Tag Archives: Department of Defense

Pentagon looking at 3-D technology to revolutionize national defense

WASHINGTON – Last November, the Department of Defense unveiled its Defense Innovation Initiative. A core component of the initiative is the formation of a new Long-Range Research and Development Planning Program that will purportedly target several technology areas, including how to use 3-D printing to revolutionize national defense.

Already, 3-D printing is capable of producing artificial limbs, guns and even cars. But what is limiting its wide-range use in military?

“Just because a new technology can provide a service, like printing new things, doesn’t mean it necessarily should provide us service,” said Brennan Hogan, program manager of LMI Research Institute, a private corporation that provides management consulting, research and analysis to governments.

A lot of concerns should be taken into account before massively applying this technology. For example, what’s the implication of applying it? How to ensure the quality? How to test different parts of a machine? How big the testing scale should be? And where to test — lab or market?

“Next two or three years would be additive manufacturing. And so the democratization of the ability of manufacturing,” said Jim Joyce, manufacturing strategy and operation specialist leader of Deloitte. “The breaking of the tyranny of the scale of capital machine or people who are manufacturing will be the basis of the profound revolution.”

“We do have the taxpayer in mind, but there seems to be a struggle between those of the current leadership on the Hill and their understanding of what the industrial bases is trying to do,” Hogan said.

The government’s procurement system provides lots of protections to taxpayers, but when it comes to additive manufacturing – which basically is able to reach all aspects of people’s life – some of the requirements don’t actually meet the needs of what things are being proposed.

“The potential for revolutionary advancement is absolutely there. Where we are, though, is that we have an acquisition system that is ill-suited to deal with that,” said James Kenyon, director of advanced programs and technology at Pratt & Whitney. “Why? Because these things cost taxpayers’ money.”

The current stage of additive manufacturing is still evolutionary as DoD is working on determining which hardware out of the hundreds of thousands should be replicated using this new technology instead of using them to do something logistically different.

However, we’ve already seen many 3-D printing use in military. The naval dental school has been printing bridges for people in their mouths for almost 30 years. The customization of an individual’s physiology and the lack of infection makes it a perfect alternative for traditional artificial teeth. It is also used in modification of weapons so that they are more customized for individuals, rather than mass produced. Another typical example for its military use is its rapid equipping ability. Whenever troops need something that they didn’t have at the moment, they can just print it out in a short time.

“The revolution comes by when you can certify the results of additive manufacturing,” Joyce said. “We should break the logistic pressure by unleash the technology in various ways.”

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The US Army is increasing troop rotations and equipment in Europe

US Army Europe officers speaks to reporters at the Pentagon about their rotational training in Eastern Europe, Wednesday, July 22, 2015. (Amina Ismail/Medill NSJI)

US Army Europe officers speaks to reporters at the Pentagon about their rotational training in Eastern Europe, Wednesday, July 22, 2015. (Amina Ismail/Medill NSJI)

Officers of the US Army’s 2nd Cavalry Regiment, currently stationed in Vilseck, Germany, stopped by the Pentagon last week to talk about their rotational training in Eastern Europe and the larger array of efforts in the region being held to reassure NATO allies.

Since Russian President Vladimir Putin’s annexation of Crimea from February 2014, and his increasingly aggressive actions near NATO’s stomping grounds, the Pentagon has been beefing up its military exercises and rotations in Central and Eastern Europe to ensure what US military officials say is the security and stability of its NATO allies.

“I can tell you that the countries that we are training with are concerned with Russia as a threat to the stability of Europe,” Army Colonel John V. Meyer III, commander of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment, told journalists at a roundtable. “We are working on strengthening the alliance. We want a strong Europe.”

The Obama administration’s European Reassurance Initiative was launched in June 2014 with a $1 billion budget for training and temporary rotations.

These rotations are less costly and less politically sensitive than permanently stationing troops in Europe because joint exercises and a temporary presence ensure the allied nation’s sovereignty and improve its military capabilities.

“It is not perceived at all that the US is trying to expand its influence,” Meyer said. “Our host nations, our allies helped sustain us.”

Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, commanding general of US Army Europe, hinted at the long-term goal for the army in a promotional video. “Being able to rotate units to come over to train, but also have an in-depth understanding of the culture, the history, the geography, the infrastructure… This is going to be a permanent part of how the army operates,” he said.

One of the things that proves a regular hindrance for US crisis response is sending hundreds or thousands of troops overseas who don’t know the people, language, culture, or terrain of the country where they’re expected to be fighting.

