Joe DeCapua | May 24

VOA - A new assessment has been released on efforts to end LRA rebel attacks in central and east Africa. The Enough Project says despite the deployment of U.S. advisers, current operations lack resources and troops.

Enough Project field researcher Kasper Agger spent several weeks in the region affected by LRA attacks. He said in the first three months of this year, there were more than 50 attacks, 9 deaths, 90 abductions and the continued displacement of nearly 450,000 civilians. Agger, who’s based in Kampala, Uganda, titled his report Mission in the Balance.

“I wanted to give it that title to stress that despite progress on the ground we are still far from seeing an end to the LRA. So I wanted to stress some kind of urgency,” he said.

The Enough Project is an advocacy group working to end genocide and crimes against humanity.

Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. | Washington | May 24

AOL Defense - The Senate Armed Services Committee unanimously passed its mark-up of the annual defense spending bill, rejecting all proposed cuts to the Air National Guard, cutting the Defense Department's civilian and contractor workforce by 5 percent over five years, and restricting aid to Pakistan.

The bill is silent on detention of terrorist suspects.

Chris Boyette | May 23

CNN - A fire was burning Wednesday evening on a nuclear submarine docked at a U.S. Navy shipyard in Maine, and four people were injured, authorities said.

The USS Miami's reactor was not operating at the time and was not affected, according to Gary Hildreth, a public affairs officer for the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Kittery.

Navy spokesperson Lt. Myers Vasquez said the attack sub was in dry dock for regularly scheduled maintenance when the fire started.

Haji Mujtaba/ Miranshah & Jibran Ahmad / Peshawar | May 23

Reuters - A U.S. drone strike on suspected Islamist militants in northwest Pakistan killed 10 people on Thursday, intelligence officials said, an attack likely to raise tensions in a standoff with Washington over NATO supply routes to Afghanistan.

The pilotless drone aircraft fired two missiles at a compound in a village in North Waziristan, a day after a similar attack killed four suspected militants in the same region.

Fret not, drone strike naysayers -- John Brennan has a list, and he's checking it twice:

White House counterterror chief John Brennan has seized the lead in guiding the debate on which terror leaders will be targeted for drone attacks or raids, establishing a new procedure to vet both military and CIA targets.

The move concentrates power over the use of lethal U.S. force outside war zones at the White House.

The process, which is about a month old, means Brennan's staff consults the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies as to who should go on the list, making a previous military-run review process in place since 2009 less relevant, according to two current and three former U.S. officials aware of the evolution in how the government targets terrorists.

In describing Brennan's arrangement to The Associated Press, the officials provided the first detailed description of the military's previous review process that set a schedule for killing or capturing terror leaders around the Arab world and beyond. They spoke on condition of anonymity because U.S. officials are not allowed to publicly describe the classified targeting program.

One senior administration official argues that Brennan's move adds another layer of review that augments rather than detracts from the Pentagon's role. The official says that in fact there will be more people at the table making the decisions, including representatives from every agency involved in counterterrorism, before they are reviewed by senior officials and ultimately the president.

Yep. Nothing beats normalizing the unthinkable via bureaucratic smoke & mirrors. Apparently Arendt's keystone work is to Obama as Orwell's was to W: not a cautionary tale, but, rather, a user's guide.

h/t Roland Paris

I always find it both amusing and frustrating when American national security analysts decide they're going to pontificate on NATO and Europe. Try as they might, it seems impossible for them to see the issue in any other than a highly polarized, American exceptionalist, way. Take my friend Michael Cohen at the national Security Network, writing today:

the biggest problem with NATO funding (and this has been true for quite some time) is not that President Obama is undermining the alliance with defense cuts here at home, but rather that America's NATO allies refuse to fully pony up their share of NATO's defense budget. And why they should they? Indeed, as long as NATO funding is used as a political football then the United States will continue to be played for a sucker by the Europeans who know that for all our complaining about their lack of financial support for the military alliance . . . we're never going to pull the plug.

At some point, it's worth asking whether this makes any sense at all. Why should the US be responsible for underwriting European security (and in turn the European welfare state), especially when European countries face not a single legitimate military threat to their well-being? Moreover, it Europeans don't think it's important enough to spend their own money on their own security why should America? Now granted, the Europeans are a little short on cash these days, but then so is the United States. But of course as the House of Representatives reminded us recently - as they eviscerated key social safety net programs to restore cuts made to the defense budget -- you can't put a price tag on a huge American military that does little to keep America safe and underwrites the security of other countries.

