visit likely put to rest whatever doubt remained about Russia's intention to proceed with fully absorbing Crimea since it voted to secede from Ukraine in mid-March and Russia agreed to annex the territory.
Mr. Medvedev said work would begin quickly to move Crimea away from dependence on energy and water supplies from Ukraine, and that construction of a bridge connecting the peninsula to mainland Russia across the Kerch Strait would start as soon as possible. In the short term, a ferry service crossing the strait will be increased.
He also said a fiber-optic cable to connect Crimea to Russian telecommunications networks would be laid by mid-April and integrating the region into Russia's banking system would be completed in the near future.
Naftali Bendavid, Gregory L. White, Julian E. Barnes and Andrea Thomas contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304157204579473611876116286
 
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2.	After Trading Fire, North And South Korea Trade Insults
(NEW YORK TIMES 01 APR 14) ... Choe Sang-Hun
 
SEOUL, South Korea – A day after exchanging artillery fire across their disputed sea border, North and South Korea hurled insults at each other on Tuesday, with the North rejecting an ambitious overture from the South’s president, Park Geun-hye.
In a speech in Dresden, Germany, that was broadcast live in South Korea on Friday, Ms. Park promised a huge investment in North Korea’s decrepit industries, as well as humanitarian aid for babies and nursing mothers, if the North gives up its nuclear weapons program.
Although Ms. Park’s proposal largely reiterated what her three predecessors had proposed, it marked her most detailed overture toward the North since she came to office shortly after the North’s nuclear test in February 2013.
On Tuesday, the state-controlled North Korean newspaper Rodong Sinmun scoffed at Ms. Park’s speech, calling the unmarried South Korean leader an “eccentric old spinster” and “a frog in a well.” It said her overture was “full of deception” and “filth” and was aimed at destroying the North Korean government.
South Korea immediately responded, condemning North Korea for using “expressions even street ruffians would refrain from.”
“North Korea must realize that by the way it is behaving, it will attain nothing and will only deepen its isolation,” the government in Seoul said in a statement.
North Korea stoked tensions on the divided Korean Peninsula last spring by threatening to launch nuclear strikes at Washington and Seoul. In the past few months, it had been moving to ease the tensions, but in recent weeks it conducted a series of short- and midrange missile tests.
Then on Sunday, North Korea threatened to carry out a “new form of nuclear test.” On Monday, it fired 500 artillery shells and rockets off its southern coast, with 100 of them falling south of a disputed sea border between North and South Korea. The South fired back, pounding North Korean waters with 300 artillery rounds.
The tensions continued on Tuesday, with the South Korean military saying it was investigating an unidentified drone that crash-landed on Baengnyeong, a South Korean island near the waters where the two Koreas exchanged artillery fire on Monday. The drone was first spotted by an islander on Monday.
“We have collected its debris for investigation,” said a spokesman for the South Korean Ministry of National Defense who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing ministry policy. “We are looking into all possibilities, including the possibility that it came from the North.”
The spokesman declined to provide further details. But the South Korean news agency Yonhap quoted an unidentified government official as saying that the drone was two to three meters long, or 6.5 to 10 feet, and carried a small camera. The drone had a Japanese engine and Chinese components, it said.
North Korea unveiled what appeared to be drones during recent military parades in its capital, Pyongyang. In March last year, its news media showed the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, watching drones attack targets during a military drill.
Mr. Kim was quoted as saying at the time that the drones were intended to be used to attack targets in South Korea.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/02/world/asia/korea.html
 
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3.	Malaysia Changes Last Words From Missing Plane, Hunt Goes On
(REUTERS 01 APR 14) ... Stuart Grudgings and Matt Siegel
 
KUALA LUMPUR/PERTH – The last words from the cockpit of a missing Malaysian jet were a standard "Good night Malaysian three seven zero,” Malaysian authorities said, changing their account of the critical last communication from a more casual "All right, good night."
The correction more than three weeks after Flight MH370 vanished with 239 people on board was made as Malaysian authorities face heavy criticism, particularly from China, for mismanaging the search and holding back information.
Painstaking analysis of radar data and limited satellite information has focused the search on a vast, inhospitable swath of the southern Indian Ocean west of the Australian city of Perth, but has so far failed to spot any sign of the jetliner.
Search coordinators warned the hunt could drag on for some time yet.
"In this case, the last known position was a long, long way from where the aircraft appears to have gone," retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, the head of the Australian agency coordinating the operation, told reporters in Perth.
"It's very complex, it's very demanding and we don't have hard information like we might normally have," he said.
The Boeing 777 disappeared from civilian radar in the early hours of March 8 as it flew from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. Minutes later its communications were cut off and it turned back across Malaysia and headed towards the Indian Ocean.
Malaysia says the plane was likely diverted deliberately, probably by a skilled aviator, leading to speculation of involvement by one or more of the pilots. Investigators, however, have determined no apparent motive or other red flags among the 227 passengers and 12 crew.
"We would like to confirm that the last conversation in the transcript between the air traffic controller and the cockpit is at 0119 (Malaysian Time) and is "Good night Malaysian three seven zero," the Department of Civil Aviation said in a statement late on Monday.
Malaysia's ambassador to China told Chinese families in Beijing as early as March 12 that the last words had been "All right, good night.” About two-thirds of the passengers on board were Chinese.
The statement said authorities were still conducting "forensic investigation" to determine whether the last words from the cockpit were by the pilot or the co-pilot. Malaysia Airlines had previously said the words were believed to have come from the co-pilot.
Search Goes On
Nine ships and 10 aircraft resumed the hunt for wreckage from MH370 on Tuesday, hoping to recover more than fishing gear and other flotsam found since Australian authorities moved the search 1,100 km (685 miles) north after new analysis of radar and satellite data.
Houston said the challenging search, in an area the size of Ireland, would continue based on the imperfect information with which they had to work.
"But, inevitably, if we don't find any wreckage on the surface, we are eventually going to have to, probably in consultation with everybody who has a stake in this, review what to do next," he said.
Using faint, hourly satellite signals gathered by British firm Inmarsat PLC and radar data from early in its flight, investigators have only estimates of the speed the aircraft was travelling and no certainty of its altitude, Houston said.
Satellite imagery of the new search area had not given "anything better than low confidence of finding anything,” said Mick Kinley, another search official in Perth.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak will travel to Perth on Wednesday to see the operations first hand.
Among the vessels due to join the search in the coming days is an Australian defense force ship, the Ocean Shield, that has been fitted with a sophisticated U.S. black box locator and an underwater drone.
Time is running out because the signal transmitted by the missing aircraft's black box will die about 30 days after a crash due to limited battery life, leaving investigators with a vastly more difficult task.
Additional reporting by Michael Martina in Perth and Jane Wardell in Sydney; Writing by Lincoln Feast; Editing by Paul Tait.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/01/us-malaysiaairlines-flight-idUSBREA2701720140401
 
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EUROPE:
4.	Russia Pulls Back A Battalion From Ukraine Border
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 31 MAR 14) ... Laura Mills and Vladimir Isachenkov
 
SIMFEROPOL, Crimea – Russia said Monday it was pulling a battalion of several hundred troops away from the Ukrainian border but kept tens of thousands in place, prompting a worried response from the Kiev government about what the U.S. warned was still a "tremendous buildup."
Russia moved quickly to strengthen its economic hold on Crimea, with Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev arriving in the newly annexed peninsula with promises of funds for improved power supplies, water lines, education and pensions for the elderly.
Russia's takeover of the strategic Black Sea region, its troop buildup near Ukraine's border and its attempts to compel constitutional changes in Ukraine have markedly raised tensions with the West and prompted fears that Moscow intends to invade other areas of its neighbor.
However, Russian President Vladimir Putin told German Chancellor Angela Merkel in a phone call Monday that some troops were being withdrawn from the Ukraine border, Merkel's office said. The withdrawal involved a battalion of about 500 troops, Russian news reports said.
The U.S. reacted cautiously to the Russian troop movement, with Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel saying that "tens of thousands" of Russian forces still remained along the Ukrainian border, a situation he called "a tremendous buildup."
The new government in Ukraine said the action only increased its uneasiness about Russia's intentions.
"We have information that Russia is carrying out incomprehensible maneuvers on the border with Ukraine," Ukrainian Foreign Ministry spokesman Yevgen Perebyinis said. "Troops in some places are moving backward, some of them are moving forward. Which is why, obviously, we are worried by these movements of armed forces. We have no clear explanation from the Russian side about the aim of these movements."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry also discussed Ukraine by phone Monday, a day after holding talks in Paris, the Russian foreign ministry said.
A senior U.S. official said Lavrov had promised Kerry that a division of Russian troops would be pulled back; a division generally consists of thousands of troops.
"Now there have been reports of possible drawdowns of Russian military forces from the border. We haven't seen that yet, but if they turn out to be accurate, that would be a good thing," White House spokesman Jay Carney said.
Concerns of a possible invasion of eastern Ukraine – home to many ethnic Russians – were stoked by the large numbers of troops Russia had along the Ukrainian border for what Moscow said were military exercises.
One Russian battalion – about 500 troops – that had been sent to the Rostov region next to Ukraine was being withdrawn to its permanent base in the central Samara region, Russian news agencies quoted the Defense Ministry as saying Monday.
Alexander Rozmaznin, deputy chief of the Ukrainian armed forces command center, also confirmed a drop in Russian troop numbers along the border.
In Kiev, meanwhile, Ukraine's acting president flatly rejected escalating Russian pressure to turn Ukraine into a loose federation.
"Russia's leadership should deal with problems in the Russian Federation, and not with Ukraine's problems," Ukraine's acting president Oleksandr Turchinov said. "It is Ukrainians that should dictate the form of the new constitution and how the country is structured."
Medvedev, who led a delegation of Cabinet ministers on a surprise visit to Crimea, pledged that Russia would quickly boost salaries and pensions and pour in resources to improve education, health care and local infrastructure.
But making no mistake about Russia's view of the peninsula, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted a photo of himself upon arrival with the words "Crimea is ours, and that's that."
Russia's defense minister, meanwhile, announced that all Crimean men of conscription age will get a deferral from the draft for one year.
Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in March after a hastily called referendum just two weeks after Russian forces took control of the Black Sea region. Ukraine and the West have rejected the vote.
The annexation came after Ukraine's president, Viktor Yanukovych, was ousted in February and fled to Russia following months of protests. Russia claims the ouster was a coup and that the new Ukrainian authorities are nationalist fascists who will abuse Ukraine's large ethnic Russian population.
To keep its influence over eastern and southern Ukraine, Russia has pushed for Ukraine to become a federation where regions would have broad powers. The U.S. says it's up to Ukrainians to determine the structure of their government, not Moscow.
Medvedev said Russia will create a special economic zone in Crimea – a peninsula of 2 million people – that will include incentives for business with lower taxes and simpler rules, and will develop the region as a top tourist destination.
"We must create a new investment history for Crimea, which will be more successful than what it has been," Medvedev said.
Medvedev particularly emphasized the need to ensure a stable power supply for the peninsula. Crimea currently gets about 80 percent of its electricity and a similar share of its water from Ukraine, and power cutoffs last week raised fears that the Ukrainian government could use energy as a weapon to bargain with Russia.
Medvedev said Russia already has made sure that Crimea has enough backup power capacity to ensure an uninterrupted electricity supply. He added that Russia will work on long-term solutions to Crimea's energy problem that could involve linking the region to Russia's power grid or developing local power generation.
In Kiev, a member of the radical nationalist group Right Sector was detained late Monday over his involvement in a shooting near a restaurant adjacent to Independence Square, which saw many of the protests that culminated in Yanukovych's ouster. Many activists have remained encamped there and have signaled their intent to remain until the election of what they deem to be a legitimate government.
Officials said a city government official was among three people injured in the incident. Police later surrounded the Dnepr hotel in central Kiev, which Right Sector has commandeered as it headquarters, in an effort to persuade the group to hand over any weapons in its possession.
Isachenkov reported from Moscow. Associated Press writers Jim Heintz in Moscow, Nedra Pickler in Washington and Matthew Lee in Tel Aviv, Israel, contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_UKRAINE
 
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5.	NATO Plans More Support For East Europeans Worried By Crimea
(REUTERS 01 APR 14) ... Adrian Croft
 
BRUSSELS – NATO will decide new steps on Tuesday to reinforce eastern European countries worried by Russia's annexation of Crimea, and on how to bolster Ukraine's armed forces.
Diplomats said NATO foreign ministers will look at options ranging from stepped-up military exercises and sending more forces to eastern members states, to the permanent basing of alliance forces there – a step Moscow would view as provocative.
Ministers from the 28 alliance members are meeting in Brussels for the first time since Russia's military occupation and annexation of Ukraine's Crimea region caused the worst East-West crisis since the Cold War.
While the United States and its allies have made clear they will not intervene militarily in Ukraine, which does not belong to NATO, they have scrambled to reassure anxious NATO members in eastern Europe, particularly ex-Soviet republics in the Baltics, that they are sheltered by the alliance's security umbrella.
The United States has increased the number of U.S. aircraft in regular NATO air patrols over the Baltic States and beefed up a previously planned training exercise with the Polish air force.
U.S. Ambassador to NATO Douglas Lute said the ministers, including Secretary of State John Kerry, would discuss further measures to reassure the eastern European allies.
"They will talk about ... what more can be done to amplify the measures that have been taken already and to sustain them over time so that these measures are not simply short-term gestures," Lute told a news conference.
Since 1999, when it began admitting former members of the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact, NATO has had a self-imposed restriction on permanently basing alliance forces in eastern Europe. However, Poland and Romania have agreed to host parts of the U.S. anti-ballistic missile shield and NATO air forces take turns to provide air cover over the Baltic states.
A senior NATO diplomat said the Crimean crisis would probably lead to the issue of permanent bases being discussed. "I think that these are the sorts of things that ministers are likely to talk about in the next couple of days," he said.
The ministers' meeting continues on Wednesday, although it is due to discuss Afghanistan then.
Flaunting Russia's Grip
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev flaunted Russia's grip on Crimea by flying to the region and holding a government meeting there on Monday. But in a gesture that could ease tension, Moscow said it had pulled some troops back from near Ukraine's eastern border.
Ben Rhodes, White House deputy national security adviser, told reporters last week that the United States would increase temporary deployments of ground and naval forces to NATO allies in eastern Europe. "We expect other European partners to step up and join us in doing so," he said.
U.S. forces in Europe have fallen from just over 300,000 in the final years of the Cold War to about 100,000 in 2005. The number is estimated at about 80,000 in 2014, including 14,000 civilians, according to the U.S. military's European Command.
Many European allies have slashed military spending in response to the financial crisis and the United States also recently unveiled cuts. Washington is pressing European allies to reverse the cuts, but is likely to face an uphill struggle.
Ministers will review NATO's cooperation with Russia, but it was unclear if they would announce further steps on Tuesday.
NATO announced soon after the Crimean crisis broke that it would no longer hold lower-level meetings with Russian counterparts and would suspend planning for a joint mission linked to Syrian chemical weapons.
NATO and Russian ambassadors could continue to meet but "other forms of practical cooperation, military cooperation are likely to be in the deep freeze for the time being," one senior diplomatic source said.
At a meeting with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytsia, the NATO ministers are also expected to offer help to make Ukraine's armed forces more efficient.
Ukraine has sent NATO "a huge list of equipment requests" which had been forwarded to individual allies for them to decide on what they could do, a senior NATO official said.
Ministers are expected to agree to step up cooperation with Ukraine's armed forces, which already includes training officers, holding joint exercises and promoting reforms.
Diplomats said they expected no discussion this week on whether the Crimean crisis would put Georgian and Ukrainian membership of NATO back on the agenda. Possible future expansion of NATO will be discussed at another meeting in June.
A divided NATO reached a compromise at a 2008 summit, declaring that the former Soviet republics of Georgia and Ukraine would one day join the alliance, but without setting them on an immediate path to membership.
Georgia's membership prospects were put on ice after it fought a war with Russia later that year while Ukraine's former pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovich, ousted in February, ditched the goal of joining NATO in 2010.
Additional reporting by Jeff Mason, Steve Holland and Phil Stewart in Washington; editing by David Stamp.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/01/us-ukraine-crisis-nato-idUSBREA2U1UF20140401
 
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ASIA – PACIFIC:
6.	Poor Coordination Led To Flawed Search For Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370
The Search Area Shifted Abruptly on Friday After Authorities More Fully Merged Two Investigative Strands
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 01 APR 14) ... Andy Pasztor and Jon Ostrower
 
