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Going back to 2012, Congress held hearings on how the United States is losing the cyber espionage war. To date, there has been no ground gained outside of the scope of creating more task forces and adding cyber personnel. To stop the intrusions by China, Russia and Iran has been a failure.
For a report on the major hacks in 2014, go here. This is by no means a complete list of corporations but it does give a view into the depth of the cyber threat.
WASHINGTON: The United States is “losing the cyber espionage war” against China, Russia and other countries, but even in the face of such a grave threat the country cannot agree on how to protect its precious intellectual seed capital from these predations, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee says.
China is stealing intellectual property on a massive scale, as Gen. Keith Alexander, head of both the National Security Agency and Cyber Command, has made clear with his estimates of such thefts topping $1 trillion. While China is not alone, U.S government officials have made clear that no country engages in cyber espionage as systematically, as thoroughly or as broadly as does the People’s Republic of China.
“China is investing hugely in this technology,” Rogers notes. And the impact of that investment is felt not only in the economic sphere, important as that is. Cyber is now an integral of military planning and operations, as the Russians have demonstrated several times.
To help stem those thefts and to protect critical infrastructure such as power grids, Rogers and Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger, his Democratic colleague on the HPSCI, met with hundreds of business leaders, civil rights and privacy groups over several months as they began to craft what became their 13-page bill. It would have offered businesses liabliity insurance in return for their agreeing to share threat information with the government. The government also would have shared threat information with the businesses.
But there was a catch. Because of how sensitive sources and methods are in the cyber world, the businesses would have to get top secret clearance for senior officials, build and maintain a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility (SCIF), and maintain the physical and bureaucratic complex required of anyone dealing with classified information.
As Rogers put it, his committee had offered industry a “carrot and a stick.” But his colleagues in the Senate wanted to chart a different path, so the Rogers-Ruppersberger bill is on life support. I asked him today what he planned to do with his “dead” bill. “All is not lost. I am reaching out to members of the Senate just to see what our options are,” as is Ruppersberger. “We are not giving up.”
WashingtonTimes: Iranian hackers are suspected of operating a network of bogus LinkedIn accounts that security researchers believe is part of a campaign targeting employees of corporations in the Middle East.
By creating phony profiles containing fabricated job histories and endorsements from other concocted accounts, researchers at Dell said this week that a group of hackers, likely acting on behalf of Iran, attempted to collect intelligence from legitimate LinkedIn users employed in the Arabian and African telecommunications and defense industries. Twenty-five fake LinkedIn accounts have been identified by researchers working for the company’s SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit, including those of supposed recruitment consultants with hundreds of connections apiece, Dell said on Wednesday.
“CTU researchers assess with high confidence the purpose of this network is to target potential victims through social engineering,” Dell said in the latest report, referring to a tactic in which sensitive data becomes compromised when an individual reveals information to an attacker, often under false pretenses.
Dell has named the actors “Threat Group-2889” and said it’s likely the same organization dubbed “Operation Cleaver” in a report released last year by Cylance, a security firm that linked the group to Iran and claimed it was working to undermine the security of over 50 companies across 15 industries in the region, possibly as retaliation for the U.S.-led Stuxnet campaign.
“Creating a network of seemingly genuine and established LinkedIn personas helps TG-2889 identify and research potential victims. The threat actors can establish a relationship with targets by contacting them directly, or by contacting one of the target’s connections. It may be easier to establish a direct relationship if one of the fake personas is already in the target’s LinkedIn network,” Dell said.
“The level of detail in the profiles suggests that the threat actors invested substantial time and effort into creating and maintaining these personas.”
According to the findings published by Cylance in December, the “Operation Cleaver” hackers used social engineering to trick targets into installing malware that would allow data to then be stolen from infected computers.
Cylance’s report had linked the group to attacks across the world, but Dell’s CTU team said the LinkedIn campaign seems to largely target account holders in the Middle East and northern Africa, a quarter of which work in telecommunications.
“Updates to profile content such as employment history suggest that TG-2889 regularly maintains these fake profiles. The persona changes and job alterations could suggest preparations for a new campaign, and the decision to reference Northrup Grumman and Airbus Group may indicate that the threat actors plan to target the aerospace vertical,” Dell said.
