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Originally published in Manufacturing and Technology News, May 17, 2011
By Charles McMillion, President, MBG Information Services, Washington, D.C.
06/06/2011 – The United States continues to lose production in the global economy, according to the first quarter 2011-trade figures for goods and services released by the Census Bureau on May 11.
(Credit: U.S. Census Bureau)
The first quarter trade deficit in goods and services is 23.5 percent worse than during the first quarter of 2010 and is 20.4 percent worse than during the last quarter of 2010. The dollar value of U.S. export growth remained near stagnant in the first quarter of 2011 (declining in February), while the value of imports accelerated sharply — largely due to higher prices for oil and other commodities.
The trade deficit for U.S. goods and services for March suggests that worsening net loss of production to global trade reduced GDP growth rate in the first quarter by more than the modest -0.1 percent cut that the Bureau of Economic Analysis initially projected.
The auto sector suffered a $10.4-billion trade deficit in March and, after $1.3 trillion in trade losses since the year 2000, appears to face a loss of at least an additional $125 billion in 2011.
But the big news in the trade report is the continuing worsening of U.S. trade losses in Advanced Technology Products (ATP), which are now 66 percent worse in 2011 than the record-setting pace of losses in 2010. Exports of advanced technology products are up only 3.8 percent year over year, while imports are up 13.5 percent.
Losses in advanced technology products always accelerate from June-to-November, but even if year-over-year losses moderate later this year, it seems reasonable to expect an annual 2011 deficit of at least $125 billion compared with last year’s record $81.8 billion in ATP losses.
Imports from China continue to account for more than the entire U.S. ATP deficit, but there are other interesting changes: so far this year the United States has ATP surpluses with NAFTA partners but deficits with Europe.
It is important to note that all foreign-earned Intellectual Property (royalties and fees) revenues of “U.S.”-Incorporated firms such as Apple, Microsoft and Starbucks, declined in the first quarter of 2011 compared to the same quarter in 2010, as did the total IP revenue in the U.S. of foreign incorporated firms. As a result, the U.S. surplus in IP is virtually unchanged over the year, and remains far less than the ATP deficit.
Shaping the Tools and Approaches to a Maintainable Force
An Interview with Captain Mike Kelly
06/05/2011 – During a visit in San Diego in late March 2011 to the Naval Air Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, Second Line of Defense sat down Captain Mike Kelly to learn about the approach of the fleet to global maintenance of the USN-USMC aircraft. It would be safe to say that the interview was wide-ranging and highlighted not only the broad approach to global maintenance, but also the challenge of managing the transition from older to new aircraft.
Captain Kelly is the Force Material Officer at Commander Naval Air Forces. He directs a worldwide staff of 240 Civil Service, Military and contractor personnel responsible for the engineering, logistics, planning, budgeting, execution and associated policy necessary to globally deploy and safely operate all 3,000+ Navy and Marine Corps aircraft and associated engines, airborne systems and support equipment.
He is an Aerospace MRO production executive with over 20 years experience in Naval Aviation operations and logistics both afloat and ashore. He has both airframe and engine experience with fixed-wing jet/prop and rotary wing platforms. And he additionally has functioned as an Information Technology Project manager with significant experience in large-scale IT system development and deployment. He has experience as well in data warehousing, networking, and web application design/development in Unix/Windows/Oracle/Sybase.
The enthusiasm and breadth of Captain Kelly’s knowledge about the challenges and approaches of the USN and USMC team to global maintenance was evident throughout the interview. The goal here is to share some of his insights with our readers.
SLD: Could you provide a baseline understanding of the focus of your shop?
Captain Kelly: Here in our shop, we manage the engineering and configuration management out in the aviation fleet. We serve as the fleet interface to the Naval Air Systems Command engineering and logistics folks. We manage the distribution of the aircraft inventory. We manage the allocation of support equipment. We manage demand signal for maintenance training and influence the skill sets of our maintainers; we write the Naval Aviation Maintenance Program policy under which all Navy and Marine Corps aircraft operate. And then, we do the triage on readiness issues as they come in from the fleet, whether it’s from a carrier strike group, an expeditionary strike group, or an independently deployed squadron.
For any Naval Aviation unit in the world, we have a readiness desk that gets their information and we triage their issues to try and help out with whatever we need to do to close their readiness gap. We have a staff of about 240 folks between here and Norfolk and we manage basically, all 3,000 or so Navy and Marine Corps aircraft.
