Subject: 02 APR 14 CHINFO CLIPS
From: "CHINFO News Clips" <[email-masked]>
To: <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 02 Apr 2014 06:08:20 -0400

On This Day In The Navy:
1827: First Naval Hospital construction begun at Portsmouth, VA.

TOP STORIES:
1.	Russia’s Actions Revive NATO’s Cold War Focus
NATO chief recommits to defending Eastern European, Baltic nations
(WASHINGTON POST 02 APR 14) ... Anne Gearan
BRUSSELS – A reinvigorated NATO flexed old Cold War muscles Tuesday as the Atlantic alliance’s chief recommitted to defending Eastern European and Baltic nations rattled by Russia’s military moves and its annexation of Crimea.

2.	China's Line In The Sea
Beijing Has Never Properly Explained What Its 'Nine-Dash Line' Represents
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 02 APR 14) ... Andrew Browne
BEIJING – When the Manchus ruled China, it was given the name South Sea – a maritime domain dotted with islets, atolls and lagoons that provided storm shelter for fishermen.

3.	Lowered Expectations As Malaysia Airlines Search Drags On
(REUTERS 02 APR 14) ... Matt Siegel
PERTH – The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 resumed on Wednesday, even as senior Australian officials warned that bad weather and a lack of reliable information were seriously impeding efforts to locate the plane's wreckage.

UKRAINE:
4.	NATO Allies Pledge To Beef Up Eastern Defenses
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 01 APR 14) ... John-Thor Dahlburg and Vladimir Isachenkov 
BRUSSELS – NATO foreign ministers moved Tuesday to beef up the defenses of front-line alliance members feeling menaced by a more assertive Russia, with Secretary of State John Kerry proclaiming the U.S. commitment to their security is "unwavering."

5.	Top U.S. Commander In Europe: Putin Not Budging
(THE COMPLEX (FOREIGN POLICY) 01 APR 14) ... Gordon Lubold
The top U.S. commander in Europe said in an interview that he sees no sign that Russian forces are backing away from the border with Ukraine and called Moscow's conquest and annexation of Crimea a "paradigm shift" that requires a fundamental rethinking of where American forces are located and how they are trained.

6.	House Clears Ukraine Aid, Sanctions Package
Lawmakers Say Move Gives President Leverage in Russia Talks
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 02 APR 14) ... Michael R. Crittenden
WASHINGTON – The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday cleared a package of aid and sanctions to address the political crisis in Ukraine that lawmakers said would give the Obama administration greater leverage in diplomatic talks with Russia.

7.	West Stumbles As Autocratic Force Trumps Economics
(REUTERS 01 APR 14) ... David Rohde
A quarter-century after the fall of the Soviet Union, authoritarian rulers such as Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad are showing they can and will defy international norms, suppress dissent and use military force. American policymakers are struggling with how to respond.

ASIA – PACIFIC:
8.	Hagel To Meet With Malaysian Counterpart
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 01 APR 14) ... Lolita C. Baldor
ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT – Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will meet with Malaysia's defense minister this week, amid ongoing criticism about how well the search for missing Flight 370 has been conducted and coordinated with other nations.

9.	Search For Missing Malaysian Plane Hampered By Lack Of Certainty
Hunt's New Leader Moves to Damp Expectations for Any Resolution in Coming Weeks
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 02 APR 14) ... David Winning and Rachel Pannett
SYDNEY – The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 moved closer to Australia's coastline, underscoring continuing uncertainty over where the plane may have gone down in the southern Indian Ocean.

10.	Deep Water Search For Jet Could Turn On Robot Subs
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 02 APR 14) ... Adam Geller
Two miles down or more and darker than night, the ocean becomes a particularly challenging place for human searchers.

11.	Suspected N. Korean Drones Prompt Seoul To Boost Surveillance
(YONHAP NEWS AGENCY (S.KOREA) 02 APR 14) ... Kim Eun-jung
SEOUL – South Korea is seeking to improve its surveillance capabilities to deal with military threats from North Korea following the discovery of two drones near the inter-Korean border, military officials said Wednesday.

12.	Job Pool Expanding For U.S. Troops Interested In Heading Down Under
(STARS AND STRIPES 01 APR 14) ... Seth Robson
YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan – The Australian Defence Force, which expects to double its budget over the next decade, is looking for even more foreign military members willing to serve Down Under.

AMERICAS:
13.	Huge Earthquake Off Chile Coast Sparks Tsunami
(REUTERS 02 APR 14) ... Anthony Esposito and Rosalba O'Brien
SANTIAGO –- A major earthquake of magnitude 8.2 struck off the coast of northern Chile on Tuesday, causing five deaths and triggering a tsunami that pounded the shore with 2-meter-tall waves.

MIDEAST:
14.	Dempsey Says Israel-U.S. Perceptions Of Iran Grow Closer
(BLOOMBERG NEWS 01 APR 14) ... Tony Capaccio
Israel’s view of how soon Iran will gain a nuclear-weapon capability has become much closer to that of officials in Washington, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said today.

15.	Army-Navy Tag Team Trains To Defend Persian Gulf
Aviators in Kuwait ready to fly from ships in a crisis
(WAR IS BORING 01 APR 14) ... Joe Trevithick
Army aviators in Kuwait spent much of 2013 training for an unusual mission – flying from Navy ships. This new mission is a major shift for the ground combat branch in the Middle East … and elsewhere.

AFGHANISTAN:
16.	March Fatality-Free For U.S. Forces In Afghanistan
(STARS AND STRIPES 01 APR 14) ... Jon Harper
WASHINGTON – For the first time in more than seven years, the U.S. military just went a full calendar month without suffering any fatalities in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon.

ARCTIC:
17.	Arctic Aviation Operations Remain Concern For U.S. Navy
(AVIATION WEEK INTELLIGENCE NETWORK 01 APR 14) ... Michael Fabey
WASHINGTON – As the U.S. Navy seeks to conduct more missions in the Arctic, it is becoming increasingly clear that aviation operations in the region will present a special set of challenges – especially when it comes to takeoffs, landings and maintenance.

LCS:
18.	Austal, Lockheed Warships Did Well In U.S. War Game -Admiral
(REUTERS 02 APR 14) ... Andrea Shalal
Both the Lockheed Martin Corp and Austal versions of the U.S. Navy's new coastal warship performed well in a major war game last week and surprised some "enemies" with their capabilities, a top Navy admiral said on Tuesday.

19.	LCS War Game Focuses On Blue Water, Anti-Sub, Anti-Ship Capabilities
(INSIDE DEFENSE 01 APR 14) ... Olga Belogolova
In a war game meant to probe the concept of operations for the Littoral Combat Ship last week, the Navy focused primarily on the anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare capabilities of the ship class in the open ocean, according to a Navy official.

20.	Littoral Combat Ship Mission Packages Safe From Budget Axe For Now
(U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE NEWS 01 APR 14) ... Sam LaGrone
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s mandate capping of the first variants of the Littoral Combat Ship at 32 hulls will do little to limit the acquisition of the mission packages for the Flight 0 LCS over the next five years, navy officials told USNI News last week.

UNMANNED SYSTEMS:
21.	UCLASS Could Be Used As Tanker For Carrier Air Wing
(U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE NEWS 01 APR 14) ... Dave Majumdar
The U.S. Navy is considering using its forthcoming Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft as an aerial refueling tanker to free up its fleet of Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets for more strike missions, several sources told USNI News.

CYBER:
22.	DoD Plans Cyber Staff Increases
(DEFENSE NEWS 01 APR 14) ... Amber Corrin
The Defense Department will increase the number of cyber professionals from roughly 1,800 today to more than 6,000 by 2016, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said last week.

CONGRESS / BUDGET:
23.	Ryan Budget Calls For Return To Pre-Sequester Defense Spending
Budget chairman cuts overall spending below sequester totals, but he takes from nondefense to boost defense spending beyond Obama.
(NATIONAL JOURNAL 01 APR 14) ... Stacy Kaper
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan laid out a budget vision Tuesday that goes beyond President Obama's request by ramping up defense spending beyond the caps in 2016 and restoring them by 2017.

24.	Republican Budget Asks Federal Employees To Contribute More To Pensions
(GOVERNMENT EXECUTIVE 01 APR 14) ... Kellie Lunney
House Republicans again are calling for a smaller government workforce and less generous benefits for federal employees, as part of a plan to help reduce the overall budget deficit.

SOCOM:
25.	Pybus On Deck As SOCOM’s Second In Command
(TAMPA TRIBUNE 01 APR 14) ... Howard Altman
The Tampa special operations community is lauding President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next deputy commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.

MARINE CORPS:
26.	Marines About To Announce New Amphibious Combat Vehicle Plan: Our Sneak Preview
(BREAKING DEFENSE 02 APR 14) ... Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
WASHINGTON – The Marines are about to move out sharply with their once-stalled Amphibious Combat Vehicle, the smallest service’s biggest program. After years of uncertainty and a last-minute change of course that came too late to make it into the administration’s budget request for 2015, the Marines will soon announce their new strategy for something they’re calling an ACV. But it will be much more modest than the revolutionary vehicle once envisioned.

PERSONNEL:
27.	Op-Ed Gets USMC Commandant’s Attention, Sparks Change For Women
(SEAPOWER 01 APR 14) ... Otto Kreisher
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Marine Corps commandant has reacted swiftly to a female Marine officer’s complaint that women are unfairly precluded from trying a second time to pass the prestigious Marine Corps Infantry Officers Course, when men can have a second try.

28.	More On Navy Cigarette Sales
Defense secretary, San Diego congressman on opposite sides of issue
(SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE 01 APR 14) ... Jeanette Steele
The debate continues – and is maybe heating up – over Navy sales of cigarettes on ships and naval installations.

29.	Aircrewmen To Receive New Zealand Medal For '79 Recovery Operation
(NAVY TIMES 01 APR 14) ... Meghann Myers 
Nearly 35 years ago, a group of Navy helicopter aircrewmen helped the New Zealand government recover the bodies of more than 250 passengers and crew after their commercial airliner crashed into Mount Erebus, Antarctica’s highest peak.

SEXUAL ASSAULT:
30.	West Point Leader Vows To Address Sexual Assault
(WESTCHESTER COUNTY (NY) JOURNAL NEWS 01 APR 14) ... Khurram Saeed
WEST POINT – Top Army officials on Monday said they were committed to ending sexual assault and harassment following a series of scandals at the nation's oldest military academy.

ENVIRONMENTAL:
31.	U.S. Navy Credited With Recovery Of Island Night Lizards
(LOS ANGELES TIMES 01 APR 14) ... Louis Sahagun
In what is being hailed as an environmental victory for the U.S. Navy, the island night lizard has been taken off the list of federally endangered species.

COMMENTARY:
32.	Realizing The Asia-Pacific Rebalance
(DEFENSE ONE 01 APR 14) ... Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel
In a world where security challenges do not adhere to political boundaries and our economies are linked as never before, no nation can go it alone and hope to prosper. Achieving sustained security and prosperity in the 21st century requires nations to work together and to meet common challenges with uncommon unity and purpose.

33.	Crimea: Too Small To Matter
(REUTERS 01 APR 14) ... Nicholas Wapshott
Crimea is permanently lost to Russia.

34.	Crimea And South China Sea Diplomacy
Russia’s big move shows both the limits and importance of diplomacy in territorial disputes.
(THE DIPLOMAT 01 APR 14) ... Sophie Boisseau du Rocher & Bruno Hellendorff
On March 18, China and ASEAN gathered in Singapore to pursue consultations on a Code of Conduct (COC) for the South China Sea, alongside talks on the implementation of the Declaration of Conduct (DOC). The gathering came at a time of rising preoccupation over a perceived creeping assertiveness by China in pursuing its maritime claims. Just one week before, Manila and Beijing experienced another diplomatic row, after Chinese Coast Guard vessels barred the resupply of Philippine marines based in the Spratly Islands.

35.	Split Persists Between Washington And Riyadh
Interviewee: F. Gregory Gause III, Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Brookings Doha Center
(CFR.ORG 01 APR 14) ... Bernard Gwertzman
Last week's meeting between President Obama and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was meant to quell speculation that relations between the two long-standing allies had collapsed, says Brookings fellow F. Gregory Gause. But despite the assurances proffered by the Obama administration, serious differences over policy regarding Iran, Syria, and Egypt remain between the two countries, says Gause.

36.	Military Caregivers Are Hidden Heroes
Many are family members who don't get the recognition and help that they deserve.
(USA TODAY 01 APR 14) ... Elizabeth Dole and Michael Rich
Right now there are 5.5 million wives, husbands, siblings, parents, children and friends devoted to the care of those injured fighting America's wars. Theirs is an all-consuming, emotionally draining task, one that has been driven for too long by loyalty and love, but little support.

37.	Violent Ex-Cons Should Never Be On Military Bases
(NORFOLK VIRGINIAN-PILOT 02 APR 14) ... Kerry Dougherty
First the good news: The Navy took only a couple of days to tighten security at all installations on the East Coast after last week's deadly shooting on the Norfolk Naval Station.

 

TOP STORIES:
1.	Russia’s Actions Revive NATO’s Cold War Focus
NATO chief recommits to defending Eastern European, Baltic nations
(WASHINGTON POST 02 APR 14) ... Anne Gearan
 
BRUSSELS – A reinvigorated NATO flexed old Cold War muscles Tuesday as the Atlantic alliance’s chief recommitted to defending Eastern European and Baltic nations rattled by Russia’s military moves and its annexation of Crimea.
At the opening of a two-day meeting of NATO foreign ministers, Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said the alliance has seen no signs of Russian troop withdrawals along the Ukraine border, as Moscow has claimed. A senior U.S. State Department official had called Russia’s promised pullback a “gesture,” but a welcome one.
“We have all challenged the tactics of intimidation,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry said after meeting Tuesday with NATO members and Ukrainian envoys.
The alliance moved to suspend many military and civilian ties with Russia over its military incursion and annexation of Crimea, but it stopped short of ordering new troop deployments of its own, a move that could provoke a larger confrontation.
“NATO has consistently worked for closer cooperation and trust with Russia” for two decades, the alliance ministers said in a statement. “However, Russia has violated international law” and its agreements with NATO, they said. “It has gravely breached the trust upon which our cooperation must be based.”
Although NATO has largely refrained from posting troops in nations at Russia’s front door, Rasmussen did not rule out doing so in the future. NATO could establish permanent bases in front-line allied nations, alliance officials said this week.
Ukraine is not a member of the alliance but cooperates with it, to Russia’s frequent dismay. Ukraine’s foreign minister reiterated Tuesday that his nation is not seeking NATO membership but is exploring greater cooperation.
NATO foreign ministers agreed Tuesday to intensify the alliance’s partnership with Ukraine and provide additional assets to Eastern European partners.
“Russia’s aggression against Ukraine challenges our vision of a Europe whole, free and at peace,” Rasmussen said. “We are now considering all options to enhance our collective defense, including an update and further development of defense plans, enhanced exercises and also appropriate deployment.”
The United States has joined Black Sea naval exercises, and NATO members have increased air patrols over the Baltic states and employed AWACS surveillance planes over Poland and Romania.
Eastern European leaders have expressed unhappiness with the pace at which NATO has sought to bulk up its presence on the front lines with Russia. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said the results have been “unsatisfactory.”
“We are gaining something step by step, but the pace of NATO increasing its military presence for sure could be faster,” he said.
In Washington, the House approved an aid package Tuesday for Ukraine, whose Western-oriented interim leaders have committed to economic and political reform and elections in May. The Senate voted on the measure last week.
The 28-member alliance’s regular spring meeting of foreign ministers was energized by Russia’s move to invade and then annex Crimea from Ukraine, and to deploy as many as 40,000 troops along the border with Ukraine.
NATO, formed as a U.S.-backed bulwark against the Soviet Union, has expanded in the past 15 years to include many former Soviet satellite states, often over Russian complaints. NATO sometimes invites Russia to attend sessions, but that was not the case this time.
“We will make clear that Russia’s actions are unacceptable. We will take decisions on which cooperation with Russia is still appropriate,” Rasmussen said. “Russia has undermined the principles on which our partnership is built and has breached its own international commitments. So we cannot go on doing business as usual.”
“Clearly we have a NATO that is now in the business, in the context of events in and around Ukraine, of rebalancing its mission,” a senior U.S. official said.
NATO has focused for two decades on joint missions, such as in Kosovo and Afghanistan. Without the organizing principle of collective defense against the Soviet Union, however, the alliance has sometimes seemed adrift. The United States has complained that it is funding a disproportionate share of NATO missions while European nations cut their defense budgets.
Those missions are still important, the U.S. official said, but after the Russian show of force, “the alliance is now very much focused once again on its core and founding mission, which is defense of allied territory.” The official spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe U.S. objectives ahead of the meetings.
Rasmussen said Tuesday that allied intelligence does not show that Russia is scaling back what he called a “massive military buildup.”
The Russian Defense Ministry announced Monday that a motorized infantry battalion would return to its home base after deployment along the border with eastern Ukraine. A battalion can range from a few hundred to about 1,500 soldiers.
Russia has maintained that it is conducting legal, routine military training and has no intention of extending its reach beyond Crimea. But Ukrainian, U.S. and European officials have said that massing troops is a form of intimidation against the government in Kiev and warned that an incursion could occur at any moment.
The United States and European allies consider Russia’s annexation of Crimea illegal and insist that it will never be recognized. Washington and the European Union have approved two rounds of relatively mild sanctions and are considering more far-reaching penalties on Russian oil and gas industries.
President Obama signed an executive order last month authorizing further sanctions if Russian forces enter Ukraine beyond Crimea.
On Tuesday, a 44 percent price increase on much of the natural gas sold to Ukraine’s Naftogaz by Russia’s Gazprom monopoly went into effect. That brought the price of natural gas sold to Ukraine in line with, or slightly above, the prevailing prices Gazprom charges other European customers.
“Ukraine will be unable to pay this higher rate without Western financing, which will heighten the prospect that Gazprom cuts some of Ukraine’s gas shipments,” said analysts at the Eurasia Group. Last month, Gazprom chief executive Alexey Miller said Naftogaz was already $1.5 billion in arrears on its payments. Although warm weather and ample gas in storage will moderate the immediate effect on Ukraine’s economy, the higher gas price will be an extra burden next winter.
Former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych had negotiated a discount late last year; the new rate is in line with prices Ukraine had been charged earlier.
A separate discount had been negotiated in 2010 as part of an agreement signed in Kharkiv, Ukraine, to extend Russia’s lease of the Crimean port of Sevastopol for its Black Sea Fleet. Although Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said that discount was no longer necessary, it is not subject to a quarterly review like the other discount. Eurasia Group analyst Emily Stromquist said legislation that would cancel the Crimean port lease – and the Kharkiv agreement – is in Russia’s upper house for final approval, after which Moscow could revoke that discount, as well.
Steven Mufson in Washington contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/nato-sees-no-evidence-russia-pulling-back-troops-from-ukrainian-border/2014/04/01/eea9b6fe-b99f-11e3-96ae-f2c36d2b1245_story.html
 
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2.	China's Line In The Sea
Beijing Has Never Properly Explained What Its 'Nine-Dash Line' Represents
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 02 APR 14) ... Andrew Browne
 