Meanwhile, local forces have little or no experience working with US forces, procedures, or practices. By cycling troops through a region, it gives local forces ample opportunity to practice with US forces, while giving a wide range of American forces at least a basic working familiarity with the area.

For more than a decade, the US and NATO have avoided deploying permanent troops and military equipment to NATO’s newer member states which, during the Cold War, were part of the Soviet bloc, or even the Soviet Union.

This has been avoided in part to minimize tensions and prevent friction with the Kremlin, and is in keeping with the 1997 Founding Act on Mutual Relations, Cooperation, and Security “to give concrete substance to their shared commitment to build a stable, peaceful, and undivided Europe.”

Apart from that more peaceful rationale, the US Army had actual wars to fight elsewhere anyway: Afghanistan and Iraq called for the majority of US troops to be in, going to, or coming from the Middle East and Central Asia.

Last month, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced that the army — for the first time since it downsized its presence in Europe — would store tanks, heavy weapons, and infantry combat vehicles in Eastern and Central Europe, a bold move that may be viewed as a violation of the essence of the treaty, which states that NATO members and Russia should not consider each other adversaries.

Carter’s decision was part of the European Reassurance Alliance and Operation Atlantic Resolve, a training program launched by the US Department of Defense in May.

Operation Atlantic Resolve is the European counterpart to the Pacific Pathways model introduced last fall. In September, the US Army Pacific deployed about 1,200 soldiers for the month-long Garuda Shield training exercise in Indonesia. This joint effort with the Indonesian military served as the pilot program, and was the first time the army deployed troops for rotational training exercises with multinational partners.

The move to expeditionary-style forces in many ways dates back to the end of the Cold War, which marked the beginning of a steady decline of US Army presence in Eastern Europe and pre-positioned Overseas Material Configured to Unit Sets (POMCUS). The last US tanks, stationed in Grafenwöhr, Germany, were pulled out of Europe in March 2013, just one year before Russian tanks began moving into Crimea.

After heavy speculation and rumors about the US decision to store such equipment, and before Carter’s official announcement, Putin responded at an arms fair west of Moscow.

“More than 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles able to overcome even the most technically advanced anti-missile defense systems will be added to the make-up of the nuclear arsenal this year,” he said.

Considering Russia’s satellite nuclear warning system will be out of service until November, this addition to Putin’s arsenal — and his public announcement — leaves the rest of the world hoping he will become neither brash nor desperate enough to make use of it.

Under Operation Atlantic Resolve, smaller companies of about US 100 soldiers are deployed to the Baltic States, while larger battalions of troops deploy to Poland to engage in rotational training exercises with allied armed forces. These so-called Regionally Aligned Forces are units that rotate into the country without bringing equipment, but instead use the European Activity Set, which contains a combined-arms, battalion-sized group of vehicles, and pre-positioned equipment permanently stationed in the US Army’s training area in Grafenwöhr — the exact location where only two years ago soldiers marked the end of an era, as the last US tanks withdrew from European soil.

The current US operations throughout Europe have a Cold War precedent. NATO’s annual REFORGER — Return of Forces to Germany — exercises filled a similar role: proving to both NATO and Russia that the US is capable of moving a large, decisive combat force quickly into the region in the event of war.

According to the official fact sheet, “Operation Atlantic Resolve will remain in place as long as the need exists to reassure our allies and deter Russia from regional hegemony.”

But is this rotational presence really going to send a clear and strong message to the Kremlin? Magnus Nordenman, an analyst with the Atlantic Council, thinks it sends “somewhat of a message.”

“The preference is to have permanently based forces, but if we can’t have that, then certainly rotations are better than nothing,” he told VICE News.

Both Marine General Joseph Dunford, the nominee to be chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and his prospective vice chairman, General Paul Selva, bring not only experience in strategic mobility, but also described Russia as a greater threat than China, North Korea, or Iran during their confirmation hearings, and encouraged deployment of heavy weapons in Europe to defend NATO allies.

Secretary of State John Kerry, who initially disagreed with Dunford and Selva, was alarmed by Putin’s comments. “Nobody should hear that kind of announcement from a leader of a powerful country and not be concerned about what the implications are,” Kerry said.

The short-term objective of the 2nd Cavalry Regiment’s training now seems obvious. “It provides us with operational mobility to maneuver throughout the alliance, and that is an incredible capability that we have inside Europe now,” Colonel Meyer said.