For any Naval Aviation unit in the world, we have a readiness desk that gets their information and we triage their issues to try and help out with whatever we need to do to close their readiness gap. We have a staff of about 240 folks between here and Norfolk and we manage basically, all 3,000 or so Navy and Marine Corps aircraft.
An F/A-18C Hornet assigned to the “Ragin Bulls” of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 37
launches from USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75) during routine flight operations.
(Credit: USN Visual Service, 12/3/10)
SLD: And you work with industry in this context? How does that work?
Captain Kelly: We’ll work with the industry when industry is a piece of the logistics. For starters, Naval Air Systems Command and the program managers at NAVAIR have the primary responsibility for acquisition and lifecycle sustainment. Once a weapons system is fielded, then it becomes a fleet asset. And the N42 shop manages the aircraft, engines, and support equipment piece of the system. We manage these items on behalf of Vice Admiral Myers to ensure we resource all the carrier air wings, expeditionary strike groups, and other deployers. We perform these functions on behalf of both Navy and Marine Corps Aviation, as we are the aircraft-controlling custodians for both Navy and Marine Corps assets. Our responsibility is to make sure that the Navy and Marine squadrons have the airplanes they need, have the support equipment they need and that we put the demand signal in place through the budgeting process for the maintenance training that they need. And then, we do all the policy work along with a host of other smart people to make sure that our folks are successful out there. To make sure we communicate effectively, we have our class desk for each type/model/series aircraft function as the primary interface point between the flight line and the acquisition enterprise. They’ll reach back into NAVAIR engineering, NAVAIR logistics, etc. And when necessary they’ll reach back to the appropriate industry point of contact to resolve whatever issue is impacting the fleet.
Maintenance personnel conduct routine maintenance to a C-2A Greyhound carrier onboard delivery aircraft at U.S. Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Jan. 18.
Service members from the Fleet Logistics Support Squadron were supporting Operation Unified Response,
providing humanitarian assistance to Haiti. (Credit: USN Visual Service, 1/19/10)
SLD: You are managing the various classes and variants of aircraft, and have significant data on each aircraft to shape the evolving maintenance regimes. Could you tell us about that process?
Captain Kelly: The Navy is the most the data obsessive service on earth. We track flight hours, we track maintenance man-hours, we track consumption of material, we track configuration management through technical directives, we track scheduled inspections, unscheduled maintenance, we track performance through the depots for cycle time and cost, we track training, both formal and on the job training (OJT).
The reason we track such a variety of information is the same as why anybody else would track metrics– to determine do I have stability? Am I staying within my control limits; that if I’m seeing a vector I don’t like, am I attacking it soon enough to try to reshape the outcome, whether it’s a sustainment issue, whether it’s a cost issue, whether it’s an effectiveness of the repair cycle issue. We want to get in there early to see how to improve the outcome.
SLD: You’re managing the metrics on a fleet basis, basically?
Captain Kelly: We have the data down to each and every bureau number. So, in other words, for fiscal year ’10, I can see the consumption of hours and material against a single bureau number. I can see it across the squadron, I can see it across the model series, and I can see it across services.
We do that to determine what is driving problems or what is driving success. Is a total population driving it that way, or is that underlying squadron having a tough time. Or in some cases, a bureau number is having a tough time. We can go all the way down to the bureau number level.
SLD: So you can figure out what the cause of the problem is and target it?
Captain Kelly: You can come up with a list of a hundred smart person questions. But if you use the data and focus down, then usually, you kind of come down to five or six reasonable person questions to determine what’s going on.
Inside a Navy or Marine Corps squadron, you have the maintenance department, which is usually the largest department, because you got all the touch labor from the maintainers. You have trained NCOs or sergeants, gunny sergeants, master sergeants on the Marine side, or chief petty officers, on the Navy side. You usually have a 03 lieutenant and Marine Corps captain or maybe a warrant officer that’s in there doing what we call a maintenance material control officer function. They are the on-scene production manager.
And then, that rolls up at each wing level. And then, those wing maintenance officers are liaisoning with one of our N42 directorates, our N423 readiness group basically reporting macro level readiness issues.
One of the reasons that we started refining our metrics is that we lacked solid connectivity between the metrics we were collecting and the outcomes on the flight line. We spent a pretty good chunk of time in 2001, 2002, and 2003 really refining that part of it.
SLD: And hence the meaning of the metrics.
Captain Kelly: What we’re trying to get down to is who owns the problem? And problem admiration is a global industry, but doing something about it, you know, that’s tough sometimes.