Last month, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told a congressional committee that Iran uses its cyber program to carry out “asymmetric but proportional retaliation against political foes, as well as a sophisticated means of collecting intelligence.” He went on to blame Iranian hackers for cyberattacks against American banks in 2012 and 2013, as well as an assault last year on the Las Vegas Sands casino company.
What does it look like when the president of the United States is a desperate man for a deal? Does he have a platoon of legal eagles searching law and then writing executive orders to finesse the law? The order from the White House is ‘FIND A LOOPHOLE’.
FNC:James Rosen > Some senior U.S. officials involved in the implementation of the Iran nuclear deal have privately concluded that a key sanctions relief provision – a concession to Iran that will open the doors to tens of billions of dollars in U.S.-backed commerce with the Islamic regime – conflicts with existing federal statutes and cannot be implemented without violating those laws, Fox News has learned.
At issue is a passage tucked away in ancillary paperwork attached to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, as the Iran nuclear deal is formally known. Specifically, Section 5.1.2 of Annex II provides that in exchange for Iranian compliance with the terms of the deal, the U.S. “shall…license non-U.S. entities that are owned or controlled by a U.S. person to engage in activities with Iran that are consistent with this JCPOA.”
In short, this means that foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent companies will, under certain conditions, be allowed to do business with Iran. The problem is that the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act (ITRA), signed into law by President Obama in August 2012, was explicit in closing the so-called “foreign sub” loophole.
Indeed, ITRA also stipulated, in Section 218, that when it comes to doing business with Iran, foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent firms shall in all cases be treated exactly the same as U.S. firms: namely, what is prohibited for U.S. parent firms has to be prohibited for foreign subsidiaries, and what is allowed for foreign subsidiaries has to be allowed for U.S. parent firms.
What’s more, ITRA contains language, in Section 605, requiring that the terms spelled out in Section 218 shall remain in effect until the president of the United States certifies two things to Congress: first, that Iran has been removed from the State Department’s list of nations that sponsor terrorism, and second, that Iran has ceased the pursuit, acquisition, and development of weapons of mass destruction.
Additional executive orders and statutes signed by President Obama, such as the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act, have reaffirmed that all prior federal statutes relating to sanctions on Iran shall remain in full effect.
For example, the review act – sponsored by Sens. Bob Corker (R-Tennessee) and Ben Cardin (D-Maryland), the chairman and ranking member, respectively, of the Foreign Relations Committee, and signed into law by President Obama in May – stated that “any measure of statutory sanctions relief” afforded to Iran under the terms of the nuclear deal may only be “taken consistent with existing statutory requirements for such action.” The continued presence of Iran on the State Department’s terror list means that “existing statutory requirements” that were set forth in ITRA, in 2012, have not been met for Iran to receive the sanctions relief spelled out in the JCPOA.
As the Iran deal is an “executive agreement” and not a treaty – and has moreover received no vote of ratification from the Congress, explicit or symbolic – legal analysts inside and outside of the Obama administration have concluded that the JCPOA is vulnerable to challenge in the courts, where federal case law had held that U.S. statutes trump executive agreements in force of law.
Administration sources told Fox News it is the intention of Secretary of State John Kerry, who negotiated the nuclear deal with Iran’s foreign minister and five other world powers, that the re-opening of the “foreign sub” loophole by the JCPOA is to be construed as broadly as possible by lawyers for the State Department, the Treasury Department and other agencies involved in the deal’s implementation.
But the apparent conflict between the re-opening of the loophole and existing U.S. law leaves the Obama administration with only two options going forward. The first option is to violate ITRA, and allow foreign subsidiaries to be treated differently than U.S. parent firms. The second option is to treat both categories the same, as ITRA mandated – but still violate the section of ITRA that required Iran’s removal from the State Department terror list as a pre-condition of any such licensing.
It would also renege on the many promises of senior U.S. officials to keep the broad array of American sanctions on Iran in place. Chris Backemeyer, who served as Iran director for the National Security Council from 2012 to 2014 and is now the State Department’s deputy coordinator for sanctions policy, told POLITICO last month “there will be no real sanctions relief of our primary embargo….We are still going to have sanctions on Iran that prevent most Americans from…engaging in most commercial activities.”
