January 14, 2013

US to warn Britain that cuts must not weaken defence

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/9799107/US-to-warn-Britain-that-cuts-must-not-weaken-defence.html



The US defence secretary will arrive in London this week with a warning that neither Britain nor America can afford to "weaken our defences in the process of solving our budget woes", a senior Pentagon official has told The Daily Telegraph.

US to warn Britain that cuts must not weaken defence
By Raf Sanchez, Washington
8:17PM GMT 13 Jan 2013

Leon Panetta's last trip as a member of President Barack Obama's cabinet will take him to four European nations at a time of severe military budget cuts on both sides of the Atlantic.

While European members of Nato rein in defence spending as part of widespread austerity drives, Mr Panetta's own department faces deep cuts within weeks unless Congress can agree on a compromise to avert them.

Derek Chollet, US assistant secretary of defence for international security, said the Pentagon chief was making the journey to "reaffirm the importance of the transatlantic security partnership" but also to compare notes on defence at a time of economic hardship.

"Clearly the UK in the last few years has been going through its own exercise of dealing with a difficult economic situation and budget cuts and giving a lot of thought to future strategy, as have we," Mr Chollet said.

January 14, 2013

US close to meeting objective of Afghan war, says Obama

http://dawn.com/2013/01/13/us-close-to-meeting-objective-of-afghan-war-says-obama/



US President Barack Obama (R) and his Afghan counterpart Hamid Karzai leave after a joint press conference in the East Room at the White House in Washington, DC, on January 11, 2013. At a joint news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the White House on Friday, President Obama announced the acceleration of the US military transition in Afghanistan, and said the US military would play a supporting role in the nation by this spring.

US close to meeting objective of Afghan war, says Obama
From the Newspaper | Anwar Iqbal | 1 day ago

WASHINGTON: US President Barack Obama said on Saturday that by the end of next year, America’s war in Afghanistan would be over. “After more than a decade of war, the nation we need to rebuild is our own,” said Mr Obama in his weekly radio address.

At a joint news conference with Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the White House on Friday, President Obama announced the acceleration of the US military transition in Afghanistan, and said the US military would play a supporting role in the nation by this spring.

On Saturday, he said he wanted to update his nation “on how we will end this war, bring our troops home, and continue the work of rebuilding America”.

~snip~

“And our core objective, the reason we went to war in the first place, is now within reach: ensuring that Al Qaeda can never again use Afghanistan to launch attacks against America,” he said.



unhappycamper comment: I did not realize we had an official objective in Afghanistan, since the (objective) goal posts have been moving on a regular basis.

January 14, 2013

The hegemonic United States

http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/international/08-Jan-2013/the-hegemonic-united-states

The hegemonic United States
January 08, 2013
KENNETH WEISBRODE

Governance in the United States is at a standoff. The crisis over the federal budget has led many people around the world to wonder if Americans haven’t lost their minds.

Ultimately, as Winston Churchill infamously observed, they may be counted on to do the right thing after exhausting all other options. But this hardly is sound policy with every new vote in Congress. Maybe the latest crisis is symptomatic of a deeper and even more serious problem.

The future of the United States - and the American experiment - seems bleak. The optimism for which Americans are known comes less readily. While pessimism is nothing unique in American history - widespread since the time of the Puritans - its prevalence today is spread by the realisation that the country’s position of global superpower may soon be lost.

This realisation, regarded as a “post-hegemonic” fact, is no longer controversial. All empires vanish eventually. Hegemony indeed may be a form of imperial rule - it’s been called an empire with good manners - but that’s beside the point. American hegemony may be giving way to some other post-hegemonic condition. It is hard to say where it will lead, or what it signifies.

