IDEX: Dassault-UAE Talks Progress on Rafale Sale

ABU DHABI - Talks between Dassault Aviation and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) on a possible sale of the Rafale fighter jet are going well, with Dassault officials hoping for a deal in the medium to long term, an executive of the aircraft company said at the IDEX trade show.

"The discussions are going well," the executive said. An announcement on the Rafale was not expected in the near term, he said. In the short term, Dassault was supporting the Mirage 2000 operated by the UAE, while the Rafale was seen as a medium- or long-term prospect, he said.

Good relations between the UAE and France have been restored after hitting a rough patch last year, when a report ran late June in the daily newspaper Le Figaro which offended the Abu Dhabi authorities.
The Dassault family owns the Figaro and is the controlling shareholder of Dassault Aviation.
At a low point in bilateral relations, UAE defense officials asked the U.S. government for technical information on the F/A-18 Super Hornet. Subsequently, relations were smoothed out between France and Abu Dhabi.
"They managed to fix it," a gulf defense official said. "The talks are back on."
French Prime Minister François Fillon recently visited Abu Dhabi, seen as a sign of improved ties between Paris and the UAE.
France sets great store by an export sale of the Rafale, which is the standard bearer of national prestige in world politics, a much-needed source of cash for the straitened defense budget and an export beacon for the French aerospace industry.

The Pakistan Navy Custodian of The Country's Coastline

As the custodian of the country's coastline, territorial waters, and Sea Lines Of Communications (SLOCs) the Pakistan Navy has a vital role to play in the defence set-up of the country. The Pakistan Navy's primary role is to guard the country's territorial waters and oversee enforcement of jurisdiction over nearly 240,000 square miles of waters constituting Pakistan's Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). The navy is also tasked with protection of Pakistan's SLOCs, its 960km long coastline and its ports, especially the port of Karachi. Barely 150 km from the Indian border, Karachi has the only developed berthing facilities for handling the bulk of Pakistan's trade, naval dockyards, repair and overhauling facilities as well as the strategic national petroleum reserves. Another port of significance is Port Qasim, a more modern commercial port designed primarily for grain exports, but without naval shore facilities. Of lesser importance are the subsidiary ports of Pasni. Jiwani and Gwadar. Critical SLOCs are the maritime routes running from Karachi to the Persian Gulf, the Suez Canal, East Africa and the Far East. After the Passing of the UN Law of Sea Convention of 1982, Pakistan acquired an EEZ of about 240,000 square miles. In order to provide protection to this vast area, the Pakistan Government decided to raise the Maritime Security Agency (MSA), which was formally inaugurated on 1 January 1987. The MSA implements the local and international laws in the EEZ, and provides surveillance against poaching by illegal vessels and unauthorised survey by foreign craft. It also conducts SAR missions, and implements measures for control of pollution and fishery protection. Available SAR facilities include aircraft, surface vessels and a network for the reception of distress signals. Secondary navy's mission comprise coastal surveillance; SAR duties, hydro-graphic surveys, maintaining navigational aids, and law enforcement. As regards in particular the latter, in recent years the navy's role has been expended to include narcotics interdiction, anti-terrorist operations, anti-smuggling, elimination of piracy and combating environmental pollution. The naval headquarters is situated at Islamabad but the fleet as logistic commands are in Karachi, together with most of the training facilities. During the late 1980s, in association with the expansion of the fleet, the Pakistan Government ordered the construction of a new major base at Ormara, 200km west of Karachi. The Ormara Project was named "Jinnah Naval Base" after the founder of the nation. During the 1980s, the Pakistan Navy went through an unprecedented period of growth. It virtually doubled its surface fleet from nine main surface combatants in 1980 up to 16 by 1989, also acquiring sophisticated long-range anti-ship missiles and enhancing its maritime reconnaissance capabilities. This expansion process also proved the navy's ability to manage the added administrative, maintenance and operational loads. The submarine force currently consists of two HASTMAT class (AGOSTA type) built between 1976 and 1980, four HANGOR class (DAPHNE type) built between 1967 and 1970 and one KHALID class (AGOSTA 90B type), all of these boats being of French origin. The HASHMATs were modified in 1985 to fire Sub-HARPOON depth-to-surface anti-ship missiles. The HANGOR class boats, now close to obsolescence, will be replaced by three new AGOSTA 90B type submarines, first of which has already been inducted into Pakistan navy. The main assets of the naval air wing currently consist of two P-3C ORION and four improved Breguet ATLANTIC anti-submarine and maritime patrol aircraft, four F-27 maritime surveillance and EW aircraft, plus thirteen ship-borne helicopters, comprising six Mk45 SEAKINGs, three LYNX ASW/attack types and four SA-319B ALOUETTE IIIs. The Marine Corps is the youngest force in the Pakistan Navy. With its establishment the navy has become capable of operations on four dimensions, i.e., on the sea with surface combatants, under the sea with submarines, in the air with naval aircraft and on the ground with the Marine Corps. The Pakistan Navy is moving from the old to new technologies at a rapid pace. The navy will have to consolidate the new weaponry, which will take time as this will involve a basic restructuring of personnel and logistics to suit future needs.

