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On May 18, 1966, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara delivered a speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in Montreal entitled “Security in the Contemporary World.” Building on remarks that he had made in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (SFRC), the title was deceptively bland and belied its significance. McNamara, heretofore loyal to Johnson, was publicly breaking ranks with official administration policy on Vietnam. In the weeks prior, back in the Pentagon, McNamara had considered and authorized the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s (JCS) proposals, which National Security Advisor Walt W. Rostow had endorsed, to expand Operation...

The pavilion of ultra-high performance fiber reinforced concrete (UHPFRC) was fabricated in the form of 3-dimensional pentagonal tiling by wood formwork. Mann/McLoud/Von Derau discovered a 15th monohedral tiling convex pentagon in 2015 using a computer algorithm. Each unit of UHPFRC pentagon in 2-dimensional plane is the same but they are changed into different shapes in 3-dimensional vault type for the pavilion. To generate the 3-D shape two attractor points were located on the ground level. The transformation from 2-dimensional pentagonal tiling into 3-D vault was generated by Reino® and Grass hoper®. The data of formwork for units of UHPFRC was generated and then fabricated by wood. The fabrication of wood formwork relies on 6-axis robot cutting. To give structural stability of the vault the thickness of lower units was increased. The advantage of flow of UHPFRC enabled us to place UHPFRC into each of wood formworks. The lateral pressure of young UHPFRC was controlled by external screw jacks to avoid the deformation of wood formworks during curing. The connections between units relied on bolts and elastic pads. The connection behavior of bolts to transfer shear was guaranteed by the experimental program for strength.

The Pentagon announced a third “offset” strategy in 2014, claiming that the United States faces threats from Russia, China, and elsewhere that require the development and deployment of cutting-edge technologies – robots, autonomous systems, and 3D printing, for example – to maintain US military superiority. The authors compare the new offset with earlier offsets that gave the United States a military advantage over the Soviet Union during the Cold War, even though the Soviets had massive conventional forces. This time around, though, the authors conclude that an offset is unnecessary to keep the United States in the lead, and that it is really just an excuse to increase defense spending.

To guide the development of the armed forces’ future, the incoming president will want to offer guidance to the Pentagon on grand strategy and the supporting principles and planning framework to size and shape the joint warfighting force. This strategic direction will be a critical aspect of the initial national security planning effort and will provide guidance as to the number of kinds of wars that the Pentagon must be prepared to deter or win should deterrence fail. This article offers options and guidance for two major components of U.S. defense policy. These are Design Principles and alternative Force Design Constructs. These force constructs are not the strategy itself, but they are the requisite building blocks and guidance which defense policymakers use to shape the desired force and explain that force in its requests for the funding required from the American people.

The combined star/pentagon connection of five-phase induction machines was recently demonstrated as a promising compromise between conventional star and pentagon connections. It combines the advantages of both star and pentagon connections without any additional hardware for winding changeover. This connection is based on two five-phase single layer concentrated winding sets shifted in space by ?/10 and connected in a combined star/pentagon configuration to provide five-phase terminals. Since the combined star/pentagon connected induction machine is fundamentally an asymmetrical ten-phase machine, the machine mathematical model possesses additional subspaces, which affect the behavior of the machine especially under open line conditions. Starting from the conventional five-phase and m -bar squirrel cage induction machine model, the phase-variable model of the combined star/pentagon connection is introduced in this paper. The corresponding equivalent dq model with five decoupled subspaces, which can account for air gap harmonics up to ninth order, is then derived. Finally, it was shown that the machine model could be simply approximated with only two subspaces similar to a conventional five-phase induction machine with sinusoidally distributed winding, where the flux produced by the nonfundamental subspace could be neglected. The model is verified using a 1 kW prototype five-phase induction machine. Scopus

In September 2015, news reports surfaced that more than 50 U.S. intelligence analysts working with the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) had filed complaints with the Pentagon's inspector general alle...

This paper presents the steady-state mathematical model of a five-phase induction machine with a combined star/pentagon connection. The connection splits the stator winding into two five-phase windings displaced in space by ?/10 and connected in a combined star/pentagon configuration. Recent work limited to an experimental investigation demonstrated that the connection possesses improved fault tolerance when compared to a conventional star-connected stator, as well as avoids the pentagon connection problems. Although the machine has five-phase terminals, it is intrinsically an asymmetrical ten-phase machine, which introduces additional subspaces in the machine's mathematical model. In order to theoretically investigate and thoroughly assess this connection against conventional connections, this paper introduces the steady-state mathematical model based on vector space decomposition and symmetrical component theory. Finite-element analysis is first used to investigate the different harmonic current components induced in the cage rotor circuit, upon which the effect of different subspaces can be clarified and the required transformation matrix from phase variables to their sequence components can be derived. The model is verified using a 1-kW prototype five-phase induction machine. 1982-2012 IEEE. Scopus

This paper proposes a switchless pentagon-shaped microstrip patch antenna for radar and radionavigation applications. The antenna is built on Rogers RT5880 substrate with five rectangular radiating elements on top. Five ports have been set up to operate at 13.5 GHz resonant frequency. Besides having reflection coefficient below -10 dB, the antenna also offers high gain when about 8.29 dB is achieved. The proposed antenna also has a bi-directional radiation pattern with 360° of beam steering.

