WarSclerotic

Fighting rages in Syria amid conflicting reports over deployment of Russian forces.

Tuesday, 20 March 2012

The statement said that the crew of the Russian tanker Iman is made up of civilians and a unit that provides for its security. (File photo)

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Navy Adds Muscle in Middle East to Counter Iran: Analyst says Pentagon ‘has no stomach’ for Iranian war – chicagotribune.com.

Adm. Jonathan Greenert could see for miles from the bridge of the USS Stenis on a rare clear day as it exited the Strait of Hormuz. And the Navy’s top admiral wasn’t satisfied with the view.

Shortly after becoming chief of naval operations last September, Greenert decided he needed to get a firsthand view of what Iran was up to in the Persian Gulf . He also wanted to form his own opinion of what kinds of U.S. ships and other hardware might be needed should tensions escalate into conflict.

Greenert decided the U.S. needed more ships designed to locate and destroy enemy mines laid on the sea floor–the Iranian navy has used this tactic in the past. The CNO, working with U.S. Central Command chief Gen. James Mattis, decided to double from four to eight the number of mine-hunting vessels in the region.

All American Navy ships that move through the strait soon will be equipped with special infrared and other sensors intended to help their crews see every Iranian vessel or other platforms that might pose a threat, Greenert told reporters Friday during a breakfast meeting in Washington.

Greenert also has ordered that the destroyers, cruisers, and other vessels that escort U.S. aircraft carriers through the Strait of Hormuz, a key transit point off Iran’s southern coast that Tehran has threatened to close, will have Gatling guns mounted on their decks. The Navy is studying whether it makes sense to also mount the guns, which can fire hundreds of rounds in just one minute, on aircraft carrier decks.

That move reflects a long-held worry among Pentagon planners that Iran might use multiple small, fast vessels to attack U.S. warships. Because the Iranian navy cannot match up against the highly advanced U.S. fleet, Pentagon officials believe it would use non-conventional tactics in a conflict.

Naval officials are examining whether it can place short-range missiles on some of its smaller ships, Greenert said.

The waters of the strait are narrower than those of the open seas, and Greenert compared it to fighting in an alley.

“It’s like having a high-powered … rifle, but you’re in a small area,” the CNO said. “Maybe what you need is a sawed-off shotgun.”

The idea is to make American warships “more lethal and more effective,” Greenert said. Naval officials have asked Congress for permission to shift monies within its budget to pay for some of the necessary ship modification work.

“It is clear … the U.S. military, specifically the Navy, is seeking to reduce risk against growing Iranian capabilities, including their large quantity of fast-attack craft and increasing ability to saturate existing U.S. systems,” says Mackenzie Eaglen, a former Senate staffer now with the American Enterprise Institute. “The Navy is also working overtime to improve its mine warfare capabilities and readiness levels now. Mine force readiness has slipped dramatically over the past decade.”

Still, the Pentagon is trying to avoid a misstep that could lead to a miscalculation, Eaglen says.

“U.S. Central Command leaders are wary of taking any steps that appear provocative or signal even a small U.S. military buildup in the Arabian Gulf,” she says. “For example, U.S. training has been reactive and of a defensive nature only in the region of late.”

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, says “the United States is not building up forces in the Persian Gulf.” Rather, it is in the midst of a shift from a presence there that was largely land-based in Iraq for nearly a decade to one where its weapons are located on ships and aircraft carriers, Thompson says.

“The kind of weapons the CNO wants to send to the Persian Gulf are not suited to an invasion of Iran, they’re mainly for protecting friendly forces and sea lanes,” Thompson says. “The Pentagon has no stomach for invading Iran, and doesn’t believe such a rash move would be required to meet U.S. security objectives. Its main goal is to block Iranian plans to acquire nuclear weapons, a goal better met with a combination of intelligence and precision munitions.”

Greenert’s disclosure of his beefing up U.S. naval capabilities in the Middle East comes as the Obama administration is walking a tightrope on Iran. President Obama continues to insist he will prevent Tehran from fielding a nuclear weapon. At the same, Obama and his aides say stiff economic sanctions not yet fully implemented still have a chance of persuading Tehran to give up its atomic arsenal ambitions.

