Israel combats cyberattacks, 'biggest revolution in warfare'

Jan. 31, 2014

Source Link

TEL AVIV, Israel, Jan. 31 (UPI) -- The chief of Israel's Military Intelligence has warned the Jewish state is under sustained cyberattack amid "the biggest revolution in warfare, more than gunpowder and the utilization of air power in the past century."

The government is scrambling to set up an emergency task force to counter the growing threat described by Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi Wednesday. The set-up will be based to some extent on the U.S. Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center.

Kovachi told the annual conference of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv that Israeli financial organizations, businesses and industries have been battered by hundreds of cyberattacks during the last year, dozens of them targeting defense institutions.

"This is a new dimension that we're far from investigating and understanding," he declared.

"Cyber in my modest opinion will soon be revealed to be the biggest revolution in warfare, more than gunpowder and the utilization of air power in the last century."

Israel has been a major leader in cyber warfare for some time. It is widely believed to have sabotaged the core of Iran's contentious nuclear program, its uranium enrichment center, with the notorious Stuxnet virus in 2010 in collaboration with the United States.

Iran is reported to have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into fast-tracking its own cyberwarfare capability, for offense and well as defense, and it's widely believed to have been behind attacks on Saudi Arabian and Qatari energy facilities.

The chief of staff of Israel's military forces, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, warned delegates at the Tel Aviv conference the Jewish state needs to increase its vigilance as the cyberwar threat grows.

Cybersecurity is "a playing field that we need to use to the full, and I think that the State of Israel can and should do much more than it has been doing until now," he said.

Israel "must be at the level of a superpower, and it can be at the level of a superpower," Gantz said.

It is "vital in the extreme" that the country devote all national resources to developing cybersecurity, he stressed. "We cannot wait."

Gantz warned in October that Israel's next war could start with a cyberattack on civilian infrastructure that would paralyze the country.

That followed media reports of an attempted attack on 140 senior figures in Israel's security and defense industries. It involved emails containing malware programmed to steal and copy data that were reported to have been traced back to Chinese defense companies.

A month earlier, what was characterized at the time as a computer malfunction -- later reports said it was the result of a cyberattack -- shut down the Carmel Tunnels, a key traffic artery to northern Israel, including the port city of Haifa, which is also the Israeli navy's major base.

Officials said there had been an attempted cyberattack on Haifa's water system in May.

This issue is assuming greater importance for Israel by the day as its military undergoes a revolutionary shift in doctrine and organization under the 2014-19 spending plan that is sharply downsizing combat forces, eliminating armor and air force formations, to develop a more agile capability focused on tactical interconnectivity and interoperability through digital systems.

Defense sources say the so-called Tzayad Digital Army Program -- spearheaded by state-owned Elbit Systems of Haifa, Israel's leading military systems company -- remains the centerpiece "for connecting command-level echelons with armor, infantry, artillery and other ground forces on a single, secure digital command, control, communications, computers and intelligence, or C4I in military parlance.

Companies Now Marketing “NSA-Proof” Phones

January 31, 2014 

A Phone for the Age of Snowden 

Joshua Kopstein 

The New Yorker 

January 30, 2014 

Source Link

Around midnight on Tuesday of last week, people near the barricaded city square at the center of mass protests in Kiev, Ukraine, received an ominous text message: “Dear subscriber, you are registered as a participant in a mass disturbance.” 

The message was most likely sent by the Ukrainian government using what’s popularly known as an “I.M.S.I. catcher”—a controversial tool that disguises itself as a cell-phone tower so that nearby devices connect to it, revealing their locations and serial numbers and, sometimes, the contents of outgoing messages. It was a bleak reminder of how cell phones, one of the past decade’s most indispensable and ubiquitous pieces of technology, can silently leave their owners exposed to governments and high-tech criminals. 

A number of companies have emerged in the post-Snowden world peddling products that claim to protect from that kind of unwanted surveillance. One of the most promising, a smartphone explicitly designed for security and privacy, calledBlackphone, comes from a respected team of cryptographers. The device is a collaboration between Silent Circle, a security company co-founded by the cryptography pioneer Phil Zimmermann, and GeeksPhone, a Spanish startup that manufactures tinker-friendly handsets.

Blackphone’s primary selling point is that its “PrivatOS” operating system andSilent Circle software provide easy-to-use, end-to-end encryption for text messaging, phone calls, and video chats, using techniques pioneered by Zimmermann that make it difficult, if not impossible, to spy on conversations. The encryption scheme, which scrambles the contents of each message or call so that only the designated recipient can understand them, is designed based on the assumption that the cellular network and other devices are fundamentally untrustworthy.

Secure phones aren’t entirely novel, but they have, in the past, been either difficult to obtain or difficult to use. The N.S.A. developed some of the first encrypted telephone systems, like the Secure Telephone Unit, a safe-size, multi-thousand-dollar device that was released in the nineteen-seventies. More recently, the agency released blueprints for a secure Android phone called Fishbowl, though it’s hard to imagine who would use the device now. A German company called GSMK has also been producing a series of secure phones, called CryptoPhone, for a number of years. Like the Blackphone, the CryptoPhone uses a “hardened” operating system that makes the device more difficult to hack, but its programming code is available for anyone to look at, allowing its security to be independently verified by experts. (Blackphone is promising to release its source code at some time in the future, but right now its creators say their priority is making sure the phone ships.)

While there aren’t many technical details yet available, Blackphone seems to be reaching for a more mainstream audience by leveraging a consumer aestheticthat you might call “surveillance-state chic.” Itspromotional video is awash in dystopian imagery: a hooded figure, dressed head-to-toe in black, navigates a dense urban sprawl, as surveillance cameras watch. “Technology was supposed to make our lives better,” the narrator gravely intones. “Instead, we have lost our privacy. We have become enslaved. Now, it’s time for a change.”

