Pentagon Creates 13 Offensive Cyber Teams For Worldwide Attacks

"Russia Today" reports the following:

The head of the United States Cyber Command says the US is developing 40 new teams of cyber-agents that will both protect America’s critical infrastructure from hackers and as well as launch attacks against the country’s adversaries.

Gen. Keith Alexander, who leads both the Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, told the US Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that the 40 online support teams should be ready for action by 2015, with 13 of those units existing specifically to attack other countries.

Alexander has been reluctant to go into detail about how the newly-designed teams will engage in cyber battle with America’s enemies, but he did say that the 13 squads of offensive fighters won’t be sitting around waiting for hackers from abroad to strike first. The NSA chief described the groups as‘‘defend-the-nation’’ teams but also stressed that their role will be one that puts them on both sides of the action.

“I would like to be clear that this team. . . is an offensive team,” he told reporters on Tuesday.

“The teams are analogous to battalions in the Army and Marine Corps — or squadrons in the Navy and Air Force,” said Alexander. “In short, they will soon be capable of operating on their own, with a range of operational and intelligence skill sets, as well as a mix of military and civilian personnel.”

Chris Strohm, a national security reporter for Bloomberg, says the units will “focus on missions such as protecting vital computer networks from attacks, supporting combat operations and keeping the Pentagon’s information-technology systems secure.”

The Associated Press reports that Gen. Alexander likened the teams’ duties to “knocking an incoming missile out of the sky before it hits a target,” and that they’d serve as defensive teams with added offensive capabilities. What offensive actions the teams will engage in exactly will likely remain unknown for now, however, as the US has continues to closely guard its secretive cyber operations. Anorder signed by President Barack Obama last year outlining the offensive capabilities of US cyber squads remains classified four months later, but it has been described as being the most aggressive cybersecurity directive ever. Meanwhile, the commander-in-chief and other administration officials have only said that attacks aimed at US infrastructure are increasing in frequency.

"What is absolutely true is that we have seen a steady ramping up of cyber security threats,” Pres. Obama told ABC News during an interview filmed on Tuesday.

And while Gen. Alexander’s 40 new teams won’t be ready for either side of a cyberbattle until 2015, meanwhile Washington is looking for other ways to protect an onslaught of attacks. In addition to the classified order signed by Mr. Obama in November — Presidential Policy Directive 20 — the White House has also released an executive order that will pave the way for the country’s private businesses to share threat information with the US government.

“I signed a new executive order that will strengthen our cyber defenses by increasing information sharing, and developing standards to protect our national security, our jobs and our privacy,” Pres. Obama said during last month’s State of the Union address. Moments later during his speech, he also urged Congress to act fast on their own “by passing legislation to give our government a greater capacity to secure our networks and deter attacks.” One day later members of Congress reintroduced the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, or CISPA, and again this week Pres. Obama asked for lawmakers on Capitol Hill to act on it.

"There are ways that we can harden our critical infrastructure, our financial sector," Obama to ABC. "They need to get this done."

Gen. Alexander and Pres. Obama’s statements come on the heels of a series of cyberattacks aimed at America’s military computers, government servers, utility companies and banks. Iran has been largely considered responsible for a series of recent attacks on US banking websites, and China has repeatedly been linked to both cyber-espionage and cyberattacks on the US Department of Defense, Department of State and the private sector. Earlier this week, hackers claiming to be from the Tunisian Cyber Army took credit for hacking a handful of government websites, and say that, along with the al-Qaeda Electronic Army and a crew of Chinese hackers, will continue to attack US websites as part of Operation BlackSummer, or #OpBlackSummer.

The Nuclear Posture Attack

By Robert Farley
Posted: June 02, 2010
Courtesy Of "Right Web"

In a May 11 Washington Times editorial, Frank Gaffney, Ed Meese, Clifford May, and four additional coauthors—all of whom represent institutions that form part of the hawkish extreme of the Republican Party establishment—called for a “renewed adherence to the national security philosophy of President Ronald Reagan: ‘Peace Through Strength.’”[1] The authors argued that “freedom,” “America’s exceptional role,” and even the country’s very existence are at stake as a result of an astounding array of purported threats—which the Barack Obama administration, they implied, was doing little to confront—including missile attacks, Shariah law, electromagnetic pulse weapons, Islamic terrorism, unlawful enemy combatants, illegal aliens, and a weak military. Echoing a message that was honed by neoconservative groups like the Project for the New American Century during the Clinton presidency, the authors championed the notion that U.S. global leadership was essential to guarantee the country’s security.

This rhetorical broadside represents one facet of a larger assault on the administration’s national security policy, with other facets including criticism about the size of the defense budget, Middle East policy, and terrorist detention policy. Arguably the most significant attacks, however, have developed around questions about strategic policies, in particular President Obama’s efforts to restructure U.S. nuclear doctrine by restraining the country’s nuclear retaliation policy and renegotiating the START Treaty with Russia. The Washington Times op-ed went so far as to call for the resumption of nuclear testing, in contravention of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and a two-decade testing moratorium.

In recent weeks, multiple lines of attack against the nuclear policy of the Obama administration have emerged from several bastions of U.S. rightwing politics, including the National Review, the Weekly Standard, the Center for Security Policy, and the Heritage Foundation. The angles of these attacks have varied, but they have centered on the claim that the Obama administration, in pursuit of international acclaim, has insufficiently provided for the security of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

These right-wing attacks reveal the continued entrenchment of elements of the hawkish extreme in the Republican Party’s foreign policy establishment, despite the significant setbacks they have suffered since helping drive the country into war with Iraq. Also, the arguments currently emanating from groups like Heritage and the William Kristol-led Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI) show the degree to which the right has grasped onto outdated, nostalgic concepts from the heyday of the Cold Warriors. Discussions about “throw weight” and “rail mobile launchers” echo intra-conservative debates that took place during the Reagan era. However, conservatives who had advocated responsible arms control measures during that time have now been left behind. Voices that argued for engagement with the Soviet Union—such as George Schultz and James Baker—now stand outside the laboratories developing Republican foreign policy.