Washington’s top ally in the Middle East, Israel, says time is up. Israeli officials publicly state they would prefer a military strike this year to slow Iran’s nuclear program. Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently held talks at the White House on Iran, but it remains unclear whether Obama convinced Netanyahu to keep his heavily armed fighter jets parked while the sanctions take effect.

The administration is “right now” focused on using sanctions and other non-military tools to convince Iran to abandon the illicit weapons program, Anthony Blinken, deputy assistant to President Obama and national security adviser to Vice President Joe Biden, said Friday at another forum in Washington.

Obama has said military force remains an option.

“We’re seeing increased pressure on Iran” from economic sanctions already imposed that have had a “significant impact on the Iranian economy,” Blinken said.

The economic pressure on the regime in Tehran “is going to get worse” in coming months as new sanctions approved by the European Union are fully implemented, Blinken said.

Stephens: The Bogus Iran Intelligence Debate – WSJ.com.

Ignore the media leaks. Tehran’s nuke program is hiding in plain sight.

To better understand the debate over the state of Iran’s nuclear bomb building capabilities, it helps to talk to someone who has built a nuclear bomb. Tom Reed served as Secretary of the Air Force and head of the National Reconnaissance Office in the 1970s, but in an earlier life he designed thermonuclear devices at Lawrence Livermore and watched two of them detonate off Christmas Island in 1962.

How hard is it, I asked Mr. Reed when he visited the Journal last week, to build a crude nuclear weapon on the model of the bomb that leveled Hiroshima? “Anyone can build it,” he said flatly, provided they have about 141 lbs. of uranium enriched to an 80% grade. After that, he says, it’s not especially hard to master the technologies of weaponization, provided you’re not doing something fancy like implosion or miniaturization.

Bear that in mind as the New York Times reports that U.S. intelligence agencies are sure, or pretty sure, that Iran “still has not decided to pursue a weapon”—a view the paper says is shared by Israel’s Mossad. The report echoes the conclusion of a 2007 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that Iran put its nuclear-weapons program on the shelf back in 2003.

All this sounds like it matters a whole lot. It doesn’t. You may not be able to divine whether a drinker, holding a bottle of Johnnie Walker in one hand and a glass tinkling with ice in the other, actually intends to pour himself a drink. And perhaps he doesn’t. But the important thing, at least when it comes to intervention, is not to present him with the opportunity in the first place.

That’s what was so misleading about the 2007 NIE, which relegated to a footnote the observation that “by ‘nuclear weapons program’ we mean Iran’s nuclear weapons design and weaponization work. . . . [W]e do not mean Iran’s declared civil work related to uranium conversion and enrichment.” What the NIE called “civil work” is, in fact, the central piece in assembling a nuclear device. To have sufficient quantities of enriched uranium is, so to speak, the whiskey of a nuclear-weapons program. By contrast, “weaponization”—the vessel into which you pour and through which you can deliver the enriched uranium cocktail—is merely the glass.

It’s for this reason that Iran has spent the better part of the last several years building a redundant enrichment facility deep underground near the city of Qom. And thanks in part to the regular reports of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the world doesn’t need to rely on spies or shady sources to figure out just how much uranium the Iranians have enriched: At last count, more than five tons to a 5% grade, and more than 100 kilos to 20%.

In other words, having a debate about the quality of our Iran intelligence is mostly an irrelevance: Iran’s real nuclear-weapons program is hiding in plain sight. The serious question policy makers must answer isn’t whether Iran will go for a bomb once it is within a half-step of getting one. It’s whether Iran should be allowed to get within that half-step.

That is the essence of the debate the Obama administration is now having with Israel. The president has stated flatly that he won’t allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon. Good. But Israelis worry that Mr. Obama will allow them to come too close for comfort (or pre-emption). Israel cannot be reassured by the administration’s apparent decision to make its case through a series of media leaks, all calculated to head off a possible Israeli strike.

On Monday, the Times published the (leaked) results of a “classified war game” in which an Israeli strike on Iran leaves “hundreds of American dead,” perhaps through an attack on a Navy warship. That isn’t exactly the subtlest way of warning Israel that, should they strike Iran, they will do so forewarned that American blood will be on their hands, never mind that it’s the Iranians who would be doing the killing.

