Reuters | Aided by a bleak job market, the U.S. military met all of its recruitment goals in the past year for the first time since it became an all-volunteer force in 1973, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
Military services have been stretched thin by conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, giving added weight to recruitment efforts as President Barack Obama considers sending another 40,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year.
The United States already has 67,000 troops in Afghanistan and about 119,000 in Iraq.
Pentagon officials said recruitment gains were fueled by the deepest U.S. recession since the Great Depression and an unemployment rate nearing 10 percent.
"For the first time since the advent of the all-volunteer force, all of the military components, active and reserve, met their number as well as their quality goals," said Bill Carr, deputy undersecretary of defense for military personnel policy.
The U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force sent a total of about 169,000 active duty recruits to training in the 2009 fiscal year that ended on September 30, beating their 164,000-member goal, the Pentagon said.
National guard and reserve forces sent about 128,000 recruits to training, beating their goal.
Carr said rising private sector unemployment was a force behind the increase in military recruitment but was not the only factor that "allowed us to be, for much of the year, in a very favorable position."
Curtis Gilroy, a senior Pentagon official, said a 10 percent increase in the national unemployment rate generally translates into a 4 percent to 6 percent "improvement in high-quality Army enlistments."
Recruitment does not come cheap. On average, the military spends between $9,000 and $10,000 per recruit, a figure that includes the high cost of advertising and of employing thousands of recruiters across the country, Carr said.
The Army spends far more, about $22,000 per recruit.
AP | As the Pentagon warns of the security risks posed by social networking sites, newly released government documents show the military also uses these Internet tools to monitor and react to coverage of high-profile events.
The Air Force tracked the instant messaging service Twitter, video carrier YouTube and various blogs to assess the huge public backlash to the Air Force One flyover of the Statue of Liberty this spring, according to the documents.
And while the attempts at damage control failed — "No positive spin is possible," one PowerPoint chart reads — the episode opens a window into the tactics for operating in a boundless digital news cycle.
This new terrain has slippery slopes, though, for the military. Facebook, MySpace and other social media sites are very popular among service members, including those in Iraq and Afghanistan who want to keep in touch with friends and family. The sites are also valued by military organizations for recruiting or communicating with other federal agencies.
But posting information on these interactive links makes it vulnerable to being lost or stolen by the enemy, according to Pentagon officials. On Thursday hackers shut down Twitter for several hours, while Facebook had intermittent access problems — an indication of the shortcomings of relying on these services.
The Marine Corps' computer network blocks users from accessing social media sites, which service officials say expose "information to adversaries" and provide "an easy conduit for information leakage."
The Marines recently made its ban official. And that prohibition might extend to other parts of the military pending a top-level review ordered in late July by Deputy Defense Secretary Bill Lynn.
In a widely distributed memo, Lynn said the so-called "Web 2.0" sites are important tools but more study is needed to understand their threats and benefits.
Air Force officials are already aware of the potential benefits.
According to the Air Force One documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, a unit called the Combat Information Cell at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida monitored the public fallout from the April 27 flight and offered recommendations for dealing with the fast-breaking story.
Formed two years ago, the cell is made up of as many as nine people who analyze piles of data culled from the Internet and other sources to determine whether the Air Force's message is being heard.
The presidential plane took off for New York from Andrews Air Force in Maryland accompanied by two F-16 jet fighters. The purpose of the flight, which wasn't publicly announced, was to get new photos of the specially modified Boeing 747 with the statue in the background.
The mission quickly became a public relations disaster as panicked New Yorkers, fearing another 9/11-style attack, emptied office buildings. In the aftermath, Louis Caldera, director of the White House military office that authorized the flight, was fired.
The Combat Information Cell's first assessment of the event said "Web site blog comments 'furious' at best." Local reporting of the flyover was "very critical, highlighting scare factor," it added.
A Twitter search revealed a rate of one "tweet" per minute about a pair of F-16s chasing a commercial airliner. A tweet is a text message of up to 140 characters delivered to the author's subscribers, who are known as followers.