Attacking No First Use

Following its release early this year, the Obama administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), which defines U.S. nuclear weapons policy and strategy, became the subject of a concerted right-wing attack. The NPR modified U.S. deterrence posture by declaring that the country would not respond to a chemical or biological attack as long as the attacker was a member in good standing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This “no-first-use” policy, however, did not entail any change in the U.S. stance toward North Korea and Iran, as the former left the NPR in the 1990s and the United States has questioned the adherence of the latter.

In an effort to win conservative “buy in,” the Obama administration made several major concessions. In addition to the caveats that significantly limit the impact of the “no first use” policy, the NPR includes significant appropriations for the modernization and maintenance of the existing nuclear stockpile. The NPR also revives “prompt global strike,” a system designed to place conventional warheads on nuclear-like delivery systems. Perhaps most disappointing to progressives, the NPR reserves a key role for missile defense in U.S. security strategy.

Nevertheless, the NPR shifted the United States, however marginally, from a policy of ambiguity regarding nuclear retaliation to a no-first-use policy. This shift has spurred a series of bitter attacks from conservative foreign policy figures and organizations, who claim that it displays weakness in the face of the enemy. For example, John Noonan of the Foreign Policy Initiative and Stuart Koehl, an analyst for the defense contractor ARDAK Corporation and a fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), argued in the National Review that the reduction of ambiguity in the NPR undercut U.S. deterrence and invited foreign aggression.[2] “This has the potential to create a false impression in the minds of potential aggressors that such weapons can be used without fear of an equivalent reprisal, because the U.S. and its allies have eliminated their chemical and biological stockpiles.”

This claim ignores the fact that the United States has stark, overwhelming conventional dominance over any foe or possible combination of foes, and that this conventional advantage provides its own deterrent. Noonan and Koehl neither explain this discrepancy, nor call for a reduction of U.S. conventional forces.

New START?

A similar line of attack has developed against the new START Treaty signed by the United States and Russia in April. The treaty reaffirms the limits on warheads and delivery devices developed at the end of the Cold War, and renews and further develops Washington and Moscow’s commitments to reduce their nuclear arsenals. Again, the administration tried to win conservative support by negotiating very mild, non-restrictive language with the Russians on missile defense. These concessions may have won the president some room on the right, especially among moderately conservative senators like Richard Lugar and Joseph Lieberman, but generated considerable consternation on the hawkish extreme.[3]

In an emblematic critique of the new START published in the National Review, two defense officials who served during the George W. Bush administration—Robert Joseph, senior scholar at the National Institute for Public Policy, and Eric Edelman, visiting scholar at Johns Hopkin’s SAIS—argued that the treaty could limit missile defense, diminish the ability to field prompt global strike weapons, and potentially result in the expansion of Russian and U.S. nuclear arsenals through exploitation of treaty loopholes regulating bombers and missiles launched from rail cars.[4] Remarkably, however, Joseph and Edelman do not call on the Senate to reject the treaty, but rather to simply examine it in detail.

Pavel Podvig, a researcher at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and a specialist on Russian weapon systems, responded to this line of argument with the refrain, “All this, of course, is just plain crazy.” He noted that the new START placed no limitations on missile defense, no meaningful limitations on prompt global strike (a system likely a decade away from service), but did put limitations on rail mounted ICBMs.[5]

However, GOP elected officials such as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation continue to echo, and occasionally elaborate upon, claims like those made by Joseph and Edelman.[6] A report from Heritage’s “New START Working Group,” for example, reiterated the rail car assertion and made a series of additional arguments claiming that the new treaty does not place enough limits upon the use of MIRV (missiles with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles) and tactical nuclear weapons, and places too many limitations upon some forms of missile defense.[7]

Marginalizing The Moderates

Ironically, the attacks launched by the conservative foreign policy establishment against the Obama administration could also have been used against Ronald Reagan’s administration. The defense and nuclear policy of the Reagan administration is often understood as the zenith of hawkish, anti-Soviet sentiment. While this largely applies to Reagan’s first term in office, in the second term Reagan pursued far more conciliatory policies toward the Soviet Union and arms control. Reagan himself, as demonstrated by several historians, held almost radical views about the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons.[8] In one famous case, Reagan’s advisers had to restrain him from coming to an overarching deal with Soviet premier, Mikhail Gorbachev, that would have substantially reduced global nuclear weapon stockpiles.[9]

As Max Bergmann, Deputy Policy Director at the National Security Network, has argued, a divide has emerged between the “realist” wing of the Republican foreign policy establishment and its more radical right-wing counterpart.[10] The debate over nuclear policy has demonstrated that the latter now essentially dominates the institutional apparatus of right-wing foreign policy thinking. Ideas and arguments that were welcome in the Reagan administration can now find no purchase at Heritage, or the Weekly Standard, or anywhere else on the right.

Many of the moderate Republicans who favored arms control and engagement with the Soviet Union are still around, but they have minimal influence on the institutional right. Henry Kissinger, James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, Colin Powell, and George Schultz have all played key roles in developing foreign policy for multiple Republican administrations. However, none have developed an extensive base within the institutional right wing, the constellation of independent organizations and foundations (including the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute) that have emerged as key players in internal Republican Party debates. This faction has, by and large, concluded that the greatest threat posed by Russian nuclear weapons is loss, theft, or accidental launch, rather than pre-emptive attack.

In contrast, the signatories to the Washington Times op-ed mentioned above all represent organizations that are part of the institutional machinery of movement conservatism.[11]

In addition, prominent political figures have been able to promote the studies and reports produced by these groups, including for instance Sarah Palin, who despite her clear lack of knowledge on the subject tried to use that hardline rhetoric in attacking Obama’s arms control initiatives.

The influence of the radical right over its realist counterpart has become clear in the behavior of many congressional Republicans. While some Republicans remain committed to arms control, others have adopted the rejectionism of the institutional right. For example, in a speech to the Heritage Foundation in early May, House Minority Whip Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) called on the Senate to reject the new START Treaty.[12]

“Cognitive Closure”

Over the past month, the question of “cognitive closure” on the right has been discussed extensively in the blogosphere. Cognitive closure refers to the concept that the Republican political establishment and major conservative pundits review information from within a very limited circle of sources. The nuclear critique mounted by the right wing represents an example of conservative “cognitive closure,” with the ironic outcome that those most eager to wave the banner of the Reagan administration’s foreign policy are offering arguments that Reagan himself would have rejected.