“A lot has been said over the last weeks about whether or not Russia is a threat, and what I can say is, I am training the formation to deal with any of the threats we can be faced with,” he added.

That same type of training has already occurred in the Pacific. Garuda Shield, along with the other training operations in Malaysia and Japan, were framed as a “Pacific Rebalance” — the current bureaucratic moniker of the Obama administration’s 2013 Pacific Pivot. The official Army Pacific Command website calls these efforts a “tangible demonstration of US commitment to Indo-Asia Pacific region security and stability.”

This operation, like its European equivalent, aims to train US forces with allied forces and familiarize the troops with the region.

Interestingly, the US Army is also focused on increasing its maritime and expeditionary capabilities, and appears to be reassessing its roots and fundamentally rethinking its structure and responsibilities.

With the implementation of this new, lighter-footprint form of power projection, some of the highest-ranking army officers envision a smaller, more flexible force capable of doing the strategic job of a much larger force. European commander Hodges would like “30,000 soldiers [to] achieve the strategic effect of 300,000 soldiers.”

“I don’t think he was being literal,” army spokesman Joseph Buccino told VICE News. “In a literal sense, it is impossible to replicate 30,000 [troops] with 300,000.”

But at least one commander sounded a word of caution.

“Rotating presence is no substitute for permanent forward presence,” said General Philip Breedlove, commander of the US European Command, which controls all military forces in that theater, in a Pentagon press briefing in April. But, he added: “Genuinely and fully funded rotational presence can play an important role in helping meet the requirements in our theater.”

This is ultimately the rub. This sort of “virtual presence” is a good way to extend limited peacetime resources, but is still just a placeholder for non-existent troops that will be sorely needed should conventional deterrence fail and war break out.

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A long road from Baghdad: Iraqi refugees and Special Immigrant Visa holders in the U.S.

Muhammad Hassoon never heard the crack of the rifle.

The force of the bullet that grazed his scalp four years ago knocked him out cold as he was leaving the gift shop he worked at on Forward Operating Base Falcon in Baghdad, Iraq. His attackers left him for dead – one less collaborator with the Americans. When he came to, Hassoon knew he had to flee the country.

“I didn’t have a choice,” said Hassoon, who is the sole provider for his mother, sister and two younger brothers. “I couldn’t stay in Iraq because they’d kill me, and my family needed the money.”

In June 2011, after the attack, Hassoon was able to find asylum at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where he lived and worked doing laundry for Americans.

He applied for a Special Immigrant Visa, a U.S. government program designed to fast-track Iraqis for repatriation to the U.S. beyond regular refugee quotas allotted to the region. These are Iraqis who had worked for Americans in the country and whose lives were endangered because of this.

The program has brought 13,000 Iraqis like Hassoon to the U.S. since it was initiated in 2008, according to the Department of State. Of these, over three thousand – or 23 percent – have gone to Texas, more than any other state.

The SIV program was slated to end in 2013, but when it became clear that thousands of qualified Iraqis remained, it was extended under the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014.

The NDAA made a special allotment to bring 2,500 additional Iraqis to the U.S. To date, approximately 1,500 SIVs have been issued, and less than currently 1,000 remain.

Hassoon waited for over a year, and was finally notified in July 2012 that his SIV had been approved. Within a week, the American government had put him on an airplane and flew him alone to Fort Worth, Texas.
“I arrived here with nothing, spoke really bad English, and didn’t know where to begin,” Hassoon said.


via chartsbin.com

Like Hassoon, Samah Azeez and her family arrived in the U.S. from Iraq with only their immediate luggage.

Her father died in 2006, when she was 17 years old, leaving her mother to provide for Azeez, her four sisters and two young brothers in the heart of the sectarian violence tearing Baghdad apart at the time.

When the Jaysh al-Mehdi began threatening them – her father had been a project engineer for the new Iraqi government – her mother fled with them to Syria and applied for refugee status to the U.S.

After a year and a half of living in what Azeez modestly described as “economically tough” conditions, their visas were approved and the U.S. flew them to Chicago.

Separate from the SIV program, the U.S. government maintains a region-based quota system to admit refugees such as Azeez and her family to America.

121,321 Iraqi refugees have fled Iraq to the United States since 2007, according to the State Department. Almost half of these – 45 percent – have been relocated to California, Michigan and Texas. California alone has received over 20 percent, or 25,391 refugees.