President Zardari to seek nuclear technology cooperation with Japan

President Asif Ali Zardari said Monday that since Japan was negotiating a deal with India to cooperate on peaceful uses of nuclear energy, the similar cooperation should be extended to his country.
“If Japan is willing to cooperate with India in nuclear technology and (is) giving nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, I do not see any reason why we should not deserve the same,” Zardari said in an interview with the Japanese media in Islamabad ahead of his departure for a three-day visit to Japan, published in leading English newspapers here.
“I do not know what questions would be raised during discussion. It depends,” he said when asked if he will raise the question of nuclear technology cooperation during the visit.
President Zardari recognizes that nuclear power is a sensitive issue for the Japanese people and government.
Neither India nor Pakistan are signatories to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, and the talks between Japan and India have triggered an outcry from survivors of the 1945 US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who fear such a deal will hamper global efforts to bring about a world without nuclear weapons.
Japanese firms, however, are keen to export nuclear power generation technology and related equipment to India, which plans to build 20 new nuclear power plants by 2020.
The President said Pakistan never wanted to go nuclear but it was forced to do so when arch rival India detonated a nuclear device in 1974 and again in 1998.

Libya protests: Gaddafi regime shaken by unrest

The 40-year rule of Col Muammar Gaddafi is under threat amid spiralling unrest throughout Libya.

Several senior officials - including the justice minister - have reportedly resigned after security forces fired on protesters in Tripoli overnight.
Witnesses say renewed protests have hit two suburbs of the capital.
In an earlier TV address, Col Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam conceded that the eastern cities of al-Bayda and Benghazi were under opposition control.
But he warned of civil war and vowed that the regime would "fight to the last bullet".
The BBC's Jon Leyne, in neighbouring Egypt, says Col Gaddafi has now lost the support of almost every section of society.
Reliable sources say Col Gaddafi has now left the capital, our correspondent adds.
'Hatred of Libya' After clashes in the capital overnight were suppressed by security forces, state TV reported a renewed operation had begun against opposition elements there.

Analysis

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The situation in Libya is becoming increasingly confused and chaotic. There are several reports that Col Gaddafi has now left Tripoli, possibly for his hometown of Sirt or his desert base of Sabha.
In Tripoli itself, elements of the security forces are still on the streets, though the violence seems to be increasingly random.
During the night, there were more brutal attacks on demonstrators who had gathered, after rumours spread that Col Gaddafi had fled the country.
Hour by hour, there are reports of more defections. Almost all major tribal leaders seem to have joined the opposition, as well as important religious leaders and several senior Libyan ambassadors.
The east of the country is already almost entirely out of the hands of the government. Col Gaddafi's hold on power is becoming weaker by the hour.

"Security forces have started to storm into the dens of terror and sabotage, spurred by the hatred of Libya," the Libyan TV channel reported.

