U.S. Rethinks Mideast Arms Sales

Due to the recent political upheaval in the region, the U.S. State Department and the Department of Defense are reviewing its defense trade relationships with countries in the Middle East and even putting some of them on hold.
The United States has put "on pause" some of its planned transactions with countries in the region, James Miller, principal deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, told the House Committee on Foreign Affairs during a May 12 hearing.

Longer term, the administration is looking at the implications for defense trade on a country-by-country basis, as well as assessing the region as a whole, he said.
"Historic change of this magnitude will inevitably prompt us, as well as our colleagues throughout government, to reassess current policy approaches to ensure they still fit with the changing landscape," Andrew Shapiro, the assistant secretary at the State Department's Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, said during a May 3 speech.
"While the impact on our defense relations and the defense trade is uncertain, changes in the region may lead to changes in policy and therefore changes in how we do business," he said.
The majority of U.S. military aid to the region goes to Israel. The United States also provides military financing to Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen.
In Bahrain, where the United States maintains a naval headquarters, the Shiite majority continues to demonstrate against the distribution of power and its lack of inclusion in the government. Early on in the protests, which erupted in February, the government used force against the demonstrators. In March, it invited foreign forces into the country to help manage the unrest.
The United States has financed the Bahrain Defense Force and the country is eligible to receive "excess defense articles," which in the past have included an Oliver Hazard Perry-class guided missile frigate, according to the Congressional Research Service. Recent foreign military financing has gone toward improving the country's air defenses, upgrading the avionics of its F-16 fleet and improving its counter-terrorism capabilities.
The government in Yemen is also using force to crack down on civilian protesters.
According to a Congressional Research Service report, the Obama administration requested $106 million in U.S. economic and military assistance for Yemen in 2011. For 2012, it has requested $116 million in State Department and USAID-administered economic and military aid.
Members of the House Foreign Affairs Committee expressed concern that arms sales to certain countries may no longer advance U.S. foreign policy interests.
Committee Chair Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., wanted assurance that all sales to the region comply with the Conventional Arms Transfer Policy.
Each sale goes through review before any deal is made, responded Ellen Tauscher, undersecretary for arms control and international security at the State Department.
During his speech to the Defense Trade Advisory Group at the State Department, Shapiro emphasized that arms transfers are used as tools to advance U.S. foreign policy goals.
"And therefore, when U.S. foreign policy interests, goals and objectives shift, evolve and transform over time, so will our arms transfer policy," he said.
Along these lines, Shapiro's office is re-examining the Conventional Arms Transfer policy.
"This policy has suited the United States well since it was enacted just after the end of the Cold War, but it is time to dust off its pages and make sure that it reflects the reality of today," he said. "We don't know yet what specific changes, if any, are needed. But in light of sweeping transformation it is essential that we, as well as our colleagues in other government agencies, assess current processes and procedures toward the region."

F-35's Range Falls Short of Predictions

The U.S. Air Force's F-35A Lightning II appears to be unable to fly as far as once predicted, according to a Pentagon document.
The aircraft is currently estimated to have a combat mission radius of 584 nautical miles, just short of the required 590 nautical miles, according to a Selected Acquisition Report dated Dec. 31.

Program officials had previously estimated that the aircraft, unrefueled, would be able to strike targets 690 nautical miles away.
The report says the shortfall is caused by increased use of engine bleed air and fuel capacity issues "that are not yet fully known."
"This estimate is based on preliminary data," the report reads, and more testing will reveal whether it is close to the truth.
The report says the range estimates have also been cut for the Marine Corps' short take-off B-model and the Navy's carrier-base C-model. But those planes' ranges still exceed the requirements.
The B-model has a radius of 469 nautical miles and a requirement of 450; the C-model, 615 and 600.

Selex Buys UAV Firm Utri

Finmeccanica unit Selex Galileo has purchased Utri, an Italian small UAV firm, Selex said May 12.
Trieste-based Utri, which was founded in 2003, has previously teamed with Selex, offering its designs for marketing by Selex.