Aviation Ordnanceman 3rd Class Isaac Reyes (left) and Aviation Ordnanceman 2nd Class Charles Block prevent corrosion on an aircraft wing tip by performing daily maintenance checkups aboard USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71). (Credit: USN Visual Service 1/15/09)
We have tried to set up the metrics so if we’re seeing a problem we can work together and determine a solution. For example, we can see from our information that you’re fully manned. We can see from our information that all of your maintainers went through the appropriate schools. We can see from our information that you have the required number of aircraft to fly your flight schedule. We can see from our information that we gave you the financial resources to execute your flight schedule. Yet we can see that you’re struggling.
In a case such as this one it’s important to get the unit’s perspective—so we know we need to reach out and hear their story because even with the right allocation of resources the unit is still struggling. On the other hand, if you’re having a hard time meeting a flight schedule and we can see that, because you’re supposed to have eight airplanes at this point in the cycle, and we can only resource you with five then we understand we have an action to correct the distribution of inventory or other material issue that is driving the deficit.
And we know why and you know why, and we know that’s on us. So now, we’ve got to go beyond the squadron, because that’s not that squadron’s issue, that’s my issue. Because we own the inventory and distribution, and we’ve got to go and figure out what went wrong in the system, that drove the resource imbalance.
Or if we anticipate, we’re not going to properly resource them, what’s our plan B or our plan C or our plan D? So, we tried to get out of the blame game about ten years ago, and just try to solve problems together.
SLD: And presumably, depending on how the metrics are managed, you can take it down to the squad level or you could say it’s almost like a car manufacturer have a recall on a particular part.
Captain Kelly: Sometimes there are fleet issues. Step one is, what is the maintenance plan with this program? And are we executing it appropriately? It might be that there was a flaw in the training; we missed something. There was a configuration change and, we didn’t pick up on it, so now we haven’t been training people effectively. So, it’s not really the item that is poorly reliable, but the sustainment plan for the item is not up-to-date.
Or it might be that there’s an issue with a piece of test equipment that’s failing to find a particular fault mode. If it’s a piece of automated test equipment, it may have an inability to accurately call out a PCOF or a primary cause of failure. Sometimes the ambiguity group of the test program set is too broad, so I’m just cycling through subcomponents.
So, step one is, what did we tell ourselves we were going to do? And can we verify that we’re executing the maintenance plan correctly?
If we’re verifying that we’re executing the maintenance plan correctly and we see that we still have the reliability issue, then we bring in our fleet support team engineers and logisticians– they would’ve been working with us along the way anyway. And they’re doing the parallel analysis.
And so, they might come back and say that they see a design problem or unanticipated issue and that they’ve worked with the OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer), and we’re going to cut this change in as a forward fit during a depot overhaul or during manufacture. And then, the big decision sometimes is, should it be do a forced retro fit or a retro fit through attrition. This decision depends upon how long we think it’ll take, criticality of the system, i.e. safety, and the cost.
But we have our Naval Aviation Enterprise construct, and within the enterprise we have type/model/series teams. And the type/model/series teams are set up to have all the necessary competencies present. You’ll have fleet people, you’ll have the depot enterprise, and the industrial piece, and you’ll have the NAVAIR fleet support team with engineers and logisticians. And so when we run across a problem, we’ll set up a subset of the type model series team, and they’ll run with it with an integrated analysis and then come up with sort of an integrated conclusion.
In some cases, we can attack the problem with training. In other cases, it may be we really do a need a design change, and here’s what it is.
For example, we had a nose landing gear strut problem. We had a title 10, section 2474 public/private partnership with Boeing and our Navy Fleet Readiness Centers in support of the Super Hornet. For the Super Hornet Boeing has a PBL contract with the USN and then as an adjunct to this PBL Boeing hired the Navy depots as a subcontractor under Title 10. So when I was at FRC Southwest we were doing touch labor for Boeing. Great relationship, fun to work with those guys. One of the things that we overhauled was the nose landing gear strut for the Super Hornet.
Well, by design, the workload standard for the strut overhaul was X, and the material kit was Y, and this package was relatively modest as landing gear struts are pretty straightforward. But when the retrograde struts were coming in, we found more internal material degradation than there should’ve been. Our landing gear artisan in the shop over in building 472 had great observations about what was occurring.
One day when I was visiting the shop to learn more about this problem he said, “See this little floating piston? This little floating piston shouldn’t move around, but it moves around. And because it moves around, it gets dinged on, and when it gets dinged on, it comes apart in tiny pieces, and these pieces score the piston all over the place inside. So instead of a relatively inexpensive repair at the depot, it turns into a requirement for much more material to accomplish the overhaul and it’s very expensive. And oh by the way, since that failure mode wasn’t accounted for upfront, we don’t have the material.”