Of course, President Obama also faces other domestic and international obstacles to his nuclear agenda. The major nuclear weapons labs favor developing new nuclear weapons, and they represent powerful economic interests in important states. Elements of the national security bureaucracy also oppose parts of the president’s agenda, including officials in the Pentagon as well as at the State Department and the Energy Department.[13] The ratification of START and the successful implementation of the goals outlined in the NPR will depend on more than just the outcome of internecine conflicts in the conservative movement. Indeed, as with health care, the success of extreme elements within the right to hijack the debate in the Republican Party may mean the functional exclusion of other conservative voices from key policy decisions.

At this point, the degree to which these attacks will find purchase with the American public is unclear. Nuclear issues appear to have relatively low salience among the public, although general charges of weakness on foreign affairs may have more influence. The general accommodation of these attacks within the context of a “peace through strength” political argument may make them more understandable to that part of the electorate responsive to GOP political arguments. However, the Republican Party may find it difficult to make the conceptual connection between a fear of underwear bombers and reloadable rail-launched ICBMs. The real constituency for the pro-nuclear message lies not with the GOP base, but rather within the right-wing institutions themselves—with the theorists and policymakers who have been fighting the nuclear fight since the 1980s.

The nature of these attacks against the Obama administration’s nuclear policy are not so much evidence of a battle within conservative foreign policy circles as they are a sign of the ascendancy of one particular faction. One key to achieving this dominant position in the discourse on the right has been the establishment and nurturing of institutions for developing and promoting their views. The wing of the GOP foreign policy establishment once regarded as “realist” failed to construct an institutional structure to develop and promulgate its ideas. Consequently, the major organs of conservative foreign policy-making now follow one line, serious debate is marginalized, and there are fewer new voices on the right arguing for responsible nuclear weapons policy.

Robert Farley is an assistant professor at the University of Kentucky’s Patterson School of Diplomacy and International Commerce. His last article for Right Web, “The EMP Threat: Lots of Hype, Little Traction,” was published in October 2009.

[1] The seven coauthors were Meese (Heritage Foundation), Gaffney (Center for Security Policy), May (Foundation for the Defense of Democracies), Elaine Donnelly (Center for Military Readiness), Brian Kennedy (Claremont Institute), Herbert London (Hudson Foundation), and Herman Pirchner (American Foreign Policy Council). “Restoring Peace through Strength,” Washington Times, May 11, 2010, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/may/11/restoring-peace-through-strength/.

[2] Stuart Koehl and John Noonan, “The Wrong Nuclear Posture” National Review Online, May 10, 2010

http://article.nationalreview.com/433824/the-wrong-nuclear-posture/stuart-koehl-and-john-noonan?page=1.

[3] Bridget Johnson, “Lieberman: Not enough votes in Senate to ratify new START treaty,” The Hill, April 11, 2010, http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/91507-lieberman-not-enough-votes-in-senate-to-ratify-start-treaty.

[4]Robert Joseph and Eric Edelman, “The New START: Weakening Our Security,” National Review Online, May 10, 2010, http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=MmFkZjc3YzJlMDgyYWM1MDUxMjg0Y2I0OGNkMzJlNTM=.

[5] Pavel Podvig, “New START on Rail-Mobile ICBMs and Reloads”, Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces, April 30, 2010, http://russianforces.org/blog/2010/04/new_start_on_rail-mobile_icbms.shtml?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+russianforces+%28RussianForces.org+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader.

[6] Peter Baker, “A Defender for a Defense the US Doesn’t Want,” New York Times, May 19, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/20/world/europe/20baker.html; New START Working Group, “An Independent Assessment of the New START Treaty,” Heritage Foundation, April 30, 2010 http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2010/04/An-Independent-Assessment-of-New-START-Treaty#_ftn16.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Richard Rhodes, Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race. New York: Knopf, 2007 2692 (refers to Kindle Edition).

[9] Ibid, 5132.

[10]Max Bergman, “Eric Cantor and the Death of a Conservative Foreign Policy,” Think Progress: Wonk Room, May 5, 2010. http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/05/05/eric-cantor-and-the-death-of-a-conservative-republican-foreign-policy/.

[11] Meese et al ibid.

[12] Mike Brownfield, “Rep. Eric Cantor Speaks on National Security,” The Foundry, May 4, 2010. http://blog.heritage.org/2010/05/04/rep-eric-cantor-speaks-on-national-security/.

[13] Jeffrey Lewis “Grading the NPR: New Warheads,” Arms Control Wonk, May 5, 2010. http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2717/grading-the-npr-new-warheads; Nuclear Watch New Mexico, “Three Huge New Facilities Rebuild US Nuclear Weapons Production Capability,” May 2010. http://www.nukewatch.org/facts/nwd/NewUS-productionfacilities4-29-10.pdf.

A Threat To Nuclear Disarmament

By VLADIMIR RADYUHIN
May 2, 2010
Courtesy Of The Hindu

Experts say that U.S. missile defences and Prompt Global Strike weapons, far from promoting nuclear disarmament, may trigger a new arms race.

Hardly had Russia and the United States signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty, New START, the U.S. pushed ahead with the development of new conventional weapon systems that threaten to stall nuclear disarmament and discredit U.S. non-proliferation efforts at the NPT Review Conference opening in New York on Monday.

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee Strategic Forces Subcommittee on April 15 Lieutenant General Patrick J. O'Reilly, U.S. Missile Defence Agency Director, said that his agency was going full steam with development of “advanced capability” anti-missile systems.

It is precisely this type of capability in missile defence that Russia said would force it to walk away from the New START treaty.

“The treaty… can operate and be viable only if the United States of America refrains from developing its missile defence capabilities quantitatively or qualitatively,” Russia said in a statement issued at the signing of the New START treaty in Prague on April 8.