BEIJING – When the Manchus ruled China, it was given the name South Sea – a maritime domain dotted with islets, atolls and lagoons that provided storm shelter for fishermen.
What today's atlases call the South China Sea received its English-language appellation, and its coordinates, under a 1953 document entitled Limits of Oceans and Seas published by the Monaco-based International Hydrographic Organization, whose patron is Prince Albert. And it's critical to the global economy.
It carries more than half of the world's seaborne trade; connects the fast growing economies of the Asian Pacific with markets in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and is reckoned to cover vast oil reserves.
Yet, in a push that's creating alarm among China's neighbors – and the U.S. – the inheritors of the Manchu empire who now run China are making increasingly assertive claims to almost all of it as part of an ancient imperium that they are proudly reviving.
The boundaries of their historical claim are marked by a "nine-dash line" – a line made up of nine dashes, or strokes, that protrudes from China's southern Hainan Island as far as the northern coast of Indonesia, looping down like a giant lolling tongue.
This line has always been something of a mystery. It was drawn up by cartographers of the former Kuomintang regime in 1946 in the chaotic final years of the Chinese civil war before the Kuomintang fled to Taiwan. And, in fact, the line started not with nine dashes but 11: Two were scrubbed out in 1953 after the victorious communists adopted the line. Scale and precision are prized by mapmakers, but the nine-dash line lacks any geographical coordinates. It looks as though it was added with a thick black marker pen.
What's more, Beijing has never properly explained what it represents. Does China's claim to "indisputable sovereignty" over the scattered territorial features inside the line derive from the line itself? Or is it the other way round, with the line deriving from those territorial features and the waters that surround them?
China's neighbors who dispute its territorial assertions – among them the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia – are left to guess.
For these reasons, the prevailing view among Western legal scholars has long been that the nine-dash line wouldn't stand much chance if it was ever challenged under international law.
We may be about to find out. On Sunday, the Philippines filed the first-ever legal challenge to the line as part of a 4,000-page submission to a U.N. arbitration tribunal in The Hague. It wants the line declared as without legal weight so that it can exploit the offshore energy and fishery resources within its U.N.-declared exclusive economic zone. China has so far abstained from the proceedings.
The landmark case risks a Chinese backlash. Already, Beijing has all but frozen political ties with Manila. In recent days, Chinese ships have been playing cat-and-mouse games with Philippine vessels trying to reprovision marines stuck on a lonely outpost called the Second Thomas Shoal.
But what's given the case even greater significance – and a potential for escalation to a strategic level – is that the U.S. has joined in attacks of the nine-dash line, dropping its previous diplomatic caution.
In congressional testimony in February, Daniel Russell, the U.S. assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, said that while Washington doesn't take a position on sovereignty issues, the way that China pursues its territorial claims by reference to the nine-dash line creates "uncertainty, insecurity and instability." He added that the U.S. "would welcome China to clarify or adjust its nine-dash-line claim to bring it in accordance with the international law of the sea."
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman retorted that "China's rights and interests in the South China Sea are formed in history and protected by international law." He didn't elaborate.
What prompted the American shift in rhetoric, says Paul Haenle, a former director for China, Taiwan, and Mongolian Affairs on the U.S. National Security Council, was China's decision last November to declare an Air Defense Identification Zone over the East China Sea, including disputed islands administered by Japan.
Washington has since explicitly warned Beijing not to do the same over the South China Sea. It fears, says Mr. Haenle "that we'll wake up one morning and discover the whole region has changed."
But altering the nine-dash line, as the U.S. suggests, may be politically impossible for Beijing. China regards the Philippines' action as a gross insolence. It's a slap at President Xi Jinping's much trumpeted "China Dream," a notion that implies the restoration of the country's imperial splendor, including its control over a sea that it regards more or less as its internal lake.
Where is all this headed?
If Manila prevails at The Hague – and it's not clear that the U.N. tribunal will accept jurisdiction over the case – China could simply ignore the verdict and carry on as before. The simplest solution would be for all countries concerned to shelve their territorial disputes and focus on joint development of the area's natural resources.
But that's not the way the Chinese empire has traditionally worked things out. In past days, small countries like the Philippines knew their place – at the bottom of a regional hierarchy dominated by China. It is not likely to quietly allow Manila to upset that order.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303978304579474570220330370
 
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3.	Lowered Expectations As Malaysia Airlines Search Drags On
(REUTERS 02 APR 14) ... Matt Siegel
 
PERTH – The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 resumed on Wednesday, even as senior Australian officials warned that bad weather and a lack of reliable information were seriously impeding efforts to locate the plane's wreckage.
Up to 10 planes and nine ships from a half dozen countries are scouring a stretch of the Indian Ocean roughly the size of Britain, where the plane is believed to have crashed more than three weeks ago.
The search and rescue teams are in a race against time to locate the plane's black box recorder, which has an expected battery life of around 30 days and without which it may never be possible to explain the plane's mysterious disappearance.
Retired Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, the head of the Australian agency coordinating the operation, said that a lack of reliable flight telemetry and punishing conditions at sea were making the operation even more challenging.
"In other words, we don't have a precise aircraft location for six hours before the aircraft went into the water somewhere," he said in an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday.
"The reality is it's the most complex and challenging search and rescue operation, or search and recovery operation now, that I've ever seen."
Malaysian authorities have still not ruled out mechanical problems as causing the disappearance, but say all the evidence suggests the plane was deliberately diverted from its scheduled route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing.
On Wednesday, Malaysia's police chief said the investigation was focusing on the cabin crew and pilots, after clearing all 227 passengers of possible involvement in hijacking, sabotage or having personal or psychological problems that could have been connected to the flight's disappearance.
"They have been cleared of the four," National police chief Khalid Abu Bakar was quoted as saying by state news agency Bernama.
No Trace
Broken clouds, sea fog and isolated thunderstorms were expected to further complicate operations on Wednesday, Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Centre said.
The search is now focused on an inhospitable 221,000 sq km (85,000 sq miles) swathe of the southern Indian Ocean some 1,500 km (932 miles) west of the Australian city of Perth. But despite the unprecedented effort, the international team has so far failed to spot any trace of the jetliner.
"Look, it's one of the great mysteries of our time," Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said in an interview with local Perth radio station Radio 6iX.
"We owe it to the world, we owe it to those families to do whatever we reasonably can do get to the bottom of this."
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak is expected to arrive in Perth late on Wednesday to inspect the search and rescue operations, which are being conducted out of RAAF Base Pearce north of the city. He was expected to meet Abbott on Thursday.
Najib will arrive with Malaysia coming under fresh fire for its handling of the incident after authorities there changed their account of the plane's critical last communication.
Malaysia on Tuesday released the full transcript of communications between the Boeing 777 and local air traffic control before it dropped from civilian radar in the early hours of March 8. (for full transcript, click: r.reuters.com/kam28v)
While indicating nothing abnormal, the transcript showed the final words from the cockpit were not the casual "All right, good night" that authorities first reported, but the more standard "Good night Malaysian three seven zero."
Minutes after the final radio transmission was received the plane's communications were cut off and it turned back across Peninsular Malaysia and headed towards the Indian Ocean, according to military radar and limited satellite data.
Malaysian authorities have faced heavy criticism, particularly from China, for mismanaging the search, now in its fourth fruitless week, and holding back information. Most of the 239 people on board the flight were Chinese.
It Won't Be Easy
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.
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.
Still, Houston said the challenging search would continue based on the imperfect information with which they had to work.
"It's vitally important for the governments involved that we find this aeroplane," he said. "But I'm just pointing out that it won't be easy given the circumstances that surround this particular search and recovery operation."
Additional reporting By Stuart Grudgings and Niluksi Koswanage in Kuala Lumpur; Editing by Alex Richardson.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/02/us-malaysiaairlines-flight-idUSBREA2701720140402
 
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UKRAINE:
4.	NATO Allies Pledge To Beef Up Eastern Defenses
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 01 APR 14) ... John-Thor Dahlburg and Vladimir Isachenkov 
 
BRUSSELS – NATO foreign ministers moved Tuesday to beef up the defenses of front-line alliance members feeling menaced by a more assertive Russia, with Secretary of State John Kerry proclaiming the U.S. commitment to their security is "unwavering."
The ministers from NATO's 28 member nations also ordered suspension of all "practical civilian and military cooperation" with Vladimir Putin's Russia, though they made sure a line of communication with the Kremlin remains open at the ambassadorial level.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, keystone of U.S. and European security since the end of World War II, is facing its most acute geopolitical crisis in years: the fallout from Moscow's unilateral annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, which the Obama administration and its allies condemn as a brazen, illegal land grab.
On Tuesday, an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 Russian troops equipped with tanks, other armored vehicles and fixed and rotary wing aircraft remained positioned near the border with Ukraine, a NATO military official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information.
The military official described the Russian buildup as "a complete combat force" that was highly threatening to Ukraine.
Those troops, and future aggressive moves that Putin's Kremlin may make, have become a troubling concern for NATO countries, especially the alliance's eastern-most members – the Baltic states, Poland, and Romania, all of which were once in Moscow's orbit.
To reassure those skittish allies, Kerry told a news conference, the U.S. has already sent six F-15 fighters to perform air patrols over the Baltic and deployed a dozen F-16s to Poland. He noted that the U.S. had previously dispatched the USS Truxtun, a guided-missile destroyer, to the Black Sea.
The Truxtun has already left the Black Sea after taking part in naval exercises with NATO allies Romania and Bulgaria that had been scheduled before the Ukraine crisis.
A senior U.S. defense official said the U.S. is likely to send another warship to the Black Sea, but there was no decision on which ship and when it would be sent. The official, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter, spoke on condition of anonymity.
"And more U.S. support is on the way," Kerry said.
At the Tuesday afternoon meeting Kerry attended with the NATO foreign ministers, the secretary said, "more allies pledged their own contributions to make sure every ally from the Baltic to the Black Sea feels secure." He did not provide details.
The defense official said the U.S. was also likely to send a small team of soldiers to Europe and was encouraging NATO allies to contribute more aircraft to the Baltic air patrol mission.
Despite annexing Crimea, Putin and other Kremlin officials have said that Russia has no intention of invading other areas of Ukraine. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu insisted Tuesday the Kremlin wants a "political settlement that would take interests and rights of the entire Ukrainian people into account."
Meeting behind closed doors, Kerry and his Canadian and European colleagues agreed unanimously on steps NATO must take in response to Russian actions.
A civilian alliance official who attended the session and briefed reporters afterward on condition of anonymity said the measures include possible deployment and reinforcement of military assets in NATO member countries that feel Moscow's actions may pose a security threat, as well as an increase of readiness levels for NATO rapid response forces. Other steps include a review of NATO's crisis response plans, as well as military training and exercise schedules.
While NATO ordered the suspension of "all practical civilian and military cooperation" with Russia, Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said later he thought some mutually beneficial cooperation programs with the Russians might continue, such as the project to train anti-narcotics personnel in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia.
The four-star U.S. Air Force general who is NATO's supreme military commander, Philip Breedlove, has been ordered to devise plans to provide visible reassurance to alliance countries in Central and Eastern Europe that other NATO nations are ready to help protect them "on land, air and at sea," Kerry said.
America's commitment to NATO's core principle – that an attack on one alliance member shall be considered an attack on all – is "unwavering," the secretary said.
NATO ministers also met Tuesday with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andriy Deshchytisa. Kerry said "they stood together in defense of Ukraine's right to choose its future and in defense of international law." Kerry blasted what he called Russia's "tactics of intimidation, especially deployment of unprecedented forces around Ukraine's borders."
On Monday, Russia's Defense Ministry said one battalion – about 500 troops – had been pulled back, but NATO's secretary general downplayed talk of a major withdrawal.
"This is not what we have seen," Rasmussen told reporters. "And this massive military buildup can in no way contribute to a de-escalation of the situation – a de-escalation that we all want to see. So I continue to urge Russia to pull back its troops, live up to its international obligation and engage in a constructive dialogue with Ukraine."
Deshchytisa, the Ukrainian foreign minister, told a separate news conference that NATO ministers had treated Ukraine's situation with "understanding and support and knowledge."
His country doesn't need weapons, the Ukrainian official said, but is hoping for "military technical equipment." He said a delegation of experts from NAT0 member countries was expected to visit Kiev next week for consultations.
In other developments, Russia sharply hiked the price for natural gas to Ukraine and threatened to reclaim billions in previous discounts, raising the heat on Ukraine's cash-strapped government.
Alexei Miller, the head of Russia's state-controlled Gazprom natural gas giant, said the company has withdrawn December's discount that put the price of gas at $268.50 per 1,000 cubic meters and set the price Tuesday at $385.50 per 1,000 cubic meters for the second quarter.
The move is expected to eventually hit Ukrainian consumers hard. Household gas prices in Ukraine are set to rise 50 percent beginning May 1.
The Russian discount was part of a financial lifeline that Putin offered Ukraine's now fugitive president, Viktor Yanukovych, after his decision to ditch a pact with the European Union in favor of closer ties with Moscow. The move fueled three months of protests that sent Yanukovych fleeing to Russia in February.
Also Tuesday, the Russian parliament annulled its deal with Ukraine to rent its Black Sea Fleet's base in Crimea until 2042 for $98 million a year as well as discounts for Russian natural gas.
In Kiev, Ukrainian police moved to disarm members of a radical nationalist group after a shooting spree. Such groups played a key role in Yanukovych's ouster, but quickly fell out with the new government in Kiev. Many activists are still encamped on Kiev's Independence Square, known as the Maidan, and have signaled their intent to remain until the May 25 presidential election.
Last week, a leader of the most prominent radical group, the Right Sector, was shot dead while resisting police. Right Sector members then besieged parliament for hours, demanding the resignation of Interior Minister Arsen Avakov. They lifted the blockade after lawmakers set up a panel to investigate the killing.
Late Monday, a Right Sector member shot and wounded three people outside a restaurant adjacent to Independence Square, triggering a standoff that lasted overnight.
Police responded by surrounding the Dnipro Hotel, which Right Sector had commandeered as its headquarters, demanding that the radicals lay down their weapons and leave. Avakov said Right Sector members agreed Tuesday to do so.
Vladimir Isachenkov reported from Moscow. Associated Press writers Peter Leonard in Kiev, David Rising in Berlin and Geir Moulson in Weimar, Germany, contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/E/EU_UKRAINE
 
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5.	Top U.S. Commander In Europe: Putin Not Budging
(THE COMPLEX (FOREIGN POLICY) 01 APR 14) ... Gordon Lubold
 
The top U.S. commander in Europe said in an interview that he sees no sign that Russian forces are backing away from the border with Ukraine and called Moscow's conquest and annexation of Crimea a "paradigm shift" that requires a fundamental rethinking of where American forces are located and how they are trained.
Gen. Philip Breedlove, who serves as both the supreme allied commander of Europe and the head of the Pentagon's European Command, said Russian President Vladimir Putin's forces were still massed near eastern Ukraine. German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Monday that Putin had ordered a partial withdrawal, but Breedlove offered a strikingly different, and more pessimistic, assessment of conditions on the ground there.
"There are reported moves away from the border, but I must tell you that we do not see that yet," Breedlove said in the interview. "We are looking for it, and we have not seen movements to the rear."
Moscow has long claimed its troops had been stationed along the border for military exercises, but Breedlove said the forces were so well equipped that they could cross the border into eastern Ukraine, begin to deploy inside the country within 12 hours, and have essentially taken it over within several more days. Beyond the soldiers, Breedlove said Moscow had deployed "the whole package" to the border, including helicopters and attack aircraft, as well as jamming systems and cyber-assets. The United States must see genuine movement away from the border and back to Russian garrisons before it will be convinced Moscow is trying to de-escalate the situation, he added.
"The bottom line is that there is a force there sized and outfitted and provisioned with everything that it needs to have an incursion into Ukraine," Breedlove said by phone from Brussels, where he was participating in a high-level NATO summit dominated by the crisis in Ukraine.
On Tuesday, European ministers meeting there ordered an end to civilian and military cooperation with Russia in the aftermath of Putin's annexation of Crimea in late March. Russian aggression "is the gravest threat to European security in a generation, and it challenges our vision of a Europe whole, free, and at peace," NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said at the conference.
Breedlove thinks there are long-term implications for U.S. policy and its military footprint in Europe as a result of the crisis. Before March, Breedlove's primary concern was holding the line against cuts to U.S. military personnel in Europe, where there are now about 67,000 troops, down from about 100,000 in 1990. Although the Pentagon has announced no public proposals to draw down U.S. forces, European Command has been seen by some as low-hanging budgetary fruit since before February. During the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the perception of European Command's operational and strategic importance sharply diminished, leaving it vulnerable to bureaucratic indifference. At the same time, the command has felt the impacts of sequestration and other cuts, with both flying hours and training opportunities for ground forces reduced in recent years.
"For years, [European Command] has been the natural bill payer," said Mark Jacobson, a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund in Washington, using Pentagon-speak for a command or program forced to accept cuts in favor of other defense programs.
But the crisis in Crimea is helping Breedlove make the case that no further cuts should be made. In fact, he said, the military footprint in Europe should be rethought altogether in light of what has unfolded in recent weeks. Breedlove declined to be specific about how he might want to beef up the U.S. military presence there, but he was adamant that the United States must endeavor to do a comprehensive examination of how the U.S. military is deployed throughout Europe.
"The question now is how is the force positioned and provisioned to prepare us for a new paradigm," he said.
The crisis in Crimea will undoubtedly have an impact on European Command and the U.S. role in Europe, but it has thrust Breedlove, a Harley-Davidson – riding Georgia Tech graduate, into the national security spotlight. The Air Force general took command in 2013 after Gen. John Allen, who had been nominated for the position following his tour in Afghanistan, opted not to take the job.
Breedlove has done multiple tours through Europe, so U.S. military officials say he has the background and credibility to forge close ties with other NATO allies. Still, the job he took over last year isn't the one he has today. As recently as January, Breedlove was focused on lobbying allies to increase their defense spending and on pushing back against Pentagon cuts. Now he finds himself managing a crisis that could potentially erupt into open conflict between NATO and Russian forces.
Retired Gen. Norton Schwartz, the former Air Force chief of staff and one of Breedlove's last bosses, said his former subordinate is just the man for the job. Breedlove, he said in an interview, is "a worldly person who is sneaky smart" and who possesses the temperament that is required for the job he now confronts. As Breedlove communicates with allies and seeks to reassure them that both the alliance and the United States will stand beside them, those qualities are particularly important, Schwartz said. And if Breedlove has to go toe-to-toe with his Russian counterparts, Breedlove can do that too.
"If the leadership in NATO needs steel, he certainly has that," Schwartz said.
Barack Obama's administration has said there are no military solutions to the Ukraine crisis and is focused on finding a diplomatic one, a position Breedlove shares. At the same time, the general has helped oversee a modest show of strength designed to send a signal to Moscow that NATO is prepared to defend member states. Since the crisis, the United States has deployed a dozen F-16s and about 200 U.S. military personnel to Poland, a NATO member, to augment training there that was part of a pre-scheduled deployment. NATO also deployed two surveillance planes to the skies above Poland and Romania, and a detachment of American C-130 transport planes arrived in Poland for a scheduled training event this week. In the meantime, the deployment of the USS Truxtun, an American warship, was extended in the Black Sea during the crisis, though it has since left the area.
"The most important thing is to assure our allies but not to accelerate the problem," said Breedlove, attempting to explain the balance the United States must walk in the region. "That's the tricky line we're walking here: show NATO resolve ... but not further incite the Russians while we're trying to negotiate a very tricky situation on the Ukrainian border."
While Breedlove has tried to hold the line on any further cuts to the size of the force in Europe, the amount of infrastructure there may be a different issue. In an interview with Foreign Policy in January, Breedlove acknowledged he has excess capacity in terms of housing, office buildings, and other base infrastructure across Europe. He has signaled a willingness to work to reduce the size of some bases and close other ones altogether. A Pentagon review of infrastructure, likely to be a political hot potato when it's complete by summer, will recommend a number of reductions across Europe. Defense officials have declined to say how the events of recent weeks may affect that review's findings.
In the meantime, as the West works to isolate Putin and the United States has itself cut off all routine ties to the Russian military, Breedlove insisted that not all communication lines should be cut off. He last spoke with his Russian counterpart around March 19, after a Ukrainian warrant officer was killed in Simferopol and there was a clear difference in opinion between what the United States was seeing and what the Russians were saying. Although "mil-to-mil" relations between the United States and Russia have been severed for now, Breedlove sees a value in staying in touch.
"I believe that we must maintain a positive contact," he said. "If we can find places where we agree on the truth, maybe we can effect positive change."
http://complex.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2014/04/01/top_us_commander_in_europe_putin_not_budging
 