Likewise, in a speech at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy last month, Adam Szubin, the acting under secretary of Treasury for terrorism and financial crimes, described Iran as “the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism” and said existing U.S. sanctions on the regime “will continue to be enforced….U.S. investment in Iran will be prohibited across the board.”
Nominated to succeed his predecessor at Treasury, Szubin appeared before the Senate Banking Committee for a confirmation hearing the day after his speech to the Washington Institute. At the hearing, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) asked the nominee where the Obama administration finds the “legal underpinnings” for using the JCPOA to re-open the “foreign sub” loophole.
Szubin said the foreign subsidiaries licensed to do business with Iran will have to meet “some very difficult conditions,” and he specifically cited ITRA, saying the 2012 law “contains the licensing authority that Treasury would anticipate using…to allow for certain categories of activity for those foreign subsidiaries.”
Elsewhere, in documents obtained by Fox News, Szubin has maintained that a different passage of ITRA, Section 601, contains explicit reference to an earlier law – the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, on the books since 1977 – and states that the president “may exercise all authorities” embedded in IEEPA, which includes licensing authority for the president.
However, Section 601 is also explicit on the point that the president must use his authorities from IEEPA to “carry out” the terms and provisions of ITRA itself, including Section 218 – which mandated that, before this form of sanctions relief can be granted, Iran must be removed from the State Department’s terror list. Nothing in the Congressional Record indicates that, during debate and passage of ITRA, members of Congress intended for the chief executive to use Section 601 to overturn, rather than “carry out,” the key provisions of his own law.
One administration lawyer contacted by Fox News said the re-opening of the loophole reflects circular logic with no valid legal foundation. “It would be Alice-in-Wonderland bootstrapping to say that [Section] 601 gives the president the authority to restore the foreign subsidiary loophole – the exact opposite of what the statute ordered,” said the attorney, who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations over implementation of the Iran deal.
At the State Department on Thursday, spokesman John Kirby told reporters Secretary Kerry is “confident” that the administration “has the authority to follow through on” the commitment to re-open the foreign subsidiary loophole.
“Under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, the president has broad authorities, which have been delegated to the secretary of the Treasury, to license activities under our various sanctions regimes, and the Iran sanctions program is no different,” Kirby said.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), the G.O.P. presidential candidate who is a Harvard-trained lawyer and ardent critic of the Iran deal, said the re-opening of the loophole fits a pattern of the Obama administration enforcing federal laws selectively.
“It’s a problem that the president doesn’t have the ability wave a magic wand and make go away,” Cruz told Fox News in an interview. “Any U.S. company that follows through on this, that allows their foreign-owned subsidiaries to do business with Iran, will very likely face substantial civil liability, litigation and potentially even criminal prosecution. The obligation to follow federal law doesn’t go away simply because we have a lawless president who refuses to acknowledge or follow federal law.”
A spokesman for the Senate Banking Committee could not offer any time frame as to when the committee will vote on Szubin’s nomination.
In the months since the signing of the Iran Threat Reduction and Syria Human Rights Act (which we will stubbornly continue to refer to here as “ITRA”), the Obama administration has worked to implement tougher sanctions against Iran. Although many of the ITRA regulations are not expected until early November, an Executive Order issued last week marked the beginning of a much stricter era of sanctions pursuant to ITRA, the Iran Sanctions Act of 1996 (ISA), and the Comprehensive Iran Sanctions, Accountability, and Divestment Act of 2010 (CISADA).
On October 9, 2012, sixty days after President Obama signed ITRA into law, he issued Executive Order No. 13,628, extending U.S. Iran sanctions to cover foreign subsidiaries of U.S. parent companies, a prohibition that did not exist until promulgated in ITRA.[1] The Executive Order implements ITRA Section 218,[2] which we highlighted in our August 17, 2012 post, by providing that:
No entity owned or controlled by a United States person and established or maintained outside the United States may knowingly engage in any transaction, directly or indirectly, with the Government of Iran or any person subject to the jurisdiction of the Government of Iran, if that transaction would be prohibited by [the pre-existing Iran sanctions].
