At Last, a Google Glass for the Battlefield

BY ALLEN MCDUFFEE

02.24.14

Walking around Silicon Valley with an augmented reality display on your face makes you a glasshole. On the battlefield, though, similar technology will soon turn U.S. soldiers into a lethal cross between the Terminator and Iron Man.

Q-Warrior, the newest version of helmet-mounted display technology from BAE Systems’ Q-Sight line, is a full-color, 3D heads-up display designed to provide soldiers in the field with rapid, real-time “situational awareness.”

With a high-resolution transparent display, Q-Warrior overlays data and a video stream over the soldier’s view of the world. Q-Warrior also includes enhanced night vision, waypoints and routing information, and the ability to identify hostile and non-hostile forces, track personnel and assets, and coordinate small unit actions.

“Q-Warrior increases the user’s situational awareness by providing the potential to display ‘eyes-out’ information to the user, including textual information, warnings and threats,” Paul Wright, the soldier systems business development lead at BAE Systems’ Electronic Systems, said in a statement. “The biggest demand, in the short term at least, will be in roles where the early adoption of situational awareness technology offers a defined advantage.”

This technology is not the stretch you might think. Specialty work-related applications for everyone from cops to doctors are increasingly considered the future of wearable computing. BAE clearly wants to be the Google of the warzone.

Image: BAE Systems

The display would play well with the Army Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit (TALOS) currently under development. TALOS is a powered exoskeleton to haul heavier equipment with liquid armor capable of stopping bullets and the ability to apply wound-sealing foam.

Darpa Developing Tech to Detect Counterfeit Microchips in Military Gear

BY ALLEN MCDUFFEE

02.26.14

Source Link

Darpa has taken on a new role in military procurement: quality control. The military’s research agency is developing a device to detect used and counterfeit electronic components in the Pentagon’s supply chain, hoping to get a handle on a problem the agency says could lead to system failures that put soldiers’ lives and missions at risk.

The agency says bad electronics are rampant in the defense supply chain. More than one million suspect parts have been found in the last two years alone.

The Supply Chain Hardware Integrity for Electronics Defense (SHIELD) program would counter that by developing a small (100 micron x 100 micron) component, or dielet, that will ”verify, without disrupting or harming the system, the trustworthiness of a protected electronic component.” Somehow, the unit is expected to cost less than a penny each.

“The dielet will be designed to be robust in operation, yet fragile in the face of tampering,” said Kerry Bernstein, Darpa program manager, in a statement. ”What SHIELD is seeking is a very advanced piece of hardware that will offer an on-demand authentication method never before available to the supply chain.”

According to Darpa, SHIELD would safeguard against several problems: recycled components that are sold as new; unlicensed overproduction of authorized components; test rejects and sub-standard components sold as high-quality; parts marked with falsely elevated reliability or newer date of manufacture; low quality clones and copies; and components that are covertly repackaged for unauthorized applications.

Although Darpa plans to offer more details in March, it imagines that SHIELD will work by inserting the dielet into the component’s package at a manufacturing site, or affixing it to existing trusted components, without any alteration of the host component’s design.

So How Did the CIA Get the STUXNET Virus Into Iran’s Computers?

Mark Clayton

Christian Science Monitor

February 25, 2014

One enduring mystery about Stuxnet, the first cyberweapon the world has known, is this: Just how did that “digital missile” infiltrate Iran’s secret Natanz nuclear fuel-enrichment facility in the first place?

A new thesis about that, to be outlined Tuesday at a security conference in San Francisco, points to a vulnerability in the Iranian facility’s supply chain – and may hold lessons for owners of critical infrastructure in the US concerning how to guard their own industrial equipment against cyberattack.

Presented by Critical Intelligence, a cyber security firm based in Idaho Falls, Idaho, the tale of cyber infiltration comes nearly four years after the covert operation was discovered. It’s already been fairly well documented that the United States and Israel created the Stuxnet worm, which ultimately infected and destroyed about 1,000 fuel-refining centrifuges at Natanz. The surreptitious attack sowed confusion within Iran’s uranium-fuel-enrichment program, which the US suspects is aimed at creating a nuclear bomb, and delayed it for years.

But how did Stuxnet get in there? As early as 2004, US intelligence agencies identified an Iranian company, NEDA Industrial Group, that had oversight of the Natanz facility’s computerized industrial control systems, says the Critical Intelligence report, citing documents gleaned from federal court cases, leaked State Department cables, and nuclear proliferation reports. 

Documents suggest that the US was monitoring NEDA’s efforts to procure components that may be needed for a nuclear weapons program, says Sean McBride, lead author of the report and director of analysis for Critical Intelligence. The report is the first to name NEDA in connection with Stuxnet. 

The US, he maintains, had identified NEDA as Iran’s leading expert in SiemensStep7 software used throughout Iran’s nuclear program, including its centrifuge fuel-refining system. Then, probably in 2008, the US targeted industrial control systems equipment that NEDA had ordered from suppliers overseas.

Leaked State Department cables posted on the WikiLeaks website show the US at that time to have been seeking to intercept shipments of equipment headed to Iran.

