The Bin Laden Effect: How Nancy Pelosi and Stephen Colbert Learned to Lo...

Thank you

The highly trained operatives who killed Osama bin Laden are part of a counterterrorism group so specialized that no one can apply to join it.

Instead, they are recruited. They are chosen from existing SEAL teams, making the unit an elite within an elite.

The group was originally known as Team Six, but the official name was changed in 1987 to the Naval Special Warfare Development Group.

While most information relating to the group is classified, it is believed to have been formed in response to the failed 1980 attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran. Richard Marcinko was its first commander.

The unit is a component of the Joint Special Operations Command, which also oversees the Army's Delta Force.

It has operated in Somalia, the former Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Members have hunted down key al-Qaeda and Taliban figures since 2001.

Five Ways to Cut Military Spending Today

Bloomberg- Northrop Navy Ships `Not Survivable' in Combat, Official Says

If the ship is a deathtrap then why in the hell are we continuing to buy more at a cost of $1.6B per ship?

Northrop Navy Ships `Not Survivable' in Combat, Official Says
By Tony Capaccio

Northrop Grumman Corp.’s $1.68 billion amphibious warship, designed to transport Marines close to shore, wouldn’t be effective in combat and couldn’t operate reliably after being hit by enemy fire, according to the Department of Defense’s top testing official.

The San Antonio-class vessel’s critical systems, such as electrical distribution, ship-wide fiber optics and voice- communications networks, aren’t reliable, according to Michael Gilmore, the Defense Department’s director of operational test and evaluation. The ship’s armaments can’t effectively defend against the most modern anti-ship weapons, Gilmore said.

The ship is capable of operating “in a benign environment,” Gilmore said in an e-mail to Bloomberg News outlining the unclassified summary of a classified report sent to Congress in June. The vessel is “not effective, suitable and not survivable in a combat situation,” he said.

The craft’s capabilities are being questioned as at least four private-equity firms are exploring bids to buy Los Angeles- based Northrop’s shipbuilding unit.

Northrop Chief Executive Officer Wes Bush announced in July the possible sale or spinoff of the unit that operates three shipyards in Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia. Northrop is the biggest maker of U.S. Navy vessels.

Northrop spokesman Randy Belote referred questions about the department’s test report to the Navy, which said it’s aware of the reported deficiencies and is making corrections that will be tested next year.

“The majority of corrective actions have been implemented across the class and other corrections are in process,” Navy spokeswoman Lieutenant Callie Ferrari said in an e-mail. “It would be inappropriate to comment on the specifics.”

Black Eye

The test report is the latest black eye for a program that has faced reliability and construction questions since the first of the ships -- the USS San Antonio, also called the LPD-17 -- was delivered in 2005, more than three years behind schedule.

Then-Navy Secretary Donald Winter, himself a former Northrop executive, said in July 2007 the company had “serious quality problems” with the program.

The San Antonio has been undergoing repairs since December at the Navy’s Norfolk, Virginia, shipyard to make it seaworthy next year at a cost that’s increased to at least $39 million from an initial $5 million estimate, said Chris Johnson, a Navy spokesman.

Northrop’s Avondale, Louisiana, yard has delivered five of the 11 planned San Antonio-class vessels in the $18.5 billion program, three of which have been deployed on missions. Four more are under construction. Contracts for the 10th and 11th vessels haven’t been signed.

Trade Center Steel

The ships include the USS New York, which was built with steel from the World Trade Center. The New York’s website says that “self-defense and survivability were crucial elements that influenced ship design,” because the amphibious transport vessels are intended to operate close to shore.

The testing office’s Gilmore, asked to define effectiveness in the context of the LPD-17, Gilmore said it was the “overall degree” to which the vessel can accomplish its missions when used by typical sailors in a combat situation.

“Survivability” for the San Antonio means the degree to which the vessel “is able to avoid or withstand” an attack “without sustaining an impairment” of its ability to accomplish a combat mission, he said.

His conclusion that the San Antonio is “not survivable” doesn’t mean, however, that the hull and structure can’t withstand a blow from an anti-ship missile due to inherent weaknesses, Gilmore said. In fact, the Northrop ship’s hull construction is “improved” in comparison with the four classes of ships it will replace, he said.

Combat Testing

Gilmore’s conclusions are based on an assessment of data compiled in combat testing the Navy completed late last year, “previous reports and raw modeling data,” the Navy said in a quarterly program report.