Media coverage over the next 24 hours "will focus on local hysteria and lack of public notification," the cell predicted. "Blogs will continue to be overwhelmingly negative."
"Damage control requires timely counter-information," but the opportunity for that had passed, the assessment said. The cell recommended acknowledging the mistake and ensuring it didn't happen again.
Another update on April 28 said the story was still "reverberating, surprisingly resilient." The tweet rate had grown to three per minute and the words "New York" had been pushed into Twitter's high-frequency topic category. Videos of the event posted on YouTube had been viewed more than 260,000 times, it said.
By April 30, the story had faded, the cell reported. The blogs were still very critical, but it was the White House, not the Air Force, that was taking the heat, the assessment for that day said.
The other dominant news story at the time was public concern over the spread of swine flu. According to the documents, the same Air Force cell suggested there may be an opportunity to turn the tide. "Government involvement in this incident could be used to frame expected handling of H1N1 outbreak," one of the PowerPoint charts reads.
A Utah Air National Guard unit, the 101st Information Warfare Flight in Salt Lake City, was also monitoring the social sites. "To say that this event is being beaten like a dead horse is an understatement," reads an April 28 e-mail from the unit to other Air Force offices. "Has really taken off in Web. 2.0."
Both the 101st and the Combat Information Cell are attached to the 1st Air Force, which is based at Tyndall and is in charge of guarding U.S. airspace.
1st Air Force spokesman Al Eakle explained that the command had no role in planning or coordinating the Air Force One flight. But the units tracked social networks and blog traffic "to obtain what lessons we might learn so as not to repeat them in the future." The assessments were sent to the command's leadership so they'd know how the public was reacting, he added.
John Verdi of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington said gray zones can emerge while monitoring social networking sites because viewing and participating is based on trust.
"Lots of times individuals upload private or sensitive information that they expect to share with their friends or family and not the whole Internet world," Verdi said. "It would certainly be a major problem if the government were accessing that information under false pretenses."
Paul Bove, an Air Force digital media strategist, said service personnel are instructed not to do that. Nor are they to use aliases or represent a position that's beyond the scope of what they do.
"We always tell people, 'Stay in your lane and don't talk about something that you're not qualified to talk about,'" Bove said.
The issue of aliases is at the heart of a complaint stemming for the Army Corps of Engineers' performance in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina.
On Tuesday, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., asked the Pentagon inspector general to examine allegations that Corps employees posed as ordinary citizens and posted comments on a New Orleans web site defending the organization from criticism following the disaster.
Jon Donley, former editor of NOLA.com, said in a June 9 affidavit that there were as many as 20 registered users who developed a pattern of not only defending the Corps, but at times being "overtly abusive" to any critics. He said he was able to trace their posts to a Corps Internet address.
Ken Holder, a spokesman for Corps' New Orleans District, said it will cooperate with any investigation.
News Scientist | THE Pentagon's enthusiasm for non-lethal crowd-control weapons appears to have stepped up a gear with its decision to develop a microwave pain-infliction system that can be fired from an aircraft.
The device is an extension of its controversial Active Denial System, which uses microwaves to heat the surface of the skin, creating a painful sensation without burning that strongly motivates the target to flee. The ADS was unveiled in 2001, but it has not been deployed owing to legal issues and safety fears.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) in Quantico, Virginia, has now called for it to be upgraded. The US air force, whose radar technology the ADS is based on, is increasing its annual funding of the system from $2 million to $10 million.
The transmitting antenna on the current system is 2 metres across, produces a single beam of similar width and is steered mechanically, making it cumbersome. At the heart of the new weapon will be a compact airborne antenna, which will be steered electronically and be capable of generating multiple beams, each of which can be aimed while on the move.
The new antenna will be steered electronically and is capable of generating multiple heat beams
The ADS has been dogged by controversy. Jürgen Altmann, a physicist at Dortmund University in Germany, showed that the microwave beams can cause serious burns at levels not far above those required to repel people. This was verified when a US airman was hospitalised with second-degree burns during testing in April 2007.