“It’s my contention that the evidence shows the US targeted the leading Siemens control systems integrator for Natanz – and that was NEDA,” Mr. McBride says in a phone interview. “NEDA would have had all the plans for just how the Natanz system was going to be set up, the proper centrifuge speeds, when they would be turned on and off. The company had all the key information the US needed to write Stuxnet – and then a way to get the worm into Natanz.”

Sometime around 2008, computerized industrial control system equipment bound for Iran was intercepted, and Stuxnet or other malware was installed on it before it was sent on its way, McBride posits.

His thesis runs contrary to prevailing theories that a spy used a memory stick, or “thumb drive,” to introduce Stuxnet into the network. Rather, NEDA engineers unwittingly installed infected work stations or other equipment, which then proceeded to infect all of Natanz’s systems, McBride says.

Among the report’s findings are online documents showing that NEDA was involved in industrial control systems work in Iran. They include archived files in which an Iranian control systems engineer, identified only as “Behrooz,” asks during an online Siemens support forum for help dealing with an unspecified virus that he says had infected all the machines in his company’s network.

Talent Management in the Army Rethinking the Block Check

This post was provided by the Master of Math and Army ORSA, Paul Dalen. He blogs about college football analytics at FootballStudyHall.com and CornNation.com. The views expressed in this piece are his alone and do not represent the US Army or the Department of Defense.

Begging Clausewitz’ forgiveness for the misuse of the term, there is a war for talent raging between organizations — and whether it wants to be or not, the Army is involved in this war. Human capital is subject to the same immutable laws of supply and demand to which oil, gold, housing, and other resources are subject. The scarcest and therefore most valuable, human capital resource to any organization is the top performer. And as with any other resource, competition for access to scarce human capital is fierce. Battacharya, Sen, and Korschun write:

Increasingly, success comes from being able to attract, motivate, and retain a talented pool of workers…With a finite number of extraordinary employees to go around, the competition for them is fierce.

Talent management within the Army has been discussed at length over the last few years. Wardynski, Lyle, and Colarusso addressed this in a U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute monograph series in 2010. A longitudinal theme of the series was that the Army must participate in an external talent market that impacts how the Army attracts and retains talent and should develop an internal talent market to better develop and employ the talent it has. They maintain establishment of a robust internal market will also favorably impact retention of talent in the Army.

Some see the Defense Officer Personnel Management Act, or DOPMA, as forcing the Army into a system that recognizes seniority over ability, stifles innovation, constrains its flexibility to recognize and fast track the highest performers to positions of greater responsibility, ultimately chasing the most talented and productive officers out of the service. Dr. Tim Kane is an outspoken critic of DOPMA. In his book Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages Great Leaders and Why It’s Time for a Revolution, he advocates scrapping DOPMA completely and transitioning the military to a management system more in line with the largest corporations in the United States.

A Strategy for Dealing with the Islamic Jihad

by Gary Anderson

Journal Article | February 26, 2014 

http://smallwarsjournal.com/ jrnl/art/a-strategy-for- dealing-with-the-islamic-jihad

Introduction

In the ongoing struggle against the Jihadists of Al Qaeda and affiliated groups, we need to stop believing that we are dealing with terrorists and recognize we are in a war with an adversary that has the capacity of a nation-state without being one. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are Fourth Generational Warfare foes. The term Fourth Generational Warfare (4GW) was coined in 1989 by a group writing in the Marine Corps Gazette to describe the reemergence of non-state actors who have the resources to wage war as effectively as some nations. We have not seen that phenomenon since the end of the Thirty Years War, but it is something that has existed in many forms since the dawn of history.

Al Qaeda and its partner franchises believe that are carrying on in the tradition of Moslem holy warriors begun by Mohammed in the Sixth Century. Mohammed did not command the army of a modern nation-state; he led an armed movement, and his would-be successors in Al Qaeda see themselves in that role. Al Qaeda is leading a 4GW Jihad, but its leaders believe that they will achieve a kingdom that combines both secular and religious governance in a way that transcends mere nation-states such our American republic. We need to understand that if we are to thwart their ambitions and marginalize them before they can do similar damage to that which they wrought on September 11th 2001. To trivialize them as mere terrorists or criminals is to underestimate them and their vision; we do so at great risk to ourselves. Despite the death of bin Laden and the elimination of many Jihadist leaders by drone strike and commando operations, Al Qaeda and its franchises continue to expand and to prosper despite the best efforts of the current administration and its European allies.

This article will be disturbing the cottage industry of counterterrorism experts that permeate our current national security establishment, and it will particularly disturb the legions of lawyers who have profited by treated the Jihadist threat entirely as a law enforcement problem. It is an assault on the conventional wisdom that has applied unsuccessful and counterproductive attempts at solutions. Fourth Generational Jihad can’t be solved, but it can be managed; more importantly, it can be marginalized without trivializing its danger.

Bin Laden’s Strategy

After the fall of the World Trade Center Towers, the attack on the Pentagon, and America’s subsequent destruction of his Afghan sanctuary; Osama bin Laden modified his strategy of chasing American and western influence out of Moslem lands realizing that a single strike would not decapitate us as he originally hoped. He developed a theory of psychological attrition in which he hoped we would attack Al Qaeda and its franchises everywhere that one of them appeared. The theory was that we would dissipate our wealth and will by chasing relatively insignificant targets all over Muslim lands. In Iraq, we did just that in attacking an Al Qaeda affiliate that did not exist; in reality, we created Al Qaeda in Iraq through the leadership vacuum we created in that county.