Gilmore’s office in August told Pentagon officials the vessel demonstrated “poor reliability with critical equipment and control systems,” and an “inability to defend itself against a variety of threats.”

Navy test data indicated the vessels demonstrated an inability to “maintain or rapidly recover mission capability” after being hit by “the variety of weapons likely to be encountered,” the testing office said.

Raytheon Co. is a subcontractor providing electronics, a fiber-optics network and an anti-missile system the testing office concluded had “persistent engineering deficiencies.”

The ships have 25,000 square feet of deck space -- more than twice that of the vessels they replace -- and will carry the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, amphibious armored vehicles used by Marines, landing craft and as many as 800 Marines.

Northrop yesterday raised its projection for 2010 profit to as much as $7 a share, while analysts surveyed by Bloomberg had estimated $6.86, on average. In July, the company said annual earnings would be as much as $6.80 a share.

Wired- $19 Billion Later, Pentagon’s Best Bomb-Detector Is a Dog

It is any wonder that we are running Trillion dollar deficits when people didn't realize after the first Billion was spent that maybe we should stop trying to create a better bomb detector.

$19 Billion Later, Pentagon’s Best Bomb-Detector Is a Dog

Drones, metal detectors, chemical sniffers, and super spycams — forget ‘em. The leader of the Pentagon’s multibillion military task force to stop improvised bombs says there’s nothing in the U.S. arsenal for bomb detection more powerful than a dog’s nose.

Despite a slew of bomb-finding gagdets, the American military only locates about 50 percent of the improvised explosives planted in Afghanistan and Iraq. But that number jumps to 80 percent when U.S. and Afghan patrols take dogs along for a sniff-heavy walk. “Dogs are the best detectors,” Lieutenant General Michael Oates, the commander of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, told a conference yesterday, National Defense reports. That’s not the greatest admission for a well-funded organization — nearly $19 billion since 2004, according to a congressional committee — tasked with solving one of the military’s wickedest problems.

Improvised explosive devices continue to rise in Afghanistan. There were 1,062 successful bomb attacks in the first eight months of 2010 there, compared to 820 during the previous period in 2009. Making matters worse in Afghanistan is the fact that most homemade bombs there are powered by fertilizers and chemicals, rendering metal detectors useless.

Picking up the chemical signature of those bombs should be relatively straightforward — just a matter of picking up the stray molecules that float away from unstable explosive material. In practice, it hasn’t been so easy. In 1997, a young program manager at Darpa launched the “Dog’s Nose” progam, to develop a bomb-sniffer as good as a canine’s. Today, that program manager, Regina Dugan, runs the entire agency. And Darpa is still has a project on the books to “leverag[e] the components of the canine olfactory system to create a breakthrough detection system.”

Detection is a “significant challenge,” Oates tells National Defense.

So rather than continuing a potentially futile search for a silver bullet, JIEDDO is now recommending other, non-technological, ways to combat IEDs, such as improved training and deeper understanding of the local sociopolitical landscape where IED planters are created much faster than U.S. forces can find them.

And JIEDDO is still spending big money on gadgets to spy on and disrupt every part of the IED network. Drones in the skies over Afghanistan hunt teams of bomb-planting insurgents. Forensics teams match latent fingerprints on bombs with Afghan bad guys whose thumb-scans and eye-prints are stored in biometric databases. JIEDDO pays for radio jammers to stop the frequencies insurgents might use to detonate the bombs.

The Vehicle and Dismount Exploitation Radar is a $138 million aircraft-mounted sensor that tracks moving targets like scampering insurgents from the skies. JIEDDO has also outfitted over 500 vehicles with special sensors to spot bombs at night (cost: $51 million); sponsored a “Wolfhound” sensor for dismounted infantrymen to detect insurgents’ personal communication devices (cost: $15 million); and an “enhanced optics system” called Keyhole that helps marksmen hit their bombmaker targets (cost: undisclosed). At yesterday’s conference, Oates said aerial sensors, particularly those creating full-motion video of bomb-heavy areas, were “enormously useful” in the fight against IEDs.

Congress, however, isn’t pleased. In March, the House Armed Services Committee questioned how well JIEDDO spent the $18.77 billion it’s received since its 2004 inception. “It is still difficult to associate funds spent with positive effects,” the committee wrote in a memo critical of the organization’s “inability to clearly articulate what it has been able to accomplish.” Last month, the Senate Appropriations Committee, while supportive of JIEDDO overall, cut nearly $442 million out of the Pentagon’s requested budget for the organization next year, finding that “certain programs” it operates “fall outside [an] IED-specific focus.” That’s in line with years of Hill disillusionment about the organization over its bureaucracy and dependence on contractors.

