April 10, 2013

Space Command Juggles Budget In Face Of North Korean Threat, Sequestration

http://defense.aol.com/2013/04/09/space-command-juggles-budget-in-face-of-north-korean-threat-spa/



Space Command Juggles Budget In Face Of North Korean Threat, Sequestration
By Colin Clark
Published: April 9, 2013

COLORADO SPRINGS, NATIONAL SPACE SYMPOSIUM: Spend $5 million to help track possible threats like North Korean missile launches by leaving an Alaskan radar site on at full power. Turn off East Coast radar receivers that provide data about satellites and space debris.

Gen. William Shelton, head of Air Force Space Command, has cut Space Fence radar coverage by one-third, making what he called a prudent risk decision to use a radar at Eglin Air Force Base "that can operate in Space Fence mode" to plug any holes that might develop. That means he's shut down two of six radar receivers. That's how tough the balancing act is getting for Shelton as he fights his way through to saving $508 million from his command's budget. (Perhaps Congress wants to consider how prudent this risk is as it decides what to do about sequestration.)

Shelton said he decided against shutting down the Alaskan radar receiver because of the highly uncertain North Korean situation but now he's got to find that $5 million from somewhere else in his budget. In addition, he's cut his civilian contractor workforce by 50 percent.

And he sounded as if the decision has been made to cut spending for the upgrade of the Space Fence, the radar and data system that monitors Earth's orbit for satellites and the debris that has accumulated there over the years.

April 10, 2013

Save Our Subs: Prioritizing The Attack Submarine

http://defense.aol.com/2013/04/09/save-our-subs-prioritizing-the-attack-submarine/



A $5 to $7 billion dollar Virgina-class sub.

Save Our Subs: Prioritizing The Attack Submarine
By Rep. Randy Forbes and Rep. Joe Courtney
Published: April 9, 2013

For a host of security and economic reasons, American foreign and defense policy will increasingly focus on the Asia-Pacific region in the decades ahead. With over 60% of all U.S. exports going to Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) countries and 40% of total global trade emanating from Asia-Pacific, the United States cannot be an impartial observer of events in the region.

That interest should be heightened by the accelerating military and particularly naval buildup that is playing out across East Asia and the Western Pacific in response to China's rapid and opaque military modernization efforts. Countries from Vietnam to the Philippines to Japan are responding to Beijing's recent assertiveness and growing military capabilities by investing in advanced systems of their own, fostering a potentially volatile climate in the economically-essential waters of East Asia.

~snip~

Attack submarines, known as SSNs in Navy parlance, are the workhorses of the submarine service. Designed for both offensive and defensive purposes - from conducting intelligence and inserting Special Operations Forces to launching targeted missile strikes and countering enemy submarines and surface vessels - SSNs and their diverse capabilities will be essential in the future Asia-Pacific security environment. Yet their numbers have declined dramatically in the last generation, from nearly 100 in 1987 to just 53 today. Even more alarmingly, the Los Angeles-class of SSNs, which comprise the majority of Navy attack submarines, are retiring faster than they are being replaced. The Navy has stated it requires 48 SSNs to execute current missions, but given the current rates of replacement, the SSN force is scheduled to drop below the stated minimum in less than a decade. Indeed, if current levels of procurement are unaltered, the SSN fleet will fall to roughly 40 boats in the early 2030s.

The Navy's attempt to rectify this dangerous path is the Virginia-class SSN. The most technologically advanced attack submarine ever built, the Virginia offers the Navy a tremendous array of capabilities across a wide-range of mission areas. After a concerted effort by the Navy and industry to reduce costs and improve delivery schedules, not to mention significant bipartisan support from Congress, the program finally hit the doubled production goal in 2011. And, just last month, Congress reaffirmed its broad support for the program by backing sustained two-a-year production of this submarine in the next multi-year procurement (MYP) contract, which is currently being negotiated by the Navy and industry.



unhappycamper comment: So randy and joe think $5+ billion dollars for more Virgina-class submarines are the way to go.

No problem. What are you going to drop for each $5+ billion dollar price? One of your $5+ billion dollar Zumwalt-class stealth destroyers? Your $16 to $40 billion dollar Ford-class aircraft carrier? Your $243 million dollar F-35? Medicare? Social Security? Food stamps?

What don't you guys have a bake sale or two to pay for this crap.

April 10, 2013

Navy Will Send Prototype Laser Weapon To Persian Gulf: Adm. Greenert

http://defense.aol.com/2013/04/08/navy-prototype-laser-to-persian-gulf-greenert-video/?icid=trending1

Navy Will Send Prototype Laser Weapon To Persian Gulf: Adm. Greenert
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
Published: April 8, 2013

NATIONAL HARBOR: The Navy will send a prototype laser weapon to the troubled Persian Gulf for a roughly year-long test deployment starting "less than a year from now," the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Jonathan Greenert, announced today at the Navy League's annual Sea-Air-Space conference.