According to Russia's Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, reference to “the interrelationship between strategic offensive arms and strategic defensive arms” included in the preamble of the treaty gives Russia a legal basis for pulling out from the START-2 treaty if the U.S. decides to upgrade regional missile defences it is currently deploying against Iran and North Korea to a strategic anti-missile system that could threaten Russia's long-range missile capabilities.

Russia's new military doctrine, adopted earlier this year, states that strategic missile defence will “undermine global stability and destroy the balance of power in the nuclear missile sphere.” A nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia may no longer be an option, but Russia says the U.S. national missile defence could become an instrument for political blackmail. As Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin put it recently, the anti-missile umbrella would make the U.S. feel so secure that it could “act with impunity” towards Russia.

U.S. President George W. Bush's national security strategy signed in 2002, which argues the need for U.S. global military superiority, is still in effect. Mr. Obama's new nuclear strategy document, the Nuclear Posture Review, released two days before the New START was signed, assigned critical role to missile defence as the U.S. shifts away from reliance on nuclear weapons.

After the New START was signed U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates said, “Missile defence is not constrained by this treaty.”

In his testimony at the Congress hearings Lt. General O'Reilly said that by 2020 the U.S. will have the capability in Europe to shoot down, not only medium-range, but also long-range missiles, and not just single-missile attacks, but “large raids” of missiles “early in flight.” This would effectively mean upgrading a regional missile defence to a strategic one that would threaten Russia's strategic missiles.

U.S. officials insist that the planned missile defences do not target Russia or China, but are only designed to give the U.S. and its allies protection against possible missile attacks by countries like Iran and North Korea.

“The United States made a unilateral statement [at the signing of the New START] to clarify that our missile defence systems are not intended to affect the strategic balance with Russia,” U.S. Under Secretary for Arms Control and Security Ellen Tauscher said a week ago. Russia is unconvinced.

“In military affairs, you have to judge not intentions but capabilities,” Mr. Lavrov once said quoting the 19th century German statesman Otto von Bismarck.

Russia has come up with a simple test of U.S. intentions: if your missile defence shield is not directed against us, Moscow told Washington, let's build it together. Mr. Putin first made the proposal to Mr. Bush in 2007. Nothing has come out of it, because, as Mr. Putin revealed in an interview, the American response had boiled down to a request that “we should give them our missiles as targets” for U.S. missile interceptors.

President Dmitry Medvedev made the same proposal to Mr. Obama when the U.S. President visited Moscow a year ago and repeated it again when they were signing the New START in Prague on April 8. Mr. Obama responded by saying that he was looking forward to “launching a serious dialogue about Russian-American cooperation on missile defence.”

However, at U.S. Congress hearings on missile defence a week later Russia was not mentioned as a possible partner, not even hypothetically. At the same time, it was stated that the U.S. planned to deploy missile interceptors in Romania by 2015 and in Poland by 2018 (Patriot missiles are to be set up in Poland as early as this May). Russia has vehemently objected to these plans seeing them as steps towards building a destabilising strategic missile shield.

A few days ago U.S. media reported that the Pentagon had won Mr. Obama's support for a new generation of conventional strategic weapons that may further upset strategic stability. The Pentagon last week tested a new hypersonic winged missile system, the Falcon Hypersonic Test Vehicle-2, developed under the Prompt Global Strike project. Launched into the upper atmosphere by a long-range ballistic missile Falcon glides down to its target with pinpoint accuracy. It is the first weapon system since the creation of ballistic missiles that will be capable of hitting a target anywhere around the globe within less than an hour.

Speaking in Congress Lt. General O'Reilly confirmed that the future U.S. missile shield would include a strong space component. Last Thursday the U.S. took a major step towards weaponisation of space with a test launch of the X-37B orbital space plane. Former Russian Air Force chief General Anatoly Kornukov said the test showed that “the U.S. plans to deploy weapons in space to target Russia.”

Mr. Lavrov warned last month that “states will hardly accept a situation in which nuclear weapons disappear, but weapons that are no less destabilising emerge in the hands of certain members of the international community”.

The U.S. has consistently rejected a joint Russia-China proposal to sign an international agreement banning space weapons.

Experts say that U.S. missile defences and Prompt Global Strike weapons, far from promoting nuclear disarmament, may trigger a new arms race. In its new report on China's nuclear strategy published on April 20 the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) comes to the conclusion that “the advent of more advanced conventional weapons, including missile defences and space-based weapons, places further pressures on China to revisit its policies and practices on the role of nuclear weapons,” and upgrade and expand its nuclear deterrent potential.

Russia also pursues modernisation of its nuclear arsenals. In recent years it has developed new long-range nuclear missiles armed with multiple warheads that are said to be capable of piercing U.S. missile defences. The land-based RS-24 missile is due to be deployed next year, and the submarine-launched Bulava missile is still undergoing tests. By 2016 Russia plans to build a heavier land-based missile.

The U.S. emphasis on missile defence and other high precision conventional weapon systems – an area where it has overwhelming superiority — casts in a new light Mr. Obama's declared goal of achieving “a world free of nuclear weapons.” It is seen as a way for the U.S. to consolidate its military supremacy.

“Obama's nuclear disarmament initiative will effectively allow the U.S. to assert its global military hegemony at a qualitatively higher level,” says Prof. Alexander Radchuk, adviser to the Chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces.

At the NPT Review Conference this week the U.S. is expected to push for all non-NPT states including India and Pakistan to join the nuclear accord. However, Washington's policy of global domination through supremacy in non-nuclear weapons may push more states to seek the n-bomb.

“Whereas in the 20th century nuclear weapons were a privilege of the powerful and technologically advanced nations, in the 21st century the opposite tendency is emerging: nuclear weapons attract countries that want to compensate for their technological weaknesses,” Prof. Radchuk opines.