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6.	House Clears Ukraine Aid, Sanctions Package
Lawmakers Say Move Gives President Leverage in Russia Talks
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 02 APR 14) ... Michael R. Crittenden
 
WASHINGTON – The U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday cleared a package of aid and sanctions to address the political crisis in Ukraine that lawmakers said would give the Obama administration greater leverage in diplomatic talks with Russia.
House lawmakers voted 378-34 to pass a measure combining loan guarantees, expanded sanctions against those deemed to have undermined Ukraine's sovereignty, and aid for security assistance and other funds to Ukraine's new government. The House vote sends the measure to President Barack Obama for his signature.
Supporters said the legislation would demonstrate to Russian President Vladimir Putin that there would be consequences for escalating the crisis in Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea, particularly in the form of additional sanctions.
"Our targets must include those who exercise influence over Russian policy, including the so-called oligarchs and others who have amassed enormous wealth through government corruption," said Rep. Ed Royce (R., Calif.), who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
The vote ends weeks of political squabbling that saw lawmakers unable to quickly respond to the growing diplomatic and political crisis in Ukraine. House lawmakers originally voted March 6 to provide loan guarantees to Ukraine, but subsequent fighting over the U.S. role at the International Monetary Fund and a scheduled congressional recess prevented a more timely response.
The White House and Treasury Department have already authorized a number of sanctions targeting Russian officials, a Russian bank and financiers connected to Mr. Putin. U.S. officials have said they would continue to expand efforts to put economic pressure on Moscow.
Rep. Hal Rogers (R., Ky.), who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, said the measure "sends a clear message that the United States will not tolerate the Russian incursion into Ukraine, human rights abuses or corruption by imposing sanctions, visa bans and asset freezes."
The legislation cleared Tuesday would fulfill a U.S. promise to provide Kiev with roughly a $1 billion in loan guarantees. Additionally, it would authorize additional sanctions – including asset freezes and visa bans – against those inside and outside of Russia deemed to have contributed to the political crisis there. U.S. lawmakers also authorized additional assistance to Ukraine's government, including $50 million to help strengthen Ukraine's political and civil organizations ahead of elections scheduled for later this spring, and $100 million for security assistance.
"This bill sends a strong message of support to the people of Ukraine at a critical moment," Rep. Eliot Engel (D., N.Y.) said Tuesday. "We are the greatest country in the world and we have interests all over the world and I think it's important we don't shirk from those interests."
Additionally, the House passed a measure championed by Mr. Royce and other House members aimed at combating Russian propaganda in Ukraine and surrounding areas. The legislation directs Radio Free Europe and Voice of America to counter Russian misinformation and propaganda with "investigative and analytical journalism," particularly in areas such as eastern Ukraine, Crimea, and Moldova.
The White House said that the legislation passed Tuesday would allow the U.S. to provide "crucial support" for Ukraine's government.
"Together with our international partners, the President will continue to build support for the Ukrainian people at this critical time," a statement from press secretary Jay Carney said.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304157204579476033468807424
 
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7.	West Stumbles As Autocratic Force Trumps Economics
(REUTERS 01 APR 14) ... David Rohde
 
A quarter-century after the fall of the Soviet Union, authoritarian rulers such as Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad are showing they can and will defy international norms, suppress dissent and use military force. American policymakers are struggling with how to respond.
"It's a big philosophical question about how to deal with a strong state with anti-Western and autocratic proclivities," said Michael McFaul, the most recent American ambassador to Moscow. "I would say on that score we are kind of confused as a country."
Citing the sweeping unpopularity of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, American officials have embraced economic sanctions as their primary means of pressuring foreign governments. In an interconnected, 21st-century global economy, President Barack Obama argues, economic sanctions are more powerful than ever.
If Russia continues on its current course, Obama warned last week, "the isolation will deepen, sanctions will increase and there will be more consequences for the Russian economy."
He may be proven right. Over the course of 2014, the threat of economic sanctions may result in Putin backing down in Crimea and Ukraine. And historic sanctions against Iran – which slashed oil sales and cut the country off from the world banking system – could produce an accord that halts Iran's nuclear program.
If not, a 16th-century Machiavellian truism will re-assert its dominance: The party most willing to decisively use force will prevail over a noncommittal opponent.
"What we've seen with Assad and Putin is a willingness to smile at international norms and pursue power politics regardless of the cost," said Andrew Weiss, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment and former official in the George H.W. Bush and Clinton administrations. "And if the West is not united and America's interests are not immediately threatened, the response immediately becomes attenuated."
How to respond has already become an issue in the 2016 presidential race. In the weeks since Putin sent Russian troops into Crimea, Republican senators Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Paul Ryan all criticized Obama's response. But none of them called for an American intervention in Ukraine.
Economic Connections
Fiona Hill, a Russia expert at the Brookings Institution and a former National Intelligence Council official, said those who believed the collapse of the Soviet Union signified the triumph of Western democratic capitalism were deluding themselves. A large number of Russians remained deeply skeptical of Western norms.
"It was only a very small elite around Yeltsin who were buying this," she said. "Too many people (Westerners) saw what they wanted to see, rather than what was happening."
Then the global financial crisis strengthened a perception in parts of the world that Western democracy was failing – both politically and economically, Hill added.
Shadi Hamid, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center, said Obama's decision to not intervene in Syria after last September's chemical weapons attack created a perception of American weakness. Strongmen, such as Egypt's military ruler, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, had been emboldened.
"They think they can get away with more than ever," Hamid said. "And this is tied to a growing sense of weakness under the Obama administration, whether it's fair or unfair."
Obama administration officials deny that. They argue that another costly intervention in the Middle East would further weaken the American economy. And they contend that economic and technological strength – not brute force alone – will be the dominant source of power for decades to come.
Steven Pifer, a former American ambassador to Ukraine and now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, argued that economic inter-connectedness will have an impact on Putin. Pifer said the Russian leader knows he needs trade with the outside world.
"While the West may rule out the military option," Pifer wrote in an email, "it has other tools, including political isolation and financial sanctions that could inflict serious pain on the Russian economy."
Weiss, the Carnegie expert, argued that Russia and Syria represent vastly different situations. Russia is far more economically connected to the world than Syria, he said. And Putin is not accused of killing thousands of his people and displacing millions in a bid to hold onto power, like Assad.
But Weiss said he was unsure that economic sanctions alone would stop the Russian leader. "He's thinking about things in a very shrewd, pure-power way.
"What leverage do we have against Putin?" he asked. "That's why people are somewhat stumped about what to do."
In the case of Iran, years of false claims from officials regarding its nuclear program finally prompted Europe to agree sweeping economic sanctions that rebounded on Europe more than on the United States. Barring a Russian military incursion deeper into Ukraine, "the Europeans are not willing to go farther," he said. "They're happy to compartmentalize and go back to business as usual."
"They Want It More"
Hill compared the current world today with the 19th century, when trade was vast but nations still clashed.
"The world was incredibly connected," she said. "And it didn't produce any greater political outcomes. You remember a lot of gunboat diplomacy."
She said that economic interdependence flows both ways.
"There is mutual dependency here," she added. "There is mutual leverage. We can use it and they can use it."
Experts said that for Putin, Crimea's port at Sevastopol was vital. In Egypt, Sisi believes he is fighting an existential threat with the Muslim Brotherhood. In Washington, American officials disagree over whether core American interests are at stake, and the autocrats know it.
"There is a calculation there," Hamid said. "They know that they want it more than we do."
Edited by Sara Ledwith.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/01/us-analysis-west-idUSBREA300W220140401
 
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ASIA – PACIFIC:
8.	Hagel To Meet With Malaysian Counterpart
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 01 APR 14) ... Lolita C. Baldor
 
ABOARD A U.S. MILITARY AIRCRAFT – Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel will meet with Malaysia's defense minister this week, amid ongoing criticism about how well the search for missing Flight 370 has been conducted and coordinated with other nations.
The defense leaders will come together at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations hosted by Hagel in Honolulu. And a key topic will be how all the countries can better work together during disasters like the missing Malaysian Airlines plane and Typhoon Haiyan that ravaged the Philippines late last year.
"There's always lessons to be learned," Hagel said when asked Tuesday about the search for the plane by reporters traveling with him en route to Hawaii. "We're going to go back, the Malaysians will go back, all the ASEAN nations will go back and walk through this. What could have been done, maybe what should have been done, what needs to be done better. But coordination is a key part of this."
The desperate search across the southern Indian Ocean for debris from the missing airliner, now in its fourth week, has shown how far nations need to go to better share information and cooperate more aggressively during disasters, said senior defense officials, who spoke to reporters about Hagel's trip on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the meeting publicly in advance.
Their observations, however, reflected ongoing concerns, particularly from some of the families of Chinese passengers who were on the plane, about poor communication and coordination as the disaster unfolded.
Hagel, who has spoken to the Malaysian defense minister twice in recent weeks, said the U.S. has complied with that government's requests. But he said that dealing with the harsh realities of the disappearance, including the massive search area, presents "certain big limitations to how much we can do."
The U.S. has provided warships, search planes and high-tech equipment designed to help find the plane and its "black box" recorder once a more precise search area is identified.
According to officials, the ASEAN meeting will include discussions on how the nations can conduct military exercises that better mirror real disasters. They will also talk about security issues in the region and the increasing effects of climate change and extreme weather events.
Hagel proposed the idea to have a meeting of the ASEAN ministers as part of the Pentagon's ongoing effort to increase the U.S. focus on Asia.
"I want them to feel even more clarity about the U.S. commitment to the area, our coordination, our communications, the areas where we can cooperate more," Hagel said. "This is not about crowding anybody out. But it is about assuring the freedom of the sea lanes and the openness of our skies and cyber. And we're going to help continue to do that."
America's heightened interest in the Asia Pacific region includes Pentagon moves to send a littoral combat ship to Singapore, rotational deployments of Marines to Australia and the development of a second military radar site in Japan that is supposed to be finished later this year.
This is Hagel's fourth visit to the region in less than a year. It's the first ASEAN defense ministers' gathering to take place in the United States.
The shift to the Pacific has been carried out against the backdrop of escalating tensions in the region over disputed islands in the East China Sea, and China's growing military buildup.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_HAGEL
 
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9.	Search For Missing Malaysian Plane Hampered By Lack Of Certainty
Hunt's New Leader Moves to Damp Expectations for Any Resolution in Coming Weeks
(WALL STREET JOURNAL 02 APR 14) ... David Winning and Rachel Pannett
 
SYDNEY – The search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 moved closer to Australia's coastline, underscoring continuing uncertainty over where the plane may have gone down in the southern Indian Ocean.
Charts released by the Australian Maritime Safety Authority put Wednesday's planned search area around 1,490 kilometers (925 miles) west of the Western Australian state capital of Perth.
The move follows earlier unsuccessful efforts by a multinational group of military aircraft and ships to scour seas for possible plane debris closer to what authorities believe was Flight 370's final flight path.
On Tuesday, the Australian former military chief leading the hunt for Flight 370 aimed to damp expectations that search teams would find any wreckage in the coming days, saying it wasn't completely certain they were looking in the right place.
"We are working from a very uncertain starting point," Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston said in the first briefing since his Joint Agency Coordination Centre took responsibility for providing regular updates on the search Tuesday.
Teams are scouring a poorly mapped area of the southern Indian Ocean the size of Ireland as the power in the beacon batteries of the plane's "black boxes" dwindles.
"We don't know what altitude the aircraft was traveling at. We don't really know what speed it was going at other than some information that gives us some idea of the speed. It is a very inexact science," the former chief of Australia's defense force said.
He added that aircraft burn very little fuel at high altitude, so if the plane were traveling at 40,000 feet it would have flown a lot further than at a much lower altitude.
Malaysian investigators believe Flight 370 crashed in the southern Indian Ocean when it ran out of fuel, thousands of kilometers from the nearest airport, after disappearing from civilian radar on March 8. All of the 239 passengers and crew are assumed dead.
On Tuesday, Malaysian Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein reiterated investigators' belief that the way Flight 370 flew before it disappeared from radar was consistent with "deliberate action” by someone on the plane.
Still, radio transmissions from the last contact the plane had with air-traffic controllers show nothing unusual in the minutes before it disappeared from radar, according to a transcript.
Australian authorities abruptly shifted the search zone in the southern Indian Ocean some 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) to the northeast last week, to about 1,850 kilometers west of Perth, based on new calculations of the radar data.
An international team of air-accident investigators are striving to piece together what caused Flight 370 to veer sharply away from its flight path to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, and go down thousands of kilometers away in the southern Indian Ocean.
"Good night Malaysian three seven zero" was the final communication from the aircraft at 1:19 a.m. March 8, two minutes before the last signal was received from its transponder, a device that helps controllers identify and locate the aircraft.
That response was different from "All right, good night," as a Malaysian civil aviation department official had previously reported.
"There is no indication of anything abnormal in the transcript," Mr. Hishammuddin, who is also Malaysia's acting transport minister, said in a statement.
Mr. Hishammuddin said investigators and Malaysian authorities remain of the opinion that until the plane left primary military radar coverage its operations "were consistent with deliberate action by someone on the plane."
Malaysian authorities have said the plane was last spotted by military radar over the Strait of Malacca, hundreds of kilometers west of its original flight route over the Gulf of Thailand.
The mystery surrounding the plane's disappearance led the Montreal-based International Air Transport Association on Tuesday to call for better systems that can track aircraft in-flight.
The global airline-industry group also urged governments to use advance passenger data more effectively.
"Whether or not there is a security dimension to this tragedy, that two passengers could board an aircraft with fake passports rings alarm bells," said Tom Tyler, IATA's director general, referring to the two Iranian nationals who boarded Flight 370 using stolen passports.
Now in its fourth week, the search for the Boeing BA +2.17% 777-200 has yielded little except satellite images and aerial photographs of objects that haven't been linked to the missing plane. Numerous ships engaged in the hunt have hauled in only unrelated scraps of junk in an area where currents frequently bring floating garbage together.
"The recovery operation is probably the most challenging one that I have ever seen," Air Chief Marshal Houston said. "It isn't something that is necessarily going to be resolved in the next two weeks."
Authorities calculate they might have less than a week left before the plane's black-box flight recorders stop emitting signals that could help searchers locate them deep underwater.
Air Chief Marshal Houston said identifying any aircraft debris would mark a critical turning point in the search effort, allowing an underwater search – using more advanced technology – to begin. Conversely, if search teams don't find any wreckage on the ocean surface, it could take years to find the aircraft, he said.
He cited the example of an Air France Airbus A330 that plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in 2009. It took investigators almost two years to retrieve the plane's flight recorders, even though the plane was traveling on a well-established flight path when it crashed and searchers retrieved some aircraft debris within days.
"Inevitably, if we don't find 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," Air Chief Marshal Houston said.
The former defense chief's remarks contrasted with those of Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who on Monday pledged to keep increasing the intensity of the search indefinitely. "If this mystery is solvable, we'll solve it," said Mr. Abbott.
Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak plans to visit Perth on Wednesday and Thursday in a show of support.
An Australian vessel carrying a U.S. Navy black-box locator that can detect flight-recorder signals left for the search area on Monday night from Perth after completing trials. Ocean Shield, a vessel built to operate in Antarctic weather, is expected to arrive in the search area by April 5 – leaving teams as little as two days to locate the recorders in depths of some 2,000 to 4,000 meters (6,500 to 13,000 feet).
"In a world where our every move seems to be tracked, there is disbelief both that an aircraft could simply disappear and that the flight data and cockpit voice recorders are so difficult to recover," said Mr. Tyler, of the IATA, which represents some 240 international airlines.
Air Chief Marshal Houston said it took more than 60 years to find an Australian warship that sank to the bottom of the Indian Ocean in World War II – despite eyewitness accounts of the sinking from survivors aboard a German raider involved in the clash.
"Now, we've got much better technology and that wouldn't happen in this day and age, but we are working from a very uncertain starting point and I just wanted to reinforce that because it will take time," he said.
The warship HMAS Sydney was lost following a battle with the German raider HSK Kormoran in the Indian Ocean off the Western Australian coast on Nov. 19, 1941. It had 645 people on board and remains Australia's worst naval disaster. The ship was discovered on March 17, 2008, by a group of Australian volunteers shortly after they found the wreck of the Kormoran, which also sank.
Jake Maxwell Watts and Gaurav Raghuvanshi in Kuala Lumpur, Ross Kelly in Sydney and Robb M. Stewart in Perth contributed to this article.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304157204579474140041314828
 
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10.	Deep Water Search For Jet Could Turn On Robot Subs
(ASSOCIATED PRESS 02 APR 14) ... Adam Geller
 
Two miles down or more and darker than night, the ocean becomes a particularly challenging place for human searchers.
If the wreckage of a missing Malaysian airliner rests somewhere in the Indian Ocean's depths, then investigators will likely need to entrust the hunt at least partly to robot submarines and the scientists who deploy them to scan remote swaths of the seafloor.
Such unmanned subs, called autonomous underwater vehicles or AUVs, played a critical role in locating the carcass of a lost Air France jet in 2011, two years after it crashed in the middle of the south Atlantic. The find allowed searchers to recover the black boxes that revealed the malfunctions behind the tragedy.
That search keyed off critical information: The search area for the Air France jet was much smaller than that for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, and the first pieces of wreckage were recovered within days of the crash. Even then, it required two years and four deep water search missions before a team from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, using an AUV equipped with side-scan sonar, located the jet about 12,800 feet (3,900 meters) underwater.
"Air France 447 is a bit different from Malaysian Air 370 in that we had a few more clues to work with," said Dave Gallo, who led the search team from Woods Hole, located on Massachusetts' Cape Cod. The independent research institution has offered its services to investigators but has not been asked to join the current search effort.
Before unmanned subs can be sent down to look for the Malaysian jet, the search zone must be narrowed considerably. The size of the search area changes daily because of factors such as currents; on Wednesday it was 221,000 square kilometers (85,000 square miles).
But if investigators can zero in on an approximate crash location, they will likely turn to AUVs to begin the methodical task of tracking back and forth across miles of ocean floor in search of anomalies that might be wreckage.
"I like to think of it as mowing the lawn. You want to cover every bit of it," Gallo said.
"You need a little bit of luck and a lot of prayer that the oceans are going to cooperate, and then off you go."
The unmanned subs used by the Woods Hole team were developed as tools to research and monitor relatively shallow coastal waters, measuring variables like salinity and temperature over wide areas for hours on end. But AUVs are increasingly harnessed to perform some of the most demanding underwater jobs.
The U.S. Navy uses them to search for underwater mines because they can stay below the surface of even very cold water much longer than any diver, without the worry of exposing a human to danger. Energy companies employ unmanned subs to survey the floor at underwater drill sites.
In 2009, California's Waitt Institute sent down a pair of AUVs that surveyed more than 2,000 square miles of South Pacific ocean bottom over 72 days in an unsuccessful search for Amelia Earhart's plane.
The area off western Australia where search planes and aircraft are looking for the Malaysian jet slopes from about 2,600 feet (800 meters) to about 9,800 feet (3,000 meters) deep. But part of the zone drops into the narrow Diamantina trench, about 19,000 feet (5,800 meters) down.
"Let's hope the wreck debris has not landed over this escarpment. It's a long way to the bottom," said Robin Beaman, a marine geologist at Australia's James Cook University.
The U.S. Navy last week sent a Bluefin-21 autonomous sub to Australia to prepare for an eventual deep water search. That sub can dive to about 14,800 feet (4,500 meters). The largest unmanned subs used by Woods Hole researchers are built to reach depths of about 19,700 feet (6,000 meters).
Searchers can also use tethered submersibles, towed by ships from cable that allows for real-time data transmission to the surface and a continuous supply of power to the vehicle. But it is a very slow process. AUVs can scan a larger area more quickly, without being affected by conditions on the surface. But they must be brought back to the surface to recharge, and for researchers to download and analyze their data.
Even so, they are much better suited to the job of deep water search than any manned sub, whose descents are limited by air, light and power, as well as safety concerns, said William Sager, a professor of marine geophysics at the University of Houston.
Sager recalled that in 2000, when he climbed aboard a sub and ventured 5,600 feet (1,700 meters) down to the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, all those factors limited time on the sea floor to just four hours, moving at a crawl. A researcher looking out a porthole into even the clearest water with a very bright light can't see beyond 100 feet, he said.
Unmanned subs are far more flexible. When Woods Hole engineers built their first REMUS 6000 sub a little more than a decade ago, they tested it off the Bahamas by driving it down a trench the scale of the Grand Canyon, said Chris von Alt, who led the team that developed the craft and then co-founded Hydroid Inc., the Massachusetts manufacturer of the subs.
The REMUS sub – nearly 13 feet long, 1,900 pounds and mustard yellow – is equipped with sonar that can be programmed to capture images of vast stretches of seafloor and the objects resting there. Powered by a lithium battery, the unmanned subs stay below the surface for 20 to 24 hours. Scientists on the surface are now able to modify instructions to the sub via an acoustic link that allows them to look at bits of data gathered by the vehicle, von Alt said.
But they don't know what the sub has found until it surfaces and its data is fully downloaded to a computer.
The task requires patience and, for researchers whose livelihoods are focused on ocean life, a willingness to harness their expertise in a grim but necessary pursuit of answers.
"That's why you do it," von Alt said. "One of (the reasons) is, ‘Why did it happen?' But the other is to get closure for the families who have suffered through the tragedy."
AP writer Nick Perry in Wellington, New Zealand, contributed to this report.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/A/AS_MALAYSIA_PLANE_ROBOT_SUBS
 