The bad news is this isn't some superweapon out of science fiction. The Navy's Laser Weapon System (LaWS) is a fairly modest death ray that, for now, can only kill small boats and drones. Unlike the lasers of Ronald Reagan's Star Wars dreams, nuclear missiles aren't on the menu.

The good news is this isn't science fiction. "We're taking it out there to be an operational weapon," said Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of the Office of Naval Research, said in a briefing after Adm. Greenert's announcement.

Klunder claims the laser has scored 12 straight hits in 12 trials against flying targets, mostly firing from test sites on land but, in three cases, from the deck of an actual Navy warship, the destroyer USS Dewey. As early as this fall, the same prototype laser used in those tests will be installed on the USS Ponce, a former amphibious warfare ship converted to the Navy's first Afloat Forward Staging Base. (Ponce's large deck and copious cargo space, originally meant for transporting Marines, make it well-suited to host experiments in everything from firing lasers to clearing mines).


From Common Dreams this morning:

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/09-2

US Navy Champions Latest Laser Technology for 'Revolutionizing' War Making
- Jon Queally, staff writer
Published on Tuesday, April 9, 2013 by Common Dreams

The laser system will be deployed in 2014, two years ahead of schedule, aboard the USS Ponce, an amphibious transport ship retrofitted as a waterborne staging base, the Navy said Monday.

Chief of Naval Research Admiral Matthew Klunder said the cost of one blast of "directed energy" could be less than $1.

"Compare that to the hundreds of thousands of dollars it costs to fire a missile, and you can begin to see the merits of this capability," he said in a US Navy statement.

The Office of Naval Research (ONR) and Naval Sea Systems Command successfully tested high-energy lasers against a moving target ship and a remotely piloted drone.

"The future is here," ONR official Peter Morrision said.



unhappycamper comment: Huzzah! One dollar per (not) kill shot. Instead of tons of things that go boom, naval ships must have a cooling system for the laser. Any bets the coolant will go boom also?

April 10, 2013

Former Navy chaplain: ‘Biologist’ Jesus opposed ‘three women and a dog’ marriage

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/04/09/former-navy-chaplain-biologist-jesus-opposed-three-women-and-a-dog-marriage/



Former Navy chaplain: ‘Biologist’ Jesus opposed ‘three women and a dog’ marriage
By David Edwards
Tuesday, April 9, 2013 12:25 EDT

A disgraced former Navy chaplain explained on Monday that Jesus Christ was effectively a “biologist” because he knew that “three women and a dog” can’t make a baby.

In a Monday interview, Internet talk show host David Pakman asked conservative former Navy Chaplain Gordon Klingenschmitt if he acknowledged that there was a trend in the United States toward the legalization of LGBT rights, decriminalization of marijuana and support of reproductive rights for women.

Klingenschmitt explained that there was a “polarization” between some Americans becoming more liberal and some churches that were becoming more conservative.

“You only have 15 percent of the middle who are hypocrites, who think, Jesus is cool, but I don’t agree with how he defined marriage,” Klingenschmitt said. “When Jesus talks about one flesh, he’s really being a scientist, he’s being a biologist. Because he realizes and he’s articulating simple biology, that when a sperm and an egg form together, they match in a zygote and a new DNA is formed and it becomes one new human flesh.”

April 10, 2013

For Price Of Iraq War, US Could Power Half Country With Renewables

http://cleantechnica.com/2013/04/08/for-price-of-iraq-war-us-could-power-half-country-with-renewables/



For Price Of Iraq War, US Could Power Half Country With Renewables
April 8, 2013
Zachary Shahan

Discussions of how to respond to climate change often involve Very Large Numbers — the needed investments to transition to a fully renewable energy system are in the hundreds of billions. The brain sort of shuts down when it encounters numbers like that. They are too big to fathom. The one thing that does seem true about them is that nobody’s ever going to spend that kind of money on anything. Right? It seems hopeless.

So I always enjoy it when someone comes along to provide some perspective, a comparison that can give us context and help us see the numbers afresh. Today, wind analyst Paul Gipe asks, how much renewable energy could we have gotten from what we spent on the Iraq War?

The total cost of the Iraq War, including future costs to care for veterans, is $2.2 trillion. If we include the interest we have to pay on the debt we used to finance the war, that figure rises to $3.9 trillion by 2053. (See Gipe’s article for sources and details.)

