WAR 04-30-2016-to-05-06-2016_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.realcleardefense.com/art...s_to_close_strait_of_hormuz_to_us_109332.html

May 4, 2016

Iranian Commander Threatens to Close Strait of Hormuz to U.S.

By Amir Vahdat

TEHRAN, Iran – The deputy commander of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guard said Iranian forces will close the strategic Strait of Hormuz to the United States and its allies if they "threaten" the Islamic Republic, Iranian state media reported on Wednesday.

The comments by Gen. Hossein Salami, carried on state television, follow a long history of both rhetoric and confrontation between Iran and the U.S. over the narrow strait, through which nearly a third of all oil traded by sea passes.

The remarks by the acting commander of the Guard also follow those of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who on Monday criticized U.S. activities in the Persian Gulf. It's unclear whether that signals any new Iranian concern over the strait or possible confrontation with the U.S. following its nuclear deal with world powers.

The U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet, based in Bahrain, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In his remarks, Salami said that "Americans should learn from recent historical truths," likely referring to the January capture of 10 U.S. sailors who entered Iranian waters. The sailors were released less than a day later, though state TV aired footage of the sailors on their knees with their hands on their heads.

"If the Americans and their regional allies want to pass through the Strait of Hormuz and threaten us, we will not allow any entry," Salami said, without elaborating on what he and other leaders would consider a threat.

He added: "Americans cannot make safe any part of the world."

The U.S. and Iran have a long history of confrontations in the Persian Gulf. They even fought a one-day naval battle on April 18, 1988, after the near-sinking of the missile frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts by an Iranian mine. That day, U.S. forces attacked two Iranian oil rigs and sank or damaged six Iranian vessels.

A few months later, in July 1988, the USS Vincennes in the strait mistook an Iran Air flight heading to Dubai for an attacking fighter jet, shooting down the plane and killing all 290 people aboard.

U.S. Navy officials say they face near-daily encounters with Iranian naval vessels. In January, an unarmed Iranian drone flew over a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf, the first since 2014, according to Navy records obtained by The Associated Press.

The U.S. has also criticized what it called a "highly provocative" Iranian rocket test in December near its warships and commercial traffic. Iran said it has the right to conduct tests in the strait and elsewhere in Gulf.

Iran also sank a replica of a U.S. aircraft carrier near the strait in February 2015 and has said it is testing "suicide drones" that could attack ships.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.realcleardefense.com/art...eeds_a_new_modernization_strategy_109334.html

May 5, 2016

The Army Needs a New Modernization Strategy

By Daniel Gouré
Comments 2

Since the passage of the Budget Control Act of 2011 and the Defense Strategic Guidance of 2012, the Department of Defense (DoD) has been cutting the size of the military, retiring obsolescent weapons systems and reducing combat units in order to meet defense budget strictures while salvaging some prospect for modernizing the force. The Army felt the impact of this new strategy more than the other services. It cut 13 Brigade Combat Teams as part of the process of downsizing the Active Component end strength from a wartime high of 570,000 to a planned level of 450,000.

Of late, the pressure to reduce force structure and cut manpower has increased as DoD set itself on a course towards investing in advanced capabilities. As reflected in its so-called Third Offset Strategy, the Pentagon’s leadership believes the military has sufficient capacity or force levels to address today’s challenges, but needs to invest in new technologies in order to reassert its eroding advantage in cutting-edge military capabilities. This focus on capabilities vice capacity, or number, was reinforced by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter’s recent directive to Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, in which he ordered that service to reduce its intended procurement of the Littoral Combat Ship and apply the savings to acquiring additional advanced tactical aircraft and munitions.

Applying this strategy to the size and composition of the Army would be disastrous for both that service and national security. Simply stated, the Army cannot afford to cut end strength and units in order to free up resources for modernization. This is all the more true if the modernization programs are complex, expensive and will take years to reach intial operational capability. The assessment of the global security environment undergirding DoD’s decision to emphasize capability over capacity is fundamentally at odds with reality. As the new Army Chief of Staff, General Mark Milley, observed in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, “Right now the level of uncertainty, the velocity of instability, and potential for significant inter-state conflict is higher than it has been since the end of the Cold War in 1989-91.” It should be noted that at that time the size of the Active Component was in excess of 700,000 and the Total Force stood at more than 1.2 million.

It is increasingly evident that the Army is too small to meet even current challenges, much less the possibility for large-scale conflicts in multiple regions. In order to deal with two long-term stability operations in Southwest Asia, the Army had to grow temporarily to 570,000 in the Active Component. Even then, it actually conducted the two campaigns sequentially, not in parallel.

The National Commission on the Future of the Army acknowledged indirectly that the Army cannot meet its current missions at proposed force levels without a significant increase in resources above those mandated by the current budget comprise. Even then, there will be significant capability shortfalls in terms of both manpower and technologies. The Commission even goes so far as to suggest the possible need for a further reduction of two combat brigades in order to free up manpower for support missions. In the words of a well-respected expert on Army issues, Dr. Nadia Schadlow, “the commission pulled its punches on Army end strength. It endorses a minimum level of manpower, while admitting existing rotational policies actually leave the active duty force understrength in the event of simultaneous contingencies.”

The reality for the Army is that numbers count and it is extremely difficult to replace the power of soldiers on the ground with machines in any form. Unlike air and naval combat, which involve clashes between a relatively small number of high performance machines, land warfare is about numbers. It is ironic that the military services and Pentagon leadership continually say that people are its critical military advantage while cutting personnel in order to acquire more hardware.

It is clear that even an enhanced Active Component will not be sufficient to address all major missions. At a minimum, the Active Component must possess both the capacity and capability to ensure that no adversary can achieve a successful “blitzkrieg.” The role of the National Guard in such a scenario is to make it clear to an adversary that the U.S. military has sufficient capacity to pursue a protracted conflict, if necessary. In order to fulfill this role, the National Guard does not need to be a carbon copy of the Active Component. But it does have to be robust, with combat units capable of taking their place in the line of battle or supporting a counterattack.

Avoiding the continual erosion of its end strength is only the first problem the Army faces. It must also invest in essential modernization. But how to do so without breaking the bank or, at least, provoking yet another round of personnel cuts to create an investment fund?

The answer is to break with past service and DoD practices with respect to modernization. Over the past two decades, Army modernization has careened from one fanciful idea to another, generally reflecting the Pentagon’s changing views of the national security environment and the prospects for future conflict. Across all the various ideas – Comanche, Future Combat System, and Ground Combat Vehicle – Army modernization focused on the wrong problem. It sought to replicate the other services, building ever more exquisite machines embedded in ever more elaborate networks that require fewer people and permit increased distance between the soldier and the target. It was predictable that each of these efforts would be extremely complex, expensive and take way too long to reach the field.

In order to both increase end strength and pursue a course of modernization, the Army needs to change how it formulates requirements and pursues acquisitions. In particular, the Army needs to institutionalize the practice of the recent conflicts of allowing commanders in the field to drive the processes through the generation of operational needs statements. This reflects the experiences of the past decade in which hundreds of items were procured, everything from cold weather gear to robots, unmanned systems, aerostats, sensors and armored vehicles, through an accelerated acquisition process based on operational requirements generated in the field. Current examples include ultralight vehicles, Mobile Protected Firepower vehicle, 30mm cannon for Stryker and the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System.

This approach will not work for everything, most notably major new weapons systems and combat vehicles. But it is particularly relevant and useful at this stage in the Army’s evolution where there is little money for new starts, transformational technologies are fairly far out on the horizon and there is substantial uncertainty regarding where the Army will be deployed and how it will be required to fight. By focusing on the operational needs generated by field commanders the Army can promote relevance, shorten acquisition timelines, constrain system costs, limit the potential for mischief by a distant acquisition bureaucracy and, perhaps most important, get new capabilities in the hands of operators rapidly.

In short, instead of tying up large blocks of resources for protracted periods of time while developing exquisite systems, the Army needs to focus on low cost, rapidly producible and deployable capabilities, particularly those that can enhance the effectiveness of current platforms and weapons systems. Where possible, the Army should rely on non-developmental items including those provided by allies. For example, Israeli defense industries have fielded the highly successful Iron Dome system to counter rockets, missiles, artillery and mortars and the Trophy Active Protection System to defeat anti-tank rockets and missiles. In areas such as communications and IT, the Army needs to leverage wherever possible the commercial world rather than pursue purpose-built capabilities that come with high price tags and long timelines.

This approach is essentially a form of spiral development. In truth, the Army already does this with respect to many of its platforms. Portions of the Stryker fleet have been upgraded several times, most recently with the addition of a double V hull and a 30mm cannon. The same is true for the Bradley fighting vehicle. The Army is employing engineering change proposals to pursue continuous modernization of both the Bradley and the Abrams tank. Army aviation will shortly begin upgrading a number of Apache helicopters to the new and more capable E model.

This approach will result in a Total Force characterized by tiered modernization. Associated with this is a return of the National Guard to its traditional old war role of strategic reserve. High-end capabilities that require extensive training and maintenance must reside largely, perhaps even exclusively, in the Active Component. It will take time to organize, equip, train and deploy Reserve Component formations. There may be time to provide these units with supplementary capabilities based on feedback from field commanders.

With tiered modernization in mind, the National Commission erred in proposing that four Apache battalions be retained in the Reserve Component. A more sensible solution would have been to replace the Apache helicopters with additional Black Hawks, but develop an appropriate light attack capability for them.

The key to managing a force based on tiered readiness will be found in its networking and command and control. Senior Army leaders have stressed the importance of end-to-end connectivity and the ability to integrate the variety of capabilities resident in the Joint Force. As the Table of Organzation and Equipment of the Total Force becomes more heterogeneous, it will be vital that it is held together by a solid communications backbone. Consequently, investments in IT, networking, sensors and ISR will be more important than the introduction of new platforms.

For too long the Army has been asked to reduce capacity in the interest of maintaining readiness and modernization. The increasingly complex and unstable international security environment is creating a new demand on the Army to field forces, not just prior to or at the start of a conflict but for the long haul. If the Army is to retain or even increase its capacity, it must be careful in the way it pursues modernization. It also must be willing to modernize selectively, with a primary focus on the Active Component.


This article originally appeared at Lexington Institute.

 

[Housecarl]

Check out Possible Impact's posts from yesterday....
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...Artillery-Enter-Ukraine&p=6040718#post6040718

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/201...broke-out-in-ukraine-the-death-toll-continue/

Two years after war broke out in Ukraine, the death toll continues to mount

By Roland Oliphant, Avdiivka
3 May 2016 • 6:00am

For two and a half months Roman, a sergeant in Ukraine’s 58th mechanised brigade, has been counting the days that his section gets away without taking casualties. It’s not many, he says.

“Usually there’s two days out of every week when no one gets hit, then it kicks off again,” said the section commander, who asked not to give his full name. “But there hasn’t been a single day since we arrived when we haven’t been shot at, shelled, or mortared.”

Dug into a warren of trenches, machine-gun nests, and bombed out houses on the outskirts of Avdiivka, an industrial town just north of the city of Donetsk, Sgt Roman’s 20 man section and the Russian backed separatists 300 yards to the east are locked in a violent attritional battle in what officials in Kiev, Moscow, and Western capitals still insist is a “ceasefire.”

The strain on their faces and voices is palpable, as is a weary frustration at fighting a war that they say has been forgotten both at home and abroad. “Even when we go home, no one wants to talk about it. They’re sick of it. The world’s sick of it,” he said, to murmurs of agreement from his men. “The Russians did their pre-planned move to distract attention in Syria, and the world bought it.”

War broke out in eastern Ukraine in April 2014, when Russian-backed separatists seized control of a number of towns across eastern Ukraine and declared independence.

Video

That summer the Ukrainian army, backed by irregular volunteer battalions, recaptured the rebel stronghold of Slavyansk and moved to encircle Donetsk, the defacto separatist capital.

Two decisive Russian military interventions (which Moscow still publicly denies) then reversed Ukrainian gains, and resulted in a peace agreement at talks between Vladimir Putin and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian president, in Minsk in February 2015.

However, although there have been no major offensive operations by either side since, the effect of the Minsk agreements has been simply to slow, rather than end, the war.

A recent surge in violence in the past few weeks led the OSCE to warn last week that the entire truce is in danger. And nor is just soldiers who are dying.

In the early hours of last Wednesday, two shells fell amongst vehicles near a separatist check point just south of Donetsk, killing four civilians including a pregnant woman. Both sides blamed one another for the attack. Observers from the OSCE’s special monitoring mission who attended the scene said crater analysis indicated two 122 mm artillery shells - banned under the ceasefire agreement - had been fired from a west-south-westerly direction.

While the mission explicitly refrains from assigning blame for such incidents, that is the direction of Ukrainian-controlled territory.

The shelling was the worst single incident of civilian casualties in months, and has raised fears of an all-out return to violence across the front.

The OSCE warned on Thursday accused both sides of “blatant disregard of the Minsk agreements” and warned that the entire peace process could unravel unless the combatants took “visible and decisive action” to deescalate.

""Armed violence in eastern Ukraine has once again reached worrying levels,” said Ertugrul Apakan, the chief OSCE monitor said.

Publicly, Russian, Ukrainian, and Western officials all insist there is no alternative to the Minsk agreement.

That deal envisages a settlement in which the separatists would allow Ukraine to retake control of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions and its border with Russia.

In exchange, Mr Poroshenko promised to grant both regions a “special status” with devolved powers, amend the country’s constitution, and grant an amnesty to rebel fighters. None of those concessions is politically acceptable to the Ukrainian public or parliament, however, meaning Mr Poroshenko is effectively powerless to deliver on them.

Russian officials claim that Mr Poroshenko deliberately signed up to undeliverable conditions. Mr Poroshenko’s defenders point out that Mr Putin, whose army was busy encircling and crushing Ukrainian forces at Debaltseve during the February 2015 talks, was effectively holding a gun to his head. Either way, the reality a is a deadlock that could last years or even decades, according to Balasz Jarabik, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment who specialises in Ukrainian affairs.

Video

“Ukraine continues to argue that security measures come first, but the Russians continue to argue that until there is political willingness in Kiev they will not reduce the (military) pressure,” he said.

For ordinary people, the slow freezing of the conflict means a strange normality of non-peace, in which military checkpoints and the occasional sound of shelling have merged into day-to-day routines.

Civilians regularly cross the lines from one side to another, while battles of attrition rumble on just a few miles away. It is not, as the horrific shelling at the final separatist checkpoint south of Donetsk showed, without risk.

Some of the area’s vast industrial enterprises, including Avdiivka’s massive coking plant, continue to operate despite repeatedly taking shell fire over the past two years.

In Slavyansk, the town 60 miles north of Donetsk where the war arguably started and which was recaptured by the Ukrainians in 2014, locals have become accustomed to using an army pontoon bridge across the river instead of a demolished bridge.

That doesn’t mean reconstruction efforts have left everyone impressed. A poster in one badly shelled out Slavyansk suburb, which still looks as if 2014’s fighting ended yesterday, bitterly calls out Mr Poroshenko for his “empty promises” of reconstruction.

Meanwhile, in Donetsk and Luhansk the separatists and their Russian backers are busy state building. Street parades are being planned for May 11, the anniversary of a separatist-organised referendum on secession and now the Donetsk People’s Republic’s “independence day,” and separatist radio stations broadcast a mixture of easy listening music, listeners’ birthday messages, and propaganda across the line of contact.

Video

For the soldiers back in Avdiivka, the “frozen” Minsk agreement means a nightly struggle for control of an industrial estate in no man’s land that is more about local tactical superiority than about grand strategy.

“We’re not going to give up an inch of Ukraine, and the people over there, or their leaders, want their Russia-dependent ‘autonomy,’” said Vitaly Ponomarenko, a senior sergeant in a position overlooking the contested industrial estate. “You have to have talks, but I don’t honestly see how it stops.”

“I’m here because if I wasn’t they’d send some 18 year old kid who doesn’t know anything, and he’d end up dead straight away,” added Roman, the section leader, as afternoon turned to evening and the machine gun and mortar fire in no man’s land intensified. “That’s my motivation.”

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-nato-divisions-idUSKCN0XV0TU

World | Wed May 4, 2016 1:11pm EDT
Related: World, Russia

Russia warns of retaliation as NATO plans more deployments in Eastern Europe

MOSCOW/BRUSSELS | By Dmitry Solovyov and Lidia Kelly


Russia will reinforce its western and southern flanks with three new divisions by the year-end, officials said on Wednesday, threatening retaliation to NATO's plans to boost its military presence in eastern members Poland and the Baltic States.

While Moscow accuses the Western alliance of threatening its Russia's security, NATO says intensified military drills and its plans for increased deployments on its eastern flank are purely defensive after Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea in 2014 and backed separatist rebels in Ukraine.

U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said on Monday NATO was weighing up rotating four battalions of troops through eastern member states amid rising tension in the Baltic.

Russia has scrambled jets to intercept U.S. reconnaissance planes in recent weeks and made simulated attack passes near a U.S. warship in the Baltic Sea.

Speaking in Brussels on Tuesday, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg confirmed the alliance would deploy "batallion-sized" multinational units on a rotational basis in the east.

Andrei Kelin, a department head at Russia's Foreign Ministry, said the proposed NATO deployment was a source of concern for Moscow. Russia once held sway in eastern Europe as the Soviet-era overlord.

"This would be a very dangerous build-up of armed forces pretty close to our borders," Kelin told the Interfax news agency. "I am afraid this would require certain retaliatory measures, which the Russian Defence Ministry is already talking about."

Russia announced in January it would create three new military divisions and bring five new strategic nuclear missile regiments into service.

On Wednesday, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said the new divisions would be formed by the end of this year to counter what Moscow saw as NATO's growing strength.

Russian media, citing unnamed military sources, said the new Russian divisions would most likely be motorized rifle ones and number around 10,000 soldiers each.

"The Ministry of Defence has adopted a series of measures to counter the growing capacity of NATO forces in close proximity to the Russian borders," Shoigu said in televised comments.

The new divisions are likely to be deployed in military districts close to Russia's borders with Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltic states and Finland as well as Georgia and Azerbaijan.


NATO TO KEEP COURSE

"What we do is defensive, it's proportionate ... And therefore we will continue to respond," Stoltenberg said.