The Pacific Century Myth?

Straight-line projections may predict America’s imminent ouster as top economy – but they miss much.

By James Clad and Robert A. Manning

February 25, 2014

For some time now, it has been fashionable to say that we have begun what will be a “Pacific Century.” We have seen a flood of books of late, variations on the theme of When China Rules the World, as one put it. Certainly, in the aftermath of the 2008-09 financial crisis and Great Recession, this has been the conventional wisdom, a view shaped to a large extent by linear thinking. One of the most celebrated proponents of such views is the prolific former Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubani, who has written a series of well received books on Asia’s rise such as The New Asian Hemisphere.

In a recent article, Mahbubani has taken this linear logic to new heights (or depths, depending on your perspective) with the premise that America’s slide to number two economic status is “inevitable by 2019.” His premise appears to be that the prospect of yielding the top spot to China appears horrible and unnatural in the collective U.S. psyche:

In 2019, barely five years away, the world will pass one of its most significant historical milestones. For the first time in 200 years, a non-western power, China, will become the number-one economy in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms… it will take longer for China’s economy to overtake America’s in nominal terms but the trend line is irresistible.

Certainly the global diffusion of power is an ongoing trend. And at $12 trillion in 2012, China’s GDP in PPP terms was at 75 percent of the U.S. level, though as most economists know, statistical precision and Chinese data don’t make easy bedfellows. But the argument that America will yield its place to China in very short order bears further scrutiny.

Even if China’s GDP does surpass that of the U.S. in PPP metrics, it says little about the quality of the economy. China’s economy is still heavily investment driven, has a fragile financial system, is SOE-dominated, and innovation-challenged (quick, how many Chinese brands can you think of?) Linear thinking also overlooks the difficult reforms China faces, which could see growth over the next five years tapering to perhaps close to America’s pace – say, 4-5 percent – with the U.S. potentially reaching the 3 percent range. For good measure, remember the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), a catchy, but always contrived notion of emerging markets. Apart from China, none will have growth reaching 2 percent this year.

Globalisation and Identity: Perspectives from India and Russia

Uma Purushothaman

25 February 2014

Source Link

Globalisation and Identity provides insights into the interplay between globalisation and identity from Indian and Russian perspectives. The authors use theoretical and empirical methods to examine several interconnected, diverse issues. Among the issues examined are local, national and international narratives on globalisation and identity, citizenship, pluralism and separatism, and economic and religious issues vis-à-vis globalisation.

Technology, Organizational Design, and Future Jointness

February 19, 2014

BY PROFESSOR ROBERT FARLEY

Major Cavanaugh’s post brings to the fore one of the most critical issues facing any defense establishment: the relationship between technology and organizational design. How does the way in which we structure our military organizations affect military technological innovation? The short answer is that institutions both shape and manage technology. The services set priorities for procurement and innovation that lead to technological transformation. This is as it should be; specialists in land, air, and naval warfare know what they need, and should have a hand in pushing the defense industrial sector in the right direction. At the same time, organizations have to respond to disruptive, unanticipated technological change. Military success over the last century had depended on having the capacity to manage such change.

Yet we struggle with major reform to our institutions; bureaucracies have ways of protecting themselves, often by mobilizing political influence. Institutions are good at pointing out how important they are, and what critical roles they play in existing structures. But granting that the technological environment in which we plan for and fight war in the future will differ considerably from the environment that exists today means that we have to consider how our institutional arrangements will shape the future. 

In 1947, the United States, in a mistaken interpretation of extant military technology, decided to divide its military assets across three services, each with a theoretical commitment to a particular domain (land, sea, or air). Over the years that arrangement has been tested and shifted; the development of the helicopter pushed the Army out of fixed wing, the development of ballistic missiles led to an elaborate series of arrangements over which missiles belonged where, and the development of drones led not only to a nasty series of fights between the services, but also to conflict between the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. As technology develops, these problems will only grow worse. We have come up with successive kludges to paper over the fact that our sea, air, and oriented services don’t make any sense in context of innovative, disruptive technological development.

A glance at the history of UAV development and employment in the United States makes puts this aspect of Major Cavanaugh’s argument into stark relief. As with ballistic missiles, the idea of unmanned aerial vehicles has always sat uneasily with an Air Force founded by pilots. Free money (through the National Reconnaissance Office and the intelligence community funded early drone development, but the key innovations (including development of the Predator drone, and the earliest armed UAVs) were pursued by other agencies.

Strategy as Narrative War’s Plot Line in Five Parts

The Barefoot Strategist in The Bridge

This post was provided by Brett Friedman, a Marine and inveterate blogger at theMarine Corps Gazette blog and Grand Blog Tarkin.