This strategy vis-a-vis the press was developed with even greater success during the December 1989 US invasion of Panama. The invasion was scheduled to take place during the Christmas season, coincidentally also overshadowed by the civil war in Romania and the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu. Journalists were kept as far away from the conflict as possible. Experienced reporters were concerned with the extent of military censorship, which was far greater than was necessary to prevent the leakage of sensitive military information. Censorship was used to eliminate information that might create a negative picture of US soldiers. Norman Schwarzkopf was pleased to describe how press agencies were deceived into contributing to the disinformation on Iraq. The only Norwegian journalist who reported the war from within Iraq said that the reporting from the war was a catastrophe, that the mass media had itself to blame, and that the media were drawn into propaganda service for the Pentagon.

The paper considers the challenges of the shifting from circuit switching to packet switching. American military communications passed three generations of transformation: from signaling SS7 and intelligent networks to IP protocol and, finally, to the extremely ambitious plans of cybersecurity of networks. Some difficulties on the way of network digital transformation are discussed.

In the twilight of the USA’s ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been an expanding shadow war of targeted killings and drone strikes outside conventional war zones, where violence is largely disappeared from media coverage and political accountability. While many attribute the growth in these shadowy operations to the use of new technologies and platforms such as drones, this article argues that the central transformation enabling these operations is the increasing emergence of network forms of organization within and across the US military and related agencies after 2001. Drawing upon evidence from unclassified reports, academic studies, and the work of investigative journalists, this article will show that elements within the US military and related agencies developed in the decade after 2001 a form of shadow warfare in which hybrid blends of hierarchies and networks combine through common information and self-synchronization to mount strike operations across transnational battle spaces. But, rather than a top-down transformation towards networks, this article will show how it was the evolution of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) from an elite strike force into a largely autonomous networked command that has been central to this process. Although drone strikes have received the bulk of critical attention in relation to this expanding shadow war of targeted killing, this often-lethal networked warfare increasingly resembles a global and possibly permanent policing operation in which targeted operations are used to manage populations and threats in lieu of addressing the social and political problems that produce the threats in the first place.

There is a good reason why the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program is so often described as the "arms deal of the century." In a report published on the last day of 2010, the Pentagon estimated lifetime operating and sustainment costs for the US F-35 Aeet-then projected at 2,443 units, not counting the prototypes-at US$1.45 trillion.1 Cost analyses of this type are always much-debated: How many units will be sold in total? How does one define "lifetime"? How reliable will the system be once it enters service? What will be the nature of its deployment? And so on. Beyond dispute is that the F-35 constitutes one of the largest, if not the largest, weapons programs in modem history.The story of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) began in 1994, when the United States Congress decided to merge two separate Department of Defense fighter jet research projects. The idea was to produce a "fifth generation" fighter aircraft for the joint use of the US Air Force (USAF), Navy, and Marine Corps. Preliminary research contracts were divided mainly among McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, Northrop Gmmman, and Lockheed Martin, which subsequently formed teams that also involved other contractors, like Dassault (partnered with Boeing) and BAE (forming a threesome with McDonnell Douglas and Northrop Gmmman). The JSF program was purposely internationalized: a memorandum of understanding was signed by the US and British governments in December 1995, specifying a 90-10 split for co-funding the aircraft's demonstration phase, or, as it was officially known, the Weapons System Concept Demonstration (WSCD) phase.4 In November 1996 the Pentagon selected Lockheed Martin and Boeing as lead contractors; in October 2001 a long and fierce competition to carry out System Development and Demonstration (SDD) was won by the former. The Lockheed demonstrator X-35 turned into the F-35 Lightning II, which carried out its maiden flight in 2006; the two Boeing X-32 prototypes ended up in museums in Ohio and Maryland.The JSF was conceived from the beginning as a multi-role aircraft that would be capable of replacing four or five separate aircraft in use by the US military. To that end, the program gave birth to three different warplanes: the F-35A or the Conventional Take-Off Landing (CTOL) version, which is intended to replace the F-16 Fighting Falcon and A-10 Thunderbolt; the F-35B Short Take-Off and Vertical Landing (STOVL), replacing the AV-8B Harrier II; and the F-35C Carrier Version (CV), taking over from the F/A18 Hornet and possibly the Super Hornet. All three versions completed the critical design reviews and are now in the SDD phase. Low Rate Initial Production (LRIP) aircraft are rolling out from Lockheed Martin's assembly plant in Forth Worth, Texas, and the final Production, Sustainment, and Follow-on Development (PSFD) phase appears to be on the horizon. The US Marine Corps have established an "operational" squadron of F-35S at their Yuma, Arizona airbase, while instructor pilot training on the initial F-35S set to roll off the assembly line is progressing at a USAF base in Florida.5Globalized industrial partnerships propelled the JSF from the outset, but the multinational collaborative project took shape gradually. Most US allies were not "briefed" on the JSF until the beginning of the SDD phase, and it is unclear how the US government-specifically the nascent JSF office-decided which governments to engage.4 Canada joined in 1997, turning the US-UK collaboration into a multinational one. At that point, the JSF specified the conditions for different "levels" or "tiers" of partnership. Each level was mainly determined by the size of the partner's contribution. Level 1 partners contribute approximately 10 percent to the development of the aircraft. The UK is the only Level 1 partner and has committed $2.2 billion to the program. Level 2 partners, such as Italy and the Netherlands, contribute approximately $1 billion. Level 3 partners-Australia, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Turkey-contribute $ioo-$2oo million. …

