Is China (Finally) Building an Aircraft Carrier?


It’s an article of faith in naval circles that China will inevitably emerge as one of the world’s great maritime powers. But a secret plan by a Chinese government agency suggests that Beijing is taking a major seafaring step forward.

Japan’s Asahi Shimbun cites a report from the State Oceanic Administration saying that China will complete construction of its first aircraft carrier by 2014, something the government never previously admitted. Constructed primarily at Shanghai, the carrier is supposed to displace between 50,000 and 60,000 tons. And it’s part of an even larger effort by the People’s Liberation Army Navy to “build itself up as a maritime power” during the next decade: a nuclear powered carrier is supposed to be completed by 2020. All of that should be taken with a grain of salt, but navy experts generally consider building a carrier to be well within Chinese capabilities.

The U.S. military has little visibility into the plans of its Chinese counterparts. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, recently urged the creation of a regularized military channel between the two nations to reduce ambiguities. Defense Secretary Robert Gates is heading to China next month for the first in a series of top-level U.S.-Chinese official visits scheduled for 2011.

Continue Reading “Is China (Finally) Building an Aircraft Carrier?” »

Tags: ,
Back to top

Will Blackwater Go Vegan After Sale to Hippy Firm?

The next time you sink into the tub after a stressful day, your relaxation illuminated by the plume of the soy candle you bought at Whole Foods, know this: you are funding the world’s most infamous private security company.

Long on the auction block, Blackwater/Xe has finally been sold, Dealbook reports, to a team of investors led by Forté Capital Advisors and Manhattan Growth Partners for an estimated $200 million. The first of those investors should come as no surprise: Forte’s Jason DeYonker is a confidante of the family of company founder Erik Prince. But the second, well — sorry, hippies.

War is Business does some digging and finds that Manhattan Growth Partners likes to put its money in the crunchier side of the consumer-goods market. Among its investments: organic beauty company Hugo Naturals, which pledges only to use “the highest quality vegan, natural, organic and kosher food-grade ingredients.” It’s their scrubs and lotions you bought at Whole Foods. Now that their moneymen have a piece of Blackwater, can it be long before the high-priced market stocks organic steroids and cocaine?

Well, probably, yeah. But it remains to be seen how much of a rebranding the company will undergo after the sale. As Dealbook points out, Prince has hinted that in order to get rid of the taint of Nisour Square — in which Blackwater security guards protecting U.S. diplomats killed 17 Iraqi civilians in a confusing 2007 melee in Baghdad — the company will make training military forces and law enforcement the core of its business. But one of its partnerships recently won part of a huge State Department contract for protecting diplomats. And with a huge Army deal to train Afghan police soon to be awarded, it’s possible that the New-Look Blackwater will find the Prince era teed up its future quite naturally. DeYonker has yet to return a request for comment, and a vague statement from the new investors, USTC Holdings, doesn’t clarify.

Continue Reading “Will Blackwater Go Vegan After Sale to Hippy Firm?” »

Tags: , , , ,
Back to top

‘Unprecedented’ Drone Assault: 58 Strikes in 102 Days


It may take years, but some researcher will travel to Pakistan’s tribal areas and produce a definitive study on what it’s been like to live amidst an aerial bombardment from American pilotless aircraft. When that account inevitably comes out, it’s likely to find that 2010 — and especially the final quarter of 2010 — marked a turning point in how civilians coped with a drone war that turned relentless.

Even as the Obama administration’s assessment of its war strategy nodded to the primacy of the CIA’s drone campaign, Predators underscored the point. Over the past two days, four Predators or Reapers fired their missiles at suspected militants in North Waziristan, with three of the strikes coming early today.

They represent a geographic expansion of the drone war. Today’s strikes come in Khyber, an area abutting Afghanistan’s Nangahar province, that’s been notably drone-free. It has become an area for militants fleeing military action in South Waziristan to take succor.

They also bring the drone-strike tally for this year up to 113, more than twice last year’s 53 strikes. But those figures don’t begin to tell the whole story.

According to a tally kept by the Long War Journal, 58 of those strikes have come since September: There has been a drone attack every 1.8 days since Labor Day. LWJ’s Bill Roggio says the pace of attacks between September and November (there was a brief December respite, now erased) is “unprecedented since the U.S. began the air campaign in Pakistan in 2004.” (By contrast, in 2008, there were just 34 strikes.)

Both Roggio and the New America Foundation have found that the overwhelming majority of this year’s strikes have clustered in North Waziristan: at least 99, by Roggio’s count.