Strategy is a form of communication; a message that you have the intentions and capabilities to impose your will, and the enemy cannot impose theirs. As war can be likened to two combatants trying to impose their will on the other, they must communicate their will and their intention not to abide by the will of the opponent. Since war is a human endeavor, this communication occurs in the same manner as other forms of communications. For example, the Six Phases of Joint Operations, found inJP 5-0 Planning, mirror the plot structure of theatrical drama as identified by Gustav Freytag. JP 5-0 lays out five phases for joint operations: Shaping, Deter, Seize Initiative, Dominate, Stabilize, and Enable Civil Authority. “Deter” is a throwaway; if it works, then no conflict occurs. It rightfully belongs as a subset of shaping, in my opinion, so I omit it below. The five remaining phases match up with Freytag’s plot structure: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Denouement. Humans have been communicating using this structure for centuries and it’s no accident that a cohesive strategy would match it. This is also why it is so common for historians to point to a “decisive battle” like Gettysburg or Stalingrad where the end of the war is allegedly decided and the rest is aftermath leading to the ending at Appomattox or Berlin.

This post is a think piece: I’m exploring the concept of strategy as narrative by writing about it. I’ll do this in three different ways. First, the post itself is arranged along the five phases of joint operations (minus deter) and the five aspects of Gustav Freytag’s theatrical structure. Second, I will link concepts from strategic history to each, where appropriate. Third, I use the Pacific Theater of Operations in World War II to illustrate each stage because it is pretty familiar to most people and provides clear waypoints, from before the war even began to well after it ended. A final note — while writing this post I was made aware of a book called Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order by Charles Hill that deals with strategy and literature. I have not read it yet, but it surely does a much better job than I have. Any similarities are purely coincidental.

Exposition and Shaping: Otto von Bismarck’s Diplomacy

The first step is exposition/shaping. The author introduces his characters and his world, arranging the context and framework of his setting. The background and environment for the story is vital to the success of the plot.

So too the strategic environment. The strategist must endeavor to arrange the environment to maximize his probability of success. The master of this was Otto von Bismarck. Diplomatic offensives preceded all of the Wars of German Unification. Some of those wars even shaped the environment of subsequent wars. All as part of an overarching strategy to achieve both the unification of Germany and the assurance of its position as a force in Europe. Bismarck understood how to shape the strategic environment and how it could contribute to future success.

In the case of the Pacific Theater of Operations, the shaping phase is evident well before Pearl Harbor. During the Washington Naval Conference, called for and held by the Harding Administration in from November 1921 to February 1922, the US attempted to limit Imperial Japanese naval capabilities. Likewise, Japan attempted to maintain as much as that capability as possible. The two Pacific giants were clearly shaping the environment for a potential future conflict.

The Essential Guide to Writing a Best-Selling Strategy

“Overlooking the interactive nature of strategic competition amounts to unilateral intellectual disarmament.”

By James R. Holmes

February 27, 2014

Source Link

Something has always bugged the Naval Diplomat about official strategy documents. Back when I was a whippersnapper of a graduate student, I assumed it was because the framers of such documents inhabited a higher plane of existence than lil’ ole me. That they had tapped into mysteries of politics and war into which I hadn’t been initiated.

In those days reading statements of strategy was like listening to some sage intone that “the oxen are slow, but the earth is patient.” Such utterances sound learned, and they’re certainly arcane. But do they mean anything?

Hmm. Eons later, as a salt-encrusted scribe of the sea, I still find strategy documents dense if not impenetrable. The biggest problem — pour moi — is that few such directives would pass muster as essays. (Having just read a stack of final exams for our intermediate course, I have essays on the brain.) They’re not page-turners.

But they should be. Their drafters should realize that. A core function of any strategic statement — National Security Strategy, Quadrennial Defense Review, Maritime Strategy, whatever — is to explain American purposes and power to key audiences, not just within officialdom but among the electorate and to friends, neutrals, and potential adversaries overseas. And it should do so in compelling fashion.

How? By attending to basic craftsmanship, for one thing. Like a lone essayist, a directive’s authors should lay out a sensible thesis at the outset, mapping out what readers should expect to find, and arrange the components of the document in some intelligible order. The text should follow that roadmap, tracing the arguments inexorably to their conclusion — namely that the United States will deploy some reasonable amount of resources in some realistic manner to fulfill some attainable strategic goals.

The document should leave the guys in the white hats chanting U-S-A! U-S-A! by the end, the villains sputtering about being foiled again! and vowing to get even next time. Wordsmithing matters.

In short, a strategy should be a good read. Don’t kid yourself: this can be, and has been, done. Before the United States entered World War II, for example, Chief of Naval Operations Harold “Betty” Stark sketched the rationale for a two-ocean, Europe-first war. And he did so in very few pages. Admiral Stark’s “Plan Dog” memorandum is a classic in this genre, a marvel of concise, spare language. That’s why we read it with our students three-quarters of a century hence. Strategies can be literary works.

Challenges in India-US ties

Washington becoming strident in economic relations

G Parthasarathy 

Source Link

Travelling across the US as the winter Olympics in Sochi commenced, one was saddened to witness how India's international credibility had been shaken when television audiences across the world saw three forlorn Indian athletes marching without the national flag. India faced this disgrace, thanks to the avariciousness and nepotism of an internationally disgraced Indian Olympic Association. Sadly, this was accompanied by charges of corruption, nepotism, match fixing and worse involving the President of the BCCI. Many Indian friends in the US asked in anguish: "Is there no section of national life left in India which is free from corruption and venality?" 

