US Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

siegecrossbow said:

Guess it's time to fire more people! Have they learned nothing?

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Equation said:

LOL...I think it's rather funny and creative!

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Jura said:

now visited NavyTimes again and the article in top-left says
"Two lieutenants drew a penis in the skies over Washington State in their EA-18G Growler this week."

check that outrage if interested (I'm not)

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Jura said:

What’s inside the $700 billion defense budget plan headed to Trump's desk?

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"... Whether the military will have that much money to spend is still up for debate. The authorization bill sets policy priorities and spending parameters for military funding for fiscal 2018, but appropriators still must allot the money to the Defense Department before they can move ahead.

That process is expected to take several more weeks. ..."

... and I'm going to quote this post

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If left unchanged by Congress, the spending levels of the current continuing resolution (CR) would exceed the caps set in place by the 2011 Budget Control Act and trigger across-the-board sequestration cuts, a new Congressional Research Service report warns. The BCA cap for defense spending in fiscal year 2018 is $549 billion, while the nondefense limit is $516 billion. The federal government is currently operating under a

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, which funds the government at a cap-breaking annualized rate of $551 billion for defense and $518 billion for nondefense spending, the report says. When the congressional session ends in December, the Office of Management and Budget will evaluate spending levels in relation to the caps, and CRS expects “a sequester to be triggered in both the defense and nondefense categories.” In order to avoid a sequester, CRS says Congress could delay OMB’s evaluation process, enact lower levels of spending that do not exceed the BCA caps, or work out a budget deal that will raise the caps.

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Equation said:

Click here for those who want's to see the sky writing.

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• immediately halt programs that simply won’t hold up on a mobile battlefield under sophisticated
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  and
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  attack;
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  that can be upgraded to withstand such harsh conditions;
• and ultimately pivot from the current clunky patchwork to a new, coherent
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Jura said:

the rest of the above article:
source:

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Air Force Brat said:

That's right, after eight years of living in "Central Obamastan" the reality here on the ground is that idiot and his idiot crew, intentionally grew the "blood sucking socialist" govt programs,, think Obama-care, so I am happier with a leaner, meaner military,,

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Air Force Brat said:

I do think we need to stabilize and then rebuild our excellent capability,, we need to continue to buy the F-35, and probably to relaunch the Raptor, and build another 500 to 700, and yes I'd be fine "offsetting the F-35 buy to acquire more Raptors..

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Air Force Brat said:

The Navy ought to hold steady on its carriers/nuke boats and make adjustments elsewhere,, think the brown water boats and a new light attack aircraft,,, we can and will live without those little toys....

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Jura said:

Yesterday at 7:43 AM

Jura said:

Congress Is Concerned About Who Gets to Launch Nuclear Bombs
me too

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sorta related:
Retired US General Says Nuclear Launch Order Can Be Refused

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The head of U.S. Strategic Command on Saturday said he would refuse to execute an order from President Donald Trump to launch a nuclear weapon if he believed its use was illegal.

Gen. John Hyten, who oversees the operation of nuclear weapons, told participants at the Halifax International Security Forum that he and Trump have already had discussions about the nuclear decision-making process. Hyten would likely be the final person that Trump would talk to, should the president decide to move forward with a nuclear strike.

“I think some people think we’re stupid. But we’re not stupid people. We think about these things a lot,” Hyten said.

“The way the process works is simple. I provide advice to the president, he’ll tell me what to do, and if it’s illegal, guess what’s going to happen?” he said. “I’m going to say, ‘Mr. President, that’s illegal,’ and guess what he’s going to do? He’s going to say, ‘What would be legal?’ And we’ll come up with options of a mix of capabilities to respond to whatever the situation is.”

One of the biggest questions raised by Hyten’s fellow panelists was how the United States — and Trump specifically — should respond to North Korea’s escalating nuclear test and development activities. However, there were no easy answers.

Hyten spoke about North Korea’s most recent missile launch in September, which he and U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis watched together at STRATCOM headquarters in Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska. According to Hyten, the launch showcased the U.S. military’s situational awareness of the North Korea’s nuclear activities, as he and Mattis were able to see the North Korean missile take off from Pyongyang, fly over Japan, and land in the Pacific Ocean.

That level of insight, coupled with the United States’ nuclear arsenal, plays a deterrent role, Hyten said.

“The president’s direction to me is to create the conditions for diplomacy to work by being ready all the time, and we are ready every minute of every day to respond to any event that comes out of North Korea. That’s the element of deterrence that has to be clear, and it is clear,” he said. “If he goes down that path, it will not end well, but my goal is to create the room for diplomacy and sanctions to work.”

Other experts sitting in on the panel, however, said more needs to be done on a diplomatic level to tighten sanctions on North Korea.

Sung-han Kim, director of Ilmin International Relations Institute of Korean University, said the international community needs to bring North Korea back to the negotiating table through “maximum pressure.”

“Quite frankly, for the past 25 years, we didn’t have a chance to implement real sanctions, but after North Korea conducted the sixth nuclear test, I think we came up with a package of real sanctions even though it is not quite sufficient,” he said.

Bonnie Jenkins, a former ambassador and the State Department’s coordinator for threat reduction programs, agreed with Kim about the need for tougher sanctions, calling them the “only thing that we have available.”

Moshe Ya’alon, the former Israeli minister of defense, characterized North Korea as an “irrational player,” while the United States has adopted a tactic of “irrational words” in response. Trump’s fiery words toward North Korea are not always a bad thing, he argued.

“The silence, on behalf of North Korea is a result of fear. If you are [going up against] an irrational player, you should demonstrate irrationality, ’Yes, I’m ready to go all the way to deter you,’” he said.