"There can be no doubt that what NATO does is a reaction to the Russian behavior in Ukraine. We didn't have any troops in Baltic countries ... before the illegal annexation of Crimea and Russia's destabilizing activities in eastern Ukraine."

He was speaking at news conference with NATO's new Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), General Curtis Scaparrotti, who said he intended to continue NATO's response so far to what the West sees as a more assertive and muscle-flexing Russia.

"My intent is to continue that. I think that is the response," he said, adding NATO and Russia still needed to talk.

"I do believe we should have communication, it's how we ensure that we don’t have an accident or miscalculation. But I would reinforce this by saying it's expected that they adhere to international norms and international laws. And until such time, those communications will likely be limited."

Scaparrotti said he was in favor of arms supplies to help Ukraine "successfully defend their territory and their sovereignty".


(Additional reporting by Jack Stubbs in Moscow and Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels, Writing by Andrew Osborn and Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by Richard Balmforth)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.vox.com/2016/5/4/11591172/russia-baltics-nato

The West needs to stop panicking about Russia's "hybrid" warfare

Updated by Mark Galeotti on May 4, 2016, 1:10 p.m. ET

https://cdn2.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/p1...image/49492519/shutterstock_252343516.0.0.jpg

There is currently a great deal of alarmist concern, triggered by a recent RAND report, about Russia’s supposed ability to conquer the Baltic states — Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, three former Soviet republics that are now part of NATO — and thus drive a wedge into NATO without the West being able to do anything to stop it.

But before we start to panic, it’s important to consider not just whether Moscow might ever actually want to do this, but also all the many ways in which the West could retaliate other than with military force. There are, after all, more ways to win wars than just with tanks and fighters.

The reality is that not only does Russia likely have zero ambitions to capture the Baltic states in the first place, but even if it did, the US and NATO could do a whole lot to punish it for doing so.

That’s because for all the talk of Russia’s brilliant use of "asymmetric" or "hybrid" warfare — that is, fighting not so much on the regular battlefield but by using all kinds of sneaky and unconventional approaches, from information and cyber warfare to political manipulation — the truth is that if anyone has an "asymmetric" or "hybrid" edge, it is actually the West.

The RAND report: Russia takes the Baltic states while NATO is caught napping

The present debate was sparked by a RAND report, released earlier this year, that was based on a series of war games whose goal was to evaluate "the shape and probable outcome of a near-term Russian invasion of the Baltic states." The report concluded that "as presently postured, NATO cannot successfully defend the territory of its most exposed members," essentially the Baltic states, which, it claimed, Russia could conquer in at most 60 hours.

There are serious questions over the RAND study’s numbers and assumptions, not least that the Russians would get pretty much everything right and NATO would be caught by surprise. Just because the Russians could take Crimea (against no opposition) and bomb rebels in Syria (who have no serious air defenses), that doesn’t make them 10 feet tall — and any invasion would be impossible to hide from the West, even under the guise of a "military exercise." That might have worked two and a half years ago, but since Crimea we are on the lookout for such scams.

The study also fails to consider the most crucial question: intent. In other words, would Russia even want to take the Baltic states in the first place?

The Baltic states would just be a major headache for Putin

The answer, in short, is probably no. Vladimir Putin is, of course, currently engaged in an aggressive campaign to raise Russia’s international standing and undermine the West’s will to punish him for his actions in Crimea and Ukraine. However, he is neither a lunatic nor some kind of imperialist desperate to rebuild the old Soviet Union.

Conquering the Baltic states may be possible, but it would win him the overt enmity of the West, the worry of his other neighbors, and three territories full of disgruntled locals with a history of guerrilla warfare against Muscovite conquerors.

And for what? There are no resources of the sort Russia could readily use (their real assets are their people, who would hardly be enthusiastic about their new overlords). Rather than dividing NATO, it would probably unite and galvanize it and make Moscow look dangerously erratic. Even China would be alarmed to find its neighbor and quasi-ally suddenly flirting with global war.

The West has many ways to make Russia pay if it did take the Baltic states

Even if Russia did take the Baltic states, though, the West would have plenty of ways to punish Russia short of launching a full military counterattack.

The first is with financial means. If Russia relies on tanks for its attack, the West could turn to banks for its response.

An invasion of the Baltic states would be grounds for invoking NATO’s Article V, which treats an attack on one member as an attack on all members, thus making all NATO members at war with Russia. Member states could not only seize any Russian state assets within their jurisdictions but could — and should — extend this to Russian companies and the personal property of those Russians deemed to be significant players within the state.

Oligarchs and officials alike have gleefully taken advantage of Western financial openness and rule of law to stash their usually ill-gotten gains away from the Kremlin’s hands. That could be turned into a vulnerability, a chance to encourage dissent and division within an elite more interested in its own kleptocratic opportunism than in Putin’s historical vision.

Not only could the West close its markets to Russia — and likewise ban all exports there — but it could also use its political and economic muscle to try to isolate Russia from its other trading partners. Russia imports almost 40 percent of its food, and while countries such as Iran are unlikely to be willing to curtail exports to Russia, others without land borders with the country could be prevented from supplying the country’s needs.

The West could also in effect force Russia out of SWIFT, the Society of Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication. This would severely limit Russian banks’ capacity to move money and engage in economic activity, and although it’s not the "nuclear option" some make it out to be — in part because there are some ways around it — it would still be a severe blow to the Russian economy.

Another way the West can hurt Russia is through cyberattacks. While Russian cyberattacks have been most evident, this is more because Moscow has been more willing to encourage its hackers to cause mischief in the West than because it has that much greater capacity. The West could strike back in kind once it was willing to take off the virtual gloves.

Putin may be willing to see ordinary Russians make sacrifices in the name of geopolitics, but with the ruble already having devalued by some 50 percent, and more than half of household budgets in Russia currently being spent on food, how long would they be willing and able to put up with that?

The old stereotypes of the fatalistic Russian peasant willing to endure any hardship for the motherland are long since out of date. Putin’s popularity at home depends on giving the appearance of easy wins, whether in Crimea or Syria.

What happens to that narrative when, for example, cyber attacks crash the cellphone networks on which Russians have come to rely? How does the country function when the software behind the railways and airports becomes compromised? How do Russians buy, sell, and work when banking systems are hit and ATMs closed down?

There are also "non-kinetic" military options that play to Western strengths and would have a disproportionate impact on Russia. NATO is worried about the threat of "A2/AD" — anti-access/area denial — as Russian missiles and submarines prevent NATO planes from flying in Central Europe and NATO ships from operating in the Baltic Sea.

But, conversely, NATO can close the Dardanelles to any Russian military or civilian shipping, locking it out of the Mediterranean, just as it can also deny Russia the Baltic, and maybe also the Barents and Okhotsk seas to the north and east. Beyond that, the West controls the global sea lanes and could impound Moscow’s ships and cargoes, or prevent third-country trade with Russia.

Of course, there are limits to such indirect ways of waging war. China can hardly be leaned on — although it is unlikely to be comfortable with a Kremlin that is willing to start such a pyrrhic and dangerous war — and none of this will be easy or cheap.

But this is war, and if the West wants to save the lives of its soldiers, it has to spend money instead.

To really deter Russia, the West needs to stop playing nice

The West can do it, though — and Moscow knows this. While we have been worrying about Moscow’s ability to wage so-called "hybrid warfare," the truth is that this kind of warfare is actually a Western strength. Moscow is just hoping we don’t notice.

Russia has in the past often managed to punch above its weight because it has been able to assume that West will be moderate and well-mannered. It has kidnapped an Estonian security officer across the border, shielded the people who shot down a civilian airliner, buzzed US warships, and invaded a neighbor.

The day the West decides to be as ruthless as Russia will be a very black one for the Kremlin. However, it is vital not only that the West grow to realize this — because if we feel powerless, we become vulnerable to Putin’s mind games and power plays — but also that we practice and posture such that the Kremlin appreciates that this is a real threat.

Just as Moscow puts on an exercise simulating an attack on a Western country or talks about nuclear attacks when it wants to push our buttons, we can do the same. Wargaming closing the Mediterranean or openly discussing how economic warfare could cripple an unnamed but obvious enemy will spark furious denunciations from Moscow. But the very scale of the response will indicate just how seriously the Kremlin takes such a risk.

The fact is that Russian security discussions are dominated by an awareness of the country’s vulnerabilities to a stronger, richer, larger, more advanced West. Up to now, though, we have not let ourselves acknowledge our strengths.

The greatest risk for the West is, after all, not its weakness of means but a perception of its weakness of will, both at home and in Moscow. After all, deterrence only works when it is displayed, when the other side knows the misery and ruin it risks.

Mark Galeotti is a professor of global affairs at New York University, a visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, and the director of Mayak Intelligence. He blogs at In Moscow’s Shadows and is on Twitter as @MarkGaleotti.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://geopoliticalfutures.com/japans-strategy-and-its-constitution/

Japan’s Strategy and Its Constitution

May 4, 2016 Tokyo cannot depend on Washington indefinitely.
By George Friedman

Yesterday was the 69th anniversary of Japan’s post-war pacifist constitution. Thousands attended rallies in Tokyo both in support of and against changing Article 9 of the Japanese constitution, which outlaws war. It states: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.”

The Japanese constitution was drafted by Douglas MacArthur and implemented in 1947. The United States quickly regretted inserting Article 9. When the Korean War broke out, the United States wanted to reposition Japan as Germany was being repositioned. It wanted Japan to develop a military force that would be commanded in the context of an alliance, in other words, not fully in the control of Japan. The Germans accepted this formula because they were at risk of Soviet invasion, and countering this threat required a substantial force raised from an alliance, NATO. Germany needed NATO and therefore had to go along with it. The Japanese were in a different position. The Japanese did not regard the Korean War as a direct threat and refused to violate their constitution.

Japan has used this clause as a legal block to participating in any subsequent American war, such as Vietnam or Desert Storm, though Tokyo did provide a small number of troops for humanitarian assistance in the Second Iraq War. At the same time, the Japanese Supreme Court ruled in 1959 that Japan had an inherent right to defend itself and this could not be overridden by Article 9. As a result, Japan has substantial air, sea and ground forces that are prevented from participating in coalition combat operations. In a way, Japan had the best of all worlds. It had sufficient military forces to deter invasion. It had a strong defense agreement with the United States, which recognized Japan’s constitutional limitations, and had significant forces deployed there. Japan was secure without being compelled to join the United States in war.

The revision of Article 9, therefore, is not about whether Japan will have military forces. It already does. It is about how they can be used. A recent poll by Kyodo News found that 56.5 percent of respondents were against revising Article 9. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said that the revision would allow Japan to defend itself, but that has already been affirmed by the Supreme Court. Authorizing the acquisition of military forces has already happened. While 56.5 percent is not an overwhelming majority, it still represents a split between the public and the government.

The public is afraid that the government wants the right to deploy Japanese forces in combat zones. If it does, then the question is why the Japanese government would give up a pretty good thing. The Japanese have the protection of the United States by treaty. That means that threats like North Korea or China will be met by the Americans and not by the Japanese. Why then are the Japanese abandoning the strategic cocoon and accepting risk?

Japan has one overarching strategic risk – it has almost no natural resources. It must import almost 100 percent of its oil, iron ore, bauxite and pretty much everything else. All of these resources, particularly oil coming from the Persian Gulf through the Strait of Malacca, must move through the South and East China seas, over which China is asserting dominance. There are potentially other routes eastward and through the western Pacific, but even these would be at risk if China managed to take control of the South China Sea.

The Japanese depend on the United States to contain China. Indeed, U.S. naval and air power dwarfs anything that China can bring to bear. But in many ways, these waterways are a secondary interest to the United States. If the Chinese dominated them, it would pose a problem, but not an existential one. For Japan, access to these sea lanes is an existential threat. If China blockaded them, it would strangle Japan as an industrial state.

This asymmetry of interests means that Japan depends on the United States for its existence as an industrial power. Should the United States decide that an accommodation with China or refusing to engage China militarily was in its interest, Japan would be in a disastrous position.

The Japanese also understand that, in order to manage the United States, being an indispensable military partner is critical. As the only global power, the United States has engaged in frequent wars. Countries that have contributed to those wars, like the United Kingdom and Australia, have maintained a special relationship with the United States. It has given them leverage as well as political support. If Japan is to maintain its dependency on the United States, it needs to share risks. During the Cold War, Japan’s geographic position blocked the Soviet fleet at Vladivostok. That made Japan indispensable. In the current environment, Japan’s significance to the U.S. has declined. Modifying Article 9 would allow Japan to create American dependency and therefore increase the likelihood that the U.S. would take risks for Japan.

The Japanese public is divided. There are those who wish to modify the constitution in order to put World War II behind them and resemble other industrialized countries, with a military force capable of defending not only the homeland, but the sea lanes, islands and other regions essential to Japan but not part of Japan. And one could add to this regaining a sense of pride that Japan lost in World War II.

Those opposed to the revision do not want to assume the burdens that go with this. They do not want to rebuild a Japan that resembles the past. There is the practical issue of risk. But there is also the moral issue that what Japan has become is more virtuous than what Japan was. They want to retain that virtue, which will be lost if Japan develops an offensive capability.

There are of course some ultra-nationalists who dream of resurrecting “the way of the warrior.” They are not critical players in this. The key difference, in a country that cherishes consensus, is between those who still remember World War II with horror and those who feel that it is essential to put World War II behind them.

It is interesting to observe Japan’s two dilemmas. One is the moral and historical one. The other is the hard strategic fact that no nation wants to depend on another for its fundamental strategic interest. The United States’ interests are changeable, but the import of industrial minerals is indispensable. When we look at this from a geopolitical and strategic perspective, Japan must change Article 9 to allow it freedom of action in the event the U.S. shifts its strategy.

In my model, the moral argument is significant, but can’t override the strategic. If China strangles Japan, the moral argument becomes moot. Paradoxically, to have the moral debate it is a precondition that Japan have the ability to defend itself. Japan has already redefined Article 9 to defend the homeland. It will at some point soon redefine it to permit defending the homeland’s overwhelming interests.

When it does this, and when Japan begins building naval and air forces in earnest, China will face a major power in the region. This is precisely what China wants to prevent and, again paradoxically, is creating.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://thebulletin.org/nuclear-battles-south-asia9415?platform=hootsuite

Analysis

4 May 2016

Nuclear battles in South Asia

Pervez Hoodbhoy, Zia Mian

Pervez Hoodbhoy

Hoodbhoy has taught in the physics department at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad for 40 years and now also teaches at...

Zia Mian

Zia Mian is at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He is co-chair of the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM).

Comments 4

The armies of Pakistan and India are practicing for nuclear war on the battlefield: Pakistan is rehearsing the use of nuclear weapons, while India trains to fight on despite such use and subsequently escalate. What were once mere ideas and scenarios dreamed up by hawkish military planners and nuclear strategists have become starkly visible capabilities and commitments. When the time comes, policy makers and people on both sides will expect—and perhaps demand—that the Bomb be used.

Pakistan has long been explicit about its plans to use nuclear weapons to counter Indian conventional forces. Pakistan has developed “a variety of short range, low yield nuclear weapons,” claimed retired General Khalid Kidwai in March 2015. Kidwai is the founder—and from 2000 until 2014 ran—Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division, which is responsible for managing the country’s nuclear weapons production complex and arsenal. These weapons, Kidwai said, have closed the “space for conventional war.” Echoing this message, Pakistani Foreign Secretary Aizaz Ahmad Chaudhry declared in October 2015 that his country might use these tactical nuclear weapons in a conflict with India. There already have been four wars between the two countries—in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999—as well as many war scares.

The United States, which at one time deployed over 7,000 tactical nuclear weapons in Europe aimed at Soviet conventional forces, has expressed alarm about Pakistan’s plans. Amplifying comments made by President Barack Obama, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest explained in April 2016 that “we’re concerned by the increased security challenges that accompany growing stockpiles, particularly tactical nuclear weapons that are designed for use on the battlefield. And these systems are a source of concern because they’re susceptible to theft due to their size and mode of employment. Essentially, by having these smaller weapons, the threshold for their use is lowered, and the[re is] risk that a conventional conflict between India and Pakistan could escalate to include the use of nuclear weapons.”

Responding to US concerns, Kidwai has said that “Pakistan would not cap or curb its nuclear weapons programme or accept any restrictions.” The New York Times reported last year that so far, “an unknown number of the tactical weapons were built, but not deployed” by Pakistan.

India is making its own preparations for nuclear war. The Indian Army conducted a massive military exercise in April 2016 in the Rajasthan desert bordering Pakistan, involving tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and 30,000 soldiers, to practice what to do if it is attacked with nuclear weapons on the battlefield. An Indian Army spokesman told the media, “our policy has been always that we will never use nuclear weapons first. But if we are attacked, we need to gather ourselves and fight through it. The simulation is about doing exactly that.” This is not the first such Indian exercise. As long ago as May 2001, the Indian military conducted an exercise based on the possibility that Pakistan would use nuclear weapons on Indian armed forces. Indian generals and planners have anticipated such battlefield nuclear use by Pakistan since at least the 1990s.

Driving the current set of Indian strategies and capabilities is the army’s search for a way to use military force to retaliate against Pakistan for harboring terrorists who, from time to time, have launched devastating attacks inside India. In 2001, Pakistan-based Jaish-e-Mohammed claimed credit for an attack on India’s parliament. India massed troops on the border, but had to withdraw them after several months. International pressure, a public commitment by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf to restrain militants from future strikes, and Pakistan’s threat to use nuclear weapons if it was attacked caused the crisis to wind down. Following the 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants, General Deepak Kapoor, then India’s army chief, argued that India must find a way to wage “limited war under a nuclear overhang.”

Paths to destruction. It could come to pass that Pakistan’s army uses nuclear weapons on its own territory to repel invading Indian tanks and troops. Pakistan’s planners may intend this first use of nuclear weapons as a warning shot, hoping to cause the Indians to stop and withdraw rather than risk worse. But while withdrawal would be one possible outcome, there would also be others. It is more likely, for instance, that the use of one—or even a few—Pakistani battlefield nuclear weapons would fail to dent Indian forces. While even a small nuclear weapon would be devastating in an urban environment, many such weapons may be required to have a decisive military impact on columns of well-dispersed battle tanks and soldiers who have practiced warfighting under nuclear attack.

