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NEWS IN BRIEF – USA

August 12, 2022 by

Sponsored by Exensor

 

www.exensor.com

 

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12 Aug 22. Strategic Command boss reveals No. 1 need for missile defense. The head of U.S. Strategic Command, Adm. Charles Richard, has said his No. 1 need is a robust missile warning capability.

Missile warning is critical “so I know what to do and how to posture and dispose my forces, and it is due to these rapidly expanding and evolving threats: hypersonic weapons, cruise missiles potentially with intercontinental range, unmanned aerial systems, proliferation of shorter-range ballistic missiles and several novel weapon systems,” he said Aug. 11 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium.

The Chinese test last year of a fractional orbital bombardment hypersonic capability was something the world had never seen before, Richard noted. “I’m not convinced at all we’ve fully thought through the implications of what that weapon system means. [It’s a prime example] of this emerging capability,” he added.

With such weapons at an adversary’s disposal, the U.S. faces decreased warning timelines, difficulties in assigning attribution, and an “increased threat to our traditional space and missile defense forces,” he explained. Yet, “ordinary” weapons like a “garden-variety cruise missile on a quiet submarine” are an underappreciated threat and also pose serious implications for strategic deterrence, he added.

Dealing with the challenge posed by exquisite and more common threats as part of the U.S. strategic deterrence strategy begins with “the need to reevaluate and readjust our missile defense posture,” Richard said. Improved missile warning is a part of that.

This means taking a more critical look at “dispersal, hardening, redundancy, mobility, complicat[ing] opponent attack plans, reduc[ing] the confidence of attack success, rais[ing] the threshold for potential conflict and giv[ing] our senior leaders more decision space by limiting damage from attacks,” he said.

New capabilities to defeat missile threats before they even launch is critical, Richard said. While it is not a new concept, “we really need to get after it,” he added.

“We must be able to detect and track cruise missiles and hypersonic attacks on the homeland, launch onward, attribute, defend and respond appropriately,” Richard said. “Early warning is essential — or conclude we’re not going to get early warning and re-posture to account for that.”

Early warning capabilities need to be responsive, persistent, resilient and cost effective with integrated command and control, Richard described, “and we have to come up with active and passive defenses against regional hypersonics.”

The focus should also be on defeating missiles rather than solely active missile defense that synchronizes American, allied and partner contributions and capabilities, explained Richard, which include getting beyond platform-centric defenses to a more “comprehensive approach where we can bring to bear all our capabilities — passive defense, offensive, kinetic, non-kinetic — and mold it together into a joint combined force.”

Richard also reiterated that the recent Minuteman III missile test delay would be short. While another test of the intercontinental ballistic missile was canceled, “the other one has been delayed and should be delayed only for a short period of time,” he said.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin ordered the Pentagon to postpone a planned test launch of the weapon. The White House cited increased tension with China over Taiwan as the reason for the delay.

The Pentagon’s decision to delay the test came as China conducted “precision missile strikes” earlier this month in waters off Taiwan’s coasts as part of military exercises that have raised tension in the region following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

It was the second delay of the Minuteman III test after Austin ordered one in March called off in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The land-based missile is one of the legs of the United States’ nuclear triad that also includes submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic aerial bombers.

The unarmed missile was due to be fired from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and splash down at the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

“The Minuteman III tests are just like other tests of our strategic systems,” Richard said. “Those tests are really important. We do them all the time. We do three to five per year. We do it across all legs of the [nuclear] triad.”

(Source: Defense News)

 

11 Aug 22. Army Space, Cyber and Special Operations commands form ‘triad’ to strike anywhere, anytime. The U.S. Army’s space, cyber and special operations commands said they formed a “triad” to enhance operational capability across all domains.

The triad concept is to integrate and converge inherent capability from U.S. Army Space and Missile Defense Command, Army Cyber Command and Army Special Operations Command to provide campaign options to commanders globally.

“We know Army space capabilities will become even more formidable when used in concert with cyber and special operations,” Lt. Gen. Daniel Karbler, commander of Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said Aug. 9 at the Space and Missile Defense Symposium. “This new triad allows us to leverage individual strengths to maximum effect, providing flexible options to counter mis- or disinformation, cyberattacks and irregular asymmetric threats. These options include striking anywhere and anytime with surprise and retaliating or responding to adversary attack.”

