Blogs of War

Obama Issues Order for More Troops in Afghanistan
President Obama has issued his order to send more troops to Afghanistan, communicating his decision to military leaders late Sunday afternoon during a meeting in the Oval Office, and will spend Monday speaking with foreign leaders to share with them the broad outlines of his new strategy, the White House said.

Statement on Afghanistan
First, Mr Speaker, I made clear that we would increase the number of British personnel in Afghanistan only if we were assured that it would continue to be the case that every soldier and unit deployed is fully equipped for the operations they are asked to undertake. At this morning’s meeting of the Afghanistan and Pakistan national security committee, the Chief of the Defence Staff gave that assurance – that this condition has been met both for the existing force and the additional 500 troops.

Will the Economy Sink the American Empire?
…empires almost always collapse because of internal mismanagement. Either that mismanagement dethrones them outright or, more commonly, makes them much more vulnerable to challengers. This is why worries about Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, et. al. miss the point. The damage they can do to the U.S. is nothing next to the damage we have done – and continue to do – to ourselves.

Maryland University Scientist Developing Virtual Worlds for Defense Strategy
V.S. Subrahmanian, a Maryland computer science professor and director of the University’s Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), is in the process of developing virtual worlds that aims to guide military commanders through military options and explore potential scenarios, according to India’s DNA news site.

CIA pulls SWIFT one to get peak at your bank records
European Union governments have given in to the pressure and appear set to make a last-minute agreement with the United States to allow its intelligence agencies to monitor bank accounts and transactions across the bloc.

Pakistan’s Youth
This British Council report, ‘Pakistan: the Next Generation’ should be required reading for people who want to understand Pakistan. Dividend or disaster is the theme. The findings are striking – about distrust, disappointment and danger.

Military Seeking Greener Spy Planes With Added Benefits
Unmanned robotic spy planes are now going green as researchers hope to develop aircraft able to fly longer while also conducting surveillance with less threat of detection due to engine noise.

Vote Now On Cyber Arms Control
It’s probably fairly clear that I don’t think an ICAC would help prevent a cyberwar. An ICAC might have some mileage as a means to agreeing that cyber attacks – particularly those aimed at civilian infrastructure – are a Bad Thing, but that’s an aspiration necessarily limited by the nature of the beast to which it refers…

Report: Domestic Terror Threat on the Rise
One of the topics on the agenda is the rising domestic terror threat. But this alarm was sounded months ago, in Apr 09, when DHS released their report entitled Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.

DARPA Funds Nano-UAV Hummingbird
For years, engineers have been working on making smaller and smaller UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). DARPA (Defense Research Advanced Projects Agency) has been taking the lead for years, and is now pushing the envelope by providing a second round of funding for the development of nano-UAVs, unmanned flyers with a mass of just 10 grams, approximately equivalent to two nickels.

Czech Intelligence Reveals Iraqi Plot To Attack RFE/RL
Czech officials say former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein ordered an attack on the Prague headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty but that the plot was foiled by the country’s intelligence services.

Web service automates WordPress password cracking
Hackers have developed a distributed WordPress admin account cracking scheme that poses a severe risk for the security of blogs whose owners select insecure passwords.

Worth Watching: ArmedwScience

Pakistan must step up action against al Qaeda
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called on Pakistan to take tougher action against al Qaeda and step up its efforts to track down the group’s leader Osama bin Laden.

Understanding China
They may have appeared more conciliatory on previous visits by American leaders, but that was largely decorative. The Chinese have a powerful sense of their identity and worth. They have never behaved toward the West in a supplicant manner, for reasons Westerners persistently fail to understand or grasp.

Kian Tajbakhsh faced with new charge; White House calls for release
According to news reports, Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian-American urban planner who earned a Ph.D. from Columbia, faces a new charge of spying. According to the New York Times, Tajbakhsh—already sentenced to 15 years in prison for spying—recently told his wife during her prison visit that a judge at the Revolutionary Court read new charges of “spying for the George Soros foundation” on Monday. The count referenced his work for the Open Society Institute, run by Soros, a financier.

CIA goes hiring in heart of Arab America
In dire need of agents fluent in Arabic, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has made an unusual public show of its recruiting effort in Dearborn — a city of 100,000 with the densest Arab population in the United States.

The role of spies in Latin America
Charges of blackmail and espionage have led to arrests and several rows between a number of Latin American countries.