India’s nuclear doctrine, meanwhile, is built on massive retaliation. In 2003, India’s cabinet declared nuclear weapons “will only be used in retaliation against a nuclear attack on Indian territory or on Indian forces anywhere … nuclear retaliation to a first strike will be massive and designed to inflict unacceptable damage.” According to Admiral Vijay Shankar, a former head of Indian strategic nuclear forces, such retaliation would involve nuclear attacks on Pakistan’s cities. Kidwai describes such Indian threats as “bluster and blunder,” since they “are not taking into account the balance of nuclear weapons of Pakistan, which hopefully not, but has the potential to go back and give the same kind of dose to the other side.” For nuclear planners in both countries, threatening the slaughter of millions and mutual destruction seems to be the order of the day.

There are also risks short of war, of course. Nuclear weapon units integrated with conventional forces and ready to be dispersed on a battlefield pose critical command-and-control issues. Kidwai believes that focusing on “lesser issues of command and control, and the possibility of their falling into wrong hands is unfortunate.” He claims “Our nuclear weapons are safe, secure and under complete institutional and professional control.” The implication is that communications between the nuclear headquarters and deployed units in the field will be perfectly reliable and secure even in wartime, and that commanders of individual units will not seek—or have the capability to launch—a nuclear strike unless authorized.

It is difficult to believe these claims. Peering through the fog of war, dizzied by developments on a rapidly evolving battlefield, confronting possible defeat, and fuelled by generations of animosity towards India as well as a thirst for revenge from previous wars, it cannot be guaranteed that a Pakistani nuclear commander will follow the rules.

Add to this the risks in what now passes for peacetime in Pakistan. The Strategic Plans Division may dismiss fears that its nuclear weapons will be hijacked. However, the military has rarely succeeded in anticipating and preventing major attacks by militant Islamist groups in Pakistan. Look no further than the May 2011 attack on Karachi’s Mehran naval base. The attackers, who may have numbered up to 20 and had insider help, “scaled the perimeter fence and continued to the main base by exploiting a blind spot in surveillance camera coverage, suggesting detailed knowledge of the base layout,” The Guardian reported. It took elite troops 18 hours to regain control of the base.

It is also unclear how the officers who are in charge of Pakistan’s military bases and those who make security-clearance decisions are chosen, and whether their own commitment to fighting Islamic radicalism is genuine. In 2009, the former commander of Pakistan’s Shamsi Air Force Base was arrested for leaking “sensitive” information to a radical Islamist organization. In 2011, a one-star general serving in Pakistan’s General Headquarters was arrested for his contacts with a militant group. In a religion that stresses its own completeness, and in which righteousness is given higher value than obedience to temporal authority, there is room for serious conflict between piety and military discipline.

Grasping at straws? A first step to reducing all these nuclear dangers is to prevent an escalation of tensions. This must start with Pakistan tackling the threat of Islamist militancy at home and preventing militant attacks across the India-Pakistan border. The outlook is mixed on both fronts. Pakistan’s army accelerated its war against radical Islamist groups after a 2014 attack on an army school in Peshawar that killed more than 140 students and staff. Despite military claims of success, though, responding with massive force and inflicting countless deaths will not resolve what is at its core a political and social problem. Ending the threat of radical Islam in Pakistan will require sweeping changes in public attitudes and major policy reversals in many areas. These are nowhere in sight.

To its credit, Pakistan has recently been more forward-leaning in dealing with militants who attack India. Following the assault on India’s Pathankot airbase in January 2016, Sartaj Aziz, foreign affairs adviser to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, made the surprising revelation that a mobile phone number used by the attackers was linked to the militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed based in Bahawalpur, Pakistan. To collect evidence for possible legal action against Jaish-e-Mohammed leaders, Pakistan sent a fact-finding mission to Pathankot with the approval of the Indian government. This kind of cooperation by the two governments is unprecedented.

Rather than limit cooperation to crisis management after an attack, Pakistan and India could agree on a South Asian version of the Open Skies Treaty to provide each with limited access to the other’s air space for surveillance purposes. India has an interest in monitoring possible militant camps within Pakistan and border areas where militants may cross. Pakistan seeks early warning in case India is preparing to mount a surprise attack. The 1992 Open Skies Treaty, covering the United States and fellow North Atlantic Treaty Organization members and Russia and its former Soviet and Eastern European partners, allows for controlled surveillance flights with agreed instruments such as photographic and video cameras, radar, and infrared scanners. The goal is to promote “greater openness and transparency in their military activities” and “to facilitate the monitoring of compliance with existing or future arms control agreements and to strengthen the capacity for conflict prevention and crisis management.” The United States and other parties to the Open Skies Treaty could share their technical tools and flight management experience with Pakistan and India, as well as what they’ve learned about the value of the agreement.

The two countries should also prepare in case things go wrong. The 1999 Lahore Agreement committed Pakistan and India to “notify each other immediately in the event of any accidental, unauthorised or unexplained incident that could create the risk of a fallout with adverse consequences for both sides, or an outbreak of a nuclear war between the two countries, as well as to adopt measures aimed at diminishing the possibility of such actions, or such incidents being misinterpreted by the other.” The question is, who will each side call and how? One possibility is a direct line of communication—a hotline—from Pakistan’s Strategic Plans Division chief to the head of India’s Strategic Forces Command. There are other hotlines, and they are not always used or used wisely, but in a crisis this may be better than relying on television, Facebook, Twitter, or Washington.

Progress towards even such limited measures will confront the fact that in both India and Pakistan, nationalist passions forged over seven decades are being reinforced by the institutional self-interests of emerging nuclear military-industrial complexes and their political patrons and ideological allies. The United States and Soviet Union saw such deepening militarization during the Cold War. The institutional forces and ideas—what the great English anti-nuclear activist, thinker, and historian E.P. Thompson called “the thrust of exterminism”—proved so strong that even when the Cold War ended, and the Soviet Union fell, the Bomb remained. With expansive and costly nuclear arsenal modernizations underway in the United States, Russia, and the other established nuclear weapon states, the Bomb now seems ready for a second life. Increasingly subject to the same exterminist forces, South Asia may be locked in its nuclear nightmare for a very long time.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/gordon-g-chang/great-power-confrontation-south-china-sea

Around Asia
Gordon G. Chang

Great Power Confrontation in the South China Sea

4 May 2016
Comments 7

On Friday in Beijing, Sergey Lavrov and Wang Yi, the Russian and Chinese foreign ministers, presented a united stand against the US on a host of issues in their joint press conference.

Among the topics were Beijing’s territorial claims. “We are of the same view with Minister Lavrov that the disputes around the South China Sea should be settled peacefully through negotiations among the directly involved countries,” declared Wang. “We discussed the situation in the South China Sea,” Lavrov noted. “The Russian stance is invariable—these problems should not be internationalized—none of the external players should try to interfere in their settlement efforts.”

The irony, of course, is that Russia, a non-claimant, was involving itself by telling others not to involve themselves.

The US and Russia are not the only non-South China Sea states believing they have an interest in that contested body of water. India and, more recently, Japan have also made their presence felt, sending ships through what they consider to be a part of the global commons.

New Delhi has for years regularly sailed its warships to ports in Vietnam, its friend. In July 2011, a voice over the radio, identifying himself as the “Chinese Navy,” attempted to stop the INS Airavat, an Indian amphibious assault ship, as it peacefully steamed through international water on its way to Haiphong. Japan, for its part, as recently as last month, dispatched warships to Subic Bay in the Philippines.

So there is great power contention. On one side, Russia supports China’s attempts to close off most of the South China Sea, while America, India, and Japan, among others, want to keep the waters open to all.

In effect, it’s a zero-sum contest where both sides see a critical—and non-negotiable—issue at stake. But what makes the South China Sea even more dangerous is that the sides are ill-defined at the moment. Like in the days that preceded World War I, the situation is difficult for participants to anticipate, much less manage, because it is unclear what other powers will do in the event hostilities break out.

The US, for instance, could now face not just Beijing but Moscow over, among other things, Scarborough Shoal. China seized that reef from the Philippines in early 2012, and it appears China intends to turn it into a military fortress through reclamation.

China, on the other hand, could see Japan join America in the defense of the Philippines. The combination of possible alliances is not endless, but uncertainty must confound planners and policymakers.

The question is, will ambiguity temp Beijing?

The danger at the moment is that deterrence can fail in this complex situation. Chinese planners today should be haunted by the lesson Kim Il Sung learned in June 1950.

The North Korean dictator calculated that, after Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously left South Korea out of America’s “defense perimeter” in Asia, no nation would defend Seoul, so he launched an attack that precipitated the Korean War. Yet the US unexpectedly came to the South’s rescue as did 15 other nations fighting under the UN banner. Those nations beat back Kim, who in turn had to be rescued by a reluctant China and Soviet Union. In the end, North Korea lost territory when the armistice was signed three years later.

The one thing we know is that no state will listen to Lavrov and Wang when they say that others should leave China alone, especially when Beijing uses aggressive military and diplomatic tactics against other claimants. And that means any incident, however minor or accidental, can flare up into a big-power confrontation.

All the conditions for conflict, therefore, are in place in the South China Sea.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-security-idUSKCN0XW0ZH

World | Thu May 5, 2016 12:31pm EDT
Related: World

Saudi security operation kills Islamic State fighters outside Mecca


Saudi security forces shot dead two alleged Islamic State fighters and two others blew themselves up outside the holy city of Mecca on Thursday, the interior ministry said.

"The terrorists fired upon security forces requiring them to respond in kind to neutralize the threat, leading to the killing of two and the death of two others who blew themselves up with explosive belts," the ministry said in a statement.

State-owned Al-Arabiya TV reported that the security forces surrounded the group in the Wadi Noman area south of the city, showing images of police trucks mounted with machine guns around a walled compound.

No civilians or security forces were killed or wounded, the interior ministry said.

In an earlier, two-day security operation that ended on Sunday, two Islamic State suspects were killed and a third was wounded in southwestern Bisha province.

Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, has been hit by a spate of deadly shootings and bombings targeting security forces or its Shi'ite Muslim minority since last year. Islamic State's local branches have claimed many of them.

The group views Shi'ites as heretics but is also bitterly opposed to the wealthy Gulf kingdom's Sunni Muslim rulers, whom it regards as having betrayed Islam through close ties with the West.


(Reporting by Noah Browning and Reem Shamseddine; Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya-security-idUSKCN0XW1SN

World | Thu May 5, 2016 12:56pm EDT
Related: World, Libya

Militants stage attacks between Libyan stronghold of Sirte and coastal Misrata


Suspected Islamic State militants staged attacks on Thursday south of the Libyan city of Misrata, killing four people and injuring 12, officials said.

Aziz Issa, the spokesman for Misrata central hospital, said two members of the local security forces had been killed and 12 wounded in an attack on a checkpoint at Abu Grain, about 140 km (85 miles) west of the Islamic State stronghold of Sirte.

Separately, militants carried out a bomb attack in Baghla, to the south, a local official and a resident said. The official, from the nearby town of Bani Walid, said two people were killed in the bombing.

There were unconfirmed reports that Islamic State fighters had forced local brigades to retreat and were holding territory around Abu Grain and to the south west, at Wadi Zamzam.

Islamic State militants regularly venture across the main road leading south from Misrata, and have carried out raids and attacks in the area before, including against checkpoints manned by brigades from Misrata.

The attacks on Thursday came as military forces in eastern Libya said they were preparing for a campaign to recapture Sirte.

There have also been reports that Misrata brigades were mobilizing to advance against Islamic State, and pictures posted on social media last week showed convoys of dozens of vehicles on the road south from Misrata.

Islamic State took advantage of Libya's security vacuum and political turmoil to establish itself in Sirte in 2015. It controls a strip of coast about 250 km (155 miles) long around the city.

The group has staged attacks in several other Libyan towns and cities but has struggled to win more support and territory, suffering setbacks in the eastern cities of Benghazi and Derna, and in western Sabratha.

A U.N.-backed unity government arrived just over a month ago in Tripoli has urged armed factions to hold back from attacking Sirte until a unified military command is created.

The unity government is trying to bridge the divide between Libya's competing armed factions and two rival administrations that have operated in Tripoli and the east since 2014.


(Reporting by Ahmed Elumami and Ayman al-Warfalli; Writing by Aidan Lewis; Editing by Richard Balmforth)

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/05/what-to-expect-from-a-rare-north-korean-gathering.html

What to expect from a rare North Korean gathering

The 30-something North Korean ruler wants all eyes on him

Heesun Wee | @heesunwee
3 Hours Ago

Following a series of failed missile tests and a claim of a hydrogen bomb during the past few months, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is preparing his nation for an historic political gathering beginning Friday.

Known as the Congress of the Workers' Party, the last such gathering was in 1980 to present Kim's father, then-heir apparent Kim Jong Il.


"This party congress is all about him"
-Bruce Bennett, senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp.


Friday's event in one of the world's most secretive nations will be only the seventh party congress in the country's history. And regime changes could be unveiled, according to North Korea watchers. In particular, there could be announcements related to a broad generational shift to younger government officials and ruling elites.

"He wants to go into this congress and get rid of a lot of older generation people, and replace them with younger people," said Bruce Bennett, senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp. "What it appears that he's trying to do is to prove that he's in power, that's he's capable, that youth can now take this country to new heights."


Kim himself is believed to be his early 30s, and has been in charge since after the death of his father in late 2011.


And if a revolving door of top leaders is any indication since Kim's ascension, it seems lonely at the top — especially in a place like North Korea.

Kim, so far, doesn't appear to have the equivalent of a deputy or trusted number two man. In contrast, his late father's inner circle had included Jang Song Thaek, Kim Jong Un's late uncle who was executed in 2103. Jang had unique access in the ruling elite and was a go-between with Chinese leadership. He also ran a vast, multinational ring of state trading companies that generated income for the North. He was the equivalent of an entrepreneurial superstar and prince maker, according to experts.

Jang's execution eliminated, arguably, the most influential senior party official remaining from Kim's father's era, according to a 2013-14 report from the Pentagon to Congress.


Young leader Kim, meanwhile, has been cleaning house and reshuffling top brass since taking over the helm.

"He's up to now five defense ministers he has replaced in four years. That's an incredible pace," said Bennett. "His dad replaced three in 17 years. And two of them died of old age."



North Korean leader Kim Jong Un watches a firing contest of the KPA artillery units at an undisclosed location in a photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency in Pyongyang on Jan. 5, 2016.
N. Korean Kim stirs crisis: Can he handle blowback?


And like any rogue dictator wary of loyalty and broad economic stability, cracking down on activity is an effective strategy.

Citing a South Korean official, North Korea apparently has banned weddings and funerals to tighten security for the party congress, The Sunday Times reported.

"The party congress, I would argue, is a huge, big, major deal. And he [Kim] doesn't want weddings getting in the way of that. He doesn't want people celebrating something else," Bennett said. "The ban on marriages and those kinds of things, as I understand it, it's just this week that that's really occurring. But he wants the focus on him. This party congress is all about him."

Kim is likely feeling the heat after experts disputed the North's claims of a hydrogen bomb test earlier this year. But still there are ongoing concerns. Could Kim be under pressure to attempt a second H-bomb test and fuel the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe?



People buy inflatable clappers before a football match at the Kim Il Sung Stadium in Pyongyang October 8, 2015.
How Kim Jong Un bankrolls his nuclear ambitions


Meanwhile, improvement to the North Korean economy and promises to raise the standard of living have yet to materialize.

In 2013-2014, the regime expanded the number of economic development zones for foreign investors from five to 25. But the initiative remains in its infancy, according to the CIA. Firm political control remains the priority.

Kim also faces toughened United Nations sanctions on the North, though the impact will take time. And it's unclear to what extent China, North Korea's strongest ally, will cooperate with those intensified sanctions.

Being a nuclear-weapons power is a priority for the North.

The ruling elite bankrolls its nuclear ambitions through varied sources of income including exported minerals and other commodities. Other sources of cash flow include exported North Korean slave labor to China and as far away as Europe, according to United Nations documents, congressional testimony and research by North Korea experts.

Meanwhile, North Korean per capita GDP in 2013 was about $1,800, according to the CIA Factbook. Economic statistics suggest that by 2005, North Korean GDP overall had retreated to late-1980s levels, according to experts. In contrast, South Korean per capita GDP has soared from around $1,200 in the early 1960s to more than $22,000 today.


The regime still cannot feed its own people without outside food aid. North Koreans rely on massive black markets in big cities and the countryside to buy rice, produce, beer and school supplies — often with hard Chinese currency. These markets essentially are tolerated by the government and have become permanent fixtures in the economy.

And Kim already has warned of potential economic difficulty akin to the 1990s, which was marked by widespread famine.

"He's announced that they could go into another period of serious difficulty like in the '90s," Bennett said. "And so he is worried apparently, and trying to prep the people to recognize this problem could be developing."



Passengers board the train at an underground railway station located in Pyongyang, North Korea.
The kids bringing down North Korea's regime


Kim, meanwhile, continues to impose his will among some 25 million North Koreans.

The number of North Koreans defecting to South Korea has declined in the last four years. Illustrative of the crackdown along the porous North Korean-Chinese border, more than 1,510 North Korean refugees entered the South in 2013, according to the latest South Korean government data. In 2008, around 2,800 refugees entered the South — a roughly 46 percent decline.

And those refugees have included older escapees. "The impression I get is that the number of senior defectors that have occurred has really ramped up in the last year or so," said Bennett.

Looking to the party congress and beyond, there's likely to be some degree of generational change. But how radical remains to be seen.

"What it will illustrate, once we see what he does, is who is he scared of. Who is he really concerned about?" Bennett said. "How do his changes potentially solve his insecurities?"

Heesun Wee

Features editor, CNBC.com

 

[vestige]

What to expect from a rare North Korean gathering

The 30-something North Korean ruler wants all eyes on him

He already has a lot of eyes on him... as well as satellites...

and coordinates.

 

[Housecarl]

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Posted for fair use.....
https://www.yahoo.com/news/people-die-shooting-rages-night-amid-spluttering-nagorno-112222275.html

People die, shooting rages at night, amid spluttering Nagorno-Karabakh truce

By Nailia Bagirova
Reuters
May 5, 2016

SARIJALY, Azerbaijan (Reuters) - A ceasefire between Azerbaijan and its breakaway Nagorno-Karabakh region may have stopped a short conflict becoming an all-out war a month ago, but gunfire and shelling still echo nightly, residents say, and people are still being killed.