The Executive Order defines the term “entity” to mean “a partnership, association, trust, joint venture, corporation, group, subgroup, or other organization.” This is a slight expansion of the definition provided by Congress in Section 218, which does not include the words “group” or “subgroup.” The resulting definition appears to authorize sanctions where any group “controlled by” a U.S. person, regardless of whether the group is formally incorporated, conducts prohibited Iran-related business.
The Executive Order gives no quarter for existing contracts, and authorizes standard Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) penalties against the U.S. person controlling the foreign entity. However, Subsection 4(c) of the Order provides that civil penalties shall not apply if the U.S. person divests or terminates its business with the foreign subsidiary not later than February 6, 2013.
The Order also directs that Secretaries of Treasury and State to issue regulations to implement several other provisions of ITRA (though the ITRA itself also directed the issuance of such regulations within 90 days of the effective date of the statute). Thus, Treasury regulations may be expected by around November 8, 2012 regarding several ITRA provisions, including the following:
Section 202, which requires the imposition of at least five ISA sanctions on any person who, on or after November 8, 2012, beneficially owns, operates, or controls a vessel that is used to transport crude oil from Iran to another country. This provision applies, however, only if the President determines under the National Defense Authorization Act that there is a sufficient supply of petroleum from countries other than Iran to permit petroleum purchasers to significantly reduce purchases from Iran;
Section 214, which increases the availability of sanctions on subsidiaries and agents of UN-sanctioned persons;
Section 215, which extends the availability of sanctions against persons connected to Iran’s weapons of mass destruction to any foreign financial institution who aids that person; and
Section 216 adds a new section to CISADA, expanding sanctions to apply to financial institutions connected to certain proliferation or terrorism activities of Iran or its National Guard.
In addition to the forthcoming regulations, the President is required to provide a great deal of information to Congress on and after November 8. Under section 211, the President must report to Congress on the identity of operators of vessels and persons that conduct or facilitate significant financial transactions that manage Iranian ports designated for sanctions under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Furthermore, the President must provide the identity of and the restrictions on individuals, including senior Iranian officials, Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Officials, foreign persons supporting the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, and foreign government agencies carrying out transactions with certain Iran-affiliated persons.[3]
The Secretaries of Treasury and State also are required to report to the relevant Congressional committees on certain aspects of the implementation of ITRA. Under Section 206, the Secretary of State must brief Congress on the implementation of the ISA by November 8, 2012, and every 120 days thereafter. The Secretary of Treasury, pursuant to sections 216 and 220, must report to Congress on the implementation of sanctions on persons and entities who provide financial assistance to proliferation and terrorism activities.
The pace of Iran sanctions has accelerated rapidly in recent months and should be expected to continue to increase over the near and medium term. We will continue to provide our analysis of new developments here.
[1] On the same day the Executive Order was issued, OFAC issued a “Frequently Asked Questions” document providing guidance with regard to the Order.
[2] Sec. 218 – Liability of Parent Companies for Violations of Sanctions by Foreign Subsidiaries (requiring the President and the Secretary of Treasury to promulgate regulations within 60 days of enactment).
More than one in five U.S. residents speak a language other than English at home, a record, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
In an analysis of the recent Census American Community Survey, a huge surge was recorded in those who speak Chinese, Spanish, Arabic and Urdu, Pakistan’s national language.
The report from the Center for Immigration Studies documented the growth of immigrants in the United States and provided evidence of concerns new immigrants are slow to assimilate into American culture, namely by speaking English at home.
According to the Center’s analysis released to Secrets Tuesday morning, in 2014, a record 63.2 million U.S. residents — native-born, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants — spoke a language other than English at home. That represents a surge of 16.2 million since 2000 and 1.4 million just since 2013.
Overall, wrote the Center’s Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, the number of non-English speakers has doubled since 1990.
Since 1990 the number of foreign language speakers has roughly doubled; the number has almost tripled since 1980.
In 2014, a record 63.2 million U.S. residents (native-born, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants) spoke a language other than English at home. That number is up 16.2 million since 2000, up 3.6 million since 2010, and up 1.4 million just since 2013.
Taking a longer view, since 1990 the number of foreign language speakers has roughly doubled.
As a share of the population, 21 percent of U.S. residents speak a foreign language at home.