Is this outcome likely? Maybe, though it assumes a level of Iranian irrationality—responding to an Israeli attack by bringing the U.S. into the conflict—that top U.S. officials don’t otherwise attribute to Iran’s leaders. But the deeper problem with this leak is that an intelligence product is being used as a political tool. It was the same story with the 2007 NIE, whose purpose was to foreclose the possibility that the Bush administration would attack Iran.

It should come as no surprise that an intelligence community meant to provide decision makers with disinterested analysis has, in practice, policy goals and ideological axes of its own. But that doesn’t mean it is any less dangerous. The real lesson of the Iraq WMD debacle wasn’t that the intelligence was “overhyped,” since the CIA is equally notorious for erring in the opposite direction. It was that intelligence products were treated as authoritative guides to decision making. Spooks, like English children, should be seen, not heard. The problem is that the spooks (like the children) want it the other way around.

How, then, should people think about the Iran state of play? By avoiding the misdirections of “intelligence.” For real intelligence, merely consider that a regime that can take a rock in its right hand to stone a woman to death should not have a nuclear bomb within reach of its left. Even a spook can grasp that.

Write to bstephens@wsj.com

Israelis Grow Confident Strike on Iran’s Nukes Can Work – Bloomberg.

Israelis send messages of love to Iran, despite threat of war.

Israel’s doctrine of the talking dog – NY Daily News.

What is the best way to stifle Iran’s nuclear ambitions?

LIOR MIZRAHI/AFP/Getty Images

The question is whether Iran poses an existential threat to Israel at the present moment.

Israel’s Barak speaks to Iran threat.

Published: March 19, 2012 9:05 PM
By AMY TEIBEL. The Associated Press

JERUSALEM — Israel views the threat posed by a nuclear-armed Iran with greater urgency than the rest of the world, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said yesterday.

Barak reiterated recent Israeli assessments that Iran’s nuclear program is on the verge of becoming immune to disruptions by a possible military strike.

The remarks are likely to fuel already-rampant speculation that Israel is preparing for a strike before Iran moves most of its nuclear facilities underground and beyond the reach of a precision attack.

In testimony to parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, Barak also said that harsher international sanctions against Iran would be needed to try to pressure Tehran to abandon the suspect elements of its nuclear program.

Barak invoked a theme that has become a recent mantra with Israeli leaders — that the Jewish state will not leave its fate to others to decide.

“The world, including the current U.S. administration, understands and accepts that Israel necessarily views the threat differently than they do, and that ultimately, Israel is responsible for taking the decisions related to its future, its security and its destiny,” he said.

Barak’s office released his statements to the committee in a media release.

Iran’s nuclear program, Barak said, “is steadily approaching maturation and is verging on a ‘zone of immunity’ — a position from which the Iranian regime could complete its program without effective disruption, at its convenience.”

Barak sent jitters through the world two months ago, when he first coined the “zone of immunity” phrase — a reference to Iran’s movement of sensitive nuclear operations deep underground in heavily fortified bunkers, in an effort to compromise any military strike.

New IDF Systems Counter Gaza Anti-Tank Threat – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Anti-tank detection system.

IDF Website

The IDF has implemented two new defensive systems to detect and deflect anti-tank missiles that are fired from Gaza. The systems are becoming operational nearly one year after terrorists fired an anti-tank missile at a yellow school bus, killing a Jewish youth.

The systems were developed by Elbit Systems Ltd., enabling early detection and warning of launched anti-tank missiles as well as redirecting them.

“Due to the anti-tank missile threat in the Southern Command, we’ve been looking for a means of detecting where missiles are launched from,” the Head of the Southern Command Weapon and Technologies Department, Maj. Nissan Mizrachi, told the IDF Website.

One of the new systems allows for detecting of laser-operated weapons and warns against possible threats. The technology detects the direction of the threat and its type, and it informs the commander in the field both visually and using audio. The system is based on the direction and speed the system calculates where the missile will land, and it can thus assist a tank, for example, to direct its fire at the threat. The warning provided by the system provides a 360-degree range.