Almost a decade following the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, most Iraqi state documents stemming from Saddam Hussein's regime remain in the possession of the United States. U.S. military forces seized the majority of them in the invasion and occupation for intelligence exploitation, approximately a hundred pages of records and thousands of audio- and videotapes from Hussein's various bureaucracies of repression. Another 5.5 million pages of secret police files chronicling Hussein's Anfal genocidal campaign in Iraqi Kurdistan in the middle to late 1980s also are in American hands. These were seized by Kurdish forces in the uprising in northern Iraq in March 1991 and removed by the Pentagon in 1992 and 1993 to American soil for safe storage and analysis. Moreover, in 2005, an additional seven million pages that once belonged to the Ba'ath Party and security forces were also spirited out of Iraq by military transport with the assistance of the Iraqi Memory Foundation, a private Washington, D.C.-based group ...

In the past few years, the Indian Ocean has emerged as a major center of geostrategic interest. The Pentagon's 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) set the tone by calling for a more “integrated a...

Duval pentagon is recently proposed interpretation technique of dissolved gas analysis (DGA) data for condition monitoring of oil-immersed transformer. This technique is the extension of well known Duval triangle method of DGA. Duval triangle method does not include Hydrogen (H2) and Ethane (C2H6) which are important gases for diagnosis of partial discharge and low thermal fault. Duval pentagon method includes all five hydrocarbon gases in one graphical representation. In this work, performance analysis of the technique is carried out using published fault database. The accuracy is found to be 87%. Further, Duval pentagon is implemented using ANN to enhance the diagnostic capability and to facilitate online monitoring. Proposed ANN is trained as per Duval pentagon method to detect transformers fault when data point belongs to some fault zone. The results presented in this paper show that the proposed ANN based model can reliably be used for transformer incipient fault diagnosis with enhanced diagnostic capability. The diagnostic accuracy of the proposed ANN based implementation is around 92%.

A novel probe feed dual polarized pentagon slot shaped planar antenna is designed and proposed supporting wireless local area network (WLAN) and worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) applications simultaneously. Structure comprises of pentagon shaped radiating element along with scaled down slot cut on center of patch, having overall compact size of 40×40mm2. The conventional pentagon patch resonates at 3.5GHz and the modified slot based structure resonates at tri bands of 2.4/3.5/5.2GHz. Effective comparison of antenna with and without pentagon slot is performed to obtain better impedance bandwidth, acceptable gain at operating frequencies and circular polarization at 2.4GHz. The simulated results exhibit the designed antenna operates over triple frequency ranges, fulfilling the standards of WiMAX and WLAN. Gain values obtained are 5.6, 3.2, 2.04dB respectively over respective tri bands. In addition, acceptable radiation characteristics are obtained over the operating bands.

