Tuesday, March 14, 2017

Trump gives CIA power to launch drone strikes

Trump gives CIA power to launch drone strikes


WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has given the Central Intelligence Agency secret new authority to conduct drone strikes against suspected terrorists, U.S. officials said, changing the Obama administration’s policy of limiting the spy agency’s paramilitary role and reopening a turf war between the agency and the Pentagon.

The new authority, which hadn’t been previously disclosed, represents a significant departure from a cooperative approach that had become standard practice by the end of former President Barack Obama’s tenure: The CIA used drones and other intelligence resources to locate suspected terrorists and then the military conducted the actual strike. The U.S. drone strike that killed Taliban leader Mullah Mansour in May 2016 in Pakistan was the best example of that hybrid approach, U.S. officials said.

The Obama administration put the military in charge of pulling the trigger to promote transparency and accountability. The CIA, which operates under covert authorities, wasn’t required to disclose the number of suspected terrorists or civilian bystanders it killed in drone strikes. The Pentagon, however, must publicly report most airstrikes.

Mr. Trump has indicated he wants to accelerate the fight against Islamic State and other militant groups. The CIA first used its new authority in late February in a strike on a senior al Qaeda leader in Syria, Abu al-Khayr al-Masri, U.S. officials said. The strike in northern Syria on Mr. Masri, a son-in-law of the late al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, had been reported, but it wasn’t previously known the CIA had carried it out under the new authority. U.S. officials are still assessing results of the strike.

Spokesmen for the Pentagon and the CIA declined to comment.

Source: foxnews.com




Japan Plans To Send Its Largest Warship To South China Sea

Exclusive:
 Japan plans to send largest warship to South China Sea, sources say
A helicopter lands on the Izumo, Japan Maritime Self Defense Force's (JMSDF) helicopter carrier,
 at JMSDF Yokosuka base in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo, Japan, December 6, 2016.
REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo

Reuters
By Tim Kelly and Nobuhiro Kubo | TOKYO

Japan plans to dispatch its largest warship on a three-month tour through the South China Sea beginning in May, three sources said, in its biggest show of naval force in the region since World War Two.

China claims almost all the disputed waters and its growing military presence has fuelled concern in Japan and the West, with the United States holding regular air and naval patrols to ensure freedom of navigation.

The Izumo helicopter carrier, commissioned only two years ago, will make stops in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines and Sri Lanka before joining the Malabar joint naval exercise with Indian and U.S. naval vessels in the Indian Ocean in July.

It will return to Japan in August, the sources said.

"The aim is to test the capability of the Izumo by sending it out on an extended mission," said one of the sources who have knowledge of the plan. "It will train with the U.S. Navy in the South China Sea," he added, asking not to be identified because he is not authorized to talk to the media.

A spokesman for Japan's Maritime Self Defence Force declined to comment.

Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines and Brunei also claim parts of the sea which has rich fishing grounds, oil and gas deposits and through which around $5 trillion of global sea-borne trade passes each year.

Japan does not have any claim to the waters, but has a separate maritime dispute with China in the East China Sea.
 Japan is planning to send its largest warship Izumo (pictured) on a three-month tour through the South China Sea in response to Beijing's claims to the disputed wars

Japan wants to invite Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has pushed ties with China in recent months as he has criticised the old alliance with the United States, to visit the Izumo when it visits Subic Bay, about 100 km (62 miles) west of Manila, another of the sources said.

Asked during a news conference about his view on the warship visit, Duterte said, without elaborating, "I have invited all of them."

He added: "It is international passage, the South China Sea is not our territory, but it is part of our entitlement."

On whether he would visit the warship at Subic Bay, Duterte said: "If I have time."

Japan's flag-flying operation comes as the United States under President Donald Trump appears to be taking a tougher line with China. Washington has criticized China's construction of man-made islands and a build-up of military facilities that it worries could be used to restrict free movement.

Beijing in January said it had "irrefutable" sovereignty over the disputed islands after the White House vowed to defend "international territories".

