Drone lands in ND in preparation for border patrol
Dec 7 08:45 PM US/Eastern
By DAVE KOLPACK
Associated Press Writer 24 Comments
FARGO, N.D. (AP) - After two failed tries, an unmanned aircraft expected to be the first to patrol the northern U.S. border completed a flight from Arizona to North Dakota.
U.S Customs and Border Protection officials said the Predator B drone touched down Saturday at the Grand Forks Air Force Base after a six-hour flight from Libby Army Airfield in Sierra Vista, Ariz.
"The aviators all brag about the perfect landing," said Michael Corcoran, deputy director for air operations at U.S. Customs and Border Protection's Air and Marine office in Grand Forks. "I guess we'll brag about this one, as well," he said.
The drone is scheduled to begin patrolling the northern U.S. border in January. Its flights will originate from the Grand Forks base.
Officials were waiting for clearance on air space before deciding on a schedule, Corcoran said.
An earlier flight on Thursday was canceled because of maintenance problems, and a flight Friday was aborted because of poor weather.
The Predator weighs 5 tons, has a 66-foot wingspan and can fly undetected as high as 50,000 feet. It can fly for 28 hours at a time and will be equipped with sensors and radar.
The drone has been in use along the southern border with Mexico since 2005.
Sen. Kent Conrad, D-N.D., said the state's congressional delegation had been working for four years to get the unmanned aircraft to North Dakota.
"It is vital to America's security that we protect our borders, particularly the northern border," Conrad said. "The Grand Forks Air Branch plays an essential role in helping shut the door on terrorists who want to sneak across remote border points to strike on U.S. soil."
08 December 2008
07 December 2008
AEROSPACE: Safer skies; MKV completes hover test
Hat tip to SteelJaw Scribe.
MULTIPLE KILL VEHICLE COMPLETES HOVER TEST, Dec. 3, 2008. Missile Defense Agency Director Lieutenant General Patrick O’Reilly announced that a test of the Multiple Kill Vehicle-L (MKV-L) was conducted Tuesday, Dec. 2 at the National Hover Test Facility at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. Preliminary indications are that planned test objectives were achieved. Objectives of the test included having the MKV-L hover under its own power and prove its capability to recognize and track a surrogate target in a flight environment. During the test, the MKV-L’s propulsion system demonstrated maneuverability while tracking a target. The MKV-L transmitted video and flight telemetry to the ground. The MKV-L mission is to destroy medium through intercontinental-range ballistic missiles equipped with multiple warheads or countermeasures by using a single interceptor missile…
More, including animation here...
OSINT: New SEC VA choosen
By HOPE YEN | Associated Press Writer
Hartford Courant
4:20 AM EST, December 7, 2008
"WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama has chosen retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki to be the next Veterans Affairs secretary, turning to a former Army chief of staff once vilified by the Bush administration for questioning its Iraq war strategy."
"Obama will announce the selection of Shinseki, the first Army four-star general of Japanese-American ancestry, at a news conference Sunday in Chicago. He will be the first Asian-American to hold the post of Veterans Affairs secretary, adding to the growing diversity of Obama's Cabinet."
More here...
Hartford Courant
4:20 AM EST, December 7, 2008
"WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama has chosen retired Gen. Eric K. Shinseki to be the next Veterans Affairs secretary, turning to a former Army chief of staff once vilified by the Bush administration for questioning its Iraq war strategy."
"Obama will announce the selection of Shinseki, the first Army four-star general of Japanese-American ancestry, at a news conference Sunday in Chicago. He will be the first Asian-American to hold the post of Veterans Affairs secretary, adding to the growing diversity of Obama's Cabinet."
More here...
OSINT: SEC DEF works on a balanced strategy
A Balanced Strategy
Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age
Robert M. Gates
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009
"The defining principle of the Pentagon's new National Defense Strategy is balance. The United States cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything. The Department of Defense must set priorities and consider inescapable tradeoffs and opportunity costs."
"The strategy strives for balance in three areas: between trying to prevail in current conflicts and preparing for other contingencies, between institutionalizing capabilities such as counterinsurgency and foreign military assistance and maintaining the United States' existing conventional and strategic technological edge against other military forces, and between retaining those cultural traits that have made the U.S. armed forces successful and shedding those that hamper their ability to do what needs to be done."
More here...