January 13, 2013

Pentagon report cites "lack of maturity" of Lockheed F-35 jet

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/01/13/us-lockheed-fighter-idUSBRE90C00D20130113

Pentagon report cites "lack of maturity" of Lockheed F-35 jet
By Andrea Shalal-Esa
WASHINGTON | Sun Jan 13, 2013 1:59am EST

(Reuters) - Lockheed Martin Corp's's new F-35 fighter jet has completed over a third of its planned flight tests, but it Still faces problems with the helmet needed to fly the plane, software development and weapons integration, according to a report by the Pentagon's chief weapons tester.

The 18-page report, sent to Congress on Friday, included a detailed account of those issues and others, which it said underscored the "lack of maturity" of the $396 billion weapons program, the Pentagon's most expensive ever.

The program exceeded the number of flight tests and specific system tests planned for 2012 but lagged in some areas due to unresolved problems and newly discovered issues, the report said. It said Lockheed did not accomplish all the tests planned for 2012, but boosted the year's total of specific tests by bringing forward some evaluations planned in later years.

~snip~

The plane's stealthy coatings - which make it nearly invisible to enemy radars - were also peeling off on horizontal tail surfaces due to higher-than-expected temperatures during high-speed, high-altitude flights, the report said.



unhappycamper comment: Is it too late to put this POS up for the Golden Fleece award??

By the way that helmet they are referring to in paragraph one costs $250,000. And it, like the F-35, does not work as advertised.

January 13, 2013

U.S. sailor arrested for trespassing in house in Yokosuka

http://www.japantoday.com/category/crime/view/u-s-sailor-arrested-for-breaking-into-house-in-yokosuka

U.S. sailor arrested for trespassing in house in Yokosuka
Crime Jan. 13, 2013 - 06:00PM JST

TOKYO —

Japanese police arrested a drunken 24-year-old U.S. Navy sailor early Sunday after he allegedly trespassed in a house, violating a night-time curfew imposed after a rape case last year, reports said.

Petty officer 2nd class Richard Lawton is stationed in Yokosuka, a port city south of Tokyo, and wrongly believed that his friends were staying in the house, Jiji Press and Kyodo News agency said. The residents of the house told local media they do not know Lawton.

Lawton, who was arrested at around 2:40 a.m., is suspected of violating a night-time curfew imposed by the U.S. military on all its servicemen in Japan after two sailors were arrested on charges of raping a woman in Okinawa in October.

~snip~

Despite the curfew, misconduct involving U.S. servicemen has continued to fuel anti-US sentiment in host communities. Incidents include trespass involving an airman and a marine under the influence of alcohol and drink-driving by another marine.


---

stripes.com reports:

http://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/bad-behavior-in-the-pacific/yokosuka-sailor-faces-trespassing-charge-after-entering-woman-s-home-1.203732

Incidents involving U.S. servicemembers have come under heightened scrutiny since October, when two Texas-based sailors were arrested for the alleged rape of a woman on Okinawa. Soon afterward, U.S. Forces Japan imposed the curfew. Other measures, aimed at curtailing late-night drinking, have been imposed since then as incidents have continued.



unhappycamper comment: For more info on US military crime in Japan, google --> japan us military crime

January 13, 2013

Military-Industrial Complex Owns Vermont

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Military-Industrial-Comple-by-William-Boardman-130111-696.html

Military-Industrial Complex Owns Vermont
By William Boardman
General News 1/11/2013 at 21:23:36

The Vermont Congressional delegation and other elected officials still refuse to explain why they support basing the first strike nuclear-capable F-35 in the midst of Vermont's most populated area even though the Air Force itself says the single engine jet is so loud it will destroy private homes as effectively as if they were bombed.

When 16 concerned, multi-denominational clergy wrote an open letter to Senator Patrick Leahy asking for a postponement of the fighter-bomber basing, he did not respond. Democrat Leahy, Vermont's senior Senator, has already spent years refusing to meet with the people closest to the Burlington Airport, where the Air Force has said it might base the F-35 even though Burlington is the only one of the Air Force's preferred options where the impact on the surrounding civilian are will be severe, and the impact on some 1,300 families will be devastating.