That torrid pace of attacks should make it beyond debate that the drones are the long pole in the U.S.’s counterterrorism tent, even if the drone program is technically a secret. The Pakistanis haven’t sent their Army into North Waziristan to harass al-Qaeda’s haven in the mountainous, Connecticut-sized region, waving off U.S. pressure to invade.

Continue Reading “‘Unprecedented’ Drone Assault: 58 Strikes in 102 Days” »

Tags: , , , ,
Back to top

Victor, Meet Spoils: Weaponeers Peddle Wares to Iraqi Cops


Next year’s supposed to be the big year in Iraq: the final departure of U.S. troops. But the Iraqi Ministry of Interior wants you to know that it has a lot of business opportunities available long after that for enterprising defense corporations.

Come by the Crown Plaza Hotel near National Airport just outside of Washington, D.C. on March 3 and 4, because that’s when the Iraq Homeland and Border Control Conference will kick off. Sponsored by a business-expo firm called New Fields, which has hosted Iraqi defense officials for similar conferences, the event bills itself as a rare chance to “brief key Iraqi homeland and border control officials and decision maker [sic] about your equipments and services,” according to a typo-prone brochure for the event passed on to Danger Room.

The invited guests are practically a parade of Iraqi brass. Meet Gen. Jassem Jawad Ali, the interior ministry’s director of contracts; Gen. Anwar Ahmed, the Air Force commander; Brig. Gen. Salah Noori al-Bayaty, the “Oil Police deputy director”; Gen. Kareem Mohammed Saloom, the Ministry of Defense’s logistics adviser; and many more.

They’ll be on the lookout to “acquire advance [sic] technology and surveillance systems to track and stop foreign militants,” the brochure advertises. Ready to pass out some business cards?

“Those from the homeland-security industries and also from aviation, from those firms, will be able to speak with Iraqi officials, have one-on-one meetings with them,” says Veronica Fuentes, one of the project coordinators for the conference. Curious — or cautious — firms can “gain insights” on “the situation in Iraq right now” that might compel them to invest. Fuentes says she expects “around 200 delegates” from different homeland-security companies to attend. Continue Reading “Victor, Meet Spoils: Weaponeers Peddle Wares to Iraqi Cops” »

Tags: , ,
Back to top

Army Set to Award Mega-Contract to Train Afghan Cops


NATO allies still haven’t provided all of the troops they promised to train Afghanistan’s nascent police force. When in doubt, contract it out.

Before the New Year, the Army will finally award a much-delayed $1.6 billion-with-a-b contract for a private security firm to supplement that NATO training command’s efforts to professionalize Afghan cops. That bid touched off a bureaucratic tempest between Blackwater/Xe Services and DynCorp, which held an old contract for the same job, as well as the State Department and the Army.

But not for much longer. The Army’s Contracting Command is in “the very final stages” of selecting the firm for the bid, Col. John Ferrari of the NATO training command tells Danger Room. “We’re expecting an announcement before the end of December, sometime in the next week or two.”

The contract is for “mentoring, training, and logistics services” to backstop Ferrari’s efforts, placing security contractors in embedded positions with the Afghan interior ministry and police units themselves, according to the terms of the bid. More than 80 firms have registered as “interested vendors” on the federal website announcing the contract. NATO is trying to build a 134,000-strong Afghan police force by October, and it’s short 900 trainers promised by U.S. allies.

The deal has been a bureaucratic and corporate tangle. In 2009, hoping to expedite the training of Afghan cops, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, then the commander of the Afghan war effort, managed to move the contracting deal from its home at the State Department’s Bureau of Narcotics and Law Enforcement — an agency criticized for weak oversight — into the Army. Only the Army element in control was the obscure Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office, an organization with unclear competency in police training, and it announced that only five corporations could bid on the contract, including Blackwater.
Continue Reading “Army Set to Award Mega-Contract to Train Afghan Cops” »

Tags: , , ,
Back to top

Yearly Price Tab for Afghan Forces: $6 Billion, Indefinitely


Want a good measurement of “NATO’s enduring commitment” to Afghanistan even after combat forces depart? The Afghan soldiers and cops NATO trains to secure the country are going to need $6 billion from international donors every year to keep operating.

Right now, the plan is to build up a force of 305,000 soldiers and police by next October, up from the 250,000 that NATO’s currently got in uniform. U.S. taxpayers have financed that force, paying $9.2 billion during 2010, and the Obama administration wants Congress to provide another $11.6 billion for them in the spending bill currently before Congress. That money doesn’t just help pay troops’ salaries. It purchases all the gear they need, like the Ford Rangers, armored Humvees, and Russian MI-17 helicopters they use for transport.