The largest percentage increases from 2010 to 2014 were among speakers of Arabic (up 29 percent), Urdu (up 23 percent), Hindi (up 19 percent), Chinese and Hmong (both up 12 percent), and Gujarati and Persian (both up 9 percent). Urdu is spoken in Pakistan; Hindi and Guajarati are languages of India; Hmong is spoken in Laos; Persian is spoken in Iran.
The largest numerical increases from 2010 to 2014 were among speakers of Spanish (up 2.3 million), Chinese (up 331,000), Arabic (up 252,000), Tagalog (up 115,000), Hindi (up 114,000), and Urdu (up 89,000). Tagalog is spoken in the Philippines.
Languages with more than a million speakers in 2014 were Spanish (39. 3 million), Chinese (3.1 million), Tagalog (1.7 million), Vietnamese (1.5 million), French (1.2 million), and Korean and Arabic (1.1 million each).
Of school-age children (five to 17), 22 percent speak a foreign language at home.
Many of those who speak a foreign language at home are not immigrants. Of the more than 63 million foreign language speakers, 44 percent (27.7 million) were actually born in the United States.
Of those who speak a foreign language at home, 25.6 million (41 percent) told the Census Bureau that they speak English less than very well.
One last item, the terror component:
Reuters: FBI counterterrorism investigators followed “dozens and dozens” of potential militants around the United States full time during the summer and “disrupted” many of them, FBI Director James Comey told a congressional committee on Thursday.
Comey, who testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs along with Nick Rasmussen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said U.S. investigators are aware of dozens of U.S.-based Islamic militant suspects who now are using encrypted communications.
Comey said investigators had followed “dozens and dozens of people around the United States 24/7” during the summer and had “disrupted” them.
Comey told the committee that Islamic State recruits from the United States are incrementally younger with more “girls –women under 18” – seeking to join the militant group.
Rasmussen testified that Islamic State has overtaken al Qaeda as leader of the global violent extremist movement and has access to a large pool of potential recruits in Western countries.
He said counterterrorism experts still regard al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate AQAP as big threat due to its interest in attacking the United States and airplanes.
Scary with all this going on…no one is talking to each other especially when Defense Secretary Ash Carter says we will not cooperate or coordinate with Russia.
Carter: “Now, the Russians originally said they were going in to fight ISIL and al-Nusra and other terrorist organizations. However, within days of deploying their forces, the Russians began striking targets that are not any of these groups. I have said repeatedly over the last week that we, the United States, believed this is a fundamental strategic mistake and that it will inflame and prolong the Syrian civil war. We have not and will not agree to cooperate with Russia so long as they continue to pursue this misguided strategy. We’ve seen increasingly unprofessional behavior from Russian forces. They violated Turkish airspace, which as all of us here made clear earlier this week, and strongly affirmed today here in Brussels, is NATO airspace.” The full remarks by Carter while in Belgium are here.
The Kearsarge Amphibious Ready Group and 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit departed Oct. 6 from the East Coast for a deployment to the Middle East.
The more than 4,000 sailors and Marines will support theater security cooperation and maritime security operations and provide an added crisis response capability to U.S. 5th and 6th Fleet areas of operations.
The ARG/MEU includes amphibious assault ship USS Kearsarge (LHD-3), amphibious transport dock ship USS Arlington (LPD-24), amphibious dock landing ship USS Oak Hill (LSD-51),
Kearsarge and the 26th MEU last deployed from March to November 2013, during a time of great unrest in the region. Kearsarge and USS San Antonio (LPD-17) spent a lot of time in the northern part of the region – operating in the Mediterranean out of Rota, Spain, and in the northern Red Sea – while USS Carter Hall (LSD-50) spent time operating independently near Bahrain and Djibouti.
Upon returning home, Kearsarge spent five months in maintenance at BAE Systems Norfolk Ship Repair before beginning sea trials last summer. Kearsarge served as the flagship in the Bold Alligator 2014 amphibious exercise last fall.
United Launch Alliance aims to launch its second Atlas V rocket in less than a week with a blastoff planned Thursday morning from California’s Central Coast.
The rocket is targeting a liftoff at 5:49 a.m. PT from Vandenberg Air Force Base, carrying a classified mission for the National Reconnaissance Office.
There’s a 70% chance of acceptable weather at Vandenberg’s Space Launch Complex-3. The full launch window has not been disclosed.
