Panetta lifting combat ban on women in armed services

WASHINGTON — Pentagon chief Leon Panetta has lifted the military's ban on women serving in combat, a move that will allow women into hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and potentially elite commando jobs, a senior Defense official said Wednesday.

The move, which was recommended by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, overturns a 1994 rule banning women from such roles, said the Pentagon official speaking on condition of anonymity because the decision has not been announced publicly.

Panetta's decision gives the military services until January 2016 to seek special exceptions if they believe any positions must remain closed to women. It comes after more than 10 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The official said the services will develop plans for allowing women to seek the combat positions. Some jobs may open as soon as this year. Assessments for others, such as special operations forces, including Navy SEALs and the Army's Delta Force, may take longer.

The official said the military chiefs must report back to Panetta with their initial implementation plans by May 15. The announcement on Panetta's decision is not expected until Thursday.

Panetta's move expands the Pentagon's action nearly a year ago to open about 14,500 combat positions to women, nearly all of them in the Army. This decision could open more than 230,000 jobs, many in Army and Marine infantry units, to women.

Sikorsky and Boeing teaming up to build the next gen combat helicopter?

Sikorsky and Boeing will once again team over a military rotorcraft project, this time the venture is the U.S. Army Aviation Applied Technology Directorate’s (AATD) requirement for a Joint Multi-Role (JMR) technology demonstrator (TD), the forerunner to the Future Vertical Lift (FVL) requirement in the 2030s.

Signed on January 13, the agreement means that the companies will submit a joint proposal to the AATD for the JMR TD Phase 1. A contract would follow in autumn for a platform demonstrator that would be used to evaluate next generation technology.

There has been no statement whether the JMR would be based on any current helicopter manufactured by either Sikorsky or Boeing, although a Boeing representative said the expectation was that further details regarding the project would be revealed before the March 2013 deadline.

Phase 2 would begin in 2015 and that would take the project forward through the inclusion of the mission equipment package.

Should the Sikorsky Boeing team then be successful, the hope is that they would then be jointly responsible for the production of the FVL (medium) aircraft, which would replace the current Sikorsky Black Hawk and Boeing Apache fleets within Army Aviation (around 4,000 helicopters).

The two rotorcraft primes have teamed before, most notably on the ill-fated RAH-66 Comanche. Two RAH-66 prototypes were built and conducted flight testing from 1996 to 2004. Widely acknowledged as having made important steps forward during its development, despite the aircraft’s eventual cancellation due to considerable cost overruns it is feasible that both companies feel that aspects of their previous joint development project could be useful to the JMR. Both Sikorsky with its S-97 Raider development based on the X2 and Boeing with its advanced Apache E have cutting-edge technologies to bring to the party. This makes teaming in this economically challenging environment a logical step for both companies.

Chris Chadwick’s released statement on the announcement alluded to the shared history: “Our teaming agreement is the continuation of a long-standing relationship between Boeing and Sikorsky and reflects a common vision for the future of Army aviation.” He continued: “Our combined technical strengths and our collective program management expertise make this partnership an exciting development in meeting the Army’s JMR program objectives.”

Finally, the statement hinted that there could be more than one demonstrator aircraft developed for the 2017 deadline.

Russians begins massive war game

THE HINDU:  

The Russian Navy has begun its biggest war games in the high seas in decades that will include manoeuvres off the shores of Syria.

More than two dozen ships drawn Russia’s all four fleets, as well as long-range warplanes, will conduct nine-day exercises in the Mediterranean and Black seas. It is the largest naval manoeuvres since the collapse of the Soviet Union, officials said.

The purpose of the war games is to improve coordination between different naval groups during missions in “far-away sea zones,” the Russian Defence Ministry said on Sunday.

Experts suggested the exercises will serve to project Russia’s naval power to a highly explosive region and render moral support for the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

“This part of the world ocean has key geopolitical interest for Russia, considering that the Russian Navy has a maintenance and supply facility in Syria,” the Russian Navy General Staff said last month.

Russia leases a naval base at the Syrian port of Tartous.

The naval manoeuvres will involve training for landing operations on the Syrian shore, informed sources told Russia’s Interfax news agency. Several big landing ships taking part in the Russian war games carry marines, munitions, and “military hardware,” Interfax reported last week.

Moscow may also be preparing for possible evacuation of thousands of Russian nationals from war-torn Syria, experts said. About 9,000 Russians are registered with the Russian Embassy in Damascus, but their total number may well exceed 30,000. Thousands of Russian women have married Syrian men who studied at Russian universities and military academies in past decades.

Drone strikes to continue in Pakistan

By Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima and Karen DeYoung, Published: January 19


The Obama administration is nearing completion of a detailed counterterrorism manual that is designed to establish clear rules for targeted-killing operations but leaves open a major exemption for the CIA’s campaign of drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. officials said.

