WAR 03-05-2016-to-03-11-2016_____THEWINDSofWAR

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

I pretty much take a day and the weekly thread slips back to page 4 with everything else going on...wow....

(205) 02-13-2016-to-02-19-2016_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...19-2016_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(206) 02-20-2016-to-02-26-2016_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...26-2016_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(207) 02-27-2016-to-03-04-2016_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...04-2016_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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Turkey Says "Massive Escalation" In Syria Imminent *update #280, Saudis launch strikes
Started by Possible Impact‎, 02-13-2016 08:49 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...nent-*update-280-Saudis-launch-strikes/page32

"Democracy Ends In Turkey": Prominent Anti-Erdogan Newspaper Seized In Midnight Raid
Started by Possible Impact‎, Today 06:28 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...nti-Erdogan-Newspaper-Seized-In-Midnight-Raid

Power outages across Syria
Started by TammyinWI‎, Yesterday 07:48 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?486289-Power-outages-across-Syria

Spanish authorities seize 20,000 military uniforms bound for ISIS, Nusra Front
Started by Dennis Olson‎, Yesterday 06:26 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-military-uniforms-bound-for-ISIS-Nusra-Front

The US Joint Chiefs of Staff arrives in Israel
Started by China Connection‎, Yesterday 02:37 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?486259-The-US-Joint-Chiefs-of-Staff-arrives-in-Israel

Pope Says The Muslim Invasion of Europe Should Be Embraced
Started by Michiana MaJo‎, Yesterday 07:39 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...m-Invasion-of-Europe-Should-Be-Embraced/page2

Massive Sweden Bound Haul Of Grenades And Automatic Weapons Seized
Started by Intestinal Fortitude‎, Yesterday 01:43 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...Haul-Of-Grenades-And-Automatic-Weapons-Seized

Are you ready for World War III?
Started by China Connection‎, 03-03-2016 01:36 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?486215-Are-you-ready-for-World-War-III

The Four Horsemen - Week of 03/01/2016 to 03/07/2016
Started by Ragnarok‎, 03-01-2016 11:47 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...our-Horsemen-Week-of-03-01-2016-to-03-07-2016

Jordanian Writer: Muslims Are Centuries, Perhaps Millennia Behind The Civilized World
Started by Codeno‎, Yesterday 09:20 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-Perhaps-Millennia-Behind-The-Civilized-World

NATO Accuses Russia Of "Weaponizing Refugees" To "Break Europe"
Started by BetterLateThanNever‎, Yesterday 03:23 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...izing-Refugees-quot-To-quot-Break-Europe-quot

Obama Administration Denies Christian Genocide By ISIS
Started by imaginative‎, 03-03-2016 06:26 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...inistration-Denies-Christian-Genocide-By-ISIS

Saudis admit they have nuclear weapons
Started by alchemike‎, 02-22-2016 12:36 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?485255-Saudis-admit-they-have-nuclear-weapons/page2

Police Officer Stabbed By 15 Year Old Girl In ISIS Inspired Palestine-Style Kitchen Knife
Started by Intestinal Fortitude‎, Yesterday 01:48 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...n-ISIS-Inspired-Palestine-Style-Kitchen-Knife

Main Russia/Ukraine invasion thread - NATO: Russian Tanks and Artillery Enter Ukraine
Started by Possible Impact‎, 02-26-2014 08:20 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ian-Tanks-and-Artillery-Enter-Ukraine/page437

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I strongly recommend listening to the pod casts of this show...HC

JOHN BATCHELOR SHOW
http://johnbatchelorshow.com/schedules/friday-4-march-2016

Hour Two

Friday 4 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block A: Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re: The U.S. just sent a carrier strike group to confront China A carrier strike group and the 7th Fleet flagship have sailed into the South China Sea in a massive show of force. ... The carrier John C. Stennis, two destroyers, two cruisers ... / US Navy deploys small armada headed by USS Stennis to South China Sea / Navy aircraft carrier group moves into contested South China Sea (1 of 2)

Friday 4 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block B: Michael E Vlahos, Johns Hopkins, in re: Russian MoD Accuses Turkey of Ongoing Hostilities in Syria's Aleppo, Idlib "Truck convoys with materiel and weaponry cross the border from Turkey to Syria round the ... / PressTV-'Syria militants get arms daily via Turkey' / Syria divisions aside, Turkey eyes closer ties with Iran (2 of 2)

Friday 4 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block C: Gregory Copley, Defense and Foreign Affairs, in re: Russian MoD Accuses Turkey of Ongoing Hostilities in Syria's Aleppo, Idlib / "Truck convoys with materiel and weaponry cross the border from Turkey to Syria round the ... / PressTV-'Syria militants get arms daily via Turkey' ; Syria divisions aside, Turkey eyes closer ties with Iran

Friday 4 March 2016 / Hour 2, Block D: Gregory Copley, Defense and Foreign Affairs, in re: Dispute Over Kurds Threatens US-Turkey Alliance Escalating tensions between Turkey and the United States, which now jeopardize their alliance in the Syria conflict, can be traced to the Kurds, ... / Turkey at odds with Russia and now the US on Syria / Turkey violence: 'PKK attack' kills two police officers - BBC News Violence has intensified in Turkey since a ceasefire between the government and the PKK ... / After Ankara bombing, questions over PKK-TAK ties resurface / Two officers killed, 35 wounded in massive car bomb attack - CRIME

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://audioboom.com/boos/4263885-...ith-china-russia-michael-vlahos-johns-hopkins

News & Politics | The John Batchelor Show

Escalations, Coups de Theatre, the Probabilities of War with China & Russia. Michael Vlahos, Johns Hopkins.

3/4/16

(Photo: ‪March 1936: German troops enter the Rhineland.‬)

Escalations, Coups de Theatre, the Probabilities of War with China & Russia. Michael Vlahos, Johns Hopkins.

The U.S. Navy has dispatched an aircraft carrier and several ships accompanying it into the South China Sea in the last few days, a deployment of thousands of U.S. sailors to a region a top U.S. admiral said last week is increasingly militarized by China.

The USS John C. Stennis, the carrier, arrived in the South China Sea on Tuesday, Navy officials said. It is accompanied by the cruiser USS Mobile Bay and the destroyers USS Stockdale and USS Chung-Hoon, said Navy Cmdr. Clay Doss, a spokesman for U.S. Pacific Fleet. The ships arrived in the Western Pacific on Feb. 4 on a deployment from the West Coast of the United States.

Doss said the carrier is carrying out a routine patrol of the South China Sea, where China has in recent weeks moved Chinese fighter jets, military radar and surface-to-air missiles. The Navy will continue to appear in the South China Sea regularly, Doss said. Pacific Fleet ships spending a combined 700 days there last year. [China testing Obama as it expands its influence in the South China Sea] Aside from the carrier group, the Japan-based USS Antietam, a cruiser, also is currently patrolling the South China Sea, Doss said. The USS McCambell, a destroyer, and the USS Ashland, an amphibious dock landing ship, completed similar patrols last week.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...into-contested-south-china-sea-pentagon-says/

On February 13, Turkish artillery positions held by the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), a Kurdish group with links to the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), in Syria's Aleppo Province.

On February 25, Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said that the truce in Syria is not obligatory for Turkey to follow if the country feels a threat against its security.

The Russian center on Syrian reconciliation registered 27 violations of the ceasefire regime in Syria in the last 24 hours, with most of them having taken place in Aleppo, the Russian Defense Ministry said Friday.

"In the past 24 hours, 27 violations of the ceasefire regime were registered (Idlib — 7, Damascus and Homs — 4 in each, Daraa — 3, Latakia —1). As before, the greatest number of violations happened in Aleppo — 8 cases, " the ministry said in a press release.

http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160304/1035791042/turkey-syria-aleppo-idlib.html#ixzz41zy0psCr

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://audioboom.com/boos/4263892-...adists-gregory-copley-defense-foreign-affairs

Ceasefire Update: Turkey & US Resupplying the Jihadists; Russia & Syria Attacking the Jihadists. Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs.

3/4/16

(Photo: Syrian Civil War)

Ceasefire Update: Turkey & US Resupplying the Jihadists; Russia & Syria Attacking the Jihadists. Gregory Copley, Defense & Foreign Affairs.

"...Columns of trucks carrying cargo and weapons for militants in Syria cross into the war-wracked country from Turkey on a daily basis, Russian Defense Ministry says. "Practically round-the-clock from the territory of the Republic of Turkey the convoys of large trucks are going across the border with supplies and weapons, which are moving exclusively to the areas, which are controlled by the terrorist groups Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar Ash-Sham," chief of the Russian Center for reconciliation between the warring parties in Syria Lt. Gen. Sergei Kuralenko told reporters on Friday. Turkey has been among the main supporters of the militant groups operating in Syria, with reports saying that Ankara actively trains and arms the Takfiri terrorists there and facilitates their safe passage into the crisis-hit Arab state...."

http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/03/04/453794/Syria-Turkey-Russia-Kuralenko

Hour Four

Friday 4 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block A: Robert E. Michael, Esq., Robert E. Michael & Associates PLLC; Chair, Committee on Middle Eastern and North African Affairs, New York City Bar Association; in re: ISIS AND ISLAM (1 of 4)
What Are Islamic Law and Shari’a?
I. Sources of Islamic Law
The Quran
- Unquestionably the highest source of all laws, rules and modes of conduct for all Moslems.
- Revealed orally to the Prophet Mohamed by the Archangel Gabriel in private appearances from 610 to 632 A.D.
- By its terms, the second amendment that corrects and amplifies both the Jewish Bible and the New Testament,
which is then the first such amendment. As a result, Jews and Christians have elevated status as “People of the Book.”
- Two main parts: the Meccan Suras ( 610-622 A.D.) and the Medinan Suras (622-632), based on time living in each city by Mohamed in his original home city (Mecca) and then after he sought refuge in Medina (literally just means “City” after Madinat Al-Nabi, City of the Prophet).
- Dispute between ‘Creationists’ – who believed it was similar to the Jewish and Christian Bibles in that it was divinely inspired but only the literal Word of God when it specifically said so – and ‘Revelationists’ – who believed that every word was the literal Word of God – won by Revelationists in late 9th early 10th century, making every word the literal Word of God.
- Concept of ‘negation’ to solve inconsistencies.

Friday 4 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block B: Robert E. Michael, Esq., Robert E. Michael & Associates PLLC; Chair, Committee on Middle Eastern and North African Affairs, New York City Bar Association; in re: ISIS AND ISLAM (2 of 4)
- Classical Islamic law or true traditional Shari’a is not the law in ANY country, and has not been since at least Colonial times. Even where it is their organic law that all law is based upon Shari’a, such as in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the law today is an amalgam of classical Islamic law and modern Western-inspired laws based upon, usually, either UK/US common law or French or German civil law. These hybrid systems also involve aspects of modern international law, often from multilateral treaties and conventions like the WTO and TRIPS.
- There is no bright line separating religious, ecclesiastical, family, interpersonal, commercial or penal law, and underlying all is a contract, whether between individuals or with God.
- Social justice and fairness is required to be an element in all dealings, both family and commercial.
- One aspect of that is in its anti-capitalist elements, such as the lack of concepts for the time or risk value of money, speculation, limited liability or almost all forms of intangible rights and assets – and the rule that you cannot finance what you are not permitted to do yourself.
- On the other hand, there are strong anti-Socialist elements as well: profit and personal, not communal, ownership of tangible assets are strongly supported.
- As noted above, among the Sunni there is no hierarchy; nor has there EVER been, since the time of the Prophet, a Caesaropapist ruler or single legislative or judicial body competent to set or adjudicate definitively the law or rules for all Moslems.
- Apostasy is a capital crime; those who believe that either the Shi’a or the Sunni are heretics may
also believe them guilty of apostasy.

Friday 4 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block C: Robert E. Michael, Esq., Robert E. Michael & Associates PLLC; Chair, Committee on Middle Eastern and North African Affairs, New York City Bar Association; in re: ISIS AND ISLAM (3 of 4)

Friday 4 March 2016 / Hour 4, Block D: Robert E. Michael, Esq., Robert E. Michael & Associates PLLC; Chair, Committee on Middle Eastern and North African Affairs, New York City Bar Association; in re: ISIS AND ISLAM (4 of 4)

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://audioboom.com/boos/4264010-...-isis-robert-michael-new-york-bar-association
Islamic Law and Finance in America; Sharia and the Claims of ISIS. Robert Michael, New York Bar Association.

3/4/16

(Photo ‪A Saba Islamic Bank branch in Djibouti City.‬)

Islamic Law and Finance in America; Sharia and the Claims of ISIS. Robert Michael, New York Bar Association.

“Classical Islamic law or true traditional Shari’a is not the law in ANY country, and has not been since at least Colonial times. Even where it is their organic law that all law is based upon Shari’a, such as in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the Islamic Republic of Iran, the law today is anamalgam of classical Islamic law and modern Western-inspired laws based upon, usually, either UK/US common law or French or German civil law. These hybrid systems also involve aspects of modern international law, often from multilateral treaties and conventions like the WTO and TRIPS. There is no bright line separating religious, ecclesiastical, family, interpersonal, commercial or penal law, and underlying all is a contract, whether between individuals or with God. Social justice and fairness is required to be an element in all dealings, both family and commercial. One aspect of that is in its anti-capitalist elements, such as the lack of concepts for the time or risk value of money, speculation, limited liability or almost all forms of intangible rights and assets –and the rule that you cannot finance what you are not permitted to do yourself. On the other hand, there are strong anti-Socialist elements as well: profit and personal, not communal, ownership of tangible assets are strongly supported. As noted above, among the Sunni there is no hierarchy; nor has there EVER been, since the time of the Prophet, a Caesaropapist ruler or single legislative or judicial body competent to set or adjudicate definitively the law or rules for all Moslems. Apostasy is a capital crime; those who believe that either the Shi’a or the Sunni are heretics may also believe them guilty of apostasy.” Robert Michael

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2016/03/nato-russia-sof-ew-hybrid-war/126401/?oref=d-topstory

How NATO Can Disrupt Russia’s New Way of War

March 3, 2016 By Bret Perry

Here are a few things the West can do against Moscow’s potent combo of special forces and electronic warfare.
Russia / Special Operations / Commentary

The Ukrainian soldiers peered over the cold dirt edge of their trench. The artillery had abated, but the whine of a nearby spotter UAV promised its imminent return. In the distance, they could see camouflaged spetsnaz moving into position with suppressed Vintorez marksman rifles. Looking at his radio, a lieutenant dared to hope. “Aleksei, you see this? Radio’s working. Maybe a break in the jamming.” “Is that really a good thing?” his sergeant responded. “Go ahead and call, that’s what they want. The Russians will hear you first and send their thermobaric regards. That is if the spetsnaz don’t get here first.” The young officer slumped. His comms gear was useless; he and his men were cut off and alone.

Much has been written about Russia’s innovative concepts of operations in Ukraine and Syria, variously dubbed “hybrid” or “non-linear” war, but specific tactics have received far less scrutiny than they deserve. A look, in particular, at Russia’s use of electronic warfare (EW) and special operations forces (SOF) suggests ways that U.S. and other NATO forces might prepare to counter them.

Technology and new EW doctrines have accelerated the decades-old competition between active attack systems and countermeasures, shortening the evolutionary cycle from weeks and months to mere hours. In The Nature and Content of New-Generation War, sometimes described as a “how-to manual” for the seizure of Crimea, two senior Russian military officers note the importance of EW in the Gulf War and assert the need for sustained “electronic knockdown” attacks in future conflicts. They recommend that Russian ground forces “be continually improved and equipped with…EW capabilities.”

The positioning of EW forces in the Russian order-of-battle underscores their importance. Every military district houses an independent EW brigade, supplemented by strategic battalions with specialized EW equipment and a special independent EW brigade carrying the title “Supreme Main Command” (only two other units in the Russian Armed Forces reportedly carry this title).

In Ukraine, Russia frequently jams its enemies’ tactical communications through a variety of means. During the initial Crimean seizure, cellphones in the area were reportedly jammed by Russian warships. As the conflict moved to the Donbas, pro-Ukrainian and OSCE UAVs found their data links persistently jammed. Further, Russian UAVs that can carry the Leyer-3 jammer and direct artillery fire have been spotted in Ukraine and Syria. Where Ukrainian forces have acquired encrypted radios, Russian EW troops hone in on their stronger signal to geolocate their position. These and many similar tactics enable Russia to erode its adversaries’ intelligence-gathering, communications, and command and control.

Russian EW gear may even threaten strategic collection platforms. For instance, the Murmansk-BN long-range jammer was recently deployed to Crimea, and the Krasukha-4 advanced EW system has been observed in both Ukraine and Syria. Even though the technical capabilities of these two systems are likely exaggerated for propaganda purposes, they are believed to have the potential to interfere with low-earth orbit spy satellites, airborne surveillance platforms, and other collection systems. In any case, their deployment certainly allows them to prove their capabilities against advanced U.S. and NATO platforms.

Russia also uses its EW capabilities to amplify the effectiveness of its special operations forces, the “little green men” used to such noteworthy effect in Ukraine. In his famous article on hybrid warfare, Gen. Valery Gerasimov asserts that SOF and internal opposition are used “to create a permanently operating front through the entire territory of the enemy state…” To the authors of The Nature and Content of New-Generation War, SOF are maneuverable shock infantry that gather targeting information for Russian strikes and “roll over” weakened enemies. Retired Colonel-General Anatoly Zaitsev writes how the ultimate goal of SOF “is to destroy the enemy’s critical facilities and disrupt or destroy his forces’ systems.” Russia’s renewed interest in SOF is further illustrated by the creation of the elite Komanda Spetsial’nikh Operatsiy (KSO) command and deployment of various SOF forces in Ukraine and Syria.

It’s hard to comprehensively track Russian SOF, but they have been observed operating throughout Ukraine. At the beginning of the conflict, KSO and naval spetsnaz units seized several strategic sites, including airports, surface-to-air missile batteries, Ukrainian military facilities, and the Crimean parliament building. As the conflict shifted to the Donbas, other SOF elements were deployed to protect Russian technical trainers, instill control over the separatists’ chain of command, and train and support separatist fighters.

In Syria, the Russian SOF deployment is more ambiguous and less overt. KSO elements have recently been “redeployed” from Ukraine to help coordinate Russian airstrikes. In addition, “highly-secretive” Zaslon SOF personnel have been deployed to guard sensitive Russian equipment, personnel, and information. Additional SOF activity is likely as Russia’s involvement in Syria expands.

Moscow has proven adept at using EW and SOF in concert to fragment and slow adversaries’ strategic decision-making. While “little green men” secure key locations and train local forces, electronic-warfare forces distort ISR collection by adversaries and third parties, limiting their ability to project an accurate counter-narrative to inform confused domestic audiences and a divided international community. And even when a defender does manage to grasp the situation, Russian EW attacks on their command, control, communications, and intelligence disrupts their response.

Nations threatened by Russia’s hybrid warfare can strengthen their resilience through investing in two areas. First, build stronger and more redundant C3I by encrypting radio, data links, and satellite communications, and developing promising new technologies such as cognitive EW. Although Russia’s advanced EW capabilities can attack nearly any system, redundancy can limit their impact. Second, improve the ability to monitor and understand the battlespace by improving tactical ISR. UAVs are key: hand-launched ones, medium-altitude drones with greater endurance, and airborne ISR platforms with electro-optical/infrared sensors and signals intelligence payloads—all of which must be supported by secure data links.

Yet since no single platform or system provides a silver-bullet solution to hybrid warfare, the U.S. and its NATO partners must explore developing new operating concepts; for example, ground forces should be prepared to mimic the U.S. Navy’s “emissions control” by operating in the absence of a data network. They must increase joint training against conventional and unconventional Russian military scenarios, allowing NATO to strengthen its response, practice its interoperability, and and signal its defensive resolve. Ultimately, they must learn how to assess their own prowess, doctrine, strategy and tactics against an adversary whose expertise in hybrid warfare is growing by the day.

The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not necessarily reflect those of any organization.

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thecipherbrief.com/article/middle-east/isis-wmd-threat

The ISIS WMD Threat

March 4, 2016 | Alana Garellek

In a town filled with a seemingly endless number of acronyms, none are dreaded as much as ISIS and WMD—especially when put together. Recent allegations that ISIS is seeking nuclear material for a dirty bomb has exacerbated fears that ISIS could inspire a WMD attack outside of the Middle East, but some experts doubt that ISIS and its followers would ever have the technical expertise to pose a real WMD threat.

For a group that thrives off of terrorism, acquiring or developing a weapon of mass destruction—the ultimate psychological weapon—would be ideal. The intent is, therefore, undeniably there. And ISIS would not even need a high-yield WMD to accomplish its goals; rather, any indiscriminate weapon with chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) material would terrorize populations to ISIS’ satisfaction.

The U.S. military has already confirmed that ISIS used mustard gas against Kurdish forces, and there are numerous allegations of other attacks involving chemical agents in Syria and Iraq. ISIS has also reportedly stolen radiological material from hospitals in Iraq and Syria.

Although ISIS has proven its ability to acquire and use chemical weapons in Syria and Iraq, questions remain about its abilities to pursue other weapons of mass destruction and target outside of the Syria and Iraq. Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, former commanding officer of the UK CBRN Regiment and NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion, believes Russia and France have the highest risks of being attacked by ISIS with a CBRN weapon—Russia because the Chechen jihadists, who claim Russia as their sworn enemy, are behind much of the ISIS WMD development and France because of its proximity to the Middle East and recent threats from radical Muslims within its borders.

That is not to say, however, that other countries do not have to worry. “I expect the U.S. and UK are already near the very top of the ISIL attack list,” de Bretton Gordon explained. As was the case throughout the Cold War, the large physical and psychological impact that WMD use would have on any given population outweighs the miniscule probability of one being used.

Unlike during the Cold War, we have not developed a psychological framework to prevent the ISIS WMD threat. During the Cold War, the fear that one’s own populations and cities could be wiped out by a nuclear weapon prevented the Soviet Union and the United States from using WMD against each other. However, ISIS, which has embedded itself within civilian populations, is likely to hedge its bets that another country would not retaliate using an indiscriminate weapon. Moreover, ISIS, a group that promotes suicide attacks as a means of accomplishing one’s life mission, does not likely fear a situation of mutually assured destruction. How can we deter ISIS WMD use if we cannot threaten anything of value as retaliation?

Without an appropriate model to do so, states are relying on international export controls, law enforcement, and other preventative measures to stop an attack before it happens. Since ISIS poses a global threat, it would be ideal for the existing international organizations that have been created to regulate the components of WMDs to monitor the situation, such as the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) or the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). These organizations, however, are restricted by mandates that were created to address the WMD threat from countries, not non-state actors. ISIS has used weapons of mass destruction in Syria and Iraq, and yet international action has not been taken.

Experts are now looking at how to build a better framework to prevent ISIS—and other terrorist groups—from furthering CBRN pursuits. “Enhanced cooperation among these and other international organizations, which include sharing expertise, resources, and best practices, could mitigate the threat… but mechanisms for formal cooperation do not exist across the board,” highlighted Natasha Lander, former advisor to the U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Countering WMD Policy. The existing international organizations are ultimately supporting bodies for member states, and therefore this enhanced cooperation would require the U.S., Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and other major actors in the region to put aside their differences and unite against this common aggressor.

ISIS has already proven to be a greater threat than initially assessed. Even those that are completely skeptical about ISIS’ ability to use a WMD abroad, or to inspire such an attack, cannot risk being wrong.

Alana Garellek is an International Producer with The Cipher Brief.

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/confessions-of-a-hybrid-warfare-skeptic

Confessions of a Hybrid Warfare Skeptic

by Christopher Paul
Journal Article | March 3, 2016 - 4:40pm

Confessions of a Hybrid Warfare Skeptic: What Might Really Be Interesting but Hidden Within the Various Conceptions of Gray Zone Conflict, Ambiguous Warfare, Political Warfare, and Their Ilk

Christopher Paul

For nearly a decade I have been aware of the “hybrid warfare” concept. Having read numerous treatments and discussions of the idea, I have frequently been tantalized by the possibility that something genuinely special or different is being captured in the term, something that will change how I think about (or think about responding to) certain conflicts. To date, that possibility remains unrealized, and I join a host of critics in being skeptical of the utility of the notion of hybrid war or hybrid threat.