The airborne version will not make it any less contentious. "Independent of the mode of production, with this size of antenna the beam will show variations of intensity with distance - not just a simple decrease - up to about 500 metres," says Altmann. Shooting it on the move with any accuracy will be difficult, he adds.
Dave Law, head of the technology division of the JNLWD, says the new antenna will operate at the lowest possible effective power level and will have a sophisticated automated target-tracking system.
In a recent cost-benefit analysis, the US Government Accountability Office rated the ADS worst out of eight non-lethal weapons currently in development.
The Global Information Grid, which began in 2003 under the guidance of Donald Rumsfeld, will give users a “God-Like” view of the entire world.
Infowars | Anyone who has ever been a fan of the Terminator mythos knows about the all seeing, all knowing global computer network known as Skynet. Well, the U.S. Military is working on the real deal! The GIG, or Global Information Grid is a worldwide surveillance network that will give anyone linked into it instant information, at the users request, about anything, anytime, anywhere in the world! This project, which began in 2003 under the guidance of Donald Rumsfeld, will give users a “God-Like” view of the entire world.
Robert J. Stevens, chief executive of the Lockheed Martin Corporation, the nation’s biggest military contractor, said he envisioned a “highly secure Internet in which military and intelligence activities are fused,” shaping 21st-century warfare in the way that nuclear weapons shaped the cold war. Every member of the military would have “a picture of the battle space, a God’s-eye view,” he said. “And that’s real power.”
But wait, there’s more!
It seems the U.S. Air Force is investing huge sums of money, which began at a summit at the University of North Dakota, into the development of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Army! Thats right folks, and there is a flavor for everyone planned for full force deployment by 2047! Not only is their the Predator and Global Hawk that the world has grown so familiar with, but they are also developing mid- and short-range UAVs as well. All of which are currently capable of autonomously taking off, flying en route to the “mission area” and landing, allowing for minimal human interaction. The real crazy stuff comes in the form of Fly insect-shaped UAV designed for espionage. These micro-sized vehicles are capable of full audio and video transmission making secrecy a thing of the past!
As if that wasn’t enough, the payload on each of these machines vary from Infrared/Electro-optical missiles to being able to deploy nanomachine weapons engineered in various different ways. Able to infect the target(s) resulting in whatever devious malaise they are programed with and ultimately resulting in death.
There you have it folks, if they have their way, there will be a global government able to know everything your doing at anytime of the day as well as all your personal information. Able to respond to any threat instantly, allowing the elitist scum to kick back and relax while anyone defying their wishes is eradicated by an unmanned vehicle using any number of weapon types, including nanomachines, to finish the job. Include the eugenics going on today and the successful depopulation of the planet and you have a corporate elitist theme park!
Below are the main links that PPF Member Anti-Illuminati graciously found for our perusal:
Media Monarchy | Pay extra attention in oregon as these exercises coincide w/ the fictional 'operation blackjack' explosion in Portland on Jun22 ...
Northcom | North American Aerospace Defense Command and U.S. Northern Command are planning to conduct a combined exercise June 18 - 24 that will incorporate several military exercises with a National Guard exercise. These linked exercises are referred to as ARDENT SENTRY 09. Events will take place in multiple venues across the country includingIowa, Kansas, Oregon, Wyoming, and off the East and West Coasts.
The exercise will allow several Department of Defense organizations and some federal and state partners to implement plans and respond to a variety of notional events. Historically, exercises like these have helped both DoD and other agencies review their processes and procedures and focus their future training efforts on closing gaps and identifying areas that need additional attention.