“We are excited and ready to take on our first Atlas launch of 2015,” said Col. J. Christopher Moss, commander of the 30th Space Wing, in a statement Wednesday. “Our team and mission partners have put a lot of hard work into preparing for this important mission for our nation.”
Amateur spacecraft observers speculate that the rocket is carrying a pair of satellites updating the Naval Ocean Surveillance System, or NOSS.
In addition to the primary mission, the rocket’s Centaur upper stage will deliver a group of 13 experimental and student-developed CubeSats to orbit.
The tiny spacecraft include nine missions sponsored by the NRO and four by NASA. Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Services Program was responsible for securing the ride for the NASA-sponsored payloads known as ElaNA-12.
A successful launch would keep ULA on track to return to Cape Canaveral for an Oct. 30 launch of the Air Force’s next Global Positioning System satellite on an Atlas V. The booster for that mission was delivered to the Cape on Tuesday.
An Atlas V last Friday successfully delivered Mexico’s Morelos-3 communications satellite to orbit, completing ULA’s 100th launch since Boeing and Lockheed Martin formed the joint venture in December 2006.
And Wednesday, in the first launch since an Antares rocket exploded shortly after takeoff on Oct. 29, 2014, a sounding rocket successfully blasted off from NASA’s Wallops Space Facility in Virginia.
“It wasn’t an easy decision,” an Iranian official source said when asked about Russia’s intervention in Syria. “The Russians were certain that if they did not move now, the next war they would fight would be inside their borders; this is about Russia’s national security before being about Syria. Therefore, a decision to start this pre-emptive war was taken by the Kremlin.”
For decades, Syria has been one of Russia’s main allies in the Middle East. The collapse of the Soviet Union didn’t change anything in this regard. Moscow continued to support Damascus with whatever necessary to keep the old empire’s last balcony on the warm waters of the Mediterranean Sea.
Russia Gets Back in the Game
In 2011, amid the eruption of the revolution in Syria, the Russians started feeling the heat. It was almost obvious to them that the fall of the regime in Damascus would lead to serious changes in Russia’s status in the Middle East; thus this wasn’t an option to even think about, and everything possible should be done to maintain the regime and keep it breathing, should this be using the veto in the UN Security Council, sending arms and ammunitions, or as we are witnessing today, intervening militarily and fighting to keep the status quo. Russia is not the only ally of the Syrian government; Iran also has been supporting President Bashar al-Assad.
Russia and Iran have not previously been allies. They share common interests, common allies and common rivals; however, this doesn’t necessarily mean they act as allies. In Syria, their common interest has been — and still is — keeping their common ally, the regime, alive. Even within the Syrian regime, there are different views among the ranks on how to deal with both countries; there are officials who are seen as “Iranians” and others as “Russians.” This is prompted by fears among one wing that the Islamic Republic’s agenda in Syria involves Islamization of society, while the other wing that prefers the Iranians sees them as very reliable since they were the first to roll their sleeves up in the fight for the regime’s existence. Yet, this is only a matter of preferences, and nothing more.
TWS: A number of cruise missiles launched from a Russian ship and aimed at targets in Syria have crashed in Iran, two U.S. officials told CNN Thursday. Monitoring by U.S. military and intelligence assets has concluded that at least four missiles crashed as they flew over Iran. One official said there may be casualties, but another official said this is not yet known.
Evidently, Russian ordinance is not quite state the art and Putin’s weapons do not match up with his will. Hard to imagine that will deter him.
***
Russia has very few precision guided missiles valued at $26,000 each, so they aging inventory of dumb bombs dropped manually, valued at $600 each are the ordnance of choice. So, accuracy by Russian pilots is well…lousy.
Russia has made little use of precision-guided bombs during its young air campaign in Syria, a choice that experts say increases the chances that more civilians will be killed in the strikes and that a stray bomb hitting Turkey could bring other NATO nations into the war.
That danger was illustrated over the weekend when a Russian aircraft crossed into Turkey and a second warplane breached a Turkish-monitored safety zone inside Syria as they conducted bombing runs in northern Syria. Turkey scrambled jets to intercept the intruders, and NATO issue a sharp rebuke over the incidents.