Israel Under Sustained Cyberattack, Chief of Israeli Military Intelligence

January 31, 2014

Israel combats cyberattacks, ‘biggest revolution in warfare’

TEL AVIV, Israel, Jan. 31 (UPI) — The chief of Israel’s Military Intelligence has warned the Jewish state is under sustained cyberattack amid “the biggest revolution in warfare, more than gunpowder and the utilization of air power in the past century.”

The government is scrambling to set up an emergency task force to counter the growing threat described by Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi Wednesday. The set-up will be based to some extent on the U.S. Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center.

Kovachi told the annual conference of the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv that Israeli financial organizations, businesses and industries have been battered by hundreds of cyberattacks during the last year, dozens of them targeting defense institutions.

"This is a new dimension that we’re far from investigating and understanding," he declared.

"Cyber in my modest opinion will soon be revealed to be the biggest revolution in warfare, more than gunpowder and the utilization of air power in the last century."

Israel has been a major leader in cyber warfare for some time. It is widely believed to have sabotaged the core of Iran’s contentious nuclear program, its uranium enrichment center, with the notorious Stuxnet virus in 2010 in collaboration with the United States.

Iran is reported to have sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into fast-tracking its own cyberwarfare capability, for offense and well as defense, and it’s widely believed to have been behind attacks on Saudi Arabian and Qatari energy facilities.

The chief of staff of Israel’s military forces, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, warned delegates at the Tel Aviv conference the Jewish state needs to increase its vigilance as the cyberwar threat grows.

Cybersecurity is “a playing field that we need to use to the full, and I think that the State of Israel can and should do much more than it has been doing until now,” he said.

Israel “must be at the level of a superpower, and it can be at the level of a superpower,” Gantz said.

It is “vital in the extreme” that the country devote all national resources to developing cybersecurity, he stressed. “We cannot wait.”

Gantz warned in October that Israel’s next war could start with a cyberattack on civilian infrastructure that would paralyze the country.

That followed media reports of an attempted attack on 140 senior figures in Israel’s security and defense industries. It involved emails containing malware programmed to steal and copy data that were reported to have been traced back to Chinese defense companies.

A month earlier, what was characterized at the time as a computer malfunction — later reports said it was the result of a cyberattack — shut down the Carmel Tunnels, a key traffic artery to northern Israel, including the port city of Haifa, which is also the Israeli navy’s major base.

Officials said there had been an attempted cyberattack on Haifa’s water system in May.

This issue is assuming greater importance for Israel by the day as its military undergoes a revolutionary shift in doctrine and organization under the 2014-19 spending plan that is sharply downsizing combat forces, eliminating armor and air force formations, to develop a more agile capability focused on tactical interconnectivity and interoperability through digital systems.

How Is Business Intelligence Being Used Differently in Asia?

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Posted by K R Sanjiv

on January 29 2014

According to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s recent study of 300 CXOs ‘The Data Directive’, commissioned by Wipro, high growth firms are making better strategic use of their data. Furthermore, they are far more likely to have changed the way they handle strategic decisions as a result of having more data, and to have seen improved outcomes as a result of better data analysis. Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics is increasingly being seen as a key differentiator in the global, competitive landscape, although the levels of adoption vary across markets. Analytical processes based on proprietary data and methods aid faster decision making and are found difficult to copy, providing a sustainable competitive advantage for businesses.

Enterprises in mature markets, like Western Europe and Northern America, are increasingly wielding BI and Analytics as a strategic tool, but what’s happening in Asia?

Driven by rapid economic growth in the Asian region, enterprises are considering the potential of BI and analytics. The growing need to leverage the power of analytics for analysis and quick decision making, in an increasingly competitive landscape, is being felt all across this region. Alongside pervasive adoption in mature markets like Hong Kong and Singapore, BI is gaining greater traction in the emerging economies such as China, India, Malaysia, and Indonesia as well. According to the 2013 Gartner Executive Programs (EXP) CIO Agenda survey, BI and Analytics topped the 2013technology priority list for CIOs in Asia Pacific again this year. As such, the estimated size of the Asia Pacific BI and Analytics services in 2013 stood at USD 2.1 billion, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.2% through 2015.

In Asia, the demand for BI ranges from simple data discovery tools to complex near real time analytical applications. Although many organisations are still using BI primarily for reporting purposes, a growing economy and population is presenting an opportunity for greater adoption of advanced BI methodologies. Mature markets in Asia are employing BI for dynamic reporting and real time analytics while less mature ones are still focusing on static reporting. Consequently, the technologies around big data, next gen visualisation and in-memory, for example, are the areas of significant interest in this region.

Enterprises in Asia with a large amount of data – such as those in finance, government, telecom and retail – are looking to leverage big data and in-memory technologies. For instance, influencer and sentiment analysis on social media data is gradually emerging as a valuable business use case.

By leveraging advanced visualisation technologies, enterprises are looking to present a much richer view of business process and customer complex data analysis, but in a simpler and easy-to-understand way. Advanced visualisation takes the whole concept of insights to the next level as it entirely converts the hitherto complex data spreadsheets and bare graphs into easy to infer, highly interactive and dynamic data visualisations. Moreover, these exciting features allow users to consume data at a rate that is in line with the rapid data input. One element that is helping enterprises in Asia leapfrog the BI adoption curve is that they don’t have to worry about legacy systems.

However, an uneven level of IT maturity, exacerbated by smaller IT budgets, is posing a roadblock in the extensive adoption of BI in this region. The emerging markets in Asia face challenges ranging from having the right tools, skills and methodology, to crucial factors like good data quality for BI and analytics. In addition to this, the common error of approaching BI from a technology driven perspective, instead of envisaging it from a business perspective, is also holding enterprises back.