Col. John Ferrari, the deputy commander for programs at NATO’s training mission, estimates that “sustainment” for the Afghan forces will cost $6 billion annually — at least. In response to a question from Danger Room on a blogger conference call Thursday, Ferrari said that those costs include “fuel, repair parts, salaries, uniforms, individual solider equipment,” as well as $300 to $400 million per year for “capital equipment.” And that’s if the Obama administration and NATO decides early next year that 300,000 soldiers and cops are enough. If not, then NATO will need more cash from Congress to fund the plus-up — and, presumably, sustainment costs will accordingly rise.

To put that number in context, the CIA estimates Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is around $27 billion. Keeping soldiers and police fed, clothed, billeted, armed and equipped, realistically, will be a job for international donors for the foreseeable future.

Getting Afghanistan economically self-sufficient enough to pay for its own security depends on how fast it can develop its “mineral wealth” or “take advantage of being at the crossroads of Asia and the Middle East and can get revenue from the trucking industry or gas pipelines,” Ferrari said. “Frankly, I don’t know what those estimates are and anyone who says that they know is taking a guess as to what that might be.” It’s worth noting that some security experts believe that injecting large amounts of foreign cash into Afghanistan’s tiny economy contributes to its economic and corruption woes.

Continue Reading “Yearly Price Tab for Afghan Forces: $6 Billion, Indefinitely” »

Tags: , ,
Back to top

Obama: Never Mind Afghanistan, It’s All About The Drones


One year and 30,000 new troops later, Afghanistan is peripheral to the Afghanistan war. According to the Obama administration’s review of its strategy, it’s official: this a U.S. drone war in Pakistan with a big, big U.S. troop component next door.

Sure, the troop surge is working, according to a summary of the long-anticipated review that the administration released today. But that assessment, reminiscent of years of Bush administration statements about Iraq during that war’s darkest days, is conditional and said to be fragile. Taliban “momentum has been arrested in much of the country” and “reversed in some key areas.” The goal for 2010 was to break the Taliban’s momentum.

But in any event, that’s the goal for Afghanistan, which the review doesn’t even address until the end. The aim of the wider campaign, reiterated in the summary, is to crush al-Qaeda across the border in Pakistan’s tribal areas, defined as taking away their bases and the “elimination of the group’s remaining leadership cadre.” In other words: whacking moles, all through massively stepped-up CIA drone strikes, despite years of warnings that they won’t lead to victory. “Significant progress” has been made in killing al-Qaeda leaders, the summary says, but there isn’t any real attempt to connect any of that to what U.S. troops are doing in Afghanistan.

And since the CIA drone program is technically secret, the review’s public summary asserts nebulously that Pakistani forces and some U.S. effort contributed to that progress. What’s that effort actually been? One hundred and ten drone strikes, supported by CIA’s teams of Pashtun spotters recruited in Afghanistan, double the number of strikes in 2009, which was a big increase from 2008. This is basically an undeclared war, which is one of the reasons why the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee wants to update the congressional authorization on taking military action against al-Qaeda.

Continue Reading “Obama: Never Mind Afghanistan, It’s All About The Drones” »

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Back to top

Real-Life UFOs, From Flying Flapjacks to Mystery Missiles

<< Previous | Next >>

If you listen to the Air Force tell it, there are simply no such things as UFOs. A two-decade investigation called Project Blue Book determined in 1969 that no extraterrestial life has made contact with Earth. And no unexplained aerial phenomena have exceeded humanity's scientific grasp, let alone threatened national security.

That has not been enough for dedicated UFOlogists. In September, a group of Air Force missile officers contended that aliens had temporarily taken control of their nukes.

The "do they or don't they exist" debate won't be settled until someone from far away asks to be taken to our leaders. And the controversy makes it easy to forget that a UFO isn't actually a ship full of little green men. It's a placeholder for a puzzle the mind can't solve. So, it's also easy to forget that, much like the Insane Clown Posse observed about miracles, UFOs are all around us.

From weird drones to cheeky satellites to things that manifest themselves to the naked eye as little more than plumes of smoke, the skies can be a mysterious, congested place. Here, we take a look at the most striking curiosities of aviation, both foreign and domestic, including actual flying saucers.

That's the trouble with aliens: the misdirection. You spend too much time tracking down intergalactic visitors and you'll miss the oddities that humans invented for getting around our home planet.