Reprogramming the Pentagon for a New Age
Robert M. Gates
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2009
"The defining principle of the Pentagon's new National Defense Strategy is balance. The United States cannot expect to eliminate national security risks through higher defense budgets, to do everything and buy everything. The Department of Defense must set priorities and consider inescapable tradeoffs and opportunity costs."
"The strategy strives for balance in three areas: between trying to prevail in current conflicts and preparing for other contingencies, between institutionalizing capabilities such as counterinsurgency and foreign military assistance and maintaining the United States' existing conventional and strategic technological edge against other military forces, and between retaining those cultural traits that have made the U.S. armed forces successful and shedding those that hamper their ability to do what needs to be done."
More here...
06 December 2008
CAP: Flight student was one of the first women to go through USAF Basic Training
An Air Force pioneer looks back
By Janene Scully/Associate Editor
December 5, 2008
When Patricia Ono attended Air Force boot camp, she and her fellow airmen wore dresses for physical training, they couldn’t carry weapons, and to leave base they had to don white gloves with their uniforms.
Ono, now 81 and an Orcutt resident, was among the first women in basic training for the fledgling service 60 years ago. She shared her experiences with today’s airmen during celebrations at Vandenberg Air Force Base earlier this year.
Women who served in the military, such as Ono, will be recognized for their service during a ceremony at 10 a.m. Sunday at the Freedom Monument Veterans Memorial in front of the Maldonado Youth Center in Santa Maria.
So what was boot camp like in 1948 for the first class of 74 women enlistees?
“Nothing compared to now,” she said with a chuckle. “When I talked at the Anniversary Ball at the base, I was telling them how we exercised in dresses, how we drilled in dresses, little seersucker dresses.
“We never got down on the ground to do pushups or anything like that. It was mainly for show because they had all the newspapermen from Washington there constantly taking pictures of the first squadron.”
When women military members now serving at Vandenberg saw the old pictures of Ono in uniform, they asked in amazement, “Are you wearing gloves?
“I said we had to wear gloves when we went off base in our uniforms. And they started laughing hysterically,” she said.
As a young woman in Cincinnati, Ono joined at the time when the Army Air Forces became a separate service, carved from the Army. The Air Force began in 1947; she attended basic training in 1948.
“I’d always wanted to from the time I was really young, and I took flying lessons in the Civil Air Patrol,” she said, adding that airsickness grounded her flying career before she could earn her pilot’s license.
She talked to an Air Force recruiter about signing up, but learned she would have to wait to enlist — the bill allowing women in the Air Force hadn’t passed yet.
“I can’t remember how long I waited, but this past October was 60 years ago when I enlisted,” she said, adding that her family didn’t like it initially, but eventually changed their minds.
She took a train from her hometown to San Antonio, Texas, for boot camp.
“It was easy compared to what they go through now,” Ono said.
The women recruits were kept separate from the men — with barbed wire fencing dividing the genders, which used separate mess halls and recreation facilities.
“We weren’t allowed to talk to any men (recruits),” she said. “We were escorted heavily. They didn’t want the first group to get into any trouble.”
Still, the men “treated us fine. They’d better. They had to show respect, a lot of respect, or they were in a lot of trouble.”
But the women recruits weren’t allowed to carry any kind of gun, Ono said, adding it wasn’t something that bothered her.
“I didn’t even know women were going to be allowed to carry guns,” she said.
After basic training, Ono was assigned to Westover Air Force Base, Mass., with the military police unit, an assignment she sought because of her pre-military jobs with two detective agencies investigating employees suspected of cash-register fraud.
She was the Westover military police unit’s lone female member.
“I still wasn’t allowed to carry a gun,” she said.
Her job was with the provost marshal office, and she took pictures for identification photos and fingerprints.
“That’s about all the women could do then is clerk typist (jobs). There wasn’t many things open for women then.”
She met her husband, George, a military photographer, through her job duties, and the pair married. But pregnancy prematurely ended her military career after three years at the rank of corporal because at the time, pregnant women weren’t allowed to serve, she said.
Ono’s military involvement was far from over, however. She moved to the Central Coast when her husband was transferred to Cooke Air Force Base as it was becoming Vandenberg Air Force Base in the late 1950s.
Working with an officer’s wife, they helped create the base’s first family services center, and Ono was the first secretary to the wives club, she said.
The couple, who had two children, remained on the Central Coast once George Ono retired from the military, and later worked for a defense contractor at Vandenberg. He died in 2001
She also spent 15 years as a volunteer with the Red Cross at the base hospital. Later, she worked 16 years as a volunteer consumer mediator with the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office.
