European security

Russia Moves Nuclear-Capable Missile System Toward Polish Border

Russia shipped a sophisticated nuclear-capable missile system toward its territorial exclave bordering Poland, according to Western government officials, introducing a powerful military asset into an already tense region and prompting expressions of concern by allied officials.

A Russian naval ship, according to the officials, was observed carrying an Iskander missile system toward the country’s Kaliningrad port. Kaliningrad is a seaside exclave of Russian territory between Poland and Lithuania.

Western officials said they believe Moscow deployed the missiles on a temporary basis as a display of strength as its relations with the U.S. reach a low.

A Russian official contacted by the Wall Street Journal declined to immediately comment.

Russia has stationed the system in Kaliningrad before—but only briefly, for military exercises. The Kremlin has threatened to deploy the Iskander missiles to Kaliningrad on a permanent basis in response to the construction of the Aegis Ashore missile defense system in Poland.

Naval history

Soviet nuclear submarine carrying nuclear weapons sank north of Bermuda in

Thirty years ago, a Soviet nuclear submarine with about 30 nuclear warheads on board sank off U.S. shores north of Bermuda as Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan were preparing for their historic summit in Reykjavik, Iceland.  But instead of Chernobyl-style denials, the Soviet government reached out to the Americans, issued a public statement, and even received offers of help from Washington, according to the never-before-published transcript of that day’s Politburo session, posted today by the National Security Archive.

The submarine, designated K-219, suffered an explosion in one of its missile tubes due to the leakage of missile fuel into the tube on October 3.  The 667-A project Yankee-class boat was armed with 16 torpedoes and 16 ballistic missiles. After the initial explosion, the crew members heroically put out fire and were forced to shut down the nuclear reactors manually because the command-and-control equipment had been damaged.  Three crew members died in the blast and fire. Senior Seaman Sergey Preminin stayed in the reactor compartment to shut down reactors, and could not be evacuated.  The rest escaped safely.

Military

Don’t mention the war: UK, Germany headed for military alliance

Former military adversaries Britain and Germany are weighing up a serious defense alliance which would see UK helicopters stationed on German naval ships.

The plans, announced by UK Defence Secretary Michael Fallon, will see the two countries increase joint training exercises with Britain stationing a new Wildcat helicopter aboard a German warship during a Mediterranean Sea training mission in 2017.

“Britain stands together with Germany to face the same challenges, including the threat from Daesh [Islamic State], and shares the same values of liberty, tolerance and justice,” Fallon said at a meeting with his counterpart Ursula von der Leyen at the German Embassy Friday.

Middle East

US Election Note: Middle East Policy After 2016

Summary

• Despite President Barack Obama’s efforts to ‘rebalance’ US strategy towards Asia, the Middle East has dominated his administration’s foreign policy agenda and will continue to demand significant attention and resources frm his successor.
• Obama’s presidency has not resolved the question of whether the United States’ quest for primacy in the Middle East is desirable; how the next president answers this question will frame his or her approach to Middle East policy...

Terror threat

Where are the Terrorist WMD Attacks?

President Obama has declared that terrorist groups and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) remain the greatest threat to the United States. According to a Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center white paper, President Obama stated, “If an organization like al-Qaeda got a weapon of mass destruction in its hands…just a few individuals could potentially kill tens of thousands of people, maybe hundreds of thousands.”

The Department of State reported, “The nexus of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism poses one of the gravest potential risks to the national security of the United States and its global partners.” Furthermore, it claims “The U.S. Government places the highest priority…to meet the global challenge of WMD terrorism.”

President George W. Bush stated in a 2004 National Defense University speech: “The greatest threat before humanity today is the possibility of a secret and sudden attack with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons.”

Information security

NSA case highlights growing concerns over insider threats

The arrest of a National Security Agency contractor charged with stealing highly classified material is yet the latest example of a trend that officials say can be every bit as dangerous as an outside hacker: the insider threat.

The federal government has been increasingly concerned about the ability of its own employees and contractors to use their positions to walk away with troves of sensitive information. And it has tried to implement new safeguards to not only better secure important data but also monitor the people with access to it.

Fears over insider threats intensified after the breach by former Army Pfc Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, an NSA contractor working for Booz Allen Hamilton. But with the revelation that Harold Thomas Martin III was arrested in August and charged with theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials, there will be even greater scrutiny of how the nation protects its secrets, officials said.