More recently, a number of other, similar terms haven begun fighting for attention and a place in the lexicon, some new, like “gray zone” and some recycled from the past, like “ambiguous warfare,” and “political warfare.” As I read these offerings I once again found certain aspects of the concepts to be insightful, but ultimately found them wanting, either because they are insufficiently distinct (they cover too many situations that are too different) or because the differences they highlight just don’t seem all that important.

In this short article I review these various concepts and what I view as their shortcomings, but I also try to tease out what I think they contribute that is important: That we are party to a host of conflicts and competitions that take place in the space between peace and war, that they are contested with capabilities all across the range of the diplomatic, informational, military, and economic elements of power, and that we are particularly ill-prepared for such conflicts or competitions when the two sides have mismatched perceptions of the type, nature, character, or intensity of competition. I conclude by recommending that we abandon our strict distinction between peace and war, move away from the conceptual constraints of the joint phasing model, and work to find more precise ways to distinguish between the different kinds of competitions and means of contesting them that will help us detect, recognize, and respond appropriately to different forms of aggression.

Hybrid Warfare: Neither New Nor Unusual

The vocabulary of hybrid warfare and hybrid threat has been adopted fairly widely, including formal use in NATO discussions and across the U.S. Army, U.S. Marine Corps, and U.S. Special Operations Command. The concept dates back to the mid-2000s, and has always hinted at something I found interesting, an assertion that we should expect to see more conflicts which blur and mix types of conflict, conflicts that “blur the distinction between war and peace, and combatants and non-combatants...” This hint of novelty has always been swallowed up by something I found more pedestrian, the simultaneity of conventional and unconventional forces and operations. The concept has remained stuck on this blending of conventional and unconventional, with hybrid threat remaining: “Any adversary that simultaneously employs a tailored mix of conventional weapons, irregular tactics, terrorism, and criminal behavior in the same time and battlespace to obtain their political objectives.”[ii]

While some discussions hint at an adversary actor’s use of a broad range of capabilities across the spectrum of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic means,[iii] most emphasize and focus on adversaries who simultaneously employ conventional and non-conventional military means. The multitude of possibly interesting blurred boundaries give way to a focus on a single blurred boundary, the one between conventional and unconventional military action, a boundary that has been regularly crossed, blurred, or ignored throughout the course of military history.

This lack of novelty is the refrain of many of the critics of the hybrid warfare concept: the employment of both conventional and irregular forces may be challenging, but it is not a new challenge.[iv] Another common criticism attacks the excessive scope and abstraction of the concept; interpreted broadly, hybrid warfare become a catchall for entirely too many modes of conflict.[v] If too many threats are hybrid threats, then the term isn’t distinctive. “If everybody is a hybrid, then nobody is.”[vi]

While I agree with these criticisms, I’m most disappointed with the concept’s failure to deliver in a meaningful way on the promise of useful categories for thinking about conflict and blurred boundaries in other less military, less kinetic areas. Frank Hoffman, a long time proponent of the concept, candidly admits this deficiency:

The problem with the hybrid threats definition is that it focuses on combinations of tactics associated with violence and warfare (except for criminal acts) but completely fails to capture other non-violent actions. Thus, it does not address instruments including economic and financial acts, subversive political acts like creating or covertly exploiting trade unions and NGOs as fronts, or information operations using false websites and planted newspaper articles.[vii]

Ultimately, I don’t find the term hybrid warfare to be all that useful. Too many dissimilar instances all end up wearing the hybrid label, and while there are interesting and important things about some of those cases, that importance doesn’t stem from the unremarkable coincidence of conventional and unconventional forces within them. I remain, however, interested in the blurring and merging of different kinds of competition and conflict, and think that is a potentially useful insight.

The Gray Zone: Too Broad to Be More Than a Starting Place

“Gray zone” as a class of conflict and term of art has a much more recent genesis. One of the prominent pieces promoting and elaborating the concept is the September 2015 USSOCOM white paper titled “The Gray Zone.”[viii] This white paper defines the gray zone as conflicts or competitions that fall between the traditional war and peace duality. So, if black is war and white is peace, these challenges are in that gray zone between them. The white paper goes on to elaborate that these challenges “...feature ambiguity regarding the nature of the conflict, the parties involved or the relevant policy and legal frameworks.”[ix] There is certainly enough there to pique my curiosity and make me acknowledge this as potentially interesting space.

As with my engagement with the hybrid warfare concept, I feel like there is a kernel of something interesting here; surely there are distinctive features about these conflicts and competitions worth identifying and exploring! What the gray zone concept doesn’t appear to do is to further decompose the space between peace and war into smaller, similar units; it just leaves the entire space of conflict short of full-on war but outside of “normal state competition” (whatever that loaded phrase really means) in this underspecified “gray zone.” Whatever might be gained from the hints of insight in the elaboration of the concept are lost when so much of the range of possible state conflict is lumped together in this way. The USSOCOM white paper includes a figure showing 57 conflicts, noting that only seven were declared wars, leaving the balance in the gray zone.[x] Like hybrid threats, if everything is in the gray zone, then nothing is.

My colleague Michael Mazarr implicitly recognizes this problem and offers a much narrower and more thoroughly specified conception of the gray zone. In his gray zone, Mazarr includes only campaigns that serve revisionist intent, seek gradual or incremental gains, and seek to avoid escalation toward outright conventional conflict.[xi] Mazarr elaborates on this gradualism, incrementalism, steady cumulative pressure, seeking faits acompli, or tactics of erosion. He admits that such tactics are nothing new; Thomas Schelling describes basically the same thing as “salami slicing” in his 1967 Arms and Influence.[xii] The goal of such efforts is for the aggressor to gain what is desired in small chunks without ever provoking a substantial response, creating dilemmas for opponents about how and if to respond, and placing the burden of escalation on the recipient of aggression. Mazarr argues that in order to stay below the threshold of war, gray zone campaigns employ a variety of “unconventional tools” that sound remarkably similar to the range of capabilities hinted at in the broader discussions of hybrid warfare and might include, for example, use of proxy forces, fifth columns, information warfare, unconventional warfare, economic warfare, economic incentives, cyber harassment, covert operatives, energy diplomacy, etc.[xiii]

I respect Mazarr’s mobilization and elaboration of Schelling’s concept; he applies it to recent Russian and Chinese campaigns, and it effectively describes a key aspect of those challenges, as well as highlighting important similarities between them. However, Mazarr’s useful insights do not apply across the whole range of potential confrontations between war and peace (nor, in fairness, does he intend them to). Mazarr’s gray zone and the gray zone described in the USSOCOM white paper are not the same thing, and that’s a concern. Though I think Mazarr offers a reasonably narrow scope and captures something interesting, too many others are going to consistently use gray zone in a way that is inconsistent with that scope and to denote something bigger and less well-defined. Numerous other glib purveyors of the concept describe practically anything and everything as belonging to the gray zone.[xiv] On one hand, this is part of the insight: there is a great deal of competition and conflict short of major conventional war that takes place. On the other hand, the lack of a clear boundary to the zone and the ease with which the phrase can be applied diminishes the value of the term for anything more than reminder of that insight.

I am not alone in this criticism. Others have attacked the concept for lacking coherence, being ambiguous in scope, and for not containing any new ideas.[xv] Personally, I’m less concerned about novelty of ideas if an effective repackaging of old concepts helps contemporary strategists and policy makers understand and address contemporary threats and challenges. Ultimately, I find the gray zone concept lacking because it fails to be sufficiently distinct; too many different things fit between peace and war for that to be the only distinction. It is a good place to start, but no more.

Ambiguous Warfare, or Ambiguous Terminology?

Other writers have tried to apply different terms to describe some aspects of certain recent security challenges, notably the recent activities of Russia and China. Two of the more prominent are brought forward from the past: ambiguous warfare (dating back to the 1980s, at least), and cold-war era political warfare.[xvi] Ambiguous warfare has no formal definition (somewhat fitting, I suppose) but is generally accepted to describe situations in which an aggressor seeks to achieve political or military effects without direct attribution to them, so either through proxy forces, maintaining plausible deniability, or through covert or clandestine activity. Once the effects have been achieved, continued ambiguity about the sponsor, actor, or action may or may not be required or desired. This term has been quite effectively leveraged to describe Russian aggression in the Crimea and Ukraine more broadly, and might also be apt to describe the burgeoning proxy conflict between Riyadh and Tehran. It does not appear to apply to Chinese “island reclamation” in the South China Sea (it is pretty obvious who is doing that and what kinds of territorial and legal claims they intend to make based on such activity), though some of the related activities, including the use of civilian industry and civilian fishing fleets in defense of these marginal territorial claims may cross into the realm of ambiguous warfare. This means that ambiguous warfare, though only minimally defined, purports to cover less of the spectrum of conflict than either Mazarr’s reasonably narrow version of the gray zone or the virtually unconstrained broader version of the gray zone, though ambiguous warfare appears to be a subset of both.

In 1948, Kennan defined political warfare as “the employment all of means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.”[xvii] If, as Clausewitz asserts, war is politics by other means, then political warfare is politics by all means short of war. This is a broad concept. It is the means of competing (or fighting?) across the whole range of the broadest conception of the gray zone, and it encompasses all of the capabilities even hinted at in the hybrid warfare concept across the spectrum of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic power... just, short of actual no-kidding war.

Critics have described political warfare as being oxymoronic, asserting that it can’t be “warfare” because it is by definition limited to contexts short of war.[xviii] Of course, by that same logic, the Cold War wasn’t really a war, either. I am sympathetic to the desire to restrict warfare to instances of conflict that involve fighting, violence, and, well, war. I think, however, that by conceiving of warfare as something grand and separate, and by privileging it and distinguishing it from all other forms of conflict and competition, we get ourselves into trouble. In fact, I think that one of the central insights driving the concepts of hybrid warfare, the gray zone, ambiguous warfare, and political warfare is that there is a fundamental flaw in how we think about the spectrum of conflict.

The Missing Insight: Mismatched Perception of Character of Competition or Conflict

So, to quickly summarize what I view as the key insights from hybrid warfare, gray zone conflict, ambiguous war, and political warfare:

First, there is a range of conflict and competition short of war, and even when we cross into “war” there is still a spectrum of variation in intensity, capabilities used, and attribution. Competition and conflict across these ranges can involve both conventional and unconventional military forces, as well as capabilities from across the elements of power, including (but not limited to) the diplomatic, informational, military, economic, and legal.

Second, adversaries can pursue these competitions in a gradual or incremental way, creeping or nibbling their way to success, and they can be conducted in a delayed or difficult to attribute manner or seek to remain below thresholds for escalation, creating challenges and dilemmas for the other competitor.

The insight that is missed, or only hinted at, in these various concepts is the role of mismatched perception of the fact and character of competition or conflict taking place. Put simply, I think there is one set of challenges associated with gradual aggression short of (or right up to) open warfare involving multiple forms of power, and I think there is a whole second set of challenges when the former is taking place but we mistake it for something more benign.

For example, during the Cold War, the United States and its allies faced a wide range of aggressions from the Soviet Union and its allies in conflicts and competitions all across the spectrum of conflict between peace and war and employing capabilities across the widest range of the elements of power. However, strategists and planners recognized that there was a conflict underway, a very serious, high-stakes competition that necessitated constant vigilance, robust investment, and engagement across a range of domains and spheres. In the Cold War, we knew we were in a war!

Contrast that with the post-Cold War world, especially after the turn of the century. Following gradualist strategies, many of our potential state competitors (the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians) have been engaged in fairly aggressive and ambitious campaigns to achieve political objectives to our detriment (or the detriment of other nations) predominantly without us recognizing that there was anything going on that was outside of the realm of routine fair and friendly peacetime competition between countries.

It is these one-sided or mismatched competitions that I find particularly interesting (and troubling). Perhaps the words “conflict” or “competition” are misleading in this context, as both imply two or more players engaged in contesting something. Do you still call it conflict when a country engages in aggressive or instrumental behavior, but does so unopposed? If it were actually a conflict or a competition in which both sides understood what was at stake and the intensity of the contest, then I think it would matter less if that conflict involved a broad range of diplomatic, informational, military, and economic capabilities, or if goals are being pursued in a gradualist fashion.

Traditionally we might talk about this as “death by a thousand cuts,” or “boiling frog.” To try out some new metaphors, I’m interested in (and worried about) situations where the other guy is wounding us, and we either don’t perceive the injuries, or feel the hurt but don’t know where it is coming from.[xix] I’m worried about competitions where our opponent is lining up to give us an MMA-style beat down, but we’re setting up for a friendly card game. I’m worried about when we sit down to a game of cards, and the other guy is picking our pocket while we play. I’m worried about when we sit down to a game of cards, and the other guy is stealing our car in the parking lot! In all of these metaphorical situations we lose because we aren’t playing the right game. The more intense (and underhanded) form of competition takes precedence, and our perceptions and expectations don’t match what is actually going on. Worse, when we lose this type of competition, it validates a template for success for the adversary, who then tries to create a similar situation in another competition later on.

This kind of mismatch can only happen if one side fails to perceive the instrumental objectives of the other side, fails to recognize that the other side is aggressively pursuing those objectives, fails to recognize that attaining those objectives will have a cost for the first side, and fails to compete. And it happens to us far too frequently.

Consequences of a Binary Distinction Between Peace and War

Part of the problem is how we think about conflict and competition. Although we talk and write about a spectrum of conflict, in practice we predominantly treat that spectrum as divided into two segments, and make a binary distinction between peace and war. This is undoubtedly the problem that inspired the conversations about the “gray zone” in the first place! And, this isn’t a new problem. In his 1948 memo (the same one that provided a definition of political warfare), Kennan wrote that “we have been handicapped however by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war...”[xx] This binary distinction means (and has meant for a long time) that we understand the rules and norms governing our behavior (and our posture, and our resourcing, and our authorities) as being fundamentally different under conditions of peace instead of conditions of war. There is the way we compete during peacetime (within the confines of free markets, preserving the global commons, and adhering to the principles of fair play), and the way we compete during wartime (heavily kinetic, in keeping with principles of overwhelming force, and adhering to international laws and norms regarding the conduct of armed forces). There is not very much that we do in between.

This thinking is deeply embedded in how we plan military operations. Consider the joint phasing model (formally the six phase joint operation construct): shape, deter, seize initiative, dominate, stabilize, enable civil authority.[xxi] While purportedly applicable to non-combat situations, the implied model is all about anticipating or trying to avoid a departure from peace, making preparations for an advantageous transition to war, winning the war, then quickly transitioning back to peace.

However, our adversaries and potential adversaries do not make this crisp black and white distinction between war and peace. Most of them imagine international relations as a continual struggle, a state of constant competition, with the aspect that varies on a spectrum being the intensity of conflict. Further, not only do our adversaries and potential adversaries not make a binary distinction between war and peace in international competition, they recognize that we do make that false distinction, and they seek to use that to their advantage. Adversaries seek to conduct aggression that is quite advanced on the spectrum of intensity while leaving us stuck on the “not war” side of our peace/war duality (Mazarr’s version of the gray zone). Adversaries attempt to create ambiguity about the level and intensity of the aggression they are engaged in so that our perceptions of the character of the competition and theirs don’t match. Adversaries intentionally avoid presenting us with unambiguous opportunities to escalate, knowing that many of our authorities and capabilities are tied to being able to cross the threshold into “war.”

When we get caught in one of these mismatches, we’re stuck with our fairly anemic phase 0 “shape” or phase I “deter” activities, while our adversary is using a much wider range of capabilities to compete, and compete aggressively. In many instances, we’re stuck “shaping” or “deterring” while they are fighting and winning.

What Should We Do About It?

Since I’ve already made a Clausewitz reference, I might as well make a full quotation: “The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish . . . the kind of war on which they are embarking.”[xxii] If we substitute competition or conflict for war in the previous sentence, it points toward where we need to be. We need to recognize that peace and war are separated by a very wide range of potential forms and intensities of competition (a “gray zone” but not a particularly homogenous one), and need to plan to match and meet our adversaries in those competitions. Doing so requires us to understand what an adversary wants, observe what an adversary is doing in pursuit of that goal, recognize those actions as a threat, and respond appropriately. We are deficient in all four of those areas unless the type of competition is “war.”

To get better at meeting this kind of challenge, we need to get better at detection, recognition/understanding, and need a better suite of responses. I think our detection capabilities are probably mostly adequate but are hamstrung by the limiting frameworks available for thinking about aggressive peacetime competition and a tendency to view aggressive actions as isolated incidents rather than a part of a long-term campaign. With a shift in perspective and perhaps some improvements in our ability to successfully attribute ambiguous actions to the correct aggressor, we’ll be adequate at detection.

The biggest deficiency is in understanding, in recognition of an adversary’s goals and the way in which they are competing to reach those goals. To succeed, we need to discard, change, or at least change the way we use and think about the joint phasing model. Understanding will also necessitate an end to a binary conception of war and peace, with a move to a much more cynical view about how other nations compete with us. This new framework will need to acknowledge that actions employing diplomatic, informational, military, or economic power can be part of threatening competition.

As much as we must recognize non-military actions as potentially part of threatening competition, we must also be prepared to respond using capabilities selected from across the range of available state powers, not just military capabilities. This will likely require the kind of whole of government coordination and integration that we like to talk about often, but seldom make much progress toward.

To accomplish all of this, we’ll need to continue to work to refine our terminology and our concepts. As noted, hybrid, gray zone, ambiguous warfare, political warfare... these all have their faults, but they contain some important insights. Rather than dismissing these terms, we need to continue to refine them, revise them, elaborate on them, subdivide them. Though I’ve impugned “gray zone” for being too broad because it encompasses too much, I think it is a good place to start. It really is all gray zone, because it is all competition, all the time; just some is more obvious, aggressive, or violent. Now, accepting that there is this huge space of potential competition between peace and war, what are the sub-types, the categories, the different forms of gray zone competition that will help us recognize, understand, and deal with these challenges? Let’s refine these concepts and identify the different shades within the gray and the new categories that are formed when traditional element of power and conflict boundaries get blurred.

End Notes

Frank G. Hoffman, Conflict in the 21st Century: The Rise of Hybrid Wars, Arlington, Va.: Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, December 2007, p.7.

[ii] The quote is from Frank Hoffman, “On Not-So-New Warfare: Political Warfare Vs Hybrid Threats,” War On The Rocks, July 28, 2014. Very similar definitions appear in NATO IMSM-0292-2010, Hybrid threats description and context, May 31, 2010, Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) G-2, Operational Environments to 2028: The Strategic Environment for Unified Land Operations, August 2012, 39, and David E. Johnson, Preparing for “Hybrid” Opponents: Israeli Experiences in Lebanon and Gaza, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, RB-9620-A, 2011, among others.

[iii] See, for example page 3 in United States Army Special Operations Command, Counter-Unconventional Warfare, Fort Bragg, N.C., White Paper, September 26, 2014.

[iv] For examples of critics who point out the lack of novelty of hybrid threats, see Frank J.Cilluffo and Joseph R. Clark, “Thinking About Strategic Hybrid Threats—In Theory and in Practice,” Prism, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2012, pp. 46-63 or Lukas Milevski, “Asymmetry is Strategy, Strategy is Asymmetry,” Joint Force Quarterly, No. 75, 4th Quarter, 2015, pp. 77-83.

[v] David Sadowski and Jeff Becker. “Beyond the ‘Hybrid’ Threat: Asserting the Essential Unity of Warfare,” Small Wars Journal, 2010.

[vi] Christopher O. Bowers, “Identifying Emerging Hybrid Adversaries,” Parameters, 2012: 40.

[vii] Hoffman, 2014, p.4.

[viii] General Joseph L. Votel, The Gray Zone, United States Special Operations Command, White Paper, September 9, 2015.

[ix] Votel, p. 4.

[x] Votel, p. 9.

[xi] Michael Mazarr, Mastering the Gray Zone: Understanding a Changing Era of Conflict, Carlisle Barracks, PA: United States Army War College Press, 2015.

[xii] Thomas Schelling, Arms and Influence, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967.

[xiii] Mazarr, p.43-44.

[xiv] See, for example, Eric Olson, “America’s Not Ready for Today’s Gray Wars,” Defense One, December 10, 2015.

[xv] Adam Elkus, “50 Shades of Gray: Why the Gray Wars Concept Lacks Strategic Sense,” War on the Rocks, December 15, 2015.

[xvi] Mary Ellen Connell and Ryan Evans, Russia’s “AmbiguousWarfare” and Implications for the U.S. Marine Corps, Washington, D.C.: Center for Naval Analyses, date the use of ambiguous warfare to the 1980s. Numerous scholars trace political warfare back to the thinking of George Kennan and his Cold War strategy. See George Kennan, “The inauguration of organized political warfare,” Policy Planning Memorandum, May 4, 1948, National Archives and Records Administration, RG 273, Records of the National Security Council, NSC 10/2,
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/history/johnson/65ciafounding3.htm

[xvii] Kennan, op. cit.

[xviii] Hoffman, 2014.

[xix] Before you dismiss the possibility of unattributable harm, consider the consequences of various forms of cyber attacks, informational aggression, or subtle economic aggression.

[xx] Kennan, op. cit.

[xxi] Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Operations Planning, Joint Publication 5-0, August 11, 2011.

[xxii] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, Michael Howard, Peter Paret (trans), Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 86.

About the Author »
Christopher Paul

Dr. Christopher Paul is a senior social scientist working out of the RAND Corporation’s Pittsburgh office. He is trained in evaluation research and has found numerous opportunities to apply evaluation and assessment methods in research on behalf of the U.S. Department of Defense. Previous contributions to Small Wars Journal include “Victory Has a Thousand Fathers: Evidence of Effective Approaches to Counterinsurgency, 1978–2008.”

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

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http://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/ar...of-the-israel-defense-forces’-approach-to-war

From Maneuver to Attrition: The Transformation of the Israel Defense Forces’ Approach to Warfare

by David Rodman
Journal Article | March 5, 2016 - 12:30am

From Maneuver to Attrition: The Transformation of the Israel Defense Forces’ Approach to Warfare

David Rodman

Military analysts commonly assert that, of the two basic types of warfare, maneuver and attrition, the former is a superior form of fighting and, therefore, is the natural choice of skilled armies. This claim ignores an important point, however. Even the most skilled armies sometimes choose an attrition-oriented battle doctrine rather than a maneuver-oriented one, because their states’ strategic environments warrant such decisions. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a consummate practitioner of maneuver warfare in the post-Second World War era, has steadily shifted toward an attrition-oriented battle doctrine over the past few decades as a result of Israel’s changing strategic environment.

Maneuver and attrition constitute the two basic types of warfare. Maneuver warfare is based primarily on mobility. Armies that employ maneuver warfare are those that attempt to penetrate—through either frontal assaults or flanking movements—into their opponents’ hinterlands with the intent of bringing about their opponents’ rapid collapse by wreaking havoc in rear areas. Attrition warfare, to the contrary, is based primarily on firepower. Armies that employ attrition warfare are those that wage either very slow-moving or largely static slugging matches with their opponents with the intent of grinding down their opponents to the brink of annihilation.

Maneuver and attrition warfare are often portrayed as polar opposites that are mutually exclusive, but such a stark contrast is quite misleading. All armies across both time and space have been guided by battle doctrines that combine both mobility and firepower. Neither pure maneuver nor pure attrition warfare has ever existed in the annals of military history. Nevertheless, it is certainly possible to classify battle doctrines as either maneuver-oriented or attrition-oriented, depending upon which end of the mobility‒firepower spectrum they lean toward. Those battle doctrines that emphasize mobility over firepower are maneuver-oriented, while those that emphasize firepower over mobility are attrition-oriented.

A few examples suffice to illustrate this assertion. The Carthaginian army that invaded and ravaged Italy during the Second Punic War waged a campaign that relied first and foremost on mobility. That it also smashed a number of Roman armies in large-scale, set-piece battles during the campaign does not invalidate the fact that it favored maneuver over attrition warfare. Similarly, the Wehrmacht’s offensives in Poland, the Low Countries, France, Norway, and the Soviet Union in the early years of the Second World War saw mobile forces swiftly pierce or outflank their opponents’ defenses and penetrate far into their hinterlands, leading to chaos in their rear areas, followed by the inevitable collapse of their armies (albeit a temporary one in the case of the Soviet army). That the Wehrmacht fought many large-scale battles along the way, employing massive firepower and inflicting enormous destruction, does not change that fact that it also favored maneuver over attrition warfare.