Despite worrying signals from Washington, Moscow is in no hurry to give up on Mr. Obama. The Kremlin sees the New START as evidence of a significant shift in the U.S. policy from Mr. Bush's refusal to sign any legally binding disarmament pacts with Russia to a revival of the system of maintaining strategic stability through verifiable arms control and reduction treaties. Mr. Medvedev, who met Mr. Obama 12 times over the past year, has a very high opinion of his U.S. counterpart. Comparing Mr. Obama with his predecessor in a recent interview Mr. Medvedev said Mr. Obama was a “thinker” who “tries to listen to his partner,” has “in-depth” knowledge of issues discussed, and overall, is “a great personality to deal with.” Moscow is well aware of the challenges the Obama administration faces in getting the New START treaty through the Republican-controlled Senate. The Kremlin hopes that once the ratification hurdle is cleared and the two sides embark on strategic dialogue proposed by the White House, they will be able to carry forward the disarmament agenda on the basis of equal security and credibly “reset” bilateral relations.

US To Develop Non-Nuclear Weapons

By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post staff writer
Thursday, April 8, 2010
Courtesy Of The Washington Post

As the White House pushes for cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the Pentagon is developing a weapon to help fill the gap: missiles armed with conventional warheads that could strike anywhere in the world in less than an hour.

U.S. military officials say the intercontinental ballistic missiles, known as Prompt Global Strike weapons, are a necessary new form of deterrence against terrorist networks and other adversaries. As envisioned, the conventional missiles would give the White House a fresh military option to consider in a crisis that would not result in a radioactive mushroom cloud.

The Prompt Global Strike program, which the Pentagon has been developing for several years, is already raising hackles in Moscow, where Russian officials predict it could trigger a nonnuclear arms race and complicate President Obama's long-term vision of ridding the world of nuclear weapons. U.S. military officials are also struggling to solve a separate major obstacle: the risk that Russia or China could mistake the launch of a conventional Prompt Global Strike missile for a nuclear one.

"World states will hardly accept a situation in which nuclear weapons disappear, but weapons that are no less destabilizing emerge in the hands of certain members of the international community," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told reporters Tuesday in Moscow.

The White House says that development of Prompt Global Strike is not affected by the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START), which Obama and Russian President Dmitry Medvedev are scheduled to sign Thursday in Prague. Analysts say, however, that any conventional ballistic missiles would count the same as nuclear ones under the treaty, which places new limits on each country's stockpile.

Deployment of a conventional ballistic missile is not expected until 2015 at the earliest. But the program has received a recent boost from the Obama administration, which sees the missiles as one cog in an array of defensive and offensive weapons that could ultimately replace nuclear arms.

The administration has asked Congress for $240 million for next year's Prompt Global Strike development programs, a 45 percent increase from the current budget. The military forecasts a total of $2 billion in development costs through 2015 -- a relative bargain by Pentagon standards.

After years of preparation, the Air Force is scheduled to perform an initial flight test of a prototype next month.

"Capabilities like an adaptive missile defense shield, conventional warheads with worldwide reach and others that we are developing enable us to reduce the role of nuclear weapons," Vice President Biden said in a February speech at the National Defense University. "With these modern capabilities, even with deep nuclear reductions, we will remain undeniably strong."

Nuclear arms have formed the backbone of U.S. deterrence strategy for six decades. Although the strategy worked during the Cold War, military leaders say they need other powerful weapons in their arsenal to deter adversaries who assume that the United States would refrain from taking the extreme step of ordering a nuclear strike.

"Deterrence can no longer just be nuclear weapons. It has to be broader," Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a leading proponent of Prompt Global Strike, told a conference last month.

Some U.S. military officials say their current nonnuclear options are too limited or too slow. Unlike intercontinental ballistic missiles, which travel at several times the speed of sound, it can take up to 12 hours for cruise missiles to hit faraway targets. Long-range bombers likewise can take many hours to fly into position for a strike.

"Today, unless you want to go nuclear, it's measured in days, maybe weeks" until the military can launch an attack with regular forces, Cartwright said. "That's just too long in the world that we live in." Other military officials said potential scenarios might include the discovery of an imminent plot by terrorists to use a weapon of mass destruction, or indications that an enemy state was preparing to launch a missile attack on a U.S. ally.

The Air Force prototype Prompt Global Strike design is a modified Peacekeeper III intercontinental ballistic missile. If it is successful, the plan is to deploy a handful of the missiles at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

The weapons would be overseen by the U.S. Strategic Command, which is responsible for the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Air Force Gen. Kevin P. Chilton, who leads the command, based near Omaha, has said he sees Prompt Global Strike as a niche weapon, not one that could substitute for nuclear arms.

"I look at that as an additional weapon in the quiver of the president to give him options in time of crisis today, in which he maybe only has a nuclear option for a timely response," Chilton told a House committee last month.

Although it is technically simple to replace nuclear warheads on a missile with conventional ones, Prompt Global Strike has been dogged by a significant problem: how to ensure that Russia could tell the difference if a launch occurred.

To alleviate the risk of an accidental Russian nuclear retaliation, the Air Force is developing a conventional, land-based ballistic missile that would fire into space at a much lower altitude than nuclear warheads, something that could be detected by Russian early-warning radar systems. U.S. military officials have also said they might be willing to grant access to Russian inspectors, or warn Moscow about a conventional strike on a third-party target.

The Army is working on a separate design that is not as far along in its development. The Navy had been preparing yet another design -- a conventional version of its submarine-based Trident missile -- but Congress curtailed that program two years ago because of concerns that it was too difficult to distinguish from a nuclear-armed Trident.

Critics acknowledge that the technological hurdles are surmountable. But they say a more basic problem is that taking the nuclear part out of the equation could make it too easy for the White House to order a Prompt Global Strike attack. Intelligence in fast-breaking crises is rarely rock-solid, they note, and could result in a rushed strike on the wrong target.

"People watch '24' and think that's how intelligence comes in," said Jeffrey G. Lewis, director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation. "It's not like the president has his brain cybernetically linked to satellite images."

But proponents of Prompt Global Strike said its primary value would be in adding a level of deterrence to the U.S. nuclear arsenal. "At the end of the day, anybody who would be your adversary walks away thinking, 'If I'm going to do this, I'm going to pay dearly,' " Cartwright said last month. "There just can't be any doubt in their mind."