So now, we end up in kind of a snowball of shortages because the item is failing in a way that wasn’t accounted for. Therefore, there’s no demand signal through the supply chain to spare for this material. The guy out in the field, okay, he can’t fix this issue; the organizational level technician is not responsible for a design issue on a strut. The next thing is okay, what’s the redesign? And the smart folks on the Hornet industry team came up with the redesign, a 24-stake bearing, which is forward-fit on new production and then we’ll work on everything that goes through the intermediate level and the FRC and, we’ll kind of catch up.
In short, through forward-fit and attrition replacement, we’ll get that problem taken care of probably in the next 12-18 months and our response was accelerated because we had a total team approach to this issue and our experienced Navy maintenance personnel at the depot were part of the early warning network on this item.
In short, through forward-fit and attrition replacement, we’ll get that problem taken care of probably in the next 12-18 months and our response was accelerated because we had a total team approach to this issue and our experienced Navy maintenance personnel at the depot were part of the early warning network on this item.
SLD: You clearly target the priority or choke point maintenance problems. You have organized your metrics and your manpower to try to align your efforts to shape maximal effect and I would assume this is a process in constant motion?
Captain Kelly: You remember when everybody was a kid and we had the JC Whitney catalog. And you know, you were flipping through the JC Whitley catalog trying to figure out what you’re going to do.
The JC Whitney catalog for Naval/Aviation, across those 2,600 airplanes, is about 13,000 repairable parts. That’s it. 13,000 repairable parts that we touch. Out of those 13,000 repairable parts that we touch, 500 of them consume 67-percent of my budget for repairs. So, we don’t have to go count all the grains of sand on the beach to know where we’re spending the taxpayer’s money.
If we go to the consumable side– screws, washers, resistors, and nickel/dime stuff–our JC Whitney catalog is about 125,000 items. The top 10,000 consumes 95-percent of the money budgeted for these type of items.
So we’ve got a pot of 500 places where we want to go look, and a pot of 10,000 places where we want to go look. And we’ve got 100,000 people helping us that are in Naval Aviation. So we can work this problem.
SLD: You’re defining your sustaining and maintenance plan, on the one hand, you’ve got the grains of sand over here. So in a certain sense, you’re creating some decision-making tools.
Captain Kelly: Absolutely. And when we look across the enterprise we want to know why is this item costing us something? Is it costing us because we’re consuming a lot of material? Or is it costing us something because the actual reliability is not matching the planned reliability. We also have the ability to parcel out the problems to the right organization in the logistics and sustainment enterprise to do something.
Not everybody has to work every problem.
SLD: Presumably, you have a common IT system throughout?
Captain Kelly: We use the same software across the fleet, which was one of the programs I was on about a decade ago. We have the same maintenance management software, all Navy and Marine Corps squadrons all around the world. And it’s one of the best products you could ever have.
SLD: What is the biggest maintenance challenge you see facing the USN-USMC aviation team moving forward?
Captain Kelly: Without question, the challenge of managing the transition from the old to the new platforms coming on line in the service is the biggest challenge.
We’re changing out 100-percent of our platforms. At the same time, we’re at one of our highest operational tempos. For instance, we’re getting P8s for P3s, we’re getting Growlers for Prowlers, and we’re getting Super Hornets for Legacy jets. We’re getting E2Ds for E2Cs and we’ll get F-35s thrown into the mix.
So, everything’s changing out, so from our perspective, we have to work with NAVAIR to make sure that the maintenance plans and the constructs for logistics and sustainment are well grounded for everything that’s coming, while we’re managing everything that is already here and deployed. And then, we have to manage to do the swap outs of airplanes and the retraining of personnel in a fashion so that we don’t impact the operational schedule.
SLD: And the problem is that when one swap outs, historically, whether it be a commercial fleet or military fleet, it is more expensive in the transition. You’ve got to manage the old as you bring in the new.
Captain Kelly: And that’s why we’re pressurized to do it kind of as quickly as we can, because we don’t want to eat cost in two spots at once.
05/29/2011: U.S. Marines of Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 264 (VMM-264) carry out their duties in effort to maintain their MV-22 Ospreys for continued mission readiness to support troops on the ground, Camp Bastion, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, May 24, 2011.VMM-264 carries out a variety of air support missions for the ground units operating in Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.
