BREAKING: Northrop Grumman wins LSR-B contract.

Northrop Grumman, Falls Church, Virginia, has been awarded a contract for the Long Range Strike Bomber.

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DEFENSE NEWS: WASHINGTON – Northrop Grumman has won the contract to build the US Air Force’s next-generation Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B), an industry-shaping deal that breathes new life into the world's sixth-largest defense company.

After US financial markets closed Tuesday evening, Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Air Force leadership announced that Northrop beat out the team of Boeing and Lockheed Martin for the contract, which is expected to top $55 billion over the life of the program. It's the largest military aircraft deal since Lockheed Martin won the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) more than a decade ago.

Northrop now has the Pentagon's blessing to build a new fleet of aircraft to replace the Air Force’s aging B-52s and B-1s. As builder of the B-2 stealth bomber, Northrop beat out a joint Lockheed Martin-Boeing team in a closely watched competition that has lasted months longer than anticipated.

Boeing and Lockheed will likely wage intense lobbying campaigns to rally support for a protest. Boeing is expected to tap the Missouri delegation, including influential Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill and Republican Sen. Roy Blunt, while Lockheed will look to the Texas delegation, particularly Fort Worth’s Republican Rep. Kay Granger and House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. William "Mac" Thornberry, also a Republican.

Earlier on Tuesday, before the announcement and after a hearing on streamlining defense acquisitions, Thornberry acknowledged concerns over a possible LSR-B protest and the litigious nature of acquisitions in general.

"It's part of the way acquisition culture has developed that every bid award has protests, and you're expected to protest – basically with no penalty," he told reporters. "So, a number of members have had ideas about improving that situation, and it's something that we will continue to discuss."

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US Special Ops rescue 70 Kurds - one soldier killed.

By Kellan Howell - The Washington Times - Thursday, October 22, 2015

At least one U.S. military member has been killed in Iraq where U.S. special operations forces were involved in an attempt to rescue Kurdish hostages from an Islamic State stronghold overnight.

In a statement released Thursday, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said the service member was wounded during the rescue mission after troops came under fire by the Islamic State militants.

“He subsequently died after receiving medical care,” Mr. Cook said. “In addition, four Peshmerga soldiers were wounded.”

This is the first known combat fatality on the ground in the war against the Islamic State terrorist group.

“On behalf of the men and women of the Department of Defense, we offer our sincere condolences to the family of the U.S. service member who was killed in this operation,” Mr. Cook said. “The U.S. and our coalition will continue to work with our Iraqi partners to degrade and defeat ISIL, and return Iraq to the full control of its people.”

U.S. Special Forces on Wednesday supported Iraqi Peshmerga in an operation to rescue 70 Kurdish hostages at the request of the Kurdistan Regional Government, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement.

“This operation was deliberately planned and launched after receiving information that the hostages faced imminent mass execution,” Mr. Cook said.

The operation took place in Hawija in norther Iraq where Kurdish fighters were being held captive in an Islamic State controlled compound.

More than 20 of the 70 hostages rescued were members of the Iraqi Security Forces, Mr. Cook said.

Five Islamic State militants were detained during the operation and a number were killed as well.

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Teenager hacks CIA Director's accounts.

(CNN) The FBI and Secret Service are investigating reports that non-government personal accounts associated with CIA Director John Brennan as well as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson were hacked, law enforcement officials told CNN.

The New York Post first interviewed the alleged hacker, who said he accessed an AOL email account associated with Brennan that included files regarding his security clearance application, and the hacker also claims to have accessed a Comcast account associated with Johnson.

In an interview with CNN on Monday, the alleged hacker said he has yet to be contacted by law enforcement.

The CIA issued a statement Monday saying they are aware of the report. A DHS spokesman also issued a statement saying, "We don't discuss the Secretary's security information. We have forwarded this matter to the appropriate authorities." The FBI declined to comment.

It does not appear that any classified information was accessed, according to a law enforcement official.


The alleged hacker said he was motivated both by politics and by the desire to shame the government.

"John and Jeh are both very big people and high-ranking people, so, I mean, if we hacked them, they would be ashamed," he said. "But it was really because the government are killing innocent people, they also fund (Israel) for killing innocent people."

The reports highlight the sensitivity of government officials using personal email addresses whether or not they use them for government purposes, an issue thrust into the spotlight in part by Hillary Clinton's use of private email when she was secretary of state.

While much of the controversy over Clinton's email use stems from the fact that she used the account for work purposes -- there has also been concern about officials using personal email for non-government purposes but on company computers.

The problem is that private email addresses make easy targets.

Johnson apologized over the summer for getting a waiver to use personal email on government computers at the Department of Homeland Security -- the civilian agency tasked largely with leading the federal government's cybersecurity efforts. He called it a "whoops" moment and extended an existing ban to cover top officials who had sought waivers for their email access.