In March 2009, the Obama administration sent a message to senior Pentagon staff instructing them to refrain from using either of the terms ‘Long War’ or ‘Global War on Terror’ and to replace these terms with ‘Overseas Contingency Operations’. The change in tone and, potentially, substance, from the Obama White House by ending the ‘war on terror’ at the rhetorical level suggests a need to shift our academic attention towards developing more appropriate analytical frameworks for examining alternative strategies for countering terrorism. This paper seeks to explore what it terms an emerging risk-based approach being deployed by states. Our framework proposed here deploys the twin concepts of ‘risk bureaucracies’ and risk regulatory regimes (RRRs) in examining terrorist financing and aviation security regulations.

The $1.3-billion renovation of the United States military headquarters, the most complex and challenging reconstruction effort in recent history, spanned 20 years and was interrupted by the catastrophic September 11, 2001, terrorist attack. However, it was completed ahead of schedule and under budget without disrupting operations. The renovation of this national icon stands as an eloquent testament to well-planned and well-executed collaboration involving an extensive field of participants.

This essay undertakes a comparative review of radical innovation in the early Cold War, when UK jet propulsion development far outpaced any US efforts. British ingenuity created a series of jet engines which Americans adopted. One among these, which captures contrasting organisational formats for handling complexity and innovation, was the Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire, a tough, reliable propulsion system. The USAF’s licence assigned production to Curtiss-Wright, which had made piston engines for decades and which spectacularly botched the project, wasting millions. Eventually, the Pentagon shifted the J-65 American Sapphire to GM's Buick division, which finally fabricated adequate but obsolete engines in the mid-1950s.

The United States and other nations have taken numerous military, police and intelligence measures in order to counter terrorists’ threats in response to the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Virginia as well as the attempted attack on a target in Washington, D. C.

Instructional technology, and the cognitivist and systems paradigms that underpin it, grew out of the military-industrial complex during the Cold War. Much as the Pentagon and this military complex defined the architecture of the Internet, they also essentially created, ex nihilo, the fields of instructional technology and instructional design. The results of the ongoing dominance or influence of the Pentagon in these specific disciplines have been traced in research that appeared during the final phases of the Cold War. But this research has not been updated to reflect circumstances now most definitive of the post–Cold War world: the rapid development of Internet infrastructures and applications, and the aggressive expansion of US military spending and activity. Tracing the imprint left by the US military on instructional technology and design, this paper considers how this influence may now extend, like the Internet itself, into schools and the university. It will conclude by stressing that the end of the Cold War, along with more recent developments concerning the US military, presents a juncture offering both opportunity and challenge to the evolving field of educational technology or “e-learning.”

Cultural projects today are often unprecedented in their complexity, scale and collaborative effort. Keith Kaseman, partner of Kaseman Beckman Advanced Strategies (KBAS), describes how building information modelling (BIM) enabled the realisation of the Pentagon Memorial in Arlington, Virginia. Twenty-eight contractors and consultants were brought on board in the design and delivery of the monument's 184 ‘memorial units’, which collectively commemorate the individual lives lost at the Pentagon on 11 September 2001.

The next Pentagon team will be faced with the dual challenge of advising on key current wartime decisions while also preparing the U.S. armed forces for a far different future. They must be stewards of the military, not just users of the instrument.

Catastrophic events often illustrate a nation’s preparedness in anticipating and preventing the extreme consequences of an intentional malicious attack. When terrorists hijacked four commercial aircraft for use as guided missiles against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, the world’s population became aware of the human potential to inflict destruction and harm, and the vulnerability of transportation systems against preventing the occurrence of similar disasters. Through research, simulation, and system analysis, procedures may be formulated that limit or eradicate the possibility of future occurrences. Operations research encompasses the optimal allocation of resources subject to constraints, as well as providing techniques that evaluate the performance of security policies. This article provides a survey of operations research activities directed toward analyzing and enhancing the aviation security system, with the intent to be informative and motivate the continual improvement of our nation’s transportation security.

This paper has described the issues on electronic circuits which are made for military equipments.The DoD of U.S. recently launched its most ambitious program yet to verify the integrity of the electronics that will underpin future additions to its arsenal. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon's R&D wing, and released details about a three-year initiative it calls the Trust in Integrated Circuits program. The findings from the program could give the military and defense contractors who make sensitive microelectronics like the weapons systems for the F-35 a guaranteed method of determining whether their chips have been compromised. The Trust program started its prequalifying rounds by sending to three contractors four identical versions of a chip that contained unspecified malicious circuitry, though U.S. military consumes only 1% of world's integrated circuits.