Conversely, the Union army relied mainly on firepower to crush the Confederate army during the last years of the American Civil War. That the Union army also pushed deep into Confederate territory during these same years does not alter the fact that its campaign favored attrition over maneuver warfare. Likewise, the armies that fought on the Western Front during the First World War clearly depended much more on firepower than on mobility to achieve their objectives throughout much of the war. That territory sometimes changed hands during the fighting does not abrogate the fact that both the allied and central powers favored attrition over maneuver warfare for much of the war.

Military analysts often claim that maneuver is a “higher” form of warfare, while attrition is a “lower” form. The reasoning behind this line of thought is as follows. Skilled armies tend to adopt maneuver-oriented battle doctrines, because mobility acts as a sort of “force multiplier” against opponents. Less-skilled armies, on the other hand, tend to adopt attrition-oriented battle doctrines, because they lack the wherewithal to conduct mobile operations and, therefore, must fall back on firepower to face their opponents. Skilled armies, in short, use finesse to try to overcome their opponents, while less-skilled armies must rely on brute force to attempt to achieve the same objective.

This line of thought, however appealing, misses an important point: skilled armies sometimes choose to emphasize attrition over maneuver warfare, because circumstances warrant such decisions. Take the case of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), one of the most proficient practitioners of maneuver warfare in the post-Second World War era. Quietly, and perhaps more in a de facto than a de jure sense, the IDF has increasingly embraced attrition warfare at the expense of maneuver warfare over the past few decades. The transformation of Israel’s strategic environment over these same decades accounts for this shift in the IDF’s battle doctrine.

Leaving aside the chronic low-intensity conflicts in which it has been embroiled since its establishment, Israel has fought nine wars. This total includes six interstate wars against one or more Arab states: the 1947‒1949 War of Independence; the 1956 Sinai Campaign; the 1967 Six-Day War; the 1969‒1970 War of Attrition; the 1973 Yom Kippur War; and the 1982 Lebanon War. This count also includes three asymmetrical wars against Arab nonstate organizations: the 2006 Second Lebanon War against Hizbullah (and allied militias); the 2008‒2009 Gaza War (or Operation Cast Lead) against Hamas (and allied militias); and the 2014 Gaza War (or Operation Protective Edge) against Hamas (and allied militias).

One fact immediately stands out when reviewing this history. During Israel’s early decades, interstate war constituted the main challenge to its national security. In the past few decades, to the contrary, asymmetrical war has constituted the main challenge to Israel’s national security. Herein lies the explanation as to why the IDF has increasingly moved away from a maneuver-oriented battle doctrine and toward an attrition-oriented one. Three variables—geography, numbers, and allies—are of paramount importance in this regard.

Israel emerged victorious from its War of Independence, but its survival remained far from assured in the aftermath of hostilities, with the Arab world still committed to its eventual destruction. Though Israel had actually added substantially to its territory during the war, its postwar borders were highly unfavorable from a military perspective. Extremely long in relation to the state’s total land area and essentially flat, they offered no topographical obstacles to an invasion in the north, center, or south. Moreover, all of Israel’s major cities, industrial assets, and military bases stood within easy reach of Arab armies. Indeed, the center of the state—which housed the bulk of the populace, most of the heavy industry, and many of the military facilities—did not exceed a mere 14 kilometers in some places. Not only did Israel possess indefensible borders after the War of Independence, but it also lacked strategic depth.

Second, numbers added another layer of uncertainty to Israel’s national security. With its limited manpower base—the state’s population at birth consisted of just 600‒650,000 souls—and a correspondingly small economic base, Israel realized that the IDF would not be able to compete for the foreseeable future in terms of the number of men or machines at its disposal in comparison to those in the hands of its Arab adversaries. Furthermore, most of the manpower that Israel could devote to the IDF would of necessity be made up of part-time reservists, so as not to undermine the state’s economic advancement. Consequently, the IDF decided that it must emphasize quality over quantity, reasoning that Israel’s “few” must be organized and trained in such a way as to be able to overcome the Arabs’ “many.”

Third, Israel’s lack of allies contributed still further to its national security dilemma. Both Western and Eastern bloc states sought the friendship of the Arab states, which controlled much of the world’s oil supply, because of the burgeoning Cold War. As part of their efforts to befriend the Arab states, predictably enough, Western and Eastern bloc states alike sought to distance themselves from Israel. This strategic reality ensured that Israel could not be a party to any bilateral or multilateral defense pact and, therefore, could not count on foreign assistance in an Arab‒Israeli confrontation. France and Great Britain would join Israel in attacking Egypt during the 1956 Sinai Campaign, but this development sprang from a unique set of circumstances that could not possibly have been anticipated when the IDF’s battle doctrine was formulated in the early 1950s.

Collectively, then, these three variables drove the IDF to adopt a maneuver-oriented battle doctrine built initially upon engaging in preventive and preemptive wars. An absence of defensible borders and strategic depth made it absolutely imperative for the IDF to take the fight to Arab territory, because permitting an Arab invasion of Israel could well spell the destruction of the state. Not only must wars be fought on Arab soil, but they must also be short so as to prevent the Arab world from bringing its greater numbers of men and machines to bear on the fighting, so as to prevent the implosion of the Israeli economy, and so as to prevent foreign powers from intervening in hostilities on the Arab world’s behalf. Offensive maneuver warfare, with its emphasis on rapid thrusts into an opponent’s hinterland to cause its army’s collapse, offered the IDF the best prospect of winning wars as quickly and as cheaply as possible.

The IDF’s experience in the final months of the War of Independence confirmed the efficacy of this paradigm. Not only did the IDF rout the Egyptian army during these months, pushing it completely out of Israeli territory, but Israeli units also temporarily seized a chunk of the Sinai, in operations that saw mobile columns of mechanized infantry drive through or around Egyptian forces in swift thrusts. Thus, in 1956, when Israel embarked on a preventive war against Egypt in order to forestall a rising threat to its national security from that quarter, the IDF waged a maneuver-oriented campaign. It opened the war with a vertical flanking action, the dropping of a parachute battalion deep in the Sinai, severing the main connection between Egyptian forces in the Sinai and those in Egypt proper. Next, several brigade-sized columns spearheaded by mechanized infantry advanced through or around Egyptian defenses in the Sinai in rapid thrusts, leading to the collapse of Egyptian forces there in just a few days. The IDF fought only a small number of large-scale, set-piece battles during the campaign, and its losses in men and machines were quite limited in comparison to those suffered by its Egyptian foe.

Much the same pattern would be repeated in 1967, when Israel engaged in a preemptive war against an imminent pan-Arab threat to its national security. At the same time as the Israel Air Force (IAF) destroyed the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian air forces on the ground at the outset of hostilities in a surprise attack, three IDF armored divisions either speedily crashed through Egyptian defenses in the Sinai in frontal assaults or else outflanked them by crossing over allegedly impassable terrain. A combination of airpower and armor then wreaked havoc in the Egyptian rear, leading to the complete collapse of the Egyptian army in the Sinai in three days as it tried to retreat toward the Suez Canal. While the Egyptian army suffered very heavy casualties in men and machines, the number of large-scale, set-piece battles on this front was again rather small. Similar scenarios played themselves out on the Judean and Samarian (Jordanian) and Golan (Syrian) fronts, though the results on these fronts were not as lopsided in terms of losses as on the Sinai front.

In contrast to the Sinai Campaign, in whose aftermath American and Soviet threats against Israel eventually compelled the return of the Sinai to Egypt, the IDF remained firmly ensconced in the territory it had captured during the Six-Day War. Control over the Sinai, Judea and Samaria, and the Golan provided Israel with defensible borders and a measure of strategic depth for the first time in its history, especially in the center and south of the state. While its improved geographical position tempered Israel’s penchant for waging preventive and preemptive wars after 1967, the IDF nevertheless continued to place its faith in a maneuver-oriented battle doctrine moving forward. Based on its past experience, the IDF judged that maneuver warfare still offered the best prospect for a speedy victory at tolerable cost, regardless of which side started future rounds of hostilities.

When Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel signaling the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, therefore, the IDF responded with a mobile defense on both the Golan and Sinai fronts. On the Golan, the IDF first halted the Syrian army’s offensive, then launched a mobile counterattack with three armored divisions to clear the area of Syrian forces, and finally engaged in a mobile counteroffensive into Syria proper, bringing the outskirts of the Syrian capital within artillery range in a few days. In the Sinai, the IDF launched a mobile counterattack on the third day of the war with two armored divisions only to be rebuffed by a stout Egyptian defense. Less than a week later, however, the IDF smashed an Egyptian offensive toward the Sinai’s mountain passes in the largest tank engagement since the Battle of Kursk during the Second World War. The IDF immediately followed up this triumph with a mobile counteroffensive that saw it slice through two Egyptian army corps, cross over to the Egyptian side of the Suez Canal, capture a substantial chunk of Egyptian territory, and eventually surround one of the two Egyptian army corps involved in the fighting. In the Yom Kippur War, as in the Sinai Campaign and the Six-Day War, the practice of maneuver warfare brought the IDF victory over its opponents.

Even in the two interstate wars in which the IDF was compelled by circumstances to wage attrition warfare on a large scale—the War of Attrition and the Lebanon War—it also engaged in maneuver warfare in attempts to end these wars on Israel’s terms. During the War of Attrition, the IAF engaged in “deep-penetration” air raids near the Egyptian capital—a vertical flanking action—in an effort to coerce Egypt into stopping the war without registering any gains. That this effort did not succeed—and that the war finally ended in a stalemate after a costly attrition campaign—does not change the fact that the IDF relied on maneuver warfare in an effort to bring it victory. During the Lebanon War, the IDF employed maneuver warfare to sweep the Syrian army and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) units from southern Lebanon, as several armored divisions drove quickly northward. Unfortunately for Israel, retreating PLO units embedded themselves in Beirut, making it necessary for the IDF to engage in a protracted and destructive siege of the city in order to pry the PLO out of Lebanon.

The first faint signs that the IDF’s battle doctrine had begun to move away from a heavy emphasis on maneuver warfare and toward a greater appreciation of the merits of attrition warfare actually appeared in the wake of the Yom Kippur War. The early setbacks that it suffered during the hostilities convinced the IDF that “quantity has a quality of its own.” Hence, the IDF not only greatly expanded its order of battle, but it also increased its reliance on firepower to accomplish its objectives. During the siege of Beirut, for example, the IDF depended almost entirely on the application of massive firepower to reach its goal of ejecting the PLO from Lebanon.

Still, the transition from maneuver to attrition warfare really began to pick up momentum in the following decade, and it has accelerated further during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. By the 1990s, Israel had reached comprehensive peace agreements with both Egypt and Jordan, so they no longer represented threats to the state. Crushed by the allied coalition in the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq has been mired in chaos ever since and, therefore, has not represented a significant threat to Israel for the last three decades. And Syria, which did not succeed in reaching its self-declared goal of achieving “strategic parity” with Israel even before the turn of the century, has disintegrated as a state in all but name since 2011, so it no longer represents a substantial threat to Israel, either.

The steep decline of interstate war as a threat to Israel has been accompanied by an equally impressive rise in asymmetrical war as a threat. Two large-scale uprisings in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza since the mid-1980s, coupled with its contested occupation of territory in southern Lebanon from the mid-1980s until the turn of the century, ultimately convinced Israel that holding onto territory inhabited by hostile populations had become a problematic endeavor. In an attempt to rid itself of the costs of waging low-intensity conflicts, Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. Unfortunately, these moves served only to heighten the prospect of asymmetrical war rather than to promote peace, because Hizbullah and Hamas, respectively, filled the vacuums left by the Israeli withdrawals. Once in control of territory, these organizations proved able to improve dramatically their military capabilities.

The same three variables that pushed the IDF toward a maneuver-oriented battle doctrine in its early decades now drove it in the direction of an attrition-oriented one. Swift and deep thrusts into an opponent’s hinterland by mobile columns had become passé. What worked to defeat conventional armies would not necessarily produce victory over unconventional ones. Moreover, as a result of its previous experiences, Israel no longer had any interest in taking and dominating territory inhabited by hostile populations. The application of massive firepower—especially precision, standoff firepower from the air—appeared to provide a much more efficient way to smash nonstate organizations like Hizbullah and Hamas. Numbers of men and machines, now heavily in the IDF’s favor, also augured well for an attrition-oriented battle doctrine, as did the fact the no foreign powers, including the Arabs states, would—or even could—come to the immediate assistance of Hizbullah or Hamas. That these organizations were entirely on their own against Israel indicated that the IDF would generally have more time to accomplish its objectives than it had during interstate wars. The IDF could now use its superior numbers and take its time to whittle down its opponents.

When Israel embarked on the 2006 Second Lebanon War, after a particularly severe Hizbullah provocation along its northern frontier, therefore, the IDF relied largely on precision, standoff firepower from the air to achieve its principal objective of destroying that organization’s rocket array and other military assets. IDF ground forces throughout most of the war did little more than conduct sporadic, short, and shallow incursions into Lebanese territory, essentially in the form of raids, to smash specific Hizbullah strongholds near the Israeli border. A somewhat more robust incursion during the last days of the war was also short-lived and shallow, not to mention executed in a very clumsy manner. At no time in the war did the IDF resort to the sort of maneuver-oriented battle doctrine that had served it so well in the Sinai Campaign, the Six-Day War, and the Yom Kippur War.

The war concluded on an unsatisfactory note from Israel’s perspective. While the IDF clearly won the contest against Hizbullah on points, to employ a boxing metaphor, it just as clearly did not succeed in delivering a knockout blow. This uninspiring outcome convinced the IDF to tweak its operational model in its next two asymmetrical wars by adding a dedicated “ground maneuver” (in Israeli parlance) to the mix. In both the First and Second Gaza Wars, the IDF executed large-scale ground incursions in Gaza after about a week or so of heavy bombardment, mostly from the air, to degrade the capabilities of Hamas (and allied) units. In the first war, the primary intent behind the ground incursion was to push Hamas rockets beyond the range of major Israeli population centers. In the second war, the primary intent was to destroy Hamas attack tunnels, many of which penetrated into Israel proper. In both wars, the ground incursion was slow and shallow. In neither instance did it resemble in any important respect past IDF land operations that flowed from the maneuver-oriented battle doctrine of earlier interstate Arab‒Israeli wars. The IDF easily defeated Hamas (and its allies) in each contest, but it did so by employing an attrition-oriented battle doctrine, not a maneuver-oriented one.

The IDF, unquestionably, still espouses maneuver warfare and still retains powerful mobile units for this type of fighting. Nevertheless, unless (or until) the threat of interstate war becomes a genuine threat to Israel once more, the IDF’s battle doctrine is likely to remain attrition-oriented. Perhaps no recent development better illustrates that the IDF has nowadays embraced attrition warfare than Israel’s enormous investment in a comprehensive rocket and missile shield. The Arrow interceptor system is intended to protect the state against ballistic missiles, including those potentially armed with nuclear warheads, while the Magic Wand (also known as David’s Sling) and Iron Dome interceptor systems are intended to protect it from medium- and short-range rockets and missiles, as well as cruise missiles. Collectively, these systems are meant to minimize damage to Israel’s home front while the IDF patiently and systematically destroys its opponent’s military assets. If the IDF expected to be able to bring about the quick collapse of an opponent on today’s battlefield, then Israel would surely not need such elaborate defensive capabilities.

About the Author »
David Rodman

David Rodman is the author of three books about Israeli diplomatic and military history. He has also published numerous articles in professional journals, such as The Journal of Strategic Studies, Intelligence and National Security, Middle Eastern Studies, Israel Affairs, Defence Studies, and Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs.

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thecipherbrief.com/article/middle-east/russia-—-most-likely-target

Expert Commentary
...
Russia — the Most Likely Target

March 4, 2016 | Hamish de Bretton-Gordon

The Paris attacks last year bought home that ISIL intends to terrorise all those who oppose the group, wherever they may be. Outside the Syria and Iraq environs, ISIL strives for evermore spectacular attacks with ever more shocking outcomes. The 130 dead in Paris came just after 228 (mainly Russians) were blown up on an airliner out of Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt and many others, including 38 British citizens, were murdered on a beach in Tunisia.

Many, especially those who oppose air strikes and ground assault on ISIL, point to the lessons learned in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which in part was caused by ‘incomplete’ information on the state of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD). However, having been involved in both Gulf Wars and having been in both Syria and Iraq last year, I see very few similarities—except for the WMD concern. In this case, ISIL does have WMD, in particular mustard gas, albeit in very small quantities, and the desire, but probably not the capability, to produce an Improvised Nuclear Device (IND). There is also speculation that they are trying to develop a biological weapon with anthrax and possibly plague.

There appears to be little doubt that the global coalition will shortly move to include ground operations against ISIL with air strikes extending into Syria, as well as Iraq, depending on the success of the impending ceasefire. A key issue is whether this is going to make terror attacks, including chemical and biological attacks, more likely in the U.S. and UK.

I expect the U.S. and UK are already near the very top of the ISIL attack list, marginally behind Russia and France, and marginally ahead of the other coalition members—but, especially considering the security provided by the large bodies of water surrounding the U.S. and the UK, they are probably not the highest priority targets. Secondly, with the major offensive about to begin to drive ISIL out of Mosul in Iraq, I do see an increased likelihood of ISIL using their chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear (CBRN) capabilities to defend Mosul. If ISIL loses Mosul, they lose their center of gravity in Iraq, and that would likely signify the beginning of the end of the ISIL Caliphate as a ground holding ‘state.’

It is in Mosul where ISIL is developing its chemical weapons programs and nuclear isotopes, which could be used as dirty bombs. The terrorists are likely to use WMD to stave off defeat, and have attacked the Iraqi Kurd Peshmerga forces 10 times in the last two weeks with mustard agent (gas). They saw how effective Assad’s chemical attacks were in Syria when he defeated the ISIL assault on the key military air base of Deir Ezzor in December 2014 using chlorine barrel bombs, and his defense of Damascus in August 2013 using the nerve agent sarin, which killed 1500, mainly women and children. We then saw the extensive use of chlorine improvised explosive devices by ISIL in Iraq to defend Tikrit in March and April with varying degrees of success – but it certainly terrified the Iraqi Army.

One of the most startling aspects after the Paris attacks was the French Prime Minister’s warnings of the threat of chemical and biological attack from ISIL. This shocking revelation was accompanied by the French government’s issuance of atropine—the nerve agent antidote—because it believes there is a high probability that a nerve agent will be used against the military and police. Apparent threats to poison the Paris water supply and a hoax anthrax attack in Brussels heightened the possibility that ISIL may have some WMD capability in Europe. Chemical and biological weapons are the ultimate terror weapons, and it appears very plausible that the ultimate terror organisation, ISIL, would want to use them if possible.

So what is the threat outside Syria and Iraq? It would be very difficult to get even the smallest amount of class 1 chemical weapons, like mustard agent (aka gas) or nerve agent (aka gas), into the United States. Western security forces and police are on high alert and have very effective procedures to interdict this type of threat. It would be a similar story with radiological isotopes to build a dirty bomb or an improvised nuclear device.

The likelihood of WMD material being smuggled into the UK or U.S. is highly unlikely. But that is not quite the end of it. The threat to the U.S. is from ISIL ‘clean skins’ or ‘sleepers.’ These are people who have been radicalised online or through visits to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, or other training camps, potentially some time ago, who are undoubtedly present in the U.S. and other Western nations, waiting for the opportunity to strike. As it becomes more difficult to acquire guns and explosives in Europe to replicate a Paris-style attack, these ‘clean skins’ are likely to look for asymmetric weapons, mainly WMD, in order to have the desired shock effect.

Russia is most at threat from ISIL WMD. It appears that the Chechen jihadists in ISIL are behind much of the ISIL WMD development. Russia is their sworn enemy and, with nuclear isotopes and legacy chemical weapons apparently available on the black market in Russia and former Soviet states, it is most likely that ISIL would try a WMD attack in Moscow or other Russian cities.

In a similar respect, Asia is probably also a slightly easier target for ISIL chemical attack, with toxic industrial chemicals relatively easy to get hold of in that region. In April 2015, I was in Jakarta looking at a Chlorine Improvised Explosive Device allegedly made in Indonesia and planted by returning Jihadists from Syria.

It is clear that ISIL has been teaching their followers in the use of CBRN for attacks in Mosul and Raqqa in Iraq. This appears to be focused on improvised chemical weapons like chlorine, organophosphates (pesticides), and dirty bombs, which Australian Foreign Secretary Julie Bishop detailed in June 2015. Chlorine and other toxic chemicals are widely available in the U.S., and there are many radiological sources in the U.S., which could be fashioned into ‘dirty’ bombs, but would hardly have the power to be considered a WMD.

Is it possible for a terrorist to poison the water supply? Yes, but they would need thousands of tons of toxic chemicals, like chlorine or cyanide, to have any real effect, and I think we might notice somebody dropping that amount into a reservoir. Could a terrorist release chlorine gas on the underground or subway? Possibly, but it would probably also be noticed. To have an effect, you would need to release or explode a lot of chlorine, and the Transport Police and security would pick somebody up trying to enter a subway station with such a device.

With threats of chemical & biological attacks apparent in mainland Europe, it is time to dust off our WMD attack and post attack procedures, which were confined, gleefully, to the bin at the end of the Cold War.

Attacking ISIL with all means does not increase the threat of attack in the U.S. because, simply, the threat couldn’t be higher. But increased assaults on ISIL, might trigger a ‘clean skin’ attack. It is time to check that we are doing all we can collectively to ensure a terror attack in the U.S. doesn’t materialise. That being said, these are much more psychological weapons than physical ones in terms of impact. ISIL wins if they terrorize us into inactivity, so any undue related fear from their WMD threat is absolutely not necessary, especially outside Syria and Iraq.

ISIS, Terrorism, biological weapons, chemical weapons, nuclear weapons, Russia

The Author is Hamish de Bretton-Gordon

Hamish de Bretton-Gordon is the Managing Director of Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) at Avon Protection Systems, the recognized global market leader in respiratory protection system technology for military forces, law enforcement teams, fire fighters, and industrial personnel. He previously served as commanding officer of the UK CBRN Regiment and NATO’s Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion.

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

North Korea Launches Ballistic Missile Confirmed
Started by eXe‎, 02-06-2016 04:39 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ea-Launches-Ballistic-Missile-Confirmed/page6

Today's photo: Front page of North Korea's official daily newspaper
Started by mzkitty‎, 03-03-2016 08:21 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...age-of-North-Korea-s-official-daily-newspaper

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://thecipherbrief.com/article/asia/four-years-kim-jong-un

Expert Commentary
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Four Years with Kim Jong-Un

March 5, 2016 | Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

Over four years have passed since Kim Jong-un took over the leadership of North Korea after the death of his father, Kim Jong-il, in late 2011. At the time, some hoped that Kim Jong-un’s young age and western education would lead him to set North Korea on a path toward economic liberalization and away from diplomatic belligerence. Four years in, such hopes appear naïve. The development of a nuclear deterrent has continued in full spree. Though minor economic changes have occurred, major liberalizations are yet to be seen.

Kim Jong-un’s tenure is not easily summarized. Only the past few months have seen both a claimed (but unlikely) successful hydrogen bomb test and the presumed purge and execution of the chief of North Korea’s general staff, Ri Yong Gil. In order to evaluate the most important policy trends under Kim, a natural starting point is the policy doctrine that he declared himself a year and a half into his tenure. In a speech on March 31st, 2013, Kim Jong-un declared his policy of byungjin, meaning parallel development of the country’s economy and defensive capabilities. Some see economic progress and arms buildup as mutually exclusive, but Kim has refused to choose one or the other.

Kim Jong-un has arguably given economic issues more attention than his father ever did. He has introduced some modest economic policy changes and launched more than ten special economic zones for tourism and foreign investment. In his first public speech, he promised that the North Korean people would “never have to tighten their belt again.” Last year also saw some very pragmatic rhetoric from Kim on North Korea’s forestry situation. In the context of discussing the country’s reforestation needs, Kim acknowledged some crucial problems that are inherent to North Korea’s economic system and planning.

Rumors of agricultural reforms began to flourish shortly after Kim took power. Some reforms have undoubtedly been launched to give North Korean farmers greater autonomy in order to increase production, but their full extent and impact still remain unclear. North Korea has suffered food shortages ever since the collapse of its economy in the early 1990s.