The ex-Soviet state of Azerbaijan and separatists backed by Armenia fought a war over the territory in the early 1990s with thousands killed on both sides and hundreds of thousands displaced.

The latest outbreak of violence was brief - intense fighting lasted only four days - and dozens rather than thousands were killed.

But locals say the ceasefire agreement, reached on April 5, is violated almost daily by shelling and fatalities.

"We are very afraid as shooting from rocket launchers and shelling has not stopped since the ceasefire," Maral Abdullayeva, an English language teacher in the village of Sarijaly in Azerbaijan, told Reuters.

"Our school was destroyed on April 4. It has been partly restored since then, but the kids are still afraid to go out," said Abdullayeva, a slim woman in her mid-40s, pointing to cracks in the walls of her small house.

At least eight soldiers, from both sides, have been killed in exchanges of fire since the ceasefire was declared, according to statements from Azerbaijan and the separatists. Locals say gunfire is particularly common at night.

The situation is a worry for European countries who fear another flare-up could deepen instability in the South Caucasus, a region that serves as a corridor for pipelines taking oil and gas to world markets.

Sarijaly is a small village in Agdam region, about six km (3.73 miles) from the frontline, which divides Azeri forces and Armenian-backed separatists from Nagorno-Karabakh, which is populated mainly by ethnic Armenians who reject Azerbaijan's rule.

Azerbaijan and officials from Nagorno-Karabakh blame each other for truce violations.

Sarijaly and some other villages in Agdam are controlled by the Azeris.

Residents in the neighboring village of Yevogly are equally derisory about the effectiveness of the ceasefire.

"Our life has turned into hell. We hear shooting every night. What kind of a ceasefire are you talking about?" complained Agul Huseinova, 56.

Her house and small farm were destroyed and her cattle killed, forcing her to move in with relatives.

"All the electricity lines were damaged. There is no electricity, no gas and we can't even go and work on our land plots," she said.

Residents of villages from the other side of the frontline - on the separatist side - make the same complaints.

Grim, almost daily, reports from both Azerbaijan and Nagorno-Karabkh, about casualties among the military reinforce local fears that a wider conflict is just round the corner.

(This version of the story restores dropped words in second paragraph)

(Writing by Margarita Antidze; Editing by Andrew Osborn and Richard Balmforth)

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[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.businessinsider.com/iran-facing-a-wide-scale-armed-uprising-2016-5

Iran is facing a 'wide-scale armed uprising' as Kurdish insurgents have started targeting the Revolutionary Guard

Now Lebanon
Albin Szakola, Now Lebanon
4h ago

BEIRUT – Reports have emerged that Kurdish insurgents attacked Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) troops near the country’s border with Iraq, an incident only briefly mentioned by Iranian media.

Media outlets based in the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Regional Government reported on the Wednesday fighting, with ARA News sayingthat Kurdish combatants staged an assault against IRGC troops in the villages of Hamran, Myouni and Sartaja outside the border town of Sardasht.

“This led the Iranian forces to [deploy] additional military reinforcements to the region in a bid to face the unexpected fierce offensive,” the news site added.

Rudaw News, in turn, cited witnesses in the three villages as saying that clashes were ongoing as helicopters circled overhead.

“At least 15 ambulances were seen rushing into areas where security forces were deployed,” the report also said.

Iranian media has remained mostly mum in its coverage of the fighting, however the state-controlled Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB)reported Thursday that a funeral was held for two IRGC members killed in “clashes” in Sardasht.

However, the report did not go into further details on the violence.

As of yet, none of the anti-Tehran Kurdish factions based in the area have claimed credit for the military operation, however Saudi Arabia’s Al-Arabiya television quoted local activists as saying that fighters in from the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) took part in the deadly clashes.

The PDKI, for its part, touted the fighting on its official Twitter account, claiming on Wednesday that more than 10 IRGC soldiers had died in Sardasht.

It also said that two Iranian helicopters had deployed to the region in a bid to aid “a large group of Revolutionary Guards that [were] suffering heavy losses,” adding that Iranian troops were shelling positions in the Myouni mountains.

The PDKI—a left-wing Kurdish nationalist group formed in 1945—announced on February 26 that it was restarting its “armed resistance against the Islamic Republic of Iran” and claimed an attack against a Basij base in the village of Majid Khan.

The group waged a deadly insurgency against Iranian authorities from 1989 to 1996, after which it maintained a peaceful policy until it purportedly engaged Iranian troops in the fall of 2015.

Another Kurdish opposition faction in Iran, the Kurdistan Freedom Party, announced Friday that it too was resuming its armed operations in Iran.

“Iran is at the doorstep of a wide-scale armed uprising… that will include all off its cities,” the commander of the PAK’s armed wing, Hussein Yazdanpana, told Asharq Alawsat.

NOW's English news desk editor Albin Szakola (@AlbinSzakola) wrote this report.

Read the original article on Now Lebanon. Follow Now Lebanon on Facebook. Copyright 2016. Follow Now Lebanon on Twitter.

 

[Be Well]

Thanks for keeping on with this thread. Wow especially on the last article.

 

[Housecarl]

Missed this one.....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.yahoo.com/news/turkey-ready-send-ground-troops-syria-necessary-pm-132147151.html

Turkey ready to send ground troops to Syria 'if necessary': PM

AFP
May 4, 2016

Istanbul (AFP) - Turkey is ready to send ground troops into Syria if necessary, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said on Wednesday, after weeks of deadly rocket strikes on a Turkish region from jihadists across the border.

"If it becomes necessary then we will send the ground forces," Davutoglu told Al-Jazeera television in an interview, when asked if Turkey was mulling sending troops to Syria.

"We are ready to take all measures that we need, both inside Turkey and outside, to provide for our own security," he added, according to a transcript published on Al-Jazeera's Turkish website.

The Turkish border region of Kilis -- which lies opposite areas controlled by Islamic State (IS) jihadists in Syria -- has been battered since January by rocket fire from the other side of the border which has claimed 20 lives.

Turkey has hit back with artillery fire of its own against IS but has always stopped short of making any firm commitment to send its troops over the border.

Drones from the US-led international coalition fighting IS have also taken off from Turkey's Incirlik base in the south of the country for bombing raids against IS targets.

Asked if Turkey could act unilaterally against IS, Davutoglu said Turkey had a right to self-defence against IS based on UN resolutions.

"But we still prefer an international consensus. As IS is an issue that concerns the whole world," he added.

Turkey has in the past repeatedly said it is open to a ground operation in Syria but wanted to move in cooperation with its Western and Gulf allies.

Turkey's NATO allies have sometimes lamented that Ankara could do more in the fight against IS but Turkey appears to have stepped up efforts in the last weeks after a string of attacks on its soil.

In the latest violence, a car bomb Sunday blamed on an IS-affiliated militant killed at least two policemen and wounded 22 people in the Turkish city of Gaziantep, a major refugee hub near the Syrian border.


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[vestige]

“Iran is at the doorstep of a wide-scale armed uprising… that will include all off its cities,” the commander of the PAK’s armed wing, Hussein Yazdanpana, told Asharq Alawsat.

bump

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-politics-idUSKCN0XW0S4

World | Thu May 5, 2016 3:04pm EDT
Related: World

Turkish PM Davutoglu bows out as Erdogan aims at stronger presidency

ANKARA/ISTANBUL | By Ercan Gurses and Nick Tattersall


Ahmet Davutoglu announced on Thursday that he was stepping down as leader of Turkey's ruling AK Party and therefore as prime minister, bowing to President Tayyip Erdogan's drive to create a powerful executive presidency.

In a speech defending his record but also vowing loyalty to Erdogan, Davutoglu said he had kept his party and the government intact during a tumultuous period and pledged that "strong" AKP government would continue.

After a leadership meeting of the party founded and dominated by Erdogan, Davutoglu told reporters that, under the current circumstances, he would not run again for leader at an extraordinary party congress on May 22.

"I am telling our members, up until today I was leading you. From now on, I am among you," he said.

Davutoglu's departure plunges the NATO member into political uncertainty just as Europe needs its help in curbing a migration crisis and Washington needs support in fighting Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

There could now be a third parliamentary election in less than 18 months.

Davutoglu's departure follows weeks of tensions with Erdogan. His successor is likely to be significantly more willing to back Erdogan's aim of changing the constitution to create a presidential system, a move that opponents say will bring growing authoritarianism.

Main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu condemned what he called a "palace coup" and rejected attempts by AKP officials to dismiss it as an internal affair.

Mehmet Ali Kulat, head of the pollster Mak Danismanlik, which is seen as close to Erdogan, forecast an election in October or November. "From now on, Turkey's sole agenda is the presidential system and an early election," he said.

Erdogan sees rule by the head of state as a guarantee against the fractious coalition politics that hampered the government in the 1990s. His opponents say he is merely furthering his own ambition.


Related Coverage
› Turkey's political turmoil casts a pall on reforms and investor confidence


CENTRAL CONTROL

"These are critical developments in my mind in Turkey - likely setting the long-term direction of the country, both in terms of democracy, but (also) economic and social policy and geopolitical orientation," said Timothy Ash, strategist at Nomura and a veteran Turkey watcher.

"Turkey changes as a result to an Asiatic model of development, with strong central control from the presidency, and most key decisions taken by the president and a small group of likely unelected advisers."

With growth slowing and inflation well above target, investors were nervous about the prospect that economic reforms could be delayed further. But the lira TRYTOM=D3 recouped around half the previous day's losses after Davutoglu indicated he would go quietly, while Istanbul's BIST 100 share index .XU100 also rebounded to finish slightly below Wednesday's close.

Davutoglu said the fact that his mandate had been cut short was "not my choice but a result of necessity".

But he said he bore no grudges and urged the AKP, which has governed Turkey since 2002, to remain united.

Government spokesman Numan Kurtulmus and Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag, both Erdogan loyalists, are potential candidates to replace Davutoglu, three sources close to the presidency said. Transport Minister Binali Yildirim and Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, Erdogan's son-in-law, have also been touted, they said.

Presidential adviser Cemil Ertem said the economy would stabilize further when a prime minister more closely aligned with Erdogan took office. He said economic policy would not change, and that no election was likely before the government's mandate expires in 2019.

But a member of the AKP's executive board and a source close to the party both told Reuters an autumn election was the most likely scenario. The aim would be to win two-thirds of the 550 seats in parliament - a gain of 50 from the AKP's current 317 - to allow the party to change the constitution without the need for a referendum.

"Erdogan will move fast and try to reach enough of a majority for the executive presidency. A party structure and a leader who will design that will be put in place," the second source said. "He does not want to lose any more time."


Related Coverage
› German politicians say Turkish PM's departure worrying
› EU unsure what Davutoglu exit means for Turkey migrant deal


ELECTION CALCULATION

The member of the AKP executive board, its main decision-making body, said Bozdag was the favorite and that the question of an early election would hinge on a leadership battle in the nationalist opposition MHP.

MHP leader Devlet Bahceli, a somber 68-year-old, is facing a challenge from Meral Aksener, a 59-year-old woman who served as interior minister in the 1990s.

Some opinion polls suggest Aksener could double the MHP's support, while under Bahceli it could drop below the 10 percent threshold needed to enter parliament, which would give the AKP a significant boost.

"The most likely alternative is an early election in October," the AKP board member said. "But if Aksener takes the (MHP) leadership, there may be no election until 2019."

Early election or not, Davutoglu's departure is likely to test relations with Europe just as Ankara implements a deal on stemming the flow of illegal migrants in return for accelerated EU accession talks, visa liberalization, and financial aid.

Davutoglu, who negotiated the deal and has largely delivered Turkey's side of the bargain, is seen in Brussels as the more liberal face of the Turkish government and more concerned about the rule of law.

EU officials involved in the deal were reluctant to be drawn on the implications of Davutoglu leaving, insisting that Ankara's existing commitments should not be affected.

"We will obviously discuss this first of all with the Turkish authorities and define together how to move forward," EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini said in Pristina, Kosovo, saying it was too early to assess the impact.


(Additional reporting by Orhan Coskun in Ankara, Daren Butler, Humeyra Pamuk and Ayla Jean Yackley in Istanbul, Fatos Bytyci in Pristina; Writing by Nick Tattersall; Editing by Kevin Liffey)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-congodemocratic-politics-idUSKCN0XW2EH

World | Thu May 5, 2016 6:13pm EDT
Related: World, United Nations, Congo, Africa

Congo opposition leader denies hiring foreign mercenaries

LUBUMBASHI, Democratic Republic of Congo | By Kenny Katombe


Democratic Republic of Congo opposition leader Moise Katumbi on Thursday denied an accusation by the government that he hired foreign mercenaries, and said he had nothing to fear from an investigation into his conduct or from reports that he might be arrested.

His comments come a day after he announced he would run for president of Congo in November, at an election to choose a successor to incumbent Joseph Kabila who is due to step down at the end of his two-term mandate.

Tensions are high ahead of the election in part because Kabila has not declared his intentions. Critics say he intends to remain in power after his mandate ends, leading a country that has not had a peaceful transition of power since independence.

Justice Minister Alexis Thambwe Mwamba said authorities had proof Katumbi was involved in recruiting mercenaries including several retired American soldiers. A government spokesman said four of Katumbi's bodyguards were arrested because they were not authorized to work in the country.

"I have nothing to fear because I have no mercenaries with me at the house, nor have I recruited any. It's just rumors ... Investigators said they were going to come to my house to search and arrest me. Let them come," Katumbi said.

"I maintain my candidacy (for the presidency) and will stay true to my peaceful struggle for the state and the law," he told Reuters.

The U.S. Embassy in the capital Kinshasa said on its Facebook page it was deeply concerned about Mwamba's accusations and believed them to be false.

It said a U.S. citizen working in Katanga province as a security advisor for a private U.S. company that consults around the world was arrested on April 24, but was unarmed and that allegations he was involved in mercenary activity are false.

Katumbi governed Katanga, Congo's southeastern copper-mining heartland, from 2007 until last September when he quit Kabila's ruling party, accusing it of plotting to keep the president in power beyond the two-term limit.

More than 40 people were killed in protests in January 2015 over the issue of whether Kabila might try to stay in power beyond his term. Since then, authorities have arrested dozens of critics of Kabila on what the United Nations and human rights groups say are trumped-up charges.


(Additional reporting by Aaron Ross, writing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg, editing by G Crosse)

 

[Housecarl]

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...upreme-Court-removes-lower-house-speaker-(5-5)

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-brazil-politics-idUSKCN0XV1UB

World | Thu May 5, 2016 8:13pm EDT
Related: World

Brazil Supreme Court removes lower house speaker Cunha

BRASILIA | By Leonardo Goy and Anthony Boadle


Brazil's Supreme Court removed the speaker of the lower house of Congress on Thursday on charges of obstructing a corruption investigation, days before an impeachment process that he engineered was expected to oust President Dilma Rousseff.

The removal of Eduardo Cunha, a bitter rival of Rousseff and one of Brazil's most divisive public figures, was the latest in a series of political earthquakes in South America's largest country as it struggles with a sweeping corruption scandal and the worst recession in decades.

The Supreme Court voted unanimously to approve a request by Brazil's top prosecutor to strip Cunha of his influential post for allegedly intimidating lawmakers and obstructing an investigation into accusations that he held undeclared bank accounts in Switzerland. Cunha said he would appeal.

An evangelical Christian with strong support from the religious right in Congress, Cunha has for months fended off ethics committee hearings in the lower house about whether he lied about the accounts, using every trick in the procedural book.

The bespectacled speaker with slicked-back hair has remained unflappable, calmly denying prosecutors' accusations he had used the Swiss accounts to stash millions of dollars in bribe money.

Cunha is the only sitting lawmaker so far officially charged by the Supreme Court with corruption in the sweeping kickbacks scandal focused on state oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, commonly known as Petrobras (PETR4.SA).

Deputy speaker Waldir Maranhao, a member of the Progressive Party who is also being investigated in the Petrobras scandal, became acting head of the lower chamber with Cunha's suspension.

As speaker, Cunha stood third in the line of presidential succession and would have become second if the Senate decides next week, as expected, to try Rousseff for alleged budget irregularities.

If the Senate puts her on trial, as expected in a vote next Wednesday, she would be immediately suspended from office for up to six months during the trial and replaced by Michel Temer, her 75-year-old vice president. Temer is already forming his cabinet.

Cunha launched impeachment proceedings against Rousseff in December on charges she broke budget laws. His suspension could have helped Rousseff had it come earlier.

Now, it could work against Rousseff by weakening her argument that she is being impeached by corrupt politicians. It may instead help Temer by eliminating a tainted ally with whom the new president would have had to negotiate legislation.

A Temer government would desperately need to pass reforms to revive confidence in Brazil's ailing economy and plug a budget deficit that exceeded 10 percent of gross domestic product last year. Fitch Ratings downgraded Brazil's sovereign debt further into junk territory on Thursday, to BB with a negative outlook, citing a very challenging political environment.

"Temer could inherit the presidency because of a process started by Cunha," said Rafael Cortez, a political analyst with Tendencias, a consultancy in Sao Paulo. "Any agreements they would have made could have looked like payback for enabling him to become president."


'FRANK UNDERWOOD'

A wily backroom dealmaker, Cunha has been dubbed the Frank Underwood of Brazilian politics by the country's media, a reference to the ruthless president in "The House of Cards" television series.

A familiar voice to many Brazilians as an evangelical radio commentator, Cunha has sparked protests with his plans to tighten abortion rules.

More recently, details of lavish spending on foreign trips with his young wife, including classes at a top Miami tennis academy, stirred outrage in the midst of the deep recession.

Cunha is accused of taking $5 million in bribes on contracts for two drill-ships in the corruption scheme that engulfed Petrobras two years ago.

Though Rousseff herself has not been accused of any wrongdoing directly related to the scandal, it has ensnared her allies and raised pressure for her ouster.

The leftist president has been fighting for her political survival since the lower house commanded by Cunha voted on April 17 to charge her with manipulating government accounts. Her opponents say this allowed her to boost public spending before her 2014 re-election.

Rousseff denies any wrongdoing and has accused Temer of orchestrating a 'coup' to end 13 years of Workers Party rule. She has accused Cunha of starting the impeachment proceedings against her because the Workers Party did not help him avoid the ethics probe.

"It’s a clear abuse of power. He used his position for revenge," Rousseff said.

