Stephen's Blog

thepoliticalnotebook:

This Week in War. A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism. Subscribe here to receive this round-up by email.

• This week we say goodbye to preeminent British military historian John Keegan, who died at age 78 after a life of prolific work.
• Kofi Annan resigns his role as the special envoy to Syria.
• Two journalists were wounded in clashes in Aleppo in the north of Syria: Omar Khashram of Al Jazeera Arabic and Turkish photographer Sinan Gul of the Anatolian news agency.
• CJ Chivers argues that Bashar Al-Assad’s use of larger and more lethal weaponry against the rebels is actually a sign of growing weakness and unsustainability.
• Both sides of the Syrian fight are accused of atrocities.
• The well-known Libyan-Irish commander Mehdi al-Harati, who led the Tripoli Brigade in 2011 in the Libyan revolution now leads the Liwa al-Umma Brigade in Syria. Liwa al-Umma is a rebel group that operates separately from the Free Syrian Army and includes some non-Syrian fighters. Recent weeks have seen a number of rebel groups declaring support for Liwa al-Umma.
• Several Iranian aid workers with Red Crescent have been abducted in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.
• A fabulous article on the New York Times’ At War blog about USAID and US supplies of arms to the Libyan military.
• Egypt has asked the US to release Tarek Al Sawah, the last Egyptian in Guantánamo.
• A Somali comedian, Abdi Jeylani Malaq, who poked fun at Al-Shabaab, was murdered in Mogadishu.
• The Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction has released its latest quarterly report, which included assessments of the Police Development Program and of Defense Contract Auditing Agency and the Defense Contracting Management Agency’s own monitoring.
• Iraq has blocked US extradition of a Hezbollah commander.
• The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction also released its quarterly report (in a much less snazzy format than SIGIR), but with some harsh revelations about the use of contracting and the effectiveness of USAID work.
• Afghan Finance Minister Omar Zakhilwal is under scrutiny for potential malfeasance after Tolo Television aired copies of his bank statements showing questionable transactions involving large amounts of money.
• Tales of imprisonment in Afghanistan.
• The Afghan truckers transporting NATO supplies are a forgotten front in the war: plagued with graft and fearful of retribution from the Taliban for their participation in NATO operations.
• The Taliban eat ice cream, too.
• James Cunningham has been confirmed as the new US Ambassador to Afghanistan, replacing Ryan Crocker. In a New York Times interview, Crocker reflects on his time as ambassador and on the political dynamic of the future Afghanistan.
• Bureau chief Jean H. Lee tells the Columbia Journalism Review about running the AP bureau in Pyongyang, which has been in operation for seven months.
• Terrorist attacks in the Western hemisphere were up by almost 40 percent last year, owing largely to an increase in fighting in Colombia.
• The United Nations have failed to reach an agreement on regulation of the global arms trade, with the US, Russia and China all asking for more time to consider it.
• Daveed Gartenstein-Ross discusses the economic impacts of the scope and scale of an Olympic security apparatus on Gunpowder and Lead.
• London’s High Court rejected Abu Qatada’s latest bid for freedom, noting that releasing him during the Olympics would pose a major security dilemma.
• A trio of suspected members of Al Qaeda were arrested in southern Spain.
• Two Three pieces in major newspapers looking at the people and bases operating drones here in the US: one in the New York Times, and one in the Guardian reporting from the training center for drone pilots at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, and one in the LA Times. You can pick your favorite.
• Lt. Col. Jenns Robertson spent serious time cataloging some data and the result is a highly useful database of all US air strikes in the last century. It’s named THOR (Theater History of Operations Reports, and gives a first time look at the expansiveness of US use of air power over the last 100 years.
• Gen. Keith Alexander, who heads the NSA and US Cyber Command, says that computer attacks on US infrastructure have increased seventeen-fold between 2009 and 2011. 
• The cybersecurity bill failed in the Senate.
• The sweeping criminal investigation into intelligence leaks in the US government is “casting a chill over coverage.”
• The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated a case brought by the ACLU against the FBI over the TSA’s no-fly list, after a lower court previously dismissed it.
• The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has opened an investigation into why the Army killed a test report on Palantir, an off-the-shelf software said assist soldiers in detecting IEDs.
• The Army Surgeon General’s office has released new guidelines for diagnosing PTSD.
• The Center for Public Integrity on the M1 Abrams tank, a real political survivor, which is currently the subject of a budgetary tug of war between lawmakers (who have some vested electoral interest in its manufacture) and the Pentagon.
• Rookie US acquisitions officials need more training.
• Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond asks if Mitt Romney has actually read Guns, Germs and Steel.
• The staff at the Missile Defense Agency have been asked to pretty please kindly lay off using their work computers for their porn surfing.
• Sgt Adam Holcomb was acquitted this week by a military jury of the most serious charges over his connection to the suicide of Private Danny Chen last year.

Blogger’s Note: This morning marks the first time that this round-up will also be circulated via email! So, if you want to get it that way, subscribe here or email me and I’ll put you on the list. 

Photo: A road through the jungle in Virunga National Park, near Mabenga, North Kivu province in the Democratic Republic of Congo. M23 rebels are seen making their way down the road. July 28th. Phil Moore/AFP/Getty.