The 249 metre-long (816.93 ft) Izumo is as large as Japan's World War Two-era carriers and can operate up to nine helicopters. It resembles the amphibious assault carriers used by U.S. Marines, but lacks their well deck for launching landing craft and other vessels.

Japan in recent years, particularly under Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, has been stretching the limits of its post-war, pacifist constitution. It has designated the Izumo as a destroyer because the constitution forbids the acquisition of offensive weapons. The vessel, nonetheless, allows Japan to project military power well beyond its territory.

Based in Yokosuka, near to Tokyo, which is also home to the U.S. Seventh Fleet's carrier, the Ronald Reagan, the Izumo's primary mission is anti-submarine warfare.





F-35s and Navy SEALs

F-35s and Navy SEALs:
Trump’s Powerful Warning to North Korea

Ciro Scotti

In a show of massive military might in and around the Korean peninsula, the Trump Administration is sending a powerful warning to the erratic – and some would say lunatic – regime of Kim Jong-un in North Korea: Back off.

Even as the Republic of South Korea leadership remains roiled after the ouster of President Park Geun-hye in a corruption scandal that has rocked the country, the U.S. military and ROK army and navy are not just continuing with war games begun on March 1, but they are openly confrontational.

The nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson began plying the waters off South Korea today, according to a report by two Reuters reporters on board. To sharpen the point, F-35 Joint Strike Fighters – the $100 million jets that are the new centerpiece of American air power – are taking off from the flight deck.

Among the joint forces taking part in the exercise involving 300,000 ROK and almost 20,000 U.S. troops, are Navy SEALs, Army Rangers and members of Delta Force. Fox News is saying today that the Pentagon is denying multiple reports on Monday – based on a story from Yonhap News Agency -- that members of SEAL Team 6, which took out Osama Bin Laden, would also be involved and would be engaged in training aimed at “decapitating” North Korea’s leadership.

Last week, in an apparent response to the war games, North Korea fired four antiballistic missiles that landed in the Sea of Japan, some as close as 190 miles from the coast. The BBC says that’s the third time it has tested missiles since last August.

But the answer back to Pyongyang goes beyond continuing with the joint exercises.

The U.S. is positioning at least two THAAD anti-missile systems in South Korea, a move that led Beijing, which worries about the ability of the system’s radar to penetrate past North Korea and deep into China, to propose a moratorium on North Korea’s missile program in exchange for a termination of the war games. That proposal was rejected by Washington.

In addition, the U.S. is permanently placing a Gray Eagle attack-drone unit at Kunsan Air Base on the west coast of South Korea, Stars and Stripes reports. The Gray Eagle is an upgrade of the Predator and is used for surveillance, reconnaissance and targeting. It can stay airborne for up to 25 hours, the website of its maker, General Atomics, says and can carry as many as four Hellfire surface-to-air missiles.
F-35_F-15_A-10

Stars and Stripes quoted an unnamed South Korean military official as saying, “In case of a war on the Korean Peninsula, the unmanned aircraft could infiltrate the skies of North Korea and make a precision strike on the war command and other major military facilities.”

On Friday, U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is set to visit Seoul and meet with the acting president, Prime Minister Hwang Kyo-ahn. And in early April, China President Xi Jinping is scheduled to confer with Donald Trump at a two-day summit at the President’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. North Korea is certain to be on the agenda of both meetings, but since China is Pyongyang’s main sponsor, the Xi visit is likely to be the most unnerving to the unpredictable Kim Jong-un.

Meantime, in what the South China Morning Post calls Japan’s “biggest show of naval force” since World War II, its helicopter carrier Izumo will cruise through the disputed waters of the South China Sea starting in May and will conduct joint maneuvers with U.S. and Indian naval forces in the Indian Ocean in July.

Japan is also buying F-35s, which can fly off the two-year-old Izumo.

South Korean elections to replace disgraced President Park will also be held in May, and the favorite candidate is a liberal, Moon Jae-in, who was defeated by Park in 2012. Moon is said to be more open to reducing tensions with North Korea. But on Tuesday he cautioned China about the economic pressure it is imposing on South Korea, which some see as retaliation for deploying the THAAD anti-missile systems.

