Obama announces drones deployed to West Africa

WASHINGTON POST: By Craig Whitlock, Friday, February 22, 10:18 AM

President Obama announced Friday that about 100 U.S. troops have been deployed to the West African country of Niger, where defense officials said they are setting up a drone base to spy on al-Qaeda fighters in the Sahara.

In a letter to Congress, Obama said about 40 U.S. military personnel arrived in Niger on Wednesday, bringing the total number of troops based there to “approximately” 100. He said the troops, who are armed for self-protection, would support a French-led military operation in neighboring Mali, where al-Qaeda fighters and other militants have carved out a refuge in a remote territory the size of Texas.

The drone base in Niger marks the opening of another far-flung U.S. military operation against al-Qaeda and its affiliates, in addition to ongoing combat missions in Afghanistan, Yemen and Somalia. The CIA is also conducting airstrikes against al-Qaeda targets in Pakistan and Yemen.

Senior U.S. officials have said for months that they would not put U.S. military “boots on the ground” in Mali, an impoverished nation that has been mired chaos since March when a U.S.-trained Malian army captain took power in a coup. But U.S. troops are becoming increasingly involved in the conflict from the skies and the rear echelons, where they are supporting the French and African militaries seeking to stabilize the region.

Obama did not explicitly reveal the drone base in his letter to Congress, but he said the U.S. troops in Niger would “provide support for intelligence collection” and share intelligence with French forces in Mali.

A U.S. defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity to provide further details about military operations, said the 40 troops who arrived in Niger Wednesday were almost all Air Force personnel and that their mission is to support drone flights.

The official said drone operations were “imminent,” but declined to say whether unmanned Predator aircraft had already arrived in Niger or how many would be deployed there. The drones will be based initially in the capital, Niamey, but military officials would like to move them eventually to the northern city of Agadez, which is closer to parts of northern Mali where al-Qaeda cells have taken root.

“That’s a better location for the mission, but it’s not feasible at this point,” the official said, adding that Agadez is a more remote city “with logistical challenges.”

The introduction of Predators to Niger fills a gap in the Pentagon’s military capabilities over the Sahara, which remains beyond the reach of its drone bases in East Africa and southern Europe.

The U.S. military has been flying a handful of small turboprop surveillance planes over northern Mali and West Africa for years, but the PC-12 aircraft are limited in range and lack the sophisticated sensors that Predators carry.

U.S. military contractors have been flying PC-12 surveillance aircraft from Agadez for several months. But those planes do not carry military markings and only require a handful of people to operate.

In contrast, Predators need ground crews to launch and recover the drones as well as to repair and maintain them. Those crews, in turn, require armed personnel for protection.

The U.S. defense official said it is likely that more U.S. troops will deploy to Niger, but declined to be specific. "I think it’s safe to say the number will probably grow.”

The Predators in Niger will only conduct surveillance, not airstrikes, the official said. “This is purely an intelligence gathering mission,” he said. Other officials said the Obama administration had not ruled out arming the Predators with missiles in the future.

Information collected from reconnaissance missions will be shared with the French and other African militaries so they can attack al-Qaeda targets, officials said.

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Pentagon to furlough 800k

The Washington Post:
The Defense Department officially notified its 800,000 civilian employees on Wednesday that they are likely to be placed on periods of unpaid leave, as the Obama administration scrambled to deal with congressionally mandated budget cuts set to kick in next week.

“There is no mistaking that the rigid nature of the cuts forced upon this department, and their scale, will result in a serious erosion of readiness across the force,” Secretary of Defense Leon E. Panetta said to employees in a memo issued Wednesday.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry separately warned against “retreating” from global diplomacy, as he made the case in a speech at the University of Virginia for retaining or expanding the State Department’s budget and argued that the costs of pulling back from the world would be huge. “Deploying diplomats today is much cheaper than deploying troops tomorrow,” he said to applause in his first address outside the department as secretary of state.

With nine days to go before $85 billion in automatic federal spending cuts begin, some Democrats on Capitol Hill are calling on Republican leaders to reconvene the Houseimmediately and find a way to avert the spending reductions known as the “sequester.” Both the House and Senate are in recess this week.

“This is an unnecessary self-inflicted wound on the United States economy,” Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.) said in a conference call with other House Democrats to highlight some of the fears and adverse affects of the sequester they’re hearing about back home. “Congress should come back to Washington to fix the problem.” Andrews’s district is home to several government contracting firms.

The Pentagon, faced with $46 billion in cuts, is required to notify Congress at least 45 days before furloughing employees, and officials told lawmakers Wednesday that the move is likely. Panetta said in his memo to the Pentagon’s workforce that affected employees would be notified of the terms of their leave at least 30 days before their furloughs begin. The Pentagon’s tentative plan is to put civilian employees on leave one day per week for 22 weeks.

Uniformed personnel are not subject to furloughs. Panetta held out hope in the memo that the cuts might be avoided. Even if a deal between the White House and Republicans doesn’t materialize by March 1, when the automatic cuts go into effect, the parties could in coming weeks reach an agreement that spares the Pentagon.