For David Roberts’ full piece, check out: For the price of the Iraq War, the U.S. could have gotten halfway to a renewable power system.

April 9, 2013

When War Hawks Become Human Rights Officials

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/15589-when-war-hawks-become-human-rights-officials



Suzanne Nossel.

When War Hawks Become Human Rights Officials
Monday, 08 April 2013 09:39
By Chris Hedges, Truthdig | Op-Ed

The appointment of Suzanne Nossel, a former State Department official and longtime government apparatchik, as executive director of PEN American Center is part of a campaign to turn U.S. human rights organizations into propagandists for pre-emptive war and apologists for empire. Nossel’s appointment led me to resign from PEN as well as withdraw from speaking at the PEN World Voices Festival in May. But Nossel is only symptomatic of the widespread hijacking of human rights organizations to demonize those—especially Muslims—branded by the state as the enemy, in order to cloak pre-emptive war and empire with a fictional virtue and to effectively divert attention from our own mounting human rights abuses, including torture, warrantless wiretapping and monitoring, the denial of due process and extrajudicial assassinations.

Nossel, who was deputy assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs under Hillary Clinton in a State Department that was little more than a subsidiary of the Pentagon, is part of the new wave of “humanitarian interventionists,” such as Samantha Power, Michael Ignatieff and Susan Rice, who naively see in the U.S. military a vehicle to create a better world. They know little of the reality of war or the actual inner workings of empire. They harbor a childish belief in the innate goodness and ultimate beneficence of American power. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents, the horrendous suffering and violent terror inflicted in the name of their utopian goals in Iraq and Afghanistan, barely register on their moral calculus. This makes them at once oblivious and dangerous. “Innocence is a kind of insanity,” Graham Greene wrote in his novel “The Quiet American,” and those who destroy to build are “impregnably armored by … good intentions and … ignorance.”

There are no good wars. There are no just wars. As Erasmus wrote, “there is nothing more wicked, more disastrous, more widely destructive, more deeply tenacious, more loathsome” than war. “Whoever heard of a hundred thousand animals rushing together to butcher each other, as men do everywhere?” Erasmus asked. But war, he knew, was very useful to the power elite. War permitted the powerful, in the name of national security and by fostering a culture of fear, to effortlessly strip the citizen of his or her rights. A declaration of war ensures that “all the affairs of the State are at the mercy of the appetites of a few,” Erasmus wrote.

There are cases, and Bosnia in the 1990s was one, when force should be employed to halt an active campaign of genocide. This is the lesson of the Holocaust: When you have the capacity to stop genocide and you do not, you are culpable. For this reason, we are culpable in the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda. But the “humanitarian interventionists” have twisted this moral imperative to intercede against genocide to justify the calls for pre-emptive war and imperial expansion. Saddam Hussein did carry out campaigns of genocide against the Kurds and the Shiites, but the dirty fact is that while these campaigns were under way we provided support to Baghdad or looked the other way. It was only when Washington wanted war, and the bodies of tens of thousands of Kurds and Shiites had long decomposed in mass graves, that we suddenly began to speak in the exalted language of human rights.

April 9, 2013

Is the Keystone XL Pipeline the "Stonewall" of the Climate Movement?

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/15598-is-the-keystone-xl-pipeline-the-stonewall-of-the-climate-movement



President Barack Obama prepares to take the stage for a speech at a pipe yard outside Cushing, Okla., March, 22, 2012.

Is the Keystone XL Pipeline the "Stonewall" of the Climate Movement?
Monday, 08 April 2013 11:15
By Bill McKibben, TomDispatch | Op-Ed

A few weeks ago, Time magazine called the fight over the Keystone XL pipeline that will bring some of the dirtiest energy on the planet from Alberta, Canada, to the U.S. Gulf Coast the “Selma and Stonewall” of the climate movement.

Which, if you think about it, may be both good news and bad news. Yes, those of us fighting the pipeline have mobilized record numbers of activists: the largest civil disobedience action in 30 years and 40,000 people on the mall in February for the biggest climate rally in American history. Right now, we’re aiming to get a million people to send in public comments about the “environmental review” the State Department is conducting on the feasibility and advisability of building the pipeline. And there’s good reason to put pressure on. After all, it’s the same State Department that, as on a previous round of reviews, hired “experts” who had once worked as consultants for TransCanada, the pipeline’s builder.

Still, let’s put things in perspective: Stonewall took place in 1969, and as of last week the Supreme Court was still trying to decide if gay people should be allowed to marry each other. If the climate movement takes that long, we’ll be rallying in scuba masks. (I’m not kidding. The section of the Washington Mall where we rallied against the pipeline this winter already has a big construction project underway: a flood barrier to keep the rising Potomac River out of downtown DC.)