In looking at the Army’s warfighting concept — multidomain operations — which lays out how the Army approaches adversaries and threats across all domains, the triad has a role to play whether that is in competition, in crisis or in conflict, Lt. Gen. Jon Braga, commander of USASOC, told reporters in a briefing at the conference.

“Information operations are extremely important, influence operations are extremely important, contributing to integrated deterrence is extremely important,” Braga said, but should operations move into conflict, the triad would have a different role to play, possibly “a combination of non-lethal effects like information operations, then perhaps a more kinetic [option], denying a capability or affecting a certain capability of an adversary — that would be a different flavor of approach.”

The idea for the triad was, in part, born out of Karbler’s previous experience at U.S. Strategic Command where he started to see the power of global integration. Karbler reasoned that Space, Cyber and Special Operations are similarly integrated.

But it wasn’t until Karbler’s deputy commander for operations, Brig. Gen. Isaac Peltier, a special operations officer, brought in that unique perspective that he realized the utility of space, cyber and special operations coming together regularly.

And while each brings its own unique capabilities, there are similarities.

“We all leverage intel extremely well for everything we do,” Braga said, “but there was more and more as we thought about it, a similarity, in a way, of our uniqueness, we are all transregional, we all work for multiple bosses. We all bring effects to try and have larger outsized effects for relatively small forces that contribute to a much larger joint force. We all approach it philosophically the same way.”

“We see this globally,” Lt. Gen. Maria Barrett, US Army Cyber Command commander, said. None of the triad participants are restricted to a particular region even though they support specific COCOMs. “It enables us to deliver more options across the spectrum of competition, crisis and conflicts,” she added.

Additionally, as the triad establishes a framework, “we can turn these things more quickly than done before,” Barrett said, and share data more easily “in an age where data is absolutely paramount.”

The triad leaders have formed a campaign plan to implement the new concept, but one of the ways it is already operating together is through exercises.

The triad is participating together in Project Convergence which is set to begin later this fall and is a wider campaign of learning the Army puts on annually to experiment with emerging concepts and capabilities.

While space capabilities will be used in the exercise, Karbler said, “it’s not just going to be a sole space solution in a particular use case. We’ve got to drive toward SOF, cyber, space integrated solution to that case study.”

That experimentation with combined capabilities will help teach the triad what works best and what it has to go back and tailor, he added.

“Some of the things we have are very unique and different, so just making sure those capabilities can talk to one another is part of the effort we’re working on,” Braga noted.

And Project Convergence and other exercises will give the triad the opportunity to show the Army and the Joint Force what it can offer when it comes together, he said. (Source: C4ISR & Networks)

 

11 Aug 22. US: Attack in Cincinnati.

Event

At approximately 0900 hrs (local time) on 11 August, an armed man attacked the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) headquarters in Cincinnati, OH. A shoot-out occurred between the attacker and the security forces. No casualties were reported. The suspect fled the scene of the incident, which the authorities are calling ‘critical’.

Significance

  • The incident comes days after the FBI searched the home of the former president, Donald Trump, at Mar-a-Lago, FL, on 8 August. Media outlets reported the search was linked to classified documents which Trump allegedly brought to Florida after leaving the White House in January 2021.
  • Supporters of the former president have reacted angrily to the FBI search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home. Their narratives indicate they believe the raid represents an abuse of federal power and was a politically motivated attack against Trump. If it is confirmed that the Cincinnati attack was conducted as an act of retaliation against the FBI search, it would mark the first violent incident linked to the operation.
  • The FBI operation represents the first time the bureau has executed a warrant to search any of the former president’s residences. This will exacerbate tensions among Trump supporters, who will possibly view the authorities as having crossed a red line. While it has not been confirmed whether the incident in Cincinnati is related to the FBI search, further attacks against government agency buildings are possible.
  • The FBI’s execution of a search warrant on Trump’s Florida residence will be leveraged by numerous sources for misinformation campaigns intended possibly to encourage right-wing extremist groups to organise protests and/or carry out attacks.