Military

Russian MoD pondering re-launch of military bases in Cuba and Vietnam – Deputy Defense Minister

Moscow is considering plans to return to Cuba and Vietnam where it had military bases in the past, Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Nikolay Pankov said on Friday, according to RIA news agency.

READ MORE: Russia intends to restore Cuban spy base – MP

“We are working on this,” Pankov said, while declining to elaborate. The Russian Defense Ministry is re-assessing the decisions made in the past to shut down the bases in those countries, according to the defense official.

Previously the deputy head of the foreign affairs committee of the Russian parliament, Aleksey Chepa said that Russia “should re-assess the issue of our presence in other regions of the world. I believe that it would correspond with Russian interests to restore the bases in Latin America, Southeast Asia, and Africa that were closed,” as quoted by TASS.

There were Soviet and Russian military bases in Cuba and Vietnam until 2002. The Russian navy was deployed in Cam Rahn, Vietnam, and Russia had a radio-electronic intelligence center in Lourdes, Cuba.

Human trafficking

Hundreds of sex slaves rescued in international trafficking ring bust

The trafficking ring targeted women who spoke little to no English and trapped them with debts as high as $60,000 and included plastic surgery that they were forced to undergo before they left to make them “more appealing” to potential buyers in the US.

The organization was able to procure fraudulent visas and travel documents in order to get them into the US. In the process of doing so, they also collected information on the victims’ families to use them as leverage against the women if they tried to resist.

The women were then taken to prostitution houses that had individual house bosses who advertised the women, handled the money, ran the house and controlled the women’s schedules with clients. The women turned over all of their earnings to the house boss who would transfer it back to the traffickers to pay down the trafficking debts and kept any remainders for themselves.

Seismic security

Earthquakes in California are discovered more than 15 miles deep. Here’s what that could mean

Scientists in California have found that earthquakes can occur much deeper below the Earth’s surface than originally believed, a discovery that alters their understanding of seismic behavior and potential risks.

Seismologists have long believed that earthquakes occur less than 12 to 15 miles underground in the planet’s brittle, rocky crust. But new research has found evidence of quakes deeper than 15 miles under the surface, in the upper mantle, an area where the rock is so hot that it is no longer brittle but creeps, moving around like an extremely hard honey. 

Three scientists at Caltech in Pasadena studied data collected over six months from 5,000 state-of-the-art sensors installed in Long Beach atop the Newport-Inglewood fault, one of the most dangerous in the Los Angeles Basin and which caused the magnitude 6.4 Long Beach earthquake of 1933.

Drug trafficking

Opium growth in Afghanistan soars, eradication close to zero – UN

Opium poppy cultivation levels in Afghanistan this year are the highest on record, said the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, adding that efforts to eradicate the crop have fallen flat.

“Unfortunately, preliminary results suggest that illicit cultivation has increased well above 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres),” UNODC Executive Director Yury Fedotov said on Wednesday., according to the text of a speech prepared for an international conference on Afghanistan in Brussels, Reuters reported.

“The production of opiates is expected to follow the same upward trend,” while eradication efforts have dropped to “close to zero,”Fedotov said.

Presently, 2016 is set to make it into the top three worst years in this regard since the UNODC started tracking information on opium production in Afghanistan in 1994. The largest growing area was detected in 2014, totaling 224,000 hectares.

The total area dedicated to opium production in Afghanistan today stands at 183,000 hectares, which is 19 percent less than last year, when 224,000 hectares were cultivated.

Military

‘We will stop you…beat you’: US Army chief offers stark warning to potential rivals and enemies

The US Army Chief of Staff warned the enemies of the United States that “we will beat you harder than you’ve ever been beaten before.” The list of rivals and foes is predictably Russia, Iran and China. He also admitted that the US Army’s readiness to fight had been eroded recently.

The US Army Chief of Staff, Mark Milley delivered his remarks before the army’s annual meeting on Tuesday in Washington, DC, and said it was the military’s aim “to deter war but if deterrents fail we as an army, we as a nation must be prepared to fight.”

General Milley said deterrents were expensive but more expensive was fighting a war, and then fighting and winning a war but most expensive is fighting and losing a war.

“Our readiness to fight a war against a high-end, near peer adversary has eroded in the last 15 years as we fought and continue to fight against terrorists and guerillas in Afghanistan Iraq and elsewhere,” said Gen. Milley. “We were highly successful in ripping apart Saddam’s military in 1991, ejecting him from Kuwait and we shattered his army in 2003. Similarly, we destroyed the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan in very short order.”