The activities in the vicinity of Camp Rilea will involve the deployment of an Army National Guard ground-based air defense system that will be integrated with Air Force airborne systems (AWACS and fighters) and a Navy Aegis Destroyer. (Media interested in covering this event should contact Mr. Al Eakle at 1-850-283-8080)
Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska National Guard units will respond to multiple events in Iowa and Kansas including simulated train derailments and foreign animal disease. (Media interested in covering events in Iowa should contact LTC Greg Hapgood at 515-971-6385; for events in Kansas, contact Sharon Watson at 785-274-1192)
In Wyoming, Air Force Space Command will respond to an incident involving a simulated nuclear weapon. (Media interested in covering this should contact Capt. Sharbe Clark at 719-554-3815).
Danger Room | Bloggers: If you suddenly find Air Force officers leaving barbed comments after one of your posts, don't be surprised. They're just following the service's new "counter-blogging" flow chart. In a twelve-point plan, put together by the emerging technology division of the Air Force's public affairs arm, airmen are given guidance on how to handle "trolls," "ragers" -- and even well-informed online writers, too. It's all part of an Air Force push to "counter the people out there in the blogosphere who have negative opinions about the U.S. government and the Air Force," Captain David Faggard says.
In contrast, the Air Force has largely kept the blogosphere at arms' length. Most of the sites are banned from Air Force networks. And the service has mostly stayed away from the Pentagon's blog outreach efforts. Captain Faggard, who's become the Air Force Public Affairs Agency's designated social media guru, has made strides in shifting that attitude. The air service now has a Twitter feed, a blog of its own -- and marching orders, for how to comment on other sites. "We're trying to get people to understand that they can do this," he tells Danger Room.
The flow chart lays out a range of possible responses to a blog post. Airmen can offer a "factual and well-cited response [that] is not factually erroneous, a rant or rage, bashing or negative in nature." They can "let the post stand -- no response." Or they cancan "fix the facts," offering up fresh perspective. No matter what, the chart says, airmen should "disclose your Air Force connection," "respond in a tone that reflects high on the rich heritage of the Air Force," and "focus on the most-used sites related to the Air Force."
Despite the chart's sometimes-stiff language, former military spokesman Steven Field says he's "a fan." Field, who's been occasionally critical of the armed services' blog outreach efforts, tells Danger Room: "I've always thought that a military-like process would be a good bridge to connect the services with the blogosphere. There's a field manual for everything in the military, so this flow-chart presents online communications in a DoD [Department of Defense] friendly format."
One stipulation -- While it should be a guide of communications, it shouldn't become a ball-and-chain. Online comms require some level of nimble, on-your-feet response. As long as the Air Force doesn't use the "evaluate" phase to get approval from every Tom, Dick and Harry in the Pentagon, it should be a good tool.
"Now they just need to lift those damn IP [Internet Protocol] filters," Field adds, so airmen can actually read those blogs that they're supposed to respond to.
The Angel Thunder rescue exercise began in 2006 as a local effort at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, which is home to several combat-rescue squadrons.
The idea caught on at the Pentagon, and the effort now includes aircraft from different branches of the service and personnel from several allied nations and non-military agencies.
Arizona Daily Star | To troops downed in combat, few sights are sweeter than the approach of military rescuers. In a few weeks, Tucson will be at the center of efforts to speed up that lifesaving process.
Personnel from around the globe will converge at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base from Dec. 1 to Dec. 12 for the largest rescue exercise of its kind.
The effort, dubbed Angel Thunder, will involve the U.S. Army and Air Force, troops from Germany, Chile, Colombia and observers from Canada, Mexico, Brazil and Pakistan.
Several non-military U.S. agencies such as the State and Justice departments, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, also will take part in the drills, which aim to smooth interaction between military branches, allied nations and civilian agencies.
With about 450 personnel involved, Angel Thunder "is the most complex and largest Department of Defense personnel- recovery exercise to date," said a news release from Air Combat Command in Langley, Va.
D-M will be at the hub of the effort, but most of the mock rescue action will take place elsewhere in Arizona and in New Mexico.
Tucsonans may notice some unfamiliar aircraft in the skies during the drills, such as Vietnam-era UH-1N Huey helicopters, which will be used to airlift personnel and equipment to and from training.
