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The 3Ds Blog
The 3-Ds Blog: Diplomacy, Defence, Development
The start of a piece at Foreign Policy’s excellent “AfPak Channel“:
Mark Collins - Which NATO Countries Are Actually Bombing in Libya? And Other Things
This article in Defense Industry Daily, on the current Indian fighter competition, assesses briefly amongst others, the Dassault Rafale, Eurofighter Typhoon, Saab Gripen NG, Boeing Super Hornet, and the Lockheed Martin F-35 (the last is not in the competition).
Further to this post,
The World Needs More Canada, US Military Sectiongeopolitical sense has prevailed. From MILNEWS.ca:
…Will our major media notice? In the middle of an election?
Remember the think tanker who said the best option for the US to dole out responsibility for the Arctic to European Command (6th item)? The US thinks differently. “Changes made to the US military’s Unified Command Plan shift geographic boundaries and stress the growing importance of the Arctic, officials said. President Barack Obama signed the document yesterday. The biggest change to the plan assigns US Northern Command responsibility for the Arctic. US European Command and US Pacific Command shared responsibility with US Northern Command for the region under the last change published in December 2008 ….”
Further to this post,
The Liberal Platform on Defence
Blah, blah, blah. Read it yourself, three sub-heads that are sadly and seriously self-explanatory…there’s not much there in the Conservative platform either–see pp. 17-18 and 32-35. Almost all a re-hash of previous things (yes, Virginia, they still plan to buy F-35As),
The Week Ahead in Foreign Affairs
Temporarily:
Nice to read about it in IceNews. Our media seem to have completely missed this interesting use of our Air Force save for this second item in a Winnipeg Free Press column:
Some countries prefer to outsource defenceAnother effect of that darn election I guess. More details at Canadian Expeditionary Force Command’s Operation IGNITION webpage; five CF-18s are actually participating. In any event congratulations to the Air Force for speedily re-arranging one overseas deployment and adding another unexpected one.
A perfectly progressive political professor, a former federal NDP candidate, can play very economically with the truth. His affiliation though is almost never, never identified in our major media for whom he is a go-to-guy for comment opposing any military Afghan mission, and for his views on most anything else to do with the CF. Their other go-to-guy is his comrade in disarmarment, Steve Staples of Ceasfire.ca, also president of the often misnamed as a “think tank” Rideau Institute–in reality a hard-core, virtually pacifist, activist, bunch (see the Update at this post for more on Mr Staples).
One does reluctantly understand the (at least perceived) need for twisting reality on the part of our politicians. Writing something such as this does however profane the professoriate. One presents the meretricious master of misrepresentation, Professor Michael Byers of the University of British Columbia (and a co-author):
The truth about Canada’s Afghan training mission
…the first four Canadian deaths in Afghanistan occurred when a training exercise attracted “friendly fire” from an American F-16 fighter jet in 2002. So just how safe will this new training mission be?
Afghan insurgents have recognized that recruitment and training centres are soft targets. On Dec. 19, five Afghan soldiers were killed when a bus was attacked outside the main army recruitment centre near Kabul. Later that day, five more Afghan soldiers and three policemen were killed when a recruitment centre in the northern city of Kunduz was attacked.
Insurgents are also infiltrating Afghan government forces to target trainers. In November of 2009, five British soldiers were killed by an Afghan policeman at a checkpoint in Helmand province; last July, three British soldiers were killed by an Afghan soldier at a base in Helmand. Later that month, two American contractors and two Afghan soldiers were killed by another Afghan soldier at a training centre outside Mazar-e-Sharif.
Excerpts from a very searching piece by Anne Applebaum in the Washington Post, note the rare mention of Canada abroad:
Will the Libya intervention bring the end of NATO?A previous relevant post, note the “Comments” regarding the Brits running out of aircraft:
…how often do we notice the more delicate fibs told by our own leaders? It isn’t quite so blatant as fake blood, but when Western leaders talk about the Libyan campaign as a “NATO operation” they are, at the very least, being economical with the truth.
Think about it: There was no NATO discussion of the operation, no debate, no vote, no joint planning. Technically, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization operates only in the wake of an attack on a NATO member. The war in Afghanistan followed such an attack and was, in the beginning, widely perceived as a war against a common enemy. Libya is different: There was no attack, there is no common enemy, and now there is no consensus.
Two very important NATO members, Germany and Turkey, openly oppose the Libya mission and are refusing to play any operational role…
…Norwegian planes, meanwhile, are apparently allowed to bomb air bases but nothing else. Italy’s planes have flown more than 100 missions but have not yet dropped a single bomb. The Canadians are doing a bit more, it is true — though Canadian politicians are bending over backward to avoid talking too much about it.
As for the United States, one could be forgiven for thinking that the American military is no longer a part of NATO at all. It has been odd and somewhat eerie to hear American officials refer to “NATO” the past few days as if it were something alien and foreign…
In truth, the Libyan expedition is an Anglo-French project and has been from the beginning. Yet neither Britain nor France wants responsibility for the operation — and neither feels comfortable relying on the other…This, after all, is the first Anglo-French military operation since the Suez escapade of 1956 — and that one ended rather badly [more here on Suez, and Canada].
But if this historically unreliable Anglo-French coalition proves unable to sustain a long operation, what then? There is certainly no European force that can replace it… If Britain and France run out of planes, fuel, money or enthusiasm, it’s over. And NATO — an organization that, I repeat, did not plan for, prepare for or even vote for the Libyan operation — will shoulder most of the blame. The use of NATO’s name, in Libya, is a fiction. But the weakening of NATO’s reputation in Libya’s wake might become horribly real.