Kim has also launched a rather massive drive for special economic zones (SEZs). The first zones were launched in 2013 and more followed the next year. Thus far, Kim hasn’t appeared willing to fundamentally change judicial frameworks and institutions, measures that would be needed to create an environment that responsible foreign investors would find favorable.

In other words, for the economy, Kim Jong-un’s tenure has been a mixed bag. On the one hand, he has shown a sense of pragmatism in acknowledging North Korea’s problems. On the other hand, no fundamental systemic changes have occurred. Kim has launched massive construction projects and modernization in Pyongyang, North Korea’s capital city. Not to mention the presumably very, very expensive ski-resort Masikryong and other prestige projects. Such investments have shown that Kim is cognizant of the need to keep the elite happy, but these prestige projects do not impact the lives of the majority of the country’s citizens, who live far away from the relative luxury of the capital city.

The other side of Kim’s dual policy line has progressed faster than economic development. In mid-December, Kim signed an order for North Korea to test a hydrogen bomb (or so North Korean state television said), and the country promptly went ahead with the test in January. It matters less that many international monitoring agencies have said the test is unlikely to have been of a fully functioning hydrogen bomb. At the very least, it shows that North Korea is striving to reach this capacity.

In total, North Korea has conducted four nuclear tests, two of which have occurred under Kim Jong-un’s tenure. North Korea’s nuclear program is not merely a strategic bargaining chip anymore but a core part of their defense capability. This fact has been increasingly solidified under Kim’s rule. The nuclear program also has domestic political value. Many North Koreans support the government’s drive towards a full nuclear deterrent, and the potential of the nuclear weapons program as a source of legitimacy for the regime should not be underestimated.

The extensive purges under Kim’s rule should also be seen in this light. No other picture is as iconic and signifying for Kim Jong-un’s rule as that of his uncle, Jang Song-taek, at the hands of two North Korean guards during his show trial in December 2013. Kim Jong-un’s tenure has seen an extensive number of purges of government officials in the top strata. According to South Korean intelligence estimates, over 70 officials have thus far been purged under Kim. Purges like these are part of everyday life for the top strata in authoritarian dictatorships. Under Kim Jong-un, however, tensions have reportedly run remarkably high. This may be a temporary phenomenon that passes as North Korea fully transitions from the power structures of the era of Kim Jong-il. Nevertheless, tensions in the political top have been one of the signifying factors of Kim Jong-un’s rule.

One important lesson from Kim Jong-un’s rule applies to many countries other than North Korea: a western education and young age does not a liberalizing leader make. Many thought they could predict features of Kim’s rule by these two factors alone, but unsurprisingly, both political systems and leaders are far more complex.

North Korea, Nuclear, Kim Jong-Un, East Asia

The Author is Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein

Benjamin Katzeff Silberstein is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at University of Pennsylvania, and a non-resident Kelly Fellow at Pacific Forum CSIS. He is also co-editor of North Korean Economy Watch.

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

The U.S. just sent a carrier strike group to confront China
Started by Shacknasty Shagrat‎, 03-03-2016 09:46 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...sent-a-carrier-strike-group-to-confront-China

China Saw This Coming! – Bill Holter
Started by BetterLateThanNever‎, Yesterday 01:05 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?486319-China-Saw-This-Coming!-–-Bill-Holter

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.realclearworld.com/artic...me_we_talked_about_war_with_china_111741.html

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?486360-It’s-time-we-talked-about-war-with-China
Started by China Connection‎, Today 02:33 AM

March 4, 2016

It's Time We Talked About War With China

By Hugh White
Comments 19

Whether Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull intended it or not, his new Defence White Paper has been widely interpreted as sending a clear message that Australia is willing to join our allies in using armed force if necessary to defend the 'rules based global order' from China's strategic ambitions in Asia. Moreover, most people apparently think that's a good message to send.

So it seems wise to ask whether this message is really true. Would we go to war with China over any of the issues which now loom as tests of the future order in Asia - in the Spratlys, or the Senkakus, or even Taiwan?

Most people who approve of the White Paper's message probably do so with complete confidence that the issue will never arise. They assume war won't happen because they are sure the Chinese would always back down rather than risk a clash. Maybe they are right. Confronted with US and allied resolve, Beijing might decide that even Taiwan was simply not worth the immense costs of conflict.

But we shouldn't bet on that, because the Chinese probably think the same about America and its allies. They think a war would be just as costly to us as to them, and they believe the issues at stake matter more to them than to us. So they are likely to assume that, whatever we say now, on the brink we would back off rather than fight. And the more confident they are of that, the less likely they are to back down. It has happened before: in an escalating crisis, both sides assume the other will step back, and so neither does before it's too late. This is exactly what happened in July 1914.

Remember, the stakes are high for both sides. This is a contest over the future of the Asian order, and we should not for a moment assume that China is any less committed to building a new order than we are to preserving the old one. Unless one side or the other abandons its core objective, the chances of a crisis in the Western Pacific escalating to the point that we face a decision about going to war is already quite high, and is growing steadily.

So we ought to think seriously about what war with China over one of these issues would actually look like.

It is easy to start a war expecting a quick fight and an easy win. But America and its allies do not have overwhelming military superiority, and nor does China. That means neither side would be likely to win decisively after a short, contained conflict.

Both sides would therefore soon face a new choice: to escalate and accept the much higher costs of a big and protected war, or give up. Again, it is easy to assume that China would back off first, but we can't bet on that. China has an immense capacity to both inflict and absorb damage, and we cannot expect it to be any less committed to victory than we would be.

So would we back off and accept defeat to avoid escalation, if China didn't? This choice carries grave consequences, because both sides have nuclear forces, and there is a real risk of an escalating conflict crossing the nuclear threshold. Of course no one can imagine it coming to that, but it could unless one side backed down. And how can we be sure the Chinese would back down if we wouldn't? Alternatively, if we were capable of backing down, wouldn't it be better never to have started the war in the first place?

Even without a nuclear exchange, this would soon become the biggest and most costly war since 1945, and the end of all we envisage for the Asian Century, even if we won. And what would 'winning' even mean? Neither side has any chance of a decisive victory, so it is hard to imagine how a war with China ends. That alone should give pause to those who think it might be a good idea to start one.

In fact, I think it is unlikely Australia would go to war with China in any situation short of the outright invasion of the undisputed territory of another sovereign state. I think it is quite unlikely America would either, once a president was brought face to face with the military realities. So we are just bluffing, and our bluff is being steadily and systematically called by China.

None of this is to deny that Australia, like others, has a huge stake in the way Asia's regional order evolves, and that we need to do whatever we can to prevent changes in the order that affect our truly vital interests. Moreover, it is not to deny that some principles of regional order would be worth going to war with China to defend.

But we do have to ask whether the costs and risks of such a war are justified to defend every element of the so-called 'rules based global order' in places like the South China Sea. More realistically, we will have to accept some changes in the regional order to accommodate China. We all find the idea of making such an accommodation uncomfortable, even scary. But is it scarier than war with China? It is time to think carefully about that. And it is time to stop talking tough when we don't mean it. It is undignified as well as dangerous.

Reprinted with permission from the Lowy Institute.

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

Hummm......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_...d_trump_french_nationalists_and_a_brexit.html

March 4 2016 4:30 PM

This Is How the West Ends

Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, and the breakdown of European stability.

By Anne Applebaum
Comments 199

Back in the 1950s, when the institutions were still new and shaky, I’m sure many people feared the Western alliance might never take off. Perhaps in the 1970s, the era of the Red Brigades and Vietnam, many more feared that the West would not survive. But in my adult life, I cannot remember a moment as dramatic as this: Right now, we are two or three bad elections away from the end of NATO, the end of the European Union, and maybe the end of the liberal world order as we know it.

In the United States, we are faced with the real possibility of Republican Party presidential nominee Donald Trump, which means we have to take seriously the possibility of a President Trump. Hillary Clinton’s campaign might implode for any number of reasons, too obvious to rehash here; elections are funny things, and electorates are fickle. That means that next January we could have, in the White House, a man who is totally uninterested in what Presidents Obama, Bush, Clinton, Reagan—as well as Johnson, Nixon, and Truman—would all have called “our shared values.”
 
Trump advocates torture, mass deportation, religious discrimination. He brags that he “would not care that much” whether Ukraine were admitted to NATO; he has no interest in NATO and its security guarantees. Of Europe, he has written that “their conflicts are not worth American lives. Pulling back from Europe would save this country millions of dollars annually.” In any case, he prefers the company of dictators to that of other democrats. “You can make deals with those people,” he said of Russia. “I would have a great relationship with [Vladimir] Putin.”
 
Not only is Trump uninterested in America’s alliances, he would be incapable of sustaining them. In practice, both military and economic unions require not the skills of a shady property magnate who “makes deals” but boring negotiations, unsatisfying compromises, and, sometimes, the sacrifice of one’s own national preferences for the greater good. In an era when foreign policy debate has in most Western countries disappeared altogether, replaced by the reality TV of political entertainment, all of these things are much harder to explain and justify to a public that isn’t remotely interested.
 
And Americans aren’t the only ones who find their alliances burdensome. A year from now, France also holds a presidential election. One of the front-runners, Marine Le Pen of the National Front, has promised to leave both NATO and the EU, to nationalize French companies, and to restrict foreign investors. Like Trump, she foresees a special relationship with Russia, whose banks are funding her election campaign. French friends assure me that if she makes it to the final round, the center left and center right will band together, as they did two decades ago against her father. But elections are funny things, and electorates are fickle. What if Le Pen’s opponent suddenly falls victim to a scandal? What if another Islamic State attack jolts Paris?
 
By the time that happens, Britain may also be halfway out the door. In June, the British vote in a referendum to leave the EU. Right now, the vote is too close to call—and if the “leave” vote prevails, then, as I’ve written, all bets are off. Copy-cat referenda may follow in other EU countries too. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, sometimes speaks of leaving the West in favor of a strategic alliance with Istanbul or Moscow.
 
It’s not hard at all to imagine a Britain unmoored from Europe drifting away from the transatlantic alliance as well. If the economic turmoil that could follow a British exit from the EU were sufficiently severe, perhaps the British public would vote out its conservative government in favor of the Labour Party, whose leadership is now radically anti-American. Everyone discounts Jeremy Corbyn, the far-left Labour leader, but they also discounted Trump. Corbyn is the only viable alternative if the public wants a change. Elections are funny things, and electorates are fickle.
 
And then? Without France, Europe’s single market will cease to exist. Without Britain, it’s hard to see how NATO lasts long either. Not everyone will be sorry. As Trump’s appealing rhetoric makes clear, the costs of alliances (“millions of dollars annually”) are easier to see than the longer-term gains.
 
Western unity, nuclear deterrence, and standing armies gave us more than half a century of political stability. Shared economic space helped bring prosperity and freedom to Europe and North America alike. But these are things that we all take for granted, until they are gone.

Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author. Her most recent book is Iron Curtain: the Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956.

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20...-pacific/peace-talks-help-defuse-north-korea/

Could peace talks help defuse North Korea?

by Eric Talmadge
AP
Mar 5, 2016

The new U.N. sanctions on North Korea are out, and they are going to pinch Pyongyang hard. But they also beg a big question: Since sanctions thus far have failed to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, are tougher ones really the most effective way to bring the North out of its hardened Cold War bunker?

Is it time to flip the script?

China, a key broker in the North Korea denuclearization puzzle, thinks so. It wants the U.S. and North Korea to sit down for peace talks to formally end the Korean War.

That idea has always been a nonstarter in Washington, which insists the North must give up its nuclear ambitions first. But some U.S. experts think it might be a viable path forward.

Advocates of sitting down with a nuclear-armed North Korea are the minority camp in the U.S. And even those who do support the idea generally agree that sanctions can be a useful tool in pushing negotiations forward, if there is a coherent and internationally coordinated follow-up plan on where those negotiations should go.

However, sanctions can also backfire, pushing an insecure and threatened regime into a more defiant — and potentially more dangerous — direction.

Pyongyang gave a hint at that possibility Friday in its first official response to the sanctions, saying the measures were an “outrageous provocation” that it “categorically rejects.” North Korea threatened to carry out countermeasures against the U.S. and other countries that supported the sanctions.

While such threats usually amount to nothing, the U.N.’s efforts to change the North’s behavior through sanctions haven’t amounted to much, either.

“Sanctions have sort of become the default strategy for not having a strategy,” said Joel Wit, speaking from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

“If you don’t have a strategy, you don’t have objectives, you don’t know how to deal with a problem, you press that button,” said Wit, who in the 1990s was a U.S. State Department official deeply involved in North Korea negotiations. “You press the sanctions button and pretend that’s a strategy. But it really isn’t, in and of itself. It’s part of a strategy.”

U.N. sanctions have long been the main tool to put international pressure on North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program. They were imposed after its first nuclear test in 2006, then in 2009 and again in 2012 and 2013.

But the North has refused to give up its nukes. It has made them a central part of its military and diplomatic strategies and enshrined its right to have them in its constitution.

In the end, 50 days after North Korea carried out its Jan. 6 nuclear test, Beijing joined the U.S. in imposing tougher sanctions that were approved unanimously Wednesday by the U.N. Security Council. But it insisted sanctions alone will never solve the nuclear issue. Instead, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi suggested a “parallel track” approach that separates nuclear talks from negotiations to replace the more than 60-year-old Korean War armistice with a peace agreement.

“What the Chinese are saying is, what’s your strategy, what are your objectives? OK, sanctions, great. But what are you trying to achieve?” Wit said. “As a general rule, the U.S. really hasn’t had a strategy.”

Wit said an initial step could be to work out a declaration that the Korean War is over and begin a negotiation process toward a more formal peace arrangement, which could involve suspending or halting annual military exercises with South Korea, establishing borders, getting rid of the demilitarized zone, and cross-recognition, along with the nuclear issue.

In exchange, the North would have to agree to suspend the things Washington doesn’t want it to do — like nuclear tests and missile or rocket launches.

“It would get complicated, no doubt about it,” Wit said.Washington’s long-standing demand has been the North must either give up its nuclear program or verifiably demonstrate it is willing to do so before any serious peace talks can start. Pyongyang wants talks first, since it says the threat of a U.S. invasion is what forced it to develop a nuclear deterrent to begin with.

The U.S. has recently indicated a little more flexibility on the idea of a “parallel track” in negotiations. The White House said that before the latest nuclear test, North Korea sought to discuss a peace treaty with the U.S. but got cold feet after the U.S. insisted denuclearization be part of the discussions.

“I don’t think we’re in a position to rule out possible discussions on a peace process. But we’re not going to decouple that in any way from what really needs to happen, which is complete denuclearization and adherence to the six-party process,” State Department spokesman John Kirby said Thursday.

David Straub, associate director of the Korea Program at Stanford University’s Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center, said that given North Korea’s record in negotiations and its position never to give up nuclear weapons, “it would not make sense to begin parallel nuclear and peace treaty talks.”

Straub noted the U.S. and South Korea, along with China, tried to negotiate a peace treaty with North Korea in four-party talks from 1996 to 1998.

Another attempt to negotiate through the denuclearization issue and discuss a permanent peace mechanism was made in six-party talks that added on Japan and Russia and were held intermittently from 2003 to 2009.

“China is well aware of this history of peace treaty talks with North Korea,” he said. “But China wishes to deflect international, especially U.S., criticism that it is not doing enough to induce Pyongyang to give up nuclear weapons.” China is by far North Korea’s biggest trading partner.

Although Afghanistan is generally placed atop the lists of America’s longest wars, the Korean War, which began in 1950, is technically still going on. The armistice — in effect, a cease-fire — ended the fighting in 1953.

That may seem like semantics to some. American troops haven’t died in a direct confrontation with North Koreans since two army officers were killed in the “Ax Murder” incident along the DMZ in 1976. But it has had a tremendous impact on North Korea’s siege mentality, been used to justify its martial law-like restrictions on political and civil freedoms and significantly warped regional security in general.

With few good options and other priority foreign policy issues on its plate, Washington under President Barack Obama has exercised “strategic patience” — essentially refusing direct talks while keeping the sanctions pressure high and bolstering relations with U.S. allies in the region.

Zhiqun Zhu, director of the China Institute at Bucknell University, said that policy has clearly failed and underscores the fundamental problem in Northeast Asian security, which he said isn’t North Korea but “distrust between the United States and China.”

He called Washington’s policy an attempt to “outsource” the heavy lifting on denuclearization to Beijing, which he said no longer sees itself as an ally of Pyongyang and has significant doubts about Washington’s intentions.

“How can one say that the U.S. policy has not failed?” he said. “Some in Washington may oppose direct talks with Pyongyang — how can we reward bad behavior? — but how can you expect North Korea to simply give up the nuclear program without receiving any tangible benefits in return?”

Asia Pacific

◉How China is transforming its military, especially in the air and at sea
◉China says military spending increase to be smallest in six years
◉‘Missing’ bookseller back in Hong Kong: government
◉Chinese propaganda machine places hopes in cartoon rappers

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

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http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/20...ing-military-especially-air-sea/#.VtrV_aTMvIV

How China is transforming its military, especially in the air and at sea

Bloomberg, AP
Mar 5, 2016

HONG KONG – With a series of edicts, speeches and martial ceremonies, President Xi Jinping has over the past six months unveiled China’s biggest military overhaul since the aftermath of the Korean War.

The plan seeks to transform the 2.3-million-member People’s Liberation Army, which features 21st-century hardware but an outdated, Soviet-inspired command structure, into a fighting force capable of winning a modern war.

China is shifting from a “large country to a large and powerful one,” Xi explained in November.

The restructuring will be a major focus of the country’s new defense budget, which was to be announced Saturday as the annual rubber-stamp National People’s Congress got underway in Beijing.

China said Friday it will boost defense spending by about 7 to 8 percent in 2016, the smallest increase in six years. The People’s Liberation Army, being trimmed to 2 million troops from 2.3 million, will still be the world’s largest standing military.

Spending at all levels of China’s government is being curbed because of a drop in the economic growth rate, which fell to a 25-year low of 6.9 percent in 2015 and is expected to decline further this year. For most years since 2000, China posted double-digit increases in military spending.

“A lot of countries do military reforms, but they are rarely as tectonic as what we are seeing in China,” said Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation in Washington who specializes in military capabilities. “Any single one of these elements constitutes a bureaucratic overhaul of the first order.”

Here are the key elements of Xi’s plan:

Fewer singers, dancers

The first piece of the overhaul — announced by Xi during a grand military parade through central Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on Sept. 3 — calls for eliminating 300,000 PLA personnel by 2017. While Xi presented the cutbacks as proof of China’s commitment to peace, they will largely target noncombat personnel and should make the country’s forces more focused and efficient.

Out are military cooks, hospital workers, journalists and some 10,000 members of the PLA’s famed singers and dancers.

Even so, China’s military will remain by far the world’s largest, with over 600,000 more active service members than the U.S., according to estimates by the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

More pilots, sailors

The reorganization will also chip away at the army’s dominance, since modern mechanized warfare requires far fewer conventional troops. China needs more pilots, sailors, commandos and drone operators to achieve ambitions of projecting force farther afield.

While the land forces still account for about 73 percent of total troop strength, China is shifting resources to the navy and air force.

Those services will be responsible for dealing with the main perceived threats to China’s interests — a conflict over control of the South China Sea and a move by self-governing Taiwan toward formal independence that China has threatened to respond to with force.

Who’s the boss?

Advanced military actions such as intercepting rival aircraft, carrying out drone strikes and using special forces to extract hostages, demand the sort of close collaboration China’s army-centric military has lacked. Xi intends to fix that by reorganizing the armed forces into five branches under a joint-command structure modeled after that of the U.S.

In addition to the existing army, PLA Air Force and PLA Navy, a new Rocket Force will be responsible for China’s nuclear arsenal and conventional missiles, while a Strategic Support Force will oversee cyberwarfare and protect China’s financial system from attack.

Redrawing the map

As part of the move toward a unified command, China consolidated its seven military regions into five “theater commands” or “battle zones,” with each service reporting to a single commander. How these zones will function remains unclear.

“A lot of energy will be spent figuring out who commands who; who supports who; and most importantly who controls which budgets?” said Felix Chang, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

Many will be watching to see how far beyond China’s borders the new zones reach and how the revamped military map will shape PLA activities in regional hot spots such as the South China Sea.

Control of the skies

Seeking an edge in air combat, China invested heavily in Su-27 jets from Russia, eventually copying that technology and producing its own version, known as the J-11.

Recent years have seen the introduction of an advanced home-made fighter jet, the J-10, and upgraded H-6 bombers capable of longer missions. At least two prototype stealth fighters have flown, although it is not known what they are capable of or whether or when they will enter service.

New navy

Equally dramatic has been the transformation of the People’s Liberation Army Navy from a coastal patrol force to one capable of operating on the high seas far from base.

The most eye-catching addition has been the commissioning of the navy’s first aircraft carrier, which was purchased as an incomplete hull from Ukraine more than a decade ago then rebuilt, armed and equipped in China.

Although the carrier, christened the Liaoning, has yet to take on its full aviation complement, China announced in December that it was already building its second aircraft carrier, this time entirely with domestic technology.

China is also adding cutting-edge frigates, destroyers and nuclear submarines and by some estimates has been launching more vessels than any other nation on an annual basis. That rapid modernization is seen as aimed at asserting its maritime claims and extending its power far from its shores, raising tensions with Japan, the U.S. and Southeast Asian nations with rival territorial claims.

More missiles

China’s missile force, formally known as the Second Artillery, has one of the most potent attack capabilities of any of the world’s armed forces. Along with its nuclear force, China now fields at least 1,200 conventionally armed ballistic missiles, along with an array of land attack cruise missiles, surface-to-air missiles, and — of greatest concern to the U.S. Navy — anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles that may be able to sink an aircraft carrier.

China has continued to build its stocks of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles deployed just across the strait from Taiwan, backing up its threat to attack the island should it irrevocably reject Beijing’s demand for unification.

Changing tactics

Along with its gradual shift away from Asian land war preparations, the PLA has been developing systems to prevent outside intervention in contingencies such as a campaign against Taiwan. It is doing so largely through its use of missiles and submarines, along with cyberwarfare efforts to disable opposing forces’ high-tech battle systems.

Consolidating power

Xi is also centralizing his authority by breaking up the military’s massive, back-office bureaucracy. Four existing general departments will be divided into 15 smaller units responsible for everything from training and logistics to punishing corrupt officers and ensuring soldiers get sufficient education in Marxist ideology. They will all report directly to the Central Military Commission, a Communist Party body led by Xi.

“It may be that this is a means for Xi to increase his support within the PLA, as all these new general officer billets will be filled with his people,” said Cheng.

One thing Xi has made clear: He has no plans to transfer control over the PLA to the government from the party, something foreign military experts say is needed to professionalize the services.

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

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http://news.yahoo.com/beijing-steps-warnings-taiwan-independence-040543277.html

Beijing steps up warnings on Taiwan independence

AFP
10 hours ago

Beijing stepped up its rhetoric against Taiwanese independence on Saturday, with Premier Li Keqiang warning against "separatist activities" on the island and pledging to safeguard China's "territorial integrity".

Li's comments at the opening of the mainland's National People's Congress (NPC) parliament came weeks after Tsai Ing-wen, chairwoman of the Beijing-sceptic Democratic People's Party, was elected Taiwan's next president.

Beijing will "oppose separatist activities for the independence of Taiwan" and "safeguard China's sovereignty and territorial integrity", Li told the Communist-controlled legislature.

Both clauses were additions to the remarks he made on the issue at last year's NPC, when the Beijing-friendly Kuomintang of current leader Ma Ying-jeou was still hoping to retain power in Taipei.

China and Taiwan split in 1949 after a civil war but Beijing still considers the self-ruled island part of its territory awaiting reunification, and has an estimated 1,500 missiles aimed at stopping Taiwan from declaring independence.

Beijing has repeatedly asserted its belief in the "1992 consensus", which says that there is only "one China", despite allowing Taiwan to make its own interpretation.

.. View gallery
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang delivers his report during …
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang delivers his report during the opening ceremony of the National People …

But the DPP -- which does not recognise either the "one China" principle or the "consensus" -- triumphed in the island's January parliamentary and presidential elections as voters turned their backs on closer ties with the mainland.

Li Keqiang spoke Saturday of people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait as "fellow compatriots" belonging to "one and the same family" sharing a "common destiny".

The phrasing echoed President Xi Jinping's rhetoric from last November, when the leaders of China and Taiwan reached across decades of Cold War-era estrangement and rivalry to exchange a historic handshake in the first summit since the two sides split.