International security

Former Intelligence Officials Warn Obama: Defuse Tensions with Russia, Rein in Demonization of President Putin, Kerry is Playing a Double Game…

We write to alert you, as we did President George W. Bush, six weeks before the attack on Iraq, that the consequences of limiting your circle of advisers to a small, relatively inexperienced coterie with a dubious record for wisdom can prove disastrous.* Our concern this time regards Syria.

We are hoping that your President’s Daily Brief tomorrow will give appropriate attention to Saturday’s warning by Russia’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova: “If the US launches a direct aggression against Damascus and the Syrian Army, it would cause a terrible, tectonic shift not only in the country, but in the entire region.”

Speaking on Russian TV, she warned of those whose “logic is ‘why do we need diplomacy’ … when there is power … and methods of resolving a problem by power. We already know this logic; there is nothing new about it. It usually ends with one thing – full-scale war.”

Cybersecurity

Passwords are the weakest link in cybersecurity today

Last month's news of the devastating breach at Yahoo stunned even the most seasoned security experts, given its impact on more than 500 million individuals.

Somewhat lost in the news of this attack and others including the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, Anthem, and the Democratic National Committee is that the impact of each of these breaches cannot be viewed in isolation. Rather, each is one node in a much bigger effort.

A closer examination of major breaches reveals a common theme: In every "major headline" breach, the attack vector has been the common password. The reason is simple: The password is by far the weakest link in cybersecurity today.

Privacy security

Welcome to the machine—Yahoo mail scanning exposes another US spy tool

At its most basic level, this newly surfaced tool exposes another US digital surveillance program. It differs from so-called "upstream" spying in which the authorities tap directly into the Internet backbone and scan for certain search terms—a spying program with diminishing returns as more and more data on the Internet has become encrypted. This Yahoo situation is also different from the Prism program, where the authorities acquire customer data from tech companies matching chosen search selectors.

In this latest bit of spying to come to light, it still hasn't been revealed whether the Yahoo e-mail scanning was of e-mail metadata—like the headers—or of a message's content. Many, including NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, believe content was being scanned. And if it was content, that would make the latest program perhaps even more aggressive than the US bulk collection of telephone metadata Snowden exposed.

Private spy

At Booz Allen, a Vast U.S. Spy Operation, Run for Private Profit

In the six weeks since federal agents raided a suburban Maryland home and arrested Harold T. Martin III on suspicion of stealing classified information from the National Security Agency, another organization has quietly prepared to face the fallout: Booz Allen Hamilton, Mr. Martin’s employer.

Booz Allen, a consulting firm that earns billions of dollars by working for American intelligence agencies, has been called the world’s most profitable spy organization. News this week of Mr. Martin’s arrest in August could renew scrutiny of the firm’s operations and, more broadly, the lucrative contracting business that American intelligence now relies on to run its vast, global surveillance operations.

Climate security

A military view on climate change: It’s eroding our national security and we should prepare for it

In this presidential election year we have heard much about some issues, such as immigration and trade, and less about others. For example, climate change was discussed for an estimated 82 seconds in the first presidential debate last week, and for just 37 minutes in all presidential and vice presidential debates since the year 2000.

Many observers think climate change deserves more attention. They might be surprised to learn that U.S. military leaders and defense planners agree. The armed forces have been studying climate change for years from a perspective that rarely is mentioned in the news: as a national security threat. And they agree that it poses serious risks.

I spent 32 years as a meteorologist in the U.S. Navy, where I initiated and led the Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change. Here is how military planners see this issue: We know that the climate is changing, we know why it’s changing and we understand that change will have large impacts on our national security. Yet as a nation we still only begrudgingly take precautions.

Cybersecurity

China’s cyber and trade war has US firms, national security in crosshairs

As we witness the home stretch of the presidential election with candidate debates, campaign stops, and political ads, both parties have an opportunity to talk substantively about a serious trade issue — ongoing efforts by China to hack and steal intellectual property from U.S. companies and using stolen U.S. trade secrets to manufacture their own cut rate products.

One assistant attorney for U.S. National Security describes the Chinese hacking campaign against the United States a true, “national security emergency.”

China has created what some describe as an army of hackers — numbering in the thousands — high tech soldiers that work to identify and steal intellectual property from various industrial, tech or defense related companies.

