US deploying missile interceptors to counter North Korean threats

THE GUARDIAN: A week after Pyongyang threatened to launch a pre-emptive strike nuclear strike on Washington, the Pentagon said it was increasing its fleet of interceptor missiles by nearly 50 per cent.

Chuck Hagel, the newly-appointed US secretary of defence, said that an additional 14 interceptors would be deployed to Alaska by the end of 2017, raising the overall total to 44 missiles stationed along the West coast.
"The United States has missile defence systems in place to protect us from limited intercontinental ballistic missile attacks, but North Korea in particular has recently made advances in its capabilities and is engaged in a series of irresponsible and reckless provocations," Mr Hagel said.

While North Korea is thought to be at least several years away from developing a capability to strike the US, Mr Hagel said the Obama administration was determined to stay "ahead of the threat".

"Whatever their timelines are [the US must be sure] we're not reacting to those timelines and are ahead of any potential threat," he said.

Barry Pavel, a former senior director for defence policy at the White House's National Security Council, said that US seeks to maintain a ratio of two interceptors for every potential incoming missile. By that formula, the expanded defence system would be able to intercept up to 22 missiles.

However, Mr Pavel said that the Pentagon's announcement was pre-emptive and did not reflect the isolated communist dictatorship's current strength.

"They have a lot of technical efforts still ahead and I don't expect them to be capable any time soon but perhaps within the next five years? It's possible," Mr Pavel told The Daily Telegraph.

The ground-based interceptors have often proved inaccurate during testing but Mr Hagel insisted yesterday "we have confidence in our system".

Last week, the North Korean foreign ministry threatened "pre-emptive nuclear strikes on the headquarters of the aggressors" after the UN voted to begin new sanctions in response to a nuclear test the country conducted in February.

The test, the country's third, drew international condemnation, including anger from China, North Korea's only major ally. In December, North Korea pressed ahead with a long-range rocket test in defiance of a UN ban.

Mr Hagel also announced the US would deploy a new radar system in Japan that would give "improved early warning and tracking of any missile launched from North Korea at the United States or Japan".

He said that sending additional resources to the Pacific would not impact plans to cover all of Europe under a Nato missile shield by 2018.

"Let me emphasise the strong and continued commitment of the United States to Nato missile defence. That commitment remains ironclad," Mr Hagel said during a briefing at the Pentagon.

The US military is currently undertaking studies as it decides whether to deploy an additional interceptor site, possibly on the Atlantic coast to counter any future threat from Iran.

"While the administration has not made any decision on whether to proceed with an additional site, conducting environmental impact studies will shorten the timeline for construction should that decision be made," Mr Hagel said.

The new Pacific interceptors are expected to cost around $200 million (£132 million) and are being deployed at a time of significant cutbacks at the Pentagon.

Under the terms of "the sequester" – a series of sweeping spending cuts that began this month – the department of defence faces $454 billion in cuts over the next decade.

Mr Hagel said the new missile deployments were designed to "counter future missile threats from Iran and North Korea, while maximising scarce taxpayer resources".

Benghazi attack suspect detained in Libya

(CNN) -- A man suspected of involvement in the September attack on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi is being held in Libya, according to two sources who have spoken with CNN.

Both sources confirmed the man's name as Faraj al-Shibli (also spelled Chalabi). One of the sources, who has been briefed on the arrest by Western intelligence officials, said al-Shibli was detained within the past two days and had recently returned from a trip to Pakistan.

It is not known whether he has been charged with any offense related to the attack in Benghazi on September 11, which resulted in the deaths of four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens.

Phone call links Benghazi attack to al Qaeda commander

Al-Shibli comes from a town called Sidi Armouma al-Marj, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Benghazi. He was a member of the Libyan Islamist Fighting Group, a militant organization that tried to overthrow the Gadhafi regime in the mid-1990s.

In 2004, the Libyan government reported al-Shibli to the United Nations as on its "wanted" list and issued an Interpol "Red Notice" seeking his arrest.