NSA Spied on Negotiators at 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Conference

January 30, 2014

Snowden Docs: U.S. Spied on Negotiators At 2009 Climate Summit

Kate Sheppard and Ryan Grim

Huffington Post

January 29, 2014

Read the full document here.

WASHINGTON — The National Security Agency monitored the communications of other governments ahead of and during the 2009 United Nations climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark, according to the latest document from whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The document, with portions marked “top secret,” indicates that the NSA was monitoring the communications of other countries ahead of the conference, and intended to continue doing so throughout the meeting. Posted on an internal NSA website on Dec. 7, 2009, the first day of the Copenhagen summit, it states that “analysts here at NSA, as well as our Second Party partners, will continue to provide policymakers with unique, timely, and valuable insights into key countries’ preparations and goals for the conference, as well as the deliberations within countries on climate change policies and negotiation strategies.”

"Second Party partners" refers to the intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, with which the U.S. has an intelligence-sharing relationship. "While the outcome of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference remains uncertain, signals intelligence will undoubtedly play a significant role in keeping our negotiators as well informed as possible throughout the 2-week event," the document says.

The Huffington Post published the documents Wednesday night in coordination with the Danish daily newspaper Information, which worked with American journalist Laura Poitras.

The December 2009 meeting in Copenhagen was the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which brings together 195 countries to negotiate measures to address rising greenhouse gas emissions and their impact. The Copenhagen summit was the first big climate meeting after the election of President Barack Obama, and was widely expected to yield a significant breakthrough. Other major developed nations were already part of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set emissions limits, while the United States — the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases when the protocol went into effect in 2004 — had famously declined to join. The two-week meeting was supposed to produce a successor agreement that would include the U.S., as well as China, India and other countries with rapidly increasing emissions.

The document indicates that the NSA planned to gather information as the leaders and negotiating teams of other countries held private discussions throughout the Copenhagen meeting. “[L]eaders and negotiating teams from around the world will undoubtedly be engaging in intense last-minute policy formulating; at the same time, they will be holding sidebar discussions with their counterparts — details of which are of great interest to our policymakers,” the document states. The information likely would be used to brief U.S. officials, such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama, among others, according to the document.

The U.S. Intelligence Community’s 2014 “State of the World” Intelligence Assessment

January 29, 2014

The U.S. intelligence community’s annual “state of the world” intelligence assessment is now available online.

The 31-page report contains something for everyone to hate.

It leads with the growing cyber threats posed by Russia, China and other state and transnational actors. In a new twist, the report levels charges against the Russian government comparable to what has said in the past about the China cyber threat, with the report stating “Russian

intelligence services continue to target US and allied personnel with access to sensitive computer network information. In 2013, a Canadian naval officer confessed to betraying information from shared top secret-level computer networks to Russian agents for five years.”

The Russian government will definitely not like being lumped in with China as a cyber threat, especially in light of the disclosures about NSA cyber espionage activities that have been published in the media over the past eight months based on materials provided by Edward Snowden. So one can expect to see counter-charges coming fast and furious from both Beijing and the Kremlin.

For the first time, the U.S. intelligence community takes aim at Bitcoin and other virtual currency systems, stating “Virtual currencies—most notably Bitcoin—are fast becoming a medium for criminal financial transfers through online payment companies. In May 2013, Costa Rica-registered Liberty Reserve— processed $6 billion in suspect transactions and sought to evade enforcement action by moving funds into shell companies worldwide prior to being indicted by US authorities.”

There is much much more, but these are the highlights just on the first couple of pages of the report.

SecDef Should Crack Whip On Cyber, Drones, & Training Foreigners

By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR. 

on January 24, 2014

A Croatian soldier and a Minnesota National Guardsman train together for Afghanistan.

Yesterday, four mid-grade military officers — one from each armed service – made a remarkable public recommendation to their boss, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel: It’s time to force the four services back into clearly demarcated “lanes” and reduce overlap between them as budgets shrink and competition escalates. They focused on three high-priority areas: 

Cybersecurity, the one area of the budget that’s actually growing. As a result, all four services are training “cyber warriors” and creating “cyber” units — but with no clear guidance from the Defense Department on which service should specialize in what, so everyone is doing a bit of everything. “The services risk building similar capabilities in different ways to conduct the same mission,” the co-authors write, “[with] significant duplication and overlap.” Their (tentative) solution: take away some of the services’ authority to “train, equip, and organize” cybersecurity personnel and give it to the interservice Cyber Command. That step would raise CYBERCOM to a status currently enjoyed only by Special Operations Command (SOCOM), halfway to being a full-scale independent service. 

Drones, aka “unmanned aircraft systems” (UAS). “Currently,” they write, “the four services are developing 15 separate UAS platforms of varying weights, speeds and altitudes” (see exhibits 1, 2, 3, and 4), as well as “42 separate UAS payload development programs… [and] 13 ground control stations.” While they stop short of a specific recommendation here, the co-authors do note regretfully that the current UAS Task Force lacks “authority over the services for programmatic consolidation or termination.” (Hint, hint?) They also speak approvingly of the much-derided 1947 Key West agreement, which among other things defined what kind of (manned) aircraft each service could fly. 

NO COIN FOR YOU? THE MOST STAGNANT DEBATE IN STRATEGIC STUDIES

Brett Friedman

January 30, 2014 

Counterinsurgency remains the most controversial topic ofdebate in the U.S. military and strategic studies community. While AirSea Battle and the so-called “rebalance” to Asia raises the temperature in the room, counterinsurgency still blows the roof off the building. But, the debate on that topic has stagnated well beyond the point of diminishing returns. It revolves between two poles that are little more than simplistic views on what is more important, the population or the enemy. Counterinsurgency is called the graduate level of war, but the counterinsurgency debate has yet to graduate from middle school.