While the focus has been on Leahy, who is perceived as the lead advocate of basing the F-35 in Vermont, his behavior has been duplicated across the political food chain. Self-described socialist Senator Bernie Sanders hasn't met with the people most directly in harm's way, not has Vermont's only Congressman, Democrat Peter Welch. All have issued evasive, misleading, and sometimes false statements about the Air Force plan.

~snip~

None of the elected officials involved, including two of the mayors, Miro Weinberger of Burlington and Michael O'Brien of Winooski, has credibly explained the social injustice of destroying the homes of people who are les well off for the benefit of wealthier people, who also took several of these "democratic" representatives on a jaunt to Eglin Air Force base in Florida to listen F-35s and their promoters extol their virtues. That, as one wag put it, was akin to going to the Vatican for a critical view of Catholicism.

January 12, 2013

Turkey Delays F-35 Order Due to Lacking in Project

http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/146396/turkey-delays-f-35-order-due-to-lacking-in-project.html



Turkey Delays F-35 Order Due to Lacking in Project
Saturday, 12 January 2013

Turkey has joined a “concern club” about a U.S.-led F-35 fighter jet development program with the Undersecretariat of Defense Industry (SSM) delaying to an unknown date the very first order for the aircraft it had placed last year.

Turkey, a member of the consortium that also includes Britain, [s]Canada[/s], Australia, Italy, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands, will reconsider the date for the order of two jets next year, the SSM said in a statement, citing concerns over poor development of the jet’s capacity to maneuver and an increase in costs due to delays in orders by the U.S. and other partners.

~snip~


After 2020 Turkey is also planning to design, develop and produce another fighter plane to eliminate the JSF’s deficiencies either by itself, or through a partner, most likely South Korea.

Canada scrapped in December last year a controversial sole-source plan to buy F-35 jets from Lockheed Martin Corp., saying it would now evaluate all available options for acquiring new fighters.

January 12, 2013

Hot Stuff: The F-35 Just Became 25% More Vulnerable

http://nation.time.com/2013/01/11/hot-stuff-the-f-35-just-became-25-more-vulnerable/



Hot Stuff: The F-35 Just Became 25% More Vulnerable
By Mark Thompson
Jan. 11, 2013

~snip~

The three versions of the plane – the F-35A for the Air Force, the F-36B for the Marines, and the F-35C for the Navy – have reached their maximum weights, about 30,000 pounds each.

But F-35 engineers know that required tweaks down the runway will force them to add weight to the plane — to strengthen parts that need to be stronger, add protection of one kind or another, or if components end up weighing more than predicted. So they’ve been whittling away at the plane’s evolving design to make it as light as possible.

That can be a problem, as the Pentagon’s Operational Test and Evaluation shop has just revealed in its 2012 report on the F-35.

Two changes designed to cut the plane’s weight by 11 pounds have made it 25% more vulnerable to exploding in mid-air, and other unfavorable outcomes.

January 10, 2013

Tomgram: Nick Turse, A War Victim's Question Only You Can Answer

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175635/

Tomgram: Nick Turse, A War Victim's Question Only You Can Answer
Posted by Nick Turse at 9:30am, January 8, 2013.

In late December 2001, not long after Washington’s second Afghan War began, there was that wedding celebration in eastern Afghanistan in which 110 of 112 villagers were reportedly killed by American B-52 and B-1B bombers using precision guided weapons. Then there were the more than 40 Iraqi wedding celebrants (27 from one extended family, including 14 children) who died when U.S. planes struck their party at a village near the Syrian border back in May 2004, and the Afghan bridal party of 70 to 90 who were taken out by a U.S. airstrike on a road near the Pakistani border in July 2008. (The bride and 46 of those accompanying her died, according to an Afghan inquiry, including 39 women and children.) Added to this list should be the 24 unarmed Iraqi men, women, and children, ranging in age from 3 to 76, murdered by U.S. Marines in November 2005 in the long-forgotten Haditha massacre. And the 14-year-old girl whom American soldiers gang-raped and murdered along with her family in Mahmudiya, south of Baghdad, the next year. And then there was the headline-grabbing case of those 16 civilians, nine of them children, 11 from one family, reportedly slaughtered (and some of their corpses burned) by Staff Sergeant Robert Bales in two southern Afghan villages in the course of a single night in March 2012.