Despite her siblings’ impeccable academic and professional qualifications, they found even minimum wage employment difficult to come by. American universities would not recognize their academic credentials, and prospective employers were too wary.

“It was a shock: you expected something different, completely opposite,” Azeez said. “The U.S. is supposed to be the land of opportunity, but the only kind of jobs we could get were cleaning offices.”

For many Iraqi refugees, coming to the U.S. has meant a new struggle to survive: poverty, lack of employment and language barriers prove for many to be almost insurmountable barriers.

According to a 2010 Georgetown University Law Center study, these Iraqi refugees are “not faring well” in the U.S.

“Most are not securing sustainable employment, and many are not able to support themselves or their families on the public assistance they are receiving. Some have become homeless,” according to the report.

Furthermore, Iraqi refugees arrive in the U.S. already deeply indebted to the government.

Under the terms of the inter-agency United States Refugee Admissions Program, which administers resettling of refugees, new arrivals must repay the U.S. government for the cost of their airfare to the U.S. This interest-free loan is recouped from garnished wages once a refugee finds employment.

In the case of large families, this can run several thousand dollars.

USRAP contracts with non-profit organizations across the country to provide initial resettlement services to newly arrived refugees, including apartment rentals, English-language classes and job training.

Through USRAP, the State Department provides resettlement agencies up to $1,800 per person each month for up to 90 days for basic housing, food and essential services.

For Hassoon, this aid was critical. It allowed him a stable beginning in the U.S., and the chance to develop his basic-level English.

“The government gave me $1,700 and got me an apartment,” Hassoon said. “The first year was really, really hard; I don’t know how I would have made it without it.”

Once this public support begins to fade, however, it becomes increasingly likely that Iraqi refugees will slip through the cracks, making support to this vulnerable population difficult.

“It’s often the case that, as refugees seek to integrate in their community, they relocate to a secondary residence to be closer to fellow refugees and ease linguistic difficulties,” said Jamie Diatta, a Department of Homeland Security Special Assistant who deals with refugee issues.

“This ‘second-tier’ migration makes keeping local refugee statistics difficult within metropolitan areas,” Diatta said.

Azeez considers herself lucky to be thousands of miles away from the current strife in Iraq.

Hardly had the U.S. withdrawn combat units from Iraq, the battle against the Islamic State tore through the fabric of the country, perhaps irrevocably.

According to the UNHCR, there were 88,991 registered Iraqi refugees in the region as of February 2014. The actual number is actually much higher: there is no internationally agreed-upon number of Iraqi refugees or Internally Displaced Persons, as it is impossible to accurately count them.

The Iraqi government’s Ministry of Migration and Displacement estimates an additional 440,000 Iraqis have fled their homes since January 2014 due to the conflict with the Islamic State.

Upon her family’s arrival, the scarcity of decent jobs for her and her siblings meant they constantly struggled to make ends meet.

“The first year here was the hardest because we didn’t speak any English,” Azeez said. “We learned English in school in Iraq, but it wasn’t enough.”

Although she missed several years of schooling in Iraq and Syria, Azeez was able to enroll in a year-long English program at Truman Community College in Chicago. She worked diligently to learn her adopted language, even while laboring in minimum-wage jobs.

With her improved language skills, she was able to find a well-paying job translating Arabic for school children in Hyde Park, and was soon able to help improve her family’s finances.

“It took two to three years for things to get better,” Azeez said. “It was a completely new life.”

Now in his third year in the U.S., Hassoon is also beginning to feel like he’s finally made it.

Starting out as a dishwasher in a local restaurant, he’s worked his way up service industry jobs to become a mall security guard, a position which pays well and offers decent hours.

Hassoon is now regularly able to wire money back to his mother in Iraq, and is helping his brother negotiate the lengthy visa process to hopefully join him.

“This is the U.S.,” Hassoon said. “You have to take it day by day; it’s the only way.”

For both Hassoon and Azeez, the last several years have consisted of constant change and an on-going struggle to improve themselves and the well-being of their families.

Azeez has returned to school, and is now a senior studying biology at Roosevelt University in Chicago. She’s preparing to take the MCAT, and intends to go to medical school. Her dream: to become an orthopedic surgeon.

“This is my passion,” she said. “I really want to make this happen.”

Hassoon is talking with U.S. Army recruiters, and wants to join the Army.

Although he couldn’t understand most of what the American soldiers were saying when he was at FOB Falcon in Baghdad, he loved working with them. More than anything, he wants to join their ranks.