In 2012, Colin S. Gray bemoaned the lack of strategic theory applied to the population-centric versus enemy-centric counterinsurgency debate. He noticed that the debate was taking place in a world apart from reality, as if counterinsurgency was some special form of warfare immune to the precepts of strategic theory. In my recent article for Military Review, I attempted to square the circle by applying Clausewitzian ideas, especially the trinity, to the problem.

Both sides of the debate were right and wrong. By focusing on one aspect of war and applying it to counterinsurgency, theorists discovered applicable ideas, but then stopped short of viewing war as a whole—itsgestalt. Since both sides see only a part of conflict rather than viewing it as a gestalt as Clausewitz would have done, the debate continued without resolution or progress. This caused the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan to pivot between two poles, first attempting to defeat insurgents directly and then indirectly, without ever pursuing a comprehensive strategy that takes advantage of both methods. While the tilt towards pop-centric counterinsurgency in 2006 after the release of FM 3-24 was probably a necessary corrective, it went too far. U.S. military forces were called upon to build schools, repair infrastructure, and take on basic governance for which they were ill-suited, diluting the combat power available in theater. While these tasks may be necessary, other elements of national power could be deemed more appropriate for their accomplishment. Certainly, the practice of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan exhibited both methods, but that just goes to show how little the debate serves the practice. Practice is already far beyond the theory.

Peace, Art and … Special Operations

by Brian S. Petit

Journal Article

January 30, 2014

It is early 2014 and the United States is surrounded by war. Iraq is behind us, Afghanistan and Libya are beside us, and ahead of us lay a number of regions in turmoil, with Syria and Egypt topping the list. With persistent talk of military actions and war, we need an intensified conversation about military options and peace.

Warren Buffett said “Most people are interested in stocks when everyone else is. The time to get interested in stocks is when no one else is.” With wars simmering on all sides, Buffett’s contrarian logic has great strategic wisdom. So in this moment of war, let’s get interested in peace. Let’s be further contrarian by examining the role of the notoriously lethal US Special Operations Forces (SOF) in peacetime, or at least non-wartime, environments.

Getting Engaged

The post-Iraq and Afghanistan US national security environment is predictably yearning for a renewed era of engagement. Engagements, described as “the active participation of the United States in relations beyond our borders,” are the centerpiece of the current (2010) US National Security Strategy.[1] The desire to exert American influence through engagement reflects the foreign policy guidance of The White House and, arguably, the mood of a war-weary American public. Yet a key question remains: How are engagements designed, arranged, and implemented to accomplish US policy goals and strategic aspirations abroad?

Engagements occur where the US is in dialogue with allies, partners, friends, and competitors in reasonably normal diplomatic relations. In military parlance, engagements occur in Phase Zero, the pre-crisis environment in which state relations are relatively peaceful and routine. Beyond Phase Zero lies the military phases that represent an escalation of conflict: Phase I (Deter), Phase II (Seize the Initiative), and Phase III (Dominate). Phase Zero then, is a slang descriptor for both the actions and theenvironment in which the US pursues its strategic interests prior to any act of war.

Closer to Peace than War

Although economic, diplomatic and informational elements of US national power generally take precedence in Phase Zero, the US military plays a significant role in peacetime foreign engagement. Among the US military options to engage foreign partners are US SOF. US Army SOF includes Special Forces, Civil Affairs and Military Information Support; US Navy SOF is comprised of SEALs and specialized maritime capabilities; and from all armed services come skilled aviators and counterterror forces. Public knowledge of US SOF is centered on tales of derring-do and inspired stories of lethal military prowess. But there is another story to be told about SOF that is less sexy but more central to the national security interests of the United States.

Specially selected, culturally attuned, and language trained US SOF operate in small teams with select, vetted host nation security forces. Very often, these Phase Zero engagements are in and among local populations with committed, military partners. At other times, engagements unfold with potential partners who are judged to be less than ideal. In such cases, these US SOF engagements are exploratory in nature and can be expanded or retracted according to partner suitability and US policy aims. When engaging new, potential partners, US SOF engagements do not represent deep policy commitments; by design, they are limited policy expressions that start where the pavement stops. Subsequently, the assessments derived from special operations engagements help guide policy decisions about expanding, contracting, or retracting relations with putative partners.

Special operations engagements range from simple tactical-level training (marksmanship, radio operation and communications, medical training, small unit tactics) to more sophisticated topics like armed forces professionalization, security philosophies, and institution building. A typical engagement might last six weeks and involve twelve to twenty US personnel. When performed correctly, these exchanges are both transactional and relational – delivering mutually beneficial exchanges (finite) while deepening the trust and partnership required for true strategic relationships (infinite).

The Art of Restraining the Knife

by Michael McBride

Journal Article | January 31, 2014

Understanding the Limits of Drone Strikes in Pakistan

Throughout the Global War on Terror, Pakistan has been a focal point of violent Islamist extremism and terrorism. President Obama remarked in 2009, “Terrorist attacks in London and Bali were tied to al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan as were attacks in North Africa and the Middle East, in Islamabad and Kabul. If there is a major attack on an Asian, European, or African city, it, too, is likely to have ties to Al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.”[1] The threat extends beyond al Qaeda; 20% of the groups designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations either reside in Pakistan or have significant ties there. Numerous senior leaders in al Qaeda, Haqqani Network (HQN), and Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) have been killed or captured in Pakistan, including Osama bin Laden himself; many are believed to reside there today. Attacks have been launched against forces in Afghanistan, thousands of extremists seeking violent jihad, including scores of suicide bombers, have attended training, and a myriad of transnational terrorist plots have been planned and prepared all from within Pakistan’s borders.