Lapses in coordination among countries and companies trying to find Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 led to three days of searches in an area hundreds of miles from where investigators now believe the plane is likely to have gone down, people familiar with the matter said.
The search area shifted abruptly on Friday after authorities more fully merged two investigative strands by international teams of experts that had largely been working separately to estimate where in the southern Indian Ocean naval forces should be looking for wreckage.
One team's calculations of the plane's likely speed and rate of fuel consumption were based on radar data and aircraft-performance modeling. Another team worked separately for at least several days using satellite data to calculate the plane's likely trajectory, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The failure to promptly coordinate the analyses raises questions about the flow of information among the many participants in the multinational probe, particularly in the process of identifying the initial search area in the Indian Ocean.
The previous search area was based primarily on the satellite analysis. The search area shifted about 700 miles northeast after investigators combined the satellite analysis with updated speed and fuel-consumption calculations, these people said.
The result provided "the most credible path" and the point at which "the aircraft is likely to have crashed into the water," according to Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.
Malaysian and Australian government officials have said the decision to shift the focus of the hunt in the Indian Ocean closer to the coast of Australia – after more than three days of fruitless searches in the previous location – was based on "updated advice" from an international technical team assisting Malaysia.
People familiar with the Malaysian-led probe said it was an evolving process and investigators shared all relevant information with international partners. But Malaysian officials didn't feel it was their role to ensure that foreign experts were sharing refined data among themselves, one of these people said.
Last week, the acting transport minister told reporters that despite the setbacks, "I do not think that we would have done anything differently" in searching for the plane.
"They don't have the necessary structure for inter-agency coordination," said James Keith, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Malaysia from 2007 to 2010. "It has exposed their lack of preparation to deal with such a disaster."
Boeing Co., which built the missing 777-200ER aircraft and calculated fuel consumption, has declined to comment on its work in the investigation.
A spokeswoman for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, which contributed to the speed estimate, said "the teams are working together and concurrently on various aspects of the data," without elaborating. British air-accident investigators, who are providing technical advice to Malaysia, declined to comment.
The announcement of the revised search area was prompted by a new analysis of how fast the plane may have been flying while it was being tracked by Malaysian military radar after disappearing from civilian radar screens on March 8. The work helped investigators and search teams better estimate where the jet likely ran out of fuel.
Among the entities involved in the latest analysis were the NTSB and Boeing.
But those calculations effectively were done separately from earlier work sketching out a likely trajectory performed by Inmarsat PLC, a British satellite operator, said the two people familiar with the matter.
Inmarsat, which was advising British air-safety experts assisting the Malaysians, was "a long way removed" from the international team's work and analysis, one of these people said.
On March 24, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak announced that based on Inmarsat's novel analysis of satellite data – briefed to him just hours earlier by the British Air Accidents Investigation Branch – the plane's flight "ended in the southern Indian Ocean" and "far from any possible landing sites."
Around that time, Malaysian Defense Minister and acting transportation chief Hishammuddin Hussein said Malaysia set up "an international working group," including the NTSB and Boeing, to refine Inmarsat data and "more accurately determine the final position" of Flight 370.
"Inmarsat is proud to see our model being applied and refined with additional data," said company senior Vice President Chris McLaughlin. "We are not proprietary where search and rescue is the goal."
Inmarsat and the British investigators used assumptions in calculating where the plane likely ran out of fuel; those included typical ground speeds of 400 to 450 knots. The faster Flight 370 flew, the shorter its overall range would have been.
"The previous analysis had a range of possible assumptions about the speed, and those assumptions have now been refined," Mr. Dolan told reporters when announcing the revised search area Friday.
Referring to Inmarsat's work and the speed analysis, he said: "Bringing those two together gives you the most credible path."
Before the new search area was identified, Inmarsat had "no Malaysian radar data showing [Flight 370 was] faster" than 450 knots, according to one person briefed on the issue.
By the end of last week, however, four days after the prime minister's announcement, the international team of technical experts concluded that the plane had indeed been flying faster than 450 knots and therefore used more fuel and likely went down earlier. Officials haven't said how fast they believe the plane was flying.
Much of the information contributed by outside experts to the investigation goes into "the pool and [is] refined by others," said a person familiar with the probe, adding that those contributors often have "no right" to any of the subsequent analysis, under the investigation's current structure.
The assumptions used to approximate the presumed final location of Flight 370 are still guided by little hard data. Even with the now-refined speed data from the 777 as it flew back across the Malaysian peninsula, investigators "don't know what speed [Flight 370] was doing after it left Malaysian [military] radar," this person said. "It's a very imprecise thing."
Richard Paddock and Robert Wall contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304886904579471272412709930
 
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7.	China Snubs Japan Over International Warship Gathering
(AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE 31 MAR 14)
 
TOKYO – Japan’s navy has not been invited to join an international flotilla of warships taking part in a ceremonial event in China, an official said Monday, the latest snub in a row between Asia’s two largest economies.
The international fleet review, being held to mark the 65th anniversary of the Chinese navy, will see warships take part in a sail-past off the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao next month, according to Japanese media reports.
“We have not received an invitation,” a spokesman for Japan’s Marine Self-Defense Force (MSDF) told AFP.
Japanese media speculated that Beijing’s move was intended to punish Tokyo, with relations mired in acrimony over historical differences and a territorial dispute.
The Nikkei business daily reported that Washington was considering boycotting the event to show its displeasure with China.
“We are prepared to participate in the fleet review and prepared to send our escort ship if we are invited,” the Japanese official said. He added Japan had not been invited to a similar gathering hosted by China five years ago.
The move comes ahead of a visit to China and Japan this week by Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel after he hosts a meeting of Asian defense ministers in Hawaii from Tuesday to Thursday.
While Japan appears to have been left off the guest list for the fleet review, it has been invited to a naval symposium that is being held in Qingdao at the same time, involving top naval officials from more than 20 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Japan has not yet decided whether to send MSDF chief of staff Katsutoshi Kawano, the official said.
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140331/DEFREG03/303310029
 
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8.	N. Korea Prepares Missile Launch, But No Imminent Sign Of Atomic Test
(YONHAP NEWS AGENCY (S.KOREA) 01 APR 14) ... Kim Eun-jung
 
SEOUL –North Korea has imposed a no-sail zone in the East Sea for domestic vessels in a move seen as preparations for additional missile launches, military officials said Tuesday, though Pyongyang has not shown any imminent sign of a nuclear test.
The latest move follows the North's live-fire drill held near the tense western sea border on Monday, which prompted South Korea to fire hundreds of shells in response to shots that fell in its waters.
"North Korea has internally set the no-sail zone in waters near Wonsan this week to control its vessels," the source said on condition of anonymity. "It is highly likely that the North may fire ballistic missiles."
   Wonsan is located on the southeastern coast, where missile and rocket launches have taken place in recent weeks.
Pyongyang last week fired off two mid-range Rodong missiles, drawing condemnation from the United Nations Security Council. The ballistic missiles, which are capable of carrying a simple nuclear warhead, flew about 650 kilometers before hitting eastern waters.
The communist state has claimed that its rocket and missile launches are "self-defensive military drills" to counter the "U.S. hostile policy," and a sharply pointed response against the ongoing military exercise between Seoul and Washington. It also threatened to conduct "a new form of nuclear test" to bolster its nuclear deterrence.
South Korean and U.S. forces have stepped up their surveillance on the North Korean military to detect signs of missile launches and an atomic test at its test facilities, but there is no imminent sign of a nuclear test, Seoul's defense ministry said.
"North Korea has prepared an underground explosion at a horizontal tunnel dug deep inside of a mountain," ministry spokesman Kim Min-seok said in a briefing. "To conduct a real atomic test, additional equipment and devices are needed. But no such movement has been detected yet."
Pyongyang conducted three atomic tests in 2006, 2009 and 2013, all of which were conducted at an underground testing site in Punggye-ri in the northeastern region.
In regard to the possibilities of an underground explosion or an airborne testing, Kim said the North may find it hard to conduct a test in this atmosphere because it could bring a strong backlash from the international community due to radioactive fallout. An underground test would yield similar effects regardless of its internal designs, he said.
Experts have speculated that the North's "new form" of nuclear test could use different testing platforms or new uranium-enrichment technology.
In November, the South Korean military said the North is believed to be capable of producing nuclear weapons from enriched uranium, though it failed to detect the fission materials used in the third nuclear test in February 2013.
Seoul officials have been on high alert ahead of several significant national anniversaries scheduled in April as the North could take noticeable actions to consolidate internal unity.
Pyongyang plans to hold the first session of the Supreme People's Assembly on April 19; celebrate the April 15 birthday of Kim Il-sung, the country's late founding leader and grandfather of current leader Kim Jong-un; and commemorate the birthday of the Korean People's Army on April 25.
"North Korea has claimed the ballistic missile launches are part of its military drills, but they are apparently aimed at having an external effect," a senior military official said on condition of anonymity. "Announcing the no-sail zone in the East Sea following the large-scale firing drill in Yellow Sea shows signs of additional provocations."
   The communist state test-fired Rodong missiles capable of striking Japan in 1993 and now is estimated to have 200 of them. It also has about 600 Scud short-range missiles that can hit all parts of South Korea.
Following Monday's drill, the North Korean batteries on its western shores have not shown any special movement.
Between Feb. 21 and March 31, Pyongyang fired nearly 600 projectiles, including missiles, rockets and artillery, in a show of force against the ongoing joint military drills between Seoul and Washington. The two-month combat field training Foal Eagle runs through April 18.
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/northkorea/2014/04/01/68/0401000000AEN20140401003600315F.html
 
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9.	Beijing And Manila In Dispute Over Reef
(NEW YORK TIMES 31 MAR 14) ... Jane Perlez
 
BEIJING – China accused the Philippines on Monday of illegally occupying Chinese territory after a Filipino vessel outmaneuvered the Chinese Coast Guard and resupplied a ship that has been stranded for 15 years on the Second Thomas Shoal, a tiny reef in the South China Sea.
Chinese ships prevented the Philippines from resupplying the boat and its eight-man military crew in early March, but on Saturday a Filipino vessel manned by troops managed to keep the Chinese at bay by going into shallow waters and lifting food onto the stranded ship.
“This is a political provocation,” the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesman, Hong Lei, said at a regular briefing on Monday, adding that the Philippines was “hyping” its “illegal occupation” by filing a case on Sunday with the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague.
The submission by the Philippines argues that the Second Thomas Shoal – known as Ayungin in the Philippines and Ren’ai Reef in China – is 105 nautical miles from the Philippines, well inside the 200 nautical miles of a Philippine exclusive economic zone that allows the Philippines to exploit the waters around the shoal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, the brief says.
The Philippine secretary of foreign affairs, Albert del Rosario, said at a news conference in Manila on Sunday that a ruling on the submission – which includes 4,000 pages and 40 maps and was written by a Washington law firm – was expected in 2015.
The State Department noted the filing Sunday and said the United States supported the peaceful resolution of territorial disputes in the South China Sea.
The cat-and-mouse maneuvers between the Philippines, an American ally with little naval capacity, and China, which has a fast-expanding navy, have captured attention for what they might foretell about future rivalries in the South China Sea.
China claims about 80 percent of the South China Sea, a vital waterway for world trade.
President Obama is scheduled to visit the Philippines during a tour of Asian allies in April, a trip that does not include China but is bound to highlight China’s projection of power in the South China Sea and the East China Sea.
In the past year, China has intensified its surveillance operations in the South China Sea, dispatching fishing vessels, coast guard ships and navy ships to keep watch.
To publicize its determination to keep the Second Thomas Shoal, the Philippines invited reporters on board the government vessel that was sent to resupply the Sierra Madre, a rusted warship that has been grounded on the reef since 1999. The warship and its crew had been kept in place as a way to reinforce the Philippine claim to the shoal.
China says that the shoal is part of the Nansha Islands, which it says are inside the so-called nine-dash line that runs deep into the waters around Southeast Asia. The line was first drawn by the Nationalist government in the 1940s and has been used by the Communist government to justify its claims to a wide area of islands and sea.
As the resupply vessel approached the Sierra Madre on Saturday, two Chinese ships approached the Filipino vessel and sent a radio message saying that it should leave immediately and “stop all” illegal activities. The Filipino vessel kept going and found waters too shallow for the Chinese ships so that the resupply operation could go ahead, Reuters reported.
After food and water were heaved onto the Sierra Madre, the crew on board left and a new crew began its rotation.
The Global Times, a Chinese state-run newspaper with nationalist views, said in an editorial on Monday that the “small and weak” Philippines had become the vanguard force of “provoking China.” It warned that China had the ability to force Filipino soldiers off the reef at any time, “like taking thieves away.”
Bree Feng contributed research.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/world/asia/beijing-and-manila-in-dispute-over-reef.html
 
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10.	Old U.S. Ship Home To Filipinos In China Standoff
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 31 MAR 14) ... Jim Gomez
 
ABOARD BRP SIERRA MADRE, Spratly Islands – On board the crumbling carcass of this World War II-era warship, Filipino marine 1st Lt. Mike Pelotera and his eight men make their way to a mid-level deck to raise the Philippine flag up a leaning pole and then salute it. Across the calm, turquoise waters, two Chinese coast guard ships lurk, looking on.
Its hull riddled with holes and rust, the BRP Sierra Madre has become a fragile symbol of the Philippines' claim to Second Thomas Shoal, an eight-kilometer (five-mile) -long submerged coral outcrop that has been disputed by China and the Philippines for years.
It's a lonely ship, where Pelotera and his team wage a daily battle against isolation.
"There's a point where you tend to feel low," Pelotera said of the challenges of his team's four-month deployment at the reef, where there is no land to stand on and nothing to stare at all day but sea. "But we have to kill the boredom because there is an important mission to fulfill."
The Philippine navy inherited the former U.S. tank-landing ship USS Harnett County in 1976, and ran it deliberately aground at Second Thomas Shoal in 1999.
A Chinese frigate and maritime surveillance ships arrived last year to press China's claim to the shoal, which is believed to be sitting atop undersea oil and gas reserves. The move was an example of China's increasing assertiveness in the South China Sea, something that is alarming the United States, Manila's longtime ally.
Analysts say China's strategy is to slowly take possession of islands and outcrops in the South China Sea, using intimidation where necessary but avoiding any major confrontation. Its military might and economic dominance in the region mean it can push its weight around with little fear.
Second Thomas Shoal and the nearby Spratly Islands lie about 120 miles (190 kilometers) from the western Philippine province of Palawan, and about 700 miles (more than 1,000 kilometers) from southern China. China's foreign ministry says Beijing has "indisputable sovereignty" over the shoal.
The Sierra Madre is now effectively a shipwreck, but the Philippine military has not decommissioned it. This makes the ship an extension of the government and means any attack on the ship is tantamount to an assault against the Philippines. The Chinese ships are around 5 miles (8 kilometers) from the outpost, clearly visible to those on board.
When Associated Press journalists and other members of the media were allowed to board the ship over the weekend, the marines went about their day, washing dishes and giving the visitors a short tour. The slow strain of Kid Rock's late 1990's song "Only God Knows" played from an old stereo set.
"We're marines," Pelotera said in an interview. "We can adapt to life anywhere."
Another marine, Cpl. Sheffrey Luna, said people should look beyond the ship's disrepair.
"They should see the determination of the soldiers in it," he said. "If you're not determined here, where everything you see is water, you won't last long."
In the last 15 years, the Sierra Madre has slowly crumbled, beaten by the sun, sea and storms.
Its main deck, used as a helipad before, is now home to an upturned lifeboat and toppled iron poles. Doors and wooden scraps cover holes and weak deck sections that could collapse and hurl a marine down into the cavernous cargo hold. Its towering mast is heavily rusted and could be toppled by the next big storm.
Three weeks ago, the Chinese succeeded in blocking for the first time a Philippine boat bringing troops and supplies to the Sierra Madre.
Manila deployed a civilian boat last week with a fresh batch of marines and 10 tons of food. In a bid to draw global attention to what Philippine officials have called China's bullying tactics, they invited more than a dozen journalists, TV cameramen and photographers to come along on the 30-hour-plus journey from the Philippine mainland.
Two Chinese coast guard ships tried to block the slow-moving vessel, with one cutting dangerously through the Philippine boat's path twice. The Chinese coast guard warned the boat by radio to turn back, saying it was illegally venturing into Chinese territory. The Chinese ships blew their horns continuously, but the boat maneuvered toward a shallow approach to the shoal dotted with submerged rocky outcrops, preventing the Chinese from continuing.
Carl Thayer, a professor at the University of New South Wales and an expert on the dispute, said China is trying to wear the Philippines down. "China is mainly motivated to squelch the Philippines and its vocal and legal opposition to Chinese assertiveness, less this inspire other regional states to do the same," Thayer said. "Bit by bit, China hopes to condition regional states into accepting its hegemony."
Philippine navy Lt. Ferdinand Gato, who led the resupply mission, smiled as the boat approached the Sierra Madre, with the outgoing marines, some of them sporting beards, waving and smiling on the deck. He had served as a gunnery officer of the warship during military campaigns against Muslim insurgents and Abu Sayyaf extremists in the mid-1990s.
A regional military commander, Lt. Gen. Roy Deveraturda, awarded Pelotera and his men with bronze cross medals Monday for their work on the Sierra Madre.
"You can now shave and have a haircut," he told the marines.
He said he was heartened when he asked each of them if they were willing to return to the Philippine ship on the shoal. "They told me, ‘anytime, sir.'"
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_SOUTH_CHINA_SEA_DISPUTED_SHOAL
 
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11.	Japan Relaxes Arms Export Regime To Fortify Defense
(REUTERS 01 APR 14) ... Kiyoshi Takenaka and Nobuhiro Kubo
 
