Miscellaneous News

windsclouds2030

Senior Member
Registered Member
Meanwhile, the US sends its own satellite with this painted image...
A 2013 story on the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) spy satellite featuring world-devouring octopus

"NROL-39 is represented by the octopus, a versatile, adaptable, and highly intelligent creature," an NRO spokeswoman told Forbes. "Emblematically, enemies of the United States can be reached no matter where they choose to hide."

The emphasis on "nothing is beyond our reach" and the long-reach octopus tentacles was sent out amidst the massive spying dragnet cases in the US be in the limelight at that time.

US National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) spy satellite featuring world-devouring octopus (Arste...png

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
 
Last edited:

windsclouds2030

Senior Member
Registered Member
More details? The linked article from tweet is paywall'ed.
Australia may not get any sub from AUKUS warns former Trump official

By ADAM CREIGHTON |
Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
- 16 JAN 2022

Australia might not receive a single nuclear submarine as part of the AUKUS security pact, according to the former Trump administration official who coined the term “Indo-Pacific”, which now dominates security and diplomatic discussion across the vast region.

RANDY SCHRIVER, a former assistant secretary of defence in the Trump administration, said “many potential obstacles on both sides” including pushback from the US navy and political turnover in Washington and Canberra could spell doom for the promised fleet of eight nuclear-powered submarines.

A supporter of AUKUS, he told The Australian there needed to be “sustained commitment from the senior political leaders in both capitals, otherwise the chances of Australia deploying its own nuclear submarine will drop below 50 per cent”.

The White House said Australia was on track to receive a nuclear-powered submarine at the “earliest possible date” in a statement last month, hosing down speculation the subs would come much later and at greater cost than the conventionally powered French-designed submarine fleet the government had ordered originally.

“Whatever the fallout from AUKUS, we need to repair our relationship with France in the Indo-Pacific,” Mr Schriver said, noting it had a larger security and population footprint in the region than the UK.

Now Chairman of Project 2049 Institute, a Washington DC think tank that specialises in Indo-Pacific issues, Mr Schriver said the idea of “leasing” a US nuclear submarine, floated by Defence Minister Peter Dutton and former prime minister Tony Abbott, was “difficult but not impossible”.

“That scenario might entail US crew still being on, or having ultimate control of the submarine,” he said.

The AUKUS announcement in September didn’t specify whether the UK or the US would provide nuclear technology for the submarines, how much they would cost, when they would be completed, or what proportion of the submarines would be built in South Australia.

Kurt Campbell, President Biden’s security adviser for the Indo-Pacific and a pioneer of AUKUS, said early last week the US needed to “be a better deputy sheriff to [Australia]” in the Pacific.

“If you look at the arena on the planet where we have enormous moral, strategic, historical interests, where we have not done enough, [but] where Australia and New Zealand have done plenty, we’ve got to substantially step up our game,” Mr Campbell said.

CHARLES EDEL, inaugural Australia chair at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), said the submarine portion of the AUKUS pact would be “unlikely to materialise” unless the White House could surmount the “bureaucratic challenge” the navy presented.

“It shouldn‘t be surprising that the US navy would be extremely cautious about sharing its technological crown jewel, … and that hesitancy would be as much about safety concerns as it would be about the security of the technology involved,” he told The Australian.

A former naval intelligence officer, Mr Schriver, who works closely with Richard Armitage, President George W Bush’s deputy secretary of state, also said he believed China planned to take over Taiwan, an island Beijing sees a renegade democracy, “without fighting”.

“Most of what we’re observing today is part of a pressure campaign to isolate Taiwan and achieve political capitulation – not preparation for a near-term invasion,” he told The Australian.

During his tenure in the defence department Mr Schriver replaced the term Asian and Pacific with Indo-Pacific, a tag that’s exploded in US in Australia as well, to “more accurately reflects our interests”, he said.

“In truth the strait of Malacca Doesn’t divide the Pacific from the Indian Ocean, it connects the two. and nobody understands this better than Australia with coasts that touch both great oceans”.
 
Top