Pakistan has proven to be a complex challenge in the United States’ efforts to dismantle al Qaeda and its like-minded affiliates. Although Pakistan is a non-NATO major ally receiving billions of dollars annually in economic and military aid, it has been a state sponsor to groups actively fighting against Coalition Forces in Afghanistan[2] and conducting terrorist attacks around the world.[3] The complicated relationship between the United States and Pakistan has at times been described as openly adversarial,[4] one of close collaboration,[5] and somewhere in between.[6] However, regardless of the tumultuous nature of the relationship, Pakistan remains an invaluable partner in the Global War on Terror. 

While several leaders have been captured in urban areas such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Karachi or Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have been a key safe haven for al Qaeda, HQN, and TTP and other terrorist groups. Largely due to geography, the FATA has throughout history been a non-permissive environment for both domestic political forces and foreign interveners. President Obama has referred to this border region straddling Afghanistan and Pakistan as, “the most dangerous place in the world.”[7] The treacherous mountain ranges make maintaining a military presence, be it expeditionary or permanent, arduous at best. The resulting natural geographic isolation has over time forged a natural distrust for centralized government among the highly autonomous, tribalized local population. 

Pakistan and the United States have both conducted operations into the FATA to root out the varied militant, terrorist, and insurgent groups residing there. Ground offensives have proven costly and of limited success as most campaigns have ended in short lived peace agreements. As a result, the United States has turned to the use of unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly referred to as “drones” to conduct counterterrorism operations. While drone strikes have proven to be enormously tactically successful, the United States has failed to develop and implement a comprehensive strategy that addresses the root causes of Islamic violent extremism and anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. 

The tactical successes of drone strikes are irrefutable. Over 50 senior Taliban and al Qaeda leaders have been killed by drone strikes in Pakistan since 2004 including two “number three” men in al Qaeda, Abu Laith al-Libi and Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, two “number two men” in al Qaeda, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman and Abu Yahya al-Libi, senior HQN leader and son of patriarch Jalaluddin Haqqani, Badruddin Haqqani, and two TTP leaders, Baitullah Mehsud and Hakimullah Mehsud.[8] The targeted killing campaign has dealt a serious blow to al Qaeda; documents recovered from the Abbottabad raid confirm that drone strikes were devastating the organization, forcing them to devote more time, energy, and resources to merely surviving rather than planning and executing attacks on the United States and its allies. Bin Laden even went as far as to write a memo in October 2010 advising al Qaeda members to flee the tribal areas of Pakistan for remote parts of Afghanistan which were deemed safer despite the presence of over 100,000 soldiers from international forces there.[9] Not only have drone strikes greatly contributed to the inability of al Qaeda to conduct a successful attack in the United States since 2001, but Johnson and Sarbahi also provide compelling evidence that, “drone strikes are associated with decreases in the number rand lethality of militant attacks in the areas where strikes are conducted.”[10]

Military brass, behaving badly: Files detail a spate of misconduct dogging armed forces

By Craig Whitlock, Published: January 27 E-mail the writer

Brig. Gen. Bryan T. Roberts publicly warned his troops at Fort Jackson, S.C., last spring that he and the Army had “zero tolerance for sexual harassment and sexual assault.” Here’s what the Army didn’t tell the soldiers: At the time, Roberts himself was under investigation by the military over allegations that he physically assaulted one of his mistresses on multiple occasions. 

Martin P. Schweitzer, a commander with the Army’s legendary 82nd Airborne Division, was respectful and polite when he met a female member of Congress to discuss matters at Fort Bragg, N.C. Afterward, however, he couldn’t resist tapping out e-mails to two other generals, describing the lawmaker, Rep. Renee L. Ellmers (R-N.C.), as “smoking hot” and jokingly referring to explicit sexual acts. 

David C. Uhrich, a one-star Air Force general, kept a vodka bottle in his desk at Joint Base Langley-Eustis and repeatedly drank on duty, so much so that another officer told investigators that “if he did not have his alcohol, the wheels would come off,” according to the findings of an Air Force probe. The married Uhrich later sought treatment for a drinking problem, but not before he was also investigated for allegedly having an affair, something prohibited under military law. 

The embarrassing episodes are described in previously undisclosed files of military investigations into personal misconduct by U.S. generals and admirals. Along with about two dozen other cases obtained by The Washington Post under the Freedom of Information Act, the investigations add to a litany of revelations about misbehaving brass that have dogged the Pentagon over the past 15 months and tarnished the reputation of U.S. military leadership. 

Since November 2012, when an adulterous affair felled David H. Petraeus, the CIA director and most renowned Army general of his generation, the armed forces have struggled to cope with tawdry disclosures about high-ranking commanders. 

The Navy has been humbled by a spiralingsex-and-bribery scandal, as well as a gambling incident involving a three-star admiral who authorities say they caught using counterfeit chips at a riverfront casino. The Air Force relieved a nuclear commander after investigators said he went on a drinking binge in Moscow. The Armyfired one general for allegedly groping a woman, forced another to retire after he accepted expensive gifts from a foreigner, and demoted its top commander in Africa after an investigation found he treated himself and his wife to a $750-a-night Caribbean hotel suite at taxpayer expense. 

The subject is painfully sensitive inside the Pentagon, where many generals and admirals say they are appalled but reluctant to openly criticize their peers. 

“It’s just offensive when you see people do some of the things we’ve seen. It’s just completely offensive,” said an Army brigadier general who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “As officers, we ought to be held to a higher standard. Some of this stuff you’re seeing with folks is just completely unacceptable.” 

Martin L. Cook, a professor of military ethics at the Naval War College in Newport, R.I., said the recent eruption of misconduct is “frankly a puzzle to everybody.” One factor, he added, may be that as officers climb higher in the ranks they become insulated and fewer people are willing to challenge or question them. 