Sudan’s northern-based government in Khartoum has forcefully seized control of the disputed Abyei region, risking renewed flare-up of the civil war just when the South Sudan is about to become an independent country on July 9. Northern President Omar al-Bashir had warned that his government would not recognize South Sudan’s scheduled independence declaration unless it accepted Khartoum’s possession of Abyei.
The move occurred just when a U.N. Security Council delegation arrived in Khartoum to discuss the Abyei issue with Bashir’s government. Although both sides claimed the other fired the first shot, the North has exploited the opportunity to seize the territory by force and confront the international community with a fait accompli. The United States has called on President Bashir and southern Sudanese President Salva Kiir to agree on ways to reestablish the ceasefire, resume implementing the peace agreement, and restart negotiations on a political settlement regarding Abyei’s status.
The Northern Sudanese Armed Forces recent seizure of the main town in Sudan’s disputed oil region of Abyei could disrupt what until now has been a fairly successful independence referendum in South Sudan. It underscores the imperative of undertaking urgent actions to address other unresolved issues that risk renewed fighting and a resumption of their only recently suspended two-decades’ old conflict. After several rounds of protracted talks, the Government of Sudan, led by the National Congress Party (NCP), and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) agreed that Southern Sudan would hold a referendum from January 9 to January 15, 2011, to determine whether it would become its’ own state or remain part of a united Sudan. The referendum was part of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended decades of conflict between the SPLM and the Sudanese Government and its sponsored militias.
Unfortunately, several important questions that could still derail a successful transition to independence have failed to been resolved by the CPA and subsequent rounds of talks. A litany of issues remains in dispute, such as future borders and citizenship, public administration and local security, economics and energy, as well as the international relations of the two new countries. Measures have been undertaken by the international community in order to ensure that levels of violence seen prior to the CPA did not recur, but the global response has been constrained by various considerations. Khartoum has taken steps to minimize the capabilities and mandates of the international institutions that have been active in Sudan, as it had done during the Darfur crisis in Western Sudan. Instead of being able to deploy a robust peacekeeping force for the referendum, the foreign military role was largely been limited to logistical and organizational support. Second, the role of the African Union was further constrained due to both the SPLM’s suspicions and the 2000 Constitutive Act of the African Union (AU).
The United Nations adopted a position of neutrality toward the referendum. It provided only technical and logistical assistance to the Southern Sudan Referendum Commission. To monitor the situation in the lead-up to the referendum, UNMIS had 10,000 peacekeepers under its command in Southern Sudan. The UNMIS sought to increase its personnel in Sudan as a hedge against potential violence, but the Sudanese government objected to a proposal by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to increase its numbers by 2,000 more troops to create a buffer zone between North and South.To ensure referendum overseers were well versed on election procedures and standards, the UN Integrated Referendum and Electoral Division (UNIRED) hosted workshops across south Sudan. By airlifting voting materials into areas inaccessible by road, UNMIS provided voting materials to more people. UNMIS personnel enhanced physical security while also rendering logistical and organizational support. Some 16,000 Southern Sudan Police Service officers were trained by UNMIS in security procedures, such as riot control techniques for the referendum.
The United Nations also played an important role as a forum for galvanizing international action. When the referendum appeared to be in trouble, world leaders exploited the occasion of the annual UN General Assembly meeting in New York to publicize the need to accelerate preparations for the issue. On September 24, 2010, President Barack Obama and others highlighted the importance of securing a free and fair referendum ballot in South Sudan and laying the groundwork for the period after the vote. In the case of the South Sudan, the UN departed from its previous strategy in areas of conflict. Instead of reacting to a conflict that has already emerged, such as in Darfur, the United Nations took preventive steps to avert conflict by deploying more traditional peacekeeping forces in roles such as troop deployment and training local police forces and by ensuring an efficient and transparent electoral process. The future of UNMIS has become unclear now that Sudan is in the process of splitting, though perhaps one or both new states would favor some kind of continued UN military presence along their new border or to assist with demilitarization and de-mining as well as border security and confidence-building.
Many international institutions have been active in the South Sudan referendum process. The EU has provided general humanitarian aid to people affected by conflict and facilitated the referendum process with its peace-building initiatives. These measures have included rendering assistance to nomadic groups and strengthening relations along the north-south divide in the run-up to the referendum. Furthermore, the European Council joined with the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to address Sudan’s debt burden, estimated at more than $30 billion. Beyond financial support, the EU has supplemented the UNMIS electoral observation mission by deploying an EU Election-Observation Mission consisting of 110 observers from 27 European countries, in addition to non-members Canada, Norway, and Switzerland. The observers were deployed in different parts of South Sudan, where they documented the referendum process and conducted meetings with both official institutions and NGOs.