"We are brothers connected by flesh even if our bones are broken. We are a family whose blood is thicker than water," Xi said then.

Tsai will take office in May, and though she has radically toned down her party's traditionally pro-independence platform, analysts agree a deterioration of ties is inevitable.

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Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

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http://news.yahoo.com/afghan-taliban-not-participate-talks-114218833.html

Afghan Taliban refuse peace talks with government

Associated Press
By LYNNE O'DONNELL and RAHIM FAIEZ
2 hours ago

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) ¡ª The Taliban said Saturday they will not participate in a peace process with the Afghan government until foreign forces stop attacking their positions and leave the country.

A statement emailed to The Associated Press by spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the insurgents "reject" peace talks and that reports of their participation were "rumors."

Face-to-face talks were expected to take place in Pakistan in early March, but Afghan officials said in recent days that they have been postponed for at least a week. Senior government officials had characterized the meeting as the first real step in a peace process aimed at ending the war, now in its 15th year.

Javid Faisal, a spokesman for Afghan Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah, said the government "has no problem holding the first round of direct peace talks."

The Taliban have meanwhile accused the United States of boosting troop numbers and carrying out airstrikes and night raids on residential compounds. They also accuse Afghan forces of stepping up operations.

Mujahid said the leader of the Afghan Taliban, Mullah Akhtar Mansoor, had not given any order to take part in talks and that the "leadership council of the Islamic Emirate" had not discussed the matter.

The talks were decided on by delegates of four countries ¡ª Afghanistan, Pakistan, China and the United States ¡ª who met in Kabul last month. No date was set, and no names of participants were announced.

The last attempt at direct talks broke down last summer after just one round when Kabul announced the death of longtime Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar.

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Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

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http://news.yahoo.com/syria-rebels-border-crossing-105858610.html

Syria rebels take Iraq border crossing from IS

Associated Press
1 hour ago

BEIRUT (AP) — Syrian rebels have seized control of the Syrian side of a major border crossing with Iraq from the Islamic State group, activists said Saturday.

The Local Coordination Committees said U.S.-backed fighters from the Free Syrian Army's Southern Front killed one IS fighter and wounded several others in the process of taking the Tanaf border crossing late Friday.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which relies on activists inside Syria, said the FSA fighters crossed into Syria from Jordan to launch the attack.

The IS-affiliated Aamaq News Agency denied the crossing had been captured. The IS group had controlled the crossing, located in southeastern Syria, since government forces withdrew in May 2015.

IS fighters meanwhile attacked the government's supply route to the contested northern city of Aleppo, killing 15 soldiers, the Observatory said. Government forces repelled the attack and secured the road, according to the Observatory and SANA, the Syrian state news agency.

SANA said government forces killed dozens of IS fighters in the clashes.

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vestige · Mar 5, 2016

From #2:

Moscow has proven adept at using EW and SOF in concert to fragment and slow adversaries’ strategic decision-making. While “little green men” secure key locations and train local forces, electronic-warfare forces distort ISR collection by adversaries and third parties, limiting their ability to project an accurate counter-narrative to inform confused domestic audiences and a divided international community. And even when a defender does manage to grasp the situation, Russian EW attacks on their command, control, communications, and intelligence disrupts their response.

Every time I read an article of this nature I am reminded of the outage a year or so ago in the central U.S. No cell phone service... no internet service...(covered a relatively huge area... lasted several hours) and especially this:

No explanation from .gov or anyone else as to the cause.

free bump

Possible Impact · Mar 5, 2016

James Drew ‏@JamesDrewNews 18h
ANALYSIS: America's hypersonic missile revolution beckons
https://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/analysis-americas-hypersonic-missile-revolution-be-422774/ …
JD @FG_Defence

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

Kind of reminiscent of the Khmer Rouge.....

For links see article source.....
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http://www.thehindu.com/news/intern...tim-to-a-crisis-it-created/article8319012.ece

International
MORA (CAMEROON), March 6, 2016
Updated: March 6, 2016 04:44 IST

Boko Haram falls victim to a crisis it created

Dionne Searcey

The hunt for food appears to be part of what is pushing Boko Haram deeper into Cameroon.

Boko Haram, the Islamist extremist group terrorising this part of the world, is on the hunt — for food.

After rampaging across the region for years, forcing more than 2 million people to flee their homes and farms, Boko Haram appears to be falling victim to a major food crisis of its own creation.

Short of food

Farmers have fled, leaving behind fallow fields. Herdsmen have rerouted cattle drives to avoid the violence. Throughout the region, entire villages have emptied, leaving a string of ghost towns with few people for Boko Harm to dominate — and little for the group to plunder.

“They need food. They need to eat,” Midjiyawa Bakari, the Governor of the Far North region of Cameroon, said of Boko Haram. “They’re stealing everything.”

Across parts of northeastern Nigeria and border regions like the Far North, trade has come to a halt and tens of thousands of people are on the brink of famine, UN officials say. Markets have shut down because vendors have nothing to sell, and even if they did, many buyers have been scared off by the suicide bombers Boko Haram sends into crowds.

The hunt for food appears to be part of what is pushing Boko Haram deeper into Cameroon, according to a U.S. State Department review of attacks in the first few weeks of this year.

“They started shooting, shooting, shooting,” said Matte Bama, recounting the night Boko Haram raided her town, Amchide. Now she shares a house with 23 others, wondering when she can return home. “They took our livestock,” she said. “They took everything and they left.”

Such attacks are becoming increasingly common in the areas bordering Boko Haram’s base in northeastern Nigeria. A military campaign by Nigeria and its neighbours has chased fighters from villages they once controlled. Now, officials contend, the militants are left to scrounge for food in the sparse Sambisa Forest during the dry season, or go out raiding for whatever they can find.

“Their supply routes are blocked,” said Brigadier General Rabe Abubakar, a Nigerian military spokesman. “They’re hungry.”

This week, dozens of emaciated Boko Haram fighters, along with captive women and children, surrendered to military officials in Nigeria, a situation the authorities expect to repeat itself in coming weeks.

“They have nowhere to go,” Brig. Gen. Abubakar said. — New York Times News Service

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

In Libya, What Hath Hillary Wrought?
Started by Codeno‎, Today 10:10 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?486388-In-Libya-What-Hath-Hillary-Wrought

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http://gulfnews.com/news/mena/libya...d-by-terrifying-daesh-un-chief-says-1.1684755

March 6, 2016 | Last updated 2 minutes ago

Libya’s future threatened by ‘terrifying’ Daesh, UN chief says

There are alarming reports of widespread human rights violations, Ban says

Published: 19:14 March 5, 2016 Gulf News
AFP

Nouakchott: UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the future of Libya, and the stability of the whole Sahel region, is at stake as it faces the “terrifying threat” of the Daesh group.

But he warned international powers not to “stoke the fires of conflict” in the country.

Ban was speaking in Mauritania before heading to Algeria on Saturday as part of a tour of West and North Africa.

While meeting Mauritanian leaders, including President Mohammad Ould Abdul Aziz and Prime Minister Yahya Ould Hademine, in the capital Nouakchott on Friday he said he was “deeply concerned about the situation in Libya”.

Chaos has engulfed Libya since the 2011 Nato-backed ouster of dictator Muammar Gaddafi and rival administrations are being urged to sign up to a UN-brokered national unity government to help restore stability.

The internationally recognised government is based in the far east of the North African country.

The Daesh group and other extremist organisations have exploited the power vacuum, making gains along the oil-rich coastal regions and triggering concern among Western nations over terrorists controlling territory just 300 kilometres from Europe.

“There are alarming reports of widespread human rights violations, including serious abuses that may amount to war crimes,” Ban said in his comments Friday.

“All those with influence must use it to calm the situation and stop the fighting. It is utterly irresponsible for any outside player to stoke the fires,” he added.

Ban said that his special representative Martin Kobler “is facilitating talks on a national unity government” as “we face the terrifying scourge of Daesh expanding in Libya and beyond its borders.”

Delays would only worsen the dire humanitarian needs, he warned, adding that “Libya’s future is at stake” and “the reverberations echo far”.

Success in stabilising Libya would also benefit the whole Sahel region and “our world” in general, he added.

The UN chief also called for Mauritania’s help in a territorial dispute between Morocco and a Western Sahara separatist group that has displaced tens of thousands in decades of fighting.

“Making progress on the situation in Western Sahara is also of importance here too,” he said, referring to Mauritania. “Numerous refugees share the same culture and family ties with Mauritanians.”

The United Nations has been trying to oversee an independence referendum for Western Sahara since 1992 after a ceasefire was reached to end a war that broke out when Morocco sent its forces to the former Spanish territory in 1975.

Tens of thousands of refugees from Western Sahara live in refugee camps in Algeria, which were built when the fighting began.

Ban visited one such camp near Tindouf in western Algeria on Saturday and was due to hold talks with leaders of the Polisario Front, who are fighting for an independent homeland.

Before visiting Mauritania, Ban held talks in Burkina Faso.

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

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http://nation.com.pk/international/05-Mar-2016/isil-s-gains-in-libya-and-the-case-for-intervention

ISIL’s gains in Libya and the case for intervention

March 05, 2016
Olivier Guitta

In the course of a few days, the United States and France reportedly conducted military operations in Libya against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL). That is not new: Both countries have allegedly been involved in special forces operations in the North African country for the past two years.

At first, the targets were linked to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb and al-Mourabitoun. Now the emergence and the fast expansion of ISIL in Libya is a game changer. Some countries consider that time is of the essence, and that they cannot afford to sit around and do nothing.

The US is one of them: the commander of their special forces in Africa believes that Libya will need the US to defeat ISIL. On February 19, in concert with Britain, France and Italy, the US conducted an air strike on an ISIL camp in Sabratha, killing at least 41 people, Tunisians for the most part.

The recent victory of the LNA in Benghazi in kicking out ISIL and Ansar al-Sharia forces from some parts of town may be the proof that Western help could have been a deciding factor. Other international actors might get involved. The European Union has also reached out to General Haftar, whom they consider the only viable option for taking on the various jihadist groups. What is interesting is how General Haftar is reaching out to Russia as well.

The latest US raid on ISIL in Sabratha seemed to have pushed some of its members to move towards the Tunisian border. The risk of a larger Western intervention may have incited ISIL fighters to leave their bases in Libya and head south, potentially putting both Niger and Chad at risk.

In the light of this, it is not surprising that Niger’s president repeats what he has said over the past two years: Foreign intervention in Libya is a must. Moreover, neighbouring Algeria is said to have amassed 50,000 soldiers at its borders with Tunisia and Libya, and beefed up drone and plane surveillance to counter jihadist threats.

Little doubt is left about a Western military intervention in Libya: For instance, Egypt’s foreign minister said in Washington that Libya intervention should wait. That meant not if but when.

The timing may be sooner than later. Indeed, the French aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle, which was sent to the Gulf in December to strike ISIL in Syria after the November Paris attacks, has been recalled to the Mediterranean, probably to go to Libya. It will carry out joint exercises with Egypt - a country very concerned about ISIL’s activities in Libya that conducted air strikes there in 2015.

This shows how Libya has replaced Syria and Iraq as the top military priority, especially for the Europeans. The rapid expansion of ISIL in Libya in terms of fighters, leaders and territory is a huge cause for concern for the West: In December, the United Nations estimated that ISIL had between 2,000 and 3,000 fighters in Libya, and now the US is talking of 6,500 fighters.

Additionally, reports of ISIL leaders leaving Syria for Libya and calling for new recruits to join them there prove the central importance of the country for the group.

Some pundits in Washington are calling for Western air strikes on ISIL in Libya now, claiming there is no need to wait for a unity government. The political stalemate is ongoing with Libya’s two governments having competing patrons: Tripoli supported by Qatar and Turkey, while Tobruk gets the nod from the West, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates.

Patience is running thin and there is speculation that if a national government is not agreed upon soon, Italy may push a plan to split Libya into three mini-states. In the meantime, countries such as France or Britain cannot afford to witness a massive terror attack at home that would have been planned in Libya. Sadly, in light of this, more chaos and violence are in store for Libya.Aljazeera

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

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http://warontherocks.com/2016/03/treating-the-islamic-state-as-a-state/

Treating the Islamic State as a State

Mike Pietrucha
March 3, 2016

Rhetorically, the tendency in the U.S. government is to treat the Islamic State as an insurgent movement rather than a state-like entity. It is often called ISIL — the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant — as if the usage of an acronym will cloak the usage of the word “state.” Even when it is called the “Islamic State,” these words are often prefaced with “so-called” or “self-proclaimed” or bracketed with quotation marks. But in the rhetorical effort to delegitimize the Islamic State, we may have missed the very important nuance that it functions more like a state than like an insurgent movement. If we recognize these state-like attributes, even those we normally attribute to a failing state, our methods for dealing with it change from those we would use to fight a non-state actor to those we would use to fight an inter-state war. In the context of this conflict, this would lead to significant changes in the application of U.S. airpower.

To date, the Islamic State has often been treated as if it were an insurgent movement inside a friendly state (Iraq). This leads to an inappropriate application of a counterinsurgency strategy, where damage done to the organization is intentionally limited to avoid a level of collateral damage that would help the Islamic State’s counter-government narrative. The nonsensical use of leaflet bombs to warn oil truck drivers that they were about to come under attack is but one example of a “zero-collateral” strategy that is inappropriate for the adversary. The Islamic State is not so much an insurgency as it is an emerging state, drawing its territory from two neighboring failed states. Until we start treating the Islamic state as a state, with a state’s vulnerabilities, we will remain trapped in inappropriate strategic applications.

The Islamic State

The Islamic State has many attributes of a state. It controls territory, collects taxation, maintains a military force, promulgates and enforces laws and policies, and pays government employees, including fighters. It gathers resources and maintains a budget. It oversees education, issues IDs, and establishes provincial governments. It has a written set of principles for governance. True, it is a government modeled after a criminal enterprise, but this kind of kleptocracy is not uncommon — the existing governments of Afghanistan, Russia, Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Togo, and Congo are notoriously kleptocratic. The point of the classification is not so much to pass judgment as it is to analyze vulnerabilities. If the Islamic State is functionally a state, it is subject to a state’s pressure points.

The key difference between an insurgency and a functioning government is legitimacy. A government must maintain legitimacy, while an insurgency only has to undermine the government. A developed insurgency may control territory and provide governing functions in areas beyond control of the “official” government. While an insurgency must eventually establish legitimacy in order to transition to a government, U.S. goals do not include the establishment of a functioning government in Islamic State territory. Without this constraint, application of airpower is an investment in entropy. In other words, without having to support a government of limited legitimacy (the Russians and Iranians are doing that), the United States only needs to accelerate the Islamic State’s loss of legitimacy on the local and international stage. If we can deprive the Islamic State of its self-declared caliphate, it will become just another jihadist terrorist organization.

The Islamic State’s claim to have established a long-dormant caliphate is one of the keys to establishing itself as a leader in the Muslim world. Declaration of a caliphate requires geographic boundaries — the caliphate cannot exist without holding territory. If Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is the caliph and Islamic State territory a caliphate, then the Islamic State holds a legitimate and historically relevant claim to religious authority as a successor to Prophet Mohammed. If the state unravels — and is clearly seen to unravel — the validity of this claim is strongly undermined, and some of the attraction to foreign fighters may wane.

Pressure Points

Still, the Islamic State is falling far short of its goals to act as a state. It is unable to effectively maintain state services, including infrastructure. Medical care has devolved due to a lack of professional practitioners, equipment, and pharmaceuticals. Electricity is scarce. Oil production has dropped even before deliberate attacks on Islamic State-controlled oil resources. Its education system is practically nonexistent and there is no realistic possibility of economic growth. The population, even those who might have supported the goals of an Islamic state, is increasingly dissatisfied with the oppression of this one in practice.

In the Islamic State’s Principles in the Administration of the Islamic State – 1435AH (trans.), the authors lay out governing and administrative guidelines for the establishment of a unified Sunni caliphate, but also describe the nature of the caliphate’s economic foundation of “secure financial resources”:

This includes oil and gas and what the land possesses including gold as currency that does not deteriorate or decline, as well as trade routes …

The Islamic State’s plans for utilization of resources have no doubt suffered from the collapse of oil prices and the devaluation of gold: Oil has fallen to a third of its mid-2014 price level (when Principles was published) and gold has lost 20 percent of its value over the same time period. While Principles outlines preservation of industry as a priority, Islamic State territory remains among the poorest in Syria and Iraq and contains little industry not associated with agriculture or oil and gas production.

From the perspective of an airpower practitioner, air interdiction combined with limited strategic attack are both classic airpower approaches that can bear fruit. There is no industrial economy to interdict, similar to Japan or Germany, but there are still what John Warden classified as “organic essentials,” critical to maintaining government functions and fighting power. Cash may be an organic essential, because of the lack of any other means to make payments other than barter. It appears that fighter salaries and military expenditures consume two-thirds of the budget, making the money connection critical to the Islamic State’s military power.

Crude oil is necessary as a source of funds, but refined petroleum products are absolutely essential for transportation and some power generation. Electricity underpins some capabilities of the Islamic State, including communications, computer use, and broadcast. Power in the capital of al Raqqah is largely hydroelectric, and it is doubtful if the Islamic State has the technicians available to repair any damage to the substation at Tabqah Dam or any of its high-tension lines. Independence from arms dealers is specifically outlined in Principles, and local arms manufacturing is considered to be a critical element of economic independence. This leads to the conclusion that the flow of arms and ammunition from outside may be a potential interdiction opportunity. The more governmental or military functions that can be starved of resources or destroyed, the more difficult the governing tasks become.

Any air campaign must be accompanied by an intense use of old-school psychological operations, deception, plus agitation and propaganda. Setting the appropriate context for unraveling the Islamic state is important, but it is equally critical that the prevailing narrative changes decisively from the Islamic State ascendant to the Islamic State unraveling. It is not enough for the caliphate to fall — it must be seen to fall. Only then will the psychological and recruiting advantage held by an established caliphate evaporate — until the next credible contender emerges.

Outcomes

Western powers have been unable to advance any viable alternative to the Islamic State: The Syrian opposition is fundamentally too fragmented to allow a single alternative to emerge, and the forces that have held post-Ottoman Syria together have been completely dissipated. The best that airpower can do under these conditions is to weaken the Islamic State by reducing its ability to provide public services, interdicting materiel and monetary flows, and depriving it of a viable oil and gas industry. A best-case scenario would be a disruption of economic, transport, and production functions in Islamic State-occupied areas so severe that they become ungovernable by any technique available to the Islamic State, including the violent oppression that is its domestic hallmark. The reality is that life in such a chaotic zone is going to be even more dangerous and miserable for the civilian occupants, regardless of the proximity of direct combat. If the Islamic State is induced to collapse, some form of local security apparatus will eventually restore itself, but if so, some form of warlordism is the likely outcome. In some areas, the fall of the Islamic State will allow for the Assad government, with Russian help, to reassert control. In other areas, other rebel, Islamist, jihadist or sectarian forces may be able to establish control. Dissolution of Islamic State territory might also assist the Iraqis in reestablishing control of their own territory as Islamic State outposts die on the vine.

The fall of the caliphate is a worthwhile end unto itself. The loss of caliphate status will remove Baghdadi’s position as caliph, which may be more important over the long term than killing him, an outcome that would necessarily generate a successor. In order to establish a caliphate, jihadists must control territory. In order to cause the Islamic State to collapse, and limit its military threat to Jordan, Turkey and Iraq, we must deprive the Islamic State of the tools for maintaining even limited governance, which necessarily renders that territory ungovernable. In the end, the Islamic State will likely still remain a viable terrorist organization, but it may be possible to constrain it to local operations and reduce its global appeal and reach.

Col. Mike “Starbaby” Pietrucha was an instructor electronic warfare officer in the F-4G Wild Weasel and the F-15E Strike Eagle, amassing 156 combat missions and taking part in 2.5 SAM kills over 10 combat deployments. As an irregular warfare operations officer, Col. Pietrucha has two additional combat deployments in the company of U.S. Army infantry, combat engineer, and military police units in Iraq and Afghanistan. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Air Force or the U.S. government.

Housecarl · Mar 5, 2016

Hummm.......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2016/03/05/revisiting_an_interventionist_doctrine_111745.html

March 5, 2016

Revisiting an Interventionist Doctrine

By Scott Burns
Comments 1

Last year, President Obama announced he would deploy 50 Special Operations troops into Syria to advise and assist local groups who are fighting the Islamic State.

As numerous foreign policy observers have noted, Obama's decision to intervene in Libya helped set the stage for the ongoing chaos in the Middle East. At the time, many pundits supported the president's intervention, justifying their support by invoking what has become known as the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, or R2P.

The R2P doctrine essentially states that governments have a sovereign responsibility to protect their population from abuses of state power such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, and other crimes against humanity. If the government fails in this first task, however, the international community, according to the doctrine, has a responsibility to intervene.

Throughout the post-World War II era, the United States has embraced its self-assigned role to "make the world safe for democracy" in three main ways: through direct military intervention; through indirect interventions, such as by arming rebel groups to help overthrow hostile regimes; and through economic sanctions. The best of intentions may drive these interventions, but in most cases the outcome has been disaster.

Luckily, economics can teach us a few lessons about reformulating the R2P doctrine in a way that maintains its altruistic spirit while at the same time giving policymakers more effective means to help victims of horrendous crimes. Surprisingly, part of the answer lies in loosening immigration quotas for refugees to come into relatively peaceful and developed countries such as the United States, which in the long term can have better results for us and for them.

To his credit, the president did announce that he plans to extend refugee status to 10,000 Syrians in 2016. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, however, have placed these proposals under enormous scrutiny. Even if we concede there might be national security concerns, the economic argument for allowing more refugees and migrants remains quite compelling.

Many Americans would reject expanding immigration out of fear that these immigrants will "steal" American jobs. Yet contrary to popular opinion, many economists have estimated that opening up immigration would actually make most people better off and bake a much larger economic pie. As George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan notes, most immigration studies do not show a long-run decline in American wages due to increased immigration. In fact, since most foreign workers enhance our productivity by doing jobs most Americans won't, most studies show a notable rise in Americans' real earnings.

Many might reasonably worry the influx of refugees would impose a net fiscal burden on our welfare state. Again, the evidence suggests these concerns are vastly overstated. As a Cato Institute study shows, immigrants pay far more taxes than they receive in benefits.

Some argue that loosening immigration is likely to result in a surge in criminal and perhaps even terrorist activity. Indeed, these concerns are what lie behind the fairly substantial support for Donald Trump's proposal to temporarily halt all Muslim immigration to the United States. Yet contra Trump, immigrants are considerably less likely to commit violent crimes or be incarcerated. It's true some might have criminal intent, but it is safe to presume the majority are good, hard-working people.

A final concern is that loosening immigration restrictions would erode American culture and values. Again, evidence of this alleged cultural erosion is incredibly weak. Most of the United States' meccas of culture are filled with immigrants. Moreover, immigrants who choose to come to the United States because of its civil and economic liberties are especially unlikely to wage war on American values either in the streets or in the voting booth.

In the special case of political refugees, there's another important economic argument for liberalizing immigration. Just as allowing open entry and exit in the marketplace introduces competitive pressures on firms to continually innovate, opening borders and allowing refugees to more easily escape the grip of oppressive despots puts enormous pressure on all governments to treat their citizens humanely for fear of losing their most productive ones to foreign competitors.

This wouldn't mark the first time the United States opened up immigration to thousands of refugees from the Levant. During the Lebanese Civil War, millions of Lebanese citizens fled. According to the Arab American Institute, one million Lebanese refugees currently reside in the United States -- roughly one-third of the Arab-American population. These immigrants earn an average annual household income of more than $67,000 -- 25 percent more than the national average.

History clearly shows that the United States has relied on its dominant military power for too long and at too high an ethical and economic cost. It's now time for policymakers to heed the advice of economists who recognize the failures of these coercive policies. They can start by recognizing that Good Samaritan policies are also good economics.

Scott Burns is a third-year Mercatus Center PhD Fellow and economics instructor at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Housecarl · Mar 7, 2016

Sorry folks, dealing with some "meat world stuff", been jumping onto the site with my phone.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/iraq-kurdish-peshmerga-isis-mosul-offensive/

CBS News/ March 7, 2016, 6:26 AM

Bracing for what could be Iraq's bloodiest battle yet

Video

NEAR MOSUL, Iraq -- For more than a year, the Iraqi military and its allies have been talking about and preparing for an operation to try and take back the country's second-largest city from ISIS.