When Donald Rumsfeld returned to the Pentagon as Secretary of Defense after a quarter-century hiatus, he found a defense establishment desperately in need of radical change; what he termed “transformation.” By the time of his departure, and in spite of the pressures caused by 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumsfeld could point to a record of significant change in the way the DoD functioned. Rumsfeld significantly altered the planning and strategy process; the command structure; force organization, deployment, training and warfighting capability; financial management; and the personnel system. Yet Rumsfeld's transformation has not been without its critics. Some say he has moved too quickly, others that he has moved too slowly. And still others argue that his efforts, while laudatory, have not focused on the right issues. Time will tell whether his enterprise will succeed, and will be accepted by the conservative culture that pervades the DoD. The Korean Defense Reform Plan (DRP...

As wounded warriors return home from Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan they face a number of challenges amidst a vast industrialized military complex’s healthcare and disability system. For those with traumatic brain injury, the signature injury of this war, this system of care seems to be anything but that. Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Veterans Administration, and the Pentagon are beleaguered by scandal. This paper reviews current challenges, recommendations of the Task Force on The Future of Military Health Care, the West and Marsh Commission report on Walter Read and the Naval Medical Center, the President’s Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Soldiers, and legislative policy proposals and solutions. Resources for military members and their families are included.

Al Qaeda's surprise attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were the U.S.'s second Pearl Harbor. The shocks jolted Americans out of the complacency about national security that they had enjoyed during the dozen years after the Cold War and launched them into a worldwide war against terrorists. When this shock was followed by the failure to find weapons of mass destruction (WMD) after the invasion of Iraq, recriminations over intelligence failure provoked the most radical reorganization of the intelli gence system since the post-Pearl Harbor National Security Act. In one case, the intelligence community failed to provide enough warning; in the other, it failed by providing too much. The discussions that follow are not complete case studies of the two failures; lengthy examinations are available in definitive official investigations, as well as in the memoirs of the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), George Tenet.1

One of the main merits offered by multiphase machines is their high fault-tolerant capability. Literature has demonstrated that the performance of multiphase induction machines under fault conditions is affected by the employed stator winding connection. In open-loop controlled five-phase machines, the star connection is favorable under healthy conditions while the pentagon connection is favorable and yields a lower derating factor under the open phase condition. In this paper, a new combined star/pentagon single layer winding layout that combines the advantages of both star and pentagon connections is proposed for a five-phase induction machine. Although the proposed winding is intrinsically an asymmetrical ten-phase machine, the proposed connection allows for only five-phase terminals. Moreover, the proposed winding not only yields better flux distribution compared to a conventional single layer winding, but also provides a complete cancellation of the third-order harmonic flux component caused by the induced third sequence currents due to the saturation effect and/or under unbalanced operation. Hence, the machine losses are decreased, which improves the overall machine efficiency. For the healthy case, the machine is similar to a conventional star connected five-phase machine. However, with one phase open, the proposed connection results in a lower derating factor compared to conventional connections for both open-loop and optimal current control techniques. A 1-kW prototype machine is used for experimental verification.

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Washington was embarking on a defense transformation emphasizing missile defense, space assets, precision weaponry, and information technology. This transformation proved irrelevant to the national security threats we now face, with the emergence of nontraditional adversaries pursuing “complex irregular warfare.” U.S. forces will have to assume a much more expeditionary character to successfully deal with Islamists’ complex irregular warfare. The March 2005 U.S. National Defense Strategy provides a balance to the longstanding American military emphasis on major-theater war, but it remains to be seen whether the military's new interest in operations other than conventional, major-combat operations will last or if it will diminish as soon as a new peer competitor rises, allowing the Pentagon to return to its more familiar paradigm.

The most recent review produced some welcome refinements in U.S. defense strategy but fell far short of its objectives, devolving into budget‐driven horse trading and raising questions about whether incumbent administrations should be required to conduct these exercises.

A former Bush administration Pentagon official clears the air about the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review, which set in motion far‐reaching changes designed to align U.S. strategic policy with the different realities and threats of the contemporary security environment.

Defines “Hawala” as an Arabic word meaning “change” or “transform”. Describes it as a system which goes back to 11th century India and allows money to be transferred around the globe without actual money movement or wire transfers, depending on a system of family, clan or ethnic connections. Outlines the benefits of hawala remittance as its cost effectiveness, reliability, efficiency, speed, and convenience for foreign workers who may be semi‐illiterate and certainly not familiar with formal banking systems. Relates this to actual hawala money changers in Malaysia’s Klang Valley, who provided the information for this article, and to the potential of the hawala system to facilitate money laundering and, ultimately, terrorism. Reports that Malaysia is a country named by the Pentagon as a country in which terrorists launder funds, and that it has implemented focused and wideranging measures to combat this menace.