The concern with personal email is that it can be relatively easy for hackers to target and exists outside the protections on .gov email addresses managed by the government.

In fact, the hacker told The New York Post that he used a stunningly simple tactic to allegedly hack Brennan's account.

The process, called "social engineering," involves collecting information on a person that is publicly available and using it to personalize an attack on their accounts. In this case, the alleged hacker told the Post he tricked Verizon employees into giving him Brennan's information and got AOL to reset his password, presumably sending the reset to the hacker.

The tactic, taking advantage of call centers, has been documented by several in the security community as a relatively easy and dangerous hacking technique.

In another form of social engineering, a hacker in 2008 broke into the email account of former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin by answering her simple security questions, including her birthday and zip code.

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GUARDIAN : US spy chief's 'highly unusual' reported contact with military official raises concerns

Barack Obama’s intelligence chief is said to be in frequent and unusual contact with a military intelligence officer at the center of a growing scandal over rosy portrayals of the war against the Islamic State, the Guardian has learned.
James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, is said to talk nearly every day with the head of US Central Command’s intelligence wing, Army Brigadier General Steven Grove – “which is highly, highly unusual”, according to a former intelligence official.

Grove is said to be implicated in a Pentagon inquiry into manipulated war intelligence.

In communications, Clapper, who is far more senior than Grove, is said to tell Grove how the war looks from his vantage point, and question Grove about Central Command’s assessments. Such a situation could place inherent pressure on a subordinate, sources said.

Knowledgeable former officials are doubtful that Clapper directly intends to manipulate intelligence. And they do not say that the director of national intelligence – who apologized to his Senate overseers in 2013 for publicly misleading Congress on the scope of domestic surveillance – ordered Grove or anyone else to change the command’s assessment of the war.

But one former intelligence official said Clapper “has to be careful of the Cheney effect, going over to the CIA and how does that affect people” – a reference to pressure felt by CIA analysts before the 2003 Iraq invasion to portray Saddam Hussein as posing a more dire threat than he actually did, following then Vice-President Dick Cheney’s direct interaction with far more junior analysts and officials.

“He can be manipulative,” a former senior defense official said of Clapper. For Clapper as a senior US intelligence officer with access to assessments across the 16 US intelligence agencies to query Grove, the Central Command intelligence chief, the ex-official said, “something’s wrong”.

Clapper’s calls, knowledgeable sources speaking on condition of anonymity said, placed Grove in a difficult bureaucratic position: between the nominal leader of the entire US intelligence apparatus and his lower-level analysts, several of whom consider the year-long war against Isis to be in dire straits.

Grove and his civilian deputy, Greg Ryckman, are said to be the sources of dissatisfaction among analysts within Central Command, where an internal controversy about integrity in intelligence has now sparked an official inquiry by the Pentagon inspector general.

More than 50 intelligence analysts, both those within Central Command and their seconded Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) colleagues, have registered complaints about manipulated or skewed data, the Daily Beast reported on Wednesday. Analysts object to internal portrayals, said to come ultimately from Grove and Ryckman, of a war proceeding better than Isis’s persistent hold over large swaths of Iraq and Syria suggests. The existence of the Pentagon inquiry was first reported last month by the New York Times.

Some of those skewed and upbeat assessments have reportedly been delivered to Barack Obama. The White House has frequently defended its “Iraq first” strategy; one source interviewed by the Guardian said Obama aides were not receptive to hearing “the narrative that Isis is winning”.

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North Korean anniversary missile launch still probable despite evidence to contrary

38 NORTH: While speculation that North Korea intends to launch a long-range space launch vehicle (SLV) on the 70th anniversary of the Korean Workers’ Party in October continues, it is still not possible to determine whether Pyongyang will conduct such a launch using commercial satellite imagery. Imagery from August 27 and September 1 show that a movable structure on the launch pad—intended to transfer SLV stages and components from the Stationary Preparation Building to the gantry tower—has shifted back and forth since observed in mid-August.

That movement may have occurred for a number of reasons ranging from testing the recently completed movable structure to launch preparations. Besides the fact that the general low level of activity throughout the facility suggests a launch is not going to occur over the next few weeks, in the case of a possible October launch, it is probably still too soon to move the SLV to the gantry.

Construction activity at the Sohae Satellite Launching Station (“Tongchang-ri”) since spring 2015 has made it more difficult to spot launch preparations. Nevertheless, there are indicators likely to be present a few weeks before a launch that such preparations are underway, such as a significant increase in fuel loading and pressure testing activity at the fuel and oxidizer buildings. Moreover, it may also be possible to spot the SLV itself at the gantry.

Recent imagery also shows construction at the vertical engine test stand that will allow the testing of larger, more capable rocket engines is proceeding rapidly. That work, however, is unrelated to the question of whether the North will conduct a new launch in the near future.

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