EA-6B Prowler Crashes - 3 Killed

ODESSA, Wash. -

A Whidbey Island-based EA-6B Prowler electronic warfare aircraft has gone down in Lincoln County and officials believe all three personnel on board were killed in the crash.

The Prowler reportedly went down just after 9 a.m., near Coffee Pot Lake Road and Duck Lake Lamona Road west of Harrington and northeast of Odessa, according to Scott McGowan, fire chief for Lincoln County Fire District No. 6.

HaLee Walter lives near the scene where the aircraft went down and said she heard what she described as a sonic boom and then her whole house shook.

"My kids and my dog ran upstairs, and then I had gone outside and I could hear another a military aircraft because they fly all the time down here and they're very loud and we're used to them, and I could hear the aircraft and I'm like 'Oh you know maybe it was just a sonic boom,'" she said.
I called my husband and I'm like 'Did you just feel that? Did you hear that?' and he's like yeah, he's like 'I think an airplane just went down, I just saw a huge plume of smoke north of the house.'"

"I went outside and of course I could see the smoke and then I took my son and we drove other there because it didn't look like it was very far from our house, and the ambulance and police and fire trucks were all there and [the] plane had gone down and there was still another military aircraft circling," she added.

A crew from the National Transportation Safety Board is heading to the scene and should be there around 11 a.m.

Whidbey Island NAS is home to the U.S. Navy's tactical electronic warfare squadrons, which fly the EA-6B Prowler and the EA-18G Growler. The Growler is based on the F/A-18 Hornet fighter attack aircraft and carries a two-person crew. The Growler is being phased into service to replace the Prowler, which carries a four-person crew.

Navy aircrews fly across Eastern Washington for training exercises, according to Kim Martin, a public information officer for Whidbey Island, who confirmed an overflight of two pair of Growlers over the Spokane area in September 2011.

"It was a routine training session. That's a designated military training route part of their flight training curriculum," Martin said in 2011.

In addition to being home to the Navy's electronic warfare squadrons, the Navy's Electronic Attack Weapons School is based at Whidbey Island NAS. The school trains aircrews in the tactical operations of the Navy's Prowlers and Growlers.

The last mishap involving an EA-6B Prowler in our area was in March 2006, when a Prowler with VAQ-135 "Black Ravens" went down during a training exercise in a remote area of Umatilla County in northeastern Oregon. All four crewmen aboard the aircraft ejected safely.

The Northrop Grumman EA-6B Prowler is based on the A-6 Intruder platform and was first introduced into the fleet in 1970. While they have served in combat in conflicts ranging from Vietnam to Desert Storm, Iraq and Afghanistan, none have ever been lost in combat.

READ THE REST OF THE STORY HERE

Insider attack kills 2 members of the U.S. Special Operations forces and five Afghan troops

By Kevin Sieff, Updated: Monday, March 11, 12:04 PM


KABUL — An Afghan police officer opened fire Monday on a gathering of Americans and Afghans in eastern Afghanistan, killing at least two members of the U.S. Special Operations forces and five Afghan troops and police officers, officials said.

The assault, one of the deadliest so-called “insider attacks” this year, occurred in Wardak province during a meeting between U.S. and Afghan troops ahead of a joint mission, according to U.S. and Afghan officials.

The attacker seized a machine gun in the back of a police pickup truck and opened fire on the U.S. and Afghan forces in a police compound, according to a senior Afghan military official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment on the incident. It was unclear whether the gunman was a Taliban recruit or acting out of personal enmity. The attacker was reported killed in the ensuing firefight.

In addition to the men killed, about a dozen U.S. and Afghan troops were injured, including the district police chief, officials said.

The attack came a day after a tense President Hamid Karzai accused the American military of colluding with the Taliban to justify a continued U.S. presence in the country. Karzai’s comment that “the Taliban are serving the foreigners” complicated an already tense weekend visit from U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, whose trip was marred by the Afghan president’s decision to call off a key prison handover from U.S. to Afghan forces and the cancellation of a joint news conference. The news conference was called off at U.S. insistence — ostensibly due to security concerns.