The second newly implemented system, also developed by Elbit Systems, diverts missiles that have been fired. The system redirects the missile using several different technologies, ensuring the vehicle carrying the system is not harmed.

Both systems became operational in the past few months and provides defense against the growing anti-tank missile threat in the Gaza Strip region. The Southern Command has also paved a new road, which it says is safe from anti-tank missile threats, for use by Jewish communities in the area. The road’s unique location in a land fold provides ultimate protection from anti-tank missiles.

Observers believe that Israel announces its new defense technologies partly because it is interested in selling them abroad.

Gaza Terrorists Resume Rocket Attacks – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Gaza terrorists fired a rocket on the Negev, causing no damage or injuries but showing Israel they do not intend to keep the “calm.”

Kassam rocket

Flash 90

Gaza terrorists fired a Kassam rocket on the Western Negev Monday morning, causing no damage or injuries but showing Israel they do not intend to keep the “calm.”

Rocket attacks on rural areas are a favorite tactic by Hamas and allied terrorists to harass Israel and draw the IDF into a retaliation that foreign media usually portray as “disproportionate.” Occasionally, a Kassam rocket explodes at a building and causes injuries or even death, in which case the media judge that Israel has more of a right to respond.

The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) Monday defined the eruption of missile attacks on southern Israel 10 days ago as “inconclusive fighting” with “possible implications for the future.”

Despite the success of the Iron Dome system in protecting Be’er Sheva, Ashkelon and Ashdod, its 80-90 percent rate of success still leaves one million residents open to a lethal missile attack, the report noted.

“Unless active defense is 100 percent effective, it will not eliminate the need for passive defense or prevent massive disruption of normal life inside the envelope of the rockets. Nor will it spare the government the need to take weighty strategic decisions that it would prefer to avoid,” according to the Institute.

“Only sheer luck stood between government reluctance to embark on large scale escalation and irresistible domestic pressure to do so,” it observed.

The report also said that the unstable political situation in Egypt does not guarantee that the regime can act in the future as an intermediary to tone down the violence, as it did last week.

“Political volatility in Egypt means that the Egyptian security establishment may not be able to go on playing this role in the future, even if its world-view remains unchanged,” the INSS study stated. “Presidential elections in Egypt are scheduled,…[and] unlike in the past, the outcome of this Egyptian presidential election cannot be known in advance.”

It also pointed out that the Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees (PRC) have “hijacked” Hamas’s agenda and were behind most of the attack.

Israel holds Hamas responsible for all terrorist attacks from Gaza, where the terrorist organization took  over in a bloody militia war five years, ousting the Fatah faction ruled by Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas. However, Hamas has lost total control over rival terrorists, leaving the Gaza region subject to unofficial anarchy under the guise of an organized government.

Knesset Approves Internet in Public Shelters – Defense/Security – News – Israel National News.

Public shelter

Flash 90

The Knesset approved on Monday the preliminary reading of a bill that requires public shelters to include infrastructure for internet access.

According to the bill, which was submitted by Orly Levy-Abekasis (Yisrael Beiteinu), a public shelter located in a community defined by an order of the Minister of Defense as being located in an area of confrontation will be set up with a wireless internet communication.

The explanatory notes to the bill said that “the Second Lebanon War in the north and Operation Cast Lead in the south have created a reality which is difficult and complex for hundreds of thousands of residents for whom normal life stopped and a routine of war became a fact of life. During this period, the educational system in these communities shut down and children and teenagers had to sit idly in shelters, scared and frustrated.”

The notes added, “For a long time period, children and teenagers whose home does not have a protected space had to stay in public shelters without a regulated education system, educational programs and cultural enrichment, which led to gaps and lost educational time.

“In today’s advanced digital age, networking all public shelters with a high speed wireless internet connection is an important need which will allow, during periods of war and confrontation, for studies, classes and enrichment. In addition, an internet connection will allow residents in shelters to be involved in what is happening around them and will help ease the tension and anxieties of those who sit for long periods in shelters and protected public spaces.”

The bill, which passed unanimously, will now be transferred to the Knesset’s Labor, Social Affairs and Health Committee, where it will be prepared for its first reading.