China then uses the stolen intellectual property to produce nearly identical products with the information it hacks. Even worse, China then dumps these products into the United States or floods other countries’ markets with products at prices no nation can compete against.

Border security

Barely half of illegal border crossers caught, according to Homeland Security report

Immigration authorities caught just over half of the people who illegally entered the U.S. from Mexico last year, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security report that offers one of the most detailed assessments of border security ever compiled.

The report found that 54 percent of people who entered illegally between border crossings got caught in the 2015 fiscal year. That's much lower than the 81 percent success rate that Homeland Security cited publicly using a different counting method.

The 98-page report was completed in May, and Homeland Security officials have declined to release it, despite urging from some members of Congress. The Associated Press obtained a copy from a government official involved in border issues who acted on condition of anonymity because the department has not made the report public.

Flight security

French intelligence concerns over 'sabotage attempts' on Air France planes

Air France has suffered a string of worrying attempts to sabotage its planes apparently by radicalised ground staff - including a bid to cut communication between the cockpit and engines - according to French reports.

French intelligence is on tenterhooks after a series of incidents involving Air France planes taking off from Paris' Charles de Gaulle airport, according to Le Canard Enchainé, the investigative and satirical weekly.

"We have noted numerous anomalies before commercial flights," a French intelligence source told the paper. "They appear to be attempts at sabotage," the source is cited as saying, adding that "ten people are currently under surveillance" in the company.

International security

Beating the Drums for War with Russia. CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Pentagon Convene at the White House

On Wednesday, the so-called Principals Committee, consisting of the secretaries of defense and state, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the CIA director, as well as top presidential security aides, convened at the White House to consider proposals to attack Syrian government forces with cruise missiles as well as other acts of military aggression.

Both the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are reportedly in favor of such an escalation, which carries with it the real prospect of a direct armed confrontation between the US and Russia, the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

Reflecting the growing support within sections of the US establishment for a far wider war, key sections of the media, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, have weighed in on the side of those within the military and intelligence apparatus advocating a new eruption of American militarism.

Prediction

The CIA Says It Can Predict Social Unrest as Early as 3 to 5 Days Out


Last year around this time, CIA stood up its first new office since 1963—the Directorate for Digital Innovation—a seismic shift for the agency that legitimized the importance of technology, including big data and analytics.

According to Deputy Director for Digital Innovation Andrew Hallman, the man tapped by CIA Director John Brennan to run the digital wing, that digital pivot is paying off.

The agency, Hallman said, has significantly improved its “anticipatory intelligence,” using a mesh of sophisticated algorithms and analytics against complex systems to better predict the flow of everything from illicit cash to extremists around the globe. Deep learning and other forms of machine learning can help analysts understand how seemingly disparate data sets might be linked or lend themselves to predicting future events with national security ramifications.

Financial safety

Nobel Laureate Stiglitz predicts eurozone disintegration should Italy walk away

Italy and other countries may leave the eurozone in the next few years, predicts Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. He blames the euro and German austerity for the stalled European economy.

"There will still be a eurozone in 10 years, but the question is, what will it look like? It's very unlikely it will still have 19 members. It's difficult to say who will still belong,” Stiglitz said in an interview with German newspaper Die Welt.

"The people in Italy are increasingly disappointed in the euro. Italians are starting to realize that Italy doesn't work in the euro," he added.

According to Stiglitz, Germany had already accepted that Greece would ditch the euro. He added he advised Greece and Portugal to leave the eurozone.

Stiglitz criticized Germany’s austerity policy, lack of European solidarity for solving common economic woes and the single currency. The best solution to boost the European economy is to break up the euro, creating two different currencies for northern and southern member countries, the economist said.

Middle East

‘S-300, S-400 air defenses in place’: Russian MoD warns US-led coalition not to strike Syrian army

Russia’s Defense Ministry has cautioned the US-led coalition of carrying out airstrikes on Syrian army positions, adding in Syria there are numerous S-300 and S-400 air defense systems up and running.

According to the Russian Defense Ministry, any airstrike or missile hitting targets in territory controlled by the Syrian government would put Russian personnel in danger.

US-led coalition jets bombed positions of the Syrian government forces on September 17, resulting in the deaths of 83 servicemen. Washington said the airstrike was a mistake, however Damascus claimed the incident was a “blatant aggression.”

Privacy security

Yahoo 'scanned emails to help FBI hunt terrorists'

Yahoo scanned its users' incoming emails for an unusual string of characters that had been linked to a terrorist organisation, according to a fresh report about the matter.