Source: https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/f-35s-navy-seals-trump-192800929.html


Monday, March 13, 2017

US military deploys attack drones to South Korea

US military deploys attack drones to South Korea
An MQ-1C Gray Eagle unmanned drone flies during an operation. US ARMY PHOTO


Agence France-Presse

Washington (AFP) - The US Army is permanently stationing an attack drone system and its support personnel in South Korea amid ongoing tensions with the North, a Defense Department spokesman said Monday.

Officials said the deployment, due by next year, was not unique to South Korea and was being conducted across the Army to provide infantry divisions with better intelligence.

But the announcement comes just one week after Pyongyang launched four ballistic missiles in its latest provocative test.

"The US Army, after coordination with the Republic of Korea Armed Forces and the US Air Force, has begun the process to permanently station a Gray Eagle Unmanned Aerial Systems company at Kunsan Air Base, Republic of Korea," Pentagon spokesman Navy Captain Jeff Davis said.

The sensor-rich MQ-1C Gray Eagle is capable of carrying Stinger and Hellfire missiles, as well as other armaments.

It typically takes a company of 128 soldiers to maintain the drones, and there are usually 12 Gray Eagles per company.

However, Commander Gary Ross said only two or three of the aircraft were planned for the upcoming Kunsan deployment.

The drone company will be assigned to the 2nd Combat Aviation Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division.

It "adds intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capability to that particular infantry division, as well as to our Korean allies," Davis said.

North Korea fired at least four missiles toward Japan last week, three of which splashed down in waters near Japan, saying they were tests for a possible strike on US bases on Japan.

A US missile defense system, THAAD, is being deployed to South Korea in the face of threats from the North.

The United States has about 50,000 troops in Japan, and another 28,000 in South Korea.




Friday, March 3, 2017

EU parliament calls to end visa-free travel for US citizens

In possible response to Trump, 
EU parliament calls to end visa-free travel for US citizens

In what has been called a “visa war,” the European Union’s parliament on Thursday called on the bloc to force American tourists visiting Europe to first obtain visas because the U.S. excludes five EU countries from its no-visa policy.

The Wall Street Journal reported that the request is unlikely to change policy, but reflects “hostility among some European politicians to the Trump administration.”

The report said Parliament’s vote came six weeks into Trump’s presidency and after the legislature publically slammed Trump’s executive order banning travelers from seven Muslim-majority countries.

U.S. citizens can travel to all EU countries without visas but the U.S. hasn’t granted visa-free travel to citizens of Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Poland and Romania.

The legislature urged the European Commission to act within two months. The Commission was legally bound to propose by last April that visas be reintroduced for U.S. citizens for 12 months but the 28-nation bloc’s member countries preferred to take no action.

The Commission has cautioned that suspending the visa waiver for Americans would also hurt trade, tourism and the European economy.

Dimitris Avramopoulos, the European home-affairs commissioner, traveled to Washington last month to talk about the issue. He wrote to The Journal: “As you know, our approach brought results with Canada. We will continue our engagement with the United States on this matter as well our broader cooperation on migration and security.”

He was referring to Canada’s decision to lift all remaining visa requirements for EU citizens by the end of the year.

The Associated Press


Pentagon now calling terror group 'ISIS'

It's official: 
Pentagon now calling terror group 'ISIS'

By Lucas Tomlinson

Not Daesh. Not ISIL. Not IS.

The Pentagon has officially declared the name of the terror group the United States and its allies have been fighting for years is, in fact, ISIS.

“We have officially switched to ISIS,” Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, said in a briefing with reporters Friday. “They all mean the same thing.” Davis said ISIS already had been used unofficially in the past inside the Pentagon because it was the “easiest to understand.”

While “ISIS” has been widely accepted for years as the common acronym for the Islamic State, then-Secretary of State John Kerry and others in the Obama administration insisted for years on using “ISIL” or “Daesh,” the acronym formed using Arabic letters to spell Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The Pentagon released a memorandum Friday afternoon dated Feb. 13 outlining the official change.