‘It's been reliably reported,’ former US Ambassador to Chad Donald R. Norland announced during a House Africa Subcommittee hearing in April 2002, ‘that, for the first time, the two concepts—’Africa‘ and ’U.S national security’—have been used in the same sentence in Pentagon documents.’ When US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for African Affairs Michael A. Westphal held a press briefing that same month, he noted that ‘fifteen per cent of the US's imported oil supply comes from sub-Saharan Africa’ and that ‘this is also a number which has the potential for increasing significantly in the next decade.’ This, Westphal explained, is the main reason that Africa matters to the United States and why ‘we do follow it very closely,’ at the Pentagon. And during his July 2002 visit to Nigeria, US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Walter Kansteiner declared that ‘African oil is of strategic national interest to us’ and ‘it will increase and become more important as we go forward.’ While American interest i...

Two months after ‘liberating’ Iraq, the Anglo-American authorities in Baghdad decided to control the new and free Iraqi press. Newspapers that publish ‘wild stories’, material deemed provocative or capable of inciting ethnic violence, are being threatened or shut down. A controlled press is a ‘responsible press — just what Saddam Hussein used to say about the press his deposed regime produced. In this edition of Pacific Journalism Review, essays by media commentators present several perspectives on the war and its aftermath. Patrick Ensor gives an overview, Louise Matthews provides media context for the war, John Pilger challenges journalists, Mohamed Al-Bendary profiles the pan-Arab satellite boom, and Alastair Thompson and Russell Brown examine the New Zealand media connection. Cartoonists Steve Bell (The Guardian) and Deven (Le Mauricien) add their views. Critical of the ‘embedded’ media, Bell laments: ‘There’s never been a more dangerous time to be a journalist at war.’

The question constantly arises, of a proportionate response to suffering. Or of an acknowledgement of suffering as disproportionate and incommensurable. On the day on which I write this paragraph, 29 March 2003, viewers of BBC World have been invited to co-construct the sadness and solemnity of the return to Britain from Iraq, in coffins draped in flags and accompanied by Handel and Elgar, of ten named, killed soldiers, and to attend to the words of an officer who tells us how hard a whole regiment may be hit by such a loss. Also today, on the same channel, with a measure of implicit concern but at more than one remove, we are shown a desperate gathering up of unnamed corpses in a market in Baghdad which has been hit by someone or other's ordinance with the loss of fifty or sixty civilian lives. And also today the BBC relays to us, without much commentary, the Pentagon's monochrome film of the obliteration of a building which is said to have contained 200 of Saddam Hussein's committed supporters, none of whom emerged. Perhaps it is easy for some to say exactly how distressed (or glad) it is appropriate to feel about each of these various cases. But for anyone who is not absolutely certain of the nature and extent of all the rights and wrongs involved, the mathematics are baffling. What are we supposed to do with these statistics? How much attention do we give to the ten, the 60, or the 200 especially when it is asserted, again on the same channel, and on

"Blowback" is a CIA term first used in March 1954 in a report on the 1953 operation to overthrow the government of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran. It is a metaphor for the unintended consequences of covert operations against foreign nations and governments. The suicidal attacks of September 11, 2001, on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were instances of blowback from American clandestine operations in Afghanistan. They have greatly accelerated tendencies toward militarism in the United States, which is defined as the phenomenon in which a nation's armed services come to put their institutional preservation ahead of effectiveness in achieving national security or a commitment to the integrity of the governmental structure of which they are a part.

GROUND BREAKING FOR THE Pentagon took place in Arlington, Va., on Sept. 11,1941. Sixty years later, terrorists slammed a commercial airliner into one side of the building, injuring and killing hundreds of civilian and military employees. That heinous attack in Virginia and the earlier, more devastating one on the World Trade Center towers in New York City have served as a rude wake-up call to the nation. And they have galvanized scientists of every stripe who, until then, may never have envisioned their expertise as serving the cause of national security and homeland defense. Months before Sept. 11,2001, the National Research Council's Board on Chemical Sciences & Technology (BCST) was busy putting together the study "Challenges for the Chemical Sciences in the 21st Century." It was envisioned as an overview document focused on basic research needs with no mention of national security or homeland defense. That vision, of course, changed quickly The chairmen of the ...