But D-M officials predict minimal impact on city residents because some of the base's normal training will be suspended during the exercises, and the heaviest traffic will be at remote sites.
For many of the military participants, the drills will serve as pre-deployment training for missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Maj. Brett Hartnett, a D-M rescue pilot and project officer in charge of the event.
Some of the practice runs are classified — the Defense Department doesn't want enemies knowing the methods used by military rescuers — so few details are being released, Hartnett said.
But a major part of training will center on a mock earthquake in a foreign country near a combat zone — the same scenario that arose in Pakistan a few years back when U.S. combat rescuers in Afghanistan were diverted over the border to aid civilian survivors.
Military rescuers often are called upon to save civilians during natural disasters abroad and at home. No matter who needs saving, many basic rescue skills are the same, Hartnett said.
Such training is crucial to keeping skills sharp, and ensuring agencies can work together well, Hartnett said.
"We need to do what we need to do to bring the kids back home," he said.
Elite combat brigade for homeland security missions raises ire of ACLU
By Erin Rosa
Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of U.S. Northern Command. (Photo/Erin Rosa)
Colorado Independent | In the next three years the military plans to activate and train an estimated 4,700 service members for specialized domestic operations, according to Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, commander of U.S. Northern Command, which was created in 2002 for homeland defense missions.
The comments, made at the annual National Homeland Defense and Security Symposium in Colorado Springs last week, reveal more details about the recent stationing of active military personnel inside United States borders for what officials say is a mission centering around responding to catastrophic emergencies.
In September the Army Times reported that the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team — a unit based in Fort Stewart, Ga., that most recently spent 35 of the last 60 months in Iraq patrolling in full battle gear — would be put under the control of Northern Command, located on Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.
Military representatives claim that the unit, now referred to as the Consequence Management Response Force, is only supposed to assist in responding to terrorist attacks or natural disasters, but that hasn’t stopped numerous civil liberties advocates from speculating just how closely the military will be involved with law enforcement issues falling under a state’s jurisdiction.
“This isn’t a military police brigade or a civil affairs brigade. This is actually a combat brigade being assigned a domestic mission,” said Mike German, national security counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s legislative office in Washington., D.C.
The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act Request last week with the Department of Justice and the Pentagon asking for records relating to the assignment of domestic forces to the Northern Command.
“One of our founding touchstones of democracy is that the military is not to be used against the American people. Over a hundred years ago that sentiment was put into law in the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibited the military from being involved in law enforcement functions,” German said. “Our hope is to find as much information as we can to challenge whether this is appropriate or not and to create some public awareness about what’s going on”
Now the commander of Northern Command claims that at least two more military units will be stationed inside the county in the next two years, contributing to an estimated total of 4,700 specially trained service members.
“It’s to help us manage the consequences of a large-scale event,” said Renuart. “We have one [unit] now trained and equipped and assigned to the Northern Command. We’ll grow a second one this calendar year of 2009 and a third one in the calender year 2010 so we can provide the nation three sets of capabilities that could respond to an event of the size of 9/11 or larger.”
According to Renuart, that means the units will have unique training in the logistics and medical fields.
“These are medical personnel, they’re chemical decontamination teams, they’re engineering teams, they’re logistics folks,” Renuart said. “It is really a force designed to respond to an event of catastrophic size. There have been some who say that this is designed as a law enforcement activity or that it will somehow be used to take away the authorities of a governor or a state, and that’s absolutely not the case.”
But German isn’t convinced.
“It’s fine for the general to say that,” the counter-terrorist operations specialist said. “But we want to know what the policies actually are, what the roles are and what the regulations are to see whether this is actually complying with the law.”
During the symposium Renuart admitted that the Northern Command has assisted regularly with law enforcement activities in the past.
“Here in Colorado every day we’re integrated with 45 other federal agencies in our headquarters planning for not only the natural disasters, but what would happen if a chemical attack was brought into our country by a terrorist organization,” Renuart said, emphasizing the command’s roles with intelligence and supporting anti-drug efforts.