The New York Times says flagged messages were made available to the FBI, but the scans have now stopped.

It adds that the tech company adapted one of its spam and child-abuse-image filters to carry out the task.

The details build on an earlier report by the news agency Reuters.

Yahoo declined to add to its previous statements, in which it said Reuters' report was "misleading" and that it was "a law-abiding firm".

Tortures

Federal judge orders top CIA officials to give depositions

A federal judge has ordered former top CIA officials to sit for depositions in a lawsuit brought against two psychologists who designed the agency’s harsh interrogation methods in the war on terror, an action the federal government called unprecedented.

U.S. District Court Judge Justin Quackenbush in Spokane, Washington, issued the order Tuesday.

Among those ordered to give depositions under oath in the next few months are John Rizzo and Jose Rodriguez. Rizzo was the CIA’s chief lawyer, and Rodriguez was the head of the CIA Counterterrorism Center.

The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of three men — Gul Rahman, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, and Mohamed Ahmed Ben Soud. They contend they were tortured using methods developed by CIA-contracted psychologists James Mitchell and John “Bruce” Jessen.

National security

Obama orders diversity measures for national security agencies

President Obama has ordered national security agencies to do more to recruit, hire and retain qualified minority employees, as data show that defense, intelligence and homeland security agencies lag behind the rest of the federal workforce.

"Our greatest asset in protecting the homeland and advancing our interests abroad is the talent and diversity of our national security workforce," Obama said in presidential memorandum issued Wednesday.

He directed agencies to collect more data on their employment and hiring practices, conduct exit interviews of employees leaving an agency, and institute mandatory training on unconscious bias for management positions.

Arctic

Russia’s Military Sophistication in the Arctic Sends Echoes of the Cold War

When the U.S. wants to learn what Russia is doing in the Arctic, it often turns to the Norwegian military, which has been conducting operations for decades from this Arctic town amid the fiords.

These days, it isn’t the volume of Russian military activity in the region that concerns Norway and its North Atlantic Treaty Organization allies. Adm. Haakon Bruun-Hanssen, Norway’s chief of defense, says Russian military activity in the Barents Sea has grown in recent years but still pales in comparison to Cold War levels.

What concerns him, he says, is the increased sophistication Norway is seeing in the far north, as the Kremlin modernizes its armed forces. NATO forces retain an upper hand in conventional equipment and prowess, he said, but Russia is catching up with new sensors, submarines and capabilities.

Drills

The Russians Are... Just Practicing

Russia is indeed holding a large-scale, three-day disaster drill involving 40 million people starting on 4 October 2016, but nothing in official statements about the drills (at least the ones in English) mention fears of a nuclear strike. According to a bulletin posted on the English-language web site belonging to Russia's Ministry of Emergency Situations, or EMERCOM:

The All-Russian civil defense drill started today in Russia. The first stage of the drill is practicing organization of civil defense actions, disaster and fire management, notification and gathering of senior officials of federal and regional executive authorities, local governments and civil defense forces, deployment of civil defense management system on all levels, readying civil defense communication and notification system.

Diplomat security

Russia denies drugging US diplomats

A top Russian official strongly denied Wednesday a report that Moscow may have been behind the alleged drugging of two US diplomats in St. Petersburg and suggested instead that the pair may simply have been drunk.

"We are outraged," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said in a statement posted on the Russian Foreign Ministry website, adding the claim may have been the work of the US State Department seeking "revenge" for the collapse of talks between the two counties to address the situation in Syria.

Russia's denial came after a report two days ago by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty that the diplomats -- a man and a woman who were not senior officials -- allegedly had their drinks spiked with a date-rape drug while attending a United Nations convention on corruption last November. The report, attributed to anonymous sources, said the State Department quietly protested the incident to Russian officials.

Information security

NSA contractor charged with stealing top secret data

A federal contractor suspected in the leak of powerful National Security Agency hacking tools has been arrested and charged with stealing classified information from the U.S. government, according to court records and U.S. officials familiar with the case.

Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, who did technology work for Booz Allen Hamilton, was charged with theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials, authorities said. According to two U.S. officials familiar with the case, he is suspected of “hoarding” classified materials going back as far as a decade in his house and car, and the recent leak of the hacking tools tipped investigators to what he was doing.

Martin was arrested in August after investigators raided his home in Glen Burnie, Md., and found documents and digital information stored on various devices that contained highly classified information, authorities said.