Air Force To Launch Robotic Winged Space Plane

This undated image released by the U.S. Air Force shows the X-37B spacecraft. The Air Force is preparing to launch this robotic spacecraft that resembles a small space shuttle to perform unspecified technology tests in orbit and then autonomously glide on stubby wings to a landing on a California runway. Originally intended to be launched from a space shuttle, the reusable X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle has been a decade in development.

(AP Photo/U.S. Air Force)

By JOHN ANTCZAK, Associated Press Writer
Sun Apr 4, 12:27 am ET
Courtesy Of Yahoo News

LOS ANGELES – After a decade of development, the Air Force this month plans to launch a robotic spacecraft resembling a small space shuttle to conduct technology tests in orbit and then glide home to a California runway.

The ultimate purpose of the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle and details about the craft, which has been passed between several government agencies, however, remain a mystery as it is prepared for launch April 19 from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

"As long as you're confused you're in good shape," said defense analyst John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org. "I looked into this a couple of years ago — the entire sort of hypersonic, suborbital, scramjet nest of programs — of which there are upwards of a dozen. The more I studied it the less I understood it."

The quietly scheduled launch culminates the project's long and expensive journey from NASA to the Pentagon's research and development arm and then to a secretive Air Force unit.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on the X-37 program, but the current total has not been released.

The launch date, landing sites and a fact sheet were released by Air Force spokeswoman Maj. Angie I. Blair. She said more information would be released soon, but questions on cost and other matters submitted by e-mail weren't answered by Friday.

While the massive space shuttles have been likened to cargo-hauling trucks, the X-37B is more like a sports car, with the equivalent trunk capacity.

Built by Boeing Co.'s Phantom Works, the 11,000-pound craft is 9 1/2 feet tall and just over 29 feet long, with a wingspan of less than 15 feet. It has two angled tail fins rather than a single vertical stabilizer.

Unlike the shuttle, it will be launched like a satellite, housed in a fairing atop an expendable Atlas V rocket, and deploy solar panels to provide electrical power in orbit.

The Air Force released only a general description of the mission objectives: testing of guidance, navigation, control, thermal protection and autonomous operation in orbit, re-entry and landing.

The mission's length was not released but the Air Force said the X-37B can stay in orbit for 270 days. The primary landing site will be northwest of Los Angeles at coastal Vandenberg Air Force Base.

The significance of the X-37B is unclear because the program has been around for so long, said Peter A. Wilson, a senior defense research analyst for the RAND Corp. who several years ago served as executive director of a congressional panel that evaluated national security space launch requirements.

"From my perspective it's a little puzzling as to whether this is the beginning of a program or the end of one," Wilson said Friday in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C.

As NASA anticipated the end of the shuttle, the X-37B was viewed as a working prototype of the next-generation design of a fully reusable spacecraft, but the space agency lost interest and the Air Force picked it up, Wilson said.

"It's viewed as a prototype of a vehicle that could carry small payloads into orbit, carry out a variety of military missions and then return to Earth," he said.

The Air Force statement said the X-37 program is being used "to continue full-scale development" and orbital testing of a long-duration, reusable space vehicle.

Wilson sees the upcoming launch as "a one-shot deal."

He acknowledged that he does not know if there is a classified portion of the program but said there is no evidence of a second vehicle being built to follow the prototype. In aerospace, a prototype typically remains a test vehicle used to prove and improve designs for successive operational vehicles.

To fully function as a completely reusable launch system there would also have to be development of abooster rocket that is capable of landing itself back on Earth to be reassembled with the spacecraft, according to Wilson, who does not see any support for such an initiative.

Wilson also said the usefulness of payloads such as small military satellites is in question, which would undercut the need for the launch system.

The X-37B is now under the direction of the Air Force's Rapid Capabilities Office. Its mission is to speed up development of combat-support systems and weapons systems.

Operating since 2003, the office has worked on several things, including upgrading the air defenses around the nation's capital as an anti-terrorism measure and assessing threats to U.S. combat operations, according to an Air Force fact sheet.

NASA began the X-37 program in 1999 in a cooperative deal with Boeing to roughly split the $173 million cost of developing an experimental space plane. The Air Force put in a small share.

The X-37, initially intended to be carried into space by shuttles in 2003, was a larger version of the Air Force X-40A, a concept for a "Space Maneuver Vehicle" to put small military satellites in orbit. The X-40A was dropped from a helicopter in glide and landing tests but was never capable of actual space flight.

In 2002, NASA awarded Boeing a $301 million contract to complete a version of the X-37 to be used in approach and landing tests and begin designing an orbital version that would fly in 2006.

But in 2004 NASA turned the project over to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Defense Department's research and development arm. In 2006, the X-37 was put through captive-carry and drop tests using Mojave-based Scaled Composite LLC's White Knight, the jet that launched SpaceShipOne on the first private suborbital manned space flights.

The Air Force then began work on the X-37B, projecting it would fly in 2008. An Air Force News story at the time reported that the first one or two flights would check out the performance of the vehicle itself and then it would become a space test platform with unspecified components flown in its experiment bay.

America’s Shadowy Base World

By Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt,
February 10, 2010
Courtesy Of Anti-War News

Once is an anomaly; twice is the beginning of a pattern. Right now, we’re seeing the same sequence of events for the second time in less than a decade, and it looks like the signature American way of war in our time is coming into focus.

In 2003, when the Bush administration invaded Iraq, the Pentagon already had on its drawing boards plans for building a series of permanent mega-bases in that country. (They were charmingly called "enduring camps.") Once Baghdad fell and it turned out that, Saddam Hussein or no, the U.S. was going to have to fight rather than settle in and let the good times roll, hundreds of micro-bases were added to the mega ones –106 of them by 2005, more than 300 in all. Then, in 2005, Washington decided to trade in its embassy in one of Saddam’s old palaces for something a little spiffier. In its place, on a 104-acre plot by the Tigris River in the middle of Baghdad, for at least three-quarters of a billion dollars after cost overruns, it built the largest, most expensive embassy on the planet. It was planned for a staff of 1,000 "diplomats" with all the accoutrements of the good life and plenty of hired help. (Even now, despite much discussion about "ending" the American role in Iraq, further plans are reportedly being made for the embassy’s staff to double.) This was clearly to be U.S. mission control for the Greater Middle East.

