Iraqi Weapons Audit
AP – Audit shows –
Nearly one of every 25 weapons the U.S. military bought for Iraqi security forces is missing and many others cannot be repaired because parts or technical manuals are lacking, a government audit said Sunday.
The Defense Department cannot account for 14,030 weapons — almost 4 percent of the semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons.
The missing semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns and other weapons will not be tracked easily: The Defense Department registered the serial numbers of only about 10,000 of the 370,251 weapons it provided — less than 3 percent.
AQ Threat Reaction
CNN –
The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, said an al Qaeda threat last month to target Gulf oil terminals had resulted in stepped-up security and vigilance at Saudi Arabia’s Ras Tanura terminal, as well as a refinery in Bahrain.
Ras Tanura, just north of the Saudi oil capital of Dhahran, is the world’s largest offshore oil loading facility with a capacity of 6 million barrels per day.
Embeds and Transparency
The government of the United States has no right to send our people off to war and keep secret that which it has no plausible military reason to keep secret. After all, American blood and treasure is being spent. Americans should know how our soldiers are doing, and what they are doing while wearing our flag. The government has no right to withhold information or to deny access to our combat forces just because that information might anger, frighten, or disturb us.
He confirmed the figure of only nine embedded reporters. Three were from Stars and Stripes, one from the Armed Forces Network, another from a Polish radio station who was with Polish forces, and one Italian reporter embedded with his country’s troops. Of the remaining three, one was an author gathering material for later, leaving two who were reporting on a regular basis to what you might think would be the Pentagon’s center of gravity: American citizens.
The atrophy and now collapse of embed efforts throughout the Iraq war is telling. Someone near the top fundamentally does not get it. This is a characteristic of the doom loop–
The risk such companies face is getting caught in a development dynamic where innovation is driven not by a focus on what the customer values and is willing to pay for, but on solving an engineering problem.
Relevance of the Dow
Pieter Dorsman (like me) doesn’t buy into the Dow being anything more than “a short-term market movement”.
Railroad Systems
Kevin M. Lynch gets it in this WaTimes Op-Ed –
A network of nearly 200,000 miles of railroad stretches across America with thousands upon thousands of switches, turnouts, crossovers, bridges, trestles, tunnels and hundreds of railroad yards and thousands upon thousands of railcars and locomotives.
All are vulnerable to attack and sabotage and given al Qaeda’s penchant for multiple, simultaneous attacks, any such attacks against the freight railroad infrastructure or the targeting of hazardous commodities in transit could spell disastrous consequences for local communities across the nation and could deliver a crippling blow to our economy. In addition, such attacks are easy and cheap to carry out.
His solution is in line with my thinking –
That could be virtually stopped by vastly increasing the number of railroad police officers, making them much more visible and available to prevent trespassing and to protect railroad property. By eliminating casual trespassers, those intent upon doing harm will be stopped.
That is, minus his bit about the fences.