Above: The Canuck Flying Saucer

The best engineering minds in two countries couldn't quite figure out how to make the Canuck Flying Saucer work. A joint venture in the 1950s between the U.S. Army, U.S. Air Force and the Canadian aviation company Avro, the VZ-9 Avrocar was supposed to be a "revolutionary" supersonic ship that brought extraterrestrial style to the military-industrial complex.

The 18-to-25-foot pancake was to lift off vertically, thanks to a five-foot fan in its belly. The "focusing ring" around its exterior would push air outward in the opposite direction its pilot wanted to fly. Manufacturers called it "Ground Effect Takeoff and Landing," or GETOL.

And it did pretty well if you only wanted to go five or six feet off the ground. Higher altitudes would cause the craft to pitch wildly, a flaw its engineers couldn't overcome. After about 10 years and as many million dollars, the military pulled the plug in 1960. But visitors to the Army's transportation museum at Fort Eustis, Virginia, check out the prototype and imagine what might have been.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia

<< Previous | Next >>
View all
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Back to top

Air Force to Share Its Info on Planet-Flattening Meteorites

Bolide

Sixty-five million years ago a five-mile wide meteorite smashed into the Earth, wreaking havoc on weather patterns and possibly hastening the extinction of the dinosaurs. In June 1908, a somewhat smaller space rock exploded over a luckily uninhabited Tunguska, Siberia, flattening trees and killing reindeer over a nearly 10-mile radius. “The fire was brighter than the sun,” one eyewitness claimed.

These planet-altering meteorites were once thought quite rare. Then came the Cold War. The U.S. Air Force filled Earth orbit with sophisticated satellites meant to spot nuclear tests and missile launches. The satellites, it turned out, were also quite good at detecting the explosions — the official term is “bolide” — of meteorites like that over Tunguska. We now know they occur as frequently as several times a year. Over the decades, the military has periodically released brief reports on bolides and the other effects of so-called Near-Earth Objects. Today, for the first time, the Air Force is considering openly sharing this vital intel in a systematic way.

There are clear scientific reasons for better data-sharing. “From past experience working with U.S. government satellite data, the information provided is unmatched by any other data source and allows scientific analyses which are otherwise impossible,” Peter Brown told Space.com. But never mind all that. Planet Earth’s safety is at stake. This isn’t national security. It’s global security. “Data from NEO air-burst events observed by the U.S. Department of Defense satellites should be made available to the scientific community to allow it to improve understanding of the NEO hazards to Earth,” stated a report from the National Research Council.

Continue Reading “Air Force to Share Its Info on Planet-Flattening Meteorites” »

Tags: , , , ,
Back to top

House Defense Chief Blasts F-35 Cuts, Dismisses Veto Threat


You can see the next two years of congressional defense debates, in miniature, from the office of Rep. Buck McKeon, the California Republican who’ll soon chair the House Armed Services Committee. What others on the Hill or in the Pentagon might take out of the defense budget, McKeon will try to restore. Especially when it comes to the Pentagon’s favorite family of fighter jets.

The Senate is taking up a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill to close out the congressional session. It includes about $667 billion for defense — less than the Pentagon requested, but not out of line with the last few years’ defense bills. Among its more eye-catching provisions: the bill would fund a second engine for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, something that Defense Secretary Robert Gates has urged President Obama to veto as as a cost-saving measure. But it also punts on purchasing seven of the planes, as they’ve been beset with delays and rising costs.

Enter McKeon. During a sprawling session with reporters in his Rayburn Building office, McKeon called cutting the plane orders “shortsighted” just because there’ve been “some setbacks.” Asked if he would consider scrapping the Marines’ variant of the plane — as the White House deficit commission recently urged — he replied, “What plane are the Marines gonna have?” He reiterated his support of the second engine (“Over the long range, I think we save money” with it, McKeon said) and grinned when asked if he was concerned about a possible veto.

Consider that an appetizer. According to Taxpayers for Common Sense’s breakdown of the omnibus bill, the Senate’s taken $272 million out of missile defense; McKeon wants missile defense “fully funded,” although he said he didn’t have a specific dollar figure in mind. When it came to the Army’s troubled plans to buy a new combat vehicle, McKeon said he wanted to hold hearings before reaching any conclusions — same thing with the Marines’ swimming tank — and expressed concern that the military might be too geared toward buying the “ultimate” in technology, rather than the practical. Taxpayer dollars are “sacrosanct,” he said — but he’s looking for savings on the margins.

Continue Reading “House Defense Chief Blasts F-35 Cuts, Dismisses Veto Threat” »

Tags: , , , ,
Back to top
« OLDER POSTS
See more Danger Room