Forecast

While there have been sporadic violent incidents in recent weeks across the US related to other socially divisive issues such as abortion rights, there has been no single incident to match or surpass the violence of the 6 January 2021 Capitol riots. However, violent incidents related to the recent FBI search are possible in the coming days and weeks. Amid a highly charged and politically febrile atmosphere, any related protests are likely to involve the most serious unrest since the 6 January riots, especially as the midterm elections are only a few months away. Businesses and business travellers located in the vicinity of either pro- or anti-Trump protests will face incidental risks, as will those located near government agency (especially FBI) buildings. Businesses whose staff demonstrate public support for either Trump or the FBI face reputational risks and will possibly be targeted by extremists from both ends of the political spectrum. (Source: Sibylline)

 

11 Aug 22. ‘A bloody mess’ with ‘terrible loss of life’: How a China-US conflict over Taiwan could play out. Early results from a DC think tank’s wargame suggest the US would prevail in defending Taiwan from China, but at a heavy cost that would leave it ill-prepared for new threats from Russia or Iran. A US Marine Littoral Regiment stationed in southern Taiwan is holding off hostile forces conducting an amphibious invasion near Tainan City. The MLR’s land-based, anti-ship missiles have slowed the Chinese fleet’s advances considerably, but the unit is running low on ammunition. It will need to be resupplied soon or face long odds in continuing to repel the invaders.

Despite the risks, the US sends in a C-17 Globemaster to restock the Marines’ precious supply of missiles — and the plane is summarily shot down by the Chinese. It’s a tragedy the kind the US has rarely faced for decades, but this far into the first major war between the US and China, with tens of thousands of lives committed to the conflict, the grim reality is this: There is no turning back for anyone.

It’s not a pleasant scene, but it is a realistic one, according to a series of wargames hosted in early August at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a DC-based think tank. The goal of the wargames — determining what would happen if China tried to take Taiwan through military force — is both an existential one for America’s security posture and an unintentionally timely one.

The simulation made some significant assumptions, but the results so far suggest that if the US intervened, it could likely prevent a complete takeover or at least reach a stalemate. But any successes would be marred by heavy losses on both sides in terms of ships, planes, submarines and, most importantly, people.

“It is a very tough sell for China such that if Taiwan resisted and the US came to Taiwan’s aid, there’s an extremely low possibility that China would be successful,” said Matthew Cancian, who partnered with CSIS as one of the wargame’s chief architects. “But, the US takes a lot of losses… In a lot of games, the US will lose almost its entire global fleet of tactical aviation.”

CSIS had not finished calculating the number of assets lost across all its games by the time of publication, but, in general, project staff said the US usually loses around 500 aircraft, 20 surface ships and two aircraft carriers per game — a staggering loss unseen for the US since World War II, in just a matter of weeks. The loss of the carriers alone – the US has only 11 total, and each carries at least 5,000 souls — would have potentially disastrous results on the nation’s ability to project power abroad.

The scenario, which the think tank is playing out 22 times this year with various defense experts, retired military officers and former Pentagon officials, will culminate in a public report by CSIS in December, which staff hope to brief to lawmakers and the Defense Department.

RELATED: Ukraine offers Taiwan a wake-up call, and lessons in resistance

While such experiments usually only interest those inside the Washington, DC beltway, CSIS’s wargames were underway while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., made global headlines by visiting Taiwan despite increasingly hostile statements from Beijing. The visit, and China’s subsequent reaction, has shed new urgency on the question of how the US could actively defend the island democracy.

When Breaking Defense arrived at the think tank on Aug. 3, in the midst of the 17th game, China had begun its assault near Tainan City, but was struggling to make headway further inland. Meanwhile, the US players were running short of their favored air-launched, long-range anti-ship missiles. To none of the staffers’ surprise, the war was quickly turning into a bloodbath.

“The outcome varies from game to game, and a lot depends on the initial conditions. But what almost never changes is [that] it’s a bloody mess, and both sides take some terrible losses,” said Bradley Martin, a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corp, who participated in the wargame that day.

As is the case with most wargames, CSIS gave players a narrow rule set that defined the opening turns of each game and what assets were at each team’s disposal. The weapons, ships, submarines and planes involved in every game mirror what each country publicly projects it will have available in 2026.

Before the game begins, China has committed to invading Taiwan and the US has decided to intervene in the island’s defense. Taiwanese forces are mostly amassed in the capital city of Taipei, but are paralyzed in the first turn to simulate what China might do — such as a cyberattack on the island’s infrastructure — in the opening hours of a conflict to slow down a response.