The move is part of a broader retrenchment of government spending devised by lawmakers in 2011, when they created a framework to reduce the nation’s deficit. The across-the-board cuts stipulated in the Budget Control Act were designed to seem so painful and foolish that their prospect, if nothing else, would force Republicans and Democrats to compromise on a measured approach to curtailing federal spending. So far, it has not.

As the deadline approaches, the White House and Republicans have accused each other of intransigence, with no sign that a breakthrough is imminent.

“If Congress allows this meat-cleaver approach to take place, it will jeopardize our military readiness,” President Obama said in a speech Tuesday morning. “It will eviscerate job-creating investments in education and energy and medical research.”

House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) issued a statement Wednesday blaming the White House for not doing enough to nudge Senate Democrats toward a compromise.

“As the commander in chief, President Obama is ultimately responsible for our military readiness,” Boehner said. “So it’s fair to ask: what is he doing to stop [these cuts] that would ‘hollow out’ our Armed Forces?”

In Charlottesville, Kerry argued that America’s duties and ambitions overseas are too important to shortchange, even in a time of tight budgets. “In today’s global world, there is no longer anything foreign about foreign policy,” he said.

If forced to pull back from the world by budget cuts, Kerry said, “the vacuum we would leave by retreating within ourselves will quickly be filled by those whose interests differ dramatically from our own.”

He called for heading off the March 1 automatic budget cuts that would force furloughs at the State Department, as well as the Pentagon and other federal agencies.

“My credibility as a diplomat working to help other countries create order is strongest when America at last puts its own fiscal house in order,” Kerry said. “Let’s reach a responsible agreement that prevents these senseless cuts. Let’s not lose this opportunity to politics.”

The budget request of the State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development for 2012 was $51.6 billion. Although Kerry didn’t make a direct comparison, the Pentagon spent an estimated $115 billion on the Afghanistan war in the same year.

Kerry embarks on his first foreign trip as secretary next week, a lengthy tour of European and Arab capitals that will largely focus on international proposals to end the grinding civil war in Syria.

Could Russian meteor could have been part of asteroid swarm?

(CBS News) It's possible the giant meteor that slammed into Russia Friday morning has something to do with the asteroid -- known as 2012 DA14 -- that's expected to soon fly by Earth, according one expert.

CBS News contributor Michio Kaku, a physics professor at the City University of New York, explained on "CBS This Morning" that, though based on video evidence the European Space Agency has not seen any direct relationship between the house-sized meteorite and the asteroid, "asteroids occur in swarms" so "it's very possible that there's a swarm of asteroids around DA14."

The DA14 -- an asteroid a half a football field across, traveling at a blistering 4.8 miles per second -- is expected to pass within just 17,200 miles of Earth on Friday, a record close encounter that will carry it well inside the orbits of communications satellites.

Faced with questions about the asteroid and safety on Earth, Kaku pointed to the moon's pockmarked look as a sign of what's spinning around in space: "The moon is pockmarked because there are a million objects of that size near the orbit of the planet Earth."

He added, "The Earth is moving in a cosmic shooting gallery."

UPDATE:

NASA Scientists have determined the Russia meteor is not related to asteroid 2012 DA14 that paassed safely pass Earth today at a distance of more than 17,000 miles. Early assessments of the Russia meteor indicate it was about one-third the size of 2012 DA14 and traveling in a different direction.

Meanwhile in Russia ; )

Meteor hits Russia - injures hundreds

A meteor streaked across the sky above Russia's Ural Mountains on Friday morning, causing sharp explosions and injuring more than 500 people, many of them hurt by broken glass.

"There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going around to people's houses to check if they were OK," said Sergey Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, about 930 miles east of Moscow, the biggest city in the affected region.

"We saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud thundering sound," he told The Associated Press by telephone.

Another Chelyabinsk resident, Valya Kazakov, said some elderly women in his neighborhood started crying out that the world was ending.

Some meteorites -- fragments of the meteor -- fell in a reservoir outside the town of Cherbakul, the regional governor's office said, according to the ITAR-Tass news agency. It was not immediately clear if any people were struck by fragments.

Meteors typically cause sizeable sonic booms when they enter the atmosphere because they are traveling much faster than the speed of sound. Injuries on the scale reported Friday, however, are extraordinarily rare.

The Emergency Ministry said more than 500 people sought treatment after the blasts and that 34 of them were hospitalized. Many of the injuries were from glass broken by the explosions.

Kolesnikov also said about 6000 square feet of a roof at a zinc factory had collapsed. There was no immediate clarification of whether the collapse was caused by meteorites or by a shock wave from one of the explosions.

Reports conflicted on what exactly happened in the clear skies. A spokeswoman for the Emergency Ministry, Irina Rossius, told The Associated Press that there was a meteor shower, but another ministry spokeswoman, Elena Smirnikh, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying it was a single meteor.

Amateur video broadcast on Russian television showed an object speeding across the sky about 9:20 a.m. local time, leaving a thick white contrail and an intense flash.

Russian news reports noted that the meteor hit less than a day before the asteroid 2012 DA14 is to make the closest recorded pass of an asteroid -- about 17,150 miles.

But the European Space Agency, in a post on its Twitter account, said its experts had determined there was no connection.