Cunha said he hoped she will be convicted by the Senate. "On Wednesday we will be able to say, better late than never, that Brazil will be free of the Workers Party," he told reporters.

Should Temer become president, Senate leader Renan Calheiros, another politician who is under investigation for corruption, would become the next in line to lead the nation.

Temer would serve out the remainder of Rousseff's term through 2018, and would not be able to run for president. The Sao Paulo state electoral court ruled this week that he exceeded the limits of campaign donations in 2014 and cannot run for elected office for eight years.


(Writing by Anthony Boadle and Daniel Flynn; Editing by James Dalgleish and Andrew Hay)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-israel-palestinians-tunnel-idUSKCN0XW14F

World | Thu May 5, 2016 7:02pm EDT
Related: World, Israel

Israel says found second Hamas tunnel from Gaza since 2014 war

SUFA, Israel | By Eli Berlzon


Israel's military said it had discovered a cross-border tunnel on Thursday built by the Islamist group Hamas from the Gaza Strip during a rare flare-up of violence along a border that has been largely quiet since a 2014 war.

Gaza hospital officials said a 54-year-old woman had been killed and a man wounded by fragments of an Israeli tank shell fired near Rafah during the violence, which erupted on Wednesday.

Israel's Shin Bet undercover intelligence agency said a Hamas operative arrested last month had provided useful information about the tunnel networks in the area, though it did not explicitly attribute Thursday's discovery to his data.

Gaza analysts said the flare-up of violence, the most intense since the 2014 war, threatened the truce that has largely held in the area for nearly two years.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was set to convene senior ministers on Friday to discuss the situation. Defence Minister Moshe Yaalon said after touring the area that Israel would not be deterred by Hamas's threats and would continue to search "until all the tunnels are found."

A senior Hamas official, Khalil al-Hayya, said efforts by Qatar and Egypt were ongoing to try to restore calm, but he warned that "Israeli incursions into Gaza would not be tolerated."

Militants fired mortar shells at Israeli forces working to unearth the tunnel and Israel responded with tank fire and air strikes, an army spokeswoman said. The violence had subsided by late Thursday night and there was a period of calm toward midnight.

Israeli aircraft earlier targeted four Hamas positions in the vicinity of the tunnel, the military said. During Wednesday and Thursday, there were 10 instances of Hamas fire against Israeli forces operating in the area, it added.

Hamas, Gaza's de facto ruler, has not confirmed responsibility for the shelling and did not comment on the announcement of the tunnel's discovery.


TUNNEL SEARCH

Lieutenant-Colonel Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said the tunnel unearthed on Thursday was situated 28 meters (31 yards) below the surface and that an investigation was under way to determine whether it was dug before or after the war.

Lerner said the militants may have started firing mortars at the Israeli forces to prevent them discovering the tunnel. Last month a first tunnel was unearthed without incident.

But the armed wing of Hamas said the tunnel was not new and had been in use in the early part of the war in 2014.

Israel has been wary about discussing what means it has employed to uncover the tunnels but the arrest of Mahmoud Atouna, 29, from Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip early last month may have helped.

"Atouna provided his interrogators much information about the tunnel routes in the northern Gaza Strip, its tunnel-digging methods, the use of private homes and public buildings to bore tunnels and materials used," Shin Bet said in a statement on Thursday.

More than 2,100 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed during the 2014 Gaza conflict. Sixty-seven Israeli soldiers and six civilians in Israel were killed by rockets and attacks by Hamas and other militant groups.


(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza, Writing by Dan Williams and Ori Lewis; editing by Gareth Jones, G Crosse)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-nigeria-oil-delta-idUSKCN0XW1PL

World | Thu May 5, 2016 3:05pm EDT
Related: World, Africa

Militants attack Chevron platform in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta

YENAGOA, Nigeria | By Tife Owolabi


Militants attacked a Chevron (CVX.N) platform in Nigeria's oil-rich Niger Delta region late on Wednesday, the U.S. energy company said on Thursday, amid growing fears of a revived militant campaign in the region.

It is the latest in a series of attacks on oil facilities in Africa's top oil exporter. President Muhammadu Buhari has vowed to crack down on "vandals and saboteurs" in the Delta region, which produces most of the country's oil.

In a statement, the energy company said Chevron Nigeria Limited, operator of a joint venture with the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), said an attack took place at about 11.15 pm (1715 ET) on Wednesday.

"Its Okan offshore facility in the Western Niger Delta region was breached by unknown persons," said Chevron in the statement. "The facility is currently shut-in and we are assessing the situation, and have deployed resources to respond to a resulting spill."

There were no immediate details of any casualties. The company could not be reached for further comment.

A group known as the Niger Delta Avengers claimed responsibility for the attack, and in a statement it said it blew up the platform.

"This is what we promised the Nigeria government since they refuse to listen to us," the group said.

The same group has said it carried out an attack on a Shell (RDSa.L) oil pipeline in February which shut down the 250,000 barrel-a-day Forcados export terminal.

The militants say they want a greater share of oil revenues. Crude sales account for around 70 percent of national income in Africa's biggest economy.

Pipeline attacks and violence have risen in Nigeria's southern swampland since authorities issued an arrest warrant in January for a former militant leader on corruption charges.

Buhari has extended a multi-million dollar amnesty signed with militants in 2009 but upset them by ending generous pipeline protection contracts.

The militancy is a further challenge for a government faced with an insurgency by the Islamist militant Boko Haram group in the northeast and violent clashes between armed nomadic herdsmen and locals over land use in various parts of the country.


(Aditional reporting by Alexis Akwagyiram, in Lagos, Anamesere Igboeroteonwu, in Onitsha, and Libby George, in London; editing by Susan Thomas and Alexandra Hudson)

 

[Housecarl]

Hummm......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.voanews.com/content/will-russian-national-guard-putin-personal-army/3317392.html

Will New Russian Force Be 'Putin’s Personal Army'?


Ia Meurmishvili
May 05, 2016 7:15 PM

While Russian lawmakers are busy changing the country’s election laws in preparation for parliamentary elections this year, the lower house of parliament is due this month to consider whether President Vladimir Putin’s new National Guard should be allowed to shoot Russian citizens without warning.

According to a draft law that Putin submitted to the State Duma, the National Guard would be prohibited from using firearms “at largely crowded places, if their use may casually hurt people.”

In addition, National Guard personnel would be prohibited from firing at “women with visible signs of pregnancy, people with apparent signs of disability, and underage persons.”

However, members of the force would be allowed to shoot, without warning, anybody determined to be “threatening the life and health of citizens.”

Taking this one step further, the Duma's committee on defense has proposed that National Guard members be granted immunity from any legal liability for actions they take that result in casualties.

Russia's RBC News quoted the committee as saying “we believe that in these cases, the risk of harming random individuals will be justified,” and that members of the force "should not be held liable” if they need to open fire.

Communications control

According to other provisions of the draft law, the National Guard would be authorized to quarantine an area to control riots, and to commandeer private citizens’ vehicles to get to a crime scene or chase criminals. The proposed legislation would also give the National Guard the right to take full control of any communication networks, if deemed necessary. Service members would be allowed to search homes, vehicles and individuals “if there are sufficient grounds to suspect them of committing a crime or an administrative offense."

The bill also says the National Guard would be staffed by conscripts as well as contract personnel.

The National Guard would also have a mandate to take part in peacekeeping missions abroad, as well as an intelligence-gathering function in order to fight terrorism, extremism and organized crime.

Some experts in Russia and the West claim the creation of the National Guard is timed with the country's parliamentary elections, set for September 18. When asked, Kremlin spokesman Dmitri Peskov said he could not explain the timing.

Putin’s supporters have praised the move. Chechen President Ramzan Kadyrov said creation of the force would "strengthen the combat readiness of units," while Irina Yarovaya, chairwoman of the Duma's committee on defense and anti-corruption, called it “an absolutely timely, adequate and systemic answer to modern challenges and threats.”

Eye on dissent

Mark Simakovsky, nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and former country director for Russia at the Pentagon, said Kremlin authorities were taking precautions in the run-up to the September parliamentary elections, as well as the 2018 presidential elections.

“Although Putin remains very popular, the regime has concerns with economic decline in the country, as well as issues related to sanctions,” Simakovsky said. He added that the Russian president "wants to make sure that any and all domestic dissent will be suppressed rapidly."

Tens of thousands of Russians participated in protests in late 2011 after parliamentary elections were marred by allegations of unfairness and fraud. Many people, including some opposition leaders, were jailed.

As recently as February, Putin said “enemies abroad” were trying to interfere with the parliamentary elections and tasked his security services to prevent any such actions.

With a nearly unlimited mandate, the National Guard may not simply discourage large-scale demonstrations but may also send a clear message to the West.

“The Russian president has always been paranoid about Western interference in Russia. This decision sends a signal to Western powers that there will be no 'Maidans' in Russia,” Simakovsky told VOA, referring to the protests in Ukraine that led to the ouster of that country's Moscow-backed president, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014.

At the moment, the size of the Guard force has not been confirmed. Unconfirmed estimates range from 250,000 to 400,000. With a wide mandate and armed with tanks, heavy artillery and attack aircraft, an entity of this size would be a very powerful force.

“This looks to be Putin’s personal army. Basically, you have a person who can declare his own wars on countries with small armies,” said Anna Borchshevskaya, Russia expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, in an interview with VOA. Other European national guards are “dwarfed compared to Putin’s National Guard in sheer numbers,” she said.

The contrast is especially stark in some cases. For example, the Lithuanian Armed Forces consist of about 16,000 soldiers, and the Latvian National Guard has some 11,000 personnel.

What constitutes 'terrorism'?

Given its proposed “peacekeeping” function, Borchshevskaya said, the Kremlin will be able to use the National Guard to intervene in neighboring countries.

“Officially, Putin said that the National Guard was created to fight terrorism. The new bills that are coming up in the Duma at the moment expand the definition of terrorism. So all this is very vague,” Borchshevskaya said. “When it comes to peacekeeping … we should be watching Ukraine, Georgia, Russia’s 'near abroad' and to some extent Syria.”

General Viktor Zolotov will lead Russia’s National Guard, which will absorb the Russian Interior Ministry's “shock forces,” including the Special Purpose Mobile Units that have been used to break up opposition rallies and were used in Russia's two military campaigns against insurgents in Chechnya.

Zolotov, 62, headed Russia's Presidential Security Service from 2000 to 2013, after which he was commander of the Interior Ministry's Internal Troops. He has known Putin since the early 1990s, when Zolotov was a bodyguard for then-St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak and Putin was an adviser to Sobchak.

As head of the National Guard, Zolotov will have a cabinet-level seat in the Security Council, the powerful Kremlin advisory body, and will report directly to the president, bypassing the interior minister.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.voanews.com/content/us-watching-north-korea-workers-party-congress/3317965.html

US Watching as North Korea Opens Biggest Political Meeting in Decades

Nike Ching
Last updated on: May 06, 2016 2:24 AM

STATE DEPARTMENT — North Korea has opened one of its biggest political meetings in 36 years, as the 7th Workers' Party Congress began meeting Friday in Pyongyang.

However, foreign journalists who traveled to Pyongyang for the event were not immediately allowed inside.

The United States is in close consultation with its Asian allies to monitor the situation on the Korean Peninsula during the high-level meeting of party representatives, which is expected to result in a reshuffling of some top officials.

North Korea is scheduled to have its 7th Workers' Party Congress on Friday. It's a high-level meeting of party representatives and is expected to result in a reshuffling of some top officials.

Washington also is anticipating the isolated regime may take this occasion to launch a missile or conduct a nuclear test.

"We will continue to look at ways we can apply and increase pressures on them, at the same time as we ensure that the security of the peninsula is kept ironclad," said State Department spokesman Mark Toner on Thursday.

Pyongyang has carried out a few ballistic missile tests in recent months, as well as its fourth nuclear test in January. Toner said the United States would welcome any signs of de-escalation by the North Korean regime.

The U.S. Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, arrived in Seoul earlier this week. He met with South Korea's Defense Minister, Han Min-koo, and discussed security issues, according to South Korea's Yonhap News Agency.

The possibility of another nuclear test from North Korea was also discussed.

"Kim Jong Un will need to deliver a report that summarizes the Korean Workers' Party's accomplishments since the last congress in 1980 and present new policy directions. As for the new policy directions, I expect him to highlight the Byungjin line," James Person of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington told VOA on Thursday.

The "Byungjin line" is the policy of the simultaneous development of the nuclear program and the consumer goods industries.

But Person does not expect any new major policy directions in economic development because North Korea's Workers' Party Congress meetings are usually "scripted affairs" and typically do not offer major policy announcements.

While anticipating more provocations from North Korea, including a fifth nuclear test, senior U.S. officials have warned of "additional steps" to punish Pyongyang and to defend Washington and its allies.

"Despite all the saber-rattling, I don't think the North [Korea] is under any illusions about the consequences of attack," Assistant Secretary of the State Daniel Russel said Tuesday at an event hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Washington has begun formal discussion with Seoul on potentially deploying a top missile defense system in South Korea, the so-called Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or THAAD.

Related Articles

What to Expect: North Korea's 7th Workers' Party Congress
Top US Official: Washington Seeking THAAD Dialogue With Beijing
North Korea Set to Celebrate Kim Jong Un’s Era

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.bloomberg.com/view/artic...eds-of-balance-would-disappear-with-davutoglu

Middle East

Turkey's Last Shreds of Balance Are Disappearing

May 5, 2016 8:20 AM EDT
By Marc Champion
Comments 20

In the beginning, nearly 14 years ago, Recep Tayyip Erdogan chose a team of smart and qualified people to run Turkey with him. He now appears set to force out one of the last of that group -- Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu -- and replace him with someone more pliant. This is disastrous for Turkey, as financial markets have recognized.

To know why, look at the issues over which Erdogan and Davutoglu -- who is no rebel or hero of a Turkish secular democracy -- have sparred, fraying what was once the tightest and subservient of political relationships to breaking point.

The earliest split came soon after Davutoglu's appointment as Prime Minister, when he proposed an anti-corruption package in response to allegations of corruption made against Erdogan's family and closest political allies. Erdogan said the idea was premature and it was dropped.

Davutoglu was keen to preserve a measure of market confidence in the independence of Turkey's Central Bank, protecting it from Erdogan's curious beliefs about monetary policy (he has said that higher interest rates promote inflation, a theory refuted by several centuries of economic theory and empirical data). When a new central bank governor was to be appointed last month, Erdogan wanted someone more responsive to his demands for lower rates.

Davutoglu has also been marginally less hawkish on the destructive war with militants from Turkey's large Kurdish minority, which was rekindled last year. He spoke out in support of hundreds of academics, who were arrested under anti-terrorism laws for writing a public letter critical of Erdogan's Kurdish policies.

And although publicly supportive of Erdogan's plans to rewrite Turkey's constitution to transfer virtually all powers to the presidency, Davutoglu's actions in trying to consolidate his own power base have given Erdogan cause to believe him insincere. Indeed, there is no intellectually honest argument to make that a presidential system which hands virtually unchecked power to someone already subverting Turkish institutions, from the judiciary to the media, to his control would be good for Turkish democracy. For that reason, most Turks -- meaning many of Erdogan's voters, too -- oppose the change.

The final straw appears to have come with Davutoglu's push to negotiate a deal with the European Union to accept refugees back from Greece, in exchange for $6 billion and a visa-free travel regime for Turks. Erdogan appeared luke-warm toward the deal, which still faces hurdles in the EU. It requires Turkey to adopt a number of policy changes, including on restraining its rampant abuse of anti-terrorist legislation, in exchange visa-free travel to the EU -- a move that would be enormously popular among Turks. In other words, it would constrain Erdogan's freedom of action and provide the EU with leverage.

Worse, the EU was clearly happier to deal with Davutoglu than Erdogan (read the leaked transcript of a meeting between the Turkish and European Commission presidents to see why). Davutoglu, for his part, made sure Turks saw the deal as his personal success. The talk at which Erdogan and Davutoglu discussed his future came on Wednesday night, hours after the European Commission recommended a green light to give Turks visa free travel.

Which brings us back to the beginning, when then-Prime Minister Erdogan and his ruling party were by any objective measure good for Turkey. He had Abdullah Gul as a partner, who would later become president. Ali Babacan and Mehmet Simsek, both well-qualified and trusted by foreign investors, ran the economy. Ertugrul Gunay, a liberal and former member of the secularist Republican People's Party, headed the sensitive ministry for culture and tourism. In parliament, Justice and Development Party MPs included a significant number of secular liberals. And when Gul became president, Erdogan picked an academic, Davutoglu to run foreign policy.

Of that team, only Simsek would remain in place once Davutoglu is gone. In parliament, the party's MPs have all been hand-picked by Erdogan. With an Erdogan lackey as prime minister, Simsek's freedom to protect Turkey's $720 billion economy from political damage would narrow further. The new central bank governor would be also exposed to greater political pressure.

Davutoglu suffered from hubris and an excess of ideology as foreign minister. But his fundamental idea -- to rebalance Turkey's foreign affairs from a singular focus and dependence on the West, towards Turkey's former Ottoman possessions in the Middle East, the Caucasus and the Balkans -- was right.

As Prime Minister, too, Davutoglu has offered a cautious counterweight to an increasingly radical president, who increasingly defines himself against Western values and goals. By replacing his hand-picked prime minister with someone still more subservient, Erdogan will get the effects of a presidential constitution even if he cannot succeed in rewriting it. And one of the last shreds of balance in Turkey's political life will disappear for the foreseeable future.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:
Marc Champion at mchampion7@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Therese Raphael at traphael4@bloomberg.net

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
[urlhttp://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2016/05/06/the_shifting_contours_of_chinas_maritime_strategy_109339.html[/url]

May 6, 2016

The Shifting Contours of China's Maritime Strategy

By Abhijit Singh


Has there been a recent shift in China's maritime strategy in the South China Sea? Has Beijing tempered its land reclamation and island building campaign, choosing to highlight positive aspects of its maritime security conduct? Is the PLAN becoming more accepting of the realities of the South China Sea, recalibrating its strategy to emphasise a more passive and benevolent presence?

In a recent Lowy Institute Report, Rory Medcalf and Ashley Townshend point to an interesting evolution in China's maritime thinking. The duo contend that not only has China turned more conciliatory in its maritime policy, Beijing is now advocating confidence-building measures that until recently it had refused to consider, helping lower the risks of maritime incidents, miscalculations and accidental conflict. Yet this behaviour is also facilitating what the authors say is a form of 'passive assertiveness' that challenges Asia's maritime status quo.