Vegas fusion center fights terrorism, street crime
Open for more than two years, the Las Vegas “fusion” center is battling terrorism and street crime, a dual mission that has affected how local and federal law enforcement agents view each other and their jobs.

Terrorism Suspected in Russia Train Crash
A crater consistent with a bomb of 15 pounds of TNT was found near the damaged Nevsky Express train No. 166, which derailed late Friday between Aleshkina and Uglovka in a rural area in Northwest Russia, about 170 miles before it would have reached St. Petersburg.

Japanese satellite spies on N Korea
Japan operates two optical intelligence satellites, which take high-precision images in clear daylight weather, and one radar satellite, which can detect objects through clouds and at night. But to monitor different spots daily, two optical satellites and two radar satellites are needed. Such a system is expected to be ready in 2011.

Saddam was telling truth in missing Gulf War pilot
Saddam Hussein was telling the truth, this time. The United States just didn’t believe him. So it took the most powerful military in the world 18 years to find the remains of the only U.S. Navy pilot shot down in an aerial battle in the 1991 Gulf War. Michael “Scott” Speicher’s bones lay 18 inches deep in Iraqi sand, more or less right where a group of Iraqis had led an American search team in 1995.

Information Request for Cybersecurity Competency Models
The U. S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council and the Chief Human Capital Officers Council of Workforce Development Subcommittee recently identified cybersecurity related occupations as high priorities for Governmentwide competency models. OPM is pleased to kick-off the development of these models. This initiative will identify the critical elements of success for the covered workforce, ensuring classification, selection, development, and performance management programs are based on a valid framework.

UUV mothership to deploy intelligence-gathering unmanned underwater vehicles in development by SAIC
U.S. Navy researchers are developing an autonomous submarine that gathers military intelligence information in coastal waters and harbors by deploying and operating small unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) as a distributed, collaborative suite of electronic sensors.

Water Management in Central Asia
As in the case of the Kyrgyz glaciers, many countries may depend on one country’s glacier, or maybe the mountain borders more than one country. Many of these countries that share borders and water supply may at best have differing political interests, and at worst, have ethnic conflicts to add to the mix.

Video: Palantir Cyber Demo
Palantir Cyber brings a unique set of capabilities to this emerging problem – allowing an organization to effectively address their highest priority concerns, including data exfiltration and insider threat.

Worth Watching: Strategypage

Patrols and turkey in Afghan war zone
Thanksgiving Day for soldiers in this valley ringed by towering snowy peaks began with a 6-mile slog to aid village schools without desks and windows, and promises to end with five, once scrawny local turkeys soldiers have been fattening up for the past month. “Just another day, another mission,” several soldiers said as a 25-man patrol from Able Troop, 3-71 Cavalry Squadron, 10th Mountain Division, set out on a cold morning under brilliantly blue skies.

Israel soldier swap talks on hold
Indirect talks between Israel and the Islamist Hamas movement over a prisoner exchange involving Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit have been suspended until Tuesday, according to a Palestinian official.

Middle East power shifting to Turkey and Iran
While the United States and Europe have been struggling to find a path forward in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Afghanistan, and Iran, the strategic ground upon which their assumptions about the region rest has begun to shift dramatically.

USAF Growing Cyber Warfare Ops Center
The newly-created 24th U.S. Air Force, the service’s latest numbered force, aims to establish the first elements of a cyberspace command operations center in San Antonio by the end of December.

US headache over Afghan deserters
One in every four combat soldiers quit the Afghan National Army (ANA) during the year ending in September, published data by the US Defense Department and the Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan reveals.

SKorea confirms some 5,000 wartime executions
South Korean soldiers and police executed nearly 5,000 citizens during the early months of the 1950-53 Korean War, fearing they could collaborate with invading North Korean troops, a government commission said Thursday.

CMF Participates in Counterpiracy Conference in Beijing
Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) participated in an international counterpiracy conference held recently Beijing. Piracy off the coast of Somalia continues to be a major concern for international shipping operating within 1,000 miles of the coast.

Military Spook In New Civilian Cyber Security Post
Air Commodore Graham Wright CBE was drafted in at some point over the last couple of months. A Jaguar pilot, he was base commander at RAF Coltishall until it closed in 2006. After this, he went to the Ministry of Defence, becoming Director of its Directorate of Targeting and Information Operations (DTIO). DTIO was set up in 2001 to integrate military information operations and targeting, and improve intelligence support to IO. The web’s littered with info on their activities in Iraq in particular, so go digging if you want to find out more about DTIO.