The core problem: the bombs are still proliferating — and not just in Afghanistan and Iraq, but globally. According to statistics Darpa provided Danger Room last month, for the last six months, there have been an average of 273 monthly IED incidents around the world excluding Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s hard to believe anyone would have such a problem with JIEDDO’s budget if the threat from the cheap, easy-to-rig bombs were receding.

Their lifesaver - Five Time Winner of Purple Heart has a Heart of Gold

Thank you Mr. Romano for both your service to our country and for the compassion you showed those fleeing a brutal communist regime.


Their lifesaver

PROVIDENCE — It was mid-May 1981, and for Lien Huong Nguyen and the 51 other Vietnamese “boat people” escaping communist Vietnam in a rickety fishing boat, the situation was looking hopeless.

They had been four days at sea attempting to reach freedom, but found themselves adrift in the South Pacific after their engine failed. They were without food and water, and the boat was leaking.

Their SOS signs and pleas for help failed to draw the attention of at least five passing ships.

It was then that Lien, who had carved out a life in Vietnam as dentist, began to wonder if she had made a terrible mistake trying to bring two of her three children, ages 5 and 6, on such a risky voyage.

“I looked at my children and saw they were so innocent. They didn’t know what freedom is, or what dictatorship is. And, I took them away from the house and put them into danger. I didn’t protect them. I felt so badly that night.”

Then she saw a light from a ship providing supplies for an Exxon oil rig. The ship, the 300-foot salvage vessel Rainbow, was skippered by Charles Romano Jr., of East Providence, an ex-Navy seal who had done three tours of duty in Vietnam.

Romano had received a memo from Exxon warning employees not to pick up any refugees. But deciding that those in the boat would perish if he failed to help them in the face of an impending storm, he ignored the memo.

The refugees were then transported from his vessel to a German drill ship that took them to a refugee camp in Indonesia.

“I always wondered what happened to everybody,” Romano said Sunday.

And for years, many including Lien Nguyen, had wondered about “the special gentleman” who saved their lives.

Though Lien had been given a business card with Romano’s name on it, she misplaced it and continued to kick herself for not being able to directly thank the man or express her gratitude in person.

“I told her to forget it,” said De Nguyen, another refugee who is no relation. “I said there was no way you would ever find him.”

But in late August, Lien, who has a dental practice in Santa Ana, Calif., was having some work done in her library when she noticed that one of the books on a lower shelf was out of place. She pulled it out and found an envelope with the long lost business card inside.

That “very, very, very good news” led to a festive reunion Sunday that brought together four of the original boat people and some of their family with the families and friends of the retired sea captain at St. Martin Episcopal Church on Providence’s East Side.

“God bless you and your family. You saved our lives,” declared Lien, who traveled from California.

Noting that other ships had passed them by, she said she worried that Romano would do the same or give them food and supplies and leave them to die in the coming storm.

But he did much more, she said.

“Had it not been for you, we would have all died in the ocean.”

And here are some of the results of Romano’s decision to take in the refugees: Lien’s son Ryan Tran, who was only 5 at the time and remembers getting his first glass of soda aboard Romano’s Rainbow, is now a doctor of internal medicine with his own practice in California. Her daughter, who was 6, followed in her footsteps and also practices dentistry.

De Nguyen, 67, who had been one of Lien’s dental patients in Vietnam and who made the trip with his 8-year-old son, Son, now works for a printing company in West Hartford, Conn., while Son is an accountant with Blum Shapiro in Shelton, Conn.

Theresa Nguyen, now 51, (also no relation to the others) recalled Sunday how her parents pushed her out of the house in Vietnam, telling her to follow her brother onto the refugee boat so she would have a life without communism. She took ill two days out at sea, passed out and only remembers standing on land after they were rescued. But, today, she’s the head of the renal department at Boston University Medical Center.

De Nguyen and Lien Nguyen — as well as Lien’s husband, Chau Tran, 75 — had first-hand experience with communist prison even before they made their move to escape.

Chau Tran was the secretary for the Ministry of the Interior for South Vietnam, as well as the lieutenant governor for the province of Phu Bon. De Nguyen, who worked under him, was the lieutenant governor for the province of Kein Hoa.