TOKYO – Japan eased its weapons export restrictions on Tuesday in the first major overhaul of arms transfer policy in nearly half a century, as Prime Minister Shinzo Abe seeks to fortify ties with allies and bolster the domestic defense industry.
In a move which alarmed China, where bitter memories of Japan's past militarism run deep, the government decided to allow arms exports and participation in joint weapons development and production when they serve international peace and Japan's security.
That is a shift from a decades-old policy of banning all weapons exports in principle, although quite a few exceptions to the rule have been made over the years, such as the transfer of arms technology to the United States, Japan's closest ally.
"This is beneficial for Japanese companies in that they can take part in joint development and joint production and have access to cutting-edge technology," Takushoku University Professor Heigo Sato said.
"If you live in a closed market like the Japanese defense industry does, you clearly lag behind in technological development."
But even under the new regime, Japan is to focus mainly on non-lethal defense gear such as patrol ships and mine detectors and says it has no plan to export such weapons as tanks and fighter jets.
The move comes when Sino-Japanese ties have been chilled due to a territorial dispute over a group of East China Sea islets and Abe's visit in December to Tokyo's Yasukuni Shrine, seen by critics as a symbol of Japan's wartime aggression.
"Japan's policy on military security concerns the region's stability. We pay great attention to this," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said at a daily news briefing.
"We request that the Japanese side learn lessons from history, earnestly respond to regional countries' strong concerns about the relevant issue ... and do more to benefit the region's peaceful development."
Japan's self-imposed restrictions on arms exports have virtually excluded defense contractors such as Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Kawasaki Heavy Industries and IHI from the overseas market and made it difficult for them to cut costs and keep abreast of technological development.
Competition Tough
Japan's defense budget slipped for a decade through 2012, raising concerns that some of the smaller and less diversified arms makers might be forced to go out of business.
The new export policy alone will unlikely help Japanese defense makers establish a big presence overseas, although some high-performance Japanese components, such diesel engines for ships, stand out among potential competitors.
"It's not as if Japanese (defense) goods will start selling right away because of this. The government still needs to play a leading role in their overseas expansion. Various governments are already competing fiercely out there," said Bonji Ohara, research fellow at the Tokyo Foundation, a think tank.
"Competition dictates prices. Of course, they cannot set the kind of prices they are setting for the domestic market," said Ohara, who once served as a Japanese navy attache in China.
One of Japan's potential defense gear exports is Kawasaki Heavy's submarine diesel engines, which do not require air and allows submarines to stay submerged for an extended period.
When Japanese Defence Ministry officials visited Australia last year, Canberra showed interest in them, a Japanese government official said.
Another one is ShinMaywa Industries' US-2 amphibious aircraft. India is already in talks with the Japanese government for possible procurement.
Under the new rules, Japan still bans weapons exports to countries that are involved in international conflicts and shipments that breach U.N. Security Council resolutions, such as exports to North Korea and Iran.
In announcing the new rules, Japan stressed that it would remain a nation "striving for peace" and screen each case to see if exports should be allowed, a move to assure its neighbors that Japan is not taking a path to a military power.
Besides the easing of arms export rules, Abe last year raised Japan's defence budget for the first time in 11 years and aims to lift its ban on exercising the right of collective self-defence, or aiding an ally under attack.
These moves, coupled with his Yasukuni visit, prompted criticism in China that Japan is lurching toward militarism.
Under its post-war, pacifist constitution, Japan drew up the "three principles" on arms exports in 1967, banning sales to countries with communist governments or those involved in international conflicts or subject to U.N. sanctions.
Over time, the rules became tantamount to a blanket ban on exports, but that later became riddled with exceptions.
Additional reporting by Sui-Lee Wee and Ben Blanchard in Beijing; Editing by Linda Sieg, Nick Macfie, Michael Perry and Ron Popeski.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/01/us-japan-defence-idUSBREA2U1VF20140401
 
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MIDEAST:
12.	Converging Interests May Lead To Cooperation Between Israel And Gulf States
(NEW YORK TIMES 01 APR 14) ... Helene Cooper
 
JERUSALEM – Looking for a potential bright spot in the roiling upheaval of the Middle East, American and Israeli officials meeting in Jerusalem on Monday held out the hope of growing security cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf.
That idea, basically unthinkable a few years ago, could be more plausible now because of widespread worry over Iran’s nuclear program, coupled with chaos in Syria and turmoil in Egypt. Even though Saudi Arabia and other gulf countries have long viewed Israel as the Arab world’s biggest adversary, the rise of threats they all share in common is creating a new urgency to find common ground, the officials said.
Emerging from meetings with his Israeli counterparts on Monday, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that discussions included “an outreach to other partners who may not have been willing to be partners in the past.”
He added, “What I mean is the Gulf states in particular, who heretofore may not have been as open-minded to the potential for cooperation with Israel, in any way.” While General Dempsey did not go into specifics, other American military officials said that possibilities include intelligence-sharing, joint counterterrorism exercises and perhaps looking for how Israeli and Saudi troops could jointly work on the training of Syrian opposition fighters.
“World jihadists are not fighting only against Israel,” said Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, chief of the Israeli Defense Forces, adding that it would behoove neighboring states to look for ways to combat common enemies.
No one is talking about scheduling peace conferences between Israel and the Gulf countries just yet. Despite a growing number of interests in common, the obstacles that would prevent a public embrace of Israel by Arab governments are all still in place.
Most notably, Arab states have long insisted on the resolution of the Palestinians’ dispute with Israel before any wider peace initiative could be taken up. And on Monday, the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian talks were so bleak that Secretary of State John Kerry made an unscheduled visit to Israel to try to salvage the process.
When asked about common goals between Israel and the Gulf, Yousef al-Otaiba, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States, notably did not mention the word “Israel” in his response: “The U.S. and the regional allies cannot find a solution to Syria, stabilize Egypt and halt the Iranian threat without the other,” Mr. al-Otaiba said. “There is simply no way around working together to resolve these issues.”
Still, American officials note that since the Arab Spring uprisings began more than three years ago, Israel and the Gulf countries have increasingly been voicing similar concerns.
For instance, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates share comparable views on the rise and fall of Mohammed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. They all were far more comfortable with the government of President Hosni Mubarak, and were dismayed at what they viewed as an abandonment of Mr. Mubarak by the United States in the face of the initial Tahrir Square uprising. The Saudis encouraged the Egyptian military’s ouster of the Muslim Brotherhood from power last year, and the subsequent crackdown on its supporters, despite American diplomatic efforts to avert both moves. Israel, for its part, is satisfied to have the Egyptian military back at the country’s helm.
The Egyptian-Israeli “peace treaty and its architecture is part of the overarching strategy of the ruling elite in Egypt,” a senior Israeli military official said on Monday, though he noted that the treaty is still not popular with much of the Egyptian public, the military government is “committed to that for many good reasons.” He spoke of an “alignment of interests, coupled with common enemies” like Al Qaeda and global jihadists that could change longstanding alliances in the region.
Another thing potentially bringing Israel and Gulf states together is their intensifying criticism of American foreign policy. When President Obama met in Riyadh with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah, for example, he heard the same disquiet over the continuing talks on Iran’s nuclear program that General Dempsey heard on Monday in Jerusalem.
A Defense Department official, who like others agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, noted that “there’s a convergence of agreement between them, and in opposition to what we’re doing.”
Both Israeli and Saudi Arabian officials have expressed fears that any American rapprochement with Iran could harm their own interests in the region.
“Close your eyes, and you’re not sure if it’s an Israeli or Saudi speaking,” said Daniel Levy, Middle East director at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
The dynamic puts the United States in the unusual position of trying to coax cooperation between adversaries by using their own opposition to American policy as bait – a tricky diplomatic maneuver at best, one Obama administration official acknowledged on Monday.
“Let’s just say I’m not sure this is the best way for us to get these guys to play on the same page,” he said. Then he added: “But hey, whatever works, works.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/world/middleeast/converging-interests-may-lead-to-cooperation-between-israel-and-gulf-states.html
 
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AFGHANISTAN:
13.	U.S. Seeking Buyers For Old Military Equipment
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 31 MAR 14) ... Kathy Gannon
 
KABUL, Afghanistan – The United States is trying to sell or dispose of billions of dollars in military hardware, including sophisticated and highly specialized mine resistant vehicles as it packs up to leave Afghanistan after 13 years of war, officials said Monday.
But the efforts are complicated in a region where relations between neighboring countries are mired in suspicion and outright hostility.
A statement by the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan said Islamabad is interested in buying used U.S. equipment. The statement said Pakistan's request is being reviewed but any equipment it receives, including the coveted mine resistant vehicles, will not likely come from its often angry neighbor Afghanistan.
An earlier U.S. Forces statement was definite: Pakistan would not get any U.S. equipment being sold out of Afghanistan.
Mark Wright, Department of Defense spokesman, told The Associated Press in a telephone interview that the U.S. would like to sell to "nearby countries" the equipment that is too costly to ship back home.
Among the items for sale are 800 MRAPs, highly sophisticated Mine Resistant Ambush Protected armored vehicles. Selling them off could mean a savings of as much as $500 million and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues, he said. The computerized MRAPs have been used by U.S. service personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan, as protection against the deadly roadside bombs used relentlessly by insurgents.
According to an Associated Press count at least 2,176 members of the U.S. military have died in Afghanistan since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001. Many were killed by roadside bombs.
Still it seems certain that Afghanistan's nearest neighbor Pakistan won't be getting any of the excess 800 MRAPs that are up for sale by the departing U.S. military, although roadside bombs have been one of the deadliest weapons used by Pakistani insurgents against an estimated 170,000 Pakistani soldiers deployed in the tribal regions that border Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Earlier this month the head of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford told a Pentagon briefing that Pakistan would be interested in getting MRAPs.
A statement issued on Monday by the U.S. Embassy said the U.S. is "currently reviewing" Pakistan's request for a variety of items under what the U.S. calls its "excess defense articles" - a category that includes the 800 MRAPs in Afghanistan.
Reports that Pakistan might be interested in the MRAPs raised hackles in Kabul, with the authorities saying all the equipment should stay in Afghanistan.
"We are strongly opposed to any deal in this regard without consultation with Afghanistan and we have clearly conveyed this to the U.S," Karzai's spokesman Aimal Faizi told the AP on Monday. "It is in contradiction to the cooperative norms between strategic partners, Afghanistan and the U.S."
In a statement last week aimed at easing Kabul's concerns that no military equipment from Afghanistan would go to Pakistan, Dunford said "our commitment to the Afghan people and the Afghan National Security Forces is unwavering."
Afghan President Hamid Karzai routinely lashes out at the United States for not attacking Pakistani territory where he says insurgents waging war against his government have found a safe sanctuary.
He has said the last 12 years of war should not have been fought on Afghan territory, but rather in the areas where insurgents hide, a reference to Pakistan. Islamabad routinely denies Karzai's accusations that it aids insurgents while at the same time saying its tribal areas that border Afghanistan are infested with insurgents.
More than 4,000 Pakistani soldiers have been killed in the protracted battle against Pakistani insurgents hiding in the tribal areas.
Wright said the United States has also been trying to dispose of $6 billion of non-military hardware - such as desks, chairs, tables and generators - ahead of the final withdrawal of U.S. and NATO combat troops by the end of this year.
He said just this month the U.S. military received approval from Afghanistan's Finance Ministry to sell off the non-lethal items to Afghan vendors. However Wright also said even non-lethal items could pose a threat and as a result some of it would be destroyed and sold to Afghans as scrap.
The U.S. began selling scrapped equipment to Afghans last year and made more than $42 million.
Wright said the reason for junking the equipment first is that "many non-military items have timing equipment or other components in them that can pose a threat. For example, timers can be attached to explosives. Treadmills, stationary bikes, many household appliances and devices, have timers."
As a result they are sold as junk, which has infuriated Afghan vendors who told The Associated Press that they could make more money selling functional equipment. They also said timers are available for the equivalent of $1 making it unlikely insurgents would pay upward of $100 for a functioning treadmill just to get a timer.
Kathy Gannon is AP Special Regional Correspondent for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_AFGHANISTAN_US
 
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ARCTIC:
14.	Ice Exercise 2014 Demobilizes Ice Camp Nautilus And Shifts To Next Phase
(NAVY LIVE BLOG 31 MAR 14) ... Larry Estrada
 
Preparing USS New Mexico (SSN 779) and USS Hampton (SSN 767) started in late 2013 with the installation of specially designed sensors by the Arctic Submarine Laboratory and training for the unique challenges and procedures required to transit and operate in the Arctic.
New Mexico and Hampton each departed their respective homeports in late February and transited to the Arctic from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. For these two submarine crews, the Arctic training and employment of special sensors enabled them to transit distinctly different routes to the Arctic. They arrived at Ice Camp Nautilus on schedule, demonstrating the U.S. Submarine Force’s ability to operate in the Arctic using two different classes of submarines from different operational fleets. With embarked arctic operations specialists on each submarine assisting the commanding officer and crew, Arctic Submarine Laboratory continued to expand its operational knowledge of the Arctic.
This initial phase of ICEX 2014 also included planned environmental data collection and testing during the transit north. All of these objectives were met including a coordinated rendezvous and verification of the unique submarine tracking range installed and operated at Nautilus. The last Ice Exercise was conducted in 2011, and the ability to plan, coordinate and mobilize a remote camp and install a temporary tracking range that worked on the first day on the frozen Arctic is a significant accomplishment for the Chief of Naval Operations (OPNAV N97) Submarine Arctic Warfare Program. The effort is much more complex than the appearance that plywood living shelters might give in pictures.
The second phase of ICEX 2014 (although abbreviated) included unique submarine surfacing and diving evolutions through the ice and mooring to an open lead in the ice floe. Both submarine crews demonstrated the ability to operate below the ice canopy and when required locate a suitable area to surface. With limited test days, some Sonar test objectives were met including one combat system test event. The ability to conduct these tests fully exercised the Ice Camp infrastructure, field parties and recovery evolutions including under-ice diving by the University of Washington (Applied Physics Lab). Despite the early demobilization, the Submarine Force and Arctic Submarine Laboratory met a critical objective of maintaining proficiency in conducting complex testing in the Arctic. Arctic Submarine Laboratory was able to partner with Lockheed-Martin and use a demonstration Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) workstation to receive secure message traffic and email, which was a first-ever accomplishment for an Ice Camp communication capability.
With New Mexico and Hampton resupplied with fresh food and repair parts using the logistics capability of the exercise, they departed Nautilus to focus on expanding operational experience in other regions of the Arctic and additional environmental data collection.
A diverse and multi-national team came together with more than a year of planning in order to execute the Ice Exercise. Besides Submarine Force, U.S. Atlantic Fleet (COMSUBLANT) and Submarine Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet (COMSUBPAC), Arctic Submarine Laboratory was supported by Submarine Squadron Eleven (CSS-11), Submarine Development Squadron Twelve (CSDS-12), the Royal Navy, Royal Canadian Navy, the Applied Physics Lab of University of Washington (APL/UW), Naval Undersea Warfare Center (NUWC), Applied Research Lab of University of Texas (ARL/UT), and Lockheed-Martin.
The Submarine Force has conducted operations in the Arctic for more than 60 years and is positioned to support national and strategic objectives in the Arctic if required. You can view some of the historical accomplishments in the Arctic in a timeline or in pictures at ASL’s website.
The Arctic’s significance in national defense has been recently highlighted in the following documents.
•	A National Strategy for the Arctic Region was released by the President in May 2013. It states that the United States will, “Seek to maintain and preserve the Arctic region as an area free of conflict, acting in concert with allies, partners, and other interested parties.
•	The Department of Defense 2013 Arctic Strategy paper listed two DoD objectives:
o	Ensure security, support safety, and promote defense cooperation; and
o	Prepare for a wide range of challenges.
•	The recently updated U.S. Navy Arctic Roadmap requires the Navy to be fully mission-capable in the Arctic.
The Submarine Arctic Warfare Program and ASL can serve as a model for other naval forces and DoD organizations to test and improve their own Arctic capabilities.
ICEX 2014 presented unique and untimely challenges and the team responded to frequently changing ice conditions in order to keep it operational. Before we concluded operations, we were able to host and provide an opportunity for the Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Jonathan Greenert, and a group of distinguished visitors to embark New Mexico. I know they will remember the experience for a long time. On March 27, Nautilus completed demobilization in a controlled fashion without loss of equipment and the ice floe restored to its original condition.
Larry Estrada is Director, Arctic Submarine Laboratory.
http://navylive.dodlive.mil/2014/03/31/ice-exercise-2014-demobilizes-ice-camp-nautilus-and-shifts-to-next-phase/
 
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AVIATION:
15.	U.S. GAO Sees $11.5 Billion Drop In Acquisition Cost Of Lockheed F-35
(REUTERS 01 APR 14)
 
WASHINGTON – The estimated acquisition cost of Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 fighter jet program dropped $11.5 billion over the past year, the congressional Government Accountability Office reported Monday in its annual report on U.S. arms programs.
The congressional watchdog agency said it now estimates the Pentagon will spend $332.3 billion over coming decades to develop the new radar-evading F-35 jet and buy a total of 2,457 aircraft, about 3.3 percent less than last year's estimate.
The new estimate was provided in fiscal year 2014 dollars.
The U.S. Defense Department's current estimate for the cost of developing and buying the F-35 is $392 billion, measured in 2012 dollars, although that projection may change when the Pentagon releases its own updated annual report on the acquisition costs of major weapons programs in mid-April.
It was not immediately clear why the GAO's estimate for the acquisition cost of the Pentagon's biggest weapons program is so much lower than the government's own projection, and GAO officials were not immediately available to comment.
Lockheed is developing three models of the F-35 for the U.S. military and eight countries that helped fund its development: Britain, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, Turkey, Italy and the Netherlands.
Israel and Japan have also placed orders, and South Korea this month said it also planned to buy the jet. Pratt & Whitney, a unit of United Technologies Corp, builds the single engine that powers for the new warplane.
The GAO's annual report on the 80 biggest U.S. weapons programs said the reduction in the estimated cost of the F-35 program was due "solely to efficiencies found within the program" since there was no decrease in quantities.
The F-35 program was one of 50 major weapons programs that saw costs go down a combined $31 billion in 2013, the GAO report said. It said the remaining 30 weapons programs reported higher combined cost increases of $43.5 billion.
The GAO reported noted that the U.S. military had already spent about $35 billion to buy 150 F-35 aircraft. It cited improvements in production by Lockheed, the prime contractor, but said the program still faced challenges with software and potential design changes.
The GAO report said the cost to operate and maintain the aircraft is estimated at over $1 trillion over the next decades, but said those estimates may come down as testing progresses and more concrete information becomes available.
The Pentagon's F-35 program office estimates the overall cost of operating and maintaining the jets will be closer to $857 billion.
Reporting by Andrea Shalal; Editing by Eric Walsh.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/01/us-lockheed-fighter-report-idUSBREA3002920140401
 