Turkey demands Israel deliver drones
Turkey has warned Israeli defense contractors to deliver on 10 promised drone aircraft in 50 days or the deal may be canceled.

German Military Chief Resigns Over Afghan Air Strike
Germany’s armed forces chief Wolfgang Schneiderhan has resigned, Defense Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg said, after accusations the military withheld information about an air strike in Afghanistan.

North Korean Arms Exports Continue
A UN investigation has concluded that North Korea is continuing to export weapons, and using the hard currency obtained to import luxury items for the ruling elite of the communist police state. The UN report detailed North Korean use of false documents and the switching of cargo containers to different ships to throw off investigators.

Wounded soldier Tom speaks about his experience
Corporal Tom Neathway of the Parachute Regiment, a triple amputee noted for his positive determination in the BBC’s ‘Wounded’ programme, has been speaking about his personal experience to those recovering from minor injuries at Royal Air Force Halton’s Primary Care Rehabilitation Facility.

Philippine troops move into the south
Hundreds of Philippine troops have taken over the main government buildings in four southern towns following political violence that has left 57 people dead, including journalists and bystanders.

Worth Watching: Ubiwar

Obama to announce Afghanistan troop strategy Tuesday
President Obama will announce the U.S. troop strategy for Afghanistan in a speech at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday.

Obama Provides Glimpse of Afghanistan Strategy
“I can tell you … that it is in our strategic interest, in our national security interest, to make sure that al-Qaida and its extremist allies cannot operate effectively in those areas,” Obama said. “We are going to dismantle and degrade their capabilities and ultimately dismantle and destroy their networks. And Afghanistan’s stability is important to that process.”

CIA Chief Panetta Winning Over Doubters at the Agency
The mood at Langley has always been difficult to measure, since insiders are not allowed to speak to the media. But several former CIA veterans who remain in contact with serving colleagues say spirits were lifted in recent weeks when the White House ruled in the agency’s favor on two disputes with the DNI. “People are more upbeat than they have been in a long time,” says a retired station chief. “They’re finally warming up to Panetta.”

Podcast: ODNI Chief Human Capital Officer Ron Sanders building a 21st century workforce
Organized under the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Intelligence Community (IC) is the umbrella organization for such agencies as the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. Some have overlapping, confidential missions, while others have very distinctive, specific roles to play in safeguarding the nation.

CIA’s Lost Magic Manual Resurfaces
At the height of the Cold War, the Central Intelligence Agency paid $3,000 to renowned magician John Mulholland to write a manual on misdirection, concealment, and stagecraft. All known copies of the document — and a related paper, on conveying hidden signals — were believed to be destroyed in 1973. But recently, the manuals resurfaced, and have now been published as “The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception.”

CIA cookbook dishes up spy tales
The more than 200 recipes — with names like Post-Soviet Thai Crab Cakes With Jam Sauce — mostly come from agents and family members whose names aren’t given and whose places of assignment remain murky. This means there’s no one to complain to if you carefully followed the directions but the dish was inedible. (Same as with any black ops gambit.)

Terrorism probe casts scrutiny on Minneapolis’ Somali immigrant enclave
Little Mogadishu residents talk of a lack of identity and a life of poverty and racism. And they disagree over their former neighbors who are accused of plotting jihad in Somalia.

Pakistan Nuclear Facilities At Risk: Former NSA
Stephen Hadley, an arms control expert who also served as former U.S. President George W Bush’s National Security Adviser said Sunday that a resurgent Taliban insurgency and the war in neighboring Afghanistan have put Pakistan’s nukes at risk giving rise to a “troubling” situation.

Lech Walesa libel trial starts in Poland over spy claim
A libel trial has started in Poland over charges former President Lech Walesa once worked as a communist spy.

A-Space Past and Future
This week marks the second anniversary of the first live internal demo of the intelligence community’s A-Space project, groundbreaking for the IC in its goal of collaborative use of social media across agency lines. Somewhere in Maryland, a remarkable government employee and friend named Mike Wertheimer should pause and quietly celebrate the fruition of his early evangelism for it.

NIST Drafts Cybersecurity Guidance
The National Institute for Standards and Technology is urging the government to continuously monitor its own cybersecurity efforts.