“America’s done so much for me,” Hasson said. “I just want to do something for them back.”

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Defense Department shows off cutting-edge tech

WASHINGTON — More than 100 display booths popped up in the Pentagon courtyard for the first-ever Defense Department Lab Day. These innovations, most of which are still under development, were designed by about 38,000 scientists and engineers.

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Afghanistan’s advances for women could disappear as soon as US troops leave

Women of Hutal village discuss building a women's center with the Maiwand District Governor - courtesy of Cythia Hogle

Women of Hutal village discuss building a women’s center with the Maiwand District Governor – courtesy of Cythia Hogle

WASHINGTON — In a rural village southwest of Kandahar, a local police force operates out of a posh modern facility surrounded by mud-brick buildings.

Three years ago it was built as a cooperative US-Afghan venture to be a focal point for the advancement of women in the community.

The Malalai Anaa Center for Women and School for Girls in Hutal village was the face of success for American policy in Afghanistan: a collaborative effort by the US military, the US Agency for International Development, NGOs and local leaders and laborers. It would provide vocational training, a girls’ school and a water source for the women of Maiwand District. It would be a prime example of the advances women have been able to make in Afghanistan since coalition forces moved in.

Except, now it’s gone.

As soon as US forces turned over the area to the Afghan National Security Forces in 2013, local police closed the center, ran the women out and commandeered the building for their own headquarters.

“We could have predicted it,” recalled Cynthia Hogle, a cultural adviser with the US Army’s Human Terrain System who coordinated the project.

“We didn’t have any plan for sustainability and relied on the [Afghan] government, who made empty promises” to continue supporting the center, she told Medill News by phone.

Advancing Afghan women’s rights has been a key US policy objective since 2001, when Congress passed the Afghan Women and Children Relief Act. Under the previous rule of the Taliban, women were banned from schools, work, health care and all manner of public life.

Significant gains have been made over the last 13 years. But some experts are worried that without sustainable support, those inroads will reverse as soon as US forces leave the country.

According to USAID, the agency primarily responsible for implementing US gender policy in Afghanistan, girls today comprise more than one-third of all school children. More than 40,000 women are enrolled in post-secondary education, and women now maintain an active and visible role in economic and political life, including holding 25 percent of the seats in the Afghan parliament.

Yet increasingly, those advocating for women’s rights in Afghanistan are subjected to violence and intimidation as well as government indifference, according to an Amnesty International report from April.

Throughout Afghanistan, the “common thread … is that the pattern of abuse against women human rights defenders is matched by the government’s systematic failure to provide an environment that protects them or to bring the perpetrators of abuses to justice,” the report claims.

Ill-conceived economic and political support from the international community makes the problem worse, AI says. Investment tends to be limited, focusing on short-term projects developed with little input from those who would benefit.

The US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), the agency set up by Congress to oversee approximately $104 billion invested in the country for redevelopment, is also concerned. Last month, SIGAR released an inquiry letter into the joint US-Afghan Promoting Gender Equity in National Priority Programs (PROMOTE).

USAID’s flagship program for women’s empowerment in Afghanistan — and its largest in the world — plans to spend $416 million targeting 75,000 Afghan women ages 18 to 30 to become future political, business and civil society leaders.

But in the letter, SIGAR Inspector General John Sopko worried that “some very basic programmatic issues remain unresolved and that the Afghan women engaged in the program may be left without any tangible benefit upon completion.”

Donald Sampler, USAID’s assistant administrator for Afghanistan and Pakistan, acknowledged that the “context in which PROMOTE is being implemented is not an easy one,” but believes the program will be successful.

Sustainability will be achieved “by prioritizing local ownership of activities and employing Afghan organizations to undertake PROMOTE activities,” Sampler says.

Sopko, however, was unconvinced.

“SIGAR continues to have concerns about how USAID will implement the PROMOTE program, assess its outcomes, ensure its sustainability, and conduct oversight, concerns which are shared by other senior US and Afghan officials,” he said in an interview, adding that SIGAR will continue to monitor the program.

Even Afghanistan’s new first lady, Rula Ghani, was skeptical about the program in a speech last November.

“The immediate effect in Kabul [of PROMOTE] has been a flurry of NGOs, newly created or reconfigured with the view of attracting some of the windfalls of that budget,” Ghani said.

“I do hope that we are not going to fall again into the game of contracting and sub-contracting and the routine of workshops and training sessions generating a lot of certificates on paper and little else.”