No date has been set for an offensive to retake Mosul, which sits about 250 miles north of Baghdad, on the edge of Iraq's semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.

But Kurdish peshmerga soldiers, who have been the most effective force against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria in northern Iraq, are getting closer.
ISIS bomb kills dozens south of Baghdad
In Mosul, the "most dangerous dam in the world"
Iraqi Kurds rescue Swedish teen from ISIS territory

Just 20 miles from Mosul, CBS News correspondent Holly Williams watched as peshmerga troops opened fire after spotting what they thought were two ISIS gunmen moving toward their post.

View gallery....

It's no wonder they were nervous; the day before Williams and her CBS News team arrived, there was a coordinated ISIS attack on the peshmerga position.

The Kurdish troops fought the extremists back, and said they had killed almost 100 ISIS militants in the process.

With peshmerga troops, Williams crossed into no-man's land to inspect the aftermath.

"That's ISIS over there... in the village about a mile away," one of the soldiers told her as he gestured at the horizon.

Crumpled pieces of a Humvee, blown up by an ISIS suicide bomber, sit by the side of a road. It's one of the group's most heavily-relied upon tactics, and they'll doubtlessly use many more of the explosives-laden vehicles to defend Mosul.

It's thought that ISIS has several thousand fighters in Mosul.

The extremists have stopped civilians leaving the city, which means, effectively, they have more than 1 million human shields.

When ISIS captured Mosul almost two years ago, many people cheered their convoy as it rolled through the streets.

But Gen. Najim al-Jabouri, the Iraqi army commander leading preparations for the Mosul offensive, told CBS News he's counting on the help of civilians.

"I think about 75 or 80 percent of the people in Mosul, they will support us," al-Jabouri predicted.

But that means about 20 percent of the population in the sprawling city could still back ISIS -- and al-Jabouri knows it.

The general told CBS News he expects the battle for Mosul to last several months.

Even that is optimistic, and the recent battle to retake Ramadi left 80 percent of that smaller city destroyed.
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© 2016 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Housecarl · Mar 7, 2016

North Korea threatens pre-emptive nuclear strikes against U.S., South Korea
Started by China Connectioný, Today 04:55 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...tive-nuclear-strikes-against-U.S.-South-Korea

North Korea Launches Ballistic Missile Confirmed
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ea-Launches-Ballistic-Missile-Confirmed/page7

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/6/north-korea-threatens-nuclear-strike-against-us-so/

North Korea threatens pre-emptive nuclear strikes against U.S., South Korea

People watch a TV news program showing North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at Seoul Railway Station on March 3. (Associated Press) more >

By Victor Morton - The Washington Times - Sunday, March 6, 2016

North Korea threatened a pre-emptive nuclear strike against South Korea and the U.S., including the American homeland, over the two nations’ joint military exercises.

In a statement Monday on the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA), Pyongyang said the annual military exercises were a pretext for war, and that the situation on the peninsula had been brought to a boil by last week’s United Nations sanctions against North Korea.

“If the enemies dare kick off even the slightest military action while vociferating about ‘beheading operation’ aimed to remove the supreme headquarters of the DPRK and ‘bring down its social system,’ its army and people will not miss the opportunity but realize the greatest desire of the Korean nation through a sacred war of justice for reunification,” the KCNA dispatch of a military statement said.

The dispatch referred to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

That attack will include nuclear weapons and their use against the U.S. proper, KCNA said in a rambling, florid statement.

“We have a military operation plan of our style to liberate south Korea and strike the U.S. mainland ratified by our dignified supreme headquarters. Pursuant to it, offensive means have been deployed to put major strike targets in the operation theatres of south Korea within the firing range and the powerful nuclear strike means targeting the U.S. imperialist aggressor forces bases in the Asia-Pacific region and the U.S. mainland are always ready to fire,” KCNA said.

KCNA then exulted in the consequences of such a war.

“If we push the buttons to annihilate the enemies even right now, all bases of provocations will be reduced to seas in flames and ashes in a moment and the U.S. imperialists’ nuclear strategic means on which the puppet forces depend as ‘saviors’ turn into piles of scrap iron whether they are in the air, seas and land … The army and people of the DPRK will make the gunfire of provocateurs in the reckless war of aggression sound as a sad dirge,” the North Korean press agency said.

The North also warned that its nuclear strikes will be “indiscriminate” in order to “clearly show those keen on aggression and war the military mettle of Juche Korea.”

In threatening what it called a “preemptive nuclear strike of justice,” KCNA went on its usual rhetorical flourishes about “how the crime-woven history of the U.S. imperialists” have created a country that has “grown corpulent.”

It also referred to South Korea as “the Park Geun Hye group,” saying that the South Korean president’s government is living its “disgraceful remaining days [that] will meet a miserable doom.”

Housecarl · Mar 7, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.theguardian.com/world/20...-recruitment-us-military-exercise-south-korea

North Korea steps up army recruitment ahead of US military exercise

Washington’s biggest ever joint drill with South Korea prompts DPRK to bolster ground forces amid heightened tensions on peninsula. Daily NK reports

Friday 4 March 2016 07.26 EST

North Korea has stepped up army recruitment and called on former soldiers to re-enlist to bolster its ground forces ahead of the traditional joint military exercise between South Korea and the US, according to sources inside the country

Washington and Seoul are scheduled to begin their biggest ever military manoeuvres across the border on 7 March, involving 15,000 US troops – double the number of previous years.

A source from South Pyongan province said a petition opposing the joint South Korean-US exercises has been circulating across the country, with mass meetings organised in the provinces and the capital.

The claims came as DPRK leader Kim Jong-un said his country should be ready to use nuclear weapons “at any time” because of growing threat from its enemies. The statement appeared to be a response to new sanctions imposed by the UN security council after North Korea’s recent nuclear test and rocket launch.

The North Korean source, who cannot be named for security reasons, said the regime had encouraged all youth from secondary school up to university level to sign up, and had proposed that all those under 40 who have been discharged get back in uniform.

A similar call was recently issued by the National Defence Commission, with the provincial military mobilisation units interviewing workers who meet the requirements for re-enlistment. Those selected for service have now been placed on stand-by.

“Only those who have a missing person – or are an inmate at a kyohwaso [re-education camps, which also function as prisons] – among their family members are exempted,” the source said.

Ahead of next week’s the military exercises, Kim told state TV that the regime’s enemies were threatening North Korea’s survival. “At an extreme time when the Americans ... are urging war and disaster on other countries and people, the only way to defend our sovereignty and right to live is to bolster our nuclear capability,” KCNA quoted Kim as saying.

Complaints

The source in South Pyongan said the provincial commissions had been gathering local residents and spreading the message that modern warfare is artillery warfare, and that “every citizen who is a gunner is expected to do their share in fighting the war for reunification”.

But ordinary North Koreans have not all welcomed the mobilisations, the source said. “A lot of people say how unfair it is that ‘rhetoric bombs’, favoured by the authorities in response to the ROK-US joint exercises, only effectively harass the domestic population.”

North Korea’s central news agency has reported that recruitment in response to the call had already reached 1.5 million, but a source in Ryanggang Province said that this did not represent the full reality.

“The nation is swept away by the fervour to join the military. But those who do not respond will be seen as having ideological problems, so who wouldn’t join?” the source said.

“The youth of this country has long said that they would much rather study technology or enter university than join the military, so why [else] would there be this sudden change of heart?”

A version of this article first appeared on Daily NK, which contacts multiple sources inside and outside North Korea to verify information. The Guardian was not able to verify the claims independently

Related:

North Korea fires missile volley into sea after UN ratchets up sanctions

North Korea says it will 'never, ever' be bound by UN human rights resolutions

Housecarl · Mar 7, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://warisboring.com/articles/to-bomb-the-islamic-state-america-sends-in-b-52s/

B-52s Are On Their Way to Blast ISIS

Giant bombers replacing B-1s in the Middle East

March 6, 2016
Joseph Trevithick
Comments 8

The Pentagon has few weapons as iconic and fearsome ¡X not to mention as old ¡X as the B-52 Stratofortress. Now the U.S. Air Force plans to send the bombers to strike the Islamic State.

Air Force Gen. Herbert Carlisle, head of Air Combat Command, made the announcement at the Air Force Association¡¦s annual Air Warfare Symposium on Feb. 26. Lt. Gen. Charles Brown, in charge of the flying branch¡¦s top headquarters for the Middle East, said he would help ¡§bring B-52s to town,¡¨ according to Air Force Magazine.

The eight-engine aircraft will take over from the sleeker B-1 ¡§Bone¡¨ bombers, which halted bombing runs in Iraq and Syria in January. The Air Force pulled the B-1s from Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar to give their crews some much needed rest and to fit important upgrades to the aircraft.

Less than a month after the first air strikes against Islamic State in August 2014, observers spotted the Bones flying missions over Iraq and Syria. In December, the swing-wing jets supported the Iraqi army during an offensive to retake Ramadi.

¡§We¡¦ve got B-1s in this fight, and when we find obstacles that we know we can hit, we¡¦ll strike them from the air as well to try and disable them,¡¨ Pentagon spokesman U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren said in a Dec. 24 interview on CNN. ¡§B-1s are evolving into a very effective close air support platform.¡¨

Despite the symbolism, these warplanes are not engaged in carpet bombing. Since the B-1¡¦s entrance in the war, they¡¦ve dropped precision-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions precisely onto Islamic State positions. When they arrive, the B-52s are likely to fly the same sort of missions.

On May 18, 2015, two B-52Hs conclusively demonstrated their ability to do just that in Jordan. The aircraft flew a non-stop round trip from Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to Wadi Shadiya and back for a training exercise, racking up 30 hours of flying time and traveling 14,000 miles in the process.

During the mission, the bombers dropped strings of JDAMs in a mock attack over a practice range.

Though they might seem smaller than the B-52s, the Bones can carry as much as 75,000 pounds of bombs ¡X more than their 1960s counterparts. Able to fly tens of thousands of feet high, both bombers can easily stay out of range of the Islamic State¡¦s small anti-aircraft guns and short range, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles.

Video

The more vexing problem is coordinating with Iraqi and other friendly troops on the ground. With few American forces in the country, the Pentagon has had a hard time confirming that bombs and missiles are hitting their intended targets.

While safe from enemy fire, bombers flying high in the sky can have difficulty finding their mark. In June 2014, a B-1 accidentally killed five American commandos and an Afghan soldier in Afghanistan. Another Air Force pilot recounted a similar story where another Bone nearly killed a contingent of British troops in 2007.

Of course, the relatively fast-moving pace of aerial combat and the general confusion of battle can still cause problems for low-flying aircraft. On March 13, 2015, two A-10 ground attack planes killed at least four civilians in Iraq after mistakenly assuming they were Islamic State fighters. The Pentagon only investigated the incident after a survivor came forward seeking reimbursement for her destroyed SUV.

Even after the B-1s returned home, the Air Force was still unsure of whether the older B-52s would take their place. ¡§A B-52 deployment is not part of the mix of B-1B substitutes being considered,¡¨ Air Force Lt. Gen. John Raymond, the service¡¦s deputy chief of staff for operations, told Air Force Magazine on Jan. 21.

Despite their age, the B-52s have received significant upgrades for their communications equipment, targeting gear and other systems. Despite being a half-century old, the combat-ready aircraft regularly appear in training exercises around the world.

Housecarl · Mar 7, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/world/africa/attack-tunisia-libya-border.html?_r=0

Africa

Clash at Tunisian Military Barracks Near Libya Kills Dozens

By FARAH SAMTI and DECLAN WALSH
MARCH 7, 2016

TUNIS — Dozens of militants stormed through a town in eastern Tunisia early Monday morning, attacking police and military posts and starting a firefight with security forces that left at least 53 people dead.

The clashes at Ben Gardane, 18 miles from the border with Libya, were the second in the district in a week and came at a time of growing concern that the war in Libya, where the Islamic State has aggressively expanded, was spilling into Tunisia.

The assault started just after 5 a.m. with coordinated attacks on a military barracks, a national guard station and a police station , according to the Defense and Interior Ministries. The confrontation spilled into the streets, where security forces pursued and opened fire on attackers.

Several times the authorities raised the estimated death toll; by midafternoon it stood at 53. The dead included 35 militants, 10 security agents, one soldier and seven civilians.

“On this painful occasion, I would like to address the Tunisian people to say that today there was an attack against our units — military, national guard and security units — in Ben Gardane at 5 a.m.,” President Beji Caid Essebsi said in a televised address. “This is an unprecedented attack. It is well organized and coordinated. The motive behind it is probably to take control over the region, and to announce a new wilayat.”

The wilayat, typically translated as a province or governorate, was part of the administrative structure of the Ottoman Empire, and the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, has used the term to refer to territory it controls.

Mr. Essebsi said that the Tunisian forces had anticipated an attack — though “probably” not one on this scale — and reacted vigilantly.

“Most Tunisians are in a state of war against this recklessness, against these rats,” he said, referring to the Islamic State.

The authorities sealed the border with Libya, set up checkpoints in Ben Gardane and used bullhorns to urge residents to remain indoors as the authorities searched for other attackers.

Although officials did not identify the attackers, this was the first such assault to target a Tunisian military installation, and most suspicions pointed to militants based in Libya as being behind the raid.

Last month, American warplanes killed at least 43 people in an attack on an Islamic State training camp in Sabratha, Libya, 60 miles from the border with Tunisia. The target of that airstrike was a militant commander linked to attacks on Western tourists at a museum and a beach resort in Tunisia last year.

American commanders say such strikes are part of an effort to contain the spread of the Islamic State while the United States and its allies consider a much wider campaign of airstrikes against the group in Libya.

The United States has said that about 6,500 Islamist State fighters are in Libya, many of whom are originally from Tunisia. Although most of the fighters are based along a 150-mile stretch of coastline in northern Libya, others are based in towns like Sabratha, from where they can plot attacks across the region.

In an effort to stop militant infiltration, Tunisia has built a 125-mile-long berm along half of the border with Libya. Still, tensions are rising: On Wednesday, Tunisian soldiers killed five militants in a firefight near Ben Gardane.

After the assault on Monday, the security forces said they had confiscated a large cache of weapons. The security forces also blocked nearby border crossing points at Ras Ajdir and on the island of Djerba, a tourist area that is home to a small population of Tunisian Jews.

In a statement, the Interior Ministry urged locals to remain indoors but assured them the situation was “under control.”

Although militants had never targeted a military installation in Tunisia, 12 people died in a suicide attack on a bus carrying members of the presidential guard in Tunis in November.

Farah Samti reported from Tunis, and Declan Walsh from Cairo.

Related Coverage

Tripoli Journal: Tripoli, a Tense and Listless City With Gunmen and a Well-Stocked Hugo Boss Outlet
MARCH 6, 2016

U.S. Bombing in Libya Reveals Limits of Strategy Against ISIS
FEB. 19, 2016

Jihadists Deepen Collaboration in North Africa
JAN. 1, 2016

Housecarl · Mar 7, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/08/w...=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article

Africa

U.S. Strikes Kill 150 Shabab Fighters in Somalia, Officials Say

By HELENE COOPER
MARCH 7, 2016

WASHINGTON — American warplanes on Saturday struck a training camp in Somalia belonging to the Islamist militant group the Shabab, the Pentagon said, killing about 150 fighters who United States officials said were preparing an attack against American troops and their regional allies in East Africa.

The strikes at a training facility in Rasa, about 120 miles north of Mogadishu, came as the Shabab fighters were nearing the end of “training for a large-scale attack” on forces belonging to the African Union in Somalia, officials said.

They were bombed during what United States officials said they believed was a graduation ceremony, and the warplanes dropped a number of precision-guided bombs and missiles on them. “They were standing outdoors in formation,” one official said.

The United States has a number of Special Operations forces in Somalia, and Defense Department officials said they were also believed to have been targets of the planned attacks.

The Shabab fighters killed in the strikes were “nearing the completion of the end of their training,” said Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman. He said the strikes “will degrade Al Shabab’s ability” to attack its neighbors and the West.

The latest strikes come as East Africa analysts say that the Shabab, the group responsible for the 2013 attack on the Westgate mall in Kenya, is making a comeback after American strikes killed the group’s top leadership in 2014. Last month, the Shabab claimed responsibility for an attack on a popular hotel and a public garden in Mogadishu that killed 10 people and injured more than 25 others.

In the past two months, Shabab militants have killed more than 150 people, including Kenyan soldiers stationed at a remote desert outpost and beachcombers in Mogadishu. In addition, the group has claimed responsibility for a bomb placed aboard a Somali jetliner that tore a hole through the fuselage.

Pentagon officials would not say how they knew that the Shabab fighters killed on Saturday were training for an attack on United States and African Union forces, but the militant group is believed to be under heavy American surveillance.

Some experts say that the Shabab, an Al Qaeda affiliate, is in a competition with the Islamic State to show that it has not been eclipsed.

Follow The New York Times’s politics and Washington coverage on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the First Draft politics newsletter.

Related Coverage

Shabab Militants Claim Deadly Attack on Hotel in Somalia
FEB. 26, 2016

Twin Suicide Bombings Kill at Least 20 as Shabab Violence Intensifies in Somalia FEB. 28, 2016

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Housecarl · Mar 7, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...e6019d-5f04-4277-9b41-e02fc1c2e801_story.html

In drills, U.S., South Korea practice striking North’s nuclear plants, leaders

By Anna Fifield
March 7 at 3:17 AM
Comments 290

TOKYO — The United States and South Korea kicked off major military exercises on Monday, including rehearsals of surgical strikes on North Korea’s main nuclear and missile facilities and “decapitation raids” by special forces targeting the North’s leadership.

The drills always elicit an angry response from Pyongyang, but Monday’s statement was particularly ferocious, accusing the United States and South Korea of planning a “beheading operation” aimed at removing Kim Jong Un’s regime. The North Korean army and people “will take military counteraction for preemptive attack so that they may deal merciless deadly blows at the enemies,” the North’s powerful National Defense Commission said in a statement.

[U.N. adopts sweeping new sanctions on North Korea]

The exercises come at a particularly tense time, with the international community — especially the United States and South Korea — looking to punish Pyongyang for its recent nuclear test and missile launch. The United Nations last week imposed its toughest sanctions yet on the North, and South Korean President Park Geun-hye is expected to unveil further, unilateral sanctions on Tuesday.

About 17,000 American forces and 300,000 South Korean personnel — a one-third increase from last spring’s drills — will take part in 11 days of computer-simulated training and eight weeks of field exercises, which will involve ground, air, naval and special operations services.

Video

The exercises will revolve around a wartime plan, OPLAN 5015, adopted by South Korea and the United States last year. The plan has not been made public but, according to reports in the South Korean media, includes a contingency for surgical strikes against the North’s nuclear weapons and missile facilities, as well as “decapitation” raids to take out North Korea’s leaders. The JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported that Kim Jong Un would be among them.

[Punishing North Korea: A rundown on current sanctions]

The joint forces will also run through their new “4D” operational plan, which details the allies’ preemptive military operations to detect, disrupt, destroy and defend against North Korea’s nuclear and missile arsenal, the Yonhap News Agency reported. “The focus of the exercises will be on hitting North Korea’s key facilities precisely,” a military official told the wire service.

Christopher Bush, a spokesman for U.S. Forces Korea, declined to comment on the reports. “Alliance operational plans are classified, and we aren’t authorized to discuss them for operations security reasons,” he said.

USFK said in a statement that it had informed the North’s Korean People’s Army — through the U.N. Command, which controls the demilitarized zone between the two Koreas — about the exercise dates and “the non-provocative nature of this training.”

But North Korea apparently did not see it this way.

“We have a military operation plan of our style to liberate south Korea and strike the U.S. mainland ratified by our dignified supreme headquarters,” the North’s National Defense Commission said in its statement, carried by the official Korean Central News Agency.

It said it had deployed “offensive means” to strike South Korea and “U.S. imperialist aggressor forces bases in the Asia-Pacific region and the U.S. mainland.”

“If we push the buttons to annihilate the enemies even right now, all bases of provocations will be reduced to seas in flames and ashes in a moment,” the commission said.

North Korea is particularly sensitive to suggestions of attacks on Kim — as the furor surrounding the 2014 Hollywood film “The Interview” showed — and it has a habit of making threats on which it cannot follow through.

Last week, Kim ordered his military to be ready to use its nuclear weapons at any time, saying they were needed, given the “ferocious hostility” of new “gangster-like” sanctions imposed on Pyongyang.

[When it comes to punishing North Korea, it’s Groundhog Day]

The threats issued Monday were “absolutely not credible,” said Daniel Pinkston, a former Korean linguist with the U.S. Air Force who teaches at Troy University’s campus in Seoul.

“They would trigger everything North Korea wants to avoid, which is their absolute destruction in retaliatory attacks,” Pinkston said. “Second, if you are going to launch an attack against a much stronger adversary, why would you telegraph that? You’d want the element of surprise.”

Much of North Korea’s rhetoric is for domestic consumption, as Kim tries to burnish his leadership credentials ahead of a much-anticipated Workers’ Party congress in May, the first in 36 years.

Kim, however, has shown himself willing to use the means available to him to express his anger. Last year, during a period of increased tensions with South Korea, he ordered his military onto a war footing, sending army units to the demilitarized zone and submarines out of port.

South Korea and the United States said they will increase monitoring of North Korea during the exercises.

“We will carry out these exercises while keeping tabs on signs of North Korean provocations,” a South Korean official told reporters. “If the North provokes us during this exercise, the U.S. and our troops will retaliate with an attack ten-fold stronger.”

About 28,500 American troops are stationed in South Korea, the result of an security alliance formed during the Korean War.

Read more:

In latest outburst, North Korea’s Kim orders nuclear weapons at the ready

North Korea fires projectiles into sea after U.N. passes new sanctions

U-Va. student held in North Korea ‘confesses’ to ‘severe’ crime

Today's coverage from Post correspondents around the world

Anna Fifield is The Post’s bureau chief in Tokyo, focusing on Japan and the Koreas. She previously reported for the Financial Times from Washington DC, Seoul, Sydney, London and from across the Middle East.

Housecarl · Mar 7, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-nuclear-usa-idUSKCN0W928S

Politics | Mon Mar 7, 2016 3:10pm EST
Related: World, Election 2016, Politics, United Nations

U.S. takes North Korea nuclear threats seriously: State Department

WASHINGTON

The U.S. State Department said on Monday the United States took North Korean threats to use nuclear weapons seriously and urged Pyongyang to halt its provocations, including testing nuclear devices and long-range rockets.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un ordered his country last week to be prepared to use nuclear weapons at any time and to be ready to carry out a pre-emptive attack, state media reported.

His comments came as U.S. and South Korean forces conducted annual military exercises amid heightened tensions on the peninsula following the North's recent nuclear and missile tests, which prompted the United Nations to impose new sanctions on Pyongyang.

"We certainly do take those kinds of threats seriously ... and again call on Pyongyang to cease with the provocative rhetoric, cease with the threats and quite frankly, more critically, cease with the provocative behavior, the actual conduct, that has led to yet another round of international sanctions," State Department spokesman John Kirby said.

(Reporting by Arshad Mohammed and David Alexander; Editing by Eric Beech)

Nowski · Mar 7, 2016

Thank you Housecarl for this incredible thread.

Got a lot of reading now, to catch up on. The entire world, is a powder house,
with spilled powder, flowing from the many burst powder kegs. Just one small flame,
from a dropped match, would blow everything to smithereens. That is how I look
at the world now.

God help us.

Regards to all,
Nowski

Housecarl · Mar 9, 2016

Was out and about as well as "out" yesterday....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.realcleardefense.com/art...rica_says_libya_is_a_failed_state_109124.html

March 9, 2016

U.S. Commander in Africa Says Libya Is a Failed State

By Richard Lardner

WASHINGTON (AP) — Libya is a failed state, according to the top U.S. general in Africa, who said that foreign fighters, weapons and illegal migrants are flowing through the oil-rich North African country, supplying the conflicts in Syria and Iraq with combatants and threatening U.S. allies.

In testimony Tuesday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Army Gen. David Rodriguez said the recent agreement to form a unity government in Tripoli is an important step. Yet even with strong international support, the new government will struggle for the "foreseeable future" to establish its authority and secure Libya's people and borders, he said.