Wikileaks Says It Has Half-a-Million 9/11 Pager Messages
The document-leaking site Wikileaks says it’s preparing to release 500,000 intercepted wireless pager messages from a 24-hour period encompassing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Intelligence agency GCHQ uses Xbox Live to attract new recruits
GCHQ, the organisation responsible for collating intelligence for the British government, is using Microsoft’s online games portal, Xbox Live, to target potential agents.

COTS Cisco router launches into space aboard Intelsat satellite
A space-tolerant router designed by Cisco, a supplier of networking equipment and network management for the Internet, flew into orbit aboard a satellite of Intelsat Ltd., a provider of fixed satellite services. The payload, on the Intelsat 14 satellite, is a demonstration of Internet Routing in Space (IRIS) for the U.S. military, which is expected to open up a number of commercial and military opportunities to improve communications connectivity around the globe.

Border zones and insecurity in the Americas
While some have fretted that these zones could harbor jihadi terrorists, the real danger lies in the violence produced by bloody competition over these lucrative areas and the spread of criminal reach and power throughout the state and across frontiers.

Phil Carter Quits Administration
Phil Carter, well known to longtime denizens of the blogosphere as the former proprietor of Intel Dump, has suddenly resigned as deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee policy.

Russian Submarine Malfunctions During Sea Trials
The Russian Navy’s Kilo Class diesel-electric submarine Alrosa has suffered an engine malfunction during sea trials and has been towed to the port of Novorossiisk.

UN mission ‘failing’ in DR Congo
The huge United Nations peacekeeping operation in the Democratic Republic of Congo has failed to disarm Rwandan Hutu fighters, UN experts say.

Worth Watching: US_EUCOM

President Obama to announce Afghanistan surge next week
President Obama will next week announce a surge of at least 25,000 new US troops to Afghanistan in a speech to the nation, according to US officials today. Mr Obama will make the announcement in an address on Tuesday, December 1, after weeks of deliberations over his Afghan strategy and a tenth session with his war council in the White House on Monday night.

US President Obama and Indian PM Singh hold talks
Discussions are expected to range from Afghanistan and climate change to nuclear energy co-operation and trade.

Alleged Hawaii spy found competent to stand trial
A Maui man accused of selling military secrets to China has been found competent to stand trial. In part, Noshir Gowadia is accused of providing data on making cruise missiles and other aircraft less visible to radar or heat-seeking devices.

Ruling delayed for Filipino jailed in spy case
A judge has delayed a ruling on whether a former Philippine National Police officer who served prison time for receiving classified U.S. government documents will be extradited to face murder charges.

Charges in Minneapolis Connection to Terrorism
The U.S. Attorney’s Office and FBI in Minnesota announced a series of charges unsealed Monday in the ongoing investigation of individuals recruiting and sending young men from Minneapolis to Somalia to fight with Al Shabaab, a terrorist organization closely linked with Al Qaeda.

Homeland Security Lacks Crucial Material for Nuclear Detectors
The agency to date has spent $230 million on the program to field up to 1,400 of the devices that would scan cargo passing though foreign seaports. However, the $800,000 machines require helium 3 for detection of neutrons, which are emitted by the nuclear-weapon material plutonium. Helium 3 is a byproduct of the decay of tritium, which is produced only in limited quantities in the United States.

The Politically Incorrect Secret to Stopping Terrorism
Sarah Palin and the rest of the right-wingers blame political correctness for the Ft. Hood tragedy, but might they actually have a point?

International anti-terrorism conference held in Kyrgyzstan
Faced with a complicated world security situation, the meeting would mainly focus on security within the Commonwealth of Independent States(CIS), Kyrgyz State Minister of Foreign Affairs Kadyrbek Sarbaevat said at the opening ceremony.

Blackwater’s Secret War in Pakistan
At a covert forward operating base run by the US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) in the Pakistani port city of Karachi, members of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, “snatch and grabs” of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan, an investigation by The Nation has found. The Blackwater operatives also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes, according to a well-placed source within the US military intelligence apparatus.

Worth Watching: ChinaPrime

Robotic Spy Planes Go Green
Now scientists are developing a robot plane that runs off alternative energy. The hydrogen fuel cell that powers the “Ion Tiger” UAV make it travel farther and carrier heavier payloads than battery-powered designs, yet are still more stealthy than internal combustion engine designs with its reduced noise, heat and emissions.