Between 2011 and 2013, USAID spent almost $850 million on 17 women’s empowerment programs in Afghanistan, but were unable to demonstrate this money directly helped Afghan women, according to a December 2014 SIGAR audit.

Despite general improvements in the status of Afghan women, according to the report, there is “no comprehensive assessment available to confirm that these gains were the direct result of specific US efforts.”

The women of Hutal village might agree. The Malalai Anaa Center — named for a local heroine who led Pashtun tribesmen to successfully revolt against the British in 1880 — might soon be just a memory.

“Without the support of their government or the men in their community, all the work and progress will come to a halt and the hopes of the women will be dashed,” Hogle said.

“There are just too many challenges for them to overcome without some source of continuing support.”

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In the middle of the Mojave, Marines make millions off bullet casings and bomb fragments

  • Piles of bullet casings sorted for recycling at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center’s Qualitative Recycling Program Range Sustainment branch. (Amina Ismail/MEDILL NSJI)
    Piles of bullet casings sorted for recycling at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center’s Qualitative Recycling Program Range Sustainment branch. (Amina Ismail/MEDILL NSJI)

TWENTYNINE PALMS, Calif. — On a stretch of California desert the size of Rhode Island at the Twentynine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, thousands of Marines train for combat each year. And the casings, shells and bomb fragments fired in these exercises are making the Marine Corps millions of dollars each year.

“You have tank parts, you have 120 tank rounds that are made up of aluminum, you have 40-mm rounds. Everything that’s made out of aluminum is sitting back there in that pile,” said Jay Jones, work leader for the seven-person team at the Qualitative Recycling Program’s Range Sustainment branch. “Believe it or not, an airplane crashed out here one year, and it stayed out there. Once the investigation was over, we went out and got it brought back. Someone’s probably driving around a car in it now.”

The Qualified Recycling Program started in 2000 and collected over 5.6 million pounds of range residue last year. The recycling program manages trash and household recyclables as well as exploded munitions and hazardous materials from across the base. Items are collected, sorted, processed and recycled or sold to government-approved contractors for profit, saving the base removal costs.

Range Sustainment

Heaping piles of shells and casings lay sorted in material-specific containers at the Range Sustainment branch, which processes some 900,000 pounds of spent munitions from across the base each year.

“Everything that’s been shot at, shot up, blown up, that’s what we recycle in here,” Jones said. “The Marines themselves bring it in, plus we have contractors that go in and they bring in the bigger pieces of gear. The blown up tanks, the airplane.”

Every unit that trains at the base’s live fire ranges must return expended ammo to the Range Sustainment branch. Staff members sort them into piles by raw material and conduct quality assurance checks for live ordinances

Norman Troy, an explosives ordinance specialist who supervises the Range Sustainment branch, said he identifies each spent munition by sight based on its fusing system and does not consider his job a risk to his life.

“We make sure nothing is live,” Troy said. “It’s once in a very blue moon does something unexploded come in that’s dangerous. And if it does come in, then we call the explosives ordinance disposal, and they come down. And they’ll hopefully go blow it up somewhere.”

Hazardous Materials

The hazardous materials branch acts as the Qualified Recycling Program’s innovative hub. Branch staff process and recycle hazardous materials from across the base, including oil, grease, paint and anti-freeze. According to Patrick Mills, program manager for hazardous materials, the major cost-saving components are the recycling of anti-freeze and the reconditioning of batteries.

Every piece of military rolling stock uses batteries worth $300 to $500, Texas company PulseTech donated machines that recondition the batteries by using an ultrasonic technology that breaks up phosphates that cocoon the lead plates within the batteries. These machines cost $5,000 a piece, but using them saves the Marine Corps up to $1.5 million dollars a year.

Projects like this have caught the eye of think tanks that work with Mills and his team to maximize their technologies.

“DARPA (the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) is one of the many different think tanks,” said Mills. “They find technology, they try to do a cross application to a [Department of Defense] use, for example, and then they would find guys like us who like to step out on the edge of that limb. And that’s what I do.”

Maximizing technology is a key driver of innovation for the branch, which reduced the amount of hazardous waste shipped off-site in 2014 by 192 tons compared with the previous year.

“We are going through a fiscal tsunami right now,” Mills said. “We just fought two long sustained wars. Not one, but two. And we’re still fighting other different neo-intensive operations. There’s ISIS.”

“The think tank, basically they’re trying to get us out of a stone age into new cutting-edge technology. The battery’s one example,” Mills added.