Which NATO Countries Are Actually Bombing in Libya? And Other Things
Not our media any more. Via MILNEWS.ca:
…Read on for the gory media details. Not enough Canadians being killed any more, I guess. Good on Matthew Fisher, far and away our best war reporter. And it takes guts to write this:
Is anybody out there watching anymore? “Where have all the embeds gone? At any one time in 2006, when the Canadian military formally launched its embed program in Kandahar, and throughout 2007 and 2008, between 10 and 15 journalists were always embedded in Kandahar to chronicle Canada’s first major combat mission in half a century. However, for the first time since the formal embed program was established in Kandahar just over five years ago, only two reporters are embedded with the troops today — yours truly from Postmedia News and a journalist from The Canadian Press …. You would think that this would be the ideal time for journalists to assess Canada’s military and diplomatic triumphs and failures in Kandahar and to provide insights into the Harper government’s controversial new training mission, which is soon to begin in northern Afghanistan [more here]. But Canadian editors obviously have different priorities. For them — although certainly not for the soldiers and their kin or Canadian taxpayers, Afghanistan is yesterday’s war
….”
…
As for the French-Canadian media, they have shown as little interest in the Afghan war as they did in Canada’s participation in the First World War, Second World War and the Korean War.
Although two French-Canadian generals have directed Task Force Kandahar, another French-Canadian general ran the war in the South in 2008, and three Van Doo battalions supported by other Quebec-based regiments, have fought and died here, only a handful of French-Canadian journalists have shown up and none has stayed very long.
The almost total absence of journalists from Quebec throughout Canada’s nearly decade-long involvement in Afghanistan is something that has deeply disappointed the French-speaking troops. They have often bitterly remarked that almost the only interviews they have ever given here have been in English, while networks such as Radio Canada have spent years spending small fortunes covering events in Europe and the Middle East.
But frankly, since 2009, much of the English-speaking media have done little better than their French colleagues…
War is Business
Better Late Than Never: US Navy Secretary Announces Anti-Corruption Unit
Buy a Navy contract now, while supplies last
“The special review team is to look at fraud, bribery, kickbacks, things like that and how to deal with it” Mabus told reporters during the Navy League’s annual Sea, Air, Space conference held just outside of Washington, DC. “We had this situation where people had been indicted for giving bribes to Navy shipbuilding officials for preferential treatment. That got my attention as to what we can do to make sure that doesn’t get that far again.”
• Read more at DoD Buzz
John Boehner’s Gift To Julian Assange
Using the recession as an excuse, the Republican leadership of the US House of Representatives is trying to destroy basically every government program they don’t like.
One of the proposed cuts could effectively cripple this website and similar experiments in online journalism.According to Federal News Radio:
The White House requested $35 million for the e-government fund in 2011. The House allocated only $2 million in its bill, H.R. 1. The Senate, meanwhile, would provide $20 million for the e-government fund.The e-government fund pays for some key government transparency websites. The most important of those, as far as War Is Business is concerned, is USASpending.gov, which tracks government contracts. USASpending has a lot of problems, but it remains the go-to source for a decade’s worth of federal contract data. It has quickly become a valuable tool not only for journalists, lawyers and bureaucrats, but for small businesses seeking to compete for those contracts.
To my mind, $35 million was already insufficient. Sunlight Foundation policy counsel Daniel Schuman told FNR that the cuts would ensure that the data on sites like USASpending
will slowly go out of date—and finally, as the money runs out, they’ll have to pull the plug. We could see the data disappearing off the internet.That is not hyperbole. The stakes here are very high.
Arming The Libyan Rebels: What To Do?
Wouldn’t it be nice if the Nike solution applied to everything? If the problem of whether (and how) the outside world should support the anti-Gadhafi forces in Libya were so simple, Obama could just appoint Phil Knight to be the next Secretary of State.
Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. When it comes to arming the Libyan rebels, many of the people saying “just do it” are the same people who were gung-ho about the last couple of American wars. It’s not entirely fair to say that the mainstream journalists and overpaid think-tankers who supported the Iraq invasion early on ought to be banned from advising anyone about anything—but, well, they probably ought to be.As painful as it is to give any number of discredited warmongers a fair hearing, it would be a bigger mistake to treat the horrific situation in Libya as a chance to reenact an eight-year-old domestic political dispute. Any seemingly reflexive stance on the matter—whether in favor of military action or against it—cannot, by definition, be based on an honest evaluation of the unique circumstances in Libya.
One Of ‘The Worst’ War Profiteers Keeps Getting US Military Contracts
Harry Sargeant III must be a pretty smart guy. After all, he’s not in jail.And isn’t that what happens to most people when they get caught blatantly ripping off the government?
It isn’t what happened to Sargeant. Ergo, the man is a genius.
Today, the politically connected businessman lives in reclusive luxury in Boca Raton, Florida, thanks in part to the tens of millions of dollars he allegedly personally received from an ill-gotten US military supply contract.
Earlier this month, freelance reporter Penn Bullock and Washington Post writer Kimberly Kindy wrote the latest chapter in Sargeant’s story. It is a story of egregious misconduct and impunity by a member of the political-military-business elite—a story that may help future historians seeking to understand the advanced rot in the democratic foundations of 21st Century America.
The story opens in 2004, when Sargeant’s company, IOTC, won a huge wartime fuel-supply contract for US forces in Iraq. Since then, the government has overpaid Sargeant’s company by $200 million,
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