Because they worked for the South Vietnamese government, both men were sent to Vietnamese “re-education” camps for 5 to 6 years to “cure” them of their anti-communist tendencies.

After his release, Chau Tran immediately fled with his youngest son, now a mechanical engineer with the U.S. Navy in San Diego.

Chau Tran said he and Lien Nguyen decided to split up their family and try to escape separately on the theory that if one was caught, the other spouse would be able to bribe the police to get him or her out.

Tran’s escape did not come easily, however. He had to fend off 14 attacks from Thai pirates, but made it to the United States, where he was joined by his wife and other children. He became a social worker in Orange County, Caif. Before her own escape in the refugee boat, Lien Nguyen was captured and jailed five times.

Recounting the escape, De Nguyen observed Sunday that he had just gotten out of prison when he saw Lien Nguyen for a dental appointment and heard her say, “I am planning to escape the country. Do you want to follow me?”

Startled by the offer, he said yes.

To avoid detection, the escapees disguised themselves as communist Vietnamese soldiers and party officials, or as housewives going to the market. They traveled to the 37-foot sampan in smaller boats.

All went well until the second day, when the engine began to break down.

Romano, who received five Purple Hearts during his three tours of duty in Vietnam as a Riverine squadron member and Navy seal, remarked Sunday: “It’s always nice to find something in your life that you did right for a change.”

But he added: “I’m sure what I did was normal … Everyone here would have done the same thing I did. There’s nothing special about it. I just happened to be there at the right time.”

But those who came to give their thanks disagreed.

Not everyone would have done the same as you, De Nguyen told him. In fact, there were many who avoided picking up the boat people because they saw it as too much trouble.

Romano’s wife, Debra, and his friends, Dr. Denis and Elke Moonan, said they believed God had put him into the situation.

Lien Nguyen said Romano should know that his life influenced so many.

“My patients say they are grateful because, if it was not for you, they would not have such a nice dentist taking care of their teeth.”

Trailblazing paratrooper broke color barrier in secret

Thank you Mr. Morris for your service to our country. While you may not have been honored then, because of racist policies your actions paved the way for so many others. We as a country are in your debt.

By Larry Shaughnessy, CNN Pentagon Producer

Washington (CNN) -- Thurgood Marshall, Hattie McDaniel, the Tuskegee Airmen and Walter Morris -- all African-Americans who made history breaking the color barrier. But while America's first black Supreme Court justice, the first African-American Oscar winner and the U.S. military's first African-American pilots are well known, you may never have heard of Walter Morris or his role in American history.

The War Department, as the Defense Department used to be called, wanted it that way. On Thursday, a ceremony at the Pentagon will undo that.

When Walter Morris first joined the Army just before World War II, he wasn't a "black" or "Negro" or "African-American" soldier -- he was "colored." And he was treated like all the other "colored" men who wanted to fight for their country.

"We were servants, we were not soldiers," Morris said. "Most of us had an inferiority complex and it was a result of what they had assigned us to do."

http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/03/25/black.paratrooper/

A Self-Sacrificing Soldier, a Self-Interested President

A very well written blog. Words cannot fully express the gratitude our country owes to Army Specialist Stephan Lee Mace and his family for his actions on that fateful day. May he know that his sacrifice was not in vain and that we will not forget him.


A Self-Sacrificing Soldier, a Self-Interested President

Dems seek cover to boost debt limit - Manu Raju - POLITICO.com##

The soldiers need our support so what do the Democrats do they use the soldiers so they can spend money we do not have on absurd social programs. Obama can't decide if McCrystal should get the troops necessary to win the war in Afghanistan but you can be assured that any Republicans that vote against this bill will be deemed a traitor by his Administration. At this point I think we just need to bring our troops home from every base around the world. I was always of the belief that our military was what kept the rest of the civilized world safe and I still believe that today but the rest of the world has taken our generosity for granted. The Europeans don't respect us even though it was because of our military that they weren't overrun by the Soviets during the Cold War. The Japanese hate our soldiers even though we are the only thing that keeps the Red Chinese from exacting revenge for the atrocities the Japanese committed during WWII. The South Koreans spit on our soldiers even though the only thing that keeps the North Koreans on their side of the DMZ. We have bases in more parts of the world than any other country. Its time to make the rest of the world foot the bill for their own peace and prosperity.


Dems seek cover to boost debt limit - Manu Raju - POLITICO.com##