Selex said it can now directly market Utri electric UAV products, including the Asio, a 6.5-kilogram Vertical Take Off and Landing (VTOL) UAV, the fixed-wing, hand-launched Crex-B weighing 2 kilograms and the ducted-fan VTOL Spyball.
Selex already markets the Falco tactical UAV, which it says is the only European-built UAV to be exported. The cost of purchasing Utri was not given.

U.S. CNO: Carrier Move to Fla. Still a Priority

VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. – The transfer of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier from its current base in Norfolk, Va., to Mayport, Fla., remains a top priority for Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations (CNO) said here May 12.
"I need to do what's best for the Navy," Roughead told reporters after speaking at the AFCEA/U.S. Naval Institute joint warfare conference. The strategic advantage of having two carrier bases on the East Coast is too important, he stressed.

Pressed by a reporter about the "emotional" responses of some Tidewater-region residents to the loss of the carrier, Roughead declared he needed to be unemotional about the matter.
"For me, it's purely a strategic issue," he said. "I'm obliged to do what's in best interests of the nation."
Virginia's congressional delegation has been fighting the move, which has been approved by the Pentagon.
This week, Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., chairman of the readiness subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, stripped out $30 million in the 2012 defense authorization bill, money needed to begin road improvements at Mayport to support the transfer.
Few non-Virginia lawmakers have raised objections to moving one of Norfolk's five carriers to Florida, scheduled to take place in 2019. The specific ship has yet to be identified by the Navy.
During his address, Roughead had another message for Congress. Asked about the effects of climate change, Roughead cited the warming of Arctic waters and the increasing access to the region.
Before too long, he said, "you're likely to have a reliable and routine sea route across the top of the world." Increased access will bring more disputes, he predicted.
"The vehicle for the adjudication of those disputes will be the Law Of The Sea," the CNO said, referring to an international treaty that has not been ratified by the Senate.
"We are not a party to that," Roughead lamented. "Decisions will be made that we will have no influence on. Myself and every one of my living predecessors have strongly endorsed becoming a party to that treaty. I think the time to do it is now.
"Nations are looking to us for leadership, and we are not there. We should agree to that treaty without delay," Roughead urged.

U.S. to Bolster Security for SEAL Team: Gates

WASHINGTON - Defense Secretary Robert Gates voiced concern May 12 about the safety of the U.S. Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden and said security would be stepped up for the commandos.
"When I met with the team last Thursday, they expressed a concern about that, and particularly with respect to their families," Gates told U.S. Marines at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.

He said he could not divulge details publicly but that "we are looking at what measures can be taken to pump up the security."
The raid against bin Laden's compound less than two weeks ago has sparked an avalanche of media attention around the secretive Navy SEAL "Team Six" that carried out the operation.
Reporters have traveled to Virginia to try to uncover more details of the SEAL team, which is based at Dam Neck, and retired SEALs are in high demand as guests for television news broadcasts.
"I think there has been a consistent and effective effort to protect the identities of those who participated in the raid. I think that has to continue," said Gates, whose remarks were carried live on the Pentagon's television channel.
He joked about how details of the raid leaked out even though there had been an understanding among the president's top deputies at a White House meeting to keep information about the operation secret.
"Frankly a week ago Sunday, in the (White House) situation room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out bin Laden," he said. "That all fell apart on Monday, the next day."
The role of the more than 20 SEALs who carried out the helicopter assault on bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan was first publicly confirmed by CIA Director Leon Panetta and Vice President Joe Biden in the days after the raid.
Team Six is an elite unit drawn from the already elite ranks of the SEALs, an acronym for sea, air and land.
The unit is so secret that the military does not openly acknowledge its existence, but its reputation has taken on near mythic proportions and features in books, films and video games.