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16.	Boeing Backers Launch Growler Gambit
(POLITICO 31 MAR 14) ... Austin Wright
 
Boeing’s backers in Congress are kicking off a campaign to save one of the company’s fighter jet programs, an effort complete with behind-the-scenes lobbying and public petitions – and one that could face resistance from rival aerospace giant Lockheed Martin.
Two Missouri House members are planning to send a letter to the leaders of the congressional defense panels urging them to support funding for 22 additional EA-18G Growlers next fiscal year.
The proposal could cost more than $2 billion but would keep open a St. Louis production line that’s at risk of closing in 2016 – and allow Boeing to remain in the fighter jet business a few more years before ceding the market to Lockheed and its Texas-based F-35 Lightning II program.
Republican Ann Wagner and Democrat Lacy Clay are circulating the “dear colleague” letter, asking their fellow lawmakers to notify them by April 11 if they’d like to sign it.
The letter, obtained Monday by POLITICO, makes clear there are powerful parochial interests at stake: Boeing’s fighter jet programs, it says, support “American manufacturing, including 60,000 jobs, 800 different suppliers and vendors, and [provide] $3 billion in annual economic impact.”
At least 15 lawmakers have agreed to sign the letter, most of them from Missouri and Pennsylvania – both states where Boeing is the dominant defense contractor, bringing in billions of dollars in federal spending.
The Growler is an electronic warfare version of Boeing’s F/A-18E and F Super Hornet, a carrier-based fighter that’s been a staple of Navy aviation since the 1990s, with an older version flown in airshows by the Blue Angels.
Navy officials don’t plan to order any more Super Hornets – meaning the additional Growlers are the only way to keep fighter production going in St. Louis. In the coming decades, the military is set to shift nearly all of its funding for tactical fighters to Lockheed and its F-35, a futuristic stealth aircraft that comes in different variants for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.
The transition is expected to usher in a massive transfer of federal contracting dollars from Boeing’s hubs in the Midwest to Lockheed’s hubs in the South – but Boeing isn’t going down without a dogfight.
“From Boeing’s point of view, the single most important thing to understand is if they don’t get more planes, then their fighter line in St. Louis will close,” said industry consultant Loren Thompson, whose think tank is financed in part by both Boeing and Lockheed.
The center of U.S. fighter production in the future, he said, “will be focused on a mile-long plant in Fort Worth.”
Lockheed’s allies are working to hasten the shift: “If we’re going to talk about additional aircraft, we think it should be the F-35,” said one industry source whose company has a stake in the F-35 program.
Both Lockheed and Boeing have teams of in-house lobbyists and retain well-connected firms like the Monument Policy Group for Boeing and the Podesta Group for Lockheed. Boeing reported spending $3.7 million on lobbying activities during the fourth quarter of last year; Lockheed reported $3.4 million.
Asked whether Lockheed is doing anything to counter Boeing’s Growler push, company officials provided a boilerplate statement. “We believe the F-35 has the best capabilities to meet the national security needs of the U.S. military, and we’ll continue to have conversations with Congress to provide them the information they need,” said spokesman Gordon Johndroe.
Boeing officials also declined to provide specifics, with spokeswoman Meghan McCormick saying the company would “work with Congress to support an emerging Navy requirement for Growlers to provide essential electronic attack capabilities to carrier-based and expeditionary Navy and joint force squadrons.”
The company is planning a lobbying blitz on the issue on Capitol Hill this week, taking out ads in Washington-based newspapers, including POLITICO, and hosting a conference for its suppliers.
It also launched an online petition that touts the Growler as “low-cost” and “combat-proven” – two descriptors that were almost certainly chosen because they don’t apply to the F-35 program, which has long been plagued by cost overruns and delays and is still in its development and testing stages.
The Navy provided Boeing a major opening to continue producing Growlers a little longer, including the 22 extra aircraft on a list of unfunded priorities it plans to submit to the House Armed Services Committee.
The increase would allow each Growler squadron within an air wing to go from five jets to seven, according to a Navy official, reducing “risk in the joint force’s ability to operate in an anti-access aerial denial environment.”
The big question is whether lawmakers will be able to find money within the defense budget to pay for the additional Growlers – a task that’ll prove especially difficult under the current budget caps.
“Any money added to the budget must come at the cost of removing another important program,” said a spokesman for Rep. Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.
Smith represents Washington state’s 9th Congressional District, where Boeing is by far the No. 1 federal contractor. And even he acknowledged the tough task ahead for those seeking to save the Growler.
“Smith believes that maintaining the EA-18G Growler production line is important, but he also understands the difficult budget position the Department of Defense faces due to congressionally mandated spending [restrictions],” said the spokesman, Michael Amato. “We will keep a close eye on the issue moving forward and make a determination once an offset is presented.”
Philip Ewing contributed to this report.
https://www.politicopro.com/story/defense/?id=32346
 
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AIRCRAFT CARRIERS:
17.	How To Keep An Aircraft Carrier: The Navy's $7 Billion Problem
(DEFENSE DAILY 31 MAR 14) ... Megan Eckstein
 
Congress wants the Navy to keep 11 aircraft carriers in its fleet. The Navy wants to keep 11. Law dictates that the Navy keep 11. And yet, the Navy’s budget plans – assuming that sequestration remains the law of the land – does not include funding to refuel the USS George Washington (CVN-73), instead defueling and inactivating the flattop.
Navy officials have said for weeks it would take an additional $7 billion across the Future Years Defense Program (FYDP), from fiscal year 2015 to 2019, to conduct the refueling and complex overhaul (RCOH) and keep the carrier in the fleet. They would rather keep the ship, they said, and would change their budget plans if Congress indicated they would unshackle the Defense Department from sequestration in FY ‘16. They say they’ll decide next year whether to defuel or refuel based on signs from Congress. But as lawmakers, industry officials and even some admirals have admitted, the truth is much more complicated.
Will Congress step in?
Several congressmen have said they fully expect the carrier refueling to find a place in the budget, though none could say how they would accomplish that feat. But the will appears to be there.
“I think the carrier needs to be activated...I think Congress will probably go ahead and push the administration to get that carrier back into the fleet,” Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.), chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee, told Defense Daily on March 28. “The amount of time and effort that goes into building these naval reactors…to think that we would be mothballing something that would have 25 years more of a life, I think, is just plain wrong.”
“I think when we finish at the end of the day, wherever the day is, the carrier will be back in there,” Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), chairman of the House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee, told Defense Daily on March 26. “I think there is a passionate will to do that, not just on the committee but across Congress.”
But the two chairmen have different approaches for how to make that happen. Asked if he was willing to cram carrier RCOH funding into the budget after the Navy insisted there wasn’t room, Frelinghuysen said, “we’re going to work with Secretary [Ray] Mabus and Adm. [Jonathan] Greenert. We’re going to work with them, I don’t think we need to go to combat with them. I think all of this – first of all, on the committee, we hate sequestration, we hate the continuing resolutions, and both the administration and Congress are somewhat responsible for this straitjacket we’ve put ourselves into. But I do think projecting naval presence out there, in this type of environment, is important, so I think we’re going to work closely with the administration to get the job done.”
What Frelinghuysen promised, despite the unknowns about how to pay for the RCOH, was that he wouldn’t postpone the decision the way the Navy proposed doing.
“The discussions are ongoing, I don’t think we’re going to wait until next year to settle this matter,” he said. Asked the same question, Forbes responded that he and his HASC subcommittee have not gone through the budget request line-by-line to look for potential cuts, but he didn’t rule out that possibility.
“I feel pretty comfortable we’ll get it back in. I can’t tell you all the pots we’ll take from…but I think that will be a debate we’ll have both privately and probably publicly before all this shakes out,” he said.
For the Navy’s part, the will is there too. During a March 26 hearing with Forbes’ subcommittee, Vice Adm. Joseph Mulloy, deputy chief of naval operations for integration of capabilities and resources, described the Navy’s extensive effort to keep its carrier fleet intact amid the threat of continued sequestration.
“If you remember last summer, DoD could not believe that we could not cut two or three carriers. The Navy, through a tremendous effort led by [Navy acquisition chief Sean] Stackley…freed up money in the Navy budget to be able to reduce that number down,” he said. A little more time to continue looking at the budget, as well as assurances the Navy will see at least some sequester relief in FY ’16, would seal the deal on keeping George Washington around, he said.
How much would it cost?
The $7 billion price tag to keep the George Washington masks the complexity of the situation. A breakdown of the bill shows a lot of unknowns, as well as a lot of items that would affect other line items in the budget.
In the current spending plan, laid out in the president’s budget request last month, the Navy would spend $2.4 billion from FY ’15 to ’19 to bring the George Washington back from its homeport in Japan to the Huntington Ingalls Industries yard in Virginia and then defuel and inactivate it. To keep the ship would cost $7.046 billion above that – for a $9.446 billion bill over the FYDP, a Navy official told Defense Daily.
The current budget plan assumes the carrier would be inactivated and its associated air wing would be shut down – and therefore the Navy would need fewer aircraft. The plan includes a $250 million placeholder line to account for terminating the multiyear procurement contract with Sikorsky for MH-60R helicopters. The Navy had planned to buy 16 in FY ’16, 11 of which would go to multiple air wings and five of which would serve as spares. The exact cost of terminating the contract a year early is unclear, as many of the termination fees and production line shutdown costs are negotiated between the contractor and the military customer when a termination decision is made, the Navy official explained.
If the Navy were to keep the George Washington and its air wing, the service would have to find an additional $1.474 billion for the air wing, the official said, to account for purchasing the 16 MH-60Rs and paying for the personnel and operations and maintenance of the air wing. The Navy official stressed the plan laid out in the budget is completely reversible – the FY ’15 budget request fully funds the MH-60R contract, including advance procurement for the ’16 helicopters, and the Navy would want to finish out the multiyear deal if Congress provided the funding to maintain the aircraft carrier and its air wing.
The current funding plan includes manpower funding that tapers down as the years go on – the thinking being that as the ship progresses with its inactivation, fewer sailors would be assigned to the ship. The budget request calls for full personnel funding in FY ’15 at $323.7 million, then dropping to $198.5 million in ’16, $165.5 million in ‘17, $90.7 million in ’18 and $33 million in ’19, the official said.
But the personnel costs somewhat muddle the true cost delta between refueling and defueling the ship. If the Navy changed course and opted to refuel the ship, it would need almost full manning levels each year, which about doubles the bill for personnel alone across the FYDP. The Navy also calculated it would need $125.7 million in additional shipyard operations and maintenance dollars to account for more sailors and their families being at Naval Station Norfolk. However, the Navy official said “in no uncertain terms” that the service would not push sailors out of the Navy if the carrier were inactivated. Instead, those personnel would be put into empty billets elsewhere – so those manpower and base operations costs aren’t true cost savings, they would just be pushed into other accounts within the Navy budget.
Finally, if the Navy refueled the George Washington, the bulk of the cost would be the refueling itself. The Navy lists this as a $4.393 billion cost for the refueling, plus a few additional associated costs that lift the total to $5.077 billion to refuel and modernize the aircraft carrier.
To stay on schedule, the Navy would have needed about $800 million in FY ’15.The Navy official said that sum is not a drop in the bucket, but the service could have found those dollars. However, unsure whether Congress would grant additional sequestration relief and allow the Navy to squeeze the other $6.2 billion into the FYDP, the official said it would be irresponsible to spend so much money planning and buying materials only to have to cancel the refueling next year if sequester relief is not granted.
Is it worth it?
By all accounts, yes. Those in the aircraft carrier business have said the United States has 11 carriers in a 15- carrier world. Dropping down to 10 would jeopardize today’s “2.0” carrier presence, with one in the Pacific and one in the Arabian Gulf at all times.
Adm. Bill Gortney, commander of U.S. Fleet Forces Command, told a group that included members of Congress, the Navy and industry that if the Navy dropped to only 10 aircraft carriers, “the impact on the rest of them in the deployment cycle is really extreme.”
Gortney, who ensures all the East Coast ships are properly manned, maintained and ready to deploy on time, said at a March 27 breakfast that the aircraft carrier fleet is already strained – he just sent the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) out on a scheduled 9-and-a-half-month deployment.
“Ladies and gentlemen, that is not a sustainable model – sailors won’t do that, sailors and their families won’t do that, but it’s the only way we can make it,” he said. As he revamps the Fleet Readiness Plans for each type of ship, he hopes to get the carrier strike groups to a 36-month cycle that includes just one 8-month deployment.
“We need to make sure we understand the ramifications of a decision” regarding the number of aircraft carriers, he said. “We’ll still get our deployment lengths down to 8 months, and we’ll get our homeport tempo to 68 percent – until GW is supposed to come out and back into that rotational cycle, and that’s in 2021. And then we’re back to 9-and-a-half-month deployments. So, this is a long-range problem that we have to work our way through.”
When is a decision needed?
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus have said repeatedly that the decision on the aircraft carrier’s fate has been postponed until next year – they have not decided to inactivate the ship, even though that’s the course of action reflected in the budget documents. Mabus even told the Senate Armed Services Committee on March 27 that he could wait until the FY ’16 budget process in Congress – a full year from now – before he needed a signal from Congress on whether lawmakers might be willing to provide sequestration relief to let the Navy keep its aircraft carrier.
But Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) suggested the signal should come now, and HII Vice President for In-Service Aircraft Carrier Programs Chris Miner said the shipyard really ought to start some of its planning now.
Miner pointed out that the Navy has little experience inactivating aircraft carriers: the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) is the only one thus far, but that ship had a different design than the current Nimitz-class carriers and therefore used plans that wouldn’t apply to George Washington. The Nimitz won’t retire until 2025, so no plans exist yet. Miner said the Enterprise defueling and inactivation took three years to plan, so the Navy would need to begin planning soon for an inactivation to avoid disrupting the drydock schedule at the yard. “We really do need to get the decision to the point where they put money in FY ‘15 for planning,” he said, stressing that the company obviously hoped the Navy would decide to keep the carrier in the fleet.
The Navy has $245 million in FY ’14 money that it has not yet spent on the RCOH planning effort. Navy acquisition chief Stackley said at the March 26 HASC hearing that the service would release $63 million for planning the defueling section alone – not for ship modernization or refueling plans – but cautioned against that logic, saying “a defueling for a refueling does not equate exactly to an inactivation,” so from the company’s perspective they need the whole sum of money to begin planning for work on the ship in its entirety.
http://www.defensedaily.com/how-to-keep-an-aircraft-carrier-the-navys-7-billion-problem/
 
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DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE:
18.	Pentagon Aiding Allies On Cybersecurity In Gulf To Asia
(BLOOMBERG NEWS 31 MAR 14) ... Gopal Ratnam
 
The Pentagon is working with a dozen countries, including allies in the Persian Gulf region and east Asia, to bolster the cybersecurity of their militaries and build a collective defense against attacks.
Bahrain, Japan and South Korea are among nations getting help from the U.S. Defense Department in developing military cybersecurity commands, designing strategies to secure computer networks and training and recruiting operators, according to a Pentagon official who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the effort.
The cooperation has persisted despite questions about the Pentagon’s intentions after disclosures by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden that the agency had engaged in widespread electronic spying on phone and Internet communications abroad, the official said. The effort began after the Pentagon presented a cyberspace strategy in 2011.
The Defense Department “will expand its formal and informal cyber cooperation to a wider pool of allied and partner militaries to develop collective self-defense and increase collective deterrence,” according to its Strategy for Operating in Cyberspace, released in July 2011. Among the goals was the creation of “coalitions to deter malicious activities in cyberspace.”
The Defense Department foresees spending $26.6 billion on cybersecurity efforts for the five years ending in 2019, including a request for $5.06 billion for fiscal year 2015, according to Pentagon budget documents.
Rebuilding Trust
U.S. military officials are focusing on developing allies’ abilities to safeguard their computer networks, as well as any U.S. systems in their regions that may be vulnerable to attacks, the official said. South Korea and Saudi Arabia have been among the victims of attacks on their computer networks.
An attack on a vulnerable network in an allied country could lead to energy or telecommunications grids in the region being disabled, which in turn could prevent the U.S. military from operating in the area, the official said.
The Pentagon isn’t helping countries develop offensive computer-attack capabilities because those could be misused and lead to instability, the official said, while acknowledging that some private computer security companies are offering such services to countries in the Middle East and Asia.
Last year, South Korea blamed North Korea for attacks that disabled computers at the country’s banks, TV stations and media outlets. North Korea denied the allegations. As a result of such attacks, South Korea has developed robust cybersecurity capabilities, the U.S. official said.
Saudi Attacks
In 2012, Saudi Arabia blamed unidentified people based outside the kingdom for a cyberattack against state-owned Saudi Arabian Oil Co. that aimed at disrupting production from the world’s largest exporter of crude. More than 30,000 computers were compromised or affected.
Once allies participating in the cooperative effort have sufficient technical capabilities, the Pentagon may be able to share threat details instantly to warn them of potential attacks, the official said.
The Defense Department also expects U.S. defense contractors to be able to provide cybersecurity services through the Defense Departments’s Foreign Military Sales program, as well as through direct commercial sales, the official said.
The department has the resources to focus its cooperative efforts on only a dozen countries, even though as many as 100 worldwide have sought U.S. assistance, the official said.
The proposed $5.06 billion budget for the Pentagon’s cybersecurity efforts for fiscal 2015, which begins in October, would be a slight decline from the $5.1 billion Congress approved for the current year. For fiscal 2016, the Pentagon anticipates spending $5.45 billion, according to the budget documents. For the years 2017 to 2019, the Pentagon forecasts annual budgets of about $5.4 billion.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-31/pentagon-aiding-allies-on-cybersecurity-in-gulf-to-asia.html
 