“We view ISIS, ISIL and Da'esh as interchangeable terms for the same thing. ISIS is the term most known and understood by the American public, and it is what our leadership uses. This memo simply aligns our terminology,” Davis said in a statement attached to the memo.

In the months leading up to the election, then-candidate Donald Trump blasted then-President Barack Obama for not using the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”

He didn't use the phrase because he insisted, “loose language that appears to pose a civilizational conflict between the West and Islam, or the modern world and Islam, then we make it harder, not easier, for our friends and allies and ordinary people to resist and push back against the worst impulses inside the Muslim world,” Obama told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg.

Obama also didn’t want the fight against ISIS, Al Qaeda or the Taliban to appear to be a “clash of civilizations” a phrase made famous by the late academic Samuel Huntington in an article by the same name. Instead, Obama and his administration used the phrase “violent extremism” to describe the terror threat.

Trump and his top advisers on the campaign trail insisted the threat facing the United States was much greater than Obama presented to the American people.

On Thursday at a Washington think tank, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford, who served under Obama and now Trump, was asked why he continues to use the phrase “violent extremism” to describe terrorist groups.

“If you talked about a specific group, I'd give you a more accurate descriptor,” said Dunford. “I was using the term violent extremism to refer to all of those groups … individuals who take up arms to advance political and/or religious objectives.”

Lucas Tomlinson is the Pentagon and State Department producer for Fox News Channel. You can follow him on Twitter: @LucasFoxNews



Thursday, March 2, 2017

Sweden will bring back conscription

Sweden will bring back conscription for teenagers to because ‘security situation has changed

Swedish teens will be forced to conscript as early as this summer under a bill expected to be passed shortly. 
Pictured, Army personnel at the Gay Pride Parade in Stockholm. Picture: Stokstad/TT, File via AP.

AFP
    SWEDISH teens just got served.

The country announced Thursday it will reintroduce compulsory military service starting this summer to respond to global security challenges including from Russia.

“The government wants a more stable staff supply system and to boost its military capability because the security situation has changed,” Swedish Defence Minister Peter Hultqvist told TT news agency.

The Scandinavian nation, which has not seen armed conflict on its territory in two centuries, ended conscription in 2010 after it was deemed an unsatisfactory way of meeting the needs of a modern army.

Sweden is not a NATO member and the move is partly designed to counter the threat from Russia.
Picture: AFP PHOTO / TT News Agency / SOREN ANDERSSON / Sweden OUTSource:AFP

Now the minority government will introduce a bill to restore conscription this summer for all Swedes born after 1999. It will last for 11 months.

The measure is expected to be adopted by parliament, subject to agreement between the leftist government and the centre right opposition.

Some 13,000 young Swedes are expected to be mobilised from July 1, but only 4000 of them, 18-year-olds of both sexes, will be selected for military service based on motivation and skills.

They will be called up each year after January 1 2018.

“The new security situation is also a reality, partly in the form of Russian power politics which has long been underestimated and downplayed,” Wilhelm Agrell, a security expert at Lund University, told AFP.

Swedish vehicles in the Visby, on the Gotland island in Sweden, where they were permanently stationed in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea. Picture: AFP PHOTO / TT News Agency / SOREN ANDERSSON / Sweden OUT.

Sweden is not a NATO member but has signed the body’s Partnership for Peace program launched in 1994 to develop military co-operation between NATO and non-member countries.

On defence issues, Sweden is very close to its Finnish neighbour, which has with Russia a border of 1340 kilometres.

In September, Sweden stationed permanent troops on the Baltic Sea island of Gotland, which Hultqvist described as sending a signal after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its “increasing pressure” on the neighbouring Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

The Nordic and Baltic region’s only non-aligned countries, Finland and Sweden, have stepped up their military co-operation with US, following concerns over Russia’s increased military activity in northern Europe.

Finland accused Moscow last year of violating its airspace when two Russian fighter jets flew on separate occasions in the south of the coastal town of Porvoo. The incident raised alarm in Sweden.

Russia has warned against Sweden and Finland joining NATO, an issue that has been debated in both countries.