An eyewitness in Tripoli told the BBC that the suburbs of Fashloom and Zawiyat al-Dahmani had been cordoned off by security forces.
Protesters were out on the streets and flames and smoke could be seen rising from the area, the witness said.
Amid the turmoil on the streets, senior officials have also begun to desert the regime.
Justice Minister Mustapha Abdul Jalil quit the government because of the "excessive use of violence", the privately owned Quryna newspaper reported.
In New York, Libya's deputy ambassador to the UN denounced the Gaddafi government, accusing it of carrying out genocide against the people.
Libya's envoy to the Arab League, Abdel Moneim al-Honi, announced he was "joining the revolution", and its ambassador to India, Ali al-Essawi, told the BBC he was also resigning.
In another blow to Col Gaddafi's rule, two tribes - including Libya's largest tribe, the Warfla - have backed the protesters.
Meanwhile, two helicopters and two fighter jets from Libya landed in Malta.
The helicopter was said to be carrying French oil workers, and the fighter pilots were reported to have left Benghazi when an airbase was taken over by protesters.
'Decisive moment'

Mid-East unrest: Libya

• Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has led since 1969
• Population 6.5m; land area 1.77m sq km, much of it desert
• Population with median age of 24.2, and a literacy rate of 88%
• Gross national income per head: $12,020 (World Bank 2009)

Human Rights Watch says at least 233 people have died since last Thursday, though in his speech, Saif al-Islam insisted reports of the death toll had been exaggerated.

The US, UK and French governments are among those condemning the harsh treatment of protesters.
The US has ordered all families of embassy staff and all non-essential diplomats to leave the country.
Italy, the former colonial power in Libya, has close business links to Tripoli and voiced alarm at the prospect of the Gaddafi government collapsing.
"Would you imagine to have an Islamic Arab Emirate at the borders of Europe? This would be a very serious threat," said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini.
The head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, described the protesters' demands as legitimate, calling it a "decisive moment in history" for Arab nations.
Oil price jumps Reports from several cities suggest the country is sliding out of the government's control:

• In Az-Zawiya, 40km (25 miles) west of Tripoli, witnesses say the police have fled, government buildings have been burnt down and the city is in chaos.
• Unconfirmed reports from the port city of Darnah say protesters are holding more than 300 workers hostage - many of them Bangladeshis.
• Several hundred Libyans stormed a South Korean-run construction site west of Tripoli, injuring at least four workers.
• In Benghazi, reports say 11 solders were killed by their commanding officers for refusing to fire on protesters.

The violence has helped to push up oil prices to their highest levels since the global financial crisis of 2008.
At one point, Brent crude - one of the main benchmarks on world oil markets - reached $105 (£65) a barrel.
International firms including BP, one of the world's biggest oil companies, are preparing to pull their staff out of Libya.

Japan probes possible WWII prisoner experiment site

Excavations are beginning at the site of a former medical school in Japan which could yield evidence of war-time experiments on prisoners.

The site in western Tokyo is said to be linked to Unit 731 of the Japanese Imperial Army, which used prisoners for biological warfare experiments.
The excavation was ordered after a former nurse came forward.
Toyo Ishii said workers were made to bury dozens of bodies there after the surrender at the end of World War II.
Ms Ishii, now 88, first came forward several years ago.
A nurse in the hospital's oral surgery department, she said she had no knowledge of any experiments on humans at the site, which is said to have been the research headquarters of the unit.
But she and her colleagues were ordered to take bodies and body parts for burial in the compound before US troops arrived.
"We took the samples out of the glass containers and dumped them into the hole," she wrote in a statement in June 2006.
"We were going to be in trouble, I was told, if American soldiers asked us about the specimens."
Excavation of the site had to be delayed until residents had been moved from the area.
"We are not certain if the survey will find anything," Health Ministry official Kazuhiko Kawauchi told the Associated Press news agency.

UNIT 731

• Japanese germ warfare centre with its headquarters in north-east China, 1936-1945
• At least 3,000 people killed at the unit in Heilongjiang, but others thought to have died elsewhere
• So far no-one has been charged and no compensation given to victims

"If anything is dug up, it may not be related to Unit 731."

Japan's government has never formally acknowledged that the atrocities of Unit 731 took place.
But witnesses and former soldiers have provided accounts of the work of the unit, which had its main base in eastern Heilongjiang province in China, then part of Japanese-controlled Manchuria.
Viruses intended for use in biological warfare were reportedly tested on prisoners, some of whom were then dissected alive.
Others were said to have been frozen to death in endurance tests.
The site being excavated in Tokyo is close to another where fragments of bone, many showing saw marks, were found in 1989.
Then the health ministry concluded that they could not be linked to Unit 731, but had been brought to Japan for "medical education".