Building of this expansive kind is, of course, a staggering imperial undertaking. It implies a global power with resources beyond measure, for which waste means nothing. The mega-bases and the embassy were, in that sense, American wonders of the world, our own ziggurat-equivalents in Mesopotamia, right down to the multiple PXs, familiar fast food outlets, and miniature golf. No empire had ever launched a base-building program quite like it (if, that is, you leave out the precursor to this whole experience, the U.S. in Vietnam in the 1960s).

The Iraqi base-building project alone had already absorbed several billion taxpayer dollars in just the first half-year of construction in 2003. But it did look like a one-of-a-kind architectural adventure – until, that is, the "forgotten war," the one in Afghanistan, came back into view. Starting in 2008, base building ramped up there, went into overdrive in 2009, and hasn’t come out of it yet. The result: according to Nick Turse, author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives, an even more staggering base-construction splurge, and with it, the announcement last year that another monster embassy would go up, this time in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, for another cool near-billion. (The already large U.S. embassy in the Afghan capital, Kabul, would also be further expanded to the tune of $175-200 million.) And keep in mind that none of this even includes the huge ring of supporting bases for America’s Afghan and Iraq operations in the Persian Gulf, South and Central Asia, and even on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Does anyone see a pattern here? The American military must be the heaviest occupation force in history. According to reports, it now has 1.5 million pieces of equipment, micro to mega, to get out of Iraq as U.S. forces draw down. This is war and occupation of Guinness World Records proportions, a veritable Ripley’s Believe It Or Not of imperial military construction. The only thing that won’t make the record books, of course, is the results: in war-fighting terms, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the world’s mightiest military has been battled to at least a draw by rag-tag, lightly armed, minority insurgencies.

Who would believe any of this, if it weren’t happening? Given how our media reports on such things, who would even know about it if you didn’t read it first here at TomDispatch.com? Tom

The 700 Military Bases of Afghanistan

Black Sites In The Empire Of Bases

by Nick Turse

In the 19th century, it was a fort used by British forces. In the 20th century, Soviet troops moved into the crumbling facilities. In December 2009, at this site in the Shinwar district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar province, U.S. troops joined members of the Afghan National Army in preparing the way for the next round of foreign occupation. On its grounds, a new military base is expected to rise, one of hundreds of camps and outposts scattered across the country.

Nearly a decade after the Bush administration launched its invasion of Afghanistan, TomDispatch offers the first actual count of American, NATO, and other coalition bases there, as well as facilities used by the Afghan security forces. Such bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-bases that resemble small American towns. Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-building boom that began last year.

Existing in the shadows, rarely reported on and little talked about, this base-building program is nonetheless staggering in size and scope, and heavily dependent on supplies imported from abroad, which means that it is also extraordinarily expensive. It has added significantly to the already long secret list of Pentagon property overseas and raises questions about just how long, after the planned beginning of a drawdown of American forces in 2011, the U.S. will still be garrisoning Afghanistan.

400 Foreign Bases in Afghanistan

A spokesman for the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) tells TomDispatch that there are, at present, nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. In addition, there are at least 300 Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) bases, most of them built, maintained, or supported by the U.S. A small number of the coalition sites are mega-bases like Kandahar Airfield, which boasts one of the busiest runways in the world, and Bagram Air Base, a former Soviet facility that received a makeover, complete with Burger King and Popeyes outlets, and now serves more than 20,000 U.S. troops, in addition to thousands of coalition forces and civilian contractors.

In fact, Kandahar, which housed 9,000 coalition troops as recently as 2007, is expected to have a population of as many as 35,000 troops by the time President Obama’s surge is complete, according to Col. Kevin Wilson who oversees building efforts in the southern half of Afghanistan for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. On the other hand, the Shinwar site, according to Sgt. Tracy J. Smith of the U.S. 48th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, will be a small forward operating base (FOB) that will host both Afghan troops and foreign forces.

Last fall, it was reported that more than $200 million in construction projects – from barracks to cargo storage facilities – were planned for or in-progress at Bagram. Substantial construction funds have also been set aside by the U.S. Air Force to upgrade its air power capacity at Kandahar. For example, $65 million has been allocated to build additional apron space (where aircraft can be parked, serviced, and loaded or unloaded) to accommodate more close-air support for soldiers in the field and a greater intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability. Another $61 million has also been earmarked for the construction of a cargo helicopter apron and a tactical airlift apron there.

Kandahar is just one of many sites currently being upgraded. Exact figures on the number of facilities being enlarged, improved, or hardened are unavailable but, according a spokesman for ISAF, the military plans to expand several more bases to accommodate the increase of troops as part of Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal’s surge strategy. In addition, at least 12 more bases are slated to be built to help handle the 30,000 extra American troops and thousands of NATO forces beginning to arrive in the country.

"Currently we have over $3 billion worth of work going on in Afghanistan," says Col. Wilson, "and probably by the summer, when the dust settles from all the uplift, we’ll have about $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion worth of that [in the South]." By comparison, between 2002 and 2008, the Army Corps of Engineers spent more than $4.5 billion on construction projects, most of it base-building, in Afghanistan.

At the site of the future FOB in Shinwar, more than 135 private construction contractors attended what was termed an "Afghan-Coalition contractors rodeo." According to Lt. Fernando Roach, a contracting officer with the U.S. Army’s Task Force Mountain Warrior, the event was designed "to give potential contractors a walkthrough of the area so they’ll have a solid overview of the scope of work." The construction firms then bid on three separate projects: the renovation of the more than 30-year old Soviet facilities, the building of new living quarters for Afghan and coalition forces, and the construction of a two-kilometer wall for the base.

In the weeks since the "rodeo," the U.S. Army has announced additional plans to upgrade facilities at other forward operating bases. At FOB Airborne, located near Kane-Ezzat in Wardak province, for instance, the Army intends to put in reinforced concrete bunkers and blast protection barriers as well as lay concrete foundations for re-locatable buildings (prefabricated, trailer-like structures used for living and working quarters). Similar work is also scheduled for FOB Altimur, an Army camp in Logar province.

