National Defense Briefs – April 4, 2014
April 4, 2014
By Thomas Smith
April 2, 2014
Twelfth in the series, NATIONAL DEFENSE BRIEFS. Each week we are bringing to readers of LowcountryBizSC.com updates aimed at informing with timely military and homeland-security news briefs, trends, definitions, and short commentaries. Defense issues are inextricably connected to business. In that, we present the National Defense Briefs that matter.
- A report published by LiveScience states that the effects of a relatively small regional nuclear war on the far side of the world – say in east Asia – would be globally catastrophic, triggering worldwide cooling – winters as much as 11-degrees Fahrenheit cooler across most of the earth. Such a war also would severely damage the ozone layer – [wiping] out the ozone layer for a decade, says Michael Mills, an atmospheric scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research – and causing devastating droughts for at least 10 years.
- All models show that the effects of limited regional nuclear war, using only a fraction of the existing nuclear weapons worldwide, would devastate the atmosphere, ocean, land and sea ice components of the Earth’s climate system. Worse, says Mills, every time we’ve approached this same question with more sophisticated models, the effects seem to be more pronounced.
- The U.S. Air Force’s robotic X-37B space plane has broken its own all-time endurance record in orbit after more than 470 days of circling the Earth on a mystery mission for the American military, according to Space.com. The X-37B space plane currently in orbit in flying the Orbital Test Vehicle 3 (OTV-3) mission, the third long-duration flight of the unmanned Air Force spaceflight program. The miniature space shuttle launched on Dec. 11, 2012 and surpassed the record for longest X-37B spaceflight on Wednesday (March 26).
- Sailors are becoming fed-up with the emphasis on relentless social conditioning programs, according to U.S. Navy Commander Guy Snodgrass – an F-18 pilot and former Top Gun instructor – in a 24-page study published by the U.S. Naval Institute. As reported by The Washington Times, the social conditioning programs are an apparent reference to gays in the military, women in combat and ending sexual harassment, all of which are demoralizing junior and mid-grade officers, eroding trust in senior leadership, and bringing about a looming officer retention problem. Snodgrass says, retention racked up its ‘worst year in history’ for the special warfare community, including Navy SEALs. Retention within Naval Aviation also is suffering. And there was a drop in applications to Annapolis, the U.S. Naval Academy, last year. Worse, he says, the fact that a growing number of quality officers have already left the service or are planning to head for the doors seems to be going undetected by senior leadership.
- According to The Washington Times, Vice Adm. William F. Moran, deputy chief of Naval operations for manpower, personnel, training and education, says, he applauds Cmdr. Snodgrass for warning that retention problems may lie ahead. Snodgrass – said to be an upwardly mobile fighter pilot – is slated to become executive officer of a Navy F-18 unit based in Japan.
- U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip M. Breedlove – U.S. European Command Commander and NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe – said Wednesday, Russia has massed all the forces it needs on Ukraine’s border if it were to decide to carry out an ‘incursion’ into the country, and it could achieve its objective in three to five days, reports Reuters (as of 2:30 p.m. Eastern, Wednesday)
– W. Thomas Smith Jr. is a military analyst and partner with
NATIONAL DEFENSE CONSULTANTS, LLC. Visit him at http://uswriter.com.