Monday’s attack could further threaten the fragile relationship between the two nations. U.S. officials have long advocated the small-footprint approach exemplified by teams of Special Operations forces as a way forward during the American military withdrawal, but Karzai has been critical of those teams, particularly in Wardak.

READ THE FULL STORY AT THE WASHINGTON POST 

Chinese space debris clobbers Russian satellite

CNN: A piece of space debris left over from a 2007 Chinese missile test collided with a Russian satellite earlier this year, rendering the satellite unusable, a researcher said Saturday.

The collision appears to have happened January 22. That's when it's thought a piece of the Feng Yun 1C weather satellite, which was destroyed in the 2007 missile test, accidentally hit the Russian satellite, said T.S. Kelso, a senior research astrodynamicist at the Center for Space Standards & Innovation.

The collision changed the orientation and orbit of the Russian satellite, which was being used in scientific experiments, Kelso said. It may have also damaged it.

"There has been a piece of debris catalogued by U.S. Strategic Command as a result of that collision," Kelso said. "That would suggest that at least a part of the satellite broke off because of the collision."

It was February 4 when two scientists with the Institute for Precision Instrument Engineering in Moscow noticed a change in the orbit of the satellite, known as BLITS, Kelso said.

The scientists estimated the change happened January 22. They contacted Kelso because CSSI operates a service that looks for close satellite approaches, he said.

CSSI looked for objects that may have had a nearby approach with the BLITS satellite around the time of the collision. The Chinese debris was the only object they found.

Although the predicted distance between the debris and the satellite seemed to preclude a collision, the fact that the close approach happened within 10 seconds of the change in orbit made the Feng Yun 1C debris the likely culprit, Kelso wrote in a blog post.

CSSI is now working with the Russian scientists to find out more about the collision.

BLITS is a small glass sphere that reflected laser beams for research. Because of the collision, the satellite now faces the wrong way and can't be used, Kelso said.

The collision also sped up the satellite's spin period from 5.6 seconds to 2.1 seconds, Kelso said.

China launched the Feng Yun 1C polar orbit weather satellite in 1999. It was destroyed in 2007 when China targeted it for a test of a ground-based, medium-range ballistic missile.

U.S. tracking sensors determined the missile collision created hundreds of pieces of space debris, according to a U.S. official at the time. The test prompted formal protests from the United States and several U.S. allies including Canada and Australia.

The problem of collisions involving space debris is not a new one.

"Collisions happen all the time, everywhere. Big collisions -- now those are the rare ones," said space debris expert William Schonberg, chairman of the Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Department at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

The last major space debris collision was in 2009 between Iridium 33, an operational U.S. communications satellite, and Cosmos 2251, a decommissioned Russian satellite, Kelso said.

Scientists know of only a handful of such collisions, but that's only because they happened with objects that were being monitored. Kelso and Schonberg say it's likely there are other "junk to junk" collisions involving unmonitored objects that no one knows about.

In the case of the Russian satellite in January, "it would have been very difficult to tell there had been a collision if it hadn't been for the fact that somebody was operating the satellite and noticed a collision," said Kelso.

Experts and leading government agencies have been working on the space junk problem for decades, but it's a tricky one to solve, Schonberg told CNN.

Trying to catch or deflect debris runs the risk of making the problem worse, he said. The debris could shatter into more pieces or change orbit and be on a collision course with something else.

Some soft-impact lasers can nudge objects into a calculated orbit toward Earth so they will be pulled down and burn up in the atmosphere, Schonberg said. But scientists must make sure that happens over an ocean to minimize danger to people.

"Our technology has not caught up with our desire to clean up our mess" in space, Schonberg said.

"If nothing else," said Kelso, this collision "was a bit of a reminder that it will likely happen again, and maybe we should get back to work trying to figure out what to do about it.