The Japanese have reached a base-sharing agreement with the US, but will not actively intervene in the war unless attacked directly.

Every turn represents roughly three to four days of real world combat, and most games lasted between six to eight turns, meaning one game simulates about three to four weeks of fighting.

Lastly, the use of nuclear weapons has been taken off the table. In their document laying out the rules, which was shared with journalists, the game designers acknowledged the importance of nuclear weapons in any conflict between two superpowers, but decided to limit the games’ scope to conventional warfare.

While that decision “makes a ton of sense” from a gameplay perspective, as wargames need to be narrowly-defined in order to be manageable, the end result is that both sides no longer needed to consider whether uses of conventional weapons could prompt an escalation to nuclear conflict, said Becca Wasser, who participated in CSIS’s wargame and also leads the Gaming Lab at the Center for a New American Security.

Despite a stated policy of no first use, China sees nuclear weapons “as a key tool that they could leverage in a potential peer conflict” and has made growing its nuclear arsenal central to its military modernization, she said.

“I think that’s also an element of what makes this such a difficult problem set for the United States. It’s the fact that it is two nuclear powers coming together and fighting in this potential conflict, and that looms quite large,” Wasser said. “CSIS took that off the table, which meant that there were fewer opportunities for vertical escalation, and that really colors what the United States felt it could do and what China felt it could do in their game.”

Despite the limited rule set, participants still saw valuable lessons to be learned about how a conventional war might play out. Martin, the RAND Corp. researcher, told Breaking Defense the game’s setup demonstrated how crucial attrition rates will be in any conflict with another superpower such as China.

Though there were more games to be played, a number of clear takeaways emerged by the time Breaking Defense talked with participants last week. Here are some key findings:

In the game Breaking Defense observed, having a Marine Littoral Regiment on the ground in Taiwan forced players to confront the difficulties of a resupply mission mid-conflict. By the end of the game, the MLR’s biggest contribution was fending off the Chinese naval fleet using land-based, anti-ship missiles. Once they ran out of missiles, they assisted Taiwanese ground forces in preventing China from establishing a safe zone for reinforcements on the beach or advancing towards Taipei.

Other games the think tank played out assumed the US would neither be able to preposition Marines on Taiwan before the war started nor get them ashore once the Chinese fleet began to encircle the island — obviously a less ideal situation for Taiwan’s defense.

Mark Cancian, a senior advisor at CSIS and one of the staff members overseeing the game, called the US government’s ability to deploy a MEB to Taiwan before the war a “huge if,” and once the war began, “it’s impossible,” he added. (Mark Cancian is the father of Matthew Cancian, one of the game’s adjudicators and designers.)

In most games, the scenarios assume the US does not attempt to preposition the Marines “because it would be too provocative.

“The events of the last 24 to 48 hours convinced us that is a good assumption,” the elder Cancian told Breaking Defense last week, while looking at a map of the island the players were using to simulate ground combat. “If Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan causes this huge emergency…what would moving a Marine brigade create?”

From the Chinese perspective, the landing site where the invasion of Taiwan was to begin was left up to player discretion. Both Cancians said most players favored the southern end of the island because the Taiwanese army was well-positioned to defend Taipei in the north. A few players did take their chances invading from the north, and they were repelled quickly.

“Some of the overall patterns of what is best for them [China] are invading in the south, just because Taiwan has so many forces around Taipei because that’s towards the crown jewels,” said the younger Cancian.

But invading from the south is not a surefire strategy either. Over the course of more than a dozen games, the red teams found it difficult to make headway inland because, with a naval and air battle raging behind them at sea, they lacked a desperately needed resupply capability.

At the strategic level, the game Breaking Defense observed had progressed like many before it: numerous Chinese amphibs sunk, hundreds of US warplanes destroyed after being stashed on lightly defended airfields in the region and, ultimately, the makings of the protracted, bloody fight analysts fear is coming.

During a separate game Breaking Defense did not see, featuring the same players, the conflict ended quickly and “spectacularly” in favor of the US.

In that scenario, China withheld numerous units to protect the mainland while sending a limited force forward to begin an assault on Taiwan. The problem, the players found, was that the US wasted no time in using its tactical air forces to assault every amphibious ship it could.

With the US claiming air superiority in short order, China’s position rapidly deteriorated and the US claimed a quick victory.