Profit Management

An environmental award submission to the secretary of Defense cited a variety of issues the base faces, including budget reductions, increased environmental requirements, greater public scrutiny and pressure to privatize commercial-like functions. But despite these pressures, the base’s recycling business is thriving.

Last year, the Qualified Recycling Program amassed $2.5 million in profit. Half of this amount went toward labor, maintenance and upgrade costs for the recycling program, and half went to the base’s Marine Welfare Program.

Scrappers

The recycling program staffers aren’t the only ones who see the lucrative potential of the Marine Corps’ leftovers. The Marines training at Twentynine Palms from dawn until dusk have turned the arid sand into a goldmine of metals primed for scrappers, who sneak onto base property illegally, collect discharged munitions, and sell them for profit to local recycling centers.

“They have the ability to just pick up as much as they can pick up,” Troy said. “They’re looking for high-value material. So our brass is a high-value material.”

Besides latent threats these scrappers face like unintentionally stumbling across a live fire training exercise, Troy said there are also risks of unexploded ordinances in the field.

“There have been a couple of incidents where they’d go out and find somebody. They found a couple scrappers that had died near their vehicle. They found a few vehicles that had been stranded out there that had materials in the back that were unsafe.”

Troy said the recycling center cooperates with San Berdardino County Sheriffs Office and conservation law enforcement officer Russell Elswick to prosecute scrappers who have illegally taken metal materials from the base.

For its environmental efforts, including recycling and water reclamation, the Twentynine Palms MCAGCC was awarded the 2015 Secretary of Defense Environmental Non-Industrial Installation Award.

 

 

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FOIA update: USDB releases Manual for the Guidance of Inmates (USDB Regulation 600-1, Nov. 2013)

WASHINGTON — On Monday, the United States Disciplinary Barracks’ Directorate of Inmate Administration released “USDB Regulation 600-1, Nov. 2013” entitled “Manual for the Guidance of Inmates” to the Medill National Security Journalism Initiative in response to an April 17 Freedom of Information Act request.

The 141-page document serves as the official rulebook for the treatment and behavior of inmates held at the military prison (including WikiLeaks firestarter Chelsea Manning) and addresses everything from media contact with inmates to rules regarding their appearance and hygiene.

The FOIA request was intended to increase transparency regarding the U.S. Army’s regulation of USDB inmates held at Fort Leavenworth, to better inform the press about rules regarding their contact with prisoners and to shed light on the status of civil liberties within the prison’s walls.

You can view the entire document below:

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Defense chief seeks to stop sexual assault in the military

WASHINGTON – Nearly nineteen thousand—18,900 to be exact—U.S. servicemen and women were sexually assaulted last year. “That’s 18,900 too many,” according to Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.

“Even though sexual assault is a disgrace in any form and happens too often across the country—including on college campuses, it’s a particular challenge and a particular disgrace to our institution, the military,” Carter told an audience of ROTC students from D.C.-area colleges at Georgetown University Wednesday.

“We have serious work to do and I need you to say, enough. Enough to dirty jokes, to excessive drinking, to hazing, to sexual advances, and to any suggestion that coercion is appropriate,” Carter said.

Carter said technology is playing a role in how victims and the people who help them are treated by their peers. He urged the students to be just as active in combating this kind of treatment online as they would be in real life.

“I trust most of you would intervene if you saw somebody being bullied around campus, but too many people let that stuff slide online,” Carter said. “We can’t allow someone who’s doing the right thing whether it’s reporting an assault or standing up to stop one to be belittled on Facebook, ignored in chow hall, passed over for promotion or mocked in officer’s club. That’s counter to the ethos you signed up for, and it’s just plain wrong.”

Tackling the problem of sexual assault in the military has become a top priority for Carter and for Congress. Last month Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, and Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., reintroduced the Ruth Moore Act, which aims to provide veterans benefits to survivors of sexual assault.

The bill is named for Ruth Moore, a Maine resident who was raped twice while serving in the Navy. Moore’s attacker was never punished.

After being discharged, Moore fought for more than 20 years to receive her benefits. The bill aims to ease the burden of proof standards, which now say veterans must show that their trauma is connected their time in the military. The proposed law seeks to make a veteran’s own testimony of events qualify as substantial proof for benefits.

“We’re not giving up until every victim of sexual assault in the military gets the acknowledgement and recognition of their post assault disabilities, fair treatment in the claims process, and the benefits they deserve as veterans who served their country with honor,” Moore said in a statement on March 27.