It was certainly joyful to see marriage equality being considered by our top judicial body. In some ways, however, the most depressing spectacle of the week was watching Democratic leaders decide that, in 2013, it was finally safe to proclaim gay people actual human beings. In one weekend, Democratic senators Mark Warner of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Tim Johnson of South Dakota, and Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia figured out that they had “evolved” on the issue. And Bill Clinton, the greatest weathervane who ever lived, finally decided that the Defense of Marriage Act he had signed into law, boasted about in ads on Christian radio, and urged candidate John Kerry to defend as constitutional in 2004, was, you know, wrong. He, too, had “evolved,” once the polls made it clear that such an evolution was a safe bet.

April 9, 2013

Iraq: The Deadliest War for Journalists

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/15613-iraq-the-deadliest-war-for-journalists



More journalists were killed during the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq than in any war in history.

Iraq: The Deadliest War for Journalists
Tuesday, 09 April 2013 09:14 By Dahr Jamail, Al Jazeera | Report

On April 8, 2003, during the US-led invasion of Iraq, Al Jazeera correspondent Tareq Ayoub was killed when a US warplane bombed Al Jazeera's headquarters in Baghdad.

The invasion and subsequent nine-year occupation of Iraq claimed the lives of a record number of journalists. It was undisputedly the deadliest war for journalists in recorded history.

Disturbingly, more journalists were murdered in targeted killings in Iraq than died in combat-related circumstances, according to the group Committee to Protect Journalists.

CPJ research shows that "at least 150 journalists and 54 media support workers were killed in Iraq from the US-led invasion in March 2003 to the declared end of the war in December 2011."



unhappycamper comment: They did everything they could to make sure the Iraq war did not appear on US television.....

April 9, 2013

Keystone XL's Impact Statement: How Stupid Do They Think We Are?

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/04/09



Keystone XL's Impact Statement: How Stupid Do They Think We Are?
by John Atcheson
Published on Tuesday, April 9, 2013 by Common Dreams

This just in: building a pipeline to carry the dirtiest oil ever used, creating 17% more greenhouse gasses than conventional oil and hastening the greatest environmental disaster ever faced by humanity, has no negative environmental impact. At least that’s the conclusion of the Environmental Impact Statement issued by the State Department …(Image: tcktcktck.org)

Dateline Mayflower Arkansas: According to some estimates, more than 150,000 gallons of bitumen ran through the streets and yards of Mayflower Arkansas, spewing fumes and posing a risk to health, property, and wildlife when the Pegasus pipeline, owned be ExxonMobile burst …

In related news, A tax loophole for tar sands that allowed ExxonMobile to avoid paying into the Oil Liability Trust Fund means US taxpayers will likely get stuck with the bill … the loophole could ultimately cost Americans $400 billion …

Elsewhere in the news, The National Safety Council gave ExxonMobile a Safety Award on April 5th for its leadership and "comprehensive commitment to safety and excellence." The award was presented at a fundraiser in Houston. Oh, a Safety Award. At a fundraiser. To one of the most profitable companies in history. I feel better…

April 9, 2013

US Navy Gets 'Slap on the Wrist' Fine for Ramming Into Pristine Philippine Reef

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/04/08-2



Part of the Guardian being removed by a crane on March 26, 2013.

US Navy Gets 'Slap on the Wrist' Fine for Ramming Into Pristine Philippine Reef
- Andrea Germanos, staff writer
Published on Monday, April 8, 2013 by Common Dreams

The U.S. government has been fined $1.5 million for damages the Navy caused when one of its minesweepers rammed into a World Heritage-listed coral reef in the Philippines, officials announced on Monday.

2,345.67 square meters of the Tubbataha reef were damaged, according to an assessment led by US Navy marine biologist Lee Shannon from April 3 - 5, far less than the 4,100 square meters the previous survey had estimated were damaged when the USS Guardian smashed into the reef.

Tubbataha Reef park superintendent Angelique Songco slammed the fine as merely "a slap on the wrist" for the US.

UPI reports that Former Philippine Sen. Jamby Madrigal, author of the Tubbataha Protected Area Act, called the fine "loose change compared to the long-term damage to the reef" and said "offenders must be taught hard lessons."



unhappycamper comment: Four US Navy folks were fired; a $277 million dollar minesweeper had to be cut up for removal; salvage operations were around $30 ~ $40 million dollars and the united States government got a $1.5 million dollar fine.

Maps, accurate GPS, the OOD and onwatch sailors were unable to miss the reef.

$1.5 million dollars is a real bargain is you think about it.