President Obama faces widespread criticism of his foreign and security policies 

The mood in Washington, where one had an occasion to meet a cross section of senior officials, business executives, analysts and scholars, was quite different. In marked contrast to the earlier years, I found widespread criticism of the conduct of foreign and security policies by President Obama. The Administration had not just botched up its healthcare programme, but was seen as indecisive and weak in dealing with challenges in West Asia, Afghanistan and the provocations of a jingoistic and militaristic China. President Obama, in turn, is acutely conscious of the mood in the country which wants an end to foreign military entanglements. 

More significantly, as the US moves towards becoming a net exporter of energy, thanks to the expanding production of shale gas and oil, the country's geopolitics are set for profound change. Using its leadership in areas of productivity and innovation, the US now appears set to the stage for increasing domination of the world economic order. From across its eastern shores, the US is negotiating comprehensive trade and investment partnerships with its European allies. Across its western shores in the Pacific, the Americans are negotiating transpacific partnerships with Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, South Korea and Vietnam as negotiating partners. While China has informally indicated an interest in joining this partnership, the US will use its influence to ensure that China is not admitted till American political and economic pre-conditions are met.

There is naturally interest in Washington in the forthcoming general election in India. The assessment appears to be that the ruling Congress is headed for a drubbing in the polls. Not many tears will be shed in Washington or elsewhere about this inevitability as the only questions which well-wishers of India ask are how India landed itself in its present morass of corruption and whether a new dispensation, which may be fractious, will be able to restore India to a high growth path. Speaking informally, a senior official recalled that President Obama had described the US-India partnership as "one of the defining partnerships of the world". The official noted that "every meaningful partnership between powerful nations encounters setbacks", adding that such setbacks should be minor compared to the benefits of the relationship and the magnitude of what the two could accomplish together.

weapons claims

25 February 2014


Since the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, strategic analysts monitoring developments in Burma (Myanmar) have been on quite a roller-coaster ride, particularly with regard to weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

Over the past 25 years, both the former military regime and President Thein Sein's reformist government have been accused of developing a nuclear device, manufacturing ballistic missiles, deploying biological agents and using chemical weapons (CW). These capabilities were reportedly acquired mainly with the help of North Korea and China.

Such is the dearth of reliable information about Burma's armed forces and national security that it has been difficult to prove or disprove many of these claims. However, enough of them have been shown to be exaggerated or false to warrant a fair degree of caution when considering any fresh accusations of WMD production or use.

With that in mind, it is worth looking closely at reports in the news media over the past few weeks that a secret chemical weapons plant has been discovered in Burma.

The Rangoon-based Unity Journal has claimed that in 2009 a CW factory was built on 12 sq km of land confiscated from farmers in Pauk township, near Pakokku in central Burma. Citing local informants, the journal said that the complex (possibly known as DI-24) included over 300m of tunnels, and was receiving technical help from China.

Following publication of this story, four journalists and one Unity executive were charged under the 1923 State Secrets Act, which prohibits trespassing on and photographing defence facilities in Burma, and divulging classified information. All unsold copies of the weekly journal were seized. Naypyidaw also flatly denied the existence of any CW plant.

India’s Solar Energy Future

Policy and Institutions

By Vineeth Vasudeva Murthy
FEB 25, 2014

This report analyzes and clarifies the regulatory and institutional frameworks put in place by the Indian government to promote investment in India’s solar energy sector. To date, lack of clarity and comprehension has inhibited investment in India’s economy in sectors ranging from defense technology to retail. This report aims to articulate India’s institutional structures in solar energy.

Public institutions have played a crucial role in India’s economic growth, and it is therefore critical to understand the regulations and reforms that India has taken to promote private domestic and foreign investment in infrastructure. Included in the report is a detailed picture of the different institutions involved in policy formulation, distribution, and administration of solar energy in India.
Publisher CSIS

Download PDF file of "India’s Solar Energy Future"

Indian Armed Forces Woes

Veterans’ woes

Defence personnel are at a great disadvantage in respect of pay, pension and medical benefits compared with civilian government servants. By MAJOR GENERAL SATBIR SINGH

OVER THE PAST FIVE YEARS, EX-SERVICEMEN have been agitating against the injustice meted out to them by the Central government. They have lost faith in the Department of Ex-Servicemen Welfare (DESW), created specifically to take care of their welfare. Ex-servicemen have won 90 per cent of the cases filed in the Armed Forces Tribunals and the Supreme Court against the government, but the government has appealed in all the cases through the DESW.

The veterans have approached the Prime Minister and the Defence Minister to seek redress in numerous cases where they felt injustice had been done to them but to no avail. The Supreme Court’s judgments in their favour have either not been implemented or not been implemented in letter and spirit in cases pertaining to disability pensions, payment of arrears with retrospective effect from January 1, 2006, rank pay, and hospital charges on authorised Ex-servicemen Contributory Health Scheme (ECHS) rates for medical treatment abroad.

The government files en masse appeals against retired defence personnel whenever any case relating to pension benefits is decided in their favour by any court of law or the Armed Forces Tribunal. Facing the brunt of the government’s apathy is the category of disabled and war-disabled soldiers. Most of the special leave petitions and appeals filed by the Ministry of Defence in the Supreme Court are against the grant of disability or war injury benefits to disabled and war-disabled soldiers. As a result, the veterans are forced into expensive litigation.