A Triumph for JSOC

When a U.S. Navy SEAL forced his way into Osama bin Laden's bedroom and put two bullets into the al-Qaida leader, it marked the culmination of a manhunt that stretched back to the 1990s, and a vindication for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
Born from the ashes of Operation Eagle Claw, the disastrous 1980 attempt to rescue 53 American hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Iran, JSOC is part of three-decade effort to ensure that when the nation called again, the military's most elite units would be up to the task.
In the years that followed, the Defense Department stood up several organizations, filling capability gaps exposed by the failure at Desert One. JSOC was among the first, starting up in December 1980 as a two-star command designed to command and control Delta Force and other elite units in the conduct of counterterrorism missions. It later added operations to counter weapons of mass destruction to its mission profile, with regular exercises aimed at neutralizing the nuclear forces of a country such as Libya. It would ultimately become, arguably, the pre-eminent three-star command in the U.S. military.
The command had some early successes, notably the rescue of American Kurt Muse from Panama's Modelo prison during Operation Just Cause in December 1989.
But it suffered a setback in October 1993 in the Somali capital of Mogadishu when a daylight operation to capture leaders of the Habr Gadir clan was thrown off course by the downing of an MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter.
In the ensuing battle, the JSOC task force killed hundreds of Somali militiamen, but 19 U.S. troops also died, the vast majority of them members of the task force.
The JSOC commander at the time, and the man who ran the U.S. side of the battle, was Army Maj. Gen. Bill Garrison. The commander of the Delta troops in the battle was William "Jerry" Boykin, a Delta Force officer on the hostage rescue mission who would go on to retire as a three-star general. Boykin called Garrison the leader who began turning JSOC into the formidable force it is today.
"Bill Garrison did a great deal to improve the headquarters by getting beyond a strict focus on just the operator in the Rangers or the SEALs or Delta or anything like that," Boykin said. "He established a strong ethos of 'Everybody's a team and you all contribute to the success or the failure of this organization, so even if you're not in the battlespace, necessarily, your contribution is equal.'"

Turning Point

But JSOC's star truly began to rise when then-Maj. Gen. Stan McChrystal took command in 2003, said one recently retired SEAL officer.
"Look at JSOC from 1980 to 2003, and there was a series of progressions that was on a very similar path … and then look what happened starting in 2003 to today, how radically different it is," the SEAL officer said. "Look at the level of respect it gets in the interagency. Look at the level of respect it gets in the conventional forces."
Before McChrystal, who spent much of his career in the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, "we were really good at what we did [in JSOC], but we were pirates and totally disorganized," the retired SEAL officer said. "McChrystal took the Ranger discipline, applied it systematically to the organization and then completely changed the way the organization works within the government, within the Defense Department and then within the greater interagency."
McChrystal's vision and force of personality molded JSOC, its component units - and, crucially, its partners in the intelligence community - into a force that took its ability to conduct precision raids to an industrial scale.
This allowed creation of multiple task forces across Iraq, who conducted raids nightly to destroy Abu Musab Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq network, and finally killing Zarqawi himself in a June 2006 airstrike.
Under McChrystal, who led the command until 2008, JSOC became a global actor with small elements deployed to many countries outside the combat theaters. In 2006, it was elevated to a three-star command.
McChrystal "came up with a way to command and control his forces so that with a limited number, he could service efforts in truly a global game," said retired Army Capt. Wade Ishimoto, who was on the ground at Desert One as Delta's acting intelligence officer and is now an adjunct faculty member at the Joint Special Operations University at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla.
Special operations sources said Vice Adm. Bill McRaven, the SEAL who commands JSOC, has continued to improve the organization.
As the Iraq war winds down, the Afghan campaign has heated up, and JSOC's task forces appear to be returning to the operational tempo of Iraq in 2006 and 2007. It is the main force going up against the Haqqani network, which U.S. commanders consider the most dangerous Afghan insurgent group.
"McRaven's going to get the credit [for the bin Laden mission], and he deserves it because he's continued the legacy," said the recently retired SEAL officer. "But make no mistake, this house was built by Stan."
Ishimoto paid tribute to McRaven, but said that others beyond the past two JSOC leaders played key roles, including Boykin, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence under President George W. Bush, and McChrystal's intelligence chief at JSOC, now-Maj. Gen. Mike Flynn of the Army.
"We had a good cast of the right people in the right places at the right time to make this kind of progress," Ishimoto said.