Nuclear security

Russia suspends cooperative nuclear research deal with US

Russia has suspended an agreement with the United States on research cooperation in the nuclear and energy sectors, the latest move underlining worsening tensions between Washington and Moscow.

A suspension decree signed by Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev was posted Wednesday on the government website, which said the decree was a “countermeasure” to U.S. sanctions imposed over Russia’s role in the Ukraine conflict.

The impact of the move is likely to be less serious than Russia’s suspension Monday of an agreement on disposal of weapons-grade plutonium. That agreement had been seen as a symbol of US-Russian rapprochement.

International security

Russia ups the pressure in search for US respect

They used to say that all roads lead to Rome.

But, today, it seems that all roads lead to Russia. Or to its president: Vladimir Putin.

Moscow is a key participant in the Syrian war and in the conflict in eastern Ukraine. Russian hackers have been accused of breaking into US servers; the Russian state has been accused of trying to influence the outcome of the US presidential election and of attempting to divide and weaken the European Union.

And yet when Vladimir Putin came to power 16 years ago, he appeared ready for a close friendship with the West. The US President Bill Clinton described him as "smart" and a man with "enormous potential".

Intel gathering

 Putin: Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service Must Be Proactive, Innovative


The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) should be proactive by taking innovative steps and identify key tendencies of development of the international situation, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday.

"Today the situation in the world makes special demands to the quality and effectiveness of the SVR work. It is necessary to be proactive, use innovative, unconventional decisions," Putin said. He also stressed the importance of identifying and analyzing "the whole spectrum of external threats, identifying key strategic trends in the development of the international situation, contributing to the strengthening of economic, technological and military potential of Russia. " "Of course the safety of our citizens should be under special control, especially in regions such as the Middle East, Africa, as well as in certain Central Asian countries," Putin said at a ceremony formally appointing Sergei Naryshkin to lead the SVR.

War

Army Warns that Future War with Russia or China Would Be ‘Extremely Lethal and Fast’


To envision the wars of the future, first remember those of the distant past, with their soul-numbing artillery barrages and unstinting waves of conventional enemy forces. Then speed up that mental newsreel and imagine a ground war accelerated by artificial intelligence and precision munitions, nested in a larger strategic sphere where everything is moving at Internet velocity.

That’s the picture that Army leaders are working from as they try to prepare their force to deter and defeat America’s enemies over the next few decades.

The nation faces existential threats from “modern nation-states acting aggressively in militarized competition,” said Lt. Gen. Joseph Anderson, Army deputy chief of staff for operations, plans, and training. “Who does that sound like? Russia?” He spoke on a future-of-the-Army panel at the annual meeting of the Association of the U.S. Army in Washington on Tuesday.

China is a growing threat as well, if not one that can project force globally yet. Together, these two powers are mustering conventionally massive militaries that are increasingly technological — and forcing the Pentagon to contemplate and prepare for “violence on the scale that the U.S. Army has not seen since Korea,” said Maj. Gen. William Hix, Anderson’s deputy.

Drones

White House Rolls Out Armed Drone Declaration

The Obama administration has lined up more than 40 countries who have agreed to a joint declaration on the import and export of armed unmanned systems, in what the US State Department is billing as the first step toward creating global norms for the weapon systems. 

The agreement will be formally announced Wednesday afternoon. Defense News first broke news of the agreement, then in draft form, in August. 

In addition to the US, signatories include Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Czech Republic, El Salvador, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malawi, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Republic of Korea, Romania, Serbia, Seychelles, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Ukraine, United Kingdom, and Uruguay. 

Personal security

Nukes On the Way: Can You Find a Bomb Shelter in 30 Minutes?

I learn that 40 million Russians are supposed to take part in a civil defense drill.  I do research about what to do when Russia fires ICBMs at the United States. I discover that after the launch, I will have thirty minutes to take action before the warhead explodes over my head.

I google “Civil Defense” and am shocked that the U.S. program stopped at the end of the Cold War.  Worse yet, the Russians still have a civil defense system. In fact, they are building enough bomb shelters in Moscow for every inhabitant to reach safety in a few minutes. Something is wrong.

I check my local government site for information about where to go in case of a nuclear attack. They refer me to the Department of Homeland Security site: ready.gov. After searching for fallout shelters in my area, the site links me to maryland.gov . The State of Maryland has no information about fallout shelters and they link me back to ready.gov. There are only 25 minutes left before detonation.