In Romney's statement he noted "NATO is a testament to the fact that the price of weakness is always far greater than the price of strength." If anything it's increasingly becoming a testament to how divorced from reality our own national security debate has become. The new American weakness is apparently when you don't let key European allies take enough advantage of you.

Now there are exactly two unarguable facts in all that: that Europe refuses to pony up its share of the NATO budget and that European countries face not a single legitimate military threat to their well-being. Do you think the two might be connected?

Look, from a European point of view - and I don't mean the poodlish yes-men in London - the NATO budget may be agreed to by all parties but it is set to an American agenda and only agreed to after a lot of American arm-bending. It funds an organization which has outlived its original purpose, surviving now only to give a modicum of cover to American military adventurism - which is why the US will "never pull the plug". NATO only survives because the costs that would be imposed by America on any European nation who withdrew would be greater than the status quo.

It is ridiculous to suggest that European allies are "taking advantage" of the US or that the US is "underwriting European security" while admitting that there's no threat to Europe needing all that money spent on it. But Michael isn't the only smart American making the same logical mistake this week, to say nothing of what gets said by the not-so-smart hawks over on the Right.

P.S.: Is America sure it wants a well armed Europe? Remember the last time it was true? The US spent the next thirty years guaranteeing Europe's security partly so that Europe (Germany) wouldn't have to stand up seriously continental-sized armed forces itself. And if it does, why does it keep trying to put its own spanner in the works of a European Defense Force and other intra-European defense pacts?

Ewen MacAskill | Chicago | May 21

The Guardian - Obama refuses bilateral meeting with his Pakistani counterpart, Asif Ali Zardari, who wants demands met before roads reopen

A rift between the US and Pakistan appears to be widening at the Nato summit in Chicago – a dangerous development that could undermine Barack Obama's hopes for an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The US has said repeatedly that Pakistan holds the key to the future of the region but relations between Obama and President Asif Ali Zardari have deteriorated in a standoff over supply routes to Afghanistan.

Pakistan closed the routes after a US air strike killed two dozen Pakistani troops in November.

Obama is refusing to see Zardari, possibly because he arrived in Chicago without a deal in his pocket on reopening the Pakistan-Afghanistan border to US transport. A White House spokesman said no bilateral meeting between Obama and Zardari at the Nato summit was scheduled.

Instead Pakistan is making a series of demands in return for reopening the supply routes, including a review of the US policy of drone attacks against targets inside Pakistan and a public apology for the killing of its troops.

Present day soldiers, who mutilate enemy corpses or take body-parts as trophies, are typically considered to be suffering from the extreme stresses of battle.

But, research [] shows that this sort of misconduct has most often been carried out by fighters who viewed the enemy as racially different from themselves and used images of the hunt to describe their actions.

"The roots of this behavour lie [] in a social history of racism and in military traditions that use hunting metaphors for war. Although this misconduct is very rare, it has persisted in predictable patterns since the European Enlightenment. This was the period when the first ideologies of race began to appear, classifying some human populations as closer to animals than others."

There's nowhere the U.S. doesn't consider it's own backyard, whether the locals like it or not.

The US army has said a combat brigade will be assigned to the Pentagon's Africa Command next year in a pilot programme that will send small teams of soldiers to countries around the continent to do training and participate in military exercises.

A brigade from 10th Mountain Division out of Fort Drum, NY will be assigned the task of putting US boots on the ground across the continent.

Africa Command is still based out of Kelley Barracks, Stuttgart, Germany because not a single African nation volunteered to host the US military basing required when Bush first stood up the unit in 2007. The view of the Southern African Development Community, which includes South Africa, Angola, Botswana and the Democratic Republic of Congo, that "it is better if the United States were involved with Africa from a distance rather than be present on the continent" was echoed by every other African security organisation and individual nations. Given that, one has to wonder just how welcome the guys from 10th Mountain will be.

Lindell Kay & Mike Mchugh | Camp Lejeune, NC | May 15

The (Jacksonville) Daily News - A wide-reaching investigation by military and civilian authorities has uncovered a criminal conspiracy within the Armed Forces to steal and sell nearly $2 million in guns and combat gear to gangs in the U.S. and foreign countries including China, military officials have confirmed.

The probe began more than a year and a half ago when agents with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service began to conduct undercover operations to disrupt and reduce the theft, transfer, sale and possession of stolen U.S. Government property. With the aid of Marine and Naval authorities, NCIS has recovered $1.8 million in stolen guns and combat gear to include assault rifles, night-vision goggles, flashlights and other items, military officials said.