In his ethics classes, Cook said, military leaders recognize “they’ve got a major trust problem with the American people. . . . They’re deeply ashamed of it. It’s horror. They say, ‘Oh, we can’t have that happening.’ ” 

Frustration is rising all the way up the chain of command. 

In late 2012, then-Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta ordered a review of ethical standards for senior military officers. Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, responded with a memo outlining several new training and evaluation programs for commanders and their staffs. 

5 QUESTIONS WITH ADMIRAL STAVRIDIS ON SCOTCH AND STRATEGY

Ryan Evans

January 27, 2014

This is the latest edition of our Five Questions series. Each week, we feature an expert, practitioner, or leader answering five questions on a topic of current relevance in the world of defense, security, and foreign policy. Well, four of the questions are topical. The fifth is about booze. We are War on the Rocks, after all.

This week, I spoke with Admiral James Stavridis, USN (Ret). He is the former Supreme Allied Commander at NATO and currently Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. Admiral Stavridis holds a PhD from Fletcher, and has written five books, includingDestroyer Command, and over a hundred articles. You can follow him on Twitter @stavridisj.

1. Admiral Stavridis, thanks for doing this. You’ve been a great supporter of War on the Rocks since we launched with your review of The Guns at Last Light. Warrior-scholars like you, General Petraeus, and General McMaster have played very important roles in our military during a trying time of two wars and new security challenges. Does this signal a new era defined by the warrior-scholar seeking to bridge theory and practice? Or was this a blip?

I think the nation has always had warrior-scholars (and warrior-diplomats for that matter) and we will continue to have them. Many of the WWII senior officers had published in the US Naval Institute Proceedings and similar journals. Flag Officers like Rear Admiral JC Wylie, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, Rear Admiral Stephen B. Luce, and Rear Admiral Bradley Fiske come quickly to mind. As I look at young officers today, we are still producing fine thinkers and writers in the field of strategy, many with PhDs or other advanced degrees. We will not deliver security solely from the barrel of a gun in this turbulent century, and we will need to out-think our opponents as well as out-fight them.

2. In the latest issue of Proceedings, you and David Weinstein call for the consolidation of all the service’s cyber components into a U.S. Cyber Force—not just a joint command, but a full-fledged, new service within DoD? What problems would this solve?

FRONT ROW SEAT: WATCHING COIN FAIL IN AFGHANISTAN

Evan Munsing

January 28, 2014

With President Karzai as unlikely as ever to sign a Bilateral Security Agreement with the United States, an early withdrawal of coalition forces from Afghanistan seems increasingly probable. Although the focus will soon turn to determining how to safely extract coalition forces, the United States also needs to think about how to preserve the strategic gains it has won at so great a cost over the past dozen years. Unfortunately, America’s own institutional inertia will probably lead Washington to continue pushing a failed nationalcounterinsurgency strategy on the Afghan military. The United States has taught its Afghan allies—albeit not always successfully—to fight and govern as Americans fight and govern, rather than teaching them to do so in a way consistent with their culture and in line with their own strategic beliefs. The current strategy, which requires a unified national policy directed by a strong, legitimate government, is unrealistic in its expectations and inappropriate against violence that is dispersed and motivated by local concerns. Unless the United States begins pushing the Afghan National Security Forces to adopt policies more suited to their current needs and their military culture, the blood and treasure we have poured into Afghanistan over the past twelve years will have been for nothing.

Current counterinsurgency doctrine presumes a national solution to local problems: that a national army, usually with the aid of local police or militias, can come into a fractious area and convince unfriendly locals to ally themselves with the state by bringing security and certain amenities like electricity or economic programs. This strategy requires a functioning and legitimate government and a skilled and disciplined military that can effectively target insurgents who hide amongst the civilian population without causing collateral damage. It assumes that all enemy strongholds must be retaken and that unless the insurgency is defeated in all its parts, the nation cannot survive.

Rather than allowing the Afghans to find their own solutions to the insurgency, the United States bequeathed its ally a reductionist approach. Thus, “the insurgents” were identified with the “Taliban” and the “Taliban” with those who most closely resemble the Taliban of Mullah Omar’s failed state. Although the insurgency is strengthened, fueled and spread partly through religious networks, it is fundamentally a localist and anti-government movement. Conservative rather than radical and tribal rather than religious, the insurgency is less a religious or political organization and more a classic peasant revolt of isolated, anti-modernist and largely landless individuals. These individuals’ only familiarity with the central government comes from being taxed and subjected to its military force. The dispersed and decentralized nature of the insurgency is not, as is sometimes argued, evidence of what is fashionably termed “chaoplexy” or otherwise indicative of an advanced cell-based structure. Rather, the insurgency is dispersed and decentralized because there are too many actors with too many different personal agendas dispersed over too large an area with too few communication tools for it to be a unified or coherentpolitical opponent—and it is precisely this that makes it so durable and so difficult to defeat using our current policies.

20YY: THE FUTURE OF WARFARE

Paul Scharre and Shawn Brimley

January 29, 2014 · in Analysis

The U.S. military is at a critical juncture. With the end of two wars and a sharp drawdown in defense spending, investments over the next several years will set the military’s course for decades to come. The Pentagon can make smart investments now to prepare for the future, or it can continue to cling to “wasting assets,” legacy platforms and concepts that will be less and less survivable in a future of widely proliferated precision-guided weapons. Without a clear vision of what future force to build, however, bureaucratic inertia and existing programs of record will carry the day.