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11.	Suspected N. Korean Drones Prompt Seoul To Boost Surveillance
(YONHAP NEWS AGENCY (S.KOREA) 02 APR 14) ... Kim Eun-jung
 
SEOUL – South Korea is seeking to improve its surveillance capabilities to deal with military threats from North Korea following the discovery of two drones near the inter-Korean border, military officials said Wednesday.
A drone was found on Baengnyeong Island, located just south of the western maritime border, on Monday after the two Koreas exchanged artillery fire across the sea boundary during a live-fire drill by the North. A similar drone was discovered in Paju, south of the demilitarized zone, on March 24, and was found to contain photos of military installations and the residential quarters of Seoul's presidential compound.
The South Korean military has concluded that the unmanned aerial vehicles are from North Korea, indicating holes in the air defense of the presidential office and border areas.
Following the discovery, the Defense Acquisition Program Administration (DAPA) said it is pushing to resume a troubled blimp development project, which has been delayed over technical problems.
"DAPA will hold a meeting later this week to approve a plan to restart the surveillance airship project," a DAPA official said.
Seoul had pushed to build a surveillance airship to better monitor the North Korean military near the western maritime border, after North Korea shelled a border island in November 2010, killing four people.
The 24 billion won (U.S. $21.9 million) project initially aimed at deployment from 2012, but has since been delayed as arms makers struggled to make an airship suitable for the rapidly changing weather conditions in the western sea.
The military is also considering purchasing advanced low-altitude surveillance radar to better monitor moving targets.
The South Korean Army operates low-altitude surveillance radar, called TPS-830K, but military officials say it is not enough to detect small aircraft such as the drones recovered from the border region.
"Although front-line troops have spotted unmanned aerial vehicles believed to be sent by North Korea several times recently, the low-altitude radar recognizes them as birds," an Army official said.
The Air Force has placed Gap Filler radar systems with a range of about 100 km in areas with front-line troops, but they cannot effectively cover a wide range of mountainous border areas.
As the North Korean drones fly autonomously according to a series of prearranged coordinates using the geographical positioning system (GPS), Seoul is seeking to develop GPS jamming devices, according to officials.
North Korea is believed to have various types of unmanned aerial vehicles, including drones whose design is based on China's D-4 and R-3 Rey.
The drones found here are considered prototypes and are equipped with cameras, designed to beef up a relatively weak aerial surveillance capability.
The isolated communist regime is known to have bought several MQM-107D Streaker targeting drones used by the U.S. via Syria and modified the design to make unmanned attack aircraft, which were first unveiled during a military parade last year.
The Streaker was first developed in the U.S. in the 1970s by Beech Aircraft and is used for testing various missiles.
http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/northkorea/2014/04/02/19/0401000000AEN20140402006300315F.html
 
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12.	Job Pool Expanding For U.S. Troops Interested In Heading Down Under
(STARS AND STRIPES 01 APR 14) ... Seth Robson
 
YOKOTA AIR BASE, Japan – The Australian Defence Force, which expects to double its budget over the next decade, is looking for even more foreign military members willing to serve Down Under.
Australian media reported last month that the government plans to increase defense spending – estimated at $26.5 billion this year – to $50 billion by 2023.
More money means more troops will be needed, and the Aussies continue to look outside their own country for help filling the ranks.
In most cases, the Australian Defence Force looks to overseas candidates to fill gaps that are currently not being satisfied by standard recruitment practices, according to the Defence Force’s website.
The Royal Australian Air Force, for example, is looking for overseas applicants to serve as fast jet pilots, air combat officers, electrical engineers, medical officers and intelligence analysts.
“We recognize that these candidates can bring skills and attributes to the Navy, Army and Air Force that will strengthen their overall operation and success rate,” the ADF website states.
Defense officials say that hundreds of U.S., British, Canadian and New Zealand troops have transferred to the Australian military in recent years.
In the last 10 years, the Australian air force recruited more than 220 overseas personnel under the lateral transfer scheme, officials said. Since 2010, the Royal Australian Army has employed more than 100 foreign servicemembers through the program, according to the Australian Defence Ministry.
“Approximately 30 candidates ranked at captain to major and 35 candidates ranked at sergeant to master sergeant (equivalent) are recruited to the Australian Army from a range of overseas military forces each year,” officials said.
Royal Australian Navy personnel director Commodore Peter Laver said his navy will grow over the next five years and that it’s looking for officers and sailors to transfer from U.S. ranks. The Australians are particularly interested in submariners and people with experience in combat systems that are used in combined operations with the U.S. Navy, he said.
In the next decade, the Australian Navy will develop new amphibious warfare, air warfare helicopter systems and submarine capabilities. It’s using lateral recruitment to fill ranks and specializations that can enhance those capabilities.
“There are also ongoing opportunities at sea and ashore to support submarines, frigates, patrol boats as well as general engineering, project management and warfare capabilities,” the Defense Force website states.
The introduction of three guided-missile destroyers this year also means the Australian navy is looking for personnel with Aegis Weapon System experience. Specifically, it is seeking specialists in Aegis computer networks, SPY 1 radar and Aegis fire control.
One former U.S. servicemember who joined the ADF through the program is Capt. Thomas Tilque.
A veteran of 10 years in the Marine Corps, Tilque was based in California and Okinawa and deployed to Iraq in 2003 and 2005 and Afghanistan in 2010 before transitioning to the reserves in 2011.
A 2012 Stars and Stripes story about Australian recruiting sparked Tilque’s interest, he said.
“I saw it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said.
Australian citizenship and the experience of working Down Under were part of the attraction, he said.
“If I had waited a couple of years I don’t know if (the program) would still be around,” he said. “I went to the Australian Defence Force lateral recruitment website and followed the steps.”
In August 2012 Tilque travelled to England for a face-to-face interview. It took about 15 months to complete all of the paperwork and a visa application and he began serving in October last year.
Tilque was assigned to the 2nd Combat Engineer Regiment in Brisbane, a large city on Australia’s east coast.
Working with the Australians isn’t vastly different than life in the Marine Corps, he said.
“We have a lot of the same equipment and we do a lot of the same tasks,” he said.
Brisbane is “similar to San Diego,” but hotter and more humid in summer, he said.
Pay and benefits in the Australian Defence Force – which include subsidized housing and free health care – are on par with what Tilque received as a Marine, he said.
Right now he’s gearing up for his first field exercise with the Australians. He expects to be involved in exercises with coalition partners from the U.S., Britain and New Zealand, he said.
There’s a good chance he’ll run into U.S. Marines before too long. About 1,200 will deploy to the Northern Australian city of Darwin this summer with plans to send 2,500-strong Marine Air Ground Task Forces there on six-month rotations each year from 2016.
The Australians have been friendly and easy to talk to, Tilque said.
“A lot of Australians, whether civilians or military, have either visited the States or worked with U.S. forces in Iraq or Afghanistan,” he said.
Tilque has signed up for six years – the standard commitment for officers – and plans to reassess his options after that.
Laver, the Australian Navy personnel director, said ADF personnel do not receive the sort of retirement benefits that U.S. personnel are eligible for after 20 years of service. Instead, they contribute part of their pay and receive a lump sum at the end of their service.
With the U.S. defense budget shrinking, thousands of U.S. troops will soon be forced to look elsewhere for a job. Heading Down Under might be just the answer, Tilque said.
“With the downturn in the U.S. military maybe people are looking to stay in a military environment,” he said. “This is an opportunity that is unique in the world.”
This year’s deadline for lateral transfer applications for the Australian Army is May 31. Closing dates for Royal Australian Navy overseas recruiting applications this year are July 1 for submariners and Dec. 1 for other applicants, the website states.
Applicants must satisfy normal Australian citizenship conditions and will be required to complete a series of selection requirements. The Australian government covers the cost of visa applications and moving expenses.
American servicemembers recruited under the lateral transfer plan add new skills and experience to the Australian military, Laver said.
“Previous experience is an asset to their new employment,” he said. “We have a lot to learn from their background and we teach them about life in Australia.”
http://www.stripes.com/news/job-pool-expanding-for-us-troops-interested-in-heading-down-under-1.275395
 
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AMERICAS:
13.	Huge Earthquake Off Chile Coast Sparks Tsunami
(REUTERS 02 APR 14) ... Anthony Esposito and Rosalba O'Brien
 
SANTIAGO –- A major earthquake of magnitude 8.2 struck off the coast of northern Chile on Tuesday, causing five deaths and triggering a tsunami that pounded the shore with 2-meter-tall waves.
Officials said the dead included people who were crushed by collapsing walls or were killed by heart attacks.
The government evacuated Chile's northern coast and President Michelle Bachelet declared the area a disaster zone, promising troops and police reinforcements to maintain public order while damage was repaired after landslides blocked roads.
"We're leaving with the children and what we can, but everything is clogged up by people fleeing buildings by the beach," said 32-year old Liliana Arriaza, who was driving away with her three children.
The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake was shallow at 12.5 miles below the seabed and struck about 100 km northwest of the mining port of Iquique near the Peruvian border.
Mining in the world's No. 1 copper producer did not appear significantly interrupted, but about 300 prisoners took advantage of the emergency and escaped from a female penitentiary in Iquique.
About 26 of the women were soon recaptured, authorities said, while security forces fanned out through the area amid reports of power outages and isolated looting.
Photos showed Chileans calmly evacuating coastal areas on foot, with policemen helping bundled-up elderly people and some residents loading up vehicles with their belongings.
Some schools were being used to shelter people, and classes were canceled in most of the country on Wednesday. LATAM Airlines said it had canceled some flights to and from Antofagasta, Iquique and Arica in northern Chile.
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said the quake generated a large tsunami with the biggest wave reported at about 2 meters. The Chilean navy said the first big wave hit the coast within 45 minutes. Early on Wednesday Chilean authorities canceled their tsunami warning for most coastal areas.
High Alert
Iquique is a key port, close to Chile's main copper mines. The area has been on high alert in recent weeks after an unusual number of tremors, and a series of aftershocks further frayed nerves in the early hours of Wednesday.
The city is more than 1,500 km north of Chile's capital Santiago, where the quake was not felt.
Seismic Chile has strict tremor-proof construction regulations and most residents stay calm during quakes, which helps to limit harm.
Lauding Chile's initial response to the quake, President Bachelet said in a televised address: "The government will work for as long as necessary to confront this emergency."
The center-left president, who only returned to power last month, was due to travel to the north on Wednesday morning.
In 2010, at the end of Bachelet's first term as president, an 8.8-magnitude quake triggered a tsunami that devastated several coastal towns in central-south Chile, a disaster that killed 526 people.
State-owned miner Codelco and other major copper companies reported no harm to workers or mines and said operations in northern Chile were normal. Still, the massive Collahuasi mine evacuated workers so they could be with their families.
A tsunami warning was issued for the Pacific coast of Mexico through Central and South America.
"An earthquake of this size has the potential to generate a destructive tsunami that can strike coastlines near the epicenter within minutes and more distant coastlines within hours," the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center said.
A tsunami advisory was issued for Hawaii, although no disaster was expected to hit the island state.
"Sea level changes and strong currents may occur along all coasts that could be a hazard to swimmers and boaters as well as to persons near the shore at beaches and in harbors and marinas," the warning center said.
Authorities in Peru started evacuating communities in the southern coastal region of Ica. Electricity was partially lost in the Peruvian cities of Tacna, Moquegua and Arequipa but there were no reports of deaths or serious damage there.
Nearly 11,000 miles northwest of Chile across the ocean, Japan's Meteorological Agency said a tsunami of up to one meter high might hit Japan's Pacific coast about 5am on Thursday (2000 GMT Wednesday). After collecting more data, it said it may issue a tsunami advisory early on Thursday.
(Additional reporting by Alexandra Ulmer, Fabian Cambero, Antonio De la Jara and Felipe Iturrieta in Santiago, Sandra Maler in Washington and Mitra Taj in Lima; Writing by Hugh Bronstein; Additional writing by Alexandra Ulmer; Editing by Gareth Jones)
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/02/us-chile-earthquake-idUSBREA3101G20140402
 
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MIDEAST:
14.	Dempsey Says Israel-U.S. Perceptions Of Iran Grow Closer
(BLOOMBERG NEWS 01 APR 14) ... Tony Capaccio
 
Israel’s view of how soon Iran will gain a nuclear-weapon capability has become much closer to that of officials in Washington, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said today.
“Initially, the two clocks just weren’t spinning at the same rate,” General Martin Dempsey, who didn’t disclose a timetable, said after meeting with officials in Jerusalem. “Our clocks are more harmonized than they were two years ago.”
Dempsey’s visit, where he met his counterpart, Lieutenant General Benny Gantz, and Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon came as Iran and six world powers continue to seek a permanent accord on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. Iran has said it has no intention of building a bomb, while the U.S. and Israel have warned that they’re ready to use military force to prevent it from doing so.
Last month, Ya’alon voiced disappointment in the U.S. handling of Iran’s nuclear program, saying “on this matter we have to behave as though we have nobody to look out for us but ourselves.”
Dempsey said his discussions with Israel reflected more confidence in the U.S. capability and political will to use military power against Iranian nuclear facilities if diplomatic efforts fail.
“There was no discussion, necessarily, of can we do it, or will we do it?” Dempsey said. “There is a different feel to our engagements now.”
There was less talk about the Iranian nuclear threat and more about other sources of instability in the region than during a previous visit, he said.
Terror, Cybersecurity
“Two years ago it was very, very much focused on the nuclear threat, and I would suggest that since we are addressing that, they want to be sure, as I do, that we’re not forgetting that there’s other things we need to be concerned about,” such as ballistic missiles, proxy terrorist groups and cybersecurity threats.
The Israeli army said today “there has been a drastic increase of terror attacks along different Israeli fronts.” In an e-mailed statement, the army spokesman’s office listed a failed attempt to smuggle long-range rockets into Gaza, two explosive devices detonated against Israeli soldiers on both the borders with Lebanon and Syria, and a barrage of 70 missiles fired from Gaza.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-04-01/dempsey-says-israel-u-s-perceptions-of-iran-grow-closer.html
 
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15.	Army-Navy Tag Team Trains To Defend Persian Gulf
Aviators in Kuwait ready to fly from ships in a crisis
(WAR IS BORING 01 APR 14) ... Joe Trevithick
 
Army aviators in Kuwait spent much of 2013 training for an unusual mission – flying from Navy ships. This new mission is a major shift for the ground combat branch in the Middle East … and elsewhere.
Before 2003, the Army’s primary worry in the Mideast had been another Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. The U.S. military first set up shop in the emirate in 1991 after liberating the country from Baghdad’s forces.
Now American troops in Kuwait mainly worry about the Persian Gulf – especially the Strait of Hormuz. The narrow waterway is a key route for commercial ships in the region. But it’s hardly the place for the ground forces’ infantry, tanks and artillery.
Officially, the Pentagon’s current mission – Operation Spartan Shield – is all about hunting down terrorists. However, the Iranians often threaten to close the Strait of Hormuz. Counter-terror ops in the area can shift quickly to dealing with Tehran.
These days, Navy ships and Air Force warplanes guard the Persian Gulf. But low-flying Army helicopters are better for hunting the small boats that Iran favors.
In the late 1980s, the Army and Navy services teamed up to fight similar threats. Army helicopters flew from Navy ships to fend off the Iranian boats during the so-called “Tanker War.”
That ’80s partnership was temporary and ad hoc. The Army and Navy have been working hard to make joint ops more permanent and routine.
In 2002, the Army outlined new formal requirements for pilots operating from Navy vessels. Six years later, the ground branch included “seabasing” – flying from ships instead of traditional land bases – on the list of things its helicopters might end up doing in the future.
Army aviators gained vital experience last year while training regularly with the Navy in the Gulf. The sailing branch’s ships also refueled Army rotorcraft on their way to other training exercises.
U.S. allies in the region have also gotten in on the game. AH-64 Apache gunships from the United Arab Emirates joined American Apaches for target practice over the Gulf last summer.
The Army’s efforts culminated in a major Navy exercise last December. Exercise Spartan Kopis brought together the Navy, Marine Corps, Army and Air Force – and even the Coast Guard.
Army helicopters flew practice missions from the USS Ponce, a sort of prototype sea base. Navy destroyers and patrol craft and Air Force bombers also participated.
Now the ground combat branch is rewriting the book on flying from ships – literally. The existing Army manual on the topic is almost 17 years old.
The Army is already applying what it learned. The service’s helicopters flew from Navy ships during exercises off Hawaii earlier this year.
This is important. Pundits have questioned the ground branch’s role in the Pentagon’s pivot toward the Pacific. The military’s new Air Sea Battle doctrine places heavy emphasis on ships and planes.
The Army clearly wants to be able to participate in these sort of “maritime contingency operations” on a regular basis in the future. The Army-Navy tag team could help the ground branch prove its worth at sea.
https://medium.com/war-is-boring/d05fd2b72ba2
 
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AFGHANISTAN:
16.	March Fatality-Free For U.S. Forces In Afghanistan
(STARS AND STRIPES 01 APR 14) ... Jon Harper
 
WASHINGTON – For the first time in more than seven years, the U.S. military just went a full calendar month without suffering any fatalities in Afghanistan, according to the Pentagon.
No American troops died in Afghanistan in March, the first month since January 2007 in which no U.S. servicemembers died in the country as a result of combat or non-combat-related injuries, according to the Defense Department and iCasualties, an independent website that tracks coalition fatalities. March was only the third month since September 2001 in which no Americans in uniform died in Afghanistan, according to DoD. Twelve servicemembers were injured last month, according to the Pentagon.
There were two non-U.S. coalition fatalities in March, according to iCasualties.
August 2011 was the deadliest month of the war for the U.S. thus far, when 71 troops were killed or died from non-combat-related injuries, according to DoD. As of Monday, 2,309 American troops have died in Afghanistan, and nearly 20,000 have been wounded, according to the Pentagon.
An International Security Assistance Force member died in southern Afghanistan from a non-battle-related injury on Tuesday, according to an ISAF press release. The nationality of the servicemember has not been disclosed.
The decreasing fatality rate in Afghanistan comes at a time when the U.S. has been transitioning combat responsibilities from American troops to the Afghan National Security Forces. All U.S. troops will be withdrawn from the country by the end of the year if the Afghan government does not sign the Bilateral Security Agreement, which would allow a continuing U.S. force presence beyond 2014.
http://www.stripes.com/news/march-fatality-free-for-us-forces-in-afghanistan-1.275634
 
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ARCTIC:
17.	Arctic Aviation Operations Remain Concern For U.S. Navy
(AVIATION WEEK INTELLIGENCE NETWORK 01 APR 14) ... Michael Fabey
 