Rodriguez estimated that it would take "10 years or so" to achieve long-term stability in Libya. He cited a "fractured society" and the lack of government institutions as major hurdles to overcome.

"The continued absence of central government control will continue to perpetuate violence, instability and allow the conditions for violent extremist organizations to flourish until the (government) and appropriate security forces are operational within Libya," Rodriguez told the committee.

Rodriguez's assessment comes nearly two weeks after Secretary of State John Kerry stopped short of declaring Libya as failed, citing the selection of a prime minister-designate to lead the new government.

"It's close," Kerry said last month during testimony before a Senate Appropriations subcommittee. "If they cannot get themselves together, yes, it will be a failed state."

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., asked Rodriguez to quantify how much of Libya is under the control of extremist groups. Rodriguez replied that the Islamic State group controls the area in and around its stronghold city of Sirte.

The Islamic State has been recruiting militants from abroad into Libya in an effort to exploit years of chaos and expand its foothold there.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said the Islamic State now commands 5,000 fighters in Libya.

Housecarl · Mar 9, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/8/obama-pressed-respond-iranian-missile-tests/

Lawmakers press Obama to punish Iran after new ballistic missile tests

By Dave Boyer - The Washington Times - Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Comments 33

Lawmakers in both parties demanded the Obama administration hold Iran accountable Tuesday for a series of new ballistic missile tests in apparent violation of a U.N. resolution, while Iran threatened to back out of its nuclear accord with the U.S. and other world powers if the West imposes fresh sanctions.

Critics say the missile tests, while not a direct violation of the nuclear pact, make a mockery of President Obama’s argument that dealing directly with Tehran would help moderate the Islamic republic’s aggressive policies elsewhere in the region.

“While international sanctions against Iran are being lifted, Iran fired ballistic missiles in violation of international resolutions yet again,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, California Republican. “Time and again, Iran has violated international agreements only to have the Obama administration bat its eyes and look the other way.”

Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, which sees itself as a hard-line defender of the 1979 revolution, conducted multiple ballistic missile tests Tuesday in what officials said was a display of “deterrent power,” defying U.S. sanctions imposed earlier this year aimed at disrupting the missile program.

State media announced that short-, medium- and long-range precision guided missiles were fired from several sites to show the country’s “all-out readiness to confront threats” against its territorial integrity. State television showed a missile being fired from a fortified underground silo at nighttime.

While the country has made some moves to dismantle parts of its once-secret nuclear operations, Iranian leaders insist that they will walk away from the nuclear deal — which also provides tens of billions of dollars in relief from biting economic and financial sanctions — if the U.S. and other global powers fail to advance the Islamic Republic’s “national interests.”

Brigadier Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp’s aerospace arm, said sanctions would not stop Iran developing its ballistic missiles, which it regards as a cornerstone of its conventional deterrent.

“Our main enemies are imposing new sanctions on Iran to weaken our missile capabilities. … But they should know that the children of the Iranian nation in the Revolutionary Guards and other armed forces refuse to bow to their excessive demands,” the IRGC’s website quoted Gen. Hajizadeh as saying.

Iran’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, said if Iran’s interests are not met under the nuclear deal, “there will be no reason for us to continue.”

“If other parties decide, they could easily violate the deal,” Mr. Araqchi told Iran’s state-controlled media. “However, they know this will come with costs.”

Mr. Araqchi appeared to be referring to the possibility of the U.S. imposing new economic sanctions as a result of the missile test. The Obama administration hit Iran with fresh sanctions in January after missile tests, 24 hours after separate sanctions related to Tehran’s nuclear activities had been lifted under the landmark deal with the U.S. and its partners — Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia.

Pictures of the new launches were broadcast and reports said the armaments used had ranges of 190 miles, 300 miles, 480 miles and 1,200 miles.

White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Tuesday that the missile testing “is not a violation of the nuclear agreement” with the U.S., although he said the testing may have violated a U.N. Security Council Resolution.

“We’re still reviewing the launch … to determine what the appropriate response is,” Mr. Earnest said.

Under U.N. Security Council Resolution 2231, Iran is prohibited from testing ballistic missiles “designed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.”

Exploiting loopholes

Blaise Misztal, national security director at the Bipartisan Policy Center, said whether the Qiam-1 missile tested Tuesday qualifies as “nuclear-capable” is “a semantic issue that Iran’s lawyers will argue vehemently about, demonstrating Iran’s strategy of finding and exploiting loopholes in international agreements.”

“Iran’s test of the Qiam-1 short-range ballistic missile is problematic not only because of its potential violation of international sanctions, but also for what it signals about Iran’s regional ambitions,” Mr. Misztal said. The largely Shiite Muslim Iran is locked in a regional battle for influence against Sunni Arab states led by Saudi Arabia.

He said Iran had not conducted any development work on the missile since 2010, and the range of about 420 miles “makes the Qiam-1 an effective tool for threatening [the] U.S. and allied forces in the Persian Gulf as well as the military and energy infrastructure of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries.”

“This test is surely intended by Tehran as saber-rattling in its escalating confrontation with Riyadh and, therefore, a signal of its continued determination to destabilize the region,” he said.

Just two weeks ago, Secretary of State John F. Kerry told Congress that a new Iranian missile could lead the White House to impose fresh sanctions against Tehran.

“We’ve already let them know how disappointed we are,” Mr. Kerry told lawmakers, citing Iranian missile tests carried out in October and November — shortly after reaching last summer’s historic nuclear deal.

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said Tuesday that Washington would review the incident and, if it is confirmed, raise it in the U.N. Security Council and press for an “appropriate response.”

“We also continue to aggressively apply our unilateral tools to counter threats from Iran’s missile program,” Mr. Toner added, in a possible reference to additional sanctions.

Deep divisions also exist within Iran between hard-liners who opposed the nuclear negotiations and more moderate elements close to President Hassan Rouhani, who argued a deal would ease Iran’s economic and diplomatic isolation and free up billions of dollars for the government. The nuclear deal got a boost last month when Mr. Rouhani and his allies scored well in elections to parliament and other key governmental bodies.

Still, U.S. lawmakers on Tuesday pressed for a more robust response from the administration over the provocative new missile tests.

“The administration’s response to Iran’s new salvo of threatening missile tests in violation of international law cannot once again be, [Iran is] ‘not supposed to be doing that,’” Sen. Mark Kirk, Illinois Republican, said in a statement. “Now is the time for new crippling sanctions against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Ministry of Defense, Aerospace Industries Organization, and other related entities driving the Iranian ballistic missile program.”

Cardin critical

Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee and one of three Senate Democrats to oppose Mr. Obama’s nuclear deal, said he was “deeply concerned by Iran’s repetitive disregard of and indifference” to U.N. resolutions barring missile tests.

“The administration should act swiftly to raise these concerns at the United Nations and take action to hold all parties involved responsible for their actions, including, if necessary, through unilateral action,” Mr. Cardin said.

Mr. McCarthy said the administration’s nuclear deal with Tehran “is enabling Iran’s aggression and terrorist activities.”

“Sanctions relief is fueling Iran’s proxies from Yemen to Iraq to Syria to Lebanon,” he said. “Meanwhile, [Iranian Supreme Leader Ali] Khamenei and the Iranian regime are acting with impunity because they know President Obama will not hold them accountable and risk the public destruction of his nuclear deal, the cornerstone of the president’s foreign policy legacy.”

“The president must hold Iran accountable in a meaningful way for its violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions,” he said.

The nuclear accord appears to be holding, but even here, Russia and the U.S. are divided on how well the U.N. atomic agency is reporting on whether Tehran is meeting its commitments. Western nations want more details while Moscow opposes their push.

Because the U.S. and its five negotiating partners want to avoid conflicts that could complicate Iranian compliance with a deal that was years in the making, their differences are mostly playing out behind the scenes.

Vladimir Voronkov, Moscow’s chief delegate to the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, which is monitoring the deal, acknowledges there is a dispute that could affect the amount of information made public about Iran’s nuclear program in the future.

“In our view, it’s an absolutely balanced document,” Mr. Voronkov said ahead of a discussion of the latest IAEA report on Iran by the agency’s 35-nation board rescheduled to Wednesday from Tuesday. “But some of our colleagues would like to have more details.”

⦁ This article is based in part on wire service reports.

Housecarl · Mar 9, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://freebeacon.com/national-secu...e-heats-up-as-u-s-builds-high-speed-missiles/

Hypersonic Arms Race Heats Up as U.S. Builds High-Speed Missiles

New hypersonic platforms to counter Chinese, Russian efforts

BY: Bill Gertz
March 8, 2016 5:00 am

Defense Secretary Ash Carter disclosed last week that the Pentagon’s new high-technology weapons to deal with threats from China and Russia will include ultra-high speed missiles.

Carter revealed during a speech in California that part of the $71.8 billion for weapons research and development this year will fund “new hypersonic missiles that can fly over five times the speed of sound.”

Days earlier, the general in charge of Air Force weapons research, Maj. Gen. Thomas Masiello, revealed that two technology prototypes of hypersonic strike weapons, a scramjet powered cruise missile and a hypersonic glider, could be ready in four years.

“We’re looking for more singles, base hits, versus trying to go for a home run,” Masiello said of hypersonic missile development during a conference Feb. 26. The effort will build on several tests in recent years of a Boeing X-51 scramjet hypersonic missile.

The X-51 had one successful flight out of three tests and reached speeds of over Mach 5, or 3,836 miles per hour.

An Army hypersonic missile test designed to glide to its target after launch on a booster rocket blew up shortly after launch in August 2014. That missile concept is part of the Pentagon’s “prompt global strike” program that will receive $181 million this year.

Masiello said past X-51 tests should not prompt an end to hypersonic arms development. “You have to build an environment that allows failure because if you don’t you’re not going to be pushing the boundaries of technology,” he said.

One problem with the X-51 missile was trouble igniting its engine at very high speed. A second test failure was caused by a broken fin.

Carter’s comments last week were the first by the defense secretary on hypersonic missiles under development by the Defense Advanced Research Agency, the Air Force, and the Army.

Hypersonic weapons represent cutting edge of technology, and the missiles are designed to travel in the border between air and space at speeds of between Mach 5 and Mach 10, or between 3,836 miles per hour and 7,672 miles per hour.

The weapons present difficult engineering challenges because of problems associated with flight at ultra high speeds, including controlling maneuverability and overcoming high heat caused by friction.

The commander of the U.S. Strategic Command said in January that China’s six successful flight tests of a hypersonic glide vehicle that can deliver nuclear or conventional warheads were part of a worrying arms buildup by Beijing.

China’s DF-ZF hypersonic glider is a high priority arms program and China’s answer to defeating advanced air and missile defenses that are increasingly being deployed around the world.

Russia also is developing hypersonic missiles that are a high priority element of Moscow’s large-scale buildup of nuclear and conventional forces.

Russian officials have said hypersonic missiles will be used to defeat U.S. missile defenses. Last month, state-run Russian press reports revealed that Moscow plans to deploy hypersonic anti-ship cruise missiles on new warships.

The Pentagon budget request for what DARPA and the Air Force call the Hypersonic Air-breathing Weapon Concept is $49.5 million, up from $13.5 million last year.

The program will “develop and demonstrate technologies to enable transformational changes in responsive, long-range strike against time-critical or heavily defended targets,” the budget report says, adding that the goal is to develop a scramjet-powered air launched hypersonic cruise missile based on the X-51.

Another $22.8 million is being spent on a short-range “tactical boost glide” hypersonic missile, launched from aircraft and ships. The funding for the boost glider this year was doubled from last year’s budget.

A report made public last week by the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies urged the Pentagon to rapidly build hypersonic weapons.

“Hypersonics — flight at five times the speed of sound (3,600 mph and above) — promises to revolutionize military affairs in the same fashion that stealth did a generation ago, and the turbojet engine did a generation before,” the report says. “By fundamentally redefining the technical means of power projection, the US can circumvent challenges facing the present force.”

The advanced ultra high-speed missiles can be launched from aircraft, ground-launchers, ships, and submarines.

“Hypersonic weapons offer advantage in four broad areas for U.S. combat forces,” the report states. “They can project striking power at range without falling victim to increasingly sophisticated defenses; they compress the shooter-to-target window, and open new engagement opportunities; they rise to the challenge of addressing numerous types of strikes; and they enhance future joint and combined operations.”

The report urged rapid development and fielding of the missiles, along with creating a cadre of professional hypersonic technicians and a support infrastructure, including test facilities.

On Chinese and Russian hypersonic threats, the report said: “The U.S. cannot afford to lose this emerging competition. An opponent who could field modern hypersonic weapons could hold any attacking force at great risk, on land, at sea, and in the air. There are few effective defenses to this capability.”

Masiello, the Air Force research director, said hypersonic weapons deployed by 2030 could include intelligence-gathering or even manned systems, although he noted that current designs are “extremely technically hard to develop.”

Among the concepts for hypersonic missiles are a cruise missile carried on a B-52 and future variants that could be used for high-speed intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, and one for conducting electronic attacks, Masiello said.

A reusable hypersonic missile also is being studied and future versions could include manned systems. “We don’t have a huge investment in this as the first priority is the weapon,” Masiello said.

Mark Lewis, director of the federally funded Institute for Defense Analysis’ Science and Technology Policy Institute, and a former chief scientist for the Air Force, said China’s hypersonic arms have received “a lot of publicity.”

The Chinese “haven’t been bashful about some of the things they have been doing,” Lewis said during same Air Force Association conference last month with Masiello. “At the classified level the work they are doing is far more extensive,” Lewis noted, without providing details.

China’s six hypersonic glide vehicle tests were first reported by the Washington Free Beacon.

Lewis said Russia also is working on hypersonic missiles. “They’re cash strapped but they still have tremendous expertise and a strong commitment,” he said.

Others states working on the high-speed missiles include India and France.

Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, dean of the Mitchell Institute, said hypersonic weapons are needed to fill gaps in U.S. weapons shortfalls. Foreign hypersonic weapons also threaten all elements of military’s “kill chain” used in war fighting, he said.

He added that hypersonic weapons are needed against hardened nuclear facilities, mobile missiles or other targets defended by high-technology air and missile defenses.

“It’s well past time for the U.S. military to get serious about developing hypersonic munitions,” Deptula said.

Deptula said few people know China has carried out six tests of its hypersonic glider in the last two years. “Why do you think they’re dong that?” he asked. “It’s because hypersonic weapons can attack every element of the kill chain — and they can do it with relative impunity.”

The kill chain is a military term for the process of finding, tracking, targeting, and engaging targets involving a complex network of sensors, radar, and other high-technology systems.

Deptula said the Soviet’s launch of the first Sputnik satellite was embarrassing but did not pose a threat to U.S. security. “Potential adversaries with a hypersonic advantage will create a loss of U.S. advantage,” he said. “And that’s why we can’t afford to continue treating hypersonics as a science fair project. It’s time to stop being a follower in hypersonics, and start being a leader.”

According to the Mitchell Institute report, in addition to countering air and missile defenses, ultra high-speed missiles offer “unprecedented rapid reach.”

“At over a mile per second or even faster, a hypersonic missile is, at a minimum, six times swifter than a conventional cruise missile,” the report said. “This enables a more effective intelligence and targeting cycle when dealing with targets that previously could not be held at risk for long, due to weapons constraints.”

A hypersonic missile also could reach a target 1,000 miles away in 17 minutes or less.
“Hypersonic warfare is, in effect, time warfare,” the report said. “A hypersonic weapon compresses a foe’s decision-making window, effectively enabling the hypersonic attacker to get inside an adversary’s command, control, and battle management cycle.”

Video

Housecarl · Mar 9, 2016

Russia’s heavy aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, could be sent to the Mediterranean
Started by China Connection‎, Yesterday 10:58 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-Kuznetsov-could-be-sent-to-the-Mediterranean

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.realcleardefense.com/art...ies_of_the_so-called_russia_reset_109114.html

March 7, 2016

Realities of the So-Called "Russia Reset"

By Senator David Perdue

Seven years ago today, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton presented Russia Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov a plastic, red “reset” button. A centerpiece of President Obama’s foreign policy, the so-called reset was intended to symbolize a more open and constructive dialogue.

Instead, where President Obama saw an open hand for cooperation — naively overlooking the true nature of Russia’s regime — Moscow saw weakness to be exploited. Since then, a continued lack of American decisiveness and leadership on the world stage has invited Russian aggression and adventurism from the Arctic to Europe to the Middle East.

Russia’s aim — becoming a power broker in the Middle East while simultaneously destabilizing Europe — is clear.

Time after time, Moscow’s adversarial approach has manifested itself over the last seven years. Russia has consistently acted to stoke tensions around the globe.

We saw it in their annexation of Crimea in 2014. We see it in their continued support of separatists in Ukraine. We see it in their repeated violations of Turkish airspace and their alliance with the Assad regime in Syria. We see it in the Republic of Georgia, where after a 2008 invasion Russia still clings to roughly one-fifth of Georgia’s territory. We also see it in the development of both a new large naval and air base, which combined with their bases in Crimea, Kaliningrad, and Murmansk reveal Putin’s aggressive strategy to put pressure on fragile Eastern European democracies.

At the Munich Security Conference, Commander of U.S. European Command, General Philip Breedlove told us, “Russia and the Assad regime are deliberately weaponizing migration from Syria in an attempt to overwhelm European structures and break European resolve.” Russia’s indiscriminate air attacks in Syria and its support of Assad are creating a fresh, destabilizing flood of refugees headed for Europe. Forcing the flow of migrants into Europe fits into Russia’s goal of using nonmilitary means to create divisions in the NATO alliance and the European Union.

The increased refugee levels have heightened economic tensions and discord among the European Union. As European resources are squeezed, support for costly EU sanctions on Russia is fragmenting. At the same time, Russia has aided the rise of extremist, isolationist, and protectionist parties in Europe through subversive support to parties and through widespread propaganda efforts.

Russia’s aim — becoming a power broker in the Middle East while simultaneously destabilizing Europe — is clear.

Despite all of this, Secretary Clinton still said in 2014 that “the reset worked.” Concurrently, the Obama administration has been unwilling to fully recognize Russia’s part in the global security crisis confronting us today.

We need to chart a new course for U.S.-Russia relations.

General Breedlove recently said, “Russia has chosen to be an adversary and poses a long-term, existential threat to the U.S. and to our European allies and partners.”

I agree with him. We are in a moment of crisis and President Obama has created an atmosphere in which our allies don’t trust us and our enemies don’t fear us.

The Obama administration’s so-called “reset” with Russia has failed, and in fact, seven years later, the world is much more dangerous. We need to chart a new course for U.S.-Russia relations.

At the very least, the Obama administration should work to keep the European coalition united in continued punitive measures on Russia for its aggression. Several European officials have visited Moscow recently and expressed their desire to withdraw the Crimea-related sectoral sanctions on Russia later this summer, without Russia abiding by the Minsk terms for their renewal. This would be a grave mistake.

We should be encouraging our European partners to renew sanctions on Russia. Any loosening of the sanctions regime against Russia would send a dangerous message at a time when Putin has refused to change his policies toward Ukraine and threatens others in the region.

Further, history has proven that peace through strength is an effective tactic, and the Obama administration cannot ignore this lesson, especially when dealing with Putin’s Russia.

Unfortunately, President Obama continues to cut back the size of our military against the advice of our military leaders.

We must ensure that our military is sufficient in size and equipped with the tools needed to take on any confrontation that may arise. But, we cannot adequately do this until Washington gets serious about tackling our nation’s $19 trillion debt, which continues to undermine our ability to respond to the global security crisis we face today.

This article originally appeared at The Medium.

Housecarl · Mar 9, 2016

Today's photo: Front page of North Korea's official daily newspaper
Started by mzkitty‎, 03-03-2016 08:21 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...age-of-North-Korea-s-official-daily-newspaper

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://38north.org/2016/03/jlewis030716/

More Rockets in Kim Jong Un’s Pockets: North Korea Tests A New Artillery System

By Jeffrey Lewis
07 March 2016

On Friday, March 4, North Korea showed off a new “large-caliber” artillery rocket system.

In this context, large-caliber probably means between 300-400 mm. North Korea appears to have tested the system from its coastal test range at Wonsan, with the projectiles flying about 150 km.

Although Kim Jong Un watched a number of tests of different kinds of conventional warheads, the North Korean statement on the weapon described the system as one of a series of new strike capabilities under development. It also talks about the importance of increasing the quantity and quality of North Korea’s nuclear weapons, implying—but not asserting directly—the system might eventually be nuclear armed.

What Is The New System?

There have been a number of press reports in recent years about North Korea’s development of a new, large-caliber artillery weapon.

The pictures released in North Korea’s Rodong Sinmun—24 in total—reveal a number of details. The launch vehicle itself appears to be Chinese. Its cab is a perfect match for a 122 mm rocket artillery system produced by Sichuan Aerospace in China. The same vehicle appeared in an October 2015 parade honoring the 70th Anniversary of the Workers’ Party of Korea, carrying smaller artillery tubes, but did not attract notice at the time.

The Chinese system was first shown at a defense exhibition in November 2006, which suggests it may have been exported after that date and may represent a violation of UN sanctions. As of October 2006, UN Security Council Resolution 1718 prohibited the export to North Korea of most kinds of conventional weapons, including large-caliber artillery systems (defined as greater than 100 mm). In 2009, UNSCR 1874 widened the ban to cover all arms exports. The cab and chassis appear to be marketed for commercial uses, raising the possibility that China will deny it knew the end use of the trucks as it did with the launch vehicle for the KN-08 road mobile ICBM in 2012.[1] The UN Panel of Experts will have to seek clarification regarding what precisely China exported to North Korea and when.

Each launcher carries eight rockets. Although North Korea describes them only as “large-caliber,” they appear similar to other rockets such as Russia’s Bm-30, Pakistan’s Hatf-9 (Nasr), and China’s SY-300, which would suggest a size of about 300-400 mm in diameter. This is not to say that any of these rockets are identical, merely that they appear similar in design.

Finally, the launch appears to have occurred out of Wonsan, at the test site we geolocated in 2014, with the rockets hitting a target on an uninhabited islet about 150 km away. This would be consistent with the upper-end of range estimates for large-caliber artillery rockets.

Image Gallery

What Does It Mean?

North Korea’s announcement emphasized the importance of developing a range of strike options to hold targets in South Korea at risk.

Longer-range artillery allows North Korea to deploy the new systems out of range of South Korean and US artillery rockets, reducing their vulnerability to counter-battery fire. One often hears that North Korea’s artillery could easily destroy Seoul, but more careful estimates of the number, type and deployment of existing North Korean artillery suggests that the US and ROK artillery fire would quickly silence North Korea’s existing artillery forces. Longer-range North Korean artillery may restore some of this threat.

Rocket artillery is also difficult to address with missile defenses, both because of the low-engagement altitudes and the potential volume of fire. In response to the most recent North Korea space launch, Seoul announced that it was negotiating the deployment of US Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile defenses in Korea. While systems like THAAD would provide an additional layer of defense against Scud ballistic missiles, they would provide no capability to defend Seoul against North Korea’s rocket artillery.

In recent years, South Korea has tested new ballistic and cruise missiles with precision-strike and earth-penetrating capabilities—developments that have alarmed the North Korean leadership. In turn, the North Koreans have accused South Korea and the US of pursuing a strategy of “beheading,” which we would normally call a “decapitation strike.” The presence of long-range artillery that is relatively safe from counterbattery fire and not liable to be intercepted by missile defenses may help restore confidence in North Korea that it can hold targets in Seoul at risk during a crisis.

Is It Nuclear-Armed?

The North Korean statement only hints at the possibility the system will be nuclear-armed, but it is perhaps worth considering the plausibility of the idea and its potential implications.

It is unclear whether North Korea can develop a nuclear warhead small enough for the new artillery system. Pyongyang has conducted four nuclear tests, but it is generally thought that the purpose of these tests has been to develop an implosion-type device that weighs a few hundred kilograms. Such a warhead would probably be about 60 centimeters in diameter and thus too large for the new artillery system.

Pakistan has asserted that it deploys small nuclear weapons for the Hatf-9 (Nasr) artillery system. The Nasr, according to some estimates, is approximately 360 mm in diameter. That would allow only for a relatively small nuclear weapon. Based on design information that appeared in the public domain following the collapse in 2002 of the nuclear smuggling network run by A.Q. Khan—the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb—many analysts think the most modern Pakistani design is approximately 60 centimeters in diameter. If the Nasr has a nuclear warhead, it must be considerably smaller.