The African Union’s Constitutive Act constrained its role in the South Sudan, which “respect[s] borders existing on achievement[s] of independence.” This wording reflects the organization’s prime principle of supporting Africa’s post-colonial borders while promoting integration and unity among Africans. The SPLM was aware of this orientation, which was reinforced by AU members’ fear that allowing South Sudan to become independent would encourage secessionist aspirations in other African countries. It led the SPLM to question whether the organization could remain genuinely neutral—and play the role of “honest broker”–when overseeing a process that could result in the partition of Africa’s largest country. The AU’s most visible role in Sudan was its participation in the United Nations Africa Union Mission 6 in Darfur (UNAMID). UNAMID’s primary objective is to protect civilians within Darfur, but the mandate also includes supporting the political processes in Sudan as well as monitoring agreements such as the CPA, which encompasses the January referendum. However, UNAMID had no mandate beyond Darfur, negating any presence in the South. Khartoum also constrained UNAMID’s resources, which hindered its effectiveness.
The AU Peace and Security Council (PSC) established the AU High-Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP) in 2008 to examine the Darfur situation and recommend how to promote accountability and reconciliation there. This panel was led by several former African presidents: Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, Pierre Buyoya of Burundi, and Abdulsalami Abubakar of Nigeria. The PSC later expanded the panel’s mandate to encompass areas beyond Darfur and “assist the Sudanese parties in implementing the CPA and related processes.” The AUHIP was perhaps less useful inside Sudan than internationally. Due to the AU’s status as the lead security institution in Africa, other foreign actors sought to collaborate with the AUHIP, thereby helping promote a coherent international approach. In June 2010, moreover, the NCP and the SPLM agreed that the AUHIP would assist them in determining their relations after the referendum.
These international institutions will now need to work with important foreign governments, including the United States, to help resolve four sets of overlapping issues, including borders and citizenship, economics and energy, public administration and local security, and, finally, the international relations of the two new countries. One obvious question is where to draw the new north-south interstate border. About 320 kilometers are still under dispute in five areas, the most important being the Abyei region, where the issue of which state to join proved so explosive that the parties cancelled a parallel referendum scheduled in January 2011 on that issue. Postponement of this ballot was caused by who should vote in the referendum. Misseriya nomads move into the region, where the Ngok Dinka tribe resides year round, from the north to obtain water and food for their animals. No easy solution exists. It might be useful to consider creative ways in which the region’s inhabitants could have dual nationality status.
In addition to Abyei, the other four disputed border regions include that separating Renk county in Upper Nile from the north’s White Nile state, that between the south’s Unity state and the north’s Southern Kordofan, that between the south’s Bahr el-Ghazal and Darfur in the north, and the border between Western Bahr el-Ghazal and Southern Darfur. Armed clashes in any of these five regions, but especially Abyei, could easily escalate into a wider North-South war due to the large number of troops concentrated nearby and the fact that the parties to the local dispute sometimes receive assistance from external sources in southern or northern Sudan.Beyond demarcating the boundaries, the actors must decide how “hard” to make the North-South border. One extreme would involve a heavily fortified frontier that very few individuals or resources could cross, similar to the arrangement after Eritrea seceded from Ethiopia. On the other hand, a more laissez-faire border regime would allow individuals without visas, animals and other resources to cross the border with minimal regulatory impediments. The second “softer” approach would encourage mutually beneficial economic development and reciprocity, such as joint trans-border projects. Such an arrangement would also respect the rights of nomads’ animals to freely graze, a possibility precluded by instituting a heavily secured border similar.
A related issue is the question of what citizenship can southerners living in the north and Arabs residing in the south obtain. The worst outcome would be the deprivation of any citizenship for individuals, rendering them stateless. Another bad outcome involves expelling or discriminating against individuals based on their race and ethnicity. The ideal solution would involve establishing a means whereby individuals could receive some form of dual citizenship with assurances that their rights would be protected like other citizens. Economics and energy are the second set of issues. Wherever they draw their new frontiers, one certainty is that both regimes will depend heavily on the revenue they earn from oil sales. Oil revenue accounts for almost all the revenue of South Sudan, and more than half the budget of the Khartoum government. Under the CPA, the two sides divided the money they earned from the oil sales. When they become two separate countries, their central governments will have to establish a mechanism by which oil revenues could flow to both states equally. Perhaps more importantly, Sudan’s possession of the one lone oil pipeline—which connects the landlocked south to Port Sudan to the Red Sea in the North—underscores the need for the nations’ leaders to reach an agreement to split the related fees involved in its maintenance and use.