WASHINGTON – As the U.S. Navy seeks to conduct more missions in the Arctic, it is becoming increasingly clear that aviation operations in the region will present a special set of challenges – especially when it comes to takeoffs, landings and maintenance.
“We have aircraft that operate in the Arctic today,” says Rear Adm. Jon White, Navy oceanographer and navigator and Task Force Climate Change director. “P-3s have been operating in the Arctic for a long time. They have long legs, they get up there and come down pretty low. Most fixed-wing aircraft can operate up in the Arctic. It’s not the getting there. It’s the taking off and landing.”
White tells Aviation Week, “It’s also the refueling. It’s getting the supplies, the parts, whatever you may need.”
He says, “It’s not just having fixed-wing aircraft flying at altitude. How do you start doing low-altitude operations in a very hazardous weather environment? How do you actually forecast conditions? That’s one of our near-term things as well in our road map: we’ve got to do a better job with weather predictions.”
One solution for enhanced Arctic aviation operations, he says, is to use unmanned aerial vehicles for such tasks as shipping monitoring.
A particular problem for Arctic aviation operations is the development of runways, many of which are now on permafrost.
“We’ve seen some of the permafrost melting in Norway,” White says. “It used to be all permafrost. Now it’s a whole different thing, just a whole lot of mud.”
There are other questions. “What’s the operational plan to get them up there? Do they leave out of Elmendorf in Alaska or some other place? Can we get them out of Canada? Greenland?”
While rotorcraft are not dependent on runways, they present other unknowns for the Navy, which has no helicopter operations in the Arctic.
“The Coast Guard operates some rotary wing in the Arctic, but we have a lot to learn about operating rotary wing up there,” White says. “There is some expertise. We have our partner nations flying up in Canada, Norway, Sweden – all of the Arctic Council Nations.”
The U.S. needs to decide what kind of aviation missions it wants or needs in the Arctic, White says.
“We’ve got to figure out what kind of aircraft we’re going to operate,” White says. “If we’re going to go up there with amphibious ships or an afloat forward staging base, that’s going to have an aircraft on board. Can they operate? Will the fuel lines work? Do the rotors work on rotorcraft? Will we have to use a different kind of oil? How well do [we] work in extreme icing conditions? What kind of deicing do we have?”
http://www.aviationweek.com
 
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LCS:
18.	Austal, Lockheed Warships Did Well In U.S. War Game -Admiral
(REUTERS 02 APR 14) ... Andrea Shalal
 
Both the Lockheed Martin Corp and Austal versions of the U.S. Navy's new coastal warship performed well in a major war game last week and surprised some "enemies" with their capabilities, a top Navy admiral said on Tuesday.
Rear Admiral Thomas Rowden, director of surface warfare for the Navy, said the war game held at the U.S. Naval War College in Rhode Island underscored the effectiveness of the new smaller warships in potential future conflicts, even in deeper waters.
"This is going to be a force to be reckoned with," Rowden told reporters on a teleconference, noting that U.S. Navy officials went home after the weeklong exercises with a new appreciation for the Navy's newest class of warships.
"The LCS represents a new tool in the tool box," he added.
The war game was planned long before Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel ordered the Navy to reassess its plans to buy 52 of the new smaller warships, and launch a study on what it would take to make give the ships better protection and more firepower.
A small group of military officials is studying the issue in a secluded office outside the Pentagon, with results due back by July 31 in time to inform the fiscal 2016 budget debate.
A Navy task force is studying options for meeting a requirement for 52 small surface combatants, including buying more of the current LCS ships, modifying them, or switching to a new design, all with a focus on affordability.
A separate advisory group, chaired by Rowden and Allison Stiller, deputy assistant secretary of Navy for ships, is also looking at the issue.
Rowden said pairing the smaller Littoral Combat Ships (LCS) with larger guided missile destroyers increased their ability to survive enemy attacks and sharply increased the Navy's ability to hunt for enemy submarines.
Rowden said the LCS ships were "played" using a new missile with a 120-mile (193-km) range that officials believe will be available for use on the ships in the mid-2020s.
Navy officials were also able to "confuse the enemy" by using Joint High Speed Vessels, smaller U.S. ships also built by Australia's Austal, to supply the LCS ships and move them around the shallow waters of the western Pacific region, he said.
He said the war game – which involved 32 LCS ships and a broad range of other ships, fighter jets and other U.S. military equipment – showed how changing the concept of operations to pair up ships during a battle could be an affordable alternative to adding air defense equipment to the LCS ships.
The ability of the LCS ships to switch equipment and take on new missions, or modularity, proved helpful in some circumstances during the game, Rowden said.
Over 800 pages of notes from the war game will be analyzed over the next two months with conclusions likely to be released in mid- to late May, Rowden told reporters.
He said Austal's aluminum trimaran LCS design had "a little bit longer legs" and proved more advantageous on the open ocean, while Lockheed's steel monohull design was more effective in areas closer to shore.
Editing by Eric Walsh.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/02/usa-navy-ships-idUSL1N0MU06M20140402
 
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19.	LCS War Game Focuses On Blue Water, Anti-Sub, Anti-Ship Capabilities
(INSIDE DEFENSE 01 APR 14) ... Olga Belogolova
 
In a war game meant to probe the concept of operations for the Littoral Combat Ship last week, the Navy focused primarily on the anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare capabilities of the ship class in the open ocean, according to a Navy official.
The war game, which was executed at the Naval War College, included 125 participants across the Navy and the other services and involved threats the service could face in the mid-2020s, Rear Adm. Tom Rowden, the Navy's surface warfare director (N96), told reporters on a conference call today.
"My initial impressions are that with respect to the Littoral Combat Ship, I think that it is going to play much more significantly in the open water than perhaps than we had previously opined," Rowden said of the war game findings. "I was amazed at the amount of problems that we caused for the folks that we were going against when we paired that ship with a guided missile destroyer, gave it air cover and matched those two ASW capabilities."
According to Rowden, the war game yielded over 800 pages of notes and surveys taken by participants, which will be included in an analysis of the war game expected to last "for about the next two months."
"I anticipate that we will have a report out from the Naval War College sometime around the middle to the latter part of May," he said.
The war game was played with both LCS variants – Freedom and Independence – in their current configurations. The findings showed different advantages for each variant.
"The Independence class has a little bit longer legs and had a tendency to be more advantageous ... in the open-ocean ASW fight and the [Freedom class] seemed to be more advantageous with respect to some of the closer-in work that we were doing with respect to the beach," Rowden said. "I think that both ships played very well in the execution of the war game."
In addition to the LCS, the war game featured a number of other weapons systems for the mid-2020s scenario, including DDG-51 destroyers, F-35Cs, E-2D Advanced Hawkeyes, MH-60 Romeos and Sierras as well as P-8As and Virginia-class attack submarines.
While the war game focused on the ASW and ASuW missions for the LCS, the service is working on a third mission for the ship with the mine countermeasures mission package. But Rowden said the blue water scenario used for the war game and the ship's ability to maneuver around mines made the countermeasures mission less of a priority.
"When we started opening up into a more of a blue water scenario, the threat for mines had a tendency to decrease, at least as played by our notional enemy," he told reporters. "If you know where mines are, you can drive around them and if you're not constrained to a specific area that you have to drive through, you can just mark the location of the mines and drive around them."
As the mission package on the ship is able to "pretty rapidly identify" the location of mines, it enables the ship to move around the mines, "mark them and then go back and clear them at time of our choosing," Rowden explained. "So when you kind of open up the space, you have the ability to really address the mine issue in a very different way than we would have to address the same in the Straight of Hormuz."
"What that did was that allowed us to put more of the mine capability in reserve and allowed us to play more of the anti-submarine and ASUW capability, which seemed to be much more important for the phases that we executed," he added.
As the Navy faces a lot of questions about the LCS program, with the Pentagon directing the halt of contract negotiations for LCS at 32 of 52 planned ships, the prevailing questions about the ship class have involved its ability to meet its requirements.
In particular, in a late February directive to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel outlined what he called his "considerable reservations" about whether LCS is what the Navy will need over the next few decades, asking the service to focus on survivability and lethality requirements for a future small surface combatant.
During the conference call with reporters today, Rowden said that the war game "found some very interesting things about survivability of the ship." These findings included increased survivability when the ships' capabilities were leveraged along with those of guided missile destroyers. The two ships working together proved to be beneficial in a number of ways, Rowden said.
"We saw significant return on that development of that concept of operation in order to be able to a) hunt submarines and b) to ensure the survivability of the ships," he told reporters.
In addition, the war game showed that the Navy can leverage the "very shallow draft associated with these ships" and spread out the Littoral Combat Ships along the coastline. "We were [able] to disperse the ships and we were able to really move them in along the coast to make targeting on these ships much more difficult and present a much larger problem to the enemy," he said.
On top of that, bringing in Littoral Combat Ships with anti-submarine warfare packages gave the destroyers more freedom to complete other missions, Rowden said.
"That freed up a number of our higher-end ships, specifically guided missile destroyers ... because that ASW capability provided a significant boost for the ASW threat and it allowed our multi-mission DDGs to go up and do other things with the strike group commander," he said. 
http://www.insidedefense.com
 
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20.	Littoral Combat Ship Mission Packages Safe From Budget Axe For Now
(U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE NEWS 01 APR 14) ... Sam LaGrone
 
Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel’s mandate capping of the first variants of the Littoral Combat Ship at 32 hulls will do little to limit the acquisition of the mission packages for the Flight 0 LCS over the next five years, navy officials told USNI News last week.
Though the service is currently working on a study to asses a follow on to the Lockheed Martin Freedom-class and Austal USA Independence-class of ships, any changes to the mission package elements won’t manifest themselves over the so-called future years defense plan (FYDP), Vice Adm. Joseph Mulloy, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations, Integration of Capabilities and Resources (OPNAV N8), told USNI News following a hearing of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces on March, 26.
“We still have a plan throughout this FYDP to continue build most of these mission packages and none of the money has been taken [out of the budget],” Mulloy said.
The Navy is on track to assemble 45 mission packages over the next five years at a total cost of $1.6 million, which includes $316 million for the Lockheed Martin Remote Multi-Mission Vehicle (RMMV) used with the Mine Countermeasure (MCM) mission package as a separate line item, according to Fiscal Year 2015 (FY2015) budget information provided to USNI News by the service.
The packages MCM, surface warfare (SuW) and anti-submarine warfare (ASW) are designed to be swapped out of LCS to tailor the ship to a particular mission set with a specialized set of crew to be brought on board as needed.
The Navy had planned for 64 mission packages for the 52 planned LCS hulls – 16 ASW, 24 MCM and 24 SuW. Over the FYDP, the service plans to buy 10 MCM, 18 RMMVs, 10 SuW and 7 ASW packages.
However with a reduction of 20 hulls, it’s unclear how the mission package numbers will be reduced past FY 2019.
“Sixty four is the operational requirement until we’re done with the study. If you’re looking at a ship that didn’t need packages, then you might come down to 48 or something, but that’s not decided,” Mulloy said.
“You have to do the study on the hull first and deiced if [the next small surface combatant] has mission packages or not. Or does it have a different mission package?”
Hagel’s directive told the service, “submit alternative proposals to procure a capable and lethal small surface combatant, consistent with the capabilities of a frigate,” in February.
The options for review by the Navy include a new design, a modified variant of LCS or an existing ship design.
The evaluation process – when completed later this year – will determine how modular the next small surface combatant will be.
Several naval analysts told USNI News in late February that the ASW and SuW packages would be the most likely candidate for reduction as most of the Navy’s surface ships are equipped with fixed anti-surface and anti-submarine components – like hull mounted sonars and anti-ship missiles. 
The MCM package, however, is the least likely to be trimmed as the service is set to retire the 1980s era Avenger-class mine hunters in the next several years.
MCM is by far the most complex of the mission packages and represents the Navy’s largest looming capability gap that LCS was created to fill.
Alone, the MCM and RMMV line items account for almost $1 billion of the $1.6 billion total for the mission package program over the next five years.
Other components of mission packages have not fared as well in ongoing Pentagon budget trimming.
The Navy zeroed out a planned buy for 17 Northrop Grumman MQ-8 Fire Scout unmanned aircraft from its FY 2015 budget submission.
The Fire Scouts were planned for the LCS SuW mission package.
http://news.usni.org/2014/04/01/littoral-combat-ship-mission-packages-safe-budget-axe-now
 
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UNMANNED SYSTEMS:
21.	UCLASS Could Be Used As Tanker For Carrier Air Wing
(U.S. NAVAL INSTITUTE NEWS 01 APR 14) ... Dave Majumdar
 
The U.S. Navy is considering using its forthcoming Unmanned Carrier Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft as an aerial refueling tanker to free up its fleet of Boeing F/A-18E/F Super Hornets for more strike missions, several sources told USNI News.
“It’s definitely of interest,” one industry official said.
“On a typical air operations day, they might have to dedicate up to five Hornets to do tanking.”
Most of those tanker sorties are for “recovery tanking” around the carrier.
According to industry sources and retired service officials, up to 20 percent of a carrier air wing’s Super Hornet sorties are consumed by the tanker mission.
Further, over the past ten years, the Super Hornet fleet has seen higher than expected fleet utilization rates because of the demands of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, industry and Navy sources said.
Particularly, the heavy “five-wet” configuration eats up fatigue life expectancy (FLE) much faster than a lighter configuration.
“We needed to cycle tankers through our airframes in order to balance out the airframe fatigue numbers,” one Navy source said.
Naval Air System Command (NAVAIR) officials said that while the tanker mission does impose stress on the Super Hornet fleet, it is in line with the service’s expectations and were factored into the aircraft’s design.
“Most of these stresses on the tanker mission are on actually when they catapult,” said Scott Bailey, NAVAIR F/A-18E/F and EA-18G air vehicle program manager. “That’s factored into how we manage our fleet in tracking fatigue and flight hours.”
Airframes are cycled to minimize the impact of the tanker mission on the overall Super Hornet fleet. Only a few aircraft at a time are use for tanking, and as those planes are rotated, the fatigue life balances out, Bailey said.
“It does consume flight hours, but no different than long flight hour mission across what is normally scheduled,” he said.
Bailey said that the Super Hornet fleet is “still tracking” to the service life limits that were originally expected from when the jet was still in its engineering and manufacturing development phase.
“We have a service life assessment program that is undergoing now that will enable us to assess the life of the aircraft as it is today,” Bailey said. “Then a follow-on service life extension program which will extend the service life of the aircraft out to the Navy requirement.”
Bailey said that the Navy requirement calls for the Super Hornet fleet to remain in service until the 2030 to 2035 timeframe. The Super Hornet was designed for a 6000-hour lifespan, Bailey said. The service life extension would push that out to 9000 hours. Potentially, the Super Hornet could be extended past even the 9000-hour mark, but additionally work would be required, Bailey said.
But industry sources are not convinced. By the mid-2020s, there probably will not be enough UCLASS air vehicles in the Navy arsenal to perform the aerial refueling mission especially as the Super Hornet airframe start to wear out, the industry sources said.
In that case the Navy will have to come up with an alternative.
“They may be forced to have a dedicated tanker on the deck,” an industry source said.
“This idea that UCLASS is somehow going to save Super Hornets from doing tanking – I’m not seeing how that’s really going to work when you look at the lifespan of the Super Hornets and when UCLASS is going to be in the fleet.”
That’s especially true if a carrier would only carry six UCLASS air vehicles – which would have to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions in addition to the tanker mission.
The source suggested the Navy recover some of the retired Lockheed S-3 Vikings from the boneyard at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Arizona.
http://news.usni.org/2014/04/01/uclass-used-tanker-carrier-air-wing
 
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CYBER:
22.	DoD Plans Cyber Staff Increases
(DEFENSE NEWS 01 APR 14) ... Amber Corrin
 
The Defense Department will increase the number of cyber professionals from roughly 1,800 today to more than 6,000 by 2016, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said last week.
Hagel’s remakrs came ahead of a trip to China in which he is expected to discuss cyber-related issues, during a speech at the retirement ceremony of Gen. Keith Alexander, commander of U.S. Cyber Command and director of the National Security Agency.
“Our military’s first responsibility is to prevent and de-escalate conflict and that is DoD’s overriding purpose in cyberspace as well,” Hagel said at the Ft. Meade, Md. event, where he stressed transparency. “We will continue to take steps to be open and transparent about our cyber capabilities, our doctrine and our forces with the American people, our allies and our partners – and even our competitors.”
Competitors such as the Chinese, however, may not necessarily agree.
On March 28 China's National Computer Network Emergency Response Coordination Centre said U.S. attacks made up a significant portion of a steep increase in hacking attacks on Chinese computers last year, which grew by more than half, according to Reuters.
"There are frequent occurrences of state-level organized Internet hacking attacks, and some of our country's important Internet information systems have been penetrated," the Chinese group said in a statement, according to the report.
The Centre said that last year 15,000 host computers were taken control of by Trojan horse malware, and 61,000 websites were taken control of through backdoor breaches from overseas – an increase of 62 percent over the previous year. Almost 11 million host computers had been taken control of by overseas-based servers, a third of which were from United States, as well South Korea and Hong Kong, the group said.
U.S. and Chinese cyber attacks on each other are nothing new, but defense officials said they hope the tension can be overcome through dialog and mutual understanding.
“It’s exactly one of the reasons that we’re trying to be more transparent about everything we do in cyberspace,” a senior defense official said in a call with reporters before Hagel’s appearance, according to reports. “We want the Chinese, just like we want our allies and others around the world, to understand what it is we're doing in building a cyber force at CyberCom, understand how we operate, understand the policies we use, like the policy of restraint.”
http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140401/C4ISRNET07/304010033
 
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CONGRESS / BUDGET:
23.	Ryan Budget Calls For Return To Pre-Sequester Defense Spending
Budget chairman cuts overall spending below sequester totals, but he takes from nondefense to boost defense spending beyond Obama.
(NATIONAL JOURNAL 01 APR 14) ... Stacy Kaper
 