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19.	Hagel Acts To Improve POW-MIA Accounting Effort
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 31 MAR 14) ... Robert Burns
 
WASHINGTON – In a bid to improve the government's accounting for missing U.S. war dead, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Monday he is establishing a new Pentagon agency with more focused authority and innovative approaches.
"We're streamlining everything," Hagel told a news conference.
The Pentagon has been under congressional pressure for months to take decisive action to improve the POW-MIA accounting effort. Its failings were highlighted last summer when The Associated Press disclosed an internal Pentagon report that said the search for remains of missing soldiers on foreign battlefields was mismanaged, wasteful and acutely dysfunctional.
After lengthy study, Hagel decided to combine the functions of the two leading agencies in this field – the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command, based in Hawaii, and the Defense POW-MIA Office, based in the Pentagon. Those two organizations will disappear; the new agency will be directed by a civilian official not yet named.
Michael D. Lumpkin, who is masterminding the reorganization in his temporary role as acting undersecretary of defense for policy, told reporters Monday that it will take some additional weeks to implement the plan.
"We need to break away from the way of traditionally doing business that is perceived by some to be outdated, institutionalized thinking and a behavior that didn't deliver the number of remains accounted for that we had hoped," Lumpkin said.
The Congress in 2009 set a requirement that the Pentagon identify at least 200 sets of remains a year by 2015 – a number it has not come close to achieving in recent years. Lumpkin said he thinks the 200 figure is attainable with a budget that he said would remain near recent levels of about $100 million a year.
Last year 60 sets of remains were identified. The head of the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command, Maj. Gen. Kelly McKeague, told Congress last August that a realistic goal is 125 identifications per year by 2018.
The Pentagon works MIA cases year-round. It lists 83,000 as unaccounted for from World War II, the Korean War and from Vietnam, although a large percentage of those – including remains lost at sea -are believed not to be recoverable.
"There's not a more poignant, emotional, important issue in our society today," Hagel told reporters, "... than you take care of the people who gave their lives to this country, and you take care of their families. And that has been a critical component of who we are as Americans from the beginning of this republic."
The issue also is among the most divisive and controversial problems facing the Pentagon.
The Pentagon's inspector general is conducting a noncriminal investigation of potential fraud, waste and abuse of resources by the accounting agencies.
Hagel said all communications with family members of the missing from past conflicts will be managed and organized by this new agency. One of the biggest complaints about the current system is from families who feel their interests have been neglected or their questions not adequately answered. Families in some cases wait decades to learn details about the circumstances of their loved one's loss, even if remains are never identified.
"They'll have a place where they can go to identify updates, questions, concerns," Hagel said. "And it won't be a one-way street. It will be a two-way street. We'll communicate with them."
Among other changes announced by Hagel, the Pentagon will establish a centralized database and case management system containing information about all missing service members. And the Pentagon will partner with private organizations with expertise in the identification of human remains.
The Pentagon also will put a single military medical examiner in charge of remains identifications. Until now that has been the responsibility of the Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, which Lumpkin said will cease to exist in its current form. The lab's scientific operations will be overseen by the medical examiner.
Hagel said he expects broad support from family members, veterans' organizations and members of Congress.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri and Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-New Hampshire, who have led efforts on Capitol Hill to compel the Pentagon to improve its MIA accounting effort, quickly praised Hagel's move. In a joint statement, the two senators called it "a great first step."
"We're now taking concrete, enforceable steps to fix what has been a management mess," McCaskill and Ayotte said. "But as with any effort to demand accountability, the devil will be in the details and the implementation."
The POW-MIA accounting effort has suffered from a variety of problems over many decades. The AP last July disclosed an internal Pentagon report that included accusations of misconduct among those responsible for overseas missions to investigate prospects for recovering remains.
Shortly after the AP report, the Government Accountability Office issued a report saying the Pentagon's effort was hampered by weak leadership, infighting and a fragmented approach to planning. The report recommended a more streamlined chain of command and other organizational changes.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, last summer told a congressional hearing that the accounting situation was discouraging and "moving rapidly toward disgraceful."
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_POW_MIA_SHAKEUP
 
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CONGRESS / BUDGET:
20.	Commissary Cuts Could Hurt MWR Programs
(NAVY TIMES 07 APR 14) ... Karen Jowers
 
Proposed cuts in commissary funding not only would drive shoppers away because their grocery prices would rise, but also could have a “devastating” ripple effect on base morale, welfare and recreation programs, advocates said.
Commissaries, exchanges and MWR programs are inextricably linked, advocates said. So if higher commissary prices drive shoppers away, that could impact customer traffic at base exchanges – which are already seeing a decline in sales. And MWR programs are partly funded by exchange profits.
But defense officials said they considered this impact when drafting their proposal to cut the annual commissary budget by two-thirds over the next three years. The proposal sent to Congress in early March would slash the annual commissary budget by $1billion by 2017, leaving it with $400 million a year to operate stores.
Overseas stores and those in remote locations would continue to get tax payer support, but prices inevitably would rise in all stores.
“Structural changes have a ripple effect,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said at a March 26 hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s personnel panel.
If the commissary becomes a less attractive shopping destination, “eventually people are less likely to shop at the base exchange,” Graham said. “And the [morale, welfare and recreation] account, the quality-of-life issues that are pretty much funded by service members themselves, take a hit.... One thing is connected to the other.”
That is a fundamental concern, acknowledged Frederick Vollrath, assistant secretary of defense for readiness and force management, in testimony before the panel.
“The leaders of the exchange systems told us that if patronage in the commissaries goes down, they would expect patronage in the exchanges to go down,” he said. He also acknowledged that money for MWR activities would not go as far.
One source said about 20 percent to30percentof traffic at exchanges on Army and Air Force installations, for example, is directly tied to customers visiting the commissaries. He said a reduction in customer traffic of that size would equal a loss of about $120 million to $180 million a year in MWR dividends.
Jessica Wright, the Pentagon’s acting personnel chief, said officials understand that money the exchanges give to MWR programs may decrease. “But at this point, with our research and what we’re looking at, we believe that we are on firm ground,” she told senators.
Joyce Raezer, executive director of the National Military Family Association, disagreed. “I think it will be devastating to MWR,” she said.
With less money from the exchanges, she said, officials will have to cut MWR services or raise fees to a point where no one will use them, and “then DoD will say, ‘See, I guess you didn’t need them.’“ Even apart from the new commissary proposal, the exchanges, and by extension MWR programs, already are seeing signs of trouble.
Sales were down in all the exchange services in 2013 compared to the year before.
In The Exchange, as the Army and Air Force Exchange Service is known, sales were down slightly more than 8 percent in 2013 comparedto2012. Profits were down by about 3 percent and would have been down more if The Exchange hadn’t been in the midst of an aggressive plan to reduce operating costs by about $175 million over the last 21 months.
Among the factors contributing to that sales decline is the evaporation of the large customer base of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Army’s drawdown in Europe and shifts in the retail market, said AAFES spokesman Judd Anstey.
Navy Exchange Service Command sales were down by about 4.5 percent. About one-fourth of the decrease – $33 million – was due to its fiscal year being one accounting week shorter than usual. The rest was due to a decline in sales of tobacco and electronics, spokeswoman Kristine Sturkie said.
Marine Corps Exchange sales were down nearly 7 percent, also partly because the fiscal year contained one less week, said spokesman Bryan Driver.
Troop cuts, shifts in training and deployment tempos, sequestration and decreased gas prices also contributed to overall sales decline.
“The changes proposed to the commissary would just exacerbate all of this,” Raezer said.
http://navytimes.va.newsmemory.com/digitaledition.php?token=A76A01DA7C96B5D2A51B76EA6C339A4086385FA5
 
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SEXUAL ASSAULT:
21.	April Is Sexual Assault Awareness Month
(NAVY LIVE BLOG 31 MAR 14) ... Rear Adm. Sean Buck
 
April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month, recognized around the world each year – both in civilian society as well as within many militaries of our partner nations.
This year, the Department of Defense will pursue the united theme: “Live Our Values: Step Up to Stop Sexual Assault.”
Sexual assault prevention and response is a priority year-round, but April brings special, focused attention to the impact and scope of sexual assault, as well as renewed attention towards effective methods of prevention.
Commands are encouraged to take time this month to review where the Navy has been over the past year – and there are many initiatives to share.
We started a program called victims legal counsel, which assigns Navy officers in the Judge Advocate General Corps directly in the service of victims; began hiring deployment resiliency counselors for our big deck ships, in order to provide continuity of care for our deploying carrier and expeditionary strike groups; and instituted roving patrols in an attempt to curb the destructive behaviors happening on our bases.
These initiatives are already making a difference. We’re controlling what we own.
Later in the month, we’ll ask you to sit down with your shipmates and co-workers, and think ahead to the next year in order to dedicate yourself to be an active bystander – to step up and intervene in potentially destructive situations.
Each installation and command will highlight this month in their own way. Get out and participate in events, meet your local sexual assault response coordinators and victim advocates, and talk to your shipmates about bystander intervention. Raise awareness, promote prevention and challenge social norms and beliefs which do not live up to our Navy values and culture. Step up to stop sexual assault.
For more information and various resources for SAAM, visit www.sapr.navy.mil. If you need help regarding a sexual assault, visit www.safehelpine.org or call the helpline at 877-995-5247.
View Clip (RT: 1:53)
Rear Adm. Sean Buck is Director, 21st Century Sailor Office.
http://navylive.dodlive.mil/2014/03/31/april-is-sexual-assault-awareness-month/
 
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PERSONNEL:
22.	Hagel Supports Review Of On-Base Tobacco Sales
(NAVY TIMES 31 MAR 14) ... Andrew Tilghman
 
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Monday that he supports a forcewide review of tobacco use and sales on military installations.
“I think we owe it to our people,” Hagel said at a Pentagon news conference.
The military’s health care costs attributable to tobacco use are “astounding, well over a billion dollars” a year, Hagel said.
“Dollars are one thing, but the health of your people, I don’t know if you put a price on that. So I do think it needs to be looked at and reviewed,” Hagel said.
“Whether we, in the military, through commissaries [and] PXs, sell or continue to sell tobacco is something that we need to look at. And we are looking at it,” Hagel said.
A Defense Department memo dated March 14 that was obtained by Military Times encourages the services to eliminate tobacco sales – and even tobacco use – on military bases, although it stops short of ordering specific actions.
“Structural reforms in how and where we allow tobacco purchases to be made, as well as the need to consider tobacco-free installations, are all matters that require our near-term attention,” stated the memo, signed by Jessica Wright, acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, and Dr. Jonathan Woodson, assistant secretary of defense for health affairs.
“The prominence of tobacco products in retail outlets and permission for smoking breaks while on duty sustain the perception that we are not serious about reducing the use of tobacco,” the memo said.
DoD spokeswoman Army Lt. Col. Cathy Wilkinson said the department “is in the initial stages of reviewing its tobacco policies” and emphasized that “no decisions on any possible or potential changes have been made.”
The Navy is reportedly pushing ahead toward eliminating tobacco sales on all its bases and ships, as well as all Marine Corps facilities.
Staff writer Karen Jowers contributed to this story.
http://www.navytimes.com/article/20140331/NEWS05/303310042
 
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23.	Caregivers For Post-9/11 Veterans Face Hurdles
(USA TODAY 01 APR 14) ... Gregg Zoroya
 
An estimated 1.1 million Americans provide care for ailing or disabled veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, including parents and spouses whose cumulative efforts save taxpayers $3billion each year, according to a RAND Corp. study released Monday.
Most of these people labor in obscurity without a support network, unaware of government assistance available to help them, untrained in best practices for providing care and at increased risk for emotional problems of their own, researchers found.
"For every hour you spend caregiving, your risk of depression increases," says Terri Tanielian, co-author of the largest study of military caregivers.
Sixty-three percent of those caring for a post-9/11 veteran have jobs. On average, they miss about a day of work each week caring for their loved one, an annual productivity loss of $5.9 billion, researchers found. Twenty-eight percent quit work to care for their veteran; 11% took early retirement.
The result is that more than 60% say they are constantly under financial strain, twice the ratio of caregivers for veterans who served before 9/11.
Challenges ahead include middle-aged parents who face decades of looking after sons or daughters, only to require their own support system as they grow old; or young spouses who are caregivers in a strained marriage, the study found.
Tanielian says aging parents or troubled spouses pose challenges for the care of veterans. "What does that suggest to society?" Tanielian asks. "Do we have a need where in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years we have a cohort of veterans who have significant caregiving requirements that don't have caregivers? Are they going to need to be institutionalized? Is society going to have to pay to hire home health workers?"
Former senator Elizabeth Dole's group, Caring for Military Families: The Elizabeth Dole Foundation, paid for the 288-page study. "This is a special issue that requires a national response," she says. "That response needs to be collaborative across the public, private and non-profit sector, the labor community and faith-based organizations."
RAND researchers surveyed more than 28,000 military caregivers from July 1 to Oct. 15. for the study. They estimated that 5.5million Americans care for veterans of all eras – helping them bathe, dress, eat, use the toilet, make medical appointments and manage finances.
They also care for their children. They help those who are emotionally troubled avoid social triggers that can exacerbate post-traumatic stress disorder.
Caregivers for those who served in Iraq or Afghanistan have far higher rates of emotional problems, more than likely because they deal with veterans diagnosed with mental health problems, researchers suggest.
Nearly half of caregivers suffer from depression, a far higher rate than was found among either pre-9/11 military caregivers or among those who care for disabled civilians.
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/NEWS/usaedition/2014-04-01-Caregivers-for-veterans-face-hurdles-report-finds_ST_U.htm
 
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INFRASTRUCTURE / INSTALLATIONS:
24.	Navy Bases Tighten Truck Driver Screening
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 31 MAR 14) ... Brock Vergakis
 
NORFOLK, Va. – An on-base shooting that left one sailor dead has prompted the Navy to begin prohibiting delivery drivers who have a felony conviction in the past 10 years from coming onto any of its bases from North Carolina to Maine, officials said Monday.
The Navy has said a civilian truck driver who was a convicted felon managed to get onto Naval Station Norfolk, walk onto a guided-missile destroyer and disarm one sailor and use her gun to shoot and kill another sailor who rushed to her defense.
Killed in the shooting was 24-year-old Petty Officer 2nd Class Mark Mayo, of Hagerstown, Md. Navy officials have said there's no indication the attack was planned or had any link to terrorism.
The civilian, Jeffrey Tyrone Savage, had a valid Transportation Worker Identification Credential that could have gotten him onto the base, but the Navy has said he lacked supporting documentation that would have authorized him to be there the night of the shooting, such as documents indicating he was there to pick up something. Savage was killed by Navy security forces shortly after shooting Mayo.
The Navy said Monday that the sentry at the gate Savage drove through has been placed on administrative leave.
The shooting has drawn widespread attention to the TWIC program, which is administered by the Transportation Security Administration. The TSA prohibits people convicted of certain crimes from having a TWIC card, but only those convicted of espionage, sedition, treason or terrorism are ineligible for a waiver.
Savage's criminal record includes pleading guilty to voluntary manslaughter in Charlotte, N.C., in 2008 for shooting a friend in a car and leaving his body on the side of an interstate. Prosecutors originally charged Savage with murder and intended to seek the death penalty if he didn't plead guilty to the lesser charge. Savage's criminal history also includes possession with intent to distribute crack cocaine.
The order issued by the commander of Navy Region Mid-Atlantic also prohibits anyone who uses a TWIC card from coming onto its installations if the person has had a misdemeanor conviction within the past five years for crimes of violence; larceny; drugs; habitual offenders; and conviction for sex offenses.
Under the new rules, the Navy is now checking the National Crime Information Center database for any criminal history or outstanding warrants that are grounds for denial to the region's installations. Beth Baker, a spokeswoman for Navy Region Mid-Atlantic, said several drivers have been turned away since the new security measures were put into place Thursday, but exact numbers weren't readily available.
The Navy is still investigating why Savage was allowed to drive onto the base and walk onto the pier where the USS Mahan was moored. The Navy is conducting a criminal investigation as well as a separate one focused on what went wrong the night of the shooting.
The Navy has said Savage never served in the Navy and didn't have a prior relationship with anyone serving aboard the Mahan.
The Navy is planning to hold a memorial service for Mayo at Naval Station Norfolk on April 7.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_NAVAL_STATION_SHOOTING_SECURITY
 
