cptmarginal » Sat Sep 28, 2013 8:15 pm wrote:http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/09/25/fbi-releases-grim-video-details-of-aaron-alexis-navy-yard-shootingThe details of Alexis' troubled past, and his ability to still attain a security clearance "certainly jumped out at me," said Ash Carter, the deputy secretary of defense, while speaking with reporters on Wednesday about the Pentagon's planned reviews of the shooting.
"Had it been spotted and understood to be indicative of this possibility, [it] might have led to an intervention," said Carter.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel announced Sept. 18 that both the Pentagon and the Department of the Navy would conduct reviews of the security at military installations, and the process by which personnel are issued security clearances. A third review will be conducted by an independent panel.
Carter announced Wednesday that panel will be headed up by Paul Stockton, the assistant secretary of defense for Homeland Defense and Americas' Security Affairs, and retired Navy Adm. Eric T. Olson, a former SEAL who served as chief of U.S. Special Operations Command from 2007 to 2011.
The Pentagon's review will be led by Mike Vickers, the undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, himself a former CIA paramilitary officer and Army Special Forces soldier.
The Navy's review must be completed by November, and a full report from the Defense review must be submitted to Hagel by Dec. 20
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nati ... n/2961957/
No. 2 Pentagon official to step down
The Pentagon's No. 2 official announced Thursday that he will leave office on Dec. 4, capping a career with several top Defense Department post except the top job.
Ashton Carter, who spearheaded efforts in the height of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to speed needed gear to troops, had been considered a contender earlier this year for Defense secretary. President Obama instead chose Chuck Hagel.
In his resignation letter, Carter told Hagel that he had long planned to leave in December. He delayed the announcement because of the "turbulence surrounding the fiscal situation." When it became apparent that it wouldn't be resolved soon, Carter chose to make the announcement Thursday to give Hagel time to choose a successor.
"I have loved every minute working for this wonderful department, now as in previous times in my career," wrote Carter, who has served under 11 Defense secretaries. He plans to move on to his "next challenge," which he did not describe.
Pentagon press Secretary George Little issued a statement after Carter's announcement that aimed to swat down any suggestion that Carter had been forced out.
"The decision to depart the Pentagon later this year was Deputy Secretary Carter's and his alone," Little said. "He'll be missed by the secretary. They've had a strong and effective working relationship and friendship that will continue for the next two months and beyond. There's a lot of work to do between now and December 4.
"At the senior Pentagon leadership staff meeting where the announcement was made, Deputy Secretary Carter received a standing ovation from Secretary Hagel and the rest of the leadership team."
Carter may have decided to step down because he was exhausted by the pace of the job and frustrated that he didn't win the military's top post, said Gordon Adams, a professor at American University and a former Pentagon official.
"I don't think he was pushed or shoved," Adams said. " I think Ash was enormously valuable to Hagel. This is a killer job."
Hagel had chosen Carter to lead reviews of the Pentagon's budget and strategy and security in light of last month's shootings at the Washington Navy Yard, which killed 12 people.
"He had every hot potato in the building," Adams said."
Carter had been appointed by former Defense secretary Robert Gates to lead a task force charged with cutting through red tape to get urgently needed gear to the battlefield — much of it need to counter top threat to U.S. troops, improvised explosive devices. Carter pushed for more camera-mounted balloons to spy on insurgents planting roadside bombs, improvements to Mine Resistant Ambush Protected trucks and explosive-sniffing dogs.
This summer, in an interview with USA TODAY, Carter said the crisis over the federal budget could embolden U.S. adversaries.
"They're watching what we do," Carter said. "They're wondering what is going on over here. And is the United States going to be the same kind of military power as an ally or that they're used fearing as a potential opponent. We want them to understand that this is still going to be the world's greatest military for a long time to come whatever these budget scenarios we face in the future.
"There is danger. There is risk associated with behaving in such a cavalier fashion with respect to spending for national defense."
In a similar vein to my previous post about the careers of Vickers, Stockton & Olson:
November 1997-August 1998: Future 9/11 Commission Staff Attend Terrorism Study Group; Predict Consequences of ‘Catastrophic Terrorism’
Over a period of nine months, faculty from Harvard University, Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Virginia meet in a collaborative effort called the Catastrophic Terrorism Study Group. Its members include experts on terrorism, national security, intelligence, and law enforcement. The project director is Philip Zelikow, future executive director of the 9/11 Commission. Future 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick is also a member, along with Ernest May, who will be a senior advisor to the 9/11 Commission. The culmination of the group’s efforts is a report written by Zelikow and its two co-chairs: former Assistant Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and former CIA Director John Deutch. A condensed version of the report is published in the journal Foreign Affairs in late 1998. They write: “Long part of the Hollywood and Tom Clancy repertory of nightmarish scenarios, catastrophic terrorism has moved from far-fetched horror to a contingency that could happen next month. Although the United States still takes conventional terrorism seriously… it is not yet prepared for the new threat of catastrophic terrorism.” They predict the consequences of such an event: “An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great ‘success’ or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a ‘before’ and ‘after.’” [Carter, Deutch, and Zelikow, 10/1998; Foreign Affairs, 11/1998; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. xi-xiv].
In recent years, the common thread among supporters of the Shultz, Perry, Kissinger, Nunn vision is a front-burning desire to legitimize U.S. action against alleged "rogue states" and to tighten control over what has, since the mid-1990s, been called the "nuclear black market." An equally important front-burner goal is to provide financial and programmatic support to the weapons labs in order to sustain the U.S. capacity to design, test, and build new nuclear weapons. These practical agendas are more or less obscured behind the rhetorical agenda of disarmament.
Perry's intellectual efforts to design an anti-nuclear imperial strategy has found expression through a collaborative project between Stanford and Harvard Universities called the Preventative Defense Project (PDP). Co-directed with Harvard political scientist Ashton Carter, the focus of the PDP, in its own words, is to "prevent the emergence of major new threats to the U.S." In addition to articles and op-eds advocating U.S. military action against North Korea, alarmist tracts about rising China, and justifications of the recent U.S.-India agreement on nuclear technology exports, Perry and Carter have also promoted a U.S. policy leading toward future disarmament as the best means of facilitating what they believe is necessary U.S. military action against those nations they simplistically label as "bad guys." In their 2003 essay "Good Nukes, Bad Nukes," they call for ratification of the CTBT as a way to lock in a global nuclear status quo, while also justifying U.S. military strikes against would-be transgressors of this geopolitical order. "The treaty does have an impact even on 'bad guys' like Iraq, Iran and North Korea," they write. "When the United States moves against such regimes, it does so with the support of the global opprobrium for nuclear weapons that the treaty enshrines."
From blimps to bugs, an explosion in aerial drones is transforming the way America fights and thinks about its wars. Predator drones, the Cessna-sized workhorses that have dominated unmanned flight since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are by now a brand name, known and feared around the world. But far less widely known are the sheer size, variety and audaciousness of a rapidly expanding drone universe, along with the dilemmas that come with it.
The Pentagon now has some 7,000 aerial drones, compared with fewer than 50 a decade ago. Within the next decade the Air Force anticipates a decrease in manned aircraft but expects its number of “multirole” aerial drones like the Reaper — the ones that spy as well as strike — to nearly quadruple, to 536. Already the Air Force is training more remote pilots, 350 this year alone, than fighter and bomber pilots combined.
“It’s a growth market,” said Ashton B. Carter, the Pentagon’s chief weapons buyer.