House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan laid out a budget vision Tuesday that goes beyond President Obama's request by ramping up defense spending beyond the caps in 2016 and restoring them by 2017.
Ryan does this by taking from the nondefense side of the ledger and still reducing overall federal spending beyond what is contemplated under the total sequester caps.
"This budget rejects the president's cuts to national security.... It also keeps faith with the veterans who have served and protected the nation," declares the Ryan budget, which increases defense spending above what President Obama has called for by $273 billion over the 10-year budget window.
"The first job of the federal government is securing the safety and liberty of its citizens from threats at home and abroad," Ryan's budget proclaims, listing national defense at the top of its budget breakdown.
"This budget provides for the best equipment, training, and compensation for their continued success."
Unsurprisingly, the Wisconsin Republican's budget, like Obama's, sticks to the defense spending caps agreed to under last year's Bipartisan Budget Act of $521 billion for discretionary spending for fiscal 2015.
And it is important to note that for fiscal 2015, Obama technically is calling for more for defense, because his budget asks for an additional $28 billion for defense spending as part of a so-called opportunity fund that Congress would have to approve through a series of other policy changes, including tax increases that are unlikely to be adopted.
Although neither Obama nor Ryan sticks to the defense sequester caps in 2016 and beyond, starting in fiscal 2016 Ryan's budget starts increasing defense spending beyond what Obama calls for, every year through 2024.
For example, in fiscal 2017 Ryan's budget asks for $590 billion for defense discretionary spending, compared with the $569 billion total for defense discretionary spending that the president requests. The trend line continues, with Ryan requesting $696 billion for defense discretionary spending in 2024, compared with the $646 billion that Obama has reqeusted, after adjustments based on policy changes the White House is assuming in its budget.
Ryan does all this while still coming in under the total discretionary budget caps set by the sequester, ultimately shaving $308 billion from the overall federal budget caps. He does so by reducing nondefense discretionary spending by more than he is increasing defense spending. By 2024 Ryan is adding $483 billion to defense spending beyond what the sequester would allow and cutting $791 billion from nondefense discretionary spending sequester caps in order to achieve overall savings to the federal government.
Defense-budget analysts were quick to put the Ryan budget in context – it's a message piece that, like the president's budget, has next to no chance of becoming law.
"This is just another marker in the debate," said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow in defense-budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
Harrison said it is important to understand that Ryan's budget resolution might not pass the House, and has no chance of being reconciled with the Senate – which has said it is not putting out a budget proposal – and does not have the teeth of an appropriations bill.
"So all it is a marker to give an indication of where the House thinks various spending levels ought to be. It does not mean that we will end up there in any way, shape, or form, even if they can get it to pass the House, which is not a given," Harrison added. "It doesn't mean too much, it's just an indication of the party's position."
Other budget analysts said the key takeaway is that both Obama and fiscal conservatives believe that the defense sequester cuts go too far in restricting funding for national defense.
"Ryan's budget – in following the president's – shows that there is bipartisan consensus that the defense sequester cuts remain too deep, which is a sensible belief because that part of the budget – like domestic discretionary – is not a driver of our long-term debt," said Shai Akabas, an associate director of economic policy with the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Whether this agreement will change the trajectory of defense spending is unclear. Democrats are unlikely to go along with Ryan's plan of sacrificing nondefense discretionary spending in order to increase defense spending.
The Ryan budget does not break down the national defense budget into specifics, such as how much would go to, say, the Defense Department versus the atomic energy defense activities of the Energy Department.
But for 2015 in total, his budget resolution calls for $528.9 billion in budget authority and $566.5 billion in outlays in fiscal 2015 for national defense. Of that, discretionary spending totals $521.3 billion in budget authority and $558.8 billion in outlays. Mandatory spending is $7.7 billion in outlays. The 10-year total for budget authority and outlays are $6.3 trillion and $6.2 trillion, respectively.
Ryan boasts that his budget sticks to the budget caps from last year's Bipartisan Budget Act approved by the House and Senate and signed into law by Obama in December.
"This is the amount provided for in the Bipartisan Budget Act," according to the budget document.
In the budget, Ryan criticizes the fact that over the last five years, DoD has repeatedly revised down its estimates of its budgetary resources necessary to meet the nation's security needs. He essentially admonishes the president for trying to cut defense spending, noting that in the president's 2014 budget, the request is approximately $184 billion lower than the Budget Control Act's pre-sequester caps.
Ryan's budget says that the defense program continues to be under-resourced and that the most recent Congressional Budget Office report found that last year's DoD defense program request was, on average, $33 billion short of providing for the full costs of the program estimated by CBO.
"Today in U.S. defense policy there are two big mismatches," the Ryan budget says. "First between the threats we face and the resources we've committed to meeting them, and second between our stated policy and the budget the president has requested."
It adds, "This budget seeks to resolve these contradictions by restoring defense budgets to to the levels dictated by the national security interests of the nation."
Ryan's budget says Obama's troop-reduction request is too severe and calls for additional resources for troops beyond what Obama requested, without providing specific details on costs.
Under last year's budget agreement between Ryan and Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray, Congress agreed to provide $9 billion in relief from the budget sequester for defense in fiscal 2015.
The sequester is one of the biggest budget challenges plaguing the Defense Department. A repercussion of the August 2011 debt-ceiling standoff, the sequester slashed $1.2 trillion in spending over 10 years and was established as a way to force Congress to come up with more targeted deficit-reduction plans. But Congress seems incapable of agreeing on a comprehensive replacement, and although they did lessen its impact for fiscal 2014 and 2015, they also extended the sequester another two years.
Last year, Ryan's budget took a similar tack with defense spending. It called for $560.2 billion in defense spending for fiscal 2014, which he called "consistent with our responsibilities."
The Ryan budget noted that the proposal was "significantly less than the levels in previous budget resolutions," but it boasted that it was roughly $500 billion more than will be available absent changes in the Budget Control Act.
"Our security is the federal government's top priority," said Ryan's fiscal 2014 budget. "The budget must reflect that fact."
http://www.nationaljournal.com/defense/ryan-budget-calls-for-return-to-pre-sequester-defense-spending-20140401
 
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24.	Republican Budget Asks Federal Employees To Contribute More To Pensions
(GOVERNMENT EXECUTIVE 01 APR 14) ... Kellie Lunney
 
House Republicans again are calling for a smaller government workforce and less generous benefits for federal employees, as part of a plan to help reduce the overall budget deficit.
Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., unveiled his fiscal 2015 budget blueprint Tuesday morning, which proposes increasing the amount feds contribute to their pensions and eliminating a special retirement supplement for certain employees who retire before the age of 62. The GOP proposal would require federal employees, lawmakers and congressional staff to contribute half to their pensions, with the government contributing the other 50 percent. Currently, the government contributes more than 50 percent to the pensions of employees enrolled in the Federal Employees Retirement System – which is most of the federal workforce.
Under the Ryan proposal, FERS enrollees would contribute 6.35 percent of their paycheck to their defined benefit. Right now there is a three-tiered contribution system under FERS: Federal employees hired before 2012 contribute 0.8 percent of each pay check to their pension; those hired in 2013 contribute 3.1 percent and those hired in 2014 contribute 4.4 percent.
The budget proposal also wants to get rid of the FERS Annuity Supplement, which benefits those government workers who retire before the age of 62 and who are not eligible for mandatory retirement. The supplement is intended to bridge the time between when they retire and when they receive Social Security benefits. The actual language in the document calls for “reform” to the special retirement benefit but Ryan has suggested eliminating it before. President Obama also has said he supports doing away with the FERS Annuity Supplement.
Also on the Republican chopping block: the student loan repayment benefit for federal employees. The GOP has recommended cutting this before.
Reforming the civil service pension system would save an estimated $125 billion over the next decade, claimed Ryan, who is chairman of the House Budget Committee. “This would achieve significant budgetary savings and also help facilitate a transition to a defined-contribution system for new federal employees that would give them more control over their own retirement security,” the budget document stated.
The GOP budget proposal, dubbed “The Path to Prosperity: Fiscal Year 2015 Budget Resolution,” also recommends reducing the government workforce by 10 percent through attrition by replacing one employee for every three who leave government service. The proposal would exempt national security jobs. Where the framework seeks to reduce benefits to civilian federal employees, it pledges to provide military service members with the “best equipment, training and compensation for their continued success.” It also carves out more money for veterans. “Veterans are, and will remain, the highest priority within this budget,” Ryan’s proposal stated. However the document expressed concern over the Veterans Affairs Department’s “elusive” success to date toward eliminating the disability claims backlog and veteran homelessness.
The Republican plan overall seeks to balance the budget in a decade and reduce spending by $5.1 trillion during that time through reforming the tax code and entitlement programs, and streamlining other government programs. Other priorities include repealing the 2010 Affordable Health Care Act, and eliminating waste governmentwide. “Federal pay, benefits and mismanagement of properties are just a few areas where savings should be achieved,” the blueprint stated.
The plan listed maintaining “robust compensation” for military service members as a priority, but also noted the “explosive” growth in Defense Department personnel costs since 2001. “In future years, serious consideration must be given to the [Military Compensation and Retirement Modernization] Commission’s recommendations if this defense program is going to be realized within existing budgets,” the document stated. The Republican plan also said that any troop reductions “should be accompanied by reductions in the civilian and contractor workforce, which has ballooned in recent years and is now approximately the same size as the active-duty military, a ratio that is out of balance.”
http://www.govexec.com/oversight/2014/04/budget-story/81676/
 
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SOCOM:
25.	Pybus On Deck As SOCOM’s Second In Command
(TAMPA TRIBUNE 01 APR 14) ... Howard Altman
 
The Tampa special operations community is lauding President Barack Obama’s choice to be the next deputy commander of U.S. Special Operations Command.
Vice Adm. Sean Pybus, currently head of NATO’s Special Operations headquarters in Brussels, was named by Obama Tuesday to take the MacDill Air Force Base headquartered command’s No. 2 slot.
That slot is currently held by Army Lt. Gen. John F. Mulholland, Jr.
Mulholland has not made his future plans known, according to SOCOM spokesman Ken McGraw, who said he could either retire or get a new assignment.
If Pybus’ nomination is approved by the Senate Armed Services Committee, that would make two SEALs in charge of the command.
SOCOM commander Adm. William McRaven is also a SEAL.
It would also mark a return for Pybus to Tampa, where he served as SOCOM’s Director of Operations from 2007 to 2009.
He still has a home and saw his children go to school here, according to Joe Maguire, a retired Navy vice admiral.
Pybus is “well-known to the Tampa area, to MacDill and is held in the highest esteeem by everyone in the joint community, not just Navy SEALs,” said Maguire, who was a SEAL and now serves as chairman of the Special Operations Warrior Foundation in Tampa. “He is a bright guy and has a very, very deep level of experience and is probably just the right guy to go in as deputy commander.”
Like Maguire, Dave Scott, a retired Air Force major general who served as Deputy Director at SOCOM’s Center for Special Operations, lauds Pybus’ nomination.
“He is absolutely the finest SEAL I have ever met,” said Scott. “He is a great operator, a great leader and he is a common sense kind of guy. The troops respect him.”
Pybus, he said, “is exactly who you would love to see be successful and work in high levels of leadership in our military. All of us are comfortable with him. I think he is the perfect choice.”
Scott said that “the highest compliment any special operator can convey is this is someone I trust, who cares about the troops, who understands the mission and someone who acts as the point operator to fight and win the nation’s wars. That’s Sean Pybus.”
Before taking the NATO job, Pybus was commander of all Navy SEALs from 2011 to 2013 as the head of Naval Special Warfare Command, Those who served under him respect Pybus as a “leader and mentor,” said Dan O’Shea, a former Navy SEAL commander now living in South Tampa.
Pybus took over at a difficult time for the SEAL community, as controversy bubbled up about publicity surrounding the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.
“I am very disappointed with the few people who use their SEAL cachet for self-serving purposes, particularly through falsehoods and certainly when the safety and security of themselves and their active-duty teammates and families are put at risk,” he said, according to the Navy Times. “Most of our former or retired NSW members find a suitable second career without compromising the ideals of their active service – honor, courage and commitment. Most of our veterans with physical or mental health issues get some degree of health care, and we are actively pursuing even better options in this realm. I think we’re doing the things that you would expect from a dedicated, disciplined and trusted force.”
As for what he will bring to the table as deputy SOCOM commander, Scott said “that depends on who the No. 1 is. It’s always a ballet. You compliment the commander.”
SOCOM spokesman McGraw would not speculate on McRaven’s future.
Pybus graduated from the University of Rochester in 1979 with a Bachelor of Arts in Economics, according to his bio and received a regular Navy commission through NROTC. He graduated BUD/S training in December 1979.
http://tbo.com/list/military-news/pybus-on-deck-as-socoms-second-in-command-20140401/
 
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MARINE CORPS:
26.	Marines About To Announce New Amphibious Combat Vehicle Plan: Our Sneak Preview
(BREAKING DEFENSE 02 APR 14) ... Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
 
WASHINGTON – The Marines are about to move out sharply with their once-stalled Amphibious Combat Vehicle, the smallest service’s biggest program. After years of uncertainty and a last-minute change of course that came too late to make it into the administration’s budget request for 2015, the Marines will soon announce their new strategy for something they’re calling an ACV. But it will be much more modest than the revolutionary vehicle once envisioned.
The not-quite-final plan:
•	Buy 200 to 600 armored troop transports as a “phase 1″ ACV. These will be modified versions of some existing US or foreign design, not an all-new vehicle. They’ll also have only limited amphibious capability: enough to cross a river or coastal inlet, but not necessarily enough to move from a ship at sea to the beach on their own power, without being carried on some kind of landing craft. “ACV 1″ is essentially a re-envisioned and resurrected Marine Personnel Carrier (MPC), a program which was cancelled just last year
•	Upgrade about 390 of the current AAV-7 Amphibious Assault Vehicles. These 1970s-vintage vehicles, descendants of the World War II amtrac, can move from ship to shore on their own power but have proven dangerously vulnerable to roadside bombs. A contract for the first set of “limited survivability upgrades” will be announced in the next 30-60 days, Pacheco told me.
•	Research a future “high water speed” option – an “ACV 2.0″ – which may be an all-new fully amphibious vehicle, a landing craft to carry the ACV 1, or something entirely different. Said Pacheco, “that’s not a procurement, it’s more in the R&D realm.”
“We are doing well with the ACV,” said the Commandant, Gen. James Amos, at the Atlantic Council Tuesday afternoon. “We are about to go public with the way forward on it. It’s affordable, ladies and gentlemen, it’s doable, and we can have our cake and eat it too here. So we’re pretty excited about it.”
Amos was short on details at the event and slipped into the elevator a step ahead of pursuing journalists afterwards. But his staff referred me to Pacheco, a spokesman for the Marine Corps’s Program Executive Office (PEO) Land Systems.
“We were talking to some [congressional] staffers last week and things were changing just as we were talking,” Pacheco told me in a Tuesday evening phone call, “but I’d venture to say we’re pretty close to making some announcement.”
What Pacheco laid out was the most refined and detailed form I’ve seen so far of the Marines’ new multi-phase, multi-vehicle approach.
The first step has to be making the existing AAV-7 more robust, Pacheco said. That means those “limited survivability upgrades,” such as blast-resistant seats and additional armor, which may require a new transmission to handle the extra weight. But only about 390 of the more than 1,000 AAV-7s in service will get the upgrades. There is no current plan for a fleet-wide overhaul or a service-life extension program (SLEP) for the aging vehicles.
The next step is what the Marines are calling “ACV 1.1.” This will not be an all-new vehicle but rather a “non-developmental item,” that is a modification of an existing US or foreign design. It also probably won’t be able to swim from ship to shore under its own power, instead requiring some kind of landing craft.
“It won’t go from the ship to the shore on its own – at least at this point right now,” Pacheco told me. “I know at least one vendor who claims they’ve deployed their vehicle from the back of an amphib, [but] we have not tested that.”
A ”fully developed acquisition strategy” for ACV 1.1 will take a little longer, Pacheco said. But the Marines’ deputy commandant for “combat development & integration,” Lt. Gen. Kenneth Glueck, is currently finalizing the detailed requirements that will allow the Marines to write a Request For Proposals and start a formal competition. (Glueck happens to be testifying before Congress on Wednesday morning, when we may hear more).
That ACV 1.1 competition would be for about 200 basic troop transports. If that goes well, the Marines will expand the program to an ACV 1.2, buying up to an additional 400 vehicles in multiple variants: not just personnel carriers but also, say, a mobile command post or a fire support vehicle that trades passenger capacity for bigger weapons.
If a company can offer an ACV 1 that can swim from ship to shore without a landing craft, that capability would “absolutely” be a major plus, Pacheco said – but it’s not going to be a requirement. That, in turn, is why it’s crucial to keep the AAV-7s viable, since those can self-deploy from the ship.
Meanwhile, research and development will continue on faster means of crossing the water. “That would be ACV 2.0,” said Pacheco. “There’s some things out there that the Marine Corps wants to keep pursuing.... to see what’s in the realm of the possible... to get us to an affordable high-water-speed ACV.” But right now such a vehicle, whatever it might be, looks like an idea for the indefinitely distant future.
Some critics of the Marine Corps have questioned why the service needs this kind of capability at all. The last opposed landing by amphibious armored vehicles came during the Korean War, they argue, and in an era of increasingly long-range anti-ship and anti-tank missiles, even a high-water-speed landing force is unlikely to reach the beach alive. But the Marines see the ability to move from ship to shore and on inland as central to their mission – and not just in major wars.
When 6,000 Marines aboard seven Navy amphibious ships responded to the Haiti earthquake of 2010, Gen. Amos said today, “there wasn’t one ounce of combat involved.” But the Navy ships couldn’t simply Haiti’s damaged ports – which had been in bad shape even before the quake – and tie up at the pier. Nor could helicopters ever carry the sheer volume of relief supplies required. Instead, the operation relied on AAV-7s, he said: “all those amphibious tractors that swam ashore and swam back every day and carried fuel, water, medical supplies, people back out to the ships,” Amos said.
In fact, “I think the bulk of [the] forces in my service are what we call general purpose, applicable across the range of military operations” from humanitarian aid to major war, Amos went on. A Navy-Marine amphibious task force is “the Swiss Army Knife of the Department of Defense,” he said, using one of his favorite phrases. (And, by the way, “our United States Navy needs more money for ships,” he added). “If you want to hand out humanitarian supplies or food or rescue people, you bring in an amphibious ship full of marines and sailors,” he said. ” They can also make a forcible entry landing some place [with] the exact same force.”
“The standard-issue United States Marine... is trained as a rifleman first and can hand out water, can hand out diapers,” Amos said, citing recent relief efforts in the Philippines after Typhoon Haiyan last fall and in Japan after the 2011 earthquake.
Amos’s problem is paying for enough Marines with enough training and enough modern equipment to handle this wide range of missions. “Yes, we can do the same with less, but there’s a price to be paid for that,” he said. For example, the Marines have been raiding equipment and base maintenance funds to pay for training, fuel, spare parts, and other immediate operational needs.
The automatic budget cuts known as sequestration are “forcing us to sacrifice our long-term health for near-term readiness,” Amos said. “I can’t continue to do this for forever.” Around 2017, he said, the next Commandant will probably have to cut back readiness to keep alive programs like the Amphibious Combat Vehicle.
http://breakingdefense.com/2014/04/marines-about-to-announce-new-amphibious-combat-vehicle-plan-our-sneak-preview/
 
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PERSONNEL:
27.	Op-Ed Gets USMC Commandant’s Attention, Sparks Change For Women
(SEAPOWER 01 APR 14) ... Otto Kreisher
 
WASHINGTON – The U.S. Marine Corps commandant has reacted swiftly to a female Marine officer’s complaint that women are unfairly precluded from trying a second time to pass the prestigious Marine Corps Infantry Officers Course, when men can have a second try.
In response to a question from a female Army officer at an Atlantic Council forum April 1, Gen. James F. Amos said he has ordered a change in the rules and lavished praise not only on Marine Corps 2nd Lt. Sage Santangelo, who protested the restriction, but on all his female Marines.
And, Amos said, he offered Santangelo a chance to go to Afghanistan while she awaits an opening in flight training.
“I got an answer back in about 14 nanoseconds. ... So we’re cutting orders right now. Sage is going to go to Afghanistan, to join the Marine Expeditionary Brigade Forward over there,” the commandant said.
The question was sparked by an opinion article Santangelo wrote in the March 30 Washington Post in which she graphically described the tremendous physical ordeal young Marine officers endure in trying to qualify to lead Marine infantry. Despite her great desire and effort, she was physically unable to complete the initial endurance test, as did 25 male officers and the three other female Marines who tried that day.
So far, 14 women officers have tried to pass the 17-week infantry officers course at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., and all have been unable to complete it. Thirteen enlisted female Marines, however, have passed the somewhat less difficult basic infantry training school at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
The women have been given those chances because the Marine Corps, along with the Army, is attempting to determine if they can open ground combat jobs, including infantry, to women. Although military women are now able to serve in many combat-related positions, including aviation, military police and, for the Army, field artillery, they still are banned from the infantry.
Putting women through the infantry qualification schools is part of the Corps’ tests to see if they can meet the tough physical standards now required, and if those standards are necessary.
The Marines also are forming an experimental unit that would give a group of volunteers a chance to see if women can perform ground combat tasks over a prolonged period.
But in her article, Santangelo complained that her training in the Marine Officer Candidate School was not as physically demanding as what was required of male officer candidates, so she was not as prepared for the infantry course.
And, she noted, the men who failed the initial qualification test could apply for a second chance, but she could not.
Amos said he read Santangelo’s article, which he said “was superb,” and invited her to his Pentagon office to discuss the issue.
“When she brought up the point about the inability to recycle. ... I went back to my folks and said, ‘we got to fix this.’ So we are,” he said.
Amos explained that the rule about not getting a second chance was intended to protect the unsuccessful officer’s ability to get into their future military occupational specialty and be positioned for the critical selection for a regular commission, rather than staying as a reserve officer, which limits their potential for a career. But, he said, “we’ll take care of them.”
Amos said he “bristled at the headline” on the Post article, which said the female officer “failed,” saying it “took enormous courage” for Santangelo and the other female Marines to attempt to win a position in what has been a male-dominated field for the Corps’ 238-year history. “I’m a big fan of our females,” he said.
In his presentation and answers to other questions, Amos spelled out the challenges he faces in trying to shape the Corps to continue to meet the nation’s challenges, when the fiscal constraints imposed by sequestration force him to reduce his force structure to have enough money to maintain combat readiness in the near term and for modernization for future capability.
And he strongly defended his top acquisition priority, the short takeoff, vertical landing F-35B, and said his top ground combat need, the Amphibious Combat Vehicle, is moving ahead and he will soon announce the road map for acquiring the initial replacement for the Vietnam-vintage AAV-7 amphibious assault vehicles.
http://www.seapowermagazine.org/stories/20140401-amos.html
 