This is just beyond tears.

I've been reading the rare posts on this blog for a while - and they should all be read - but I seldom comment simply because words are insufficient.

I'm sure there are many more women and probably gays in similar circumstances.

All I can do is agitate for better VA funding and programs and speak up for tighter controls in the military.

And weep.

Go read David Axe on how Italian aviation blogger David Cenciotti joined the dots to throw some new light on America's shadow wars along Africa's Indian Ocean coastline. F-15s based in Djibouti carrying out airstrikes in Yemen, spyplanes at the same airbase, Reaper drones with bases in the Seychelles Yemen and Ethiopia. Axe himself adds the possibility of a floating headquarters for special forces ops sitting somewhere of the coast.

America is waging more wars, with a bigger involvement, than it wants to admit.

Sajjad Tarakzai | Islamabad | May 14

AFP - Pakistan said Monday it was time to "move on" and repair ties with the United States and NATO, the strongest sign yet that it may reopen supply routes into Afghanistan closed for nearly six months.

Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar made the remarks a day before Pakistani leaders are to discuss ending the blockade, and thereby cave in to a key demand from the West in time to attend a NATO summit in Chicago on May 20-21.

Islamabad shut its Afghan border to NATO supplies after US air strikes killed 24 soldiers on November 26, provoking a major crisis in Pakistani-US relations on top of the outcry from the raid that killed Osama bin Laden the previous May.

"It was important to make a point, Pakistan has made a point and we now need to move on and go into a positive zone and try to conduct our relations," Pakistan's foreign minister told a news conference.

"We are trying to put this relationship, you know, in a positive zone and I am quite sure that we will be successful in doing so."

Jim Michaels | Quantico | May 10

USA TODAY - In retooling for the 21st century, the Pentagon is counting on death delivered from a distance.

Seth Robson | Yokota Air base, Japan | May 10

S&S - U.S. servicemembers looking at career options in this era of shrinking military budgets and force drawdowns might want to take a look Down Under.

The Australian government is recruiting experienced U.S. enlisted personnel and officers to fill a range of positions — from submariners to doctors — in its military, according to a posting on the Australian Defence Force website.

“The Australian Defence Force looks to overseas candidates to fill gaps in our Services, which can’t currently be satisfied by standard recruitment,” reads the intro for overseas applicants on the Defence Force’s recruitment website. “We recognise that these candidates can bring skills and attributes to the Navy, Army and Air Force that will strengthen their overall operation and success rate.”

The job offers could be tempting for U.S. troops as the Afghan War winds down and the Department of Defense looks to trim billions of dollars and more than 100,000 uniformed personnel from its books.

Michael Klare | May 10 | Tom Dispatch

The Energy Wars Heat Up: Six Recent Clashes and Conflicts on a Planet Heading Into Energy Overdrive

Conflict and intrigue over valuable energy supplies have been features of the international landscape for a long time. Major wars over oil have been fought every decade or so since World War I, and smaller engagements have erupted every few years; a flare-up or two in 2012, then, would be part of the normal scheme of things. Instead, what we are now seeing is a whole cluster of oil-related clashes stretching across the globe, involving a dozen or so countries, with more popping up all the time. Consider these flash-points as signals that we are entering an era of intensified conflict over energy.

From the Atlantic to the Pacific, Argentina to the Philippines, here are the six areas of conflict -- all tied to energy supplies -- that have made news in just the first few months of 2012:

Washington | Mar 10

AFP - US defense chiefs appealed Wednesday for lawmakers to ratify the UN convention on the law of sea, saying the country was at a disadvantage because of the Senate's refusal to back the accord.

The UN convention governing maritime rights entered into force in 1994 but despite support from successive American presidents from both parties, the US Senate has never ratified the treaty, which requires a two-thirds majority.

A small faction of conservative Republicans oppose the agreement, arguing it could undermine US legal authority over oil and gas resources in the continental shelf.

But Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a speech that ratification "has broad support among major US industries, including offshore energy, shipbuilding, commercial shipping, and communications companies."

The companies see the treaty as providing legal certainty and "the same is true for national security," Panetta told a conference organized by the Atlantic Council and the Pew Charitable Trusts.

Panetta was joined by the US military's top officer, General Martin Dempsey, who also argued that the convention would "strengthen our strategic position in Asia."