Embrace the Air-Power Revolution

U.S. Can't Approach 5th-Gen Aircraft the 'Old Way'

By ROBBIN LAIRD
Published: 21 February 2011

U.S. air power has reached a turning point. As budget cuts increase and the U.S. Air Force's percentage of the defense budget falls, the crucial requirement is to invest in the future. President Barack Obama is calling for a Sputnik moment in the investment in future technologies, and there is little reason to exclude the Defense Department from such an effort.
Yet this is exactly what is happening. After canceling the F-22 without ever understanding what the Raptor brings to the joint war fighter, the administration is slowing its investment in the F-35, instead putting money into legacy aircraft.
The new aircraft represent a sea change with significant savings in terms of fleet costs and overall capability. But this will not happen unless policymakers understand that the transition is not simply from fourth-generation to fifth-generation aircraft, but a transition from yesterday's approach to war fighting to distributed operations.
The shift is from linear to sequential operations; it is a shift away from fighter pilots who need to reach back for support from large aircraft command-and-control and ISR platforms, to 360-degree dominance by deployed decision-makers operating not in a network but a honeycomb.
The F-35 is a flying combat system able to operate across the spectrum of warfare. It is the first plane that has the combat system to manage 360-degree space. Deployed as a force, it enables distributed air operations, an approach crucial to the survival of our pilots in the period ahead.
The fifth-generation aircraft are a benchmark for a new approach to airpower. The traditional aircraft adds systems that provide capabilities, and the pilot has to manage each new system. The F-35 has five major combat systems that interact with each other to provide capabilities.
Functional capabilities emerge from the interaction of the systems done by the machine and are not simply correlated with a single system. For example, jamming can be done by several systems aboard the aircraft; the machine determines which one through interaction among the systems. The entire system rests on a common architecture with broadband capabilities.
But if airpower leaders simply mimic the operations of older aircraft with fifth-generation planes, the promise of new air operations will not be realized. The result would be a repeat of the failures of the French facing the Germans in World War II, where the French had superior tanks but outmoded tactics and command structures, and achieved predictable results.
The new aircraft simply do not function as do the old. Considerable cultural change will be required in moving to distributed air operations and decision-makers.
And the shift will require developers of weapons and remotely piloted aircraft to think differently about how to leverage the new stealth-enabled distributed air operational capabilities.
F-22 pilots have already called for the change. They don't want to be tethered to the Airborne Warning and Control System; they don't want to be directed by the classic operations of a centralized combat air operations center.
Another key part of the airpower cultural revolution is the approach to maintainability. To hear some Air Force officials, they sound like the union members in the 1970s objecting to changes in the work force associated with digital production of the newspaper. To recall the days of the controversy, union members wanted to keep their typesetting functions in spite of the elimination of the jobs necessary to produce a newspaper digitally. They lost and Rupert Murdoch won.
The same is true of the shift from mechanical to digital maintenance regimes. Many jobs will be eliminated - the U.S. Marine Corps estimates one-third - and the tooth-to-tail ratio much improved.
The administration's ideological opposition to performance-based logistics (PBL) systems is part of the problem of "union style" resistance to change. The last administration signed a PBL with the partners; the current administration should honor it. The benefits are clear; less cost for sustainment for a more capable aircraft.
In short, the U.S. and its partners are on the cusp of an air-power revolution if our leaders have the courage to embrace cultural change. And there is a clear need to direct investments toward the future, not the past. After all, this is change you can believe in.
Robbin Laird is editor of a book on the evolution of air operations, "Re-Norming Air Operations," and co-founder of the defense analytical website Second Line of Defense.

IDEX: NATO, Thales Extend Comms System Agreement

ABU DHABI - NATO has extended with Thales for two years a contract to act as operator of the secure communications system used by coalition forces in Afghanistan, the French systems company said in a Feb. 20 statement at IDEX 2011.

Thales won a contract in 2007 years ago to provide an information and communications service for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan. The service allows more than 7,000 users in the various militaries to talk to each other on the Afghan Mission Network, the company said.

No financial details were available.
"We are very proud of the renewed trust shown in us by NATO for such a sensitive issue as the outsourcing of its communications capabilities, with all the security aspects that this involves," said Pascale Sourisse, Thales senior vice president in charge of C4I (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence), Defense and Security activities.
The system uses satellite, point-to-point radio links, fiber optics, secure voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and video on demand, the company said.