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28.	More On Navy Cigarette Sales
Defense secretary, San Diego congressman on opposite sides of issue
(SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE 01 APR 14) ... Jeanette Steele
 
The debate continues – and is maybe heating up – over Navy sales of cigarettes on ships and naval installations.
Yesterday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel weighed in on the side of the Navy Secretary, who is apparently considering a ban on tobacco sales on boats and bases.
“I don’t know if there’s anybody in America who still thinks that tobacco is good for you,” Hagel told reporters at the Pentagon, according to the military newspaper Stars and Stripes.
“We don’t allow smoking in any of our government buildings. ... I think in reviewing any options that we have as to whether we in the military through commissaries [or] PXs sell or continue to sell tobacco is something we need to look at.”
However, on Friday, U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter, a San Diego County Republican, voiced his strong opposition to the idea in a letter to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus.
Hunter, a Marine Corps veteran, suggested that the move was political and would “intrude” on the personal decisions of Marines and sailors.
He also suggested that it could hurt profits at Navy base stores and that there are more immediate things to focus on, if the readiness of the fleet is the concern.
In March 2012, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus embarked on a get-healthy campaign called the 21st Century Sailor and Marine Initiative. It includes regular breath tests for alcohol when sailors and Marines report for work and expanded testing for designer drugs such as Spice.
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2014/apr/01/hagel-hunter-navy-cigarette-sales-ships-bases/
 
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29.	Aircrewmen To Receive New Zealand Medal For '79 Recovery Operation
(NAVY TIMES 01 APR 14) ... Meghann Myers 
 
Nearly 35 years ago, a group of Navy helicopter aircrewmen helped the New Zealand government recover the bodies of more than 250 passengers and crew after their commercial airliner crashed into Mount Erebus, Antarctica’s highest peak.
It was the deadliest disaster in the country’s history.
The aviators finished their tour at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station with Antarctic Development Squadron 6 and got on with their Navy careers and post-military lives. But in late 2012, retired Chief Aviation Electronics Technician (AW/NAC) Erich Eggers learned that the New Zealand Defence Force was looking for Americans who’d helped in the weeks-long recovery effort.
Eggers, now 55 and working for Iowa’s transportation department, contacted the NZDF, who said they’d been looking for him, but a spelling error in his name led them to a dead end.
In 2006, the government had authorized a New Zealand Special Service Medal, the highest award given to citizens of other countries, for participants in Operation Overdue, the recovery effort’s official name. Since then, a few dozen Americans have received the award, in addition to hundreds of New Zealand rescue personnel.
“I just kind of figured all of the other guys already had theirs,” he told Navy Times in a March 11 phone interview.
Then the representative asked Eggers, who received his medal last summer, if he’d take a look at their list of crew members to help fill in any gaps. He asked if it included more than pilots, he said, and they assured him it did. He didn’t see any helicopter aircrewmen, though.
“When this thing happened I was the youngest kid in the squadron,” he said. “I was only 20, and they were all my instructors, they were all my big brothers. When I got the list and found out that I was only one on it, my heart kind of sank.”
Through a Facebook page dedicated to his old unit, Eggers found four more of his fellow crew members, who will receive their medals April 2 in a ceremony at the New Zealand Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Responding To Disaster
The squadron deployed to Antarctica in support of the National Science Foundation, transporting glaciologists, volcanologists and other researchers around the region as part of Operation Deep Freeze.
On Nov. 28, 1979, the squadron went on alert after New Zealand Air Flight 901 lost contact during a sightseeing trip.
The flight was a daylong tourist excursion aboard a DC-10-30 that left from New Zealand’s Auckland International Airport at 8 a.m., spent the day flying over Antarctica, then returned to Auckland at 9 p.m.
McMurdo Station’s U.S. military air traffic control was responsible for the flight, so when the pilot stopped responding to radio transmissions that afternoon, the Navy released a situation report. A ski-equipped LC-130 and two UH-1N Huey helicopters went to search for the plane and any signs of life the next day.
The LC-130 found the plane, which had slammed into the side of Mount Erebus. A lengthy and controversial investigation into the cause of the crash concluded the pilots and crew hadn’t been informed of a change in the flight plan, which shifted flying coordinates to about 27 miles east of the previous path.
While the pilots thought they were flying over the McMurdo Sound, the investigation found, they were actually flying straight into the mountain.
A white cloud resting on the snow-covered volcano looked to them like the Ross Ice Shelf, a large piece of floating ice.
By the time the plane’s warning system alerted the pilots that they were dangerously close to land, it was too late. Everyone aboard – 237 passengers from eight countries and 20 New Zealand crew members – died instantly.
Former Aviation Machinist’s Mate 1st Class (NAC) Ken Becker, now 60 and working as a helicopter engineer for Boeing in Northern California, was on one of the Hueys, which flew to the crash site after the LC-130 spotted the wreckage.
“One of the first things we saw was the debris trail going up the mountain,” he told Navy Times in a March 24 phone interview. “So it was sort of black and snow and ice and parts and pieces everywhere. We were able to recognize some of the larger pieces, you know, the tail with the New Zealand emblem on there.”
Retired Chief Aviation Structural Mechanic (AW/NAC) Hector Rodriguez, now 60 and a robotics engineer in San Diego, was the crew chief of the first Huey to reach the site. That crew determined there were no survivors, but the wind and angle of the mountain made it too dangerous to land.
When conditions cleared up a few days later, the crews began the weeks-long process of bringing in New Zealand police and mountaineers to investigate, while flying remains back to Auckland for identification.
Providing Closure
Eggers, Becker and Rodriguez all recalled Operation Overdue as the most significant mission of their Navy careers.
For Eggers, it was his first flight as a certified aircrewman, without an instructor. Becker and Rodriguez had flown rescue missions before but usually with better outcomes.
“In my mind, we were returning those bodies, those souls, back to their homelands so that they could be buried and for their families’ sake,” Becker said. “So from that perspective, it’s a feeling of accomplishment that we were able to support that.”
Becker and Rodriguez will reunite with retired Senior Chief Aviation Machinist’s Mate (AW/NAC) Joe Madrid and retired Senior Chief Aviation Structural Mechanic (AW/NAC) Bob Cox for the ceremony in Washington, D.C.
“The only thing I can say is, I just don’t want anyone to think that we’re like, ‘Oh boy, we’re getting a medal,’“ Rodriguez said. “For most of us, it puts kind of the icing on the cake of a big event in our lives, and there’s nothing better than to get together for it.”
http://www.navytimes.com/article/20140401/NEWS/304070021
 
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SEXUAL ASSAULT:
30.	West Point Leader Vows To Address Sexual Assault
(WESTCHESTER COUNTY (NY) JOURNAL NEWS 01 APR 14) ... Khurram Saeed
 
WEST POINT – Top Army officials on Monday said they were committed to ending sexual assault and harassment following a series of scandals at the nation's oldest military academy.
Lt. Gen. Robert Caslen Jr., who took over as superintendent of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point last July, told the members of an oversight board new efforts were underway to develop character and prevent future incidents.
"My focus is to change the culture," Caslen told West Point's Board of Visitors, whose 15 members, which include Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, advise the president on issues ranging from finances to academics to discipline at West Point.
Gillibrand, who was recently appointed to the board, has used her position to draw attention to sexual assault in the military and the difficulties of getting justice for the victim.
"Do you define how we view our peers as a measure of character?" Gillibrand asked Caslen at the meeting in Jefferson Hall.
There are 4,400 cadets at West Point, and 15 percent of them are female with the number expected to rise in the coming years.
Board member Brenda "Sue" Fulton, a past critic of senior command at West Point for its "utter contempt for women," said Caslen had provided "extraordinary" and "exemplary" leadership.
In 1980, Fulton became part of the first class of women to graduate from West Point.
"It does appear we're getting it right at West Point," said Fulton, who is one of six presidential appointees on the Board of Visitors and was elected its vice chairwoman on Monday.
There were10 sexual assault complaints at West Point during the 2012-13 school year, a decrease from the prior year, according to a Pentagon study. The victims were mostly female and alcohol consumption was cited as a major factor.
Last June, Fulton in an open letter expressed her anger at the way West Point handled a scandal involving its rugby team.
Caslen provided an update on Monday, revealing that emails circulated among the 60 team members contained material, including photographs, that were "very disrespectful" of team members and non-members. The team was disbanded for six months, returning to competition on Jan. 14. Two second lieutenants are under investigation for allegations made in the emails.
Gillibrand spoke of a "disconnect" between rugby players who were familiar with the Army's code of honor yet took no action to stop the emails. She also warned of "predators" who feel empowered to repeatedly seek out vulnerable cadets.
Cadet Havana Schmidt said the "Cadets Against Sexual Harassment-Assault" (CASH-A) program was a relatively new tool that could prove effective because it was "cadet-designed and cadet-led."
One issue that didn't come up was the case of a sergeant at West Point accused of secretly recording female students in the shower and bathroom. Sgt. First Class Michael McClendon was court-martialed in early March at Fort Drum and will serve about three years in prison, an Army spokesman said outside of the meeting.
http://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/rockland/2014/03/31/west-point-sexual-assault-visitors-board/7134799/
 
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ENVIRONMENTAL:
31.	U.S. Navy Credited With Recovery Of Island Night Lizards
(LOS ANGELES TIMES 01 APR 14) ... Louis Sahagun
 
In what is being hailed as an environmental victory for the U.S. Navy, the island night lizard has been taken off the list of federally endangered species.
An estimated 21.3 million night lizards occupy 21-mile-long San Clemente Island, one of the highest densities of any lizard on earth, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced this week.
The population number is especially significant because the 57-square-mile volcanic isle, about 75 miles northwest of San Diego, hosts the only ship-to-shore bombardment training range in the United States.
The lizard’s recovery on San Clemente and two other Channel Islands – San Nicholas and Santa Barbara – was credited to habitat conservation and restoration efforts by the U.S. Navy and the National Park Service.
“The incredibly high numbers of lizards on San Clemente Island,” Christopher Sund, commanding officer of Naval Base Coronado, said, “shows that unique island species can thrive alongside high-tempo Navy operations through protective management.”
The lizard that scientists know as Xantusia riversiana was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1977 due to severe habitat loss caused by ranching, grazing and the introduction of non-native goats, pigs and rabbits, which browsed native plants to oblivion and trampled the landscape.
The islands’ unique assemblage of flora and fauna, including night lizards, has been on the rebound since the goats, pigs and rabbits were removed in the mid-1990s. Also important has been cultivation of native vegetation on the islands.
Much larger than its mainland cousins – up to 8 inches long compared with 2-inchers in the California desert – the lizard with bright stripes and mottled green scales spends its entire life within a few yards of ground and bears its young live, as mammals do.
Collette Adkins Giese, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity said: “It’s amazing that the Navy was able to save this precious creature from extinction, and still be able to carry out its mission.”
http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-navy-night-lizard-recovery-20140401,0,5203763.story
 
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COMMENTARY:
32.	Realizing The Asia-Pacific Rebalance
(DEFENSE ONE 01 APR 14) ... Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel
 
In a world where security challenges do not adhere to political boundaries and our economies are linked as never before, no nation can go it alone and hope to prosper. Achieving sustained security and prosperity in the 21st century requires nations to work together and to meet common challenges with uncommon unity and purpose.
This kind of unity is increasingly visible in the Asia-Pacific, one of the most critical regions for global security and the global economy. Just recently, the disappearance of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 brought together more than 25 countries to conduct a complex search operation across the Indian Ocean’s vast expanses. Last fall, the destruction caused by Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines led to a massive international relief and recovery effort – and produced Japan’s largest overseas military deployment in the post-war period.
In both cases, nations in the region were able to set aside rivalries and differences and instead work together. At the same time, both cases underscore the reality that nations must engage in more practical security cooperation ahead of time in order to work together more effectively when challenges arise.
This deepening cooperation did not – and will not – materialize on its own. It requires deliberate and sustained efforts, like those being undertaken by members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, or ASEAN, to continue building a stronger regional security architecture that can address shared challenges.
These efforts have the full support of the United States and will be highlighted this week in Hawaii, at the first-ever U.S.-hosted gathering of U.S. and ASEAN defense ministers. By hosting this meeting at the start of my 4th visit to the Asia-Pacific region – which will include stops in Japan, China and Mongolia – it serves to underscore the growing role ASEAN members are playing in promoting regional stability and enhanced security cooperation.
The United States also has a key role to play in this endeavor. As a leading economic and military power in the Pacific – one with no disputed territorial claims or ambitions in the region – the United States is uniquely positioned to continue to help Asian nations build a vibrant regional security architecture. My upcoming trip emphasizes three ways in which the Department of Defense will contribute to this effort.
First, the United States military will increase its role in cooperative security efforts and exercises as we continue to shift forces and operational focus to the Asia-Pacific region. It has been more than five years since President Barack Obama came to office determined to lead America’s rebalance toward the Asia-Pacific, and it remains front and center in our national security strategy. The rebalance has helped to strengthen our alliances and partnerships in Asia and led to increased engagement, exercises and training on a bilateral and multilateral basis. The deployment of our most advanced military capabilities to the region has also proven indispensable. For example, the United States’ contributions to the search for Flight 370 included the world’s most advanced maritime patrol aircraft – the P-8A Poseidon – which was recently deployed to Japan.
Second, the United States military will continue to build new types of partnerships that tackle non-traditional security challenges more effectively. The military presence we maintain in the Pacific – including approximately 330,000 personnel, 180 ships, 2,000 aircraft, the 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force and five Army brigades – provides unparalleled capabilities. But the kind of non-traditional security challenges that pose a growing threat to stability in the region, such as climate change, natural disasters and pandemic disease, cannot be resolved through military efforts alone. They require strong partnerships across military and civilian agencies, and with the private sector and non-governmental organizations. That’s why I am pleased that USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah will lead one of our sessions in Hawaii.
Even as we look for new ways to tackle shared challenges, a third point I will emphasize throughout the trip is that the United States military will defend our allies and consistently champion the international laws and norms that have provided the basis for regional security and prosperity for generations. 
Over the course of 10 days, I will meet with 13 defense ministers whose nations represent more than 30 percent of the global economy. They recognize that there can be no economic growth without stability and prosperity for their people. Continuing the positive trends in the region will depend on upholding the principles of free and open commerce, the rule of law, open access to sea lanes, air, space, and cyberspace, and resolving conflicts and disputes peacefully. As we have recently seen in Ukraine, threats to these principles are threats to peace and security in the 21st century. That’s why all nations must commit to resolving disputes peacefully, without coercion and in accordance with international law.
For more than 60 years, the Asia-Pacific region has enjoyed relative peace and stability and become an engine for global progress and prosperity. The beneficiaries of this progress have been the people of the region, and that includes the American people. The region has benefited from American leadership, and it will continue to do so. But sustaining this progress is not the work of any single nation – it is a shared responsibility. And the more nations that embrace this responsibility and spirit of cooperation, the more confident we can be that Asia in the 21st century will be defined by security and prosperity for all its people.
Chuck Hagel is the secretary of defense of the United States of America. 
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/04/realizing-asia-pacific-rebalance/81730/
 
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33.	Crimea: Too Small To Matter
(REUTERS 01 APR 14) ... Nicholas Wapshott
 
Crimea is permanently lost to Russia.
That is implicit in President Barack Obama’s remarks about where the Ukraine crisis heads next; the terms of the Paris talks between Secretary of State John Kerry and the Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and the West’s rejection of military action to hurl back the occupying Russian forces.
That Crimea is gone forever is also the view of former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who declared, “I do not believe that Crimea will slip out of Russia’s hand.”
It is now generally accepted in Washington that short of sparking a shooting war, Crimea is lost and will now always be Russian. President Vladimir Putin, presiding over an economy of $2 trillion, barely equal to California, has roundly defeated the United States and the European Union, with a combined worth of more than $34 trillion.
The loss of Crimea is a considerable blow to U.S. prestige and confirmation that Obama holds a weak hand in Ukraine, a country everyone agrees is too hard to defend from Russian aggression. But why has Obama’s response to Russia’s stealth invasion of Crimea been so muted? Where is the simple demand: “Mr. Putin, order your troops out of Crimea”?
Why is keeping Russia out of eastern Ukraine – rather than the swift return of Crimea to Ukraine – not the core of the Paris talks? Why are economic sanctions limited to a small number of Putin cronies and not applied to the entire population?
Why have the Crimeans been sacrificed? One quick answer is that Americans are not prepared to defend them. According to a recent poll, though two-thirds (66 percent) of Americans think the president has not been tough enough with Putin, with just 11 percent thinking he is handling Russia just right, a majority (53 percent) thinks the United States should not counter the threats to Ukraine. Half of Americans believe Crimea can only be wrested from Russia through military force, but there appears no appetite for sending troops, or even military aid, to Ukraine.
There are, however, larger forces at work here. Obama needs Putin’s continuing support in three pivotal geopolitical conflicts. The first is Afghanistan. After 12 years of occupation and 2,211 U.S. lives lost, America is on the point of withdrawing its final 33,000 troops from the country that once harbored the al Qaeda terrorists who attacked America.
The U.S. forces there, and the nascent Afghan security forces, are being and will continue to be supplied from the United States via a long overland route, known as the Northern Distribution Network, through Russia and territories allied to Russia – Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. To further complicate matters, some important arms contracts to bolster Afghanistan’s frail army against a resurgent Taliban, including a $1 billion contract to buy helicopters, have been placed with Russian companies.
A war between the West and Russia, or even a full-scale sanctions regime, would abruptly cut that essential supply line, putting in jeopardy the fragile achievements of the 12-year Western occupation.
Never mind that if Afghanistan were to return to Taliban rule, it would harbor Islamist terrorists who would try to wrest Islamic Russian republics from the Russian federation. Putin feels that snatching Crimea and invoking the wrath of the West is worth the gamble. He is guessing – correctly thus far – that the United States and the European Union will shrug and do nothing.
Then there are the U.S.-led Western sanctions against the Islamist masters of Iran, who are believed to be seeking to build nuclear weapons and whose constant bellicose threats toward Israel suggest that if they manage to build nukes they will use them on the Jewish state. With Russian help, Iran has been tempted to the negotiating table.
Crimea has put those talks in jeopardy. The Russian deputy foreign minister has made clear that, if the West steps up its sanctions against Russia or Russian individuals to win back Crimea, Russia will withdraw its support for the Iran nuclear disarmament talks and help Iran dodge the tight Western sanctions regime that has forced the mullahs to start talking.
Again, there are many good reasons why it suits Russia to continue with the talks – not least that it does not want a new nuclear power on its southern doorstep. But it appears sentiment rather than realpolitik inspires the Kremlin.
Putin is gambling that Obama is under such domestic pressure to stay out of another war and halt Iran’s nuclear ambitions that Russia can both remain at the Iran talks and keep Crimea. Crimea is therefore the price for trying to disarm Iran.
The third U.S. foreign policy goal Russia is helping with is mediating in the Syrian civil war. After Obama blinked and Congress showed its lack of appetite for intervening militarily in Syria, Putin stepped up and forged a compromise with its longtime ally, in which President Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime would hand over the chemical weapons it had been using to kill its own people.
Since then, though Russia has soft pedaled and allowed Syria to slow the pace of destruction of its poison gas and other weapons of mass destruction, Washington has been beholden to Moscow to keep the program on track. The story of Syrian disarmament so far has been one of deception and delays. But the prospect of Russia withdrawing its support for the United Nations effort and even further bolstering the Syrian regime with arms would be a profound setback for Obama’s efforts to bring peace and stability in the Middle East. Putin thinks the world owes him Crimea for doing the right thing in Syria.
So after 50 years as a province of Ukraine, first under the Soviets then an independent Ukraine, Crimea is once again a part of Russia. Even Putin’s successors will not wish to hand over land that has been such a bone of contention between Russia and the West.
Crimea is the price Putin has put on cooperating with Obama. And he may still demand more. But is the sacrifice of Crimea worth it?
Consider Tibet, an independent nation that the Chinese Communists annexed by force in 1950. For more than 60 years the Tibetan people have been subjugated and their natural resources plundered.
As with Crimea, Tibet was a country too far away and of insufficient importance to be saved from annexation. To have continued to demand the freedom of Tibet would have put at risk the settlement in the East that ended the Korean War, leaving both North Korea and Tibet in China’s grip.
Before long the State Department will come to consider Crimea part of Russia, just as it now considers Tibet part of China. Will the compromise have been worth it?
Perhaps to Americans, weary of conflict and eager to save money on defense. But Ukranians and, over time, the Crimeans, as they come to understand what it is to live in a bankrupt despotism, will not think so.
Abandoning them is not moral and it is certainly not dignified, but Crimea is not so much too big to fail as too small to matter.
Nicholas Wapshott is the International Editor of Newsweek. Previously, he was former New York bureau chief of The Times of London. and editor of the Saturday Times of London.
http://blogs.reuters.com/nicholas-wapshott/2014/04/01/crimea-too-small-to-matter/
 