Over 3,000 cases decided in favour of defence personnel by the Armed Forces Tribunal have not been implemented; the Defence Ministry has contested all these judgments in the Supreme Court. Imagine the plight of a widow of a sepoy living in a far-flung rural area. How is she going to find the resources to fight her case in the Supreme Court? The tribunals were created for delivering speedy justice to defence personnel at minimum cost. But the Ministry’s decision to appeal against the tribunal’s judgments has not only delayed justice but also made it near impossible for the defence personnel to fight their cases. The Armed Forces Tribunals do not have contempt powers to get their judgments implemented whereas Central Administrative Tribunals (CATs) are vested with such powers.

This is the biggest cause of heartburning in the military community today. Military personnel with non-service-related disabilities discharged with less than 10 years of service remaining are not entitled to any form of pension, whereas the employment of civilian employees who “acquires a disability during his service” is protected under Section 47 of the Persons with Disabilities Act, 1995.

The Bricks of Wrath: India’s Migrant Workers

Migrant workers in Indian cities face a bleak future, but one organization is trying to bring hope.

By Arjun Claire

February 26, 2014

As the share of agriculture in India’s growing economy plummets, farmers from the country’s poorest regions are moving in droves to cities in search of better prospects. Many of them find work in the booming construction industry, which employs more than 30 million people. But the gleaming office towers and slick residential complexes they build stand in stark contrast to the tiny tin shacks where they live, often on the construction sites itself. Moreover, the obligation to constantly change sites and cities means that their children receive no education and are locked in a malicious cycle of poverty.

A child helps in harvesting the wheat crop in the Indian state of Bihar, where many construction laborers come from. Many farmers here do not own land, and instead work as daily wage laborers on other people’s properties. In recent years, lack of employment in agriculture, low wages and indebtedness have forced workers to look for alternative employment in other states. Many end up working on construction projects in big cities.

**** The Taliban in Afghanistan

Author: Zachary Laub, Associate Writer
Updated: February 25, 2014

Introduction

The Taliban is a Sunni Islamic fundamentalist group that ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until 2001, when a U.S.-led invasion toppled the regime for providing refuge to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. The Taliban regrouped across the border in Pakistan, where its central leadership, headed by Mullah Mohammed Omar, operates an insurgency and shadow government aimed at undermining the government in Kabul. Since 2010, both the United States and Afghanistan have pursued a negotiated settlement with the Taliban, but with the planned withdrawal of international forces at the end of 2014, many analysts say the prospects for such an agreement are dim.

Rise of the Taliban

The Taliban was formed in the early 1990s by a Pashtun faction of mujahideen, Islamic fighters who resisted the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979–89) with the covert backing of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and its Pakistani counterpart, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate (ISI). They were joined by other Pashtun tribesmen who, like the mujahideen, studied in Pakistani madrassas (seminaries); taliban is Pashto for "students." Pashtuns comprise a plurality in Afghanistan and are the predominant ethnic group in much of the country's south and east.
Taliban militiamen chant slogans as they drive toward the front line near Kabul in November 1997. (Photo: Courtesy Reuters)

The Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Mohammad Najibullah, a Soviet client, was president from 1987 until 1992. He stepped down amid increasingly fractious politics, ushering in a period of civil war. Burhanuddin Rabbani, a Tajik mujahideen leader, held tenuous control as president as mujahideen parties competed for control of Kabul.

The Taliban coalesced during this period, promising to impose stability and with it, rule of law in place of endemic corruption, a charge it leveled at Rabbani's government. Taliban jurisprudence was drawn from both Deobandi interpretations of sharia, which were colored by the austere Wahabbi traditions of the madrassas' Saudi benefactors, and Pashtunwali, the Pashtuns' pre-Islamic tribal code. As the Taliban consolidated its control over Afghanistan, it began imposing nationwide this syncretic legal system, which, with punishments such as flagellation, amputation, and execution, "deepened the ethnic divide," writes journalist Ahmed Rashid.

The Taliban took the southern city of Kandahar in November 1994, and in September 1996 seized Kabul, ousted the Rabbani government, and stormed the UN compound where Najibullah had sought refuge, torturing and executing him. The Taliban controlled some 90 percent of the country before its 2001 overthrow by U.S.-led forces, analysts say.

In power for five years, the Taliban regime was an "oxymoron of an Islamist state," writes Gilles Kepel, a scholar of political Islam. The Taliban's exclusive interests, he writes, were imposing Deobandi norms in Afghanistan while waging jihad on the country's periphery, and so it neglected basic state functions. The Taliban's Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, for example, was responsible for morality. It enforced prohibitions on behavior deemed un-Islamic, requiring women to wear the head-to-toeburqa, or chadri; banned music and television; and jailed men whose beards it deemed too short. Humanitarian aid agencies, mostly drawn from the Islamic world, moved to fill the void of social services.

The Taliban regime was internationally isolated and censured from its inception; only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates recognized the government. Two UN Security Council resolutions passed in 1998 urged the Taliban to end its abusive treatment of women. The following year the council imposed sanctions on the regime for harboring al-Qaeda. The Taliban garnered international outcry in 2001 after destroying the colossal, ancient Buddha statues at Bamiyan, an iconic piece of the country's cultural heritage revered by local Shiites.