The authors note that while China's creation and militarisation of disputed islands, its establishment of new zones of military authority, and its conduct of expansive patrols in the East and South China Seas are tactically non-threatening, these actions represent a long-term strategic challenge to the regional order. Beijing's new strategy, Medcalf and Townshend point out, forces regional states to assume a degree of cost and risk in assessing China's latent aggression, complicating their strategic calculi and leading to ineffective responses.

What is needed, the authors recommend, is a prudent balance between the 'open display of tactical resolve and the pursuit of other indirect strategies' to shape Chinese behavior in ways that minimise the risks of escalation. Doing so, they say, needs a multidimensional international effort, one that is likely to impose costs on Beijing even as it offers incentives linked to its 'reputational, strategic, and economic interests'.

This is an insightful report on China's contemporary maritime behaviour and it makes some useful observations. Despite its informed assessments about China's revised maritime posture in the Pacific littorals, however, it overlooks some critical political and maritime developments, which suggest Beijing's recent maritime turn is more in the nature of a 'strategic pause' marked by a political expediency rather than a considered re-calibration of national maritime strategy.

There are three reasons why Beijing could have suddenly turned more conciliatory in its approach to defending its maritime stakes in the contested waters of the Pacific.

First, there is a process of sweeping defence reforms underway in China that is causing turmoil in the PLA's military power structure. The proposed changes challenge a number of established interests, including some in the higher echelons of the military, causing deep resentment in the PLA's power elite. Most notably, Beijing has announced itsdecision to restructure the PLA's four general departments, the vast bureaucracy responsible for the day-to-day functioning of the military, blaming it as a primary source of the corrupting patron-client relationships within the military. An anti-corruption drive launched last year targeted officials of the general departments, leading many observers to term the anti-corruption drive as an old-fashioned communist purge – a vindictive campaign to eliminate senior officials perceived to be disloyal to President Xi Jinping.

The politics of the reform process is significant, because there is enough evidence to suggest that Xi is using the reforms to consolidate his power and position in the CCP, to the detriment of the military's organisational effectiveness. Indeed, even as officers in the general departments have been targeted, some other military commanders known for their inept ways remain untouched, possibly because of their loyalty to Xi, who has now assumed direct command of the armed forces.

More importantly, internal differences between the services seem to be undermining the PLA's operational efficiency. While the reforms seek to put the Army, Navy and Air Force on an equal footing, senior naval and Air Force officers are unhappy with the fact that the Army retains overall command of the new military theatres. Given that China's three principal external threats (Taiwan, the South China Sea and East China Sea) have a maritime character, the PLAN was said to have been expecting command of the Southern Theatre Command. The Chinese Air Force, which plays a major role in defence of the western Pacific islands, had also been hopeful of a greater command responsibility. The continuing dominance of the Army over joint formations, analysts say, is likely to effect the PLA's operational posture, especially its ability to undertake integrated operations in a maritime environment.

Beijing realises the limitations imposed by the defence reforms on maritime operations, and deems the coming months particularly unsuited for militaristic missions in the western Pacific.

The second reason for a lull in China's maritime provocations in the South China Sea is the impending decision by the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) on the legitimacy of China's Nine-Dash line. The case, brought before the PCA late last year by the Philippines, is widely expected to reject China's excessive claims in the South China Sea. While Beijing has refused to participate in the case and publicly declared its intention to ignore the ruling, it realises the verdict could impact the political dynamics of the South China Sea. A decision in favour of the Philippines' position would be perceived as a moral victory by the US and its allies. Fearing the worst, China has intensified lobbying of other nations to win support for its own claims in the region. It is Beijing's keenness to avoid 'internationalising' the South China Sea issue that has held Chinese maritime agencies back from an open display of aggression. At a time when Beijing has been urging Asian countries to collaborate in the framing of a security governance model with 'Asian features' to counter the US 'rebalance' to the region, a maritime power-play would seem incongruous.

The third and most important reason for China's strategic drawdown in the South China Sea is ironically an issue of maritime tactics. Apparently, Beijing's slow build-up of maritime features over the past two years has already given it the facilities it needs to monitor and control maritime activities in the South China Sea. During a hearing in the US Congress last week, it was revealed that China's ongoing reclamation at Scarborough could create the 'third vertex of a triangle of Chinese military bases' which could be used to not only threaten the main Philippine island of Luzon (as is being widely speculated) but also to exert wider control over the South China Sea. US Pacific Fleet intelligence indicates that China's seven new islands at the southern end of the Spratly Islands and a new naval facility at Scarborough could provide Beijing the ability to effectively control the freedom of navigation and free access to markets for nations which ply the waters of the South China Sea. Beijing's announcement that its forthcoming drills in the South China Sea will involve forces both in the Spratly as well as the Paracel islands, as well as recent confirmation by a source close to the PLAN who said Beijing would begin reclaiming Scarborough shoal, appears to vindicate US suspicions.

Beijing realises that while it operates from a position of strength in the region, it must not harm its interests by displaying needless aggression. All it must do is ensure a quiet and efficient assertiveness to make sure it protects its strategic interests without indulging in an act that could provide the spark for its own tactical containment.


This article originally appeared at the Lowy Institute Interpreter.

 

[Housecarl]

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http://www.navytimes.com/story/mili...sit-canceled-global-times-editorial/83971974/

Chinese state media blast U.S. Navy for 'menacing' China's sea claims

David Larter, Navy Times 5:32 p.m. EDT May 5, 2016
Comments 2

This story was originally published May 5 at 2:31 p.m. and has been updated.

The U.S. Navy’s stepped up patrols in the South China Sea are getting under the skin of some Chinese leaders.

An outlet affiliated with the Chinese communist party implied the U.S. Navy’s patrols prompted a port-visit denial and blasted the Pacific Fleet for raising tensions in the region.The Stennis Carrier Strike Group has been in the South China Sea for more than a month and was denied a port visit to Hong Kong, a move that many saw as payback for the long patrol and a recent visit by Defense Secretary Ash Carter.


NAVY TIMES
This U.S. Navy carrier was set to visit Hong Kong. Then Beijing pulled the welcome mat.


“The U.S. Pacific Fleet has now become the biggest source of such a pessimistic mentality for both countries,” Global Times wrote in a May 4 editorial. “While they have become accustomed to controversies such as human rights, trade frictions and diplomatic divergences on hot spots, the US abruptly started its menacing military deployment against China's offshore interests, showcasing its military muscle by sending naval vessels and warplanes to China.

“That seems to be changing the nature of the Sino-US frictions. Due to the severe strategic suspicions, military problems have unprecedentedly emerged between the two.”

Experts rely on editorials in state-approved media to gauge opinions inside the Chinese government.

A spokesman for Pacific Fleet shot back, saying the U.S. presence in the region is hardly a new development.

"Pacific Fleet has operated there for decades, averaging about 700 ship days a year in the South China Sea alone," said Cmdr. Clay Doss.


MILITARYTIMES
After ships and planes, Chinese singers assert sea claims


China, which has been constructing islands and airstrips atop reefs and rocky outcroppings in the Spratly Islands, sees the whole South China Sea as its territory. Evidence is mounting that China also aims to build another island atop the Scarborough Shoal, an atoll just 140 miles from the Philippines’ capital of Manila and well within the Philippines' 200-mile exclusive economic zone.

Global Times, a tabloid, is among the most hawkish voices within Chinese state media and the editorial may reveal frustrations within some elements of the Chinese government, especially the military, said Zhiqun Zhu, a political scientist who heads The China Institute at Bucknell University in Pennsylvania.


NAVY TIMES
Carrier group returns to South China Sea amid tensions


“In their views, U.S. military involvement in the South China Sea, especially U.S. Navy's freedom of navigation operations, have complicated the dispute and emboldened other claimants especially the Philippines to stand up against China,” Zhu said.

“The USS John C. Stennis’ port call on Hong Kong was denied exactly because of U.S. Navy's more frequent and active patrols in the region that are challenging Beijing's position,” he said. “This is a political statement. I think Beijing wants to see a decrease or more low-profile U.S. military activities in the region.”

The cancellation angered some U.S. officials and lawmakers, including Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., who is a member of the House Armed Services Committee. Forbes called for the U.S. to respond by considering a port visit to Taiwan, which would almost certainly infuriate Beijing.The canceled Hong Kong visit was the first time in three years the Chinese have canceled liberty call for U.S. sailors, but it is not unprecedented. The amphibious command ship Blue Ridge was in Hong Kong at the time, however, and its port visit was not affected.


NAVY TIMES
South China Sea standoff: 'Both sides need to step back'


"China has repeatedly politicized the long-standing use of Hong Kong for carrier port visits, inconveniencing the families of thousands of U.S. sailors and continuing a pattern of unnecessary and disruptive behavior,” Forbes said in a statement.

“As Beijing's direct control of Hong Kong intensifies, the U.S. Navy should strongly consider shifting its carrier port calls to more stable and welcoming locations. While China finds profit in needlessly harming our sailors' families, many U.S. allies and partners in the region, including Taiwan, would no doubt welcome our carriers and their crews with open arms. The time has come to consider these alternate locations going forward.”


NAVY TIMES
Pacific Command chief urges new capabilities as tensions mount with China


That move would likely be a non-starter, said Bonnie Glaser, a China expert and director of the China Power Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C.

“The proposal that U.S. carriers should use ports in Taiwan instead of Hong Kong is unlikely to be considered,” Glaser said. “It would be among the most provocative actions that the U.S. could take from Beijing's point of view.

“It would be viewed as a direct challenge to Chinese sovereignty. … Such a move would be seen in Beijing as signaling U.S. support for Taiwan independence and emboldening [Taiwan’s new president] to challenge Beijing.”

Zhu, the Bucknell professor, said the flare-up shouldn’t have a lasting impact.

“As happened in the past, such incidents harm military relations in the short-term,” he said. “But it seems both militaries are playing down the incident. … So the militaries are keeping the doors open, which is good news.”

 

[Housecarl]

Make more sense than the AH-64s they were originally asking for.....The problem though with the Nigerian military and the internal political situation is a huge hurdle to climb over even before they can eradicate Boko Haram....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-nigeria-arms-idUSKCN0XX09M

Business | Fri May 6, 2016 5:35am EDT
Related: World, Aerospace & Defense, Africa

Exclusive: U.S. seeks to approve attack aircraft for Nigeria in Boko Haram fight

WASHINGTON | By Phil Stewart and Warren Strobel


The U.S. administration is seeking to approve a sale of as many as 12 A-29 Super Tucano light attack aircraft to Nigeria to aid its battle against the extremist group Boko Haram, U.S. officials say, in a vote of confidence in President Muhammadu Buhari's drive to reform the country's corruption-tainted military.

Washington also is dedicating more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets to the campaign against the Islamist militants in the region and plans to provide additional training to Nigerian infantry forces, the officials told Reuters, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration's plans.

The possible sale -- which the officials said was favored within the U.S. administration but is subject to review by Congress -- underscores the deepening U.S. involvement in helping governments in north and west Africa fight extremist groups.

U.S. Navy Vice Admiral Michael Franken, a deputy commander of the Pentagon's Africa Command, told a Washington forum last week that there now are 6,200 U.S. troops - most of them Special Operations Forces - operating from 26 locations on the continent.

The widening U.S. military cooperation is a political victory for Buhari, who took office last year pledging to crack down on the rampant corruption that has undermined the armed forces in Africa's most populous country.

"The Buhari administration I think has really reenergized the bilateral relationship in a fundamental way," one U.S. official said.

The previous Nigerian government of Goodluck Jonathan had scorned the United States for blocking arms sales partly because of human rights concerns. It also criticized Washington for failing to speed the sharing of intelligence.

The souring relations hit a low at the end of 2014 when U.S. military training of Nigerian forces was abruptly halted.

That is changing under Buhari, whose crackdown on corruption has led to a raft of charges against top national security officials in the previous government.

"Buhari made clear from the get-go that his number one priority was reforming the military to defeat Boko Haram ... And he sees us as part of that solution," a second U.S. official said.

Related Coverage
› Fact box: The A-29 Super Tucano aircraft at a glance

Still, serious human rights abuses committed by security forces, which include police, increased in 2015, according to the U.S. State Department's annual human rights report.

Many of the funds alleged to have been misused and siphoned off by corrupt Nigerian officials under Jonathan's government were earmarked for the fight against Boko Haram, which has killed thousands in northeast Nigeria and neighboring countries in the last seven years. Last year, the group pledged loyalty to Islamic State.

"No wonder they weren't doing well with respect to Boko Haram. (They) didn’t have the ammunition," the first official said.

The accused officials include Nigeria's former chief of defense staff, who last month pleaded not guilty to using money allocated for Nigeria's air force to buy a mansion and a commercial plot of land and build a shopping mall.


ARMED AIRCRAFT

Congress has not yet been formally notified of the possible U.S. approval of the sale of Embraer's (EMBR3.SA) A29 Super Tucano turboprop aircraft to Nigeria.

The Tucanos can be used for training, surveillance or attack. They can be armed with two wing-mounted machine guns and can carry up to 1,550 Kg (3,417 pounds) of weapons. (See Factbox

One production line for the Super Tucano is in Florida, where it is built with U.S. firm Sierra Nevada Corp. The aircraft that would be sold to Nigeria come with a "very basic armed configuration," one of the U.S. officials said.

The sale could offer Nigeria a more maneuverable aircraft that can stay aloft for extended periods to target Boko Haram formations. Officials did not disclose the cost of the planes to be sold to Nigeria.

However, a contract for 20 similar aircraft sold to Afghanistan was valued at about $428 million at the time it was announced in 2013.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council think tank, said any sale of Super Tucano aircraft would demonstrate improving ties, but cautioned that their ability to counter Boko Haram could be limited.

"When you're fighting a group that's no longer holding towns and villages, that's no longer massing forces in a conventional way, the aircraft – attack aircraft – have a much more limited role in that kind of fight," Pham said.

African armies routed the militant group from much of its self-proclaimed caliphate in northeastern Nigeria last year.

Its fighters have since regrouped and intensified their attacks in the Lake Chad Basin, threatening regional security, despite the creation of a 9,000-strong African multinational force to counter it.

The U.S. military expects to train a second Nigerian infantry battalion once the current group completes its training later this year, the first official said.

The officials did not specify what type of additional intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance assets would be provided to bolster the regional fight against Boko Haram.

They acknowledge that they have a tough task combating the group, which is sending women and children strapped with explosives to blow up civilian targets such as marketplaces.

"Boko Haram has morphed back in to what it had earlier been, not a holder of large amounts of territory, but rather a generator of asymmetric attacks," the second official said.


(Additional reporting by Jonathan Landay. Editing by John Walcott and Stuart Grudgings)

 

[Housecarl]

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Posted for fair use.....
http://english.alarabiya.net/en/News/middle-east/2016/05/05/Saudi-busts-ISIS-cell-near-Makkah.html

Saudi authorities bust ISIS cell near Makkah

Staff writer, Al Arabiya English
Thursday, 5 May 2016

Saudi security forces on Thursday busted a cell of five alleged ISIS fighters in the Saudi city of Makkah, authorities said. Two of the militants were killed in the ensuing firefight, while two blew themselves up.

"The security authorities succeeded in their operation against a number of ISIS partisans holed up at a recreational area in Makkah," the local authorities said in a tweet. Makkah is Islam's holiest city and key site of the annual hajj pilgrimage.

Authorities gave no details, but sources said that the forces surrounded a group of men in the Wadi Noman area south of the city where a group of five ISIS fighters had been hiding.

In another parallel operation in Jeddah, security forces carried out a raid on a house, arresting two suspects. A bomb squad was deployed to the house after the operation.

In the Makkah operation, Saudi security forces deployed helicopters to back up forces on the ground.

According to Saudi sources, the cell was preparing to attack a security base around a house where the ISIS fighters had gathered.

In an earlier, two-day security operation that ended on Sunday, two ISIS suspects were killed and a third was wounded in southwestern Bisha province.

The operation came shortly after the Saudi security forces arrested Ukab Atibi, a member of the ISIS cell that had carried out a suicide attack on a mosque used by members of a local security force in southwest Saudi Arabia in August 2015.

Last Update: Thursday, 5 May 2016 KSA 18:52 - GMT 15:52

 

[Housecarl]

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Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-singapore-military-idUSKCN0XW2FQ

World | Fri May 6, 2016 1:37am EDT
Related: World, China, Australia

Singapore, Australia expand military cooperation in $1.7 billion deal

SYDNEY/SINGAPORE | By Ian Chua and Aradhana Aravindan

Australia and Singapore have agreed to jointly develop military training areas and facilities in Australia in a sign of how China's increasingly assertive military presence in the region is encouraging nations to boost their own defense capabilities.

Singapore will fund a A$2.25 billion (US$1.7 billion) expansion of military training facilities in Australia, a government source told Reuters.

Singapore will have enhanced and expanded military training access in Australia over a period of 25 years. The two will strengthen intelligence and information sharing, such as in counter-terrorism, the city-state's Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement on Friday.

The move to forge closer military ties between Australia and Singapore comes at a time of rising tensions between much of Asia and China, which has been building military and civilian facilities on its artificial islands in the disputed South China Sea.

"The kind of military relationships that (Singapore) have and types of military ties that they are developing and deepening, they don't have with China," said Richard Bitzinger, a security expert at the S.Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

"I am not saying that this is being done overtly to deal with China, but I wouldn't be surprised if that isn't a major driver behind this."

The region is also facing rising risks from Islamic extremists. Earlier this week, Singapore said it had detained eight Bangladeshi men who were planning attacks in their homeland. It deported five others who were arrested by police in Dhaka.

Land-scarce Singapore has long sent troops to Australia for military exercises. The new deal would allow the Asian nation to increase the number of troops it has on rotation in Australia to 14,000, from 6,000.

Under the agreement, Singapore would fund the cost of expanding the Shoalwater Bay Training Area and the Townsville Field Training Area, both in the north of Queensland state.

Both bases lie in electorates critical to the government. The timing of the agreement is viewed as a political coup for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull ahead of an anticipated July federal election.

"Under our comprehensive strategic partnership, our aim is to elevate our relationship to a level similar to the one we enjoy with New Zealand," Turnbull told reporters in Canberra.