Pentagon officials see the treaty as crucial given a renewed US focus on naval power and the Asia-Pacific region. With China's more assertive stance in the South China Sea, US officials believe the convention will enable US warships to continue to operate in the Pacific and hold exercises.

By backing the convention, the United States would "ensure that our rights are not whittled away by the excessive claims and erroneous interpretations of others," said Panetta, apparently referring to China's maritime disputes with other Asian states.

By opposing the treaty, the United States potentially undermines its "credibility" in Asia "just as we're pushing for a rules-based order in the region and the peaceful resolution of martime and territorial disputes in the South China Sea and elsewhere," he said.

"How can we argue that other nations must abide by international rules when we haven't officially accepted those rules ourselves?"

Paul Elias | San Francisco | May 7

AP - A federal appeals court on Monday reversed its demand that the Veterans Affairs Department dramatically overhaul its mental health care system.

A special 11-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said that any such changes need to be ordered by Congress or the president.

The 10-1 ruling reversed an earlier decision by a three-judge panel of the same court.

The May 2011 ruling had ordered the VA to ensure that suicidal vets are seen immediately, among other changes. It found the VA's "unchecked incompetence" in handling the flood of post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health claims was unconstitutional.

The new decision said courts are powerless to implement the fixes sought by two veterans groups that filed the lawsuit against the VA in 2007. The lawsuits alleged that hundreds of thousands of veterans had to wait an average of four years to fully receive the mental health benefits owed them.

LaHore | May 7

PakTribune - Defence Minister Ahmed Mukhtar said on Sunday that Pakistan had offered the US to jointly carry out drone strikes in the restive Tribal Areas but the Obama administration turned down the proposal.

Addressing a press conference, the minister said Pakistan was willing to maintain its relations with the US according to expectations of the nation. Therefore, he added, the government had also asked Washington to stop drone strikes in Pakistan but to no avail. Mukhtar said he could not predict anything about the future of NATO supply through Pakistan.

However, he added, it would be a violation of international laws if the supply route for Afghanistan was not restored.

And what does international law say about unauthorized drone strikes against a sovereign nation?

Natalie DiBlasio | May 6

USA TODAY - An Army wife who witnessed her husband's death during a Skype video chat said she saw a bullet hole in a closet behind him after he collapsed, the (New York) Daily News reported.

Capt. Bruce Kevin Clark, stationed in Afghanistan, fell suddenly on Monday during a routine Skype conversation with his wife, Susan Orellana-Clark, the Daily News reported.

The family released a statement today describing what Orellana-Clark saw in the video feed.

"Clark was suddenly knocked forward," the statement said. "The closet behind him had a bullet hole in it. The other individuals, including a member of the military, who rushed to the home of CPT Clark's wife also saw the hole and agreed it was a bullet hole."

The statement says the Skype link remained open for two hours on April 30 as family and friends in the U.S. and Afghanistan called for help.

"After two hours and many frantic phone calls by Mrs. Clark, two military personnel arrived in the room and appeared to check his pulse, but provided no details about his condition to his wife," the statement said.

Ed Pilkington | New York | May 6

The Guardian - The problem of US military veterans falling into a life of crime after returning from Iraq and Afghanistan has reached such levels that a law enforcer in Georgia has opened what is believed to be America's first county jail devoted to veteran inmates.

John Darr, the sheriff of Muscogee County in Columbus, Georgia, has created the new facility in an attempt to break the cycle of recidivism by providing them with specialist services to help them deal with the problems they carry with them when they decamp.

"It's really unique. What we're bringing together is a lot of resources," Darr told the local Columbus Ledger-Enquirer.

Among the partnerships that are being set up is a link to Veterans Court, a community group that works with veterans in prison suffering from mental illness. The new dormitory, that will house 16 incarcerated veterans, will also provide those soon to be released with advice and support as they transition back into the community.

Up-to-date figures on the number of imprisoned veterans are hard to come by, but the problem is known to be extensive. A report from 2004 calculated there were about 140,000 veterans in US federal and state prisons but that might be a small fraction of the total as many more are held at county jail level.

Killing the messenger may (still) be an ineffectual means of addressing and mitigating serious problems. But, as a recently-unearthed internal Pentagon report from May 2011 notes, career-killing reprisals on Defense Department whistleblowers are all-too common. R. Jeffrey Smith and Aaron Mehta of the Center for Public Integrity explain how Defense Department officials charged with investigating reprisal claims showed "persistent sloppiness and a systematic disregard for Pentagon rules meant to protect those who report fraud, abuses and the waste of taxpayer funds":

A three-person team of investigators, assigned to review the performance of the Directorate for Military Reprisal Investigations, concluded that in 2010, the directorate repeatedly turned aside evidence of serious punishments inflicted on those who had complained.