Sixty years after joining the military, she says she enjoyed being among the pioneering women for future female airmen.
As for today’s women serving in the Air Force, Ono believes they have “wonderful opportunities if they make good use of them.”
One sergeant recently asked Ono, “Would you go back in if you had a chance?”
“In a minute,” Ono answered.
OSINT: Pentagon to Detail Troops to Bolster Domestic Security
By Spencer S. Hsu and Ann Scott TysonWashington Post Staff Writers
Monday, December 1, 2008
"The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials."
"The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said."
"There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement."
"The Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
"This is a genuine recognition that this [job] isn't something that you want to have a pickup team responsible for," said Tussing, who has assessed the military's homeland security strategies.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Cato Institute are troubled by what they consider an expansion of executive authority."
"Domestic emergency deployment may be "just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority," or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU's National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of "a creeping militarization" of homeland security."
"McHale stressed that the response units will be subject to the act, that only 8 percent of their personnel will be responsible for security and that their duties will be to protect the force, not other law enforcement. For decades, the military has assigned larger units to respond to civil disturbances, such as during the Los Angeles riot in 1992."
"Although some Pentagon leaders initially expected to build the next two response units around combat teams, they are likely to be drawn mainly from reserves and the National Guard, such as the 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade from South Carolina, which returned in May after more than a year in Afghanistan."
"Now that Pentagon strategy gives new priority to homeland security and calls for heavier reliance on the Guard and reserves, McHale said, Washington has to figure out how to pay for it.
"It's one thing to decide upon a course of action, and it's something else to make it happen," he said. "It's time to put our money where our mouth is."
Monday, December 1, 2008
"The U.S. military expects to have 20,000 uniformed troops inside the United States by 2011 trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terrorist attack or other domestic catastrophe, according to Pentagon officials."
"The long-planned shift in the Defense Department's role in homeland security was recently backed with funding and troop commitments after years of prodding by Congress and outside experts, defense analysts said."
"There are critics of the change, in the military and among civil liberties groups and libertarians who express concern that the new homeland emphasis threatens to strain the military and possibly undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, a 130-year-old federal law restricting the military's role in domestic law enforcement."
"The Bush administration and some in Congress have pushed for a heightened homeland military role since the middle of this decade, saying the greatest domestic threat is terrorists exploiting the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction."
"This is a genuine recognition that this [job] isn't something that you want to have a pickup team responsible for," said Tussing, who has assessed the military's homeland security strategies.
The American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Cato Institute are troubled by what they consider an expansion of executive authority."
"Domestic emergency deployment may be "just the first example of a series of expansions in presidential and military authority," or even an increase in domestic surveillance, said Anna Christensen of the ACLU's National Security Project. And Cato Vice President Gene Healy warned of "a creeping militarization" of homeland security."
"McHale stressed that the response units will be subject to the act, that only 8 percent of their personnel will be responsible for security and that their duties will be to protect the force, not other law enforcement. For decades, the military has assigned larger units to respond to civil disturbances, such as during the Los Angeles riot in 1992."
"Although some Pentagon leaders initially expected to build the next two response units around combat teams, they are likely to be drawn mainly from reserves and the National Guard, such as the 218th Maneuver Enhancement Brigade from South Carolina, which returned in May after more than a year in Afghanistan."
"Now that Pentagon strategy gives new priority to homeland security and calls for heavier reliance on the Guard and reserves, McHale said, Washington has to figure out how to pay for it.
"It's one thing to decide upon a course of action, and it's something else to make it happen," he said. "It's time to put our money where our mouth is."
More here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/30/AR2008113002217.html
OSINT: HR 1333 CAP Homeland Security Act
OSINT (open source intelligence)
The below bill is before the Senate now. CT Junior Senator Joe Lieberman has retained his chairmanship of the committee.
H.R. 1333
Civil Air Patrol Homeland Security Support Act of 2007
June 18, 2008
Representative Charlie Dent (R-PA)
Download Document
STATUS: PASSED and referred to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
SUMMARY
H.R. 1333 instructs the Comptroller General of the U.S. Government Accountability Office to review the functions of the Civil Air Patrol and how they may support the homeland security missions of State, local, and tribal governments and the Department of Homeland Security.