He said the new partnership will also generate a construction boom in North Queensland due to the need for roads, accommodation and facilities for the Singaporean Defence forces.

The agreement makes Singapore the only other foreign country to invest in military infrastructure in Australia besides the United States.

Earlier this week Reuters reported that Singapore will soon pick the winner of a $1 billion tender for military utility helicopters, as it modernizes its air force and navy amid rising tensions in the region.

The city-state and Australia also updated a free trade agreement, which includes improved access for businesses to bid for government procurement contracts and allowed for easier movement of people between the two markets.

Singapore is Australia's fifth largest trading and investment partner, with bilateral trade of S$20.2 billion ($14.86 billion) in 2015. The city-state has investments amounting to A$80.2 billion in Australia.


(Reporting by Ian Chua; Additional reporting by Matt Siegel in SYDNEY Aradhana Aravindan in SINGAPORE; Editing by Shri Navaratnam)

 

[Housecarl]

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Posted for fair use.....
http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/2016/05/06/south-china-sea-us-man-made-islands/84012356/

China seeks global support for South China Sea policies

Christopher Bodeen, The Associated Press 7:35 a.m. EDT May 6, 2016

BEIJING — China is seeing mixed results in its effort to enlist friendly states in its push to exclude the U.S. and its allies from the festering South China Sea dispute, underscoring the limits of Chinese diplomacy despite its massive economic clout.

Beijing won a major endorsement for its position with remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov last month that players from outside the region should not get involved.

However, its recent announcement of added support from Brunei, Laos and Cambodia drew unusually strong criticism from senior Singaporean diplomat Ong Keng Yong, who said Beijing may be trying to split the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, the regional bloc to which all four nations belong. China's announcement was even questioned by Cambodian government spokesman Phay Siphan, who said no new agreement with China had been reached.

Despite the blow-back, China has noted recent statements that "show that the international community has come to understand and support the Chinese government's position on handling the South China Sea issue and the arbitration case brought by the Philippine side," Ouyang Yujing, the head of the Foreign Ministry's Department of Boundary and Ocean Affairs, told reporters Friday.

Ouyang was referring to a case challenging China's South China Sea territorial claims brought by fellow claimant the Philippines before the United Nations Court of Arbitration in 2013. China has refused to join in the legal process and says it won't accept the court's ruling, expected within weeks.

Beijing's approach displays its craving for international respect and desire to avoid isolation over the issue, and provides "an iota of self-satisfaction," said Yu Maochun, an expert on Chinese politics at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Russia's support is particularly significant, both for China and the world at large, because of the growing appearance of an anti-U.S. and anti-Western united front, Yu said.

"This breeds a great potential danger of the world skidding to a formation of big power alliances of opposition, whereby China and Russia act together against a US.-led coalition of democracies," Yu said.

However, the fact China, with the world's second largest economy, has gained the vocal support of only a handful of largely undemocratic, economically dependent states also shows the limits of its push for greater diplomatic influence, said Jonathan Holslag, a professor of international politics at the Free University of Brussels.

"Actually, it is striking how small the number Chinese supporters remains, given the enormous amounts of financial aid that China threw into the scale," Holslag said. "It all shows the limits of China's economic diplomacy."

Although China has called repeatedly for outside states to stay neutral on the issue, it welcomes the expressions of support and sees no contradiction, said Li Guoqiang, a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences researcher and top government adviser on the South China Sea.

Russia and others are "expressing a political stance, they are not interfering in South China Sea matters. On the other hand, other countries are substantively taking a whole series of actions," Li said at a Beijing forum on Tuesday.

The drive to enlist international backing comes as China faces growing scrutiny over its claim to virtually the entire South China Sea along with its reefs and islands.

The U.S. has kept up steady pressure, sending ships and planes to emphasize its rejection of China's assertion that the newly created islands it has built atop coral reefs are entitled to territorial waters and other legal rights.

Washington and its allies, including Japan, say the massive reclamation projects, complete with airstrips and military installations, raise tensions in a strategically vital waterway home to rich fishing grounds and a potential wealth of undersea gas and oil, and through which $5 trillion in global trade passes each year.

China has responded by accusing Washington of endangering peace and stability with its naval activities. On Friday, Beijing reaffirmed its sovereignty claim while issuing a new attack on the court case brought by Manila, calling it illegitimate and vowing never to "accept, participate in or acknowledge" any subsequent rulings.

"The case brought by the Philippines is nothing but a political farce under the cloak of law," the Foreign Ministry's Ouyang told reporters. "It is a grave threat to regional peace and stability."

The region could grow more tense if China begins reclamation work, as some speculate it might, on Scarborough Shoal, an uninhabited coral reef near the main Philippine island of Luzon that Chinese government vessels seized in 2012 following a tense standoff with Filipino ships.

China's Defense Ministry has not said whether such a plan exists, but has reiterated China's ownership and right to develop the shoal however it sees fit.

Asked about future developments, Ouyang merely reiterated an earlier government statement that all reclamation work had concluded by the end of June last year.

"I believe you are very clear about the meaning of this remark," he said without elaborating.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.npr.org/sections/paralle...-will-be-heard-unlike-his-more-elusive-father

Politics & Policy

This Weekend, Kim Jong Un Will Be Heard, Unlike His More Elusive Father

May 6, 2016·7:55 AM ET
Elise Hu

North Korea's highest political body, the Workers' Party Congress, is convening Friday for the first time in 36 years. Over the course of the next few days, about 3,000 delegates are expected to endorse the leadership of Kim Jong Un, formalizing a rushed transition of power that followed the death of his father, Kim Jong Il.

In one notable way, the elder Kim was very different from his son.


A South Korean army soldier walks by a TV screen showing North Korean leader Kim Jong Un with superimposed letters that read: "North Korea's nuclear warhead." The warhead was later jokingly dubbed "the disco bomb."

Parallels

As North Korea Acts Out, A Search For Kim Jong Un's Motives

"[Kim Jong Il] was widely quoted saying that he felt it was best to keep the enemy in the dark. The less he was out there, the less his enemies would have to use against him," says Jean Lee, an American journalist who opened the Associated Press' Pyongyang bureau. Much of her time in Pyongyang overlapped with the final years of the late Kim's rule.

"He never gave a public speech," Lee says. "There are no recordings of a public speech."

Despite all the propaganda touting Kim's achievements, and even video showing him speaking to the public, the sound of Kim Jong Il's voice was almost never broadcast. There's only one recorded statement to the masses, according to researcher Curtis Melvin from the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies.


Kim Jong Il's one recorded public statement.

YouTube

"He uttered one line at a parade, 'Long live the Korean people's army,'" Melvin says. "And that's it."

South Korean media did once capture Kim's voice while he made a joke about buckwheat noodles during a summit with the South Korean president. But no public speeches.

Why is Kim Jong Il's voice so hard to find? He was an omnipresent dictator, after all.

"There's all sorts of theories about this, I can't tell you why," offers Melvin. "But a lot of people said he just didn't like the attention or didn't like being scrutinized so much."

That's what made journalist Lee's discovery a few years ago at a museum in northern North Korea so surprising.

"Wandering off in a museum by myself when I spotted this Toshiba TV monitor, with a picture of a painting and a caption saying, 'Kim Jong Un giving a speech on juche ideology,'" Lee says. "Juche is their philosophy of self-reliance — so of course I pressed the play button on the stand and lo and behold, there was a voice, so I did tape a little bit of that."

In Lee's clips, Kim is indeed heard.

"What we're doing now is trying to find the exact speech," she says. "Exactly where and when he gave these speeches."

Lee and her researchers believe it was given in 1974 or in 1980. 1980 is historically important, because 1980 was the last time North Korea held a Party Congress.

Now, Pyongyang is hosting another, in which thousands of the regime's most trusted insiders are meeting. Kim's son, Kim Jong Un, who wasn't even born when the last Congress was held, is expected to cement his authority. To do so, Curtis Melvin says he'll be heard.


The North Korea Information Center in Seoul, South Korea, holds a vast collection of publications, videos and everyday items from the North. Here, North Korea Woman magazine features the classic propaganda art often seen in North Korea.

Parallels

In The Heart Of Seoul, A Trove Of North Korean Propaganda

"He's never been shy to stand in front of people and use his voice," Melvin says.

A stark contrast to his father. The younger Kim's public persona is being shaped to appear a lot more like his grandfather — North Korea founder Kim Il Sung, who was known as a gregarious man who mixed often with the people.

"A lot of North Koreans are still nostalgic about the Kim Il Sung era and Kim Jong Un has tried to model himself on his grandfather rather than his father," Melvin says.

Callbacks to the eldest Kim may be wise, Lee says.

"They want to go back to a happier time in their history. And associate Kim Jong Un with that happier time in their history."

Haeryun Kang contributed to this story.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.newsweek.com/north-korea-issues-nuclear-deterrent-warning-start-landmark-congress-456429

World

Fears Rise of North Korea Nuclear Test as Party Congress Starts

By Jack Moore On 5/6/16 at 4:29 AM
Video

North Korea warned on Friday that it would counter the threat of nuclear weapons with its own nuclear arms in the face of U.S. hostility, at the start of a landmark congress to confirm the total power of leader Kim Jong-un.

The Committee for the Peaceful Reunification of Korea (CPRK), the body charged with handling relations with South Korea, said that the U.S. was behind the nuclear tensions on the Korean Peninsula.


The CPRK said in a statement that Pyongyang would only continue its attempt to develop a nuclear arsenal unless Washington halts its policy of intimidation towards the country, the South Korean news site the Korea Herald reported.

The country’s KCNA state news agency also hailed “miraculous results” and “the greatest gifts” of advances in its missile arsenal ahead of the Seventh Congress of the Workers’ Party, Reuters reported.

On Friday, North Korea held the first party congress for 36 years but foreign journalists were not authorized to enter the event at the House of Culture, draped in large images of Kim Jong-il and North Korean founder Kim Il-sung in the capital.

There are fears that Kim is planning another nuclear test during the congress, which is expected to last four to five days. Nuclear and missile tests since the start of the year have seen the international community, backed by the United Nations, impose the toughest-ever sanctions regime on North Korea.

Chinese delegates were not present at the party congress in a signal of the worsening ties between Beijing, North Korea’s only diplomatic ally, and Pyongyang after the hermit kingdom’s recent ballistic missile and hydrogen bomb tests.

The last party congress, in October 1980, saw Kim Il-sung promote his son Kim Jong-il to his deputy in the party, forging the family hierarchy that would lead to Kim Jong-un’s youthful leadership, taking the helm at age 29.

 

[Housecarl]

Looks like things are starting to heat up in "the Kingdom"....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-saudi-security-idUSKCN0XX12U

World | Fri May 6, 2016 8:00am EDT
Related: World

Saudi policeman shot dead in Mecca area after Islamic State raid: SPA agency

Unknown gunmen shot and killed a Saudi policeman in the Mecca region, Saudi state news agency SPA reported on Friday, after four suspected terrorists died during a raid in the same area.

Corporal Khalaf al-Harithi was shot late on Thursday while on duty at a police station outside the holy city of Mecca, SPA reported, citing a local police spokesman.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Islamic State has previously staged such attacks on security forces or the country's Shi'ite Muslim minority, which is viewed by the jihadist group as heretics.

Saudi Arabia's Shi'ite community is largely based in the oil-producing Eastern Province.

On Wednesday Saudi security forces shot dead two suspected Islamic State fighters and two other militants blew themselves up outside Mecca, the interior ministry said.

Saudi Arabia, the world's top oil exporter, has been hit by a spate of deadly shootings and bombings targeting security forces or the Shi'ite minority since last year. Islamic State's local branches have claimed many of them.

Islamic State is bitterly opposed to the wealthy Gulf kingdom's Sunni Muslim rulers, whom it regards as having betrayed Islam through close ties with the West.


(Reporting by Tom Finn)

 

[vestige]

Fears Rise of North Korea Nuclear Test as Party Congress Starts

I'll bet... especially if the test is real close to the Party.

bump

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/irans-other-isis-problem-16071

Iran's Other ISIS Problem

Tehran can't ignore Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Fatemeh Aman, Alex Vatanka
May 5, 2016
Comments 24

On paper, Iran should be the one country in west Asia that does its utmost to counter the message of Islamic State (ISIS). The movement, after all, is both vehemently anti-Shia and deeply anti-Iranian in its messaging and worldview. However, Iran’s efforts to combat ISIS have been missing one important element, one that should be a prerequisite to any successful anti-ISIS campaign: taking innovative and meaningful steps to inoculate Iran’s own Sunni minority against ISIS dogma. Time is also a factor. Tehran sees ISIS’ rise in Iraq and Syria as a long-term challenge, but meanwhile, the movement’s emergence to Iran’s east, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, may not be as temporary as many have assumed.

A Problem at Home

Iran is concerned about the rise of Sunni extremism in the entire region, including within Iran. And yet Tehran has fallen short in recognizing the role of its own, often discriminatory, policies against its Sunni minority. It appears that the dominant view in Tehran is that the issue of Sunni extremism will be resolved once ISIS is defeated militarily in Iraq and Syria. At the same time, Iranian authorities closely monitor any activities by radical Sunni operatives in Iran’s Sunni-majority provinces of Baluchistan and Kurdistan, which border, respectively, Afghanistan-Pakistan and Iraq.

A recent report from Iran’s interior ministry highlighted activities by ISIS sympathizers in those provinces and warned the authorities to avoid mistakes that could create a “domino effect.” So-called “Salafi activities” are closely monitored not only on Iranian territory, but also in neighboring Iraqi Kurdistan. Salafi groups with an active presence in the region include Ansar al-Islam, the Kurdistan Islamic Emirate, Kataib Qaed fi Kurdistan and Jaish Sahabeh. In referring to recruitment on the Internet, the report indicates that “many Iranian Salafi Kurds are prepared to join them [ISIS] in Iraq and many have gone to Syria to join them.”

In fact, fears about a growing ISIS appeal inside Iran’s borders seem to be a key justification for Tehran’s intervention in Syria and Iraq. In a meeting with the families of fallen Iranian fighters in Syria and Iraq, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei indicated Iran attempting to be proactive in taking the battle to the ISIS in Iraq and Syria. “If these martyrs did not stop the enemy [in Syria and Iraq,] we would have to fight with the enemy in [the Iranian provinces] Kermanshah and Hamedan and other provinces,” he said.

Still, what Khamenei and other officials in Tehran are rarely willing to admit is the fact that among Iran’s nearly eight-million-strong Sunni minority, some feel that the regime’s Shia-centric policies put them at a disadvantage. Addressing these grievances, even though they are limited to only the margins of the Sunni population in Iran, will go a long way to mute the ISIS message being targeted toward Iranian Sunnis.

A Threat in the East

Iran’s ISIS predicament is not limited to events in Iraq and Syria. In what can only be called an unnerving development for Iranian authorities, a number of Pakistani and Afghan militant groups have declared allegiance to ISIS. In Pakistan, this has included Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan commanders, and some factions and members of Jamaat-ul-Ahrar and Jamaat-ud-Dawa.

Locations in Pakistan that have traditionally witnessed sectarian violence are now experiencing an escalation of attacks by Sunni extremists. Most recently, Pakistani authorities warned residents of Parachinar, a town of ethnic Pashtuns that mostly belong to the Shia sect, of possible attacks by local ISIS cells. The state of affairs in Parachinar, referred to by some Iranian Shia clergy as “Little Iran,” is an important barometer of sectarian relations in Pakistan, a country of nearly 190 million people that suffers from fragile Sunni-Shia relations, which Tehran watches closely.

Meanwhile, deepening differences and outright splits within Afghan Taliban could translate into more space for an ISIS presence in Afghanistan. A number of recent incidents in Afghanistan, including the kidnapping and beheading of ethnic Hazara (who are Shia) returning from pilgrimage in Iran, has also created fears among this ethnic group—that they have more to fear from ISIS and their local sympathizers than from the Afghan Taliban.

In this delicate sectarian context, Tehran’s most visible policy is arguably only fueling tensions at the moment. Iranian authorities have, in the last five years, actively recruited and deployed a number of Afghan and Pakistani Shia—from the ranks of immigrants that were already living in Iran or directly from Afghanistan and Pakistan—to the conflict in Syria. Most commonly referred to as the Zaynabiyun Brigade, hundreds of these fighters have been killed in the anti-ISIS campaign in Syria.

This is a policy that by no means helps to de-escalate regional sectarian tensions in the midst of the all-important struggle against ISIS. While Iran continues to point the finger at its regional rivals as exacerbating sectarian tensions in the broader Middle East, Tehran’s inadequate addressing of Sunni grievances at home and its expedient but controversial use of Afghan and Pakistani Shia militiamen in the Syrian civil war highlights the inconsistencies of Iranian actions, compared to its rhetoric on the need to foster better Sunni-Shia relations.

Alex Vatanka is a Senior Fellow at the Middle East Institute and the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, DC. Follow him at @AlexVatanka. His book Iran and Pakistan: Security, Diplomacy and American Influence was published in 2015. Fatemeh Aman is a veteran Iranian-American journalist with a focus on developments in Middle East and South Asia.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.defenseone.com/technolog...a-would-look/128082/?oref=defenseone_today_nl

What A War With ISIS in Libya Would Look Like

May 5, 2016 By Patrick Tucker

With three competing governments, some of which hate each other more than the Islamic State, things would get tricky fast.

In Libya, which has been in a state of civil war for years, ISIS operates in what Pentagon officials call a “permissive environment.” But if the political stalemate should end, the U.S. would be more likely to up its anti-ISIS efforts in the country, Pentagon and intelligence officials said.

On Tuesday, Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joe Dunford said the Pentagon had been talking with one of the factions vying for control of the country to determine operational needs. But removing ISIS from the Libyan sands or their stronghold in Sirte would be more complicated than fighting them in Iraq or even in Syria. The good news, such as it is, is that ISIS, too, has limited prospects there.

Currently, U.S. defense officials estimate, ISIS in Libya may have up to 6,500 fighters. They are led by an “emir” named Abdul Qadr al-Najdi, appointed in March by ISIS’s Syrian leaders after U.S. air strikes killed the previous boss. al-Najdi sits atop a developed leadership structure, closely modeled on the Syrian group’s, with separate portfolios for finance, infrastructure, and so forth.