One possibility is that Pakistan or North Korea might attempt to develop an artillery shell similar to early US nuclear artillery projectiles such as the W-9 shell, which was 280 mm in diameter. The W-9 was a gun-type device that used uranium. There is no evidence to suggest that Pakistan or North Korea have developed such a device, although it would be technically feasible.

North Korea might choose to build nuclear-armed artillery for a number of reasons. Nuclear-armed artillery would pose a serious threat to Seoul that would be difficult for the United States and South Korea to completely eliminate. And North Korea, like Pakistan, might see nuclear artillery rockets as a possible way to compensate for its conventional inferiority, particularly if US and South Korean armored units were racing northward.

Nuclear-armed artillery would pose real stability challenges for the Korean Peninsula. North Korea may view nuclear-armed artillery as an effective deterrent to South Korean military action, particularly to South Korean threats to decapitate the North Korean leadership. But this deterrence may come at a cost. The decision in the United States to deploy nuclear-armed artillery was accompanied by a decision to pre-delegate the authority to use nuclear weapons to commanders in the field. The possibility that conventional war might escalate to a nuclear war, and that the decision might not be fully under the control of North Korea’s leadership, is what Thomas Schelling termed “the threat that leaves something to chance.” This also, however, creates the prospect of inadvertent to uncontrollable escalation.

Moreover, South Korea’s leaders may be more alarmed than deterred by such a threat. Seoul might reasonably conclude that the possibility of inadvertent escalation is yet one more reason in a crisis to attempt to decapitate the North Korean leadership in the hope that lower-level North Korean commanders would not use nuclear weapons. Although the point of pre-delegating nuclear use to local commanders would be to create a sort of “dead hand” that will retaliate even after the Kim family is gone, South Korean leaders might gamble that the will of the North Korean army will dissipate without the Kims in charge.

Conclusion

The appearance of a new long-range artillery system that is specifically linked to North Korean fears about decapitation strikes deserves our attention, even if the possibility of nuclear armament is only hinted at.

Over the past few years, both North and South Korea have invested in new artillery and missile systems in what is clearly an action-reaction cycle. The development of these capabilities has been described in terms of doctrines in both countries that raise questions about whether future crises on the peninsula will be stable.

The new system is a wake-up call that stability on the Korean peninsula is not something that will happen naturally. The bottom line is that far more attention needs to be paid to North Korea’s evolving nuclear doctrine, on the one hand, and South Korea’s development of conventional doctrines that involve preemption and decapitation on the other.

Jeffrey Lewis is Director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Program at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS), Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, and a frequent contributor to 38 North.

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[1] At the April 15, 2012 military parade in North Korea, six KN-08 road-mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles were featured on transporter-erector-launchers (TELs) that appeared to have been of Chinese origin. The UN Panel of Experts confirmed that the Chinese company, Wanshan Special Vehicle Company, had exported to North Korea six heavy-duty chassis in 2011. Chinese officials claimed that Pyongyang had purchased the vehicles to be used in logging activities for the Ministry of Forestry. See Jeffrey Lewis, “That Ain’t My Truck: Where North Korea Assembled Its Chinese Transporter-Erector-Launchers,” 38 North, February 3, 2014, http://38north.org/2014/02/jlewis020314/.

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Reader Feedback

4 Responses to “More Rockets in Kim Jong Un’s Pockets: North Korea Tests A New Artillery System”

1. Ildo Hwang says:

March 9, 2016 at 4:25 am

This is South Korean journalist, and here is an interesting estimate about 300mm MLRS from the NK defector who worked as a senior engineer in the Second Economic Committee. (Basically this covert person is the most high-ranked defector since Hwang Jang-Yop.)
On the interview that I performed last year, he underestimated the actual capability of 300mm MLRS. Considering the level of NK’s precision manufacture, CEP must be too large, and the destructive power should be miserable, in his opinion. For this reason there were vast objections during the development of 300mm MLRS in early 2000s, within the military and the Second Economic Committee as well, he said.
In this regard, I guess that the only military utility of the weapon system will be completed when it’s nuclear-armed, which is unseen by now.
Though it’s all written in Korean, here below is the link of the interview.
http://news.naver.com/main/read.nhn?mode=LSD&mid=sec&sid1=100&oid=037&aid=0000019333

2. o.m. says:

March 9, 2016 at 2:06 am

Regarding the comment by Josh, tanks fire depleted uranium kinetic penetrators, howitzers fire genuine nuclear weapons. They include HEU designs (gun type) and plutonium designs (implosion type). The US and Soviets got the diameter down to 155 and 152mm, respectively.

3. Josh says:

March 7, 2016 at 11:07 pm

What a poor write up. There is a huge difference between a nuclear warhead and uranium depleted rounds or ammo. They are radioactive rounds but they aren’t “nuclear”.

4. Robert Bryan says:

March 7, 2016 at 8:44 pm

This “new artillery system is called MLRS we first employed in Desert Storm. This upgrade of Russian and Chinese versions is similar only now with larger weapons tube to help accomodate larger diameter projectiles of enhanced lethality. My concern is the long range aspect. This may challenge our ability to effectively respond. Satellites and advanced radar systems may see this happening but may be too late to alert the target.

Housecarl · Mar 9, 2016

North Korea threatens pre-emptive nuclear strikes against U.S., South Korea
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...uclear-strikes-against-U.S.-South-Korea/page2

N.Korea publishes pictures of ‘miniaturized’ nuclear device
Started by Possible Impactý, Yesterday 07:51 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...hes-pictures-of-‘miniaturized’-nuclear-device

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For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/north-k...ry-has-miniaturised-nuclear-warheads/42009242

North Korea's Kim says country has miniaturised nuclear warheads

Mar 9, 2016 - 09:22
By Jack Kim

SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said the country has miniaturised nuclear warheads to mount on ballistic missiles and ordered improvements in the power and precision of its arsenal, state media reported on Wednesday.

Kim has called for his military to be prepared to mount pre-emptive attacks against the United States and South Korea and stand ready to use nuclear weapons, stepping up belligerent rhetoric after coming under new U.N. and bilateral sanctions for its nuclear and rocket tests.

U.S. and South Korean troops began large-scale military drills this week, which the North called "nuclear war moves" and threatened to respond with an all-out offensive.

Kim's comments, released on Wednesday, were his first direct mention of the claim, made repeatedly in state media, to have successfully miniaturised a nuclear warhead, which has been widely questioned and never independently verified.

"The nuclear warheads have been standardised to be fit for ballistic missiles by miniaturising them," KCNA quoted Kim as saying as he inspected the work of nuclear scientists, adding "this can be called a true nuclear deterrent".

"He stressed the importance of building ever more powerful, precision and miniaturised nuclear weapons and their delivery means," KCNA said.

Kim also inspected the nuclear warhead designed for thermo-nuclear reaction, KCNA said, referring to a miniaturised hydrogen bomb that the country said it tested on Jan. 6.

Rodong Sinmun, official daily of the North's ruling party, carried pictures of Kim in what seemed to be a large hangar speaking to aides standing in front of a silver spherical object.

They also showed a large object similar to the KN-08 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) previously put on display at military parades, with Kim holding a half-smoked cigarette in one of the images.

South Korea's defence ministry said after the release of the images that it did not believe the North has successfully miniaturised a nuclear warhead or deployed a functioning ICBM.

That assessment is in line with the views of South Korean and U.S. officials that the North has likely made some advances in trying to put a nuclear warhead on a missile, but that there is no proof it has mastered the technology.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, speaking by telephone to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, described the situation on the Korean peninsula as "very tense" and called for all parties be remain calm and exercise restraint, China's foreign ministry said.

North Korea conducted its fourth nuclear test on Jan. 6 claiming to have set off a miniaturised hydrogen bomb, which was disputed by many experts and the governments of South Korea and the United States. The blast detected from the test was simply too small to back up the claim, experts said at the time.

The U.N. Security Council imposed harsh new sanctions on the isolated state last week for the nuclear test. It launched a long-range rocket in February drawing international criticism and sanctions from its rival, South Korea.

South Korea on Tuesday announced further measures aimed at isolating the North by blacklisting individuals and entities that it said were linked to Pyongyang's weapons programme.

China also stepped up pressure on the North by barring one of the 31 ships on its transport ministry's blacklist.

But a U.N. panel set up to monitor sanctions under an earlier Security Council resolution adopted in 2009 said in a report released on Tuesday that it had "serious questions about the efficacy of the current U.N. sanctions regime."

North Korea has been "effective in evading sanctions" by continuing to engage in banned trade, "facilitated by the low level of implementation of Security Council resolutions by Member States," the Panel of Experts said.

"The reasons are diverse, but include lack of political will, inadequate enabling legislation, lack of understanding of the resolutions and low prioritisation," it said.

(Additional reporting by Ju-min Park and James Pearson in Seoul and Jessica Macy Yu in Beijing; Editing by Michael Perry and Nick Macfie)

Housecarl · Mar 9, 2016

Iran Threatens to Walk Away From Nuke Deal After New Missile Test
Started by Jonas Parker‎, Yesterday 10:39 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...lk-Away-From-Nuke-Deal-After-New-Missile-Test

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For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-missiles-idUSKCN0WB0I9

Business | Wed Mar 9, 2016 8:48am EST
Related: World, Aerospace & Defense, Israel, Davos

Iran tests more missiles, says capable of reaching Israel

DUBAI | By Sam Wilkin and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin

Image Gallery

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) test-fired two ballistic missiles on Wednesday that it said were designed to be able to hit Israel, defying U.S. criticism of similar tests carried out the previous day.

State television showed footage of two Qadr missiles being launched from northern Iran which the IRGC said hit targets 1,400 km (870 miles) away. Tests on Tuesday drew a threat of new sanctions from the United States.

"The reason we designed our missiles with a range of 2,000 km is to be able to hit our enemy the Zionist regime from a safe distance," Brigadier General Amir Ali Hajizadeh was quoted as saying by the ISNA agency. The nearest point in Iran is around 1,000 km from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

Iranian agencies said the missiles tested on Wednesday were stamped with the words "Israel should be wiped from the pages of history" in Hebrew, though the inscription could not be seen on any photographs.

Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon told Israel Radio the tests showed Iran's hostility had not changed since implementing a nuclear deal with world powers in January, despite President Hassan Rouhani's overtures to the West.

"To my regret there are some in the West who are misled by the honeyed words of part of the Iranian leadership while the other part continues to procure equipment and weaponry, to arm terrorist groups," Yaalon said.

The IRGC maintains dozens of short and medium-range ballistic missiles, the largest stock in the Middle East. It says they are solely for defensive use with conventional, non-nuclear warheads.

Tehran has denied U.S. accusations of acting "provocatively", citing the long history of U.S. interventions in the Middle East and its own right to self-defense.

Related Coverage
› Iran officer says missiles designed to reach Israel: ISNA

INTERNAL RIFT

The United States said it would raise Tuesday's tests at the U.N. Security Council, where resolution 2231 calls on the Islamic Republic not to develop missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads.

Washington also imposed sanctions against businesses and individuals in January over another missile test in October 2015. But the IRGC said it would not bow to pressure.

"The more sanctions and pressure our enemies apply... the more we will develop our missile program," Hajizadeh said on state television.

The missile test underlined a rift in Iran between hardline factions opposed to normalizing relations with the West, and Rouhani's relatively moderate government which is trying to attract foreign investment to Iran.

Rouhani's popularity has soared since the nuclear deal in January, under which Tehran won relief from international sanctions in exchange for limiting its nuclear research. The president's allies made strong gains in recent elections to parliament and the body that will elect the next supreme leader.

Foreign business delegations have since flocked to Tehran, but hardliners including senior IRGC commanders have warned that economic ties could strengthen Western influence and threaten the Islamic Republic.

Related Coverage
› Iran plays hardball with European oil buyers, slowing exports

Some criticized a $27 billion deal between the government and Airbus to add 118 planes to its aging civilian fleet, saying the money should be used to create jobs locally.

The Tasnim agency, which is close to the Guards, carried a photograph of reporters in front of the missile before launch. It quoted an IRGC officer as saying: "Some take photos with the French Airbus, but we take photos with native Iranian products".

Washington said Tuesday's missile tests would not themselves violate the Iran nuclear deal.

(This story has been refiled to fix a typo in paragraph 6)

(Reporting by Sam Wilkin and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; Additional reporting by Dan Williams in Jerusalem and Andrea Shalal in Washington; Editing by Hugh Lawson and Andrew Heavens)

Housecarl · Mar 9, 2016

Considering the kind of added "targeting" of Australian territory this will result in, I'm wondering if since they're in for a penny, they're going to go in for a pound and evolve this into basing US SSNs and prompt global strike systems in Australia as well?....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southchinasea-australia-usa-idUSKCN0WB05Q

World | Wed Mar 9, 2016 3:19am EST
Related: World, China, Australia, South China Sea

U.S. says in talks to base long-range bombers in Australia

SYDNEY/WASHINGTON

The United States is in talks to base long-range bombers in Australia, U.S. defense officials said, within striking distance of the disputed South China Sea, a move that could inflame tensions with China.

The deployments could include B-1 bombers and an expansion of B-52 bomber missions, said Lt. Col. Damien Pickart, a spokesman for the U.S. Air Force in the Pacific, stressing that discussions were continuing and no decisions had yet been reached.

"These bomber rotations provide opportunities for our Airmen to advance and strengthen our regional alliances and provide (Pacific Air Forces) and U.S. Pacific Command leaders with a credible global strike and deterrence capability to help maintain peace and security in the Indo-Asia-Pacific region," said Pickart.

The United States does not currently fly B-1 bombers from Australia, but does conduct periodic B-52 missions.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declined to comment on the discussions.

"I can just assure you that everything we do in this area is very carefully determined to ensure that our respective military forces work together as closely as possible in our mutual national interests," he told reporters on Wednesday.

Should an agreement be reached, it would position further U.S. military aircraft close to the disputed South China Sea and risk angering China, analysts said.

"China will see it in the context of the (Australian Defence) White Paper which they have already mentioned that they expressed a certain degree of dissatisfaction," said Euan Graham, director of the International Security Program at Sydney-based think tank, the Lowy Institute.

China's Foreign Ministry expressed concern.

"Cooperation among relevant counties should protect regional peace and stability, and not target the interests of third parties," spokesman Hong Lei told a daily news briefing.

Australia last month committed to increase defense spending by nearly A$30 billion ($22 billion), seeking to protect its strategic and trade interests in the Asia-Pacific as the United States and its allies grapple with China's rising power.

The potential stationing of B-1 bombers in Australia was raised by U.S. officials last year, but Australia's then Defence Minister said they had misspoken.

China claims almost all of the South China Sea, but Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam have overlapping claims.

Tensions between the U.S. and China have been inflamed in recent weeks.

The U.S. Navy has carried out freedom of navigation exercises, sailing and flying near disputed islands to underscore its rights to operate in the seas.

Those patrols, and reports that China is deploying advanced missiles, fighters and radar equipment on islands there, have led Washington and Beijing to trade accusations of militarizing the region.

General Lori Robinson, talking to reporters in Canberra, said the U.S. would continue to conduct exercises through the disputed waterway, while calling on Australia to conduct similar freedom of navigation exercises.

"We would encourage anybody in the region and around the world to fly and sail in international air space in accordance with international rules and norms" the Australian Broadcasting Corporation quoted Robinson as saying.

($1 = 1.3466 Australian dollars)

(Reporting by Colin Packham in Sydney and David Brunnstrom in Washington; Additional reporting by Jessica Macy Yu in Beijing; Editing by Bernard Orr and Lincoln Feast)

Housecarl · Mar 9, 2016

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-southkorea-usa-northkorea-drills-idUSKCN0WB16H

World | Wed Mar 9, 2016 5:32am EST
Related: World, South Korea

U.S. serves up Korean rocket salad in war drill response to North's nuclear threats

CHEORWON, South Korea | By James Pearson

There's more to do in South Korea's heavily forested Rocket Valley, just a few miles from the demilitarized zone separating the two Koreas, than fire rockets. In quieter times, people tend vegetable patches along ice-cold streams.

But on Wednesday, a U.S. artillery brigade based in the South heated things up, launching a barrage of rockets close to the border town of Cheorwon.

The live-fire drills came hours after a report by reclusive North Korea that it had miniaturized nuclear warheads to be mounted on ballistic missiles and leader Kim Jong Un had ordered further improvements to its arsenal.

Tension in the region was already high as South Korean and U.S. troops began large-scale military exercises on Monday in a test of their defenses against North Korea, which called the drills "nuclear war moves" and threatened to respond with an all-out offensive.

The U.N. Security Council imposed harsh new sanctions on North Korea last week for its Jan. 6 nuclear test. The North launched a long-range rocket a month later, drawing international criticism and sanctions from South Korea.

The drills in Rocket Valley were separate to the annual joint U.S.-South Korean maneuvers which involve about 17,000 U.S. troops and more than 300,000 South Koreans.

They were a test of the U.S. Army M270A1 system, a multiple-launch rocket system (MLRS) built by Lockheed Martin that can fire 12 rounds and re-load and move at 64 km (40 miles) per hour.

One unit was dug in at the foot of Rocket Valley, under the swaying firs. A sonic boom followed the rockets as they screamed over the tree line followed by trails of flame toward targets eight km (five miles) away, invisible over the ridge lines.

"If North Korea decides to use their long-range artillery, which they have so many pieces of, Seoul would be in direct range," Captain Harry Lu of the U.S. Army's 37th Field Artillery Regiment said.

"So our mission here is to make sure we destroy that artillery before they can cause any more damage to the greater Seoul metropolitan area."

SHRILL THREATS OF WAR

In bellicose rhetoric, North Korea routinely threatens to turn Seoul into a "sea of flames" and the city was reduced to rubble in the 1950-53 Korean conflict, which ended in a truce, not a treaty, meaning the two sides are technically still at war.

Kim Jong Un's announcement of advances in North Korea's nuclear program followed his order last week for the country to be prepared to mount pre-emptive attacks against the United States and South Korea and stand ready to use nuclear weapons.

He issued the command as the North showcased its own MLRS which is carried by a Chinese-made truck and may be able to operate outside the range of similar U.S. and South Korean weapons, according to an expert.

South Korea's defense ministry said the North's rockets flew up to 150 km (90 miles) off the east coast and into the sea, a display of power seen as a response to the U.N. sanctions.

The U.S. 210th Field Artillery Brigade, based in Dongducheon, north of Seoul, is one of the only U.S. battalions that will not move to a newly expanded military base south of the capital under an agreement between South Korean and U.S. defense chiefs.

That is because it is considered part of South Korea's "counter-fire plan" and contains MLRS, capable of firing a barrage of rockets at a target beyond the range of conventional artillery.

It is one of South Korea's first lines of defense in the event of war.

"Unless using guided munitions, (multiple-launch rockets) are less accurate than tube artillery but can put a lot of steel downrange with devastating effect," said Bruce Klinger, a senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation and former Korea specialist at the CIA.

On Wednesday, the devastating effect was being unleashed over an idyllic landscape which belies its name. In just a few weeks, holiday makers will return to the private cottages, camp sites and vegetable plots that dot the hills to get away from the summer heat of the city.

(Editing by Jack Kim and Nick Macfie)

Housecarl · Mar 9, 2016

Hummm......The author definitely isn't pulling any punches with this op-ed....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20160309001023

[Kim Tae-Woo] It’s time to revise South Korea-U.S. alliance

Published : 2016-03-09 17:52
Updated : 2016-03-09 17:52

China has been quite the wet blanket in international efforts to seek stronger sanctions against North Korea.

In the period between North Korea’s fourth nuclear test on Jan. 6 and the point when China finally agreed on the new United Nations Security Council resolution, Beijing repeatedly called for dialogue and negotiations, knowing full well they would fall short of curbing Pyongyang’s nuclear ambition.

The Chinese government’s duplicity can be attributed to the coexistence of two factions in China. One views the North as a strategic asset, and the other sees it as an economic-diplomatic burden.

Furthermore, given the strategic rivalry between the U.S. and China within the framework of the new Cold War standoff in Northeast Asia, China’s sensitivity toward the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system is also understandable.

Such considerations are critical for Seoul, for which Beijing is a key partner, both historically and economically. As such, Seoul is compelled to apply diligent and thoughtful diplomatic strategies toward China.

However, if Beijing continues on a path of disrespect for South Korea’s security concerns, Seoul must voice its opposition.

For South Korea, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions are a matter of life or death, whereas for Beijing, it may be little more than an issue of overflowing defectors and an occasional act of defiance toward its leadership.

China has already shown it is willing to accept North Korea’s nuclear weapons as a fact by insisting on dialogue while knowing that this alone is futile in disarming North Korea. It also tried at first to detour the UNSC resolutions against the Pyongyang regmime, though it ultimately agreed to it. This means that China indirectly endorses the strategic value of nuclear weapons in the hands of its only ally in the region.

China’s opposition to South Korea’s efforts to reinforce its security -- either independently or in the framework of an alliance with the U.S. -- is like demanding that South Korea remains naked and vulnerable to the increasingly formidable nuclear threat from the North.

The rising tension brought about by North Korea’s recent provocations is pushing the South Korean public to look in two directions. There is growing resentment toward Beijing’s unilateral and interventionist opposition to Seoul’s defense efforts. There is also a call for the U.S. ally to expand or strengthen its nuclear umbrella.

Toward China, the following questions are posed: “If the THAAD system is deployed in South Korea, how and why should the radars that will be attached to the system bother China, given that it also possesses nuclear weapons and operates more than 200 satellites?” and “Isn’t stopping the North’s nuclear arms a quicker and simpler way to delay or even stop the THAAD deployment?”

Toward the U.S., these questions are asked: “How much longer should South Korea remain wholly dependent on the U.S.’ nuclear umbrella without its own nuclear leverages against China and North Korea?”

Reflecting these questions and concerns, an increasing number of South Koreans are demanding that the Seoul government develop its own leverages over China rather than lodge complaints about Beijing’s dual stance.

Theoretically, the best way to keep both Pyongyang and Beijing in line would be for Seoul to independently pursue a nuclear weapons arsenal.

For South Korea, which is heavily dependent on external factors for its economic survival, this plan seems implausible since it not only counters U.S. nonproliferation policies but would mean a violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) framework.

However, the U.S. has the power to quell South Korea’s security concerns without seeing Seoul opt for such radical measures. This could involve critically reinforcing its nuclear umbrella to include full-time deployment of strategic submarines in the East Sea or reintroduction of U.S. air-based tactical nuclear weapons.

Washington also needs to heed the fact that the U.S. has been denying South Korea not only from nuclear armament, but also from peaceful use of spent fuel, such as enrichment and reprocessing, which are not prohibited by the NPT.

In a nutshell, many South Korean strategic planners believe that the U.S. will undermine the spirit of alliance if it continues to discourage Seoul’s atomic activities in this manner.

They believe it is time for the two allies to reshape the alliance cooperation framework so that South Korea can have more security options, including nuclear potential, and thus exercise more military deterrence as well as diplomatic leverages vis-a-vis North Korea and China.

For example, the U.S. should support, not dissuade, South Korea’s pursuit of its own nuclear-propelled strategic submarines.

Now may be the right time to revise the ROK-U.S. alliance treaty and introduce new paradigms for the alliance cooperation between Seoul and Washington. The revision, if any, will have to include an “automatic intervention” clause as is the case in the NATO treaty and a pledge for protection under the nuclear umbrella, which has been confirmed through the annual Defense Ministers’ Meetings since 1978.

South Koreans now want the U.S. to become a true ally in helping South Korea become more secure and independent within the boundaries of the NPT. This would serve not only to protect Seoul but to strengthen the alliance.

If the two nations consider themselves as a blood ally based on the spirit of “Gachi Gapshida” or “Let’s go together,” this is what they must do in a time when North Korea pursues boosted fission bombs and hydrogen bombs, beyond atomic bombs.

It is critical for Washington to see that South Korea is becoming increasingly weary of turning helplessly to Beijing and Washington each time a provocation occurs from the North. It is time for Seoul’s friends to act.

By Kim Tae-Woo

Kim Tae-woo is professor at Konyang University and a former president of the Korea Institute for National Unification (KINU). -- Ed.

WAR 03-05-2016-to-03-11-2016_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

WAR 03-05-2016-to-03-11-2016_____THEWINDSofWAR