In mid-October 1962, US intelligence analysts, using photographs taken a few days earlier by two U-2 aircraft flying over Cuba, determined that the Soviet Union was installing middle-range ballistic missiles (MRBM) on the island with the capability to deliver nuclear warheads. After discussing the new information with his advisors for two full days, President John F. Kennedy decided that the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba posed a direct threat to the national security of the United States and, thus, that they had to be removed. To achieve this objective, the president and his advisors narrowed their options to either launching a conventional airstrike on the missile sites followed by an invasion or implementing a naval quarantine on the delivery of offensive weapons. They agreed that were the president to authorize the set up of a blockade, shortly thereafter he might have to order the launching of an invasion followed by an air strike. On Monday, October 22, Kennedy announced on television that he had ordered the US Navy to set up a quarantine around Cuba and had called the premier of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, to ask him to “halt and eliminate [the] clandestine, reckless, and provocative threat to world peace.” That same day, Kennedy authorized the Pentagon to redeploy US military forces toward the southern parts of the United States in preparation for a direct attack on the Cuban island in case Moscow were not to act as he had insisted. Fourteen days after the discovery of the Soviet missiles, the crisis ended.

This historical case study reviews and analyzes congressional efforts, from 1967 to 1973, to limit and control military public relations. A review of the effectiveness of the efforts showed that they had, at best, only a limited effect. A major cause of the relative ineffectiveness of this effort was due to the use of counterstrategies by the military that were legal, yet contravened the intent of Congress. The importance of public relations to administrative agencies suggests that they would be expected to behave as the military did. This means that there are limits to the legislative power of the purse, which, it turns out, may not be the ultimate governmental power to control public bureaucracies after all. Mordecai Lee is an Assistant Professor of Governmental Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

In March 1948, Sir Percy Sillitoe, Director-General of M15, flew to Australia to inform its Prime Minister, J.B. Chifley, that a spy ring had been detected operating out of the Soviet embassy in Canberra. The details Sillitoe produced were vague and no suspect could be arrested. Then chaos broke out. The Pentagon banned all information flowing to Australia: Australian/British/US relations became strained: the Australian Security Intelligence Organization (ASIO) was established under the aegis of M15, but it failed to placate the USA; and the Chifley government lost the subsequent elections. What was behind these espionage sensations? The defection of the KGB man in Canberra, Vladimir Petrov, in 1954 was expected to produce the insider's exposé on local spying and although suspected spies were paraded, nothing happened. Then in 1996, everything was made clear. The US National Security Agency (NSA) released the Australian Venona papers, comprising the decrypted Soviet cables detailing the operation of this 1940s spy ring. They had been sealed in the NSA's most secret archives for 50 years to avoid compromising all Sigint (Signal intelligence) work. The exploration of these events by Australian historians has hitherto been handicapped by a lack of knowledge about the detail of this missing intelligence dimension. The revealing of that secret now provides the opportunity for these disjointed events to be viewed in their proper Cold War perspective. This article analyses the events from the aspect of what was known before the Venona releases and what can now be known of those same events.

Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in the United States, many measures have been taken to prevent similar attacks from happening against iconic targets from the land, air, or sea. However, most of the efforts have so far focussed only on the prevention of terrorist attacks. The APEC Trade Recovery Programme (TRP) was developed to increase the speed of post-incident recovery amongst the APEC economies and the US to facilitate a resumption of trade after a terrorist incident.

Though the restrictions placed on the press during the Persian Gulf War have generated substantial scholarly discussion, the voices of key actors, especially pool reporters, have not been emphasized in the research literature. Using surveys and in—depth interviews, we investigate the impact that the rules for pool reporting had on media coverage of the Gulf War. Conclusions indicate that there was a need as well as a benefit to some Desert Storm reporters who participated in the pool. However, the study confirms the argument that the pool system is inadequate in providing complete and balanced war coverage to a dependent US audience.

The Pentagon's reluctance to use force in recent conflicts in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda stems ultimately from the organizational trauma the U.S. military suffered in Vietnam. The near total disintegration of the military in the early 1970s created an organizational survival imperative that produced the military's lessons of Vietnam and its doctrine on the proper use of force. This Weinberger-Powell Doctrine, despite frequent criticism, has steadily gained legitimacy over the years since Vietnam and is preeminent today in the American foreign policy community. Military leaders, by applying the doctrine, have succeeded in avoiding new Vietnam-type quagmires by constraining the imperial impulses of the presidency, but the inherent ambiguity of international conflict in the post-Cold War era will make it more difficult for the promulgators of this doctrine to continue to negotiate the fine line between quagmires and appeasement in the twenty-first century.

In the 1960s, the Pentagon commissioned several computer scientists to build a systems of decentralised communication network that could remain functional in the event of a nuclear war. The result is the Arpanet, which initially linked up four universities. Over time, this network grew rapidly to interconnect numerous universities, research centres and commercial organisations, and became the technological underpinnings of the Internet.