Pakistan supported the Taliban as a force that could unify and stabilize Afghanistan while staving off Indian, Iranian, and Russian influence, and saw its Pashtun roots, shared with much of the Pakistani army's officer corps, as a source of leverage, Kepel writes.

In the late 1990s, factions in northern Afghanistan opposed to Taliban rule formed theNorthern Alliance, which was composed of ethnic minority Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Hazaras (who are Shiites). The alliance assisted U.S.-led forces in routing the Taliban after 9/11.
Courtesy Congressional Research Service
Leadership and Support Structure

U.S. Intensifying Strikes Against Haqqani Network Leadership and Networks in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Reuters

February 25, 2014

KABUL/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has intensified its drive against the Taliban-linked Haqqani network in an attempt to deal a lasting blow to the militants in Afghanistan before foreign combat forces depart this year, according to multiple U.S. officials.

The effort is taking on added urgency as the clock ticks down on a NATO combat mission in Afghanistan set to end in December, and as questions persist about whether Pakistan will take action against a group some U.S. officials believe is quietly supported by Pakistani intelligence.

The Obama administration has created a special new unit based in Kabul to coordinate efforts against the militant group, according to officials familiar with the matter. It was set up late last year, as part of a new strategy that involves multiple government agencies,

The unit, headed by a colonel and known in military parlance as a “fusion cell,” brings together special forces, conventional forces, intelligence personnel, and some civilians to improve targeting of Haqqani members and to heighten the focus on the group, the officials said.

"Things are coming together in terms of the more comprehensive approach (against the Haqqanis). So, there’s a lot of focus - there’s a lot of energy behind it right now," said a U.S. defense official, who asked not to be identified.

It was not immediately clear whether the intensified focus on the Haqqanis has led to increased strikes on the group by the U.S. military or the CIA, which operates drones over Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Contingency Plans Begin for Possible Full Afghanistan Withdrawal

American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON, Feb. 25, 2014 – President Barack Obama today informed Afghan President Hamid Karzai that because the Afghan leader has demonstrated that it is unlikely that he will sign the bilateral security agreement on a U.S. military presence in Afghanistan beyond this year, he has asked the Pentagon to ensure that it has adequate plans in place to accomplish an orderly withdrawal by the end of the year should the United States not keep any troops in Afghanistan after 2014.

In a summary of the Obama-Karzai phone call released to reporters, White House officials said Obama is leaving open the possibility of concluding a bilateral security agreement with Afghanistan later this year.

“However, the longer we go without a BSA, the more challenging it will be to plan and execute any U.S. mission,” they added. “Furthermore, the longer we go without a BSA, the more likely it will be that any post-2014 U.S. mission will be smaller in scale and ambition.”

Soon after, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel released a statement expressing his “strong support” for the president’s decision.

"This is a prudent step, given that President Karzai has demonstrated that it is unlikely that he will sign the bilateral security agreement, which would provide DOD personnel with critical protections and authorities after 2014,” the secretary said. He also commended the efforts of Marine Corps Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., commander of U.S. forces and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, and other military leaders to provide flexibility to the president as the United States works to determine the future of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

Taking on Taliban

Pakistan: With the repeated targeting of the Army in North Waziristan and the recent terror attacks elsewhere in the country, the government seems to have little option but to go in for a military operation against the Taliban. By MEENA MENON in Islamabad

IT WAS an enterprise doomed from the start. When the All Parties Conference (APC) held on September 9, 2013, gave the government the green signal for dialogue with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), there was a surge of hope for peace. Subsequent events proved that it was short-lived. A week after the APC, militants killed two Army officers in Upper Dir district in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. This was followed by a spate of bombings in Peshawar, including a suicide attack on a church, killing over 80 persons at Sunday prayers. Yet, the government persisted with its efforts at mediation, and just as it was planning to send a team of negotiators to meet TTP chief Hakimullah Mehsud, he was killed in a drone strike on November 1, 2013. An outraged Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan was swift to pin the blame on the United States for deliberately snuffing out what was the start of a peace dialogue. Events since then have indicated that dialogue with the TTP, over which there was much scepticism anyway, will be difficult. Incidents in the new year have effectively put an end to that process for now.

The government is weighing targeted military strikes in the tribal areas, as discussed in a recent high-level security meeting chaired by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. The military had resorted to targeted operations in December after the attack on a check post in North Waziristan. But in the wake of two bomb blasts recently, in Bannu Cantonment and near the General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, in a rare use of air power it bombed militant hideouts in North Waziristan and killed over 40 militants, including four Taliban leaders. Thirty-three of those killed were Uzbek nationals and three were Germans.

The government has still kept the dialogue option open, but by now it is clear that there is little to talk about. The former Army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who attended the APC, was on the same page as the government and had, in a public statement, made his position clear, favouring dialogue. But the repeated targeting of the Army in North Waziristan and the recent terror attacks have prompted the military to show readiness for what could be a full-fledged operation, backed by the federal government, against the Taliban.

Myanmar’s Census Controversy

The inclusion of ethic and tribal identification questions could lead to discrimination and violence.

By Mong Palatino

February 26, 2014

Source Link

Myanmar is scheduled to hold a census next month but local and international monitoring groups are worried that it could inflame ethnic and religious tensions in the country.

