Category Archives: Military

Who are Those Wearing Blue Helmets?

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I have been saying for years that those that make up the U.N. Peacekeepers are the worst of the worst that member nations offer up and finally, The New York Times figured it out. I bet that Donald Trump actually meant the United Nations rather than NATO when he spoke about breaking it up or did he?

Armies Used by U.N. Fail Watchdog Group’s Test

NYT: The militaries of the 30 countries that provide the most soldiers and police officers to United Nations peacekeeping operations also are among those most susceptible to corruption, according to a study released Sunday by an anti-corruption monitoring organization.

The organization, Transparency International, known for its annual corruption rankings of governments around the world, said that in its A-to-F grading for the armed forces of the top troop-contributing countries, only Italy scored higher than a D.

Six of the countries — Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Egypt, Morocco and Togo — received F grades, Transparency International said.

The three countries that contribute the most troops, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and India — which together provide about 25,200 uniformed personnel, roughly a quarter of the total in United Nations peacekeeping operations — also scored poorly in the study’s rankings. Bangladesh and India each received a D, and Ethiopia an E.

The organization cited poor anti-corruption practices and inadequate training as factors in assessing the rankings.

The study comes against a backdrop of new allegations against some peacekeepers. The most recent catalyst for concern has been a growing sex-abuse scandal that has implicated peacekeepers deployed to the Central African Republic, in episodes dating to 2013, many involving children.

Transparency International did not cite any examples of peacekeeper corruption in the study.

United Nations officials did not dispute the findings but said the study did not reflect steps the organization had taken to prevent corruption by peacekeepers.

“There are a full range of audit and independent oversight systems that are in place to protect against such risks once individual units deploy to peacekeeping operations,” Nick Birnback, a spokesman for United Nations peacekeeping, said.

A few years ago there was the genesis of the Syrian civil war, Somalia, Libya and more. This speaks to not only the peacekeepers being criminals and corrupt but the leadership of the United Nations as well. Neither Kofi Annan or Ban Ki Moon have taken the UN up to levels where it becomes meaningful. It is not for lack of intelligence, the UN building in New York is full of international spies and well connected to world leaders, it becomes a lack of will and management.

2012, Ignatius of WaPo in part: The Somalia mess made the United Nations so nervous about intervention that it ignored an appeal a few months later from its own representative in Rwanda that a genocidal massacre was about to begin there.

In January 1994, Gen. Romeo Dallaire, the French Canadian commander of a small force called UNAMIR, cabled New York that the Hutu-led government in Kigali was planning the “extermination” of Tutsis. He concluded his message, “Allons-y.” Let’s go. The United Nations did nothing. Three months later, 800,000 Rwandans were dead.

Annan was running peacekeeping operations at the time, and his deputy cabled the brave Dallaire insisting on “the need to avoid entering into a course of action that might lead to the use of force and unanticipated consequences.” That’s a sorry U.N. chapter, and it’s to Annan’s credit that he tells this and other stories so honestly.

The third debacle was Bosnia. In April 1993, the Security Council demanded that the town of Srebenica, filled with 60,000 Muslim refugees and encircled by Bosnian Serb forces, become a “safe area . . . free from armed attacks.” The refugees waited more than two years for the United Nations to deliver. In July 1995, Gen. Ratko Mladic committed his infamous massacre. A month later, UNPROFOR finally intervened.

When Annan became secretary-general, the United Nations tried to bolster its peacekeeping efforts. It did better in East Timor, Kosovo and Libya in putting some teeth in the concept of a “responsibility to protect.” But the abiding story has been the United Nations’ limitations — in dealing with Iraq, the Palestinian issue, Iran and now Syria.
What to do? Albright and 15 other former foreign ministers just sent a letter to President Vladimir Putin saying they were “gravely disappointed” by Russia’s failure to support the U.N. mission and pleading for action to stop the war in Syria. Albright’s office says that the Russians responded negatively. As the whole of this revealing book demonstrates, there’s got to be a better way to prevent ruinous conflicts.

The Looming Military Showdown with Russia

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U.S. F-15s deployed to Iceland

(CNN)Demonstrating its commitment to a “free” and “secure” Europe, the United States deployed 12 F-15C Eagles and approximately 350 airmen to Iceland and the Netherlands on Friday, the Air Force announced.