Although they will naturally contest access to this resource, the oil sector also creates a form of interdependence between the two states. North Sudan would logically seek a means to gain some of the South’s oil takings, whereas the South will desire access to the North’s oil transportation networks—at least until it can construct its own pipeline through Ethiopia or Kenya, or devise a way of creating a South Sudanese mining industry with the capacity to exhume would could very well be very lucrative natural resource deposits. It is believed that South Sudan rests above potential deposits of gold, diamonds, copper, and coltan, but conflict and general disarray has impeded excavation efforts. Until the South is capable of either building a pipeline or untapping what may lie beneath South Sudanese territory, both regimes would benefit from sustaining conditions that stimulate investment by oil and extraction companies. Indeed, a time must come when the two regimes can obtain and dole out Sudan’s holdings in a fair manner (such as water and state-owned companies) and dispatch its liabilities, on top of the aforementioned vast international debt, amounting roughly $30 billion. SPLM representatives have refused demands to deal with Sudan’s debt, given their suspicion that Khartoum utilized money loaned to the nation in order to pay for its war against the south.
One of these essential benign conditions potential investors look for is effective public administration and local security. As newly independent countries, both the North and the South will need to adopt new constitutions and hold new national elections. The South has had some six years to prepare for independence in July when the six-month transition period ends. They have succeeded in converting their militia into an army with foreign training, but they still need help with education, agriculture, and the training of an adequate corps of public administrators and police. Persistent political and ethnic rivalries within the SPLM leadership and among the South’s 50 tribes could present a problem. For example, in 2009, autonomous militias within the SPLM violently clashed with one another. But the immediate problem is the North’s seizure of Abyei, which threatens to undermine the entire hard-won peace process.
06/02/2011 – In Mid-May, Second Line of Defense sat down with Pravin Sawhney, editor of Force Magazine, the highly regard Indian monthly on national security and defense. Sawheny provided his interpretation of the decision to downselect European aircraft and its potential impacts.
Sawney: This competition is worth easily about $10 billion and more, and as rightly pointed out as we were going through this competition, that it is more than a platform. It’s about building relationships between the nations.
In the downselect, both American aircrafts are out of the race. The Indian Air Force has made it very clear that is a core combat platform. The key word is “combat.” We’ll use it against Pakistan if a war breaks out, and the Air Force is not really sure about a guaranteed product support if they chose the U.S. platform.
SLD: And that’s because of the past embargoes?
Sawhney: No. It is because U.S. has as much as a relationship with India as it has with Pakistan.
In case of a war, the apprehension in the Indian Air Force was that we might just be denied the product support at that critical juncture when we need it.
SLD: And so, put simply here, if the Indian Air Force was asked by the Indian government to defend Indian interests against Pakistan, there is concern that the U.S. would be in the position to make the ultimate decision?
Sawhney: Exactly. And the second point was what sort of a technology can the U.S. really give us. Because, as you know, U.S. is one country, and rightly so from their perspective, they have a lot of agreements that need to be signed before defense cooperation can commence and the length and depth of that relationship then discussed.
India has its own sensitivity about signing these agreements. I think the reason is that because we have never signed such agreements with any country, any major party that we have dealt with, so, there is sensitivity about where exactly will we end up with the Americans if we sign this.
What sort of technology can be given, we were not sure.
And the third reason I would say is that, see, this aircraft that we buy today stays with us for 35, 40 years. So, what sort of upgrades can we do? Will the Americans help us in those upgrades, or not help us in those upgrades? That was another apprehension. So, the long and short is, right now we have the Eurofighter and we have the Rafael in the race.
SLD: What happens next?
Sawhney: There are three quick processes that they have to go through. There is a commercial bid and there is an offset bid, and then there is talk about transfer of technology, what can be done and how it will be done. And, of course, after that, we need a final price, L1, as we call it. Again, as far as L1 is concerned, I don’t think it is sacrosanct because all these things, the offset, the technology, they all will play a very important role. Life cycle costs, these all are very important things.
We are at a stage now where I would personally say when you talk of this Eurofighter consortium; you are basically talking of two big countries. You’re talking of Germany and you’re talking of UK. So, what sort of cooperation they have within themselves? Can they even meet at the target of the AESA radar? Because as we understand, that there is a slippage in the government’s funding of this radar. Can they meet the 2013 deadline when they want the AESA to be operational?
But the long and short is as of now, it looks like that the Indian government and the Indian Air Force, they are very keen that they sign this at the earliest, this agreement. And I would say that by September this contract should get signed.