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Jura said:

if the tragedies hadn't recently happened, it would've been nothing ("No one was injured on either vessel and Benfold sustained minimal damage ...") Destroyer USS Benfold Damaged After Collision with Japanese Tug

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but now let's wait and see

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The guided-missile destroyer that collided with a tugboat off the coast of Japan is back at its homeport on Monday, a U.S. 7th Fleet spokesperson told USNI News.

USS Benfold (DDG-65) returned to Yokosuka, Japan after the warship collided with a tugboat during a towing exercise in the Sagami Bay on Saturday.

An evaluation of the damage on the warship found “minimal scrapes” and a “slight dent” in the starboard slightly aft of amidships, according to 7th Fleet.

USNI News has learned that the collision occurred while both ships were moving at low speeds while the towline between the two ships was loosened. The loose line became wrapped in the propeller of the Japanese tug and caused it to lose propulsion and drift into Benfold. The incident is under investigation and it is unclear how long the ship, assigned to the forward-deployed Destroyer Squadron 15, maybe pier side.

While the collision is minor, it comes as the Navy is struggling with the aftermath of two fatal collisions between destroyers and merchant ships in the Western Pacific that claimed the lives of 17 sailors. The collisions of USS Fitzgerald (DDG-62) USS John S. McCain (DDG-56) also caused hundreds of millions in damage to the ships and will keep them sidelined for months for repairs.

The Navy is instituting changes found in a fleet-wide

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. A strategic review of U.S. surface forces, led by the Secretary of the Navy Richard V. Spencer, is due out early next month.

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Jura said:

Wednesday at 9:11 PM

and also STRATCOM head would push back on illegal nuclear launch order

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It’s hard to overstate how thoroughly the U.S. military has prepared for doomsday — the day America gets into a nuclear shooting war.

No detail seems to have been overlooked. There’s even a designated “safe escape” door at the nuclear-warfighting headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska, through which the four-star commander would rush to a getaway plane moments before the first bomb hit.

Procedures are in place for ensuring U.S. nuclear weapons are ready for a presidential launch order in response to — or in anticipation of — a nuclear attack by North Korea or anyone else. There are backup procedures and backups for the backups.

And yet fundamental aspects of this nightmare sequence remain a mystery.

For example, what would happen if an American president ordered a nuclear strike, for whatever reason, and the four-star general at Strategic Command balked or refused, believing it to be illegal?

Robert Kehler, a retired general who once led that command, was asked this at a congressional hearing last week. His response: “You’d be in a very interesting constitutional situation.”

By interesting, he seemed to mean puzzling.

Brian McKeon, a senior policy adviser in the Pentagon during the Obama administration, said a president’s first recourse would be to tell the defense secretary to order the reluctant commander to execute the launch order.

“And then, if the commander still resisted,” McKeon said as rubbed his chin, “you either get a new secretary of defense or get a new commander.” The implication is that one way or another, the commander in chief would not be thwarted.

The current head of Strategic Command, Gen. John Hyten, said Saturday at the Halifax International Security Forum in Canada that he would refuse a launch order from a president if he believed that order to be illegal. Hyten also predicted that the president would then ask him for options that Hyten judged to be legal.

Bruce Blair, a former nuclear missile launch officer and co-founder of the Global Zero group that advocates eliminating nuclear weapons, said the Kehler scenario misses a more important point: The Strategic Command chief might, in effect, be bypassed by the president.

A president can transmit his nuclear attack order directly to a Pentagon war room, Blair said. From there it would go to the men and women who would turn the launch keys.

The renewed attention on these questions reflects unease — justified or not — about President Donald Trump’s temperament and whether he would act impulsively in a crisis.

This past week’s Senate hearing was the first in Congress on presidential authority to use nuclear weapons since 1976, when a Democratic congressman from New York, Richard L. Ottinger, pushed for the U.S. to declare it would never initiate a nuclear war. Ottinger said he wanted to “eliminate the prospect that human ignorance and potential human failure in the use of nuclear materials, especially nuclear weapons, will lead to the destruction of civilization.”

Forty-one years later, the U.S. hasn’t ruled out first-strike nuclear options and is unlikely to do so during Trump’s tenure. This troubles experts who worry about a president with the sole — some say unchecked — authority to initiate nuclear war.

“We are concerned that the president of the United States is so unstable, is so volatile, has a decision-making process that is so quixotic, that he might order a nuclear weapons strike that is wildly out of step with U.S. national security interests,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said at the outset of last week’s hearing.

The committee chairman, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said he was not targeting Trump. But he, too, has publicly questioned whether Trump’s aggressive rhetoric toward North Korea and other countries could lead the U.S. into a world war. In the end, Corker’s hearing produced little impetus for legislation to alter the presidential authorities.

James Acton, co-director of the nuclear policy program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, saw politics at play.

“But I think it’s a genuinely important subject, and I think it’s one we should be debating irrespective of who the president is,” he said.

Acton said a president rightly has unchecked authority to use nuclear weapons in response to an actual or imminent nuclear attack. In his view, the president should otherwise be required to consult in advance with the secretaries of state and defense, and the attorney general, and get approval from two of the three before acting.

Matthew Waxman, a professor at Columbia Law School, says changes of this sort would put a valuable check on the president and protect his nuclear authority from potential military insubordination.

Waxman and Richard Betts, director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University, have a proposal: To order a nuclear first strike, the president would first have to get “certification” from the secretary of defense that the order is valid and authentic, and from the attorney general that it is legal.

These added safeguards wouldn’t risk delaying a response to an enemy attack in progress, Betts said. They would apply “only in situations where the United States is considering starting the nuclear war.”

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