U.S. aircraft units from the 131st Fighter Squadron at Barnes Air National Guard Base in Massachusetts and the 194th Fighter Squadron at Fresno Air National Guard Base in California will support NATO air surveillance missions in Iceland and conduct flying training in the Netherlands.
The F-15s are not the only package of American fighters being sent to Europe in an effort to deter further Russian aggression in the region.
In February, the U.S. said it will send six F-15s to Finland as part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, which the United States initiated in 2014 to reassure NATO allies after Russian military intervention in Ukraine. These aircraft are scheduled to deploy next month.
Although it maintains a small coast guard force, Iceland is the only country in NATO that does not have a military.
The F-15s are part of the U.S.’s Theater Security Packages, a rotational force used to augment existing Air Force capabilities in Europe, according to the Air Force.
It is also somewhat of a secret that while Russia was taking over yet another country outside of Crimea and Ukraine, meaning Syria, Russia was in fact testing pilots, electronic warfare and newly developed ordnance obscured with the dropping over older and prohibited cluster unguided munitions.
TurkishWeekly: Russia’s engagement in Syria presents an apposite opportunity for the Russian military to test the effectiveness of its modernization program even though its involvement in the conflict is very limited.
 

Some of the modern Russian munitions with modern precision technology include the Kh-25 laser-guided missile and the KAB-500S Glonass satellite-guided bomb. However, these weapons are used in limited numbers, according to the defense consultancy company IHS. A Russian military expert Mikhail Barabanov said “There have been no casualties, the intensity of action is quite high, and new types of weapons — such as satellite-guided bombs, cluster munitions with smart elements, and cruise missiles — have been tested.” Barabanov believes it is still too early to judge the success of the new equipment.

In 2014, Russia has been flying bombers in Northern Europe to likely test NATO’s defense systems and responsive actions by NATO members.
FreeBeacon: Six Russian aircraft, including two Bear H nuclear bombers, two MiG-31 fighter jets and two IL-78 refueling tankers were intercepted by F-22 fighters on Wednesday west and north of Alaska in air defense identification zones, said Navy Capt. Jeff A. Davis, a spokesman for the U.S. Northern Command and North American Aerospace Defense Command. Two other Bears were intercepted by Canadian jets on Thursday.
Additionally, Russia has introduced and has been testing a new stealth AMUR 1650 attack submarine. In February of 2016, it was announced by a U.S. Navy Vice Admiral that Russia’s activities are at Cold War levels.
Putin is challenging NATO in Europe and the Obama administration is responding with all the guidance being coordinated by General Breedlove. Europe requires hard military assets and is receiving them while the same goes for the Baltic States.
The possible showdown could come at the time the West is most vulnerable, not only for Europe dealing with a migrant and economic crisis but for the United States when a new president and administration takes over. It worked for al Qaeda just a mere few months into the Bush administration.
Russia is anything but bashful having made this declaration less than a week ago.

Russian Officials: Russia Is Ready To Militarily Answer NATO’s Growing Potential In Europe

MEMRI: In recent days, tensions have risen between the U.S. and Russia over the U.S. decision to increase the budgets and activities of NATO forces in Eastern Europe. Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu has stated that Russia is ready to respond to NATO’s growing potential in Europe. On March 25, 2016, he denounced the upgrade of NATO troops in Europe, in particular near Russia’s borders, thus compelling Russia to react. “NATO continues to build up its military potential in Europe, including in close vicinity to the Russian borders. No doubt, this situation cannot but concern us. We are forced to respond to it,” the minister said.[1]

Shoigu added that in 2016, Russia’s Western Military District will be upgraded with over 1,100 pieces of military hardware, including Sukhoi Su-35 advanced fighter jets, Koalitsiya-SV and Msta-SM self-propelled howitzers, and S-400 antiaircraft missile systems. The District has set up a new 1st Tank Army headquartered in the Moscow area. During 2016, Russia will raise its alert levels and conduct 800 operative and combat training drills to boost the military’s response readiness.[2]  More here.

Add in the emerging threats of Iran and North Korea, the West has a trifecta of a military showdown.

Who is APT6?

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Darkhotel APT hackers campaign ‘followed’ global CEOs using hotel networks

A state-backed espionage group has spent years targeting senior executives from large global companies using a specialised Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) that can follow and steal data from them as they move around the globe from hotel to hotel, Kaspersky has revealed.

TechWorld: Interestingly, despite some smarts, the sophistication level isn’t always top drawer, which points towards China rather than the US or Russia. The victim list is another hint at that too.

“Overall, victims in our sinkhole logs and KSN data were found across the globe, with the majority in Japan, Taiwan, China, Russia, Korea and Hong Kong,” (in that order) noted Kaspersky Lab’s researchers.