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25.	Civilian Guard On Leave As Navy Boosts Base Security
(NORFOLK VIRGINIAN-PILOT 01 APR 14) ... Lauren King
 
NORFOLK – A civilian police officer has been placed on leave, and the Navy is boosting security measures at bases from Virginia to Maine after last week's shooting aboard the destroyer Mahan.
The guard who allowed the shooter onto Norfolk Naval Station was a federal police officer, not a sailor or a contractor, officials said Monday.
Everyone entering a base in the service's mid-Atlantic region using a transportation worker credential – the kind Jeffrey Savage showed before he shot and killed a sailor – now must be checked against a federal crime database.
Until last week, those checks weren't mandatory. Navy policy permitted truck drivers to enter with the credential and proof of their business on the base.
It isn't clear why Savage was allowed in. The 35-year-old convicted felon had no legitimate reason to be at Norfolk Naval Station on March 24, according to authorities.
Driving a tractor-trailer cab, he used a Transportation Worker Identification Credential, or TWIC card, to get past a main gate and a checkpoint at Pier 1, where the Mahan is moored. About 11:20 p.m., Savage boarded the ship. After a female sailor standing guard stopped him on the deck, he managed to take her gun. He used it to shoot and kill 24-year-old Petty Officer 2nd Class Mark Mayo, a Navy guard who was patrolling the pier and rushed to intervene.
The new security measures, which the Navy said started Thursday, call for the names of all TWIC card users to be checked against a federal database, the National Crime Information Center. Base guards are turning away anyone with an outstanding warrant, a felony conviction in the past 10 years or a violent misdemeanor in the past five. Habitual offenders, sex offenders and people with drug or larceny convictions also aren't being allowed in, officials said.
Criteria to obtain a TWIC card are less strict.
Already, drivers are lamenting longer waits to get on base.
"Some people have been turned away," said Beth Baker, a spokeswoman for the Navy's mid-Atlantic region.
The new measures would have kept out Savage, who served prison time for a drug offense and voluntary manslaughter; he shot and killed a friend during a 2005 argument.
The Navy also has increased random checks, such as vehicle searches, officials said. The changes were ordered by the region's commander, Rear Adm. Dixon Smith.
In addition to an investigation being conducted by the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the Navy has launched an inquiry that will "explore in detail how (Savage) accessed the base, including whether the gate sentry complied with access control procedures in effect at the time," the service said in a Monday news release.
Officials declined to say whether any Mahan sailors had been disciplined. It was the ship's job to staff the Pier 1 checkpoint.
Officials have not given a motive or said why they believe Savage was on the base – if they know. They've said only that they don't think he planned the attack, and he walked onto the Mahan unarmed.
Savage only recently had become a truck driver; he got his TWIC card earlier this year. The credentials are issued by the Transportation Security Administration and allow unescorted access to secure ports and military installations.
The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees the TSA, has not responded to repeated inquiries about the TWIC program.
Savage's body was transferred from Portsmouth Naval Medical Center to a funeral home Friday. His funeral is today.
The Navy is planning a memorial service for Mayo on April 7 at Norfolk Naval Station.
Pilot writer Bill Sizemore contributed to this report.
http://hamptonroads.com/2014/03/civilian-guard-leave-navy-boosts-base-security
 
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26.	Naval Base Kitsap's Lockdown Lifted; No Proof Shots Fired
(NAVY TIMES 31 MAR 14)
 
Law enforcement officials at Naval Base Kitsap, Bangor, sounded the all clear after an investigators failed to uncover evidence that shots had been fired near the base, Navy officials said Monday afternoon.
The base went into lockdown around 9:45 a.m. Pacific Standard Time after several reports of loud bangs Monday. Navy Installations Command tweeted the news around 10:20 a.m., PST.
Naval Base Kitsap spokesman Tom Danaher said local authorities investigated reports of loud noises that sounded like shotgun blasts in the neighborhood outside the base and Navy security forces searched inside the gate, but neither turned up any evidence of gunfire. No injuries were reported, Danaher said.
The Kitsap Sun reported that the Navy locked down the base as a precautionary measure and that officials believe the noise could have been a backfiring truck.
Naval Base Kitsap is the largest installation in Navy Region Northwest and is composed of installations in Bremerton, Bangor and Keyport.
http://www.navytimes.com/article/20140331/NEWS/303310040/BREAKING-Naval-Base-Kitsap-lockdown-after-shots-fired-report
 
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COMMENTARY:
27.	The U.S. Should Not Be Shutting Out Ukraine
(WASHINGTON POST 01 APR 14) ... Editorial
 
The Obama administration insists that it won’t negotiate the future of Ukraine with Russia over the heads of the Ukrainians. But something very much like that has appeared to be happening since Vladimir Putin telephoned President Obama on Friday.
According to the White House, the Russian president called “to discuss the U.S. proposal for a diplomatic resolution” and “President Obama suggested that Russia put a concrete response in writing.” Secretary of State John F. Kerry then rushed to Paris to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. No Ukrainians were present. After four hours of talks, the two men emerged to say that, in Mr. Kerry’s words, they had “agreed to work with the Ukrainian government and the people” to “assure” such “priorities” as “the rights of national minorities,” “an inclusive constitutional reform process” and “free and fair elections.”
Russia’s proposals in these areas have been rejected by the Ukrainian government, and with very good reason. Moscow is demanding that Ukraine be turned into a federation in which regions of the country close to Russia would have a veto over national policy. The Kremlin says that Russian must be made an official language equal to Ukrainian and that elections scheduled for May must be postponed.
The proposals would strip Ukraine of its sovereignty and render it ungovernable, which is exactly Mr. Putin’s intention. These poison pills are being proffered while up to 50,000 Russian troops have massed near the border, threatening an invasion.
Mr. Kerry objected to that deployment and reiterated that it was up to Ukrainians to “decide their future by themselves.” He added, however, that there “will have to be an input, obviously, of what the Russian view is” because “Russia obviously has long ties and serious interests.” That appeared to concede one of Mr. Putin’s most aggressive and dangerous claims: that Russia should have a say in the governance – even the constitutions – of its near neighbors.
U.S. officials tell us that isn’t the administration’s position and that Russia’s proposals are being treated as dead on arrival. They say that, by engaging the Russians in talks, the administration is at least delaying an invasion of Ukraine and buying time for the Kiev interim government – which, to its credit, is rushing to implement both economic reforms and more modest constitutional changes.
Mr. Putin reportedly told German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Monday that a partial troop redeployment was underway. But it is obvious that the Putin regime has no intention of agreeing to a diplomatic solution that grants Ukraine political independence – and the Kremlin is refusing even to discuss Russia’s occupation of Crimea. While the talks go on, the administration and European Union appear to have suspended further action on sanctions, much to the relief of Mr. Putin’s oligarch cronies.
While it’s appropriate to offer Russia a diplomatic way out of the crisis, the administration’s approach is unbalanced. It should insist that Ukraine’s representatives be present in all meetings and that Crimea be put back on the agenda. As negotiations continue, so should work on sanctions. A good place to start would be with the Ukrainian and Russian companies that are stealing assets and property in Crimea even as Mr. Putin demands more.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-us-must-not-shut-out-ukraine-from-its-talks-with-russia/2014/03/31/7077bc8c-b8f9-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html
 
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28.	When Sanctions Aren't Enough
If NATO wants to stanch Russian adventurism in Eastern Europe, it needs a comprehensive security plan (and fast).
(FOREIGN POLICY 31 MAR 14) ... William B. Taylor, John E. Herbst and Steven Pifer
 
It should be clear now that the West has a Russian security problem. Twice in the last six years, the Kremlin has seized territory in a neighboring country on the grounds of protecting minorities or ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. In each instance, the rejoinder from the West proved to be inadequate. Now, this threat demands a broad response that goes beyond the steps taken to date, that will deter the Kremlin from further aggression.
In 2008, the victim was Georgia. The Russian army took control of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and recognized their declarations of independence. This past winter the victim was Ukraine. Russian troops seized Crimea and proctored a dubious referendum in which 97 percent of the voters allegedly chose annexation by Russia. Less than one week after the vote, the Russian government formally "annexed" Crimea.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has since declared that he has no further territorial designs on Ukraine. In his March 18 speech in the Duma, however, he noted that the Bolsheviks in 1918 gave to Ukraine the "historical South of Russia" (a swath of land from Kharkiv, Luhansk, and Donetsk in Ukraine's northeast stretching southwest to Odessa) with "no consideration for the ethnic makeup of the population." He reiterated his intention to protect Russians abroad and expressed concern about the "ongoing disorder" in Ukraine. Yet it is the Kremlin that continues to send in clandestine agents to stir up unrest and continues to marshal large military forces near Ukraine's eastern border.
Putin has shown a willingness to violate sovereign borders, Russian obligations, and international law. Having declared himself the protector of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers outside of Russia, he has used this principle to pressure neighboring governments and to change territorial borders by force.
The question now is how the United States and NATO should respond. President Obama has designed financial sanctions to chasten the Kremlin for its aggression against Ukraine, and the European Union has followed suit. But Obama now needs to lead NATO in developing a security response – the West needs to take seriously the possibility of future Russian aggression.
There are many countries at risk from Kremlin trouble making "on behalf" of ethnic Russians. Of most immediate concern to NATO are its Baltic members. Ethnic Russians make up 28 percent of the population in Latvia and 25 percent in Estonia (and 6 percent in Lithuania). NATO should consider measured steps to increase its defensive capabilities in the Baltic states, for example by providing anti-aircraft missiles and anti-armor systems. Putin's aggressive concern for ethnic Russians is also a danger to the states of Central Asia. Ethnic Russians number 23 percent of Kazakhstan's population, concentrated in the north along the border with Russia.
The U.S. decision to increase the contingent of F-15s in Lithuania and dispatch F-16s to Poland were smart steps to assure nervous Central European allies, but more is necessary. NATO should continue to commit at least 10 fighters – the number of U.S. F-15s now in Lithuania, up from the usual four NATO fighters – to the Baltic air-policing mission for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, NATO should review its policy on its eastern flank. In 1997, it affirmed that "in the current and foreseeable security environment, the Alliance will carry out its collective defense and other missions by ensuring the necessary interoperability, integration, and capability for reinforcement rather than by additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces." Putin's actions have dramatically altered the European security environment; the Alliance should consider whether it should change its policy in response.
NATO attention should not exclude its southeastern flank. Cynical Kremlin exploitation of ethnic Russian minorities makes Transnistria in Moldova, Romania's neighbor, a potential flashpoint.
The point of this review and the deployments to NATO's Baltic and Central European members is to deter further Russian aggression and to signal to the Russian General Staff that the seizure of Crimea has complicated their strategic position.
In parallel with the above steps, NATO should freeze all arms sales to Russia. The German government announced last week that it would not proceed with the sale of an advanced combat simulator to the Russian army. The French should cancel, or at a minimum suspend, sale of Mistral-class helicopter assault ships to the Russian navy.
There is no expectation that American or NATO forces should defend Ukraine from further Russian invasion. But there is every reason to help Ukraine to defend itself. First, the West should help Ukraine guard itself from Russian subversion. It should provide border control equipment and training to help Kiev keep Russian agitators and provocateurs from entering the country. Second, the West should also share intelligence with Ukraine about Russian efforts to destabilize the country and Russian military plans threatening Ukraine. Third, NATO should conduct regularly scheduled joint exercises in Ukraine. Finally, should the Russian military continue its threatening stance, NATO should provide anti-tank and anti-aircraft weapons, and appropriate training, that would raise the costs of any further aggression against Ukraine.
The Kremlin's aggressive new posture could threaten other states on its border, including Georgia and energy-rich Azerbaijan. Kazakhstan – where 23 percent of the population, or higher along the northern border with Russia, is ethnic Russian – also might be vulnerable. Uzbekistan in the past has had concerns about Russian ambitions in the Central Asian region. Key NATO members should consult with the governments of these countries on the implications of Moscow's apparent new policy.
These steps would bolster NATO security, strengthen Ukraine's ability to resist aggression, and offer political support to other countries made nervous by Putin's recent actions. More pointedly, such a show of strength could discourage the Russian leader from more Crimeas.
William B. Taylor was ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2008. He is currently vice president for the Middle East and Africa at the U.S. Institute of Peace. John E. Herbst was ambassador to Ukraine from 2003 to 2006. He currently directs the Center for Complex Operations at the National Defense University. Steven Pifer was ambassador to Ukraine from 1998 to 2000. He currently is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/31/NATO_needs_comprehensive_security_response_putin
 
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29.	The Naïveté Of Distance
The befuddled response to Russia's Crimea takeover shows that America needs a refresher on how the rest of the world actually thinks and works.
(FOREIGN POLICY 31 MAR 14) ... Aaron David Miller
 
The Ukraine crisis has made it clear that there are some crucial facts about world history and geography that Americans don't really understand. As the world digests Russian President Vladimir Putin's aggressive moves and ponders future ones by Russia or other smaller powers, here are a few things about these two profoundly important forces – or more specifically, the U.S. relationship to them – that Americans need to keep in mind. Grasping them is, in a word, critical.
America is of the world. But does it really understand it?
Sandwiched between two non-predatory powers to the north and south, and fish to the east and west, the United States has lost – if it ever had it – the capacity to think and feel like a power that is vulnerable to geography and history. One would have thought that the nation's experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan would have made it wiser in this regard, and it did in one respect: America is more wisely and willfully risk averse when it comes to nation-building and meddling in the affairs of smaller powers and tribes. But have these experiences made Americans any wiser about why small powers and tribes – and bigger ones too – behave the way they do, or more artful in anticipating their actions or reactions?
I don't think so.
People in the United States just don't have the head or stomach for it. Americans have never really lived on the knife's edge, worried about physical or political survival; they have not felt the breath or boot of the big power on their necks. Don't get me wrong: That's a good, very special thing. Most nations have no such luxury. But this specialness has also made Americans much less adept at understanding the behavior of others who aren't as fortunate. Indeed, people in the United States tend not to understand others' fears or to trivialize them, choosing to dismiss their concerns as not terribly relevant to our modern world.
Nor do Americans seem to know or care much about seemingly 19th or even 20th-century concepts such as national pride, honor, dignity, and the like – at least not as much as other countries. Sure, Americans get excited about the Olympics, but they don't appear to get angry, to feel slighted, bruised, or humiliated when other nations a quarter the size of the United States and with a fraction of its power ignore U.S. warnings, play Washington like a finely-tuned fiddle, or say no without cost or consequence. I don't see a whole lot of enthusiasm in America for confronting the Russians over Sevastopol, let alone Kharkiv.
It takes something really big like 9/11 to get Americans going. So when Putin, the Egyptian generals, or the mullahs in Iran act in ways that don't seem to add up to Americans' neatly ordered world or when they speak out against the United States in defense of their national dignity and pride, or out of personal or national pique, Americans judge it to be either inauthentic, politically contrived, somehow unhinged from reality, or unmoored from anything that could be perceived to be a legitimate interest.
Just because America doesn't seem to have many vital interests doesn't mean others don't.
Vital interests are those for which a nation is prepared to invest its time, treasure, and prestige, and ultimately to risk its citizens' lives and those of others, in the name of protection. Right now, U.S. vital interests are defined primarily in terms of defending the homeland. And this president, even while he's all but declared the war on terror over, has been pretty robust in prosecuting it.
But for a smaller power, Americans often seem to forget, protecting the homeland can mean being much more proactive: Offense can be the best defense, they say. So maybe it's not all that unusual that the United States didn't see Putin's land grab in Crimea coming: Americans couldn't imagine themselves doing something similar. Why would the Russians risk violating another nation's sovereignty? Just because they are worried about Ukraine drifting westward? Why would a pragmatist like Putin risk the post-1991 geopolitical arrangements so painstakingly created?
Why indeed.
Americans, it seems, can't understand because they can't place themselves in other people's shoes, to see what the rest of the world sees as vital.
Just because it's the 21st century doesn't mean everyone sees the world the same way.
Part of the reason America misjudges smaller powers is that it assumes somehow that all countries see the world in the same way – or at least are prepared to accommodate themselves to the way the United States sees it. This is driven by a dangerous illusion that today's world is a more modern world, a globalized one where everything is more integrated and nations don't act in ways that undermine their own economic interests. Doesn't everyone have a stake in everyone else's success?
Referring to Putin moving forces into Ukraine, Secretary of State John Kerry observed, "It's really 19th century behavior in the 21st century." Maybe. But thinking about it in another way, maybe Putin – along with Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong Un, some of the Iranian mullahs, and others – is a 21st-century leader using 19th-century tactics that in fact still work for him. For Putin, geography and power – that is, how to avoid being gobbled up by the first and how to maintain the second – still mean something. And that sometimes requires actions that don't quite measure up to American standards.
History still matters.
The notion that nothing in America lasts longer than 15 minutes is a bit of an overstatement. But it's true that Americans don't pay attention to history much, and when they do, they're often using it to defend some partisan foreign policy or to draw the wrong conclusions.
For the great power willing to learn, history can be a very useful exercise in humility, and prudence – a cautionary tale, really, about avoiding the transgressions of omnipotence and omniscience (believing that one can do anything and knows everything). But for the smaller power, history can also be a trap and create a current reality that forces actions based and driven by past traumas, vulnerabilities, victories, and humiliations. Americans expect others to get over the past, but for much of the world, Faulkner's famous line in Requiem for a Nun still rules: "The past is never over; it's not even past."
The mullahs have been living in the shade of the 1953 CIA coup for decades. Putin exists in the demise of the former Soviet Union and maybe even identifies with figures as far back as Peter the Great. Assad is an Alawite whose worldview is shaped by his minority community's historical experience both in and out of power. And while not all Israeli prime ministers' current realities have been shaped by the Holocaust, Benjamin Netanyahu's decidedly is.
In short, smaller powers' histories cast long shadows.
Not all leaders are cut from the same cloth.
American presidents and secretaries of state far too frequently deal with their counterparts as if they all belonged to some kind respectable club in which certain rules apply and mere winks and nods can work things out. U.S. leaders were fascinated with Syria's Hafez al-Assad for years, convinced that they could somehow make him into a partner; even his son, Bashar, for a brief period cast a spell on the Bush 43 administration as a modern man who saw Syria's future in terms of reform. President Bill Clinton emerged from his successful Israeli-Palestinian summit in 1998 persuaded he could convince Yasser Arafat to do a deal at Camp David. And both Obama and Kerry saw Putin as a guy they could work with on Syria and Iran.
American leaders tend to rely too heavily on their persuasive skills with these tough leaders from tougher neighborhoods or underestimate their partners' capacity to just say "no." In truth, the Bushes, Clinton, and Barack Obama have about as much in common with the Assads, Arafat, or Putin as they do with Mickey Mouse. Americans seem to get confused by the fact that such leaders wear suits and ties – or in Arafat's case, kiss a few Israelis – and think it's possible to make long-term deals with them. To be sure, at times, short-term gains are possible, and there are indeed exceptional leaders and moments. But these are rare and sometimes tragic too: Anwar Sadat and Yitzhak Rabin paid with their lives for their peacemaking, while U.S. presidents have gotten to write about how they almost made peace in their memoirs.
In short, Americans think they understand the world. But their detachment from it, and the idealism, naïveté, arrogance, and unbridled pragmatism that separation brings, tell a different story. For the United States to influence the world differently – and more meaningfully – than it does now, that story will have to change.
Aaron David Miller is vice president for new initiatives and a distinguished scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/31/united_states_russia_crimea_isolationism
 