Congress Cyber Report Tilts At China
I’d be interested to know what definition of ‘attack’ is being used across DoD. Reason being that it wasn’t so long ago that DoD were claiming millions of daily ‘probes’ and ’scans’, which were often referred to as ‘attacks’.

Boycott Microsoft Bing
Western corporations have often behaved embarrassingly in China, sacrificing any principles to ingratiate themselves with the Communist Party authorities. Yahoo was the worst, handing over information about several email account holders so that they could be arrested – and then dissembling and defending its monstrous conduct. Now Microsoft is sacrificing the integrity of Bing searches so as to cozy up to State Security in Beijing. In effect, it has chosen become part of the Communist Party’s propaganda apparatus.

Bing: Committed to Comprehensive Results
We appreciate the dialog that Mr. Kristof has kicked off. Community feedback and input is incredibly important to Bing – it helps us do better and sometimes alerts us to things we can take immediate action to fix as we continue to improve.

Karzai ‘would fall in weeks’ if Nato pulls out
In an interview with the Guardian at the end of a visit to Kabul for the presidential inauguration of Hamid Karzai, the foreign secretary said: “If international forces leave, you can choose a time – five minutes, 24 hours or seven days – but the insurgent forces will overrun those forces that are prepared to put up resistance and we would be back to square one.”

Moscow’s Leash
Many analysts think that Gazprom’s “grip” on Europe has loosened. The company has been battered by the economic crisis, while the Continent is now coping with a glut of natural gas rather than scrambling for resources. But this is a cyclical crisis, not a structural one. Europe still needs gas, and Gazprom still wants to sell it. And although the times have changed, Europe’s energy challenges have not gone away.

The Al Qaeda Diaries
As the Pakistani soldiers moved into South Waziristan, they found something almost as valuable as al Qaeda itself: the diaries and books that explain how militant ideology binds the diffuse world of terrorism together.

Microsoft Denies Windows 7 Has NSA Backdoor
“Microsoft has not and will not put ‘backdoors’ into Windows,” a company spokeswoman said to Computerworld. “The work being discussed here is purely in conjunction with our Security Compliance Management Toolkit.”

China can destroy most US GPS satellites
China’s Anti-Satellite (ASAT) has the capability of destroying 23 US’ 31 functional GPS satellites, said Dr Geoffery Forden, principal research scientist in MIT’s Programme on Science, Technology and Society, USA.

Former U.S. official, wife admit to 30 years of spying for Cuba
Walter K. Myers, 72, pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit espionage and wire fraud. His wife, Gwendolyn Steingraber Myers, 71, pleaded guilty to conspiring to gather and transmit national defense information.

CIA, Pakistan agree on intelligence cooperation
In a meeting between Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani and CIA Chief Leon Panetta, the two sides have agreed to expand military and intelligence cooperation.

ABC’s Flawed CIA ‘Black Site’ Report
Yesterday, ABC News tried — and largely failed — to put a dent in the news cycle by breathlessly reporting a four-year-old scoop about secret CIA facilities in Eastern Europe. In short: After 9/11, the CIA converted an old Lithuanian horseback-riding academy into a so-called “black site” prison where high-value terrorists were detained and interrogated.

Lithuania to look again at CIA links
Twice in the past three years, the Lithuanian Parliament investigated reports that the CIA secretly imprisoned al-Qaida leaders in this Baltic country. Both times, legislators concluded that there was no evidence.

How to Break and Open Source Insurgency
It’s long been my contention that Iraq was stabilized at an acceptable level of controlled chaos due to a happy accident by al Qaeda (in an attempt to expand/lead the loose insurgency in a new direction). What did they do? They blew up the Golden Mosque in Samara in 2006.

TV ad seeks to recruit Arab-Americans to CIA
The commercial, which the agency plans to debut on mainstream and ethnic TV stations and Web sites nationwide within the next few months, represents artistic and technological leaps for the agency. Until now, its print, broadcast and Web advertising has focused on the variety of career options and the diversity among its ranks, but the agency hasn’t used a storytelling approach to sell its message.

Joint Doctrine Publication (JDP) 3-40: Security and Stabilisation: The Military Contribution
JDP 3-40 identifies the general priorities for stabilising failed or failing states, and determines the nature, level, principles and priorities that govern the UK military contribution and the guidelines governing transition to civilian and host nation control.

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