The census, supported by several UN agencies, is deemed important because it has been more than 30 years since a nationwide census was conducted. Through the census, Myanmar’s demographic profile can be objectively determined, which would prove useful for policymakers and potential investors in planning for Myanmar’s development needs.

But the census question on ethnic or tribal identification threatens to ignite more conflicts in the country. The census form requires citizens to choose from the 135 ethnic groups identified by the government. This listing, according to some scholars, is a colonial legacy that should have been revamped a long time ago. Several ethnic groups have complained about being lumped with other minorities while others claimed they were dropped from the listing.

For example, the Palaung (Ta’aung) tribe questioned their inclusion as a member of the Shan race.

“We, Ta’aung, settled down in this land before the Shan…We are not the same with other races. We live in mountainous area and have a different culture and language,” according to an official statement issued by the Palaung community.

In Myanmar, most people identify as Burmans. An estimated 40 percent of the population is considered an ethnic minority, with the Shan composing the biggest minority group. The other major groups include the Karen, Karreni, Kachin, Chin, Mon and Arakan.

To avoid misunderstanding, the government is urged to reclassify the listing based on a “democratic consultation” with ethnic communities. And while the government is doing this, some groups wanted the census delayed for another month. The postponement is also necessary to pursue the peace process in some remote areas where a ceasefire has not yet been finalized between government troops and armed rebels.

Why China Isn't Interested in a South China Sea Code of Conduct

A South China Sea code of conduct would threaten Beijing’s interests – so don’t expect much progress in negotiations.

By Shannon Tiezzi

February 26, 2014

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According to Reuters, ASEAN officials say that they will meet with Chinese representatives in Singapore beginning March 18 to try and make some progress on talks to establish a “code of conduct” in the South China Sea. China agreed to discuss a South China Sea code of conduct at the ASEAN forum last July, a move that was widely applauded in the region. The first round of meetings was held in Beijing in September, and concluded with an agreement to seek “gradual progress and consensus through consultations.”

Unfortunately, when it comes to ASEAN, China, and the South China Sea, progress has been slow and consensus almost nonexistent. Negotiations over a code of conduct are complicated by the simple fact that not every ASEAN member state is involved in the territorial disputes. Of the 10 ASEAN members, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei claim territory that also falls within China’s “nine-dash line.” Even these four states are not on the same page, with Vietnam and the Philippines vocally protesting China’s ‘aggression’ and Malaysia and Brunei keeping a much lower profile.

Of the remaining ASEAN states, Indonesia often positions itself as a mediator, sometimes joined by Singapore. The others (Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand) have little interest in becoming embroiled in disputes between China and their neighbors — especially as China accounts for over 12 percent of all ASEAN trade. China is an especially lucrative partner for Cambodia, which received a promise of nearly $550 million in aid last year, and for Myanmar, where China accounts for one-third of all foreign direct investment.

Actually, China and ASEAN already have one agreement on the South China Sea — the 2002 “Declaration on the Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea.” That document expressed a desire to “enhance favorable conditions for a peaceful and durable solution of differences and disputes among countries concerned.” In the 2002 declaration, ASEAN and China reaffirmed a commitment to international law (including the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea) and to the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. All parties also agreed to “resolve their territorial and jurisdictional disputes by peaceful means, without resorting to the threat or use of force.” Further, the parties agreed to “exercise self-restraint” in taking actions that could “complicate or escalate disputes.”

China Can Be More Powerful Without Getting Rich

History shows that wealth is a poor indicator of the distribution of power in the international system.

By Zachary Keck

February 25, 2014

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With the Chinese economy set to overtake the American economy in terms of absolute GDP in the next few years, many in the U.S. and allied countries are taking solace in the fact that China will be far poorer than America for the foreseeable future. This is perfectly logical if one’s deciding which country to live in. However, history suggests that it says little about China’s ability to challenge the U.S. internationally, particularly within the Asia-Pacific.

Although a country’s economy is unquestionably the foundation of its national power, the relationship between the two variables is far from perfect. As I noted last week, the Soviet Union’s economy was at the best of times about half the size of the American one during the Cold War. Often times it was much, much less. The disparity between the economies of NATO and the Warsaw Pact was often times much greater. Indeed, by the late 1980s, Germany had a larger absolute GDP than the Soviet Union; Japan’s economy was well over twice the size of Moscow’s during this time. Still, this not did prevent the Soviet Union from posing a substantial strategic threat to the U.S. and its European allies during the Cold War era.

Similarly, according to the Los Angeles Times, in 1940 Japan’s population was about half that of the United States, while its economy was one-tenth as large. Nonetheless, following Pearl Harbor Japan was able to sweep through much of the Asia-Pacific and seize territory from the U.S., England, and the Dutch. In key battles like the one at Java Sea, Japan was also able to defeat the joint militaries from those three countries, which also had help from key commonwealth nations like Australia and New Zealand.

But if absolute GDP is an imprecise measure of national power, the relative wealth of nations is often even more inaccurate. Given the much larger population size of the Soviet Union relative to the U.S., for instance, the gap between America and the Soviet Union’s GDP per capita was even larger than the already large gap the size of their economies. Similarly, in 1970 the Soviet Union’s GDP was greater than Japan and France’s combined. However, both Japan and France were richer than the Soviet Union.