“How do we track intelligence information that might identify networks of terrorists that might be around the world trying to get to us? How do we support law enforcement every day in the fight against narcotics entering illegally in our southwest borders? All of these things are part of the Northern Command mission.”
Said German, “It seems to be an incremental approach where the military is being used for narrow missions, but then more and more types of narrow missions until they all combine into one overarching mission.”
It is currently unknown what units may be assigned to domestic tasks in the next two years, but members of Northern Command will undergo a large-scale exercise this month simulating a destructive earthquake in southern California.
Near-Earth space ... lots of players on the pitch.
The Register| American weaponrytech behemoth Lockheed Martin has been awarded a $30m contract by the US Air Force Space Superiority Systems Wing. Under the deal, Lockheed will develop a prototype "tactical" space scanner for use in the covert orbital warfare of tomorrow.
The tech demonstrator programme is referred to as Self-Awareness Space Situational Awareness (SASSA), and will see Lockheed developing a "payload to provide tactical space situational awareness with dedicated communications".
The US military and intelligence communities operate a satellite fleet numbering in the hundreds, with missions ranging from spying to communications to navigation. Civilians worldwide also depend on some of these satellites - especially those of the Global Positioning System (GPS), used by the vast majority of the world's satnav devices.
These satellites are a major part of America's power - its ability to watch the world and operate globally. But they are far from invulnerable, as the famous Chinese antisatellite interceptor test of 2007 (and the US Navy shootdown later that year) have recently shown.
Quite apart from shooting at satellites from the ground, there are other methods which rival powers might use to nobble each other's spacecraft or play cunning space tricks on one another - perhaps in a less obvious fashion than firing a rocket up from one's own territory. The US satellite fleet, after all, is far from alone - there are more than 8,000 known objects being tracked in Earth orbit by the Pentagon.
Various cunning tricks can be used to disguise just what a given nation is doing. America already has plans to put up surveillance spacecraft not to monitor events on earth, but rather to keep track of what foreign satellites are up to.
There is a need ... to understand when a satellite manoeuvres, to understand when something deploys off a satellite or a bus ... ultimately to be able to determine the capabilities of the satellite and the intent of the operator ... Objective: monitor blue, red and grey space order-of-battle ...
Blue forces are friendlies, of course, and red are known hostiles - but a lot of the time there's something in space and nobody but its makers know where it came from or what its mission is.
Strictly speaking, direct military action in space is a no-no, an international diplomatic position which was established following Soviet and US sat-buster weapons trials back in Cold War times. It's OK to use space for military purposes, but not to actually start making active strikes against other people's machinery. Probably. Unless you really need to.
Thus America doesn't admit that it has any pukka anti-satellite weapons - just missile-defence ones like the Standard interceptor used in its Pacific spy-bird shootdown last summer, and groundbased sat jammers ("Offensive Counterspace" CCS) whose effect is claimed to be "temporary and reversible". Likewise, nations such as Russia, China, Iran et al all deny that they even want the ability to fight a war in space - but all happily admit that they want the ability to put things up there.
Hence the SASSA demo inked today, which is intended to evolve into a package which could be added to future US satellites, letting them know when they came under attack and relay information back to the air force Space Superiority Wing in California. Without SASSA, goes the thinking, American satellites might one day simply go offline at inopportune moments and the US would have no idea just who had nobbled them or how - or even, if it was just one or two sats, any real certainty that nobbling had taken place.
Out-and-out warfare in orbit would seem to remain unlikely for the foreseeable future, then. But moves like today's indicate that coming decades will see the established and emerging space powers jockeying for advantage on the orbital playing field.
By and large the rules will be followed - but an occasional crafty foul while the ref's attention is elsewhere seems more than likely. Just as in international rugby, tactics which are theoretically verboten seem likely to become part of the game.
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Reuters | Aided by a bleak job market, the U.S. military met all of its recruitment goals in the past year for the first time since it became an all-volunteer force in 1973, the Pentagon said on Tuesday.
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