Civil Air Patrol Study
The bill directs the Comptroller General to conduct a study of the functions and capabilities of the Civil Air patrol in supporting the homeland security missions of State, local, and tribal governments, as well as those of the Department of Homeland Security. The study is to review the ability of the Civil Air Patrol to provide aerial reconnaissance or communications support for border security; augment the Department’s situational awareness and search-and-rescue capabilities in the aftermath of an act of terrorism, natural disaster, or other catastrophic event; and assist in other activities the Comptroller General determines appropriate for review.
Reporting
The Comptroller General is to report to Congress within 180 days of the enactment of H.R. 1333, assessing the feasibility and cost effectiveness of using the Civil Air Patrol in supporting homeland security missions. The report must also assess whether the current mechanisms through which Federal and State agencies request support from the Civil Air Patrol are sufficient or whether these agreements and channels are in need of updating.
The bill requires the Secretary of DHS to submit an additional report to Congress within 90 days of completion of the Comptroller General’s Civil Air Patrol Study. The Secretary’s report shall include a review of any conclusive findings by the Comptroller General and any recommendations the Secretary may have for further action.
BACKGROUND
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-296) was introduced by Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX) on June 6, 2002. President Bush signed the legislation into law on November 25, 2002. The Act established DHS as an executive department headed by the Secretary of Homeland Security, to be appointed by the President.
COST
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cost less than $1 million in Fiscal Year 2009 for the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Homeland Security to complete the reports required by H.R. 1333, as amended.
The below bill is before the Senate now. CT Junior Senator Joe Lieberman has retained his chairmanship of the committee.
H.R. 1333
Civil Air Patrol Homeland Security Support Act of 2007
June 18, 2008
Representative Charlie Dent (R-PA)
Download Document
STATUS: PASSED and referred to the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
SUMMARY
H.R. 1333 instructs the Comptroller General of the U.S. Government Accountability Office to review the functions of the Civil Air Patrol and how they may support the homeland security missions of State, local, and tribal governments and the Department of Homeland Security.
Civil Air Patrol Study
The bill directs the Comptroller General to conduct a study of the functions and capabilities of the Civil Air patrol in supporting the homeland security missions of State, local, and tribal governments, as well as those of the Department of Homeland Security. The study is to review the ability of the Civil Air Patrol to provide aerial reconnaissance or communications support for border security; augment the Department’s situational awareness and search-and-rescue capabilities in the aftermath of an act of terrorism, natural disaster, or other catastrophic event; and assist in other activities the Comptroller General determines appropriate for review.
Reporting
The Comptroller General is to report to Congress within 180 days of the enactment of H.R. 1333, assessing the feasibility and cost effectiveness of using the Civil Air Patrol in supporting homeland security missions. The report must also assess whether the current mechanisms through which Federal and State agencies request support from the Civil Air Patrol are sufficient or whether these agreements and channels are in need of updating.
The bill requires the Secretary of DHS to submit an additional report to Congress within 90 days of completion of the Comptroller General’s Civil Air Patrol Study. The Secretary’s report shall include a review of any conclusive findings by the Comptroller General and any recommendations the Secretary may have for further action.
BACKGROUND
The Homeland Security Act of 2002 (P.L. 107-296) was introduced by Rep. Dick Armey (R-TX) on June 6, 2002. President Bush signed the legislation into law on November 25, 2002. The Act established DHS as an executive department headed by the Secretary of Homeland Security, to be appointed by the President.
COST
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that it would cost less than $1 million in Fiscal Year 2009 for the Government Accountability Office and the Department of Homeland Security to complete the reports required by H.R. 1333, as amended.
05 December 2008
Public Service: A Soldier's Angels Christmas
HI Angels!!
I am checking on who is going to attend our Christmas VA Hospital visits (the 169th Composite Squadron in Manchester attended last year). West Haven will be on Saturday, December 13th. 1:00 - 3:30 ish. We will hand out cards/candy. If anyone has any cards/candy they would like to donate towards this event that would be awesome!!
Cards can be made out to Dear Veteran or Dear Hero. Newington will be on Thursday, December 18th. 11:00-1ish. We have been invited to attend their party. We are bringing baked goods and presenting each attending Veteran with a gift bag, which will contain a blanket, card, candy, and little jugs of CT maple syrup.
Please let me know if you can attend or if you have any cards/candy/baked goods for an event.--
Sincerely,
Judy Lee
Soldiers AngelsCT State Coordinator, CT CTL , CT VA CTLhttp://soldiersangelfarmgirl1967.blogspot.com/
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