The “Chinese” players tried to “defend the mainland and defend [the] ports. Well, if China does that, then they fall flat on their face… We played one turn and China was completely defeated right off the bat,” said Matthew Cancian.

Wasser, the wargaming expert from CNAS, took part in the CSIS wargame on Aug. 4, acting as part of the red team. During that exercise, China pursued an aggressive war plan, bombing US bases in Guam and Japan right out of the gate before starting an amphibious invasion of Taiwan.

Eventually, however, US and Japanese submarines struck back at Chinese amphibs, which impacted China’s ability to field troops ashore and also to resupply ground forces already battling to control the island.

Ultimately, the red team’s decision to attack Japan may have been ruinous for China, giving the US military an ally willing to lend its own advanced capabilities and trained forces to the fight.

“When you decide to attack Japan, you have to attack all of Japan and really clobber [them]. You can’t just attack once and bring in the [Japanese Self-Defense Forces] and allow them to run riot,” Matthew Cancian said of the choice to engage the Japanese.

By the end of that game — again, simulating three to four weeks of combat — there were sizable losses on each side, with China successful in sinking a US carrier strike group and holding about a third of Taiwan. However, Wasser believes those gains would have ultimately been short-lived, as China was not able to resupply its forces and the United States was postured to flow more forces into the region.

CSIS isn’t the first think tank to run a Taiwan invasion scenario this year. In June, the Center for a New American Security published the results of its own wargame, set in 2027, in which a five-person blue team playing as the United States sought to stop the five-person red team playing as China from taking over Taiwan. This wargame was played only once, as it was filmed for an episode of Meet the Press.

Unlike CSIS, CNAS allowed players to use nuclear weapons and that played a powerful role in shaping both teams’ behavior. The red team’s first move “took a page from “[Russian Federation President Vladimir] Putin’s playbook in Ukraine,” with China threatening to use nukes should the West decide to interfere in an “internal affair” concerning Taiwan. While the blue team believed the size of the US nuclear arsenal would deter China from using its own nuclear weapons, it “was also careful to avoid attacking targets that might threaten the Chinese regime,” CNAS stated in its report on the game.

However, the blue team was proven wrong in the last move of the game, when the red team conducted a nuclear demonstration near Hawaii — far enough away to not result in loss of life, but close enough to signal the credibility of its threats.

Despite some key differences in game mechanics, Wasser said the CSIS and CNAS games present very similar conclusions. For one, while US officials such as former US Indo-Pacific Command head Adm. Phil Davidson have warned lawmakers that China hopes to develop the capability to invade Taiwan by 2027, wargames set in that timeframe highlight the difficulty China would have in conducting an amphibious invasion — even if its military modernization goes as planned.

“That suggests that perhaps maybe the window is a bit further afield, and that perhaps maybe we need to be looking at 2030, 2035 and beyond,” Wasser said. “That said, because this is such a difficult problem for China … perhaps in the more near term, we need to think about China’s ability to do other forms of coercion.”

Those measures could include a blockade of Taiwan — a scenario that China practiced earlier this month when Chinese ships and aircraft encircled Taiwan, launching almost a dozen missiles into the waters surrounding the island, with five missiles landing in Japan’s exclusive economic zone.

Both wargames also stress the importance of undersea capabilities, mainly Virginia-class attack submarines, used to pick off Chinese amphibious ships before they could deploy troops ashore, as well as the need to buy much more long-range precision guided munitions, Wasser said.

“Every single time I have ever run a US-China conflict over Taiwan, and this is going back years and years … the United States begins to run out of preferred munitions. There’s not enough to go around,” she said. “And if you look at how this could unfold into protracted conflicts, if we are already expending so much of our PGMs in the early days of the fight, and the conflict continues to go on and on, that doesn’t look very good for us.”

And even once that fight concludes, there still may be others looming, Mark Cancian said. With hundreds of planes shot down and potentially more than a dozen ships sunk, the United States’ ability to project power forward will be deeply diminished.

“It would take years for the United States to rebuild its forces because of low production rates. Other nations like Russia and Iran might take advantage of US weakness,” said Cancian. “Further, a costly victory might turn the US population towards isolationism as it did after World War I. So, victory is not enough.”