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30.	The U.S. Navy And The Pivot: Less Means Less
Given resource constraints, the U.S. Navy may need to execute a pivot of its own.
(THE DIPLOMAT 31 MAR 14) ... William Kyle
 
Five years of Obama administration foreign policy are in the history books as the world continues to move beyond the era of the Global War on Terror. While the jury is still out regarding the ultimate impact of his post-GWOT redirection of American foreign policy, U.S. President Barack Obama’s initiatives since 2011 have clearly been designed to steer American policy in a profoundly Pacific direction. This shift has direct consequences for the U. S. Navy in the so-called “Pacific Century.”
In fact, this new direction leaves the U.S. Navy in the unenviable position of being at the vanguard of a “Pacific Pivot” while facing potentially dramatic reductions in force structure and modernization budgets. However, it is not clear that the Pacific “pivot” strategy actually requires a dramatic, Cold War-like increase in American naval presence for success–rather, it may be enough for the U.S. Navy to implement its own structural pivot to better match American foreign policy goals with resources.
In the wake of the GWOT and 2008 financial crisis, many assessments predicted the end of America’s “unipolar moment,” spurring the Obama administration to announce a new foreign policy direction in 2011. Fighting popular perceptions of previous regional neglect, Obama stressed that the United States was permanently turning its principal attention towards Asia. In November 2011, this new Asia policy directive got its own catchphrase when then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton published an article in Foreign Policy magazine titled “America’s Pacific Century,” emphasizing both the current and future importance of Asia and America’s desired role in the region. Thus was born the American “pivot” to the Pacific.
More than two years after Clinton first outlined that broad policy, there are many indicators that the strategy is more than just another step in a U.S.-China arms race. Since announcing the pivot, emphasis has been placed on involvement in regional multilateralism and economic integration through pursuit of initiatives such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership regional free trade agreement, accession to the East Asia Summit, and establishment of a permanent mission to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. The administration continues to play up regional involvement to convey the message that the United States intends to remain an integral Pacific power. Although security policy does constitute a key component of the unfolding, multifaceted Pacific strategy, the very limited security initiatives implemented or proposed to date do not appear to be the policy centerpiece. In reality, the “pivot” is (thus far) more of a rhetorical statement of American interest in the preservation of the American-led status quo, backed up with regional initiatives that do not require or include a significant redistribution of hard power assets. Even so, this new emphasis on the Pacific theater has significant repercussions for the U.S. Navy, in an era of diminishing resources and unpropitious regional trends.
The security aspect of the strategic pivot ostensibly seeks to enhance the United States’ military presence in the region in the coming “Asian century.” Highly publicized steps such as the stationing of 2,500 U.S. Marines in Darwin, Australia and Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) in Singapore thrust this aspect of the pivot into the public eye. The strategic impetus behind these largely symbolic force re-deployments has been the subject of much debate. While the Obama administration has tried to emphasize that China’s military growth is not driving the American pivot strategy, many analysts and scholars see things differently. Advocates from the “realist” camp of foreign policy experts often focus on China’s growing military capabilities. For example scholars Andrew Erickson and Adam Liff offer analyses such as this:
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) increasingly has the resources, capabilities, and confidence to attempt to assert China’s interests on its contested periphery, particularly in the Near Seas (Yellow, East, and South China Seas). This development has the potential to seriously challenge the interests of the U.S., its allies, and other partners in the region, as well as access to and security of a vital portion of the global commons–waters and airspace that all nations rely on for prosperity, yet which none own. That’s why the PLA’s development matters so much to a Washington located halfway around the world.
Key policy documents such as the Pentagon’s “Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership – Priorities for 21st Century Defense” and the “Joint Operational Access Concept” aim squarely at China’s anti-access/area denial military strategy and further bolster the argument that the pivot is a function of growing American insecurity at China’s military rise.
While China has been critical of America’s new Pacific military posturing, the Obama administration has focused much effort in the diplomatic and economic arenas as a means to alleviate the growing strategic distrust between America and the PRC. Secretary of State John Kerry has followed in former Secretary Clinton’s footsteps with a high level of personal engagement, while both America and China have invested substantial resources in more than 60 issues-based and regional dialogues. Even the U.S.-China military-to-military relationship, traditionally the weakest component of the bilateral relationship, has improved substantially under Xi Jinping’s leadership. While strategic insecurity stemming from China’s military expansion certainly is a major factor behind the strategic pivot, the Obama administration has not yet adopted hard power as the primary instrument to counter Chinese revisionism in the Asia-Pacific of the 21st century.
On the surface, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert appeared to initiate a major “pivot” in U.S. naval power, increasing the Pacific allocation of naval ships and aircraft from fifty to sixty percent of the navy’s total force while fielding new capabilities focused on Asia-Pacific challenges. This appears to be consistent with other U.S. Navy rebalancing endeavors such as accessing new Pacific bases, expanding joint exercises and arms sales, and debating new doctrine (such as the controversial Air-Sea Battle). However, the increasingly unfavorable budgetary environment may ultimately render the rebalanced force in the Pacific a paper tiger. For example, Greenert’s sixty percent force reallocation means little as his vision of a 306-ship navy crashes upon the rocks of sequestration. Constrained budgets, rather than a Pacific surge, are dictating force reductions that may undermine regional trust in America’s continued leadership. More interestingly, in calling for a more muscular Pacific posture, the Navy may actually be out of sync with more balanced Obama administration policy. Even as the Navy attempts to pursue more robust Pacific capabilities, Obama administration budget cuts may result in a Navy that is too under-resourced to ensure sufficient American control of the seas in the event of an Asian Pacific conflict.
While previous ideas and initiatives, such as Admiral Mike Mullen’s “thousand-ship navy” and “offshore balancing,” have been proposed as a means to sustain regional influence, the continued reliance of the traditional “hub-and-spokes” Pacific alliance system with the U.S. Navy serving as security guarantor indicate a lack of progress in implementing any new strategic concept. For example, ongoing attempts to regain military access to the Philippines is a continuation of previous Cold War era policy, which now risks stretching dwindling U.S. Navy assets instead of encouraging Manila to contribute more to collective regional security. Other relatively modest efforts to bolster the capabilities of regional allies (such as the recent joint-Japanese and American joint program to develop a new littoral combat ship), also feature in the American pivot. However, outstanding issues such as the severe restrictions the pacifist post-World War II Japanese constitution places upon its military, and Japan’s dismal relations with South Korea (another staunch “spoke” ally of America), further underline the need for an updated American approach to regional security. Pursuit of a more cooperative relationship with regional allies via equitable burden-sharing security arrangements is most likely the best way forward, as America’s shrinking military footprint may prove insufficient to hold a U.S.-friendly coalition together in the future.
Regional experts have highlighted the potential risk of antagonizing Beijing while cutting defense budgets and engaging only in soft rebalancing as a hedge against China’s military rise. This risk of making an enemy out of an increasingly capable great power, while presenting only a modest deterrent, represents a potential recipe for disaster for American credibility and national interests. The apparent gap between the forces that the current U.S. maritime strategy would require in the increasingly militarized Pacific of the 21st century and the fading likelihood sufficient resources will be readily available reveal a dangerous disconnect between resources and expectations.
Rather than expend scarce resources trying to maintain uncontested sea dominance, the Navy may be better advised to strengthen its East Asian spokes rather than the hub under the current policy direction. As the United States prioritizes diplomatic and economic initiatives to enhance its integration in the Asia Pacific while downsizing its military, the U.S. Navy will face a diminishing pool of assets to maintain regional military hegemony even as China grows increasingly capable. As the gap between goals and resources allotted to American forces in the Pacific grows increasingly irreconcilable, perhaps another pivot, this time of American maritime strategy, is in order.
William Kyle is an imagery analyst covering military issues in Asia.
http://thediplomat.com/2014/03/the-us-navy-and-the-pivot-less-means-less/
 
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31.	Will Presidential Elections Bring Stability To Afghanistan?
Expert roundup interviews
(CFR.ORG 31 MAR 14) ... Zachary Laub
 
Afghans will choose among eleven contenders for the presidency on April 5. The stakes are high: The election promises to bring Afghanistan's "first peaceful and democratic transfer of executive power," writes Andrew Wilder of the U.S. Institute of Peace. But some degree of fraud is inevitable, and after the votes have been cast, backroom dealing may sway the outcome, says Martine van Bijlert of the Afghanistan Analysts Network.
The leading candidates have all promised to end the uncertainty facing the country by signing an agreement with the United States that would enable the long-term presence of foreign troops (and foreign funding) to support Afghan forces. Outgoing president Hamid Karzai has rejected the agreement – a move meant to bolster his nationalist credentials and secure his legacy, says historian Amin Tarzi. Meanwhile, the Taliban will try to spoil the elections by suppressing the vote and casting the next administration as illegitimate, writes journalist Anand Gopal.
Andrew Wilder, Vice President of the Center for South and Central Asia, United States Institute of Peace
Afghanistan's upcoming presidential election is arguably the country's most significant political event since the Bonn Agreement established its post-Taliban order in December 2001. With President Hamid Karzai constitutionally barred from seeking a third term, a successful election would be Afghanistan's first peaceful and democratic transfer of executive power. It is also critical for the country's stability and economic viability.
A successful election would have three main characteristics: higher turnout than the 2009 presidential election, less fraud, and a result accepted by the losing candidates. This would restore the state's legitimacy, create opportunities to build on the remarkable gains of the past twelve years, and repair the Afghan-U.S. relationship.
A failed election, on the other hand, could hand a major victory to the Taliban. It might lead to civil war as major political and ethnic factions take up arms, and the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) could splinter along ethnic lines. Afghanistan could also once again become a haven for terrorists and threaten the stability of nuclear-armed Pakistan.
International assistance will inevitably decrease as troops withdraw and donor fatigue sets in. While a government perceived as illegitimate would provide donors an excuse to radically cut their assistance, a reform-oriented government emerging from a legitimate election would encourage many to maintain moderate levels of assistance, especially if they saw steps taken to fight corruption.
Karzai has squandered enormous amounts of goodwill in the United States, bringing to an all-time low Afghanistan's relations with its largest provider of civilian and military assistance. A legitimately elected successor will have the opportunity to reset the relationship, beginning by signing a bilateral security agreement (BSA), which the White House has made a necessary condition for a post-2014 U.S. troop presence. The BSA, which all the leading candidates have promised to sign if elected, will not only ensure training and support for the ANSF, but also more robust civilian assistance.
The Taliban has made clear its intent to disrupt the elections, but despite the threatened and actual violence, unprecedented numbers of Afghans are participating in the country's most vibrant campaign ever. The country faces huge uncertainty, and Afghan voters recognize that they have a responsibility to vote, not only for a new president, but also for a peaceful future.
Martine van Bijlert, Co-Director, Afghanistan Analysts Network
Even for the professionally optimistic, it is difficult to imagine fraud-free elections in Afghanistan. The political stakes are high, institutions are both partial and divided, and campaigns have co-opted electoral staff. Insecurity facilitates gross interference in large parts of the country, and the excessive distribution of voter cards (twenty-one million cards have been distributed for about thirteen million eligible voters) encourages fraud. The Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) has formulated fraud mitigation policies, but these will prevent only a small portion of the irregularities – mainly multiple voting by individuals – leaving it and the Independent Electoral Complaints Commission (IECC) with the unattractive job of sifting through a messy vote and deciding which ballots to count.
This election has no obvious winner: there are three strong contenders, but none has the clear advantage. How well they fare will be determined by voters' decisions, observers' vigilance, security incidents, logistical setbacks, and the ballot disqualification process. As each candidate is likely to claim victory, the count process threatens to be tense and drawn-out, with various groups jockeying to influence the outcome.
Although many commentators speak as if violence is the norm in Afghan politics, in reality the threat of violence is often mainly used to press political negotiations and to force the sharing of power. Massive fraud or an unwanted outcome will probably not spark spontaneous anger, and it is unlikely that angry candidates will turn against the state, but they may well choose to play with fire by mobilizing crowds and playing on their emotions. It is a high-stakes game that will be solved through brokered backroom deals while the country holds its breath.
International actors can help by not inflating expectations of a clear-cut win or a relatively fraud-free election, and by discouraging inflammatory behavior. They can also help by refraining from playing favorites, watching the process until the very end, and toning down overly simplistic analyses, ethnic or otherwise.
Anand Gopal, Bernard L. Schwartz Fellow, New America Foundation, and Author, No Good Men Among the Living
As the campaign convoy of candidate Abdullah Abdullah wound its way through the mountains outside of Kabul last month, Taliban gunmen opened fire, nearly killing him and his aides. Two weeks later, police foiled a bomb attack against Ashraf Ghani, another leading contender. Not long after, campaign workers for presidential hopeful Gul Agha Sherzai were gunned down in Helmand. That same week, in northern Faryab province, unidentified gunmen killed three Abdullah supporters, warning that they would sever the hands of anyone who voted on election day.
"The Taliban's goal is to delegitimize the incoming government."
The Taliban has vowed to "target all workers, activists, callers, security apparatuses, and offices" in order to disrupt the April 5 presidential election. This means that the turnout in the south and east, where the movement is strongest, is all but guaranteed to be exceedingly low, although these numbers will likely be masked by widespread ballot stuffing. The Taliban's goal is to delegitimize the incoming Afghan government, much as it had done with the Karzai administration. This strategy will be all the more crucial to the movement's survival if U.S. troops withdraw, since the Taliban portrays itself as fighting a client regime.
In the 2009 presidential election, the Taliban succeeded in keeping southern voters away by launching an unprecedented number of attacks on polling centers and Afghan government forces. While the insurgency is weaker today – the movement has lost ground in Kandahar and Helmand – it is still active in roughly half the country, and enjoys outright control in some areas. But the Taliban is far more disarticulated today; it now consists of distinct factions, some of which are no longer under the control of the Pakistan-based leadership. And the departure of foreign troops may persuade some to give up the fight. However, the relentless stream of abuses perpetrated by the Afghan government and U.S.-backed militias and the Taliban's undying belief that only religious law can save the country ensures that the battle will continue for years on end.
Amin Tarzi, Senior Fellow, Program on the Middle East, Foreign Policy Research Institute
As expected, U.S. president Barack Obama has told his counterpart, Hamid Karzai, that the Afghan leader's refusal to sign a bilateral security agreement (BSA) would prompt the withdrawal of all U.S. forces by the end of this year.
Afghanistan's security situation is likely to deteriorate if U.S. and other foreign forces withdraw [in the aftermath of the April presidential elections]. The BSA would provide a safety net for Afghanistan's security forces and a light American footprint to mitigate terrorist threats. In November 2013, a loya jirga – a consultative grand assembly – overwhelmingly endorsed the BSA. However, Karzai rejected the loya jirga's position and instead offered a list of grievances against the United States.
To better understand the rationale behind Karzai's position on the BSA and his increasingly anti-U.S. sentiments, one must look to Afghanistan's history.
Earlier this year Karzai compared the BSA to two documents that nineteenth-century Afghan rulers signed with British India: the 1879 Gandumak Treaty and the 1893 Abdul Rahman – Durand Agreement. Afghans regard them as humiliating agreements under which Afghanistan lost its sovereignty and large tracts of territory that are now part of Pakistan. The former can be considered foreign-imposed; the latter, however, was fairly negotiated. The Afghan amir was cognizant of its provisions and participated in crafting it.
Karzai ignores this history and instead embraces a notion, held by the majority of Afghans, that the 1893 agreement was forced upon Afghanistan. In his mind, were he to sign the BSA, his legacy would be like those of his nineteenth-century predecessors who are regarded as having served foreign interests.
Two goals seem to be driving Karzai as he obstructs a long-term U.S. footprint in Afghanistan. Karzai is trying to ensure that after he leaves office he will continue to hold clout with successive administrations in Kabul as well as insurgent leaders, and that future generations of Afghans will remember him as a fearless nationalist who had the temerity to face down the much more powerful United States.
http://www.cfr.org/afghanistan/presidential-elections-bring-stability-afghanistan/p32680
 