The carve-out would allow the CIA to continue pounding al-Qaeda and Taliban targets for a year or more before the agency is forced to comply with more stringent rules spelled out in a classified document that officials have described as a counterterrorism “playbook.”

The document, which is expected to be submitted to President Obama for final approval within weeks, marks the culmination of a year-long effort by the White House to codify its counterterrorism policies and create a guide for lethal operations through Obama’s second term.

A senior U.S. official involved in drafting the document said that a few issues remain unresolved but described them as minor. The senior U.S. official said the playbook “will be done shortly.”

The adoption of a formal guide to targeted killing marks a significant — and to some uncomfortable — milestone: the institutionalization of a practice that would have seemed anathema to many before the Sept. 11 , 2001, terrorist attacks.

Among the subjects covered in the playbook are the process for adding names to kill lists, the legal principles that govern when U.S. citizens can be targeted overseas and the sequence of approvals required when the CIA or U.S. military conducts drone strikes outside war zones.

U.S. officials said the effort to draft the playbook was nearly derailed late last year by disagreements among the State Department, the CIA and the Pentagon on the criteria for lethal strikes and other issues. Granting the CIA a temporary exemption for its Pakistan operations was described as a compromise that allowed officials to move forward with other parts of the playbook.

The decision to allow the CIA strikes to continue was driven in part by concern that the window for weakening al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan is beginning to close, with plans to pull most U.S. troops out of neighboring Afghanistan over the next two years. CIA drones are flown out of bases in Afghanistan.

“There’s a sense that you put the pedal to the metal now, especially given the impending” withdrawal, said a former U.S. official involved in discussions of the playbook. The CIA exception is expected to be in effect for “less than two years but more than one,” the former official said, although he noted that any decision to close the carve-out “will undoubtedly be predicated on facts on the ground.”

The former official and other current and former officials interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were talking about ongoing sensitive matters.

Obama’s national security team agreed to the CIA compromise late last month during a meeting of the “principals committee,” comprising top national security officials, that was led by White House counterterrorism adviser John O. Brennan, who has since been nominated to serve as CIA director.

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Panetta speaks out on Algeria hostage crisis and Syrian chemical weapons

By LUIS MARTINEZ (@LMartinezABC)
Jan. 17, 2013

The United States will take "all necessary and proper steps" needed to deal with the ongoing hostage situation in Algeria, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told ABC News' Martha Raddatz in an exclusive interview, although he cautioned that American officials fear the information coming out of the African country is "pretty sketchy."

Panetta also provided new details about Syria's mixing of chemical weapons in December and the clearest explanation yet of the Obama administration's red lines if the Assad regime uses the weapons against its own people.

Panetta was interviewed by Raddatz as he traveled to visit U.S. Army soldiers in Vicenza, Italy. The defense secretary is on a European trip that he has characterized as his final trip overseas while in his post.

Panetta described the hostage taking at the gas complex at In Amenas as a "terrorist act" undertaken by terrorists affiliated with al Qaeda.

The "United States takes that very seriously, when our citizens are put in jeopardy by terrorists," he said.

Panetta added that he is not certain that the motive of the attack was retaliation for the French military intervention in Mali, as the hostage takers have claimed.

"All I do know is that when you're dealing with affiliates of al Qaeda, that they're terrorists and they will do terrorist acts," he said. "And that's what they've done here.

"They have total disregard for innocent men and women and children," he added. "And it's reflected in what they just did here in Algeria."

Panetta made his comments prior to reports that the Algerian Army had launched a military strike targeting the hostage takers that resulted in an undetermined number of fatalities among both hostages and hostage takers.

Panetta told ABC News that as many as 100 hostages were being held at the facility at In Amenas and that there might be seven or eight Americans among them.

He said the U.S. government was looking at "all of the necessary steps that we need to take in order to deal with that situation."

One thing being looked at, he added, was how the U.S. can "bring our military assets to bear in order to deal with it and also basically talk with the other countries that are involved here. There are a number of other countries that are in the same situation with these individuals. How can we address that situation together?"

A U.S. official told ABC News that a Predator drone was providing surveillance over the Ain Amenas facility.

Syria Chemical Weapons Details

Panetta expressed the belief that Syria has not used chemical weapons against its citizens "as we would imagine chemical weapons being used in that kind of battle."

He added, "We have not seen intelligence that they have deliberately used this against their own people."

U.S. officials have consistently avoided confirming news reports that, in early December, U.S. intelligence determined that elements of the Syrian regime mixed precursors to sarin gas into bombs located near Syrian airfields. At the time, President Obama issued a strong warning to the Assad regime that it could face undetermined consequences should chemical weapons be used against the Syrian people.

At a news conference in December, Panetta said, "There will be consequences if the Assad regime makes a terrible mistake by using these chemical weapons on their own people."

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