I was waking up in the sunny California morning on September 11 , 2001. Instead of music playing on my radio alarm clock, I was hearing fragments of news broadcast about airplanes crashing into the Pentagon and the twin towers of the World Trade Center. I thought I was dreaming about waking up in an alternative universe.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has repeated its call for an independent investigation into last October’s attack on the charity’s hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, after a US military investigation ended with recommendations for administrative punishments against 16 unnamed servicemen, but no charges.1 “The investigation found that the incident resulted from a combination of unintentional human errors, process errors, and equipment failures, and that none of the personnel knew that they were striking a hospital,” said General Joseph Votel, who heads US Central Command and presented the report at a Pentagon press conference. “The label ‘war crimes’ is typically reserved for intentional acts—intentionally targeting civilians or intentionally targeting protected objects or locations,” …

(By staff commentator Pavel Felgengauer. Novaya gazeta, April 20, 2016, p. 6. Condensed text:) A pair of Russian Su-24 bombers cruising over international waters of the Baltic Sea 70 kilometers from Kaliningrad Province flew within several meters of the USS Donald Cook’s deck. A day later, an Su-27 fighter intercepted a US Air Force RC-135U reconnaissance aircraft, reportedly flying within a dozen meters of it. A random gust of wind, and one of the Su-24s could have grazed the rigging, subsequently crashing into the water or onto the destroyer’s deck. The Su-24 would have been destroyed, the USS Donald Cook could also have sustained damage, and inevitably, there would have been casualties. If the Su-27 had collided with the RC-135U in midair, both aircraft and their crews could have been lost. With people killed and equipment destroyed, the smoldering regional conflict could have ignited into a very real war in the worst-case scenario. ... Thankfully, no one was killed, nothing crashed from the sky or burned down, and no one opened preemptive fire. Such incidents are not the first: They have happened before, but they are becoming more frequent, and it seems that Russian [military] commanders have no desire to rein in their subordinates in any way. Both the [Russian] Foreign Ministry and the Kremlin have formally distanced themselves from these [incidents], stating that the [Russian] Defense Ministry has already said everything that needed to be said. For its part, the Defense Ministry, while fully confirming the interception of both the RC-135U and the USS Donald Cook, denies any potential risk. Evidently, the assumption is that since Russia has the Kaliningrad enclave in the Baltic, where its main Baltic Fleet base is located, and Sevastopol in the Black Sea, foreign ships and aircraft must be intercepted and chased away even if they are in international waters. ... According to US military sources, the pair of Su-24s that intercepted the USS Donald Cook were not carrying any weapons. To all appearances, they were Su-24MP reconnaissance aircraft that may have been carrying pods with electronic countermeasures equipment (ECM). A Ka-27 Naval helicopter was also spotted near the destroyer. Evidently, the overflight of the USS Donald Cook was not accidental: This points to a special operation planned in advance that may have involved an attempt to make a direct impact on the USS Donald Cook’s Aegis integrated combat information and control system, and to register its response. ... Then again, the military’s needs extend beyond just technical ones: The Finance Ministry has announced a 10% sequestration of all budget expenditures with the exception of social programs, and if oil prices remain low, more cuts may be in the offing. The Defense Ministry is doing its best to resist, and it seems to have gotten assurances [from the government] that the extremely costly rearmament program will not end up on the chopping block. But there is no money, and something has to give. If the level of confrontation with the US goes up a notch, it would help [the Defense Ministry] in its struggle against the Finance Ministry. Of course, everyone understands that aggressive interception carries the risk of collision and crash, but such things happened in the old days and everything turned out okay - after all, it never came to a war. . . . ... Military acrobatics over the Baltic [Sea] look like madness only at first glance, since everything has been carefully calculated: A [successful] low overfly means the adversary has been put in its place. A crash is fine, too - the people will rally and agree to suffer deprivations for the sake of new arms. ... Hotbeds of armed conflict are proliferating along Russia’s borders: the Crimea and the Donetsk Basin; Syria and Turkey; Nagorno-Karabakh; and the Transcaucasus. And now the Baltic region. Granted, in the Baltic region, unlike those other places, so far there has been no exchange of fire and no casualties. However, the problem is that the situation in the Baltic region is particularly unstable in strategic terms: There are only a few US military groupings there with a few tanks on a rotational basis acting like a deterrence tripwire, so that Moscow understands that any potential conflict would immediately become intercontinental. So in the event of an incident in the Baltic region involving an airplane or a ship, US generals would urge their political leadership to begin the immediate redeployment of substantial reinforcements. Because the Russians can mobilize substantial forces and move them to the Baltic borders much quicker, [US military would insist that] reinforcements should be redeployed without waiting for any conflict to be resolved by diplomatic means. ... In Moscow, if the General Staff is put in a similar situation, it would also insist on immediate action. If the Pentagon is allowed to deploy a secure base in the Baltics, that would put both the St.