SLD: What could be the impact on building a new manufacturing capability in India and what are the prospects for this bargain really creating a new capability in the market space of an Indo-European capability? What’s your thought about that?
Sawney: We have had decades of cooperation, both with the French as well as with the UK. So, these are the countries that are known. These are the countries that have given us combat aircraft. We know what they can give and the time frame in which they can give it. I think it will be a slow process, and more so, not for what they can give us; equally so, for how much and in what time frame we can absorb the technology that they can give us; how we can build up the infrastructure and in what time frame.
But, again, to make that basic point that India has worked with these countries on a combat aircraft in the past and that is important to India.
06/02/2011 – Marines with Motor Transportation Maintenance Platoon, Maintenance Company, 2nd Marine Logistics Group (Forward), repair uparmored vehicles for units supporting International Security Assistance Forces Operations throughout Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
Harold Guckin during the interview, April 2011 (Credit: SLD)
05/19/2011 – Over the next few weeks, we are presenting interviews with the folks who make Tanker Airlift Control Center (TACC) happen at the operational level. Several of the pieces of the TACC puzzle come together at the command level. But less focused upon by outsiders is the management of the pieces. These interviews fill in some of those details.
A key element of TACC execution is its ability to leverage commercial air assets and to run the USAF variant of FEDEX. This effort is referred to as airlift planning for channel missions. During the roundtable, Harold Guckin led the discussion of channel missions. The channel missions are the regularly scheduled flights that fly a fixed route and operate on a fixed schedule.
Guckin: The XOG directorate receives TRANSCOM requirements and formulates a routing, like FedEx would do in order to service their customers in the most efficient way possible. Most of XOG’s planning is done based on historical data. Just like FedEx doesn’t have any projection of what’s coming in their door or of what a customer’s going to ship, planning is done off assumptions from the past.
SLD: So you’re laying down your map of expectant behavior as the basis for planning?
Guckin: Yes. We lay out a basic plan. We then go into the barrel and figure out how many organic tails they can give us. We evaluate how much outsized cargo we might have based on historic data (i.e. cargo too big to fit on a 747; items such as 20-foot pipes). We then plan the effort to augment our gray tail forces with civilian contract charters. Right now about 80% of our lift is commercial vs. organic.
SLD: You have gotten your projected demand from historic rates of need for delivery of certain categories of equipment. You’re going in to the barrel and you are inputting your expected demand structure forecast over the next couple weeks. I would imagine that you’d be a lower priority if a higher priority comes in, so now you’ve got to handle the slack and the complaints from theater that “I didn’t get my pipes” or whatever. So, you’re trying to manage the slack to meet your customer’s requirements.
Guckin: Correct. And sometimes commercial assets are available and sometimes they are not. You get around Christmas time when commercial business is making more money and they don’t bid on a DoD route.
Working co-ordination on the TACC operations floor (Credit: TACC)
SLD: How is commercial contracting handled and managed?
Guckin: The contracting is done by TRANSCOM. We do a fixed buy for an annual amount of tonnage of freight, projected for a year out. When they contract with us a lot of times, we will want them to do a round trip, to bring cargo over and back, but they will only bid on the cargo going one way. They will wish to use the return trip to go to places they go to pick up commercial freight.
SLD: What’s the biggest challenge you face? It sounds to me like managing the shortfalls in daily activity might be the issue.
Guckin: It is. The biggest challenge is meeting the unknown surges of cargo. Dealing with shortfalls on airlift that you were planning to have (i.e. the gray tails), but which you don’t get because of higher priorities or maintenance impacts. We can’t give you an airplane that we don’t have to fly.
05/18/2011 – In his May 29, 2009 remarks announcing the results of his cybersecurity policy review, President Barack Obama said that he had turned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), as well as the CIA and the Secret Service, when hackers managed to gain access to his campaign-related email messages. Still, the FBI’s unique role can be overlooked when national security analysts contemplate cyber issues.
The FBI identifies countering cyber threats, along with counterterrorism and counter intelligence, as its three main priorities. As in the counterterrorist domain, the FBI’s role in cybersecurity is unique in that it is both a law enforcement and national security agency. These dual missions arose from the 9/11 al-Qaeda terrorist attacks within the United States, which the FBI failed to identify and prevent in time.
Previously, the bureau had prioritized its anti-crime mission in both terrorism and the cyber domain. The FBI’s Computer Analysis and Response Team (CART) became operational in 1991. It focused on criminal activities such as computer fraud and the