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34.	Crimea And South China Sea Diplomacy
Russia’s big move shows both the limits and importance of diplomacy in territorial disputes.
(THE DIPLOMAT 01 APR 14) ... Sophie Boisseau du Rocher & Bruno Hellendorff
 
On March 18, China and ASEAN gathered in Singapore to pursue consultations on a Code of Conduct (COC) for the South China Sea, alongside talks on the implementation of the Declaration of Conduct (DOC). The gathering came at a time of rising preoccupation over a perceived creeping assertiveness by China in pursuing its maritime claims. Just one week before, Manila and Beijing experienced another diplomatic row, after Chinese Coast Guard vessels barred the resupply of Philippine marines based in the Spratly Islands.
In broader terms, several high-profile developments have hinted that China is becoming more inclined to consider the threat and use of force as its preferred vehicle for influence in the South China Sea. China’s considerable maritime build-up has been accompanied by the merging of its maritime agencies into a unified Coast Guard unit, the publication of maps with a 10-dash line covering Chinese claims in the South China Sea, and even the announcement of an Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) in the East China Sea, covering the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. All have contributed to turning the South China Sea into “Asia’s cauldron,” as one renowned expert titled his last book. A widely circulated photograph picturing Chinese sailors forming the slogan “The Chinese dream, the dream of a strong military” on the deck of the Liaoning did nothing to help mitigate nervousness over Chinese aims and strategy in the region.
The timing of these China-ASEAN discussions coincided with rising tensions in Eastern Europe around the fate of Crimea. In recent days, neither international law nor European pressure have proved of much value in the face of Russian resolve. Illegal in many respects, the Crimean referendum was still deemed valid in Moscow, which subsequently annexed the region. The Ukrainian military bases in Crimea were rapidly overwhelmed by pro-Russian forces as the last vestiges of political control from Kiev were swept aside, making a return to status quo ante increasingly remote. Russia clearly has the upper hand in Crimea. It successfully promoted its interests through a combination of intimidation and crawling assertiveness while answering European and American criticisms by pointing to Western interventions in Kosovo and Libya. The larger consequences of this strategy for Euro-Russian relations and stability in Eastern Europe remain unclear. However, this demonstration of how, in certain situations, force prevails over diplomacy, a notion long fought by the European Union, has opened a new Pandora’s box.
Certainly, Russia’s bid to bend international norms in its favor through the use of force, and Western reactions to it are being watched with great interest, and probably some trepidation, in Beijing and Southeast Asia. Whether the Crimea issue will have influence in Southeast Asia, in the context of competing territorial claims, is far from clear. However, the Crimean and South China Sea issues have several elements in common. One of the most prominent is the complexity of managing – let alone solving – territorial disputes, especially when dealing with an evolving power. Another is that both cases stress the necessity but limited efficacy of diplomacy.
Confronted with a complex and contradictory China, Southeast Asian countries may derive a sense of urgency from developments in the Crimea. For ASEAN and its members, the crucial question may well be whether they can succeed in convincing China of the long-term benefits of diplomacy over force and fait accompli. It may well be ASEAN’s last chance: Negotiations began 22 years ago, in 1992, and have yet to produce convincing results for either party. If the 2002 Declaration reaffirmed a commitment to international law and freedom of navigation, there has been obvious evidence of unilateralism by certain parties, be they the Filipino government, the Chinese military or even the Hainan authorities. The case may be pressed further in light of the Crimea events: should a Code of Conduct be effectively agreed, with – as China made clear – no deadline for its actual implementation, will it suffice to curtail national frustration from any party, limit tensions and therefore avoid escalation?
Diplomacy is important. It is the channel through which the different stakeholders can showcase and explain their diverging perceptions and interests, communicate, negotiate, and ultimately create a path to de-escalation and stabilization for future common benefit. But it could also prove limited in that it is largely dependent on power configurations and functions under a series of conventions and norms that can either facilitate or constrain discussions. In the Crimean and South China Sea cases, diplomacy is largely, yet not exclusively, undertaken under the particular framework of one international institution (the EU or ASEAN) engaging one great power (Russia or China). Facilitating discussions is the fact that in both situations, stakeholders are connected through a series of strong economic, political and institutional interests. The bad news is that these networks of interests look rather fragile when history becomes a self-asserted, and emotional, argument. Moreover, internal divisions within both the EU and ASEAN have the consequence of blurring the common vision that their members may seek to promote, weakening their negotiating position and constraining the options available to their diplomats. In both cases, the basic worry for the EU and ASEAN alike is to come up with a compelling response to political and military resolve, with international law and negotiations offering little assistance.
The Singapore round of consultations on a Code of Conduct in the South China Sea produced no notable progress. That is not much of a surprise to experts already of the opinion that the very process is merely cosmetic and deserving of little attention, arguing that China will not give way on what it considers its national and sovereign territory. Other authors have explained that Chinese diplomats are content with the DoC, and will not push for quick progress on a CoC as the latter would inevitably hurt the national interest. Such speculation and doubt over the scope and effectiveness of the negotiations did not alter ASEAN’s official line: sanctions do not help; consultations are always better. Will the future prove that correct? It appears that ASEAN’s bet is to prove that China sees an interest in these talks and would gain in following certain rules not just in terms of image and status but also in promoting its views and “dream” through an ASEAN platform.
Before the recent events in Crimea, ASEAN’s diplomacy was considered adequate by most stakeholders – with the possible exception of the Philippines, which nonetheless ceaselessly appealed to the bloc for help. All claimant countries and their neighbors found an interest in pursuing dual-track negotiations with China, bilateral and multilateral, the latter stage mainly serving, via ASEAN, communication purposes. But now may be the time to consider adding more substance to the discussions, and more glue to the Southeast Asian claimants.
The Crimea is far from the South China Sea, and the two contexts certainly differ in many respects. But Russia’s bold move has shown that resorting to international law to contain a great power’s resolve is not always effective. Even in Moscow, few would disagree, pointing to the invasion of Libya or that of Iraq as counterexamples. Whether the events of the Crimea provide lessons to Chinese and ASEAN diplomats is unknown, but they have made a Code of Conduct for the South China Sea an urgent diplomatic imperative. Success would showcase China’s “peaceful rise” as it would ASEAN’s diplomatic capacity. The efforts of both partners to create stability and security would also be welcome news to a heavily challenged international community.
Bruno Hellendorff is a Research Fellow and Dr. Sophie Boisseau du Rocher is an Associate Researcher at the Group for Research and Information on Peace and Security, Brussels.
http://thediplomat.com/2014/04/crimea-and-south-china-sea-diplomacy/
 
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35.	Split Persists Between Washington And Riyadh
Interviewee: F. Gregory Gause III, Professor of Political Science at the University of Vermont, Non-Resident Senior Fellow at Brookings Doha Center
(CFR.ORG 01 APR 14) ... Bernard Gwertzman
 
Last week's meeting between President Obama and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was meant to quell speculation that relations between the two long-standing allies had collapsed, says Brookings fellow F. Gregory Gause. But despite the assurances proffered by the Obama administration, serious differences over policy regarding Iran, Syria, and Egypt remain between the two countries, says Gause.
 On Iran, although Saudis voice support for the international negotiations to limit the country's nuclear program, they worry that Washington is not doing enough to limit Iran's growing influence in the region. They also believe that Washington should be doing more to buttress the anti-Assad forces in Syria and the military government in Egypt. "The United States and Saudis have some serious differences, and this meeting didn't solve them," he says.
President Obama's meeting with King Abdullah was overshadowed by news that Russian president Vladimir Putin called Obama in his Riyadh hotel to discuss the Ukraine crisis. What do we know about the two-hour meeting that was held at the king's palace outside of Riyadh?
The meeting was important in the sense that there had been quite a bit of talk in Saudi Arabia and the Middle East in general about the coming collapse of U.S.-Saudi relations. In that sense, it was a reassurance meeting, but the official read-out was pretty modest. What the United States did was basically reassure the Saudis that some of the more wild interpretations of American policy that were floating around in the Middle East about the United States – leaving the Middle East, throwing over the Saudis, and allying with Iran – were just exaggerations.
Syria seems to be a sticking point. Do you think the United States will step up aid to the Syrian opposition?
The big rumor going around was that the United States was going to agree to give shoulder-launch missiles (i.e., MANPADS) to the Syrian opposition. But the official U.S. response coming out of the meeting was, "No, we don't approve of that, and we don't want to see those kinds of weapons introduced because who knows what's going to happen to them after that." The United States and Saudis have some serious differences, and this meeting didn't solve them.
Qualify some of the differences that are complicating the U.S.-Saudi relationship.
They revolve first and foremost around Iran. The Saudis have basically signed onto the idea that there's nothing they can do to stop the United States and Iran from negotiating on the nuclear question. Officially they say that they hope the negotiations will achieve their goals. But it's clear that the Saudis are extremely suspicious of the Iranians, and they're as worried about the spread of Iranian power in the region as they are about the nuclear issue. They fear, I think rightly, that the United States puts a much higher stake on the nuclear issue than on rolling back Iranian power in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and other places that the Saudis are concerned about. So that's a major difference. The United States wants Syrian president Bashar al-Assad gone, but we put a much lower priority on it than the Saudis do.
The other big issue on which there are differences is Egypt. While the United States has publically condemned the 600-plus death sentences that were issued last week against members and sympathizers of the Muslim Brotherhood, our position on Egypt remains somewhat muddled. On one hand, we keep talking about a democratic transition, but on the other hand, we also refuse to call the military coup a "coup" because we don't want to be required by law to cut off our aid to the Egyptian military. Right now, we seem to be moving toward a position where we accept as fait accompli that [Abdel Fattah] al-Sisi will be the next president. As long as he maintains the peace treaty with Israel and continues to cooperate with Washington on military, intelligence, and political matters, we'll probably have a decent relationship with him. Every once in a while, a human rights report or some comment from an American official urging greater democracy will spur some tensions.
The Saudis like Sisi, that's clear. But why do they hate the Muslim Brotherhood so much?
The Saudis had a pretty good relationship with the Brotherhood back when they had a common enemy in Arab nationalism and socialism under President Nasser in Egypt. Lots of the Egyptian Brothers came, lived, and worked in Saudi Arabia [during that time]. But this changed during the first Gulf War, when most of the Brotherhood factions in the Arab world stood against Saudi Arabia and with Saddam Hussein against the U.S. military intervention. The Saudis have been suspicious of the Brothers since then, and with the upsurge in political activity in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War, lots of Saudi leaders blamed the Brotherhood as being the root cause of the politicization of Islam in Saudi Arabia. And with the Arab Spring and the victories of the Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia and, of course, in Egypt, the Saudis started thinking that this notion of an electoral Islamism is something that is a threat to them in the long term. Certainly it has the possibility of putting Egypt forward as a competitor to Saudi Arabia as the leading Sunni-Muslim country.
Now, talk about the domestic politics in Saudi Arabia. The king is quite old and he has recently shuffled subordinate roles. Whom did he recently elevate?
There's Crown Prince Salman, minister of defense and the former governor of Riyadh, who is a major figure. A couple of years ago, the king also appointed the youngest son of his half-brother, Prince Muqrin, as second deputy prime minister, which, for years, has been the crown-prince-in-waiting job – the number three guy. But then just last week, the king took the unprecedented step of naming Muqrin deputy crown prince. And in a very directly worded pronouncement, the king decreed that when Salman becomes king, Muqrin will immediately become crown prince.
That removed some amount of discretion from Salman, which is interesting. There are all sorts of stories circulating about why he wants to limit Salman's authority, but they're just stories and rumors.
How have these decisions been received in Saudi Arabia?
There's growing uncertainty in the country about how this all going to shake out. The king might be trying to inject some certainty [into the succession process] with this appointment of Muqrin, but Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. So when he goes and Salman comes in, there's nothing to stop Salman from doing what he wants to do.
http://www.cfr.org/saudi-arabia/split-persists-between-washington-riyadh/p32696
 
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36.	Military Caregivers Are Hidden Heroes
Many are family members who don't get the recognition and help that they deserve.
(USA TODAY 01 APR 14) ... Elizabeth Dole and Michael Rich
 
Right now there are 5.5 million wives, husbands, siblings, parents, children and friends devoted to the care of those injured fighting America's wars. Theirs is an all-consuming, emotionally draining task, one that has been driven for too long by loyalty and love, but little support.
This population of military caregivers in the United States has largely been hidden. They are an unpaid national workforce providing services worth $15 billion annually to those who returned from the battlefield with injuries, disabilities and emotional scars that may last a lifetime. These are costs that would otherwise be assumed by home health care aides or by institutional care facilities. In other words, those who give so much of themselves to care for injured or ill loved ones not only deserve help, they have earned it.
For those looking after the young service members and veterans of America's most recent conflicts, the battle has just begun, and often they find themselves facing this challenging reality alone. What services are available through public, private, nonprofit and faith-based organizations are neither coordinated nor easily accessible.
The Dole foundation which helps address the needs of military caregivers, commissioned the RAND Corporation to conduct the largest study ever undertaken to help identify gaps in the policies and programs that support them.
RAND found that there are 5.5 million military caregivers in America, and that 1.1 million of them are caring for those who served in the military after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. These caregivers, mostly young, face challenges that can make their mission even more daunting than that of the generations who came before them.
This new cohort of military caregivers is composed largely of individuals caring for injured spouses, parents caring for their children, or friends caring for their neighbors. Many are veterans themselves. They are more likely to be caring for loved ones with mental and cognitive impairments like PTSD and traumatic brain injury – the invisible wounds of war. Current services to support caregivers may be less relevant to this new generation in a caregiving journey that, for many, could last decades.
RAND's research tells us that those caring for post-9/11 veterans are suffering adverse effects at a much higher rate than caregivers from prior war eras or civilian caregivers. They spend more time providing care and – because of the multiple and serious conditions they are caring for – consistently experience more health problems, financial challenges, strains in family relationships, and have more workplace issues than non-caregivers. These caregivers need holistic services and support.
The Dole foundation is using the RAND research as a cornerstone for building a national coalition involving individuals and organizations across the public, private, nonprofit, faith, and labor communities. The foundation also will continue to encourage collaboration and invest in innovative initiatives that meet military caregiver needs. To give voice to caregivers, the foundation has announced a 50-state Caregiver Fellows Program; individuals actively serving as caregivers across America serve as powerful ambassadors and advocates for their fellow caregivers.
This is an urgent societal issue that deserves a national response. The most effective way to start is by prioritizing evidence-based research, leveraging existing resources, breaking down silos, and encouraging collaboration. It is a mistake to believe the government should or will shoulder this responsibility alone.
The RAND study makes it clear that there is no silver bullet. The Departments of Veterans Affairs, Defense, Health and Human Services, Labor, and others have an important role to play, but so do employers, labor, health care providers, nonprofits, faith communities, and state and local governments. And individuals in every community across the country can play a role, too, by raising awareness, helping a neighbor or friend, donating funds, or volunteering.
America owes a great debt to those who served in our armed forces, and especially those who return home injured or emotionally damaged. But a great debt is also due to the millions who look after them. Caregivers facing decades of sacrifice to care for post-9/11 veterans should get special attention. America's hidden heroes deserve no less.
Elizabeth Dole is founder and president of Caring for Military Families: The Elizabeth Dole Foundation. Michael Rich is president and chief executive officer of the RAND Corporation.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/04/01/elizabeth-dole-michael-rich-military-caregivers/7128129/
 
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37.	Violent Ex-Cons Should Never Be On Military Bases
(NORFOLK VIRGINIAN-PILOT 02 APR 14) ... Kerry Dougherty
 
First the good news: The Navy took only a couple of days to tighten security at all installations on the East Coast after last week's deadly shooting on the Norfolk Naval Station.
Now the bad: While the new rules are a start, it appears violent felons could continue to have access to secure military installations – if their convictions are more than a decade old.
That's not acceptable. Once a violent convict has paid his debt to society, many doors should open. But not the gates to secure military installations. The risk is simply too great.
According to a front-page story in Tuesday's Pilot, the Navy stiffened security Thursday after its dangerously porous system was exposed by the actions of convicted killer Jeffrey Tyrone Savage on March 24.
Savage, who shot a man and tossed his body on an interstate ramp in 2005, passed a Transportation Security Administration background check earlier this year and was awarded a Transportation Worker Identification Credential.
That card is the first step toward unescorted access to military installations. And a convicted killer was given one. Mind-boggling.
Savage apparently got onto Norfolk Naval Station late that Monday night simply by showing his TWIC card, even though he was also required to provide proof of having business on the base.
Naval officials say Savage had no legitimate reason to be there. The federal police officer who allowed him through the gate has been placed on leave. On top of that, Savage presumably passed through a second checkpoint, at Pier 1, where the destroyer Mahan was moored.
Savage was somehow able to board the ship, where he disarmed a sailor standing watch. Petty Officer 2nd Class Mark Mayo was shot to death as he tried to protect a fellow sailor.
The killing of the 24-year-old Hagerstown, Md., native was horrific. But the events of that March night could have been catastrophic had Savage been a terrorist bent on widespread destruction.
One fact was obvious after last week's events: Security at America's largest naval installation was astonishingly sloppy.
As The Pilot's Corinne Reilly reports, those with TWIC cards will now have to pass a second criminal background check, by the National Crime Information Center, before being allowed on base.
This additional layer of security is expected to ferret out anyone with an outstanding warrant, a felony conviction that's less than 10 years old or a violent misdemeanor conviction in the past five years.
Yet consider this: In just one year, Savage's 2005 voluntary manslaughter conviction would have hit the decade mark and presumably wouldn't have been flagged even by the NCIC.
How about a lifetime ban for anyone who's been convicted of a killing?
Let's not forget, though, that what set the shootings at Norfolk Naval Station in motion was the TSA's meaningless TWIC card.
Because of the agency's lax standards, the public will now have to pay for a second set of criminal background checks. A colossal waste.
The TSA website describes the TWIC card as, "A vital security measure that will ensure individuals who pose a threat do not gain unescorted access to the secure areas of the nation's maritime transportation system."
Memo to TSA: Delete that.
http://hamptonroads.com/2014/04/violent-excons-should-never-be-military-bases
 
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