The actions included threatened or actual discharges, demotions, firings, prosecutions and a mental health referral. At least one of the alleged reprisals was taken because the complainer had written to Congress, an act that Pentagon regulations say is a “protected communication” immune from retaliation. Some of the other whistleblowers had alleged discrimination, travel violations and “criminality,” the report states.

In all, investigators disputed the directorate’s dismissal of more than half of the 152 whistleblowing cases it reviewed and called for it to revamp its procedures and start enforcing the protective rules.

Related: Paul Harris outlines what he contends is a sharp escalation under Obama in the war on whistleblowers:

Over the past three and a half years the Obama White House has instead shown a ferocious hostility to many whistleblowers and earned itself the ire of progressive columnists like Salon's Glenn Greenwald and whistleblower defence groups like the Project on Government Oversight and the Government Accountability Project.

Danielle Brian, of the PGO, has said the US department of justice in the Obama administration "sent a clear of message of fear and intimidation" to whistleblowers in the national security field. This is how the GAP's Jesselyn Raddack – herself a former whistleblower at the DoJ – put it: "While the Bush administration treated whistleblowers unmercifully, the Obama administration has been far worse. It is actually prosecuting them," she wrote recently.

To do that it is using the bluntest of tools: the Espionage Act, a first world war-era law intended to combat the threat from spies, not internal dissenters. So far six whistleblowers have been charged under the draconian law with the last one – CIA veteran John Kiriakou – being indicted on 3 April.

Flashback: Jane Mayer on Obama's aggressive contribution to the seemingly neverending quest for tighter secrecy in DC -- and what it all means for American democracy.

U.S. special forces commander seeks to expand operations

Same as we've been doing, but more of it - and with less control. As I read the article, I'm not the only one disturbed by the possibility of having a special ops command with the capability to go 'rogue', whatever the original intent or understanding might be.

From the point of view of military operations, it might be an improvement over mobilizing tens of thousands of conventional troops and wreaking havoc as in Iraq & Afghanistan - probably a lot fewer bodies.

May 5

AFP - Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called on US troops to tighten up discipline and display “integrity” after a series of public relations disasters that he said could play into the hands of America’s enemies.

Panetta, echoing a message from Army and Marine Corps leaders, on Friday said the misconduct related only to a small percentage of the force but that digital technology magnified any incident, posing a threat to the military’s image.

“These days, it takes only seconds, seconds, for a picture, a photo to suddenly become an international headline,” he told hundreds of troops at Fort Benning, Georgia.

“And those headlines can impact the mission that we’re engaged in, they can put your fellow service members at risk, they can hurt morale, they can damage our standing in the world and they can cost lives.”

The Pentagon chief appealed to the troops to uphold the highest standards of conduct.

“I need every one of you, every one of you, and all of your fellow service members, to always display the strongest character, the greatest discipline, and the utmost integrity in everything you do,” he said in a televised.

...and whatever you do, don't youtube it! ;)

Mansur Mirovalev | Moscow | May 3

AP - Russia's top military officer has threatened to carry out a pre-emptive strike on U.S.-led NATO missile defense facilities in Eastern Europe if Washington goes ahead with its controversial plan to build a missile shield.

President Dmitry Medvedev said last year that Russia will retaliate militarily if it does not reach an agreement with the United States and NATO on the missile defense system.

Chief of General Staff Nikolai Makarov went even further Thursday. "A decision to use destructive force pre-emptively will be taken if the situation worsens," he said at an international conference attended by senior U.S. and NATO officials.

Russian Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov also warned on Thursday that talks between Moscow and Washington on the topic are "close to a dead end."

U.S. missile defense plans in Europe have been one of the touchiest subjects in U.S.-Russian relations for years.

Moscow rejects Washington's claim that the missile defense plan is solely to deal with any Iranian missile threat and has voiced fears it will eventually become powerful enough to undermine Russia's nuclear deterrent. Moscow has proposed running the missile shield jointly with NATO, but the alliance has rejected that proposal.

Makarov's statement on Thursday doesn't seem to imply an immediate threat, but aims to put extra pressure on Washington to agree to Russia's demands.