A new report from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) articulates a vision of unmanned and autonomous systems as the centerpiece of an emerging warfighting regime dominated by robotics. The proliferation of anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) technologies to both state and non-state actors is only a precursor to an even more lethal regime characterized by swarms of networked, intelligent machines. Because many of the underlying technologies behind robotics are driven by commercial sector innovation in information technology, the U.S. defense community does not have a monopoly on this technology. Unlike previous innovations like GPS, stealth technology, or advanced sensory capabilities, the robotics revolution will happen whether the U.S. moves first in this arena or not. While the United States enjoys a small lead in unmanned and robotic systems today, other actors are moving aggressively. Scores of states have unmanned vehicles, as do some non-state actors. Autonomous drones can be purchased off-the-shelf, allowing a single terrorist to field a swarm of kamikaze drones. Last month, a hacker demonstrated the ability to use a drone to hack and take control ofother drones, raising the specter of a “zombie drone” air force. The robotic warfighting regime is barreling down upon us at an alarming rate, and the U.S. military will need to be more adaptive and innovative or risk falling behind.

20YY: Preparing for War in the Robotic Age is the first report in a multi-year initiative that CNAS has launched examining the impact of emerging technology on the future of warfare. Rapid changes in robotics, autonomy, networking, and computer processing have the potential to dramatically change the character and speed of armed conflict.

Rapidly advancing information technology is leading to a world with greater transparency, connectivity, and more intelligent machines. Advanced sensors will make it increasingly difficult for U.S. platforms to hide from states possessing sophisticated reconnaissance-strike battle networks, while ubiquitous smart phones will make hiding large force elements in populated areas impossible. Smartphones and social media empower citizens with ad hoc command-and-control networks, allowing non-state groups to operate makeshift battle networks. The proliferation of precision-guided weaponry, from long-range ballistic missiles like China’s DF-21 to guided rockets, artillery, mortars, and missiles (GRAMM) in the hands of non-state actors, will increasingly allow adversaries to accurately hit what they find. These trends in the democratization of information and the democratization of violence will result in a future operating environment that is more contested, transparent, and lethal.

Unmanned and autonomous systems have enormous potential to help U.S. forces not only survive in such an environment but prevail decisively over adversaries. Unmanned systems can operate with greater range, persistence, and endurance than comparable manned systems, extending the reach of U.S. surveillance and strike forces into contested and denied environments. Ship-based assets can provide low-cost reconnaissance and close-air support to better enable expeditionary operations. Long-endurance air vehicles can operate as relays for navigation information and communications, acting as a resilient airborne command-and-control network in the face of satellite disruption. Unmanned scouts can operate on land, in the air, on the ocean’s surface, and undersea for weeks or months at a time, providing commanders a persistent reconnaissance network to track and observe adversaries.

But that is not their revolutionary potential.

Unmanned systems can take greater risks than manned systems, enabling new concepts of operation. They can be made cheap, expendable, and numerous, reversing the current paradigm of ever-smaller numbers of increasingly expensive platforms and bringing mass back into the warfighting equation. Platform survivability will be replaced by swarm resiliency, where survivability is a function of the swarm as a whole, rather than a single platform. Rather than suffer the catastrophic loss of a single expensive platform, a swarm can degrade gracefully and continue to fight as assets are attrited. Swarms of unmanned systems can protect manned platforms by extended their sensors and defenses. Picket lines of unmanned surface vessels and aircraft can defend U.S. ships from swarming small boats. Unmanned “loyal wingmen” can augment the capabilities of manned aircraft, providing stand-in jamming, forward reconnaissance, and additional strike capacity. Unmanned surface and undersea pods loaded with vertical launching system (VLS) cells can augment the strike and missile defense capacity of manned ships and submarines. On the ground, expendable robots can be dropped behind enemy lines to scout out positions and call for fire. Unmanned vehicles can take point, drawing fire and flushing out enemy forces while manned vehicles follow safely behind. Tiny micro drones can swarm buildings to identify and neutralize enemies while troops wait safely outside. Across the entire battlefront, the leading edge would be unmanned.

But that is not their revolutionary potential.

Swarms of networked, autonomous systems could operate with greater coordination and speed of maneuver than possible with human-controlled systems. The resulting reconnaissance-strike swarm could saturate and overwhelm enemy defenses, being everywhere and nowhere at once. Low-cost systems can soak up enemy missiles at favorable cost-exchange ratios. Autonomous non-kinetic weapons could jam, spoof, and disable enemy sensors, sowing confusion and raising the electromagnetic noise level to hide follow-on U.S. strike platforms. Air-mobile swarms could revolutionize ground maneuver warfare. Self-coordinating airborne reconnaissance networks could hunt mobile missile launchers, relaying coordinates to human controllers for strike approval. Humans would provide mission-level command-and-control and strike authorization, but at the tactical level, autonomous speed and networking would dominate.

These developments will not happen automatically, however, and thecurrent path the Department of Defense is on will not take full advantage of unmanned systems’ potential. Technology is nothing without the right concepts of operation, doctrine, training, and organizational structures to use it. What command-and-control structures are needed to take advantage of swarms? What doctrine should be adopted to employ them? How should human-machine interfaces be designed and how should human controllers be trained to yield appropriate levels of trust in automation? How will networks be made resilient against degradation and insertion of faulty data? How will we harden systems against adversary cyber attacks to prevent a zombie robot army turned against us? What is the right mix of human and machine cognition to manage the deluge of data our sensors will collect? What is the right balance of autonomy and human control?