Let’s not forget either the 12 Iraqis, including two Reuters employees, shot dead (and two children badly wounded) on a Baghdad street in July 2007 by the laughing crew of an Apache helicopter, as revealed in an infamous video released by WikiLeaks. There were also the 60 children (and up to 30 adults) who died in the Afghan village of Azizabad on an August night in 2008 while attending a memorial service for a tribal leader who had been, villagers reported, anti-Taliban. That, too, was thanks to air strikes. There were also those three (or more) Afghan civilians hunted down “for sport” in the summer of 2010 by a self-appointed U.S. “kill team” who were collecting trophy body parts. And there were the 10 boys, including two sets of brothers, collecting wood for their families in Afghanistan's Kunar Province early in 2011, who were attacked by U.S. helicopters. Only one wounded boy survived. Or most recently, the 11 Yemeni civilians, including women and children, in a Toyota truck killed by a U.S. airstrike and initially labeled “al-Qaeda militants.”

Such a list, of course, only scratches the surface of a reality that we in the United States have hardly noticed and so have to expend no effort whatsoever to ignore. Unlike for the victims of 9/11 or more recently of Newtown, there will be no memorials, no teddy bears, no special rites, no solemn ceremonies. Nothing. The distant dead of our wars have largely paid the price in silence and anonymity for what the U.S. intelligence community likes to call the last superpower’s duty of being a “global security provider” -- and which elsewhere often looks more like inflicting mayhem on local populations.

In addition, the particular form of “security” we’ve brought to such areas via the U.S. military continues even after we leave. U.S. troops are gone from Iraq, for example, but the violence our invasion and occupation set loose has never ended. Iraq Body Count has just issued its report on rising deaths from violence in that country in 2012, both among the Iraqi police (922) and civilians (4,471). It concludes: “In sum the latest evidence suggests that the country remains in a state of low-level war little changed since early 2009, with a ‘background’ level of everyday armed violence punctuated by occasional larger-scale attacks designed to kill many people at once.” We bear genuine responsibility for this, but no longer care a whit.

January 10, 2013

Want Pentagon Cuts? Make Barney Frank a Senator

http://www.opednews.com/articles/Want-Pentagon-Cuts-Make-B-by-John-Nichols-130109-655.html



Former US Representative Barney Frank (D-MA) holds a news conference on issues before the House Financial Services Committee, November 3, 2009.

Want Pentagon Cuts? Make Barney Frank a Senator
By John Nichols
OpEdNews Op Eds 1/9/2013 at 15:59:38

Well, of course, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick should pick former Congressman Barney Frank to fill the US Senate vacancy that will be created when John Kerry is confirmed as the nation's 68th Secretary of State.

~snip~

Just days ago having finished serving 32 years as one of the most outspoken and engaged members of the US House of Representatives, he's actively campaigning for appointment to Kerry's seat.

Frank makes the best case for his selection, arguing that his experience as a former chairman of and ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee makes him uniquely qualified to serve during a period when -- because the "Fiscal Cliff" deal has set up huge fights over everything from raising the debt ceiling to sequester cuts -- the focus of the Congress will be on issues on which he's something of an expert.

~snip~

He is one of the most ardent and consistent advocates for cutting the Department of Defense budget. And it is hard to imagine how Congress gets beyond the current wrangling over debts and deficits without addressing what President Obama's designee for Secretary of Defense -- former Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel -- refers to as a "bloated" Pentagon budget.