Another commonality between the two games was their eventual outcome: a situation in which China is unlikely to successfully take over the whole of Taiwan, but where the US and China would be locked into a protracted war with massive losses of equipment and personnel by both the Chinese and US sides in the initial weeks of the campaign — a devastating scenario unlike any conflict since World War II.

“Fighting a peer military is incredibly different than trying to bomb ISIS into submission in Iraq and Syria. And not only does it require a change to the way in which the US military operates, but it also requires a change in how the US military thinks about risk,” Wasser said. “There is going to be massive loss of life, there are going to be ships sunk at the bottom of the ocean, and we haven’t had to deal with that. That’s going to be a massive change in the American psyche, for the average American citizen watching this unfold, but also for our military.”

(Source: Breaking Defense.com)

 

10 Aug 22. Shell companies purchase radioactive materials, prompting push for nuclear licensing reform. Late last year, government employees forged a copy of a license to buy hazardous, radioactive material. They created shell companies, then placed orders, generated invoices and paid two U.S.-based vendors.

The scheme worked. The employees successfully had the material shipped, complete with radioactive stickers on the side, then confirmed delivery.

But the workers were actually investigators from the Government Accountability Office, the congressional watchdog, and they were testing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s ability to regulate the sale and procurement of dangerous materials.

The act, and a subsequent report from the GAO, alarmed Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., who is now calling on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to overhaul its licensing system as a way to avoid a national security disaster.

“Anyone could open a shell company with a fraudulent license to obtain dangerous amounts of radioactive material that could be weaponized into a dirty bomb,” Torres told Defense News in an interview on Wednesday. “Disperse radioactive material in a city as densely populated as New York, and it could cause catastrophic damage.”

The commission classifies radioactive material into five categories of risk. Only categories one and two currently are subject to its independent license verification system – a loophole that Torres and the GAO fear that an individual or group could exploit to wreak havoc by building a dirty bomb that combines combines conventional explosives with category three radioactive materials.

Torres, who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, is pressing the NRC to immediately expand its independent license verification system to include category three quantities of radioactive materials. He formally made the licensing overhaul request in a letter seen by Defense News on Wednesday. This request is in line with the GAO’s recommendations in what Torres called an “alarming report.”

The report notes that the watchdog “provided a copy of a license that GAO forged to two vendors, subsequently obtained invoices and paid the vendors.” It notes that the GAO did not accept the shipment at the delivery point and instead “safely and securely” returned the radioactive material to the vendors.

“While radioactive materials have legitimate medical and industrial uses, the illicit possession, purchase and use of radioactive materials poses an extreme threat to homeland security,” Torres wrote in his letter. “Without additional security protocols, including a more rigorous system of independent license verification, a terrorist could exploit current vulnerabilities to obtain radioactive material and weaponize it into a dirty bomb against a soft target in America’s largest cities.”

The GAO report notes that a malicious actor could use category three materials to build a dirty bomb. For instance, it says that someone “might be able to obtain a category 2 quantity by purchasing and aggregating more than one category 3 quantity from multiple vendors.”

Torres also wrote in his letter that the NRC should “assess the need for independent license verification for category four and five radioactive materials,” which goes beyond the scope of the GAO recommendations.

Category three materials are frequently used in fixed radiation gauges to measure things like moisture and density in soil and asphalt for industries ranging from mining to oil and gas to agriculture. The lowest-tiered categories of radioactive materials are often used in devices such as Xray machines.

David McIntyre, a NRC spokesman, told Defense News that the agency is “taking actions to address the issues identified by the GAO.”

“Upon release of the report, we immediately contacted manufacturers of these radioactive sources to ensure they are vigilant with sales, especially for new customers or unusual activities,” said McIntyre.

McIntyre noted the NRC is “expediting a rule change already in progress” that would include “consideration of multi-factor authentication” for category three radioactive materials.

“In contrast, imposing immediate additional security requirements would risk unintended impacts to important and safe medical, academic and industrial uses of these materials,” he added.

The GAO report acknowledged that “NRC is taking some steps to strengthen its licensing program” but cautioned that “current gaps will remain unaddressed until at least the end of 2023.”