CNAS’s 20YY Warfare Initiative will examine these and other critical issues as we explore the contours of the emerging warfighting regime. Developments in secure communications, energy density, cyber defenses, human performance optimization, and other enabling technologies will be essential to fully achieve the potential of a robotics revolution. How technology matures in materials science, rail guns, and high-energy lasers could change key contests in stealth, armor, and cost-exchange ratios in offensive and defensive operations. Advancements in military technology will also intersect in hard-to-predict ways with long term megatrends in the evolution of the Internet, synthetic biology, empowered citizenry, shifting demographics, the diffusion of power across the international system, resource scarcity, and environmental degradation. Institutional changes will be needed to foster a defense bureaucracy and culture that is more agile, adaptable, and receptive to innovation and change. In an era of rapid, disruptive change, the Pentagon risks being too slow to adapt to the future if it continues to take decades to design and field new systems and resists the new concepts of operation that unmanned and autonomous systems might enable.

Beyond the military operational implications, emerging technologies will raise profound questions of policy, strategy, ethics, and morality. How will unmanned systems influence decisions about use of force, war powers, civil-military relations, or deterrence and crisis stability? What principles and norms should guide the development of weapons in space or cyberspace, or weapons with autonomous functions or employing directed energy? Policy makers must begin to grapple with these challenging issues today as the foundations for the future are being laid. In the wordsof technologist and futurist Bill Joy: “We can’t pick the future, but we can steer the future.”

Technology will never make war clean, bloodless, or easy. War will remain a human endeavor, but the tools of warfare matter. As Max Boot wrote in his sweeping history of revolutions in warfare: “Fighting will never be an antiseptic engineering exercise. It will always be a bloody business subject to chance and uncertainty…. But the way punishment gets inflicted has been changing for centuries, and it will continue to change in strange and unpredictable ways.”

Sustaining America’s military advantages requires peering into a dim and uncertain future to understand, as best we can, the contours of the emerging warfighting regime. In launching the 20YY Warfare Initiative, we at CNAS aim to build a community of interest to explore these and other possibilities and how best to prepare the U.S. military for whatever developments lie ahead. Our goal is a spirited debate that can better illuminate the general shape of the future and develop actionable recommendations to help today’s leaders ensure tomorrow’s U.S. military is prepared to fight and win. We hope you will join us. The time to invest in the future is now.

Paul Scharre (@paul_scharre) is Fellow and Director of the 20YY Warfare Initiative at the Center for a New American Security. Shawn Brimley (@shawnbrimley) is Executive Vice President at CNAS, and co-author of the new report, 20YY: Preparing for War in the Robotic Age.

Personality of Sardar Patel Distinctive Attributes

All the Indians are proud of their most lovable and most adorable hero, the greatest patriot, pragmatist to the core, a formidably awe inspiring and a towering personality who commanded respect and total devotion from all whether he was a bureaucrat, or an army General, British or Indian or a political leader. He was a real Sardar of our country. As such, I shall not add any word of my own though I would love to and consider a great honour to peg my heart felt impressions about him. I shall refrain from doing so and rather present before my readers the views of his contemporaries who have been the great sons of the soil or the research scholars thereafter. 

Sh. V. Shanker, the then political secretary to Sardar Patel has said “It was only when I came in to closer association with Sardar that I realized his strength and influence over his colleagues including the Prime Minister; his lightening decisions, his definite views, his intensely practical out look, his uncanny gift of sizing up men and situations. His keen sense of strategy, his power of anticipation and the difficulty of his opponents in catching him on the wrong foot” (1) and that “psychologically, pt. Nehru was in a sense afraid of Sardar’s influence and position; he had some thing of inferiority complex. When ever Sardar disposed of his long worded arguments cryptically, Pt. Nehru was usually non plussed and there was a silent gap before he resumed his talk again” (2) “I know how deeply anguished he used to feel at his helplessness in settling the problem with his accustomed swiftness”(3) He had a beautiful quote on Sardar that “Sarojini in her own characteristic manner described Sardar as ‘a rough diamond in an iron casket’ Sardar was par excellence a self made man. He owed little to others until he met Gandhi ji. Gandhi ji was undoubtedly the greatest single influence on his life” (4) 

This is how the Princes of British India viewed him. Maharaja of Gwalior while presenting a portrait of him to Parliament in 1954, said “Here is the man whom I once I hated. Here is the man of whom I was later afraid. Here is the man whom I admire and love” (5) 

President Rajinder Prasad wrote in his diary on May 13, 1959 “That there is to day an India to think and talk about, is very largely due to Sardar Patel’s statesman ship and firm administration” “yet” added Prasad “We are apt to ignore him” “Patel is a man to remember gratefully in good times and as a benchmark of India’s potential when the times seem depressing or daunting”(6)

Sh. B. Krishna, an illustrious Journalist, son of a great patriot and a freedom fighter Late Sh. Gauri Shanker has written an extremely well researched book on Sardar Patel, a kind of Magnum Opus titled “Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel-India’s Iron Man” He has mentioned in his book that during the Cabinet Mission parleys in 1946 in New Delhi, a Jain Muni visited Patel. After a lavish praise, he went on to suggest: ‘Sardar Sahib, you must write India’s history.’ Patel had a hearty laugh and said, ‘We do not write history, we make history.’ He has given one more interesting anecdote that showed up his mind. Sh. Krishna quotes Mahavir Desai, a freedom fighter and a close associate of Gandhi ji, that “Sardar revealed his true character rather humorously when he told Gandhi in Yervada jail in 1932 “Who has attained immortality by reading and writing? They live for ever who are either victorious or go down fighting bravely” (7) 

“On the subject of states, Mount batten reported to London, ‘Nehru and Gandhi are pathological.’ He was relieved that unsentimental Vallabh Bhai Patel had been made head of the Deptt rather than more emotional Nehru. (8) Late Mehar Chand Mahajan, the then Prime Minister of the state of J&K and former Chief Justice of India while recording his tributes to Sardar Patel after demitting his office of the Prime Minister of J&K, mentions “ If God had spared him for India for some more years, the history of India and its administration might have been differently written”(9)