ISIS in Libya serves as intermediary between the group’s “capital” in Raqqa and its eight other African affiliates in Algeria, Egypt, and elsewhere. Many of the affiliates are just terror groups or militias that pledge allegiance to ISIS; in return, they get Syrian help, mostly in media production and dissemination. (After Nigeria’s Boko Haram pledged its loyalty to ISIS, its media content got “about a million times better,” one U.S. official said. Still, coordinated attacks have shorn Boko of most of the power they held in January 2015.)

The Libyans have a stronghold in Sirte, but “can’t completely press outward,” one defense official said. The reason: ISIS in Libya is surrounded by enemies.

Unfortunately, ISIS’ enemies are also at war with each other.

Three Governments

There are no fewer than three competing governments running Libya. The United Nations has awarded legitimacy to the three-month-old “government of national accord” (GNA) or Unity Government, but that’s hardly settled the matter, said Wayne White, a former deputy director at the State Department.

“Neither of the previous rival governments have fully accepted it,” White said. “Indeed, the previously recognized eastern government in late April attempted to ship crude out of an eastern oil terminal on its own, a vessel and cargo which had to be blacklisted by the UN.”

Still, the GNA, headed by prime minister-designate Fayez al-Sarraj, is the one that the Pentagon has been talking to since launching limited airstrikes in February.

“With regard to subsequent operations that might take place in Libya, that’s going to be at the invitation of the Government of National Accord,” Dunford told reporters on Tuesday. “We’re already working very closely with the GNA to determine what assistance they may require.”

Dunford said Gen. David Rodriguez, head of U.S. Africa Command, has already met with U.S. diplomats, who will “meet with the Government of National Accord to see what requirements may exist from a security perspective and from an operations perspective.”

When might that assistance come? Defense Secretary Ash Carter declined to offer a timeline.

“I think it’s going to be up to them,” the GNA, Carter said at the Tuesday briefing. “But I think that the signs are very positive there. And certainly, you have a willing inclination on the part of the European nations and the United States that have already agreed to assist that government.”

Despite al-Sarraj’s important foreign supporters, the most powerful group on the ground since 2014 has been the General National Congress. Made up of different militias, most notably former members of Libya Dawn, the GNC opposes ISIS, but also al-Sarraj’s efforts to unite the country under his authority, which would require the GNC to relinquish its power gains and its hold on the capital.

The third faction, the Tobruk Parliament, governs the oil-rich eastern part of the country under Gen. Khalifa Haftar. Forced out of Tripoli by the GNC, the Tobruk Parliament stands to gain under a Unity Government, which would install the parliament as the country’s legislative body.

There are signs that al-Sarraj and his Unity Government are gaining ground.

“We’re very hopeful about the latest version of the government in Libya, the government of national accord. Very, very fragile. It appears that there’s room for some hope here,” National Intelligence Director James Clapper said at a Christian Science Monitor meeting with reporters on April 25. “Certainly, we are much better off if we can operate with a government, and co-operate with one and certainly if we are going to do something militarily that we have some recognized governmental entity that can we can engage with and that can hopefully consent to such operations.”

Defense Department officials said they were “realistically hopeful” about the prospects for the Unity Government but added, “there will be hardliners who continue to push back.”

“There are likely to be spoilers…dead-enders that will be irreconcilable under any conditions. That could be anywhere between ten to 40 percent of the militias that are out there,” said Chris Chivvis associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND “That’s a reality that Libya has to deal with.”

Such spoilers would put an international protection force in an awkward position, depending on how many people side against the government. Exactly how unified or unifying is a government that rules from behind a wall of foreign troops?

The good news is that ISIS has popularity problems too, and is now seen as a foreign, occupying force.

“In the beginning, it was mostly Libyans,” a defense official said, but foreign fighters from the more southern parts of Africa are now moving into the country and staying, instead of moving on to Turkey, Iraq or Syria. The new arrivals annoy the Libyans, according to one official, who described ethnic prejudice against sub-Saharan Africans as a regular fact of life in Libya.

Gathering Forces

Last month, al-Sarraj rejected a British offer to help, and announced instead plans to gather various Libyan forces for a joint anti-ISIS effort. But experts say it’s going to need foreign help.

Patrick Skinner, former CIA case officer and director of special projects for the Soufan Group, says that it’s a fair bet that the United States will “play a train-and-advise role at very least once a stable partner is in place.”

“Sadly, the U.S. has growing experience with training and equipping forces that some large portion of the ‘host’ country probably oppose or at least don’t support. Libya will continue a recent trend from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria of the U.S. seeking stability through picking a partner and hoping increased capacity leads to larger change/acceptance/reform. It hasn’t worked altogether well in various degrees, but we will try it again in Libya,” he said.

Skinner said the U.S. might wind up helping more than one of the competing governments.

“We’ve got no qualms encouraging a new Unity Government while maintaining a strike capability with local forces somewhat less aligned with the new government. It’s a balance,” he said.

A very delicate balance; the United States must be careful not to appear to slight the eastern-based Tobruk Parliament as it doles out gear to the Unity Government.

“One of the fundamental challenges here is to avoid picking sides between the east and the west,” said Chivvis. “The President’s Council, in theory, should represent at least part of the Eastern government because it’s supposed to be a government of national accord. It’s not only supposed to be about unity between the GNC and the GNA It’s also about bringing in the representatives from the east. How effectively it’s done that is unclear because the east refused, for many months, to confirm the cabinet that the presidency council of the GNA had appointed. It’s still unclear, to me at least, exactly to what extent the presidential council can be said to represent the Tobruk government.”

The United States could work with both, said Chivvas.

“Any support, training, or equipping you provide to one side will be viewed by the other side as favoritism. Up until now, both sides have cared much more about their relative strength vis-à-vis each other than they have about ISIL insurgents,” he said. “If we go in and say we are going to give support to the forces of…General Haftar’s forces in the east, that will be looked upon very negatively by exactly those forces that we are trying to get to come around to an agreement in Tripoli.”

This new force’s first mission would likely be defending the al-Sarraj administration from rival militia groups.

“You’ve got a government set up, say, in buildings in Tripoli. Who is providing protection for that government, first of all? That’s an important question. Depending upon on what militias they have that are loyal to them, it’s not entirely clear whether or not they will be able to provide sufficient protection without some kind of international help,” said Chivvis. “That’s the first instance in which discussion about international support, the international assistance mission start to come into play, and that’s separate from the question of what kind of counter-ISIL operations the United States and its allies and partners in the region might carry out.”

And what of those counter-ISIS efforts?

Defense officials said that U.S. airstrikes had been effective “to a point.” A renewed campaign could even keep ISIS from spreading in Libya or outward to places like Algeria and the Sinai, would “need to be sustained,” one official said. “We had to do multiple strikes in Iraq every night” to change the dynamic there.

If that doesn’t work, it will be time to consider ground troops, Chivvis said.

“A full-scale recapture of Sirte from ISIL, which needs to be the objective, that’s going to require ground forces,” said Chivvis. “My view is that those forces don’t exist in Libya itself in any combination of the various militias that are on the ground. So, what that means is that either the political situation is going to have to get better, or eventually there will have to be Western ground forces on the ground to retake and stabilize Sirte. Now, we are not at that point. Because if you do that right now, before there is a legitimate government in Libya, there’s going to be no way out, effectively. So that is a strategy that could become necessary in the medium term.”

But will the presence of U.S. troops provide a rallying point for ISIS and its recruiters?

“Most people who are experts in Libya believe that any foreign forces in Libya will be rejected immediately by the rejected by the local population. My view is that that is an overly simplistic understanding of how local populations respond to the presence of foreign forces,” Chivvis said. “While there’s no question that ISIL would use the presence of foreign forces as part of its strategic communications plan, the actual reception of the vast majority would depend upon a range of different factors, first and foremost, whether or not their lives are actually improving,” he said. “There are things we now know to do better ten or 15 years ago.”

Let’s hope so.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/201...fense-wont-fix-it/128093/?oref=d-channelriver

Throwing Money at Missile Defense Won’t Fix It

9:44 AM ET By Stefan Soesanto

We need a smarter, holistic approach that combines offense and defense.

Following the recent missile launches by Tehran and Pyongyang, some analysts have argued for an increase in the annual budget of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA). It is a predictable response, but it will not produce the desired effect – and not just because sequestration makes it difficult.

In November 2014, the then-heads of the Army and Navy wrote a memo titled “Adjusting the Ballistic Missile Defense Strategy,” in which they argued that the “current acquisition-based strategy is unsustainable in the current fiscal environment and favors forward deployment of assets in lieu of deterrence-based options to meet contingency demands.” That same year, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments noted that “barring technological breakthroughs, the competition in [missile defense and defensive space control] is currently heavily offense-dominant, and thus, ramping up expenditures in a likely futile attempt to actively defend it is a cost-imposing strategy on the United States.”

In essence: The combination of sequestration and a persistently unfavorable cost-intercept exchange ratio sets up a tyranny of numbers, in which a limited U.S. BMD system is forced to compete with the world’s growing and increasingly capable arsenal of ballistic missiles.

Increasing the number of interceptors at the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) will not negate this reality, nor will it improve the chances of intercepting an ICBM launched against the continental United States.

First, the GMD is too expensive. In 1998, the Clinton administration envisioned a National Missile Defense system of 250 Ground-based Interceptors (GBIs) by 2011. In 2000, the Congressional Budget Office estimated that this system would cost $48.8 billion to build and operate through 2015. Sixteen years and some $40 billion later, the current GMD consists of a mere 30 GBIs.

Second, the GMD is inefficient. Riddled with technical problems, the program has a dismal flight test record of nine successful intercepts in 17 attempts since 1999. The program’s two types of exoatmospheric kill vehicles include the CE-1, which failed its latest intercept test in July 2013 after a substantial refurbishing and retrofitting effort; and the CE-2, which intercepted its first target in June 2014 after failing its two previous attempts in January and December 2010. Neither has been tested against an ICBM-range target. Unsurprisingly, the Government Accountability Office concluded in its latest report that the “MDA has not proven GMD can defend the homeland.”

Introducing a new kill vehicle design will not fix the GMD. The MDA has to make the CE-1 and CE-2 EKVs work, to be able to compete with the threats of today, and not divert scarce resources in the pursuit of a possible technical solution five years down the road.

Other BMD systems, such as the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), AEGIS BMD, and the Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC), are facing an entirely different set of challenges. First, they have to be guarded or be able to defend themselves against non-ballistic missile threats, such as cruise missile attacks, rocket, artillery, and mortar, and unmanned aerial systems. Second, they need to become interoperable by pivoting toward an open architecture that can plug-and-fight, streamline command-and-control processes, and extent situational awareness. And third, they must be integrated in the Joint Force to increase their tactical and strategic utility on the battlefield. Overall, BMD deployments must become more flexible and mobile, with a greater emphasis on an intelligence-driven, rather than a global demand-driven, force posture.


Read more: Your Pocket Guide to How US Missile Defense Works


BMD can be harnessed and refined to win a prospective missile salvo competition, but it will never substitute for offensive nuclear and conventional capabilities. In the end, what counts is not the amount of missiles that are intercepted in the sky, but the number of enemy launching platforms that are destroyed during an exchange. As such, the military services are already laying the groundwork for a system-of-systems, the so-called Integrated Air and Missile Defense (IAMD). According to then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dempsey, IAMD is an envisioned super-structure in which “all capabilities—defensive, passive, offensive, kinetic, non-kinetic—are melded into a comprehensive joint and combined force capable of preventing an adversary from effectively employing any of its offensive air and missile weapons.” In the context of IAMD, the Army is currently focusing on the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System, the Navy has put forward the Navy Integrated Fire Control-Counter Air, and the Air Force is relying on an offensive counter-air posture in the absence of ground-based air defenses within the aviation branch.

IAMD is the smart way forward to shape the future Joint Force and apply a holistic approach to integrate offensive and defensive counter-air capabilities. And while bipartisan support in Congress for BMD is certainly good to have, spending billions on trying to overcome the tyranny of numbers is and remains a bad and outdated idea.

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-media-trial-idUSKCN0XX1GO

World | Fri May 6, 2016 3:12pm EDT
Related: World

Turkish journalists jailed for five years, hours after courthouse attack

ISTANBUL | By Ayla Jean Yackley and Melih Aslan


Two prominent journalists were sentenced to at least five years in jail for revealing state secrets on Friday, just hours after a gunman tried to shoot one of them outside the Istanbul courthouse.

Can Dundar, editor-in-chief of the opposition Cumhuriyet newspaper, who was unscathed in the shooting, was given five years and 10 months. Erdem Gul, the newspaper's Ankara bureau chief, was sentenced to five years. They were acquitted of some other charges, including trying to topple the government.

The case, in which President Tayyip Erdogan was named as a complainant, has brought widespread condemnation from global rights groups and increased fears about freedom of the press in Turkey, a NATO member and EU candidate country.

Hours before the verdict was handed down, an assailant attempted to shoot Dundar. In full public view, before a courthouse, the attack marked an alarming development in a country already grappling with bombings by Kurdish insurgents and spillover of violence from neighboring Syria.

The man shouted "traitor" before firing at least two shots in quick succession. A reporter covering his trial appeared to have been wounded.

A Reuters witness said the assailant was detained by police. Before the shooting, he had approached reporters, saying he had been waiting since early morning and hoped Dundar would be found guilty. His motives and background were not immediately clear.

"We experienced two assassination attempts in two hours: one by firearms, the other by law," Dundar told reporters following the trial. "I have no doubt that the orders of the highest office played a role in this ruling."

The two are free pending appeal. The court also decided to postpone a hearing on separate charges of links to a terrorist group until the outcome of a related case.

No one was immediately available for comment at Erdogan's office after the ruling.

Dundar and Gul had faced up to life in jail on espionage and other charges for publishing footage purporting to show the state intelligence agency taking weapons into Syria in 2014.


"HEAVY PRICE"

Erdogan had accused the men of undermining Turkey's international reputation and vowed Dundar would "pay a heavy price", raising opposition concerns about the fairness of any trial.

"We say the incident we covered was a crime, not our coverage," Dundar said. "And for that we were confronted by the president. He acted like the prosecutor of this case. He threatened us and made us targets."

Under the ruling AK Party, which was founded by Erdogan, Turkey has seized control of opposition newspapers and broadcasters and cut the satellite feed of a pro-Kurdish channel, accusing them of terrorism-related activities.

Erdogan has acknowledged that the trucks, which were stopped by gendarmerie and police officers en route to the Syrian border in January 2014, belonged to the National Intelligence Organisation and said they were carrying aid to Turkmen battling both Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Islamic State.

"This case isn't based on law, it's political," said Mahmut Tanal, a lawmaker from the opposition Republican People's Party.

Gul and Dundar spent 92 days in jail, almost half of it in solitary confinement, before the constitutional court ruled in February that pre-trial detention was unfounded because the charges stemmed from their journalism.

Erdogan said he did not respect that ruling.

Journalists have been targeted in the past. Last month senior Turkish security officials were among 34 defendants put on trial accused of links to the murder of a prominent Armenian journalist, Hrant Dink, a decade ago.

Dink, who ran a newspaper serving Turkey's 60,000 Christian Armenians, was gunned down in broad daylight on a busy Istanbul street in 2007.


(Reporting by Ayla Jean Yackley; Editing by David Dolan and Ralph Boulton)

 

[Housecarl]

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://38north.org/2016/05/punggye050616/

New Possible Indication of North Korean Nuclear Test Preparations

By 38 North
06 May 2016

A 38 North exclusive with analysis by Joseph S. Bermudez Jr.

Commercial satellite imagery of North Korea’s Punggye-ri Nuclear Test Site from May 5 suggests that Pyongyang may be preparing for a nuclear test in the near future. While the test site continues to show low levels of activity, vehicles have been spotted at what is believed to be the Command Center, located approximately 6 kilometers south of the test site. While the historical record is incomplete, it appears that vehicles are not often seen there except during preparations for a test.

North Portal

There is a low level of activity with one truck or several small vehicles parked close together (measuring approximately 4.1 m by 2.2 m) 20 meters west of the portal and what appears to be several people immediately outside the portal. The crates or trailers seen in this area in previous imagery are no longer present.

Figure 1. Truck or several small vehicles identified at the North Portal.

Image includes material Pleiades © CNES 2016. Distribution Airbus DS / Spot Image, all rights reserved. For media licensing options, please contact thirtyeightnorth@gmail.com.
Image includes material Pleiades © CNES 2016. Distribution Airbus DS / Spot Image, all rights reserved. For media licensing options, please contact thirtyeightnorth@gmail.com.

West Portal

There is no activity of significance (e.g., vehicles, people, etc.). However, the dark area at the top of the spoil pile for the North Portal has grown slightly, suggesting that there has been some recent activity.

Figure 2. Recent activity at the West Portal.

Image includes material Pleiades © CNES 2016. Distribution Airbus DS / Spot Image, all rights reserved. For media licensing options, please contact thirtyeightnorth@gmail.com.
Image includes material Pleiades © CNES 2016. Distribution Airbus DS / Spot Image, all rights reserved. For media licensing options, please contact thirtyeightnorth@gmail.com.

Main Support Area

No significant activity is observed at the Main Support Area. The vehicle seen in imagery from May 2 is no longer present.

Figure 3. No significant activity at the Main Support Area on May 5.

Image includes material Pleiades © CNES 2016. Distribution Airbus DS / Spot Image, all rights reserved. For media licensing options, please contact thirtyeightnorth@gmail.com.
Image includes material Pleiades © CNES 2016. Distribution Airbus DS / Spot Image, all rights reserved. For media licensing options, please contact thirtyeightnorth@gmail.com.

South Portal

A small object (measuring approximately 2 meters by 1 meter)—likely a trailer or crate—is present nine meters from the portal.

Figure 4. Small object identified close to the South Portal on May 5.


Image includes material Pleiades © CNES 2016. Distribution Airbus DS / Spot Image, all rights reserved. For media licensing options, please contact thirtyeightnorth@gmail.com.

Facility Access Road

No vehicles or people were observed moving along the road south of the test facility.

Command Center

Structures located approximately 6 kilometers south of the test facility are believed to be the Command Center for nuclear tests. While the historical record is incomplete, it appears that vehicles are not often seen here except during preparations for a test. No vehicles or people were observed at this facility on imagery from May 2. However, what appears to be four closely-parked vehicles are present on May 5.

Figure 5. Vehicles observed at the Command Center.

Before/After