Pingree and Tester originally proposed the bill in 2013. It passed unanimously in the House but never came up for a vote in the Senate.

Other laws have also aimed to help survivors of sexual assault in the military. Most notable is the watershed 2013 Military Justice Improvement Act, which overhauled the investigation and prosecution of sexual assaults in the military.

Carter said 100 congressionally mandated provisions and 50 Secretary of Defense directives have also contributed to changing the prevalence of sexual assault in the military.  His speech coincided with National Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

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U.S. preparing for cyber wars

WASHINGTON – As the U.S. military prepares its cyber rules of engagement, Congress wants to help identify computer-borne threats by making it legal for companies to share personal data that they collect with the government.

Cyber intrusions are distinct from cyber warfare, which has the larger purpose of crippling key physical or technological infrastructure. Cyber attacks waged as acts of aggression or war could infiltrate computer systems or technological infrastructure, crippling government entities or economies by attacking energy sources or transportation systems.

Cyber warfare could take on different forms. In a Wall Street Journal piece in April, two officials at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in Washington D.C, wrote about how an “electronic curtain” in Iran allows the government to engage in electronic repression by controlling what kinds of information the public can send and receive over the Internet. This is just one example of how cyber warfare tactics have the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of citizens, succinctly and swiftly, without inflicting more traditional forms of violent aggression.

Congress has to balance protecting the nation’s infrastructure and citizens with the potential for violating personal rights and privacy in the proposed Cybersecurity Act of 2012. Congress’s aim is to help the U.S government investigate cyber threats and ensure the security of networks against attacks.

Meanwhile, the military is expected to release its rules of engagement for wars fought via the Internet. The rules will outline how the U.S. will define a cyber attack as an act of war or aggression against the state, and the appropriate response.

In addressing what a military response to cyber warfare could look like, the military is navigating uncharted territory. The rules will also define when the military can engage in defensive activities against online adversaries. Can U.S. forces “shoot’’ back with weapons when an attacker sends a massive computer virus or can troops only respond with a similar use of force? What if you can’t definitively identify the enemy? These are some of the complications of identifying and defending against vague threats online.

The potential outcomes and impacts of cyber warfare could look different than those seen in traditional warfare. Most citizens, save for the extraordinarily security conscious, leave a data footprint of their lives that, under the proposal, might be made available to the government for the purposes of identifying, preparing for and containing threats.

Citizen Watchdog organizations including the American Civil Liberties Union and The American Association of Practicing Psychiatrists said in a recent letter that the act would allow too much sharing of individual data, and the groups have proposed amendments to the bill that they say would help to protect civil liberties—things like giving customers effective legal recourse for violations of what little privacy protections the bill offers.

It seems inevitable that American citizens will lose some personal freedoms relating to rights to their e-information, the question is how much personal information does the government need to protect the nation from online warfare.

 

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A new National Guard role

As U.S. military forces have been called on to increasingly lend a hand during crises unrelated to war, the Department of Defense has created a new designation for National Guard members: Homeland Response Forces. These teams of about 600 guard soldiers and airmen will specialize in responding to domestic attacks and disasters. The first such units, in Washington and Ohio, will be on-line by the end of next month, with an additional eight regional units to be up and running in 2012, according to the DoD.

The biggest change the special units will bring about is the speed with which guard members will be able to respond, a Defense Department spokesman wrote in an e-mail. Military leaders expect the Homeland Response Forces to be able to respond to 90 percent of the country within 12 hours, according to DoD.

The units will specialize in responding to situations including domestic attacks using explosives, chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons; providing emergency medical care and crisis management functions. The members will also provide emergency medical help, specializing in decontamination, rescue and evacuation and fill communication and logistics roles.

About a fourth of the members of every homeland response guard unit will be full-time, in comparison with about 9 percent of existing guard members, according to the DoD. The majority of National Guard members train two days a month along with a two-week annual training, but most guard units have a few full-time staff. Homeland response units will also have more training time allotted and access to more vehicles, including aircraft.

The military has been asked to intervene in the fallout following Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana and Mississippi in 2005; the earthquake in Haiti, response to the ongoing oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico – Chicago Alderman have even floated the idea of using National Guard troops to keep order in the city’s crime-ridden neighborhoods.

The Department of Defense established the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, in 2002 as a home for homeland defense operations after the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks in New York and Washington, D.C.

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