The Special Operators

The Obama administration has not identified the units that took part in the mission to kill bin Laden.
But the stealth MH-60 Black Hawks that carried the SEALs to the compound were almost certainly flown by crews from the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), another unit created in the 1980s. The unit went by a series of different names in the 1980s before acquiring the 160th SOAR(A) moniker in 1990.
The SEALs who killed bin Laden, his son and two male couriers - as well as, accidentally, a woman in the compound - came from another unit formed to fill a capability gap identified after Operation Eagle Claw: Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, popularly known as SEAL Team 6.
"DEVGRU was created specifically as a result of [Eagle Claw]," Boykin said. "It was created to give this new joint command a maritime capability."
Multiple sources in the special operations community said the operators who conducted the bin Laden mission were drawn from DEVGRU's Red Squadron, chosen because it was ready at DEVGRU's Dam Neck, Va., headquarters and available for tasking.
"It was Red Squadron," said the recently retired SEAL officer. "They were not on alert and they weren't deployed."
Each squadron has about 50 operators, "of which they picked about half … for this thing," he added.
The selection of DEVGRU to conduct the bin Laden mission has irked some in Delta, who are miffed that their organization - traditionally considered the pre-eminent special mission unit for direct action operations on land - was overlooked.
"The infighting between the tribes is at an all-time high," said a field-grade Army special operations officer. "People [in Delta] are livid."
Some Delta personnel think that because SEALs command both JSOC and U.S. Special Operations Command - Adm. Eric Olson in the latter case - that was a critical factor behind DEVGRU's selection for the mission, the field-grade Army special operations officer said.
But other sources said a bigger factor was likely the fact that DEVGRU has worked nonstop in the Afghanistan theater since 2001, while Delta spent much of that time focused on Iraq.

India's Joint Ops Doctrine Slowly Takes Shape

NEW DELHI - A joint warfare doctrine adopted in 2010 is slowly improving coordination among India's military forces, but some experts question how effectively this is translating into real-world scenarios.
"Optimum synergy in the Indian armed forces is an oxymoron. While there is a general agreement among one and all that jointness is essential, implementation of this sentiment is lacking, in particular over ownership of assets, and professional nepotism is marring synergy today," said Rahul Bhonsle, a retired Indian Army brigadier and defense analyst here.
In 2010, India defined the joint air-land operations doctrine that seeks to harmonize operations among the three services in important military matters and greatly improve joint fighting capabilities, said a Defence Ministry official.
"On the ground, close coordination between the three wings does gets disrupted, on some occasions due to lack of understanding, which will get sorted out in the time ahead," said Mahindra Singh, a retired Indian Army major general. As future wars are likely to be short-lived, coordination among the three services is vital, he said.
The joint doctrine lays down organizations and procedures to leverage available technology toward the application of air power; however, no details are known of its operational aspects.
Defence Ministry sources said that, based on the joint warfare doctrine, more joint commands are likely to be established in addition to the Andaman Nicobar Command (ANC), which is a joint force of the Army, Navy and the Air Force.
The ANC has pooled its assets and is primarily engaged in protecting the eastern border, especially from a likely threat from China at sea. The Indian Coast Guard also has participated in several ANC exercises since the command was set up 10 years ago.
India has Army, Navy and Air Force troops on the 572-island chain, which lies less than 100 kilometers from the Indonesian coast. A joint command was established there in 2001 as part of a $2 billion plan to boost India's ability to rapidly deploy troops in the region.