US executives were on the list but far below the prevalence for targeting Japanese CEOs and managers. And the attackers seem to go after almost everyone with the right job title, with sectors hit including electronics, finance, manufacturing, pharma, cosmetics, chemicals, automotive, defence, law, military and even NGOs – the last one has been an obsession for Chinese actors. More here.

FBI Says a Mysterious Hacking Group Has Had Access to US Govt Files for Years

Motherboard: The feds warned that “a group of malicious cyber actors,” whom security experts believe to be the government-sponsored hacking group known as , “have compromised and stolen sensitive information from various government and commercial networks” since at least 2011, according to an FBI alert obtained by Motherboard.

The alert, which is also available online, shows that foreign government hackers are still successfully hacking and stealing data from US government’s servers, their activities going unnoticed for years. This comes months after the US government revealed that a group of hackers, widely believed to be working for the Chinese government, had for more than a year infiltrated the computer systems of the Office of Personnel Management, or OPM. In the process, they stole highly sensitive data about several millions of government workers and even spies.

In the alert, the FBI lists a long series of websites used as command and control servers to launch phishing attacks “in furtherance of computer network exploitation (CNE) activities [read: hacking] in the United States and abroad since at least 2011.”

Domains controlled by the hackers were “suspended” as of late December 2015, according to the alert, but it’s unclear if the hackers have been pushed out or they are still inside the hacked networks.

“Anybody who’s been in that network all this long, they could be anywhere and everywhere.”

“Looks like they were in for years before they were caught, god knows where they are,” Michael Adams, an information security expert who served more than two decades in the US Special Operations Command, and who has reviewed the alert, told Motherboard. “Anybody who’s been in that network all this long, they could be anywhere and everywhere.”

For Adams, this alert shows that the US government still is not in control of what’s going on inside its most sensitive networks. This alert, he said, is an admission of that.

“It’s just flabbergasting,” he told me. “How many times can this keep happening before we finally realized we’re screwed?”

The FBI wouldn’t comment on the alert, only saying that it was just another example of a routine notice to private partners, “provided in order to help systems administrators guard against the actions of persistent cyber criminals.”

This group of “persistent cyber criminals” is especially persistent. The group is none other than the “APT6” hacking group, according to sources within the antivirus and threat intelligence industry. There isn’t much public literature about the group, other than a couple of old reports, but APT6, which stand for Advanced Persistent Threat 6, is a codename given to a group believed to be working for the Chinese government.

“This is one of the earlier APTs, they definitely go back further than 2011 […] more like 2008.”

“This is one of the earlier APTs, they definitely go back further than 2011 or whatever—more like 2008 I believe,” Kurt Baumgartner, a researcher at the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab, told me. (Baumgartner declined to say whether the group was Chinese or not, but said its targets align with the interest of a state-sponsored attacker.)

Kyrk Storer, a spokesperson with FireEye, confirmed that the domains listed in the alert “were associated with APT6 and one of their malware backdoors,” and that the hackers “targeted the US and UK defense industrial base.”

Another researcher at a different security company, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak publicly about the hacker’s activities, said this was the “current campaign of an older group,” and said there “likely” was an FBI investigation ongoing. (Several other security companies declined to comment for this story.)

At this point, it’s unclear whether the FBI’s investigation will lead to any concrete result. But two years after the US government charged five Chinese military members for hacking US companies, it’s clear hackers haven’t given up attacking US targets.

NATO members Pay Billions

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There is no doubt the NATO member countries have offered aid and support in the war on terror. Could countries do more? Yes, yet member countries are hardly free riders. NATO does coordinate more than what is realized in current conditions of hostilities in the Middle East.

NATO: The first group of officers from Iraq’s national security forces started their NATO training course at the King Abdullah Special Operations Training Centre in Amman, Jordan, on 2 April 2016. Their training is part of NATO’s effort to help Iraq build up its defence capacities, reform its security sector and increase its ability to contribute to regional stability. In the next six months, 350 Iraqi officers will be trained in the NATO course. Training will begin with a focus on military medicine, civil military planning and on countering improvised explosive devices.

NATO Intelligence Fusion Cell Operations since 2006

Trump Willing to Break Up NATO

AtlanticCouncil: Donald J. Trump on Saturday went further than ever before in his criticism of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, telling a crowd here that he would be fine if NATO broke up.

Mr. Trump had previously questioned the need for the organization, and on Saturday he reiterated his criticism that other NATO countries were “not paying their fair share” in comparison with the United States.