(Source: glstrade.com/Defense News)

 

11 Aug 22. US: Far-right threats against law enforcement over Trump probe elevate risk of attacks. On 10 August, the director of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Christopher Wray stated that violent threats against the FBI and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) had circulated on social media following the FBI’s search of the former president Donald Trump’s residence in Florida. FBI agents searched Trump’s residence on 8 August as part of an investigation into whether Trump took classified White House documents after he left office. Trump has accused the FBI of persecuting him as part of an effort by Democrats to prevent him from running in the 2024 presidential elections. Posts on social media platforms such as Gab, popular among far-right extremist groups, have called for the killing of FBI agents and federal prosecutors investigating Trump, as well as for an uprising against the government. This raises the likelihood of extremists carrying out attacks against FBI and DOJ facilities, increasing the physical risks to assets and staff nearby. (Source: Sibylline)

 

10 Aug 22. Dr. Kathleen Hicks’ Meeting With the Defense Business Board.

Pentagon Spokesman Eric Pahon provided the following readout: Deputy Secretary of Defense Dr. Kathleen Hicks met with the Defense Business Board in a closed session today at the Pentagon.  During the session, she briefed board members on the department’s business practices and management of the DoD innovation ecosystem and efforts to reduce barriers to innovation and modernization.  The deputy noted that she is focused on improving the management processes required to orchestrate efforts across organizations and enable department to be a place where innovative ideas and capabilities thrive.

She highlighted three focus areas:

  • Alleviating security-related roadblocks;
  • Improving enterprise-wide progress toward recruiting, retaining and upskilling the innovation workforce;
  • Addressing challenges related to the gap businesses face between prototype/experimentation and production.

Board members then provided their feedback and suggested ideas related to best business practices within industry and the private sector which could be helpful in addressing these focus areas.

Deputy Secretary Hicks thanked the board members, including 10 newly-appointed members, for dedicating their time and expertise toward improving Department of Defense business practices and culture. (Source: US DoD)

 

10 Aug 22. US: Enactment of CHIPS Act will sustain heightened tensions with China.  On 9 August, US President Joe Biden signed into law the Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors for America Act (CHIPS), which will provide USD 57 bn in subsidies for US microchip production and research. The initiative aims to boost domestic chip production to alleviate current global shortages that are holding back US manufacturing, reducing US reliance on Asian chip suppliers and ensuring that the US can better compete with China in economy and technology. The Biden administration says that achieving these objectives is critical for US national security. However, the act is controversial and seen as a protectionist trade measure by China. Prior to its congressional approval, the Chinese government lobbied against the bill, arguing it goes counter to free trade and is based on a “Cold War mentality”. Chinese officials warned that US companies would risk losing market share or revenue in China if the bill became law, elevating policy risks for US firms with Chinese operations. (Source: Sibylline)

 

08 Aug 22. US: Senate approval of Inflation Reduction Act elevates policy risk potentially threatening socio-economic health. On 7 August, the US Senate approved the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping economic bill tabled by the Joe Biden administration seeking to combat climate change, cap certain prescription drug prices, and increase corporate taxes. The bill was approved with Vice President Kamala Harris’ casting vote despite Republican opposition in the evenly split Senate and now goes to the House of Representatives. The Biden administration says it is designed to cut carbon emissions, provide relief to households suffering high living costs, and raise more funds to shore up public finances. Republicans argue it will hurt the economy by increasing energy costs and discouraging investment, which could undermine economic growth and job creation as the US faces a recession. They accuse Democrats of pushing a populist measure in a bid to win more votes in the November midterm elections. The Democrat majority in the House of Representatives means the bill is highly likely to be passed this week, increasing regulatory challenges and policy risk, potentially undermining socio-economic health. (Source: Sibylline)

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Founded in 1987, Exensor Technology is a world leading supplier of Networked Unattended Ground Sensor (UGS) Systems providing tailored sensor solutions to customers all over the world. From our Headquarters in Lund Sweden, our centre of expertise in Network Communications at Communications Research Lab in Kalmar Sweden and our Production site outside of Basingstoke UK, we design, develop and produce latest state of the art rugged UGS solutions at the highest quality to meet the most stringent demands of our customers. Our systems are in operation and used in a wide number of Military as well as Homeland Security applications worldwide. The modular nature of the system ensures any external sensor can be integrated, providing the user with a fully meshed “silent” network capable of self-healing. Exensor Technology will continue to lead the field in UGS technology, provide our customers with excellent customer service and a bespoke package able to meet every need. A CNIM Group Company

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