The Afghan Base Boom

Recently, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Afghanistan District-Kabul, announced that it would be seeking bids on "site assessments" for Afghan National Security Forces District Headquarters Facilities nationwide. The precise number of Afghan bases scattered throughout the country is unclear.

When asked by TomDispatch, Col. Radmanish of the Afghan Ministry of Defense would state only that major bases were located in Kabul, Pakteya, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-Sharif, and that ANA units operate all across Afghanistan. Recent U.S. Army contracts for maintenance services provided to Afghan army and police bases, however, suggest that there are no fewer than 300 such facilities that are, according to an ISAF spokesman, not counted among the coalition base inventory.

As opposed to America’s fast-food-franchise-filled bases, Afghan ones are often decidedly more rustic affairs. The police headquarters in Khost Farang district, Baghlan province, is a good example. According to a detailed site assessment conducted by a local contractor for the Army Corps of Engineers and the Afghan government, the district headquarters consists of mud and stone buildings surrounded by a mud wall. The site even lacks a deep well for water. A trench fed by a nearby spring is the only convenient water source.

The U.S. bases that most resemble austere Afghan facilities are combat outposts, also known as COPs. Environmental Specialist Michael Bell of the Army Corps of Engineers, Afghanistan Engineer District-South’s Real Estate Division, recently described the facilities and life on such a base as he and his co-worker, Realty Specialist Damian Salazar, saw it in late 2009:

"COP Sangar … is a compound surrounded by mud and straw walls. Tents with cots supplied the sleeping quarters. … A medical, pharmacy and command post tent occupied the center of the COP, complete with a few computers with Internet access and three primitive operating tables. Showers had just been installed with hot [water] … only available from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.…

"An MWR [morale, welfare, and recreation] tent was erected on Thanksgiving Day with an operating television; however, the tent was rarely used due to the cold. Most of the troops used a tent with gym equipment for recreation. … A cook trailer provided a hot simple breakfast and supper. Lunch was MREs [meals ready to eat]. Nights were pitch black with no outside lighting from the base or the city."

What Makes a Base?

According to an official site assessment, future construction at the Khost Farang district police headquarters will make use of sand, gravel, and stone, all available on the spot. Additionally, cement, steel, bricks, lime, and gypsum have been located for purchase in Pol-e Khomri City, about 85 miles away.

Constructing a base for American troops, however, is another matter. For the far less modest American needs of American troops, builders rely heavily on goods imported over extremely long, difficult to traverse, and sometimes embattled supply lines, all of which adds up to an extraordinarily costly affair. "Our business runs on materials," Lt. Gen. Robert Van Antwerp, commander of the Army Corps of Engineers, told an audience at a town hall meeting in Afghanistan in December 2009. "You have to bring in the lumber, you have to bring in the steel, you have to bring in the containers and all that. Transport isn’t easy in this country – number one, the roads themselves, number two, coming through other countries to get here – there are just huge challenges in getting the materials here."

To facilitate U.S. base construction projects, a new "virtual storefront" – an online shopping portal – has been launched by the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency (DLA). The Maintenance, Repair, and Operations Uzbekistan Virtual Storefront Web site and a defense contractor-owned and operated brick-and-mortar warehouse facility that supports it aim to provide regionally-produced construction materials to speed surge-accelerated building efforts.

From a facility located in Termez, Uzbekistan, cement, concrete, fencing, roofing, rope, sand, steel, gutters, pipe, and other construction material manufactured in countries like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan can be rushed to nearby Afghanistan to accelerate base-building efforts. "Having the products closer to the fight will make it easier for warfighters by reducing logistics response and delivery time,” says Chet Evanitsky, the DLA’s construction and equipment supply chain division chief.

America’s Shadowy Base World

The Pentagon’s most recent inventory of bases lists a total of 716 overseas sites. These include facilities owned and leased all across the Middle East as well as a significant presence in Europe and Asia, especially Japan and South Korea. Perhaps even more notable than the Pentagon’s impressive public foreign property portfolio are the many sites left off the official inventory. While bases in the Persian Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates are all listed, one conspicuously absent site is al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in nearby Qatar, where the U.S. Air Force secretly oversees its ongoing unmanned drone wars.

The count also does not include any sites in Iraq where, as of August 2009, there were still nearly 300 American bases and outposts. Similarly, U.S. bases in Afghanistan – a significant percentage of the 400 foreign sites scattered across the country – are noticeably absent from the Pentagon inventory.

Counting the remaining bases in Iraq – as many as 50 are slated to be operating after President Barack Obama’s Aug. 31, 2010, deadline to remove all U.S. "combat troops" from the country – and those in Afghanistan, as well as black sites like al-Udeid, the total number of U.S. bases overseas now must significantly exceed 1,000. Just exactly how many U.S. military bases (and allied facilities used by U.S. forces) are scattered across the globe may never be publicly known. What we do know – from the experience of bases in Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea – is that, once built, they have a tendency toward permanency that a cessation of hostilities, or even outright peace, has a way of not altering.

After nearly a decade of war, close to 700 U.S., allied, and Afghan military bases dot Afghanistan. Until now, however, they have existed as black sites known to few Americans outside the Pentagon. It remains to be seen, a decade into the future, how many of these sites will still be occupied by U.S. and allied troops and whose flag will be planted on the ever-shifting British-Soviet-U.S./Afghan site at Shinwar.

Nick Turse is the associate editor of TomDispatch.com and the winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Nation, In These Times, and regularly at TomDispatch. Turse is currently a fellow at New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War. He is the author of The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives (Metropolitan Books). His Web site is NickTurse.com.

Copyright 2010 Nick Turse

Read more by Tom Engelhardt

• Destabilizing Pakistan – February 7th, 2010
• Will Iraq’s Oil Ever Flow? – February 2nd, 2010
• Seven Days in January – January 31st, 2010
• Obama’s Secret Prisons – January 28th, 2010
• Our Wars Are Killing Us – January 26th, 2010