A repeat, however, is highly likely, because unlike the United States military, Russia doesn’t have a vast supply of the precision-guided weapons that have become the hallmark of American air power.
Since the start of the U.S.-led air war in Iraq and Syria more than a year ago, American military leaders repeatedly have boasted that the current U.S.-led air campaign is the most surgical that American forces ever have conducted, thanks to the use of laser-guided missiles, GPS targeting and other high-tech systems. Last week, Army Col. Steve Warren, the spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, called the airstrikes over Iraq and Syria “the most precise in the history of warfare.”
“The amount of care that we have taken to preserve civilian life, to preserve civilian infrastructure is unprecedented,” he said.
Still, that care has not saved the lives of hundreds of civilians who’ve died in U.S. airstrikes. While the U.S. Central Command, which runs American military operations in the Middle East, has acknowledged responsibility for only two such collateral killings – the deaths of two children in a November 2014 bombing raid in Syria – human rights groups and local activists put the numbers much higher.
Russian bombing is likely to take an even higher toll, experts say, for one simple reason: Russia is bombing the old-fashioned way: flying its planes over the target, releasing the bombs and letting gravity carry them to their ground targets.
“I can’t definitively rule out that they haven’t used any of their advanced guided munitions, but so far there is nothing in the images and video we’ve seen of the actual strikes that indicates the use of those guided munitions yet,” said Sim Tack, a Russian military analyst with Stratfor, an Austin, Texas-based group that sells geopolitical intelligence to U.S. and international corporations and government agencies.
Tack and other experts offered a range of theories for why the Russians aren’t using precision-guided missiles in Syria, from their much higher cost (precision-guided weapons cost from $26,000 to $1.1 million each; an unguided bomb as little as $600) and the Kremlin’s relative inexperience in employing them, to looser rules of engagement that allow Russian pilots to identify their targets with relative impunity from discipline over civilian deaths.
“There are at least some pilots in the Russian air force who have some capability of using (precision-guided weapons),” Tack said. “If the Russians wanted to make it a priority right now, they could do so. The fact that they are not probably means they’re fine with doing things as they are.”
EDITORS: BEGIN OPTIONAL TRIM
But beyond the increased threat to civilians, Russia’s bombing strategy carries a still greater risk: Sparking a wider war by hitting Turkey, even if only incidentally.
Satellite imagery and reports from Syrians in the area indicate that some Russian bombs have landed as close as 200 yards from the Turkish border.
10,684 The number of Islamic State sites that U.S. Central Command says were hit by American bombs during the first year of Operation Inherent Resolve, including buildings, fighting positions, staging areas, Humvees, oil infrastructure, tanks and other targets.
“The lighter a bomb is, the more surface area it has, the higher you drop it from and the stronger the wind, the farther it can drift off course,” Tack said. “I would say that 200 meters is definitely dangerously close to the border, if that’s where they are conducting their bombings.”
EDITORS: END OPTIONAL TRIM
Dmitri Gorenburg, a researcher at Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian Studies and an analyst for the CNA think tank in Arlington, Va., said successive Russian governments showed little regard for civilian life during their short-lived 2008 war in the former Soviet republic of Georgia or earlier during two wars totaling more than 10 years in the vast country’s Muslim-dominated Chechnya region.
“In Chechnya, there was wholesale destruction of (the regional capital) Grozny, not just from aircraft but with artillery as well,” Gorenburg told McClatchy. “And if you look at (the Russian incursion in) Ukraine recently, there haven’t been too many qualms about using artillery on population centers. So Russia certainly has demonstrated less care about harming civilians.”
EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE
Gorenburg said that Russia may be more hesitant to use precision bombs simply because it possesses fewer of them than do the United States and its more technologically advanced allies.
“They don’t want to use up all their (precision-guided weapons) in Syria, so they use the dumb bombs instead,” Gorenburg told McClatchy. “From their point of view, given the scale of destruction that’s already taken place in Syria, it may not matter as much if some stray building gets hit.”
Gorenburg said that Moscow may be starting its air campaign by using bombs it had previously given or sold to the Syrian government, a longtime Russia ally.
“Because Syria uses the same (Russian-made) planes, they can use the bombs they’ve provided Syria the last few years,” he said. “They weren’t giving the Syrians anything too fancy or expensive.”