“That means we are protecting them, giving them military protection and other things, and they’re ripping off the United States. And you know what we do? Nothing,” Mr. Trump said at a subdued rally here on the outskirts of Milwaukee. “Either they have to pay up for past deficiencies or they have to get out.”

“And if it breaks up NATO, it breaks up NATO,” he concluded.

The role of the United States in NATO has become a point of contention here between Mr. Trump and his chief rival, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, as the candidates battle to win the state’s 42 delegates in Tuesday’s primary. Mr. Cruz has criticized Mr. Trump’s comments on NATO, saying that the United States needed to support the organization’s fight against terrorism and to counterbalance Russia’s influence….

Later, at an event in Wausau, Wis., Mr. Trump seemed to acknowledge the controversy his initial remarks about NATO had prompted.

“I said here’s the problem with NATO: it’s obsolete,” Mr. Trump said, recounting his comments. “Big statement to make when you don’t know that much about it, but I learn quickly.”

**** WSJ:

Paying up? Well yes, no free-riders

In part from Bloomberg: Even before being pinched by the global financial crisis, most NATO nations repeatedly cut their defense budgets, failing to meet the 2 percent benchmark. On the other hand, this viewpoint — part of what my colleague Eli Lake calls the Obama-Trump Doctrine — ignores some facts.Japan, Korea and European countries to some extent subsidize the U.S. troop presence inside their borders; Germany pays over $1 billion and Japan upped its 2016 contribution by 1.4 percent, to $1.6 billion. Recall, too, that the allies have been there for American-initiated wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Consider NATO. According to the latest annual report from Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, 16 members spent more on defense last year than in 2014. While the Baltic states and other smallish countries living in Russia’s shadow generally had the largest percentage increases, Germany has approved boosts of $2.1 billion per year through 2019, and the U.K. has pledged an additional $18 billion over a decade.

More important, perhaps, NATO nations are spending a lot more on actual fighting equipment rather than staffs and pensions — eight allocated more than 20 percent of their military budgets to hardware. Readiness is also being stressed: Last year’s Exercise Trident Juncture in Southern Europe was the largest joint drill in over a decade, involving 36,000 troops, 140 aircraft and 60 ships.

Just as Russia has shaken Europe out of its defense stupor, so have China and North Korea energized the rest of East Asia. Japan has allocated a record $42 billion in fiscal 2016 (although a sluggish yen means its global spending power has increased at a lower rate). The budget includes purchases of six next-generation Lockheed-Martin F-35s and three Global Hawk drones, and funding for building a new guided missile destroyer. For more information and charts on funding NATO.

Gitmo Detainees Released to Senegal

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Both of these detainees are Libyan. DW: According to their leaked prisoner files, the men had ties to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group and al Qaeda. A US official told Reuters news agency they were the first of a group of around a dozen inmates who are expected to be moved from the detention center in the next few weeks.

Secretary of State John Kerry thanked the west African country of Senegal for offering “humanitarian resettlement” to the two men after US authorities approved their release.

Senegal is not without jihad terror threats. US Wary of Africa ‘Terrorist’ Threat, Senegal Detains Suspects

Detainee Transfers Announced

Press Operations

Release No: NR-118-16
April 4, 2016

The Department of Defense announced today the transfer of Salem Abdu Salam Ghereby and Omar Khalif Mohammed Abu Baker Mahjour Umar from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to the Government of Senegal.

As directed by the president’s Jan. 22, 2009, executive order, the interagency Guantanamo Review Task Force conducted a comprehensive review of this case. As a result of that review, which examined a number of factors, including security issues, Ghereby was unanimously approved for transfer by the six departments and agencies comprising the task force.

On Aug. 20, 2015, the Periodic Review Board consisting of representatives from the Departments of Defense, Homeland Security, Justice, and State; the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence determined continued law of war detention of Umar does not remain necessary to protect against a continuing significant threat to the security of the United States. As a result of that review, which examined a number of factors, including security issues, Umar was recommended for transfer by consensus of the six departments and agencies comprising the Periodic Review Board. The Periodic Review Board process was established by the president’s March 7, 2011 Executive Order 13567.

In accordance with statutory requirements, the secretary of defense informed Congress of the United States’ intent to transfer these individuals and of the secretary’s determination that these transfers meets the statutory standard.

The United States is grateful to the Government of Senegal for its humanitarian gesture and willingness to support ongoing U.S. efforts to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. The United States coordinated with the Government of Senegal to ensure these transfers took place consistent with appropriate security and humane treatment measures.

Today, 89 detainees remain at Guantanamo Bay.