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32.	Congress, Pentagon Battle Over Budget
Congress, Pentagon at odds in budget talks; it’s military’s needs vs. lawmakers’ home front
(WASHINGTON POST 01 APR 14) ... Walter Pincus
 
Defense Department officials and Congress continue to disagree on how to save money in the fiscal 2015 defense budget.
In most instances, Pentagon officials have the facts and politicians generally have concern about the effects on their constituents.
Here are two examples from recent Capitol Hill hearings:
•	Retiring the 40-year-old A-10 “Warthog,” the slow-flying, close-air-support jet fighter-bomber that was designed to kill Warsaw Pact tanks, may be the most controversial. The Pentagon’s plan last year to replace of all its 325 A-10s with the newer, still-being-developed, costly F-35 was blocked by Congress, at least through the end of 2014. So the Pentagon is trying again.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh III, a former A-10 pilot, set the stage March 14 before the House Armed Services Committee, saying: “Close air support is not an afterthought to me. It is not going to be a secondary mission in the United States Air Force. But close air support is not an aircraft – it’s a mission – and we do it very, very well with a number of airplanes today.”
Welsh said that retiring the A-10s would save $3.7 billion over the next five years and an additional $500 million for planned upgrades if the A-10s were to be retained. After studying other cost-saving ideas, he said, “cutting the A-10 fleet was ... the lowest-risk option from an operational perspective.”
Rep. Ron Barber (D-Ariz.), whose district includes Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, home to A-10s since 1975, pointed out that he had “31 colleagues here in the House and in the Senate, both parties represented, who have fought from the beginning to say let’s take another look at this decision or proposal on the A-10s.” With the A-10s retired, he asked, what aircraft are “U.S. troops going to have when engaging the enemy on the fluid battlefield with moving targets below 1,500 feet and weather ceilings?”
Air Force Secretary Deborah James said “80 percent of what we have done in close air support in Afghanistan has been by aircraft other than A-10s,” starting with F-16s.
Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.), whose district includes Whiteman Air Force Base, which houses an Air Force Reserve A-10 squadron, noted that the airplane is the most cost-efficient in flying hours.
Welsh said the Army wants the Air Force to perform deep attacks that stop an enemy’s resupply and eliminate second-echelon forces.
“The A-10 cannot do any of those other missions,” Welsh said. “Other airplanes that we have doing close air support today can, and as we look at what we have to cut, we have to balance across our mission areas. That’s the debate.”
Hartzler suggested that savings equal to the amount gained by retiring the A-10 could be accomplished by “a 6 percent reduction in the Air Force’s civilians through attrition.”
James replied that it would require “an additional, I think, 10,000 civilians to equate to the same amount of money, roughly speaking, as the A-10.” That 10,000 figure would be on top of already planned civilian reductions in headquarters staffs and would involve those doing depot maintenance on aircraft.
At the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Thursday, Welsh offered a more personal take on the A-10.
“You can’t dress up a fourth-generation airplane, our legacy fighters, and make it competitive with an F-35. … And so the real question for me ... is do I want to look the moms and dads of America in the eye and say it’s okay that your son and daughter will be flying that older airplane, because they’re really good and ... we’ll win the war anyway,” he said.
“More of them will die,” he said. “I’m not willing to have that conversation. The number-one superpower in the world shouldn’t.”
•	Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) raised another issue during Thursday’s Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the Navy and Marine Corps fiscal 2015 budget authorization bill. Cruz and others have questioned what he called “billions of dollars on alternative fuel research and programs at DoD that I think are far less essential than maintaining our readiness and ability to defend our national security interests.”
Cruz, who represents an oil-producing state, called attention to the Navy spending $170 million on algae fuel, which he said “costs four times as much as regular fuel, which means potentially $120 million was spent unnecessarily.”
Navy Secretary Ray Mabus responded, “Senator, now is exactly the time that we have to diversify our energy sources.”
He said increases in fuel prices cost the Navy an additional $1 billion in both 2011 and 2012 and “if we don’t get an American-made, more stably based source of fuel, if we don’t get some competition into the fuel, we’re looking at fewer soldiers, fewer sailors, fewer platforms.”
Mabus also said that the $170 million mentioned was for alternative fuels and that the Navy is working with four companies “that are obligated to provide us with 163 million gallons of biofuel by 2016 at less than $3.50 a gallon.”
The Navy, he said, was not researching algae. “The research has been done,” Mabus said. “The production is there. We are moving toward changing the way we use fuel. We’re doing energy efficiency as well.”
Cruz was not satisfied. He said that at an earlier hearing Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel had “characterized the algae-fuel program, and also programs such as a wind farm in Alaska that was built where there’s no wind, as, quote, ‘luxuries.’ ”
Cruz told Mabus, “It sounds like you don’t agree with Secretary Hagel’s characterization.”
Mabus replied that he didn’t hear Hagel’s comments, “but I’m confident that, in these energy terms, that he did not state that they were luxuries.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/congress-pentagon-at-odds-in-budget-talks-its-militarys-needs-vs-lawmakers-home-front/2014/03/31/6bd292e8-b81c-11e3-9a05-c739f29ccb08_story.html
 
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33.	The Things She Carried
(NEW YORK TIMES 01 APR 14) ... Cara Hoffman
 
The injury wasn’t new, and neither was the insult. Rebecca, a combat veteran of two tours of duty, had been waiting at the V.A. hospital for close to an hour when the office manager asked if she was there to pick up her husband.
No, she said, fighting back her exasperation. She was there because of a spinal injury she sustained while fighting in Afghanistan.
Women have served in the American military in some capacity for 400 years. They’ve deployed alongside men as soldiers in three wars, and since the 1990s, a significant number of them are training, fighting and returning from combat.
But stories about female veterans are nearly absent from our culture. It’s not that their stories are poorly told. It’s that their stories are simply not told in our literature, film and popular culture.
Women have the same issues as men upon return, from traumatic physical injuries to post-traumatic stress disorder. One young combat veteran told me a harrowing story of crushing a little boy beneath the wheels of her speeding Humvee. I am sure she hears the sound of that vehicle hitting his small body every day of her life.
In addition, as many as a third of all women serving in the military are raped by fellow soldiers during their tours of duty, compounding whatever traumas they may have experienced in combat.
And yet Rebecca’s experience at the V.A. hospital is common. I’ve talked with many women veterans, and like all soldiers, they’ve recounted the firefights, moral confusion and compassion for those whose lives are torn apart by war.
Each had a different experience, and each bore her pains differently. But there was this simple, common thread: their stories of being unrecognized at home, which always carried with it a separate kind of frustration and incredulity.
Male soldiers’ experiences make up the foundation of art and literature: From “The Odyssey” to “The Things They Carried,” the heroic or tragic protagonist’s face is familiar, timeless and, without exception, male. The story of men in combat is taught globally, examined broadly, celebrated and vilified in fiction, exploited by either side of the aisle in politics.
For women it’s a different story, one in which they are more often cast as victims, wives, nurses; anything but soldiers who see battle. In the rare war narratives where women do appear, the focus is generally on military sexual assault, a terrible epidemic of violence that needs to be revealed and ended, but not something that represents the full experience of women in the military.
Homecoming isn’t easy for anyone, but traditional domestic expectations can make it particularly challenging for women.
Feelings of wanting to be alone, of alienation, are more difficult, as women are expected to be patient nurturers who care for spouses and children. Parenting under the best circumstances can test a person’s patience, but parenting after life under fire is more than most of us could take. Studies show women experience elevated anxiety about caring for their families upon homecoming, including an increased fear that they may hurt their own children.
Lack of recognition is also a problem. I’ve stood next to my uniform-wearing brother, a veteran of two tours in Afghanistan, in a grocery store while three separate strangers approached to thank him for his service. Women veterans are rarely stopped by people who want to shake their hands. Even wearing fatigues and boots and carrying duffel bags standing in a bus station or at the airport, somehow they go unrecognized as returning warriors.
The sense of emptiness that can follow unacknowledged accomplishments and unacknowledged trauma makes women soldiers feel invisible and adds yet one more insult to injury. Depression, drug and alcohol abuse, homelessness and suicide do not just affect male soldiers, though theirs are the stories we see. Women who have served in the military are three times more likely to commit suicide than their civilian counterparts.
I can’t help but think women soldiers would be afforded the respect they deserve if their experiences were reflected in literature, film and art, if people could see their struggles, their resilience, their grief represented.
They would be made visible if we could read stories that would allow us to understand that women kill in combat and lose friends and long to see their children and partners at home. They would be given appropriate human compassion if we could feel their experiences viscerally as we do when reading novels like “All Quiet on the Western Front,” or seeing films like “The Hurt Locker.”
Society may come to understand war differently if people could see it through the eyes of women who’ve experienced both giving birth and taking life. People might learn something new about aggression and violence if we read not just about those fighting the enemy but about those who must also fight off assault from the soldiers they serve beside or report to.
Female veterans’ stories clearly have the power to change and enrich our understanding of war. But their unsung epics might also have the power to change our culture, our art, our nation and our lives.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/opinion/the-things-she-carried.html
 
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34.	U.S. Navy Takes ‘One Giant Leap’ With New Research Vessel
(NAVY LIVE BLOG 31 MAR 14) ... Tim Schnoor
 
It’s a great day for the U.S. Navy and the ocean science community – I just witnessed the christening of the Navy’s newest research vessel at the Dakota Creek Industries shipyard in Anacortes, Washington, about 70 miles north of Seattle.
Named after the first man to walk on the moon, the research vessel (R/V) Neil Armstrong will assume its place among the Office of Naval Research (ONR) fleet of six research ships next year. Each is assigned to a U.S. oceanographic institution or university, and is operated by a 20-person university crew. Up to 24 scientists can be accommodated on Armstrong for research missions lasting up to a month. ONR will assign Armstrong to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution as a replacement for the R/V Knorr, which is being retired after an impressive 45 years of global research, making numerous ocean discoveries, including finding the wreckage of the Titanic.
With open, flexible, state-of-the-art laboratory spaces and modern ocean sensors, the Armstrong will set sail for new discoveries of the deep.
Because naval forces operate below, upon and above the seas, understanding the ocean environment is critical to successful operations, and keeping Sailors and Marines safe. Enter the research fleet.
ONR, along with other federal research partners (such as the National Science Foundation and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) support and maintain research vessels that include the historic deep-submergence vehicle Alvin, and the Floating Instrument Platform, or FLIP, and more. Every day, somewhere on the global seas, U.S.-sponsored ocean-going scientists pursue their quest for new knowledge of the oceans.
I am awed by the capability of our research vessels and the men and women who crew them. Managing these vessels for ONR is a responsibility and challenge that I look forward to each day.
In fact, I travel quite a bit. These vessels regularly operate far from their U.S. homeports for months and even years at a time. Replenishment, maintenance and voyage repairs take place in foreign ports, both large and small. Planning for the logistics of scientific research cruises takes place years in advance, and requires constant communication between the ship, crew, science teams and home institutions. International cooperation in ocean science research is a frequent occurrence, and assists the U.S. in achieving science objectives.
So what will the Armstrong bring to the fleet? Its specs are impressive:
•	238 feet in length, beam 50 feet
•	Cruise speeds of up to 12 knots with a range 11,500 nautical miles
•	Mission durations of up to 40 days
•	Advanced sonar technology to map the deep, and monitor currents to better understand ocean and atmosphere interaction
o	Hull designed to reduce bubble sweepdown from the sonar area, and to enhance the performance of its acoustic sensors
o	Propulsion provided by four diesel generators that produce 1044 kW each
o	Advanced over-the-side sampling equipment handling systems enable safe work conditions in high seas states
o	Deep sea winches and marine cranes support unmanned systems, including remotely operated vehicles autonomous underwater vehicles and unmanned aerial vehicles
At the completion of their time at sea, scientists return to their home institutions to analyze the samples and ocean data they have collected and publish their findings. Last year, they published more than 1,500 scientific papers.
Additionally, the Oceanographer of the Navy, naval meteorologists and the National Hurricane Center benefit from data collected aboard these ships, and from many ocean sensors they moored at sea. This knowledge helps make accurate daily weather predictions and improve computer forecasting models. More than 25 operational prediction systems are actively used by Navy oceanographers that range from global weather to local riverine currents.
Recently, a new atmospheric model for tropical cyclones went operational for the Navy. It works so well, in fact, that the National Hurricane Center credited it as the most significant advance in cyclone intensity prediction in 30 years.
Looking forward, new research will help us better understand and predict the impacts of the changing Arctic, the creatures inhabiting the oceans, and the safety of mariners who travel its vast surface.
I have high expectations for the Armstrong, not just for its design and unique attributes, but for the spirit of discovery its namesake will bring to its mission and crew. Neil Armstrong’s famous words when stepping onto the moon – “This is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” – will guide this ship’s work: It is one ship of many in our Navy, but its impact is for all humankind.
TIm Schnoor is oceanographic facilities program manager at the Office of Naval Research.
http://navylive.dodlive.mil/2014/03/31/u-s-navy-takes-one-giant-leap-with-new-research-vessel/
 
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35.	Chief Petty Officers Celebrate 121 Years Of Excellence
(NAVY LIVE BLOG 31 MAR 14) ... Master Chief Petty Officer of the Navy Mike Stevens
 
As the master chief petty officer of the Navy, I get the chance to talk with chief petty officers from all across the world. As I travel throughout the fleet, it is evident that chiefs are doing great things. Their Sailors are a reflection of their amazing work. Established on April 1, 1893, chiefs have led each Sailor in their charge.
No one can be under any illusions of what being a chief petty officer means. You must be “All In, All The Time.” We must live honest and humble lives because our Sailors can see between the lines. They can see through the chief who tells his or her Sailors one thing, but does the opposite on the weekends. You must live and lead consistently.
By myself, I don’t have the capacity to come up with all of the answers, but I believe that our chiefs’ mess must have common ground, something that we can all work on together. We must have a focus. This is where “Zeroing in on Excellence” comes in.
Developing leaders: Leaders are the lids to their organizations. Leadership touches us all. Leadership is also one’s ability to influence others. I was in a command that made every mission, people were happy to come to work, they were proud to wear the command colors, and people wanted to be there. There was very little misconduct, or mishaps, and it was a good place to be stationed. The lid was the commanding officer and the command master chief. Nothing changed within that command except for the change of command. Within 30 days of the change of command, the command went from being world champions to the worst in the league. It took me years to understand the significance of influence our senior leaders make. Great leaders are what make great organizations. If we want to mitigate many problems we are facing, we must have the right leaders in the right place at the right time. We are investing our time, energy and effort into the problem, but the reality is that without the leadership we won’t rid the problem.
Good order and discipline: I think with our young men and women who serve, their behavior is a reflection of our behavior. If you want people to do the right thing, then we must to do the right thing. Across the board of senior leaders, if we live the life beyond reproach then we would highly encourage, through our actions, young men and women who serve beneath us to do the same thing. Our greatest failure has been our failure to lead by example. I’m not looking to start a program, collect date, but rather just do the right thing. Especially when it’s hard because young Sailors will see you when they look in the mirror.
Controlling what we own: The greatest difference maker in life is our attitude. You can’t always control what happens to you but you can control how you react. We often spend so much time complaining about some of the challenges that life has dealt us, and I’m guilty too, but if we really stood back and took a hard look, we’d realize that within those challenges, lies tremendous opportunities. With the many challenges facing our Navy today, as much or more than ever, “controlling what we own” is of utmost importance. The things that we have no control over simply cannot distract us.
I’ve been a chief petty officer for 19 years, and I understand the perceived history and traditions of our Chief’s Mess. I’ve seen a lot during evolution of the way we’ve trained our first class petty officers. For many years, we weren’t physically hurting people, but it seemed to bring out the worst in our chief petty officers. We’d do things in a group that we would never do individually. I saw people say and do things that they normally wouldn’t do on their own. I just knew that if I didn’t stand for what is fundamentally right, with treating people with dignity and respect, then I was just as guilty as the people I had a problem with.
If you look throughout our history of the United States, some of the greatest things we’ve done have created strife and discontent. We say that we are a democratic society and that the majority has the say so, but every once in a while in our history, there’s a person that goes against the majority because it’s simply the right thing to do.
Chief petty officers are very influential in the Navy. If we can train our reliefs with dignity and respect, then we can ultimately get it right with every Sailor we come across. Remember, when you do the right things for the right reasons, you will always prevail.
There are many young Sailors who will one day serve among the ranks as chief petty officers to continue commemorating the legacy of excellence.
I’d like to take a moment to say thank you for everything you do, every single day. Our time in these jobs as seniors is short and we must continue to make every day our masterpiece.
http://navylive.dodlive.mil/2014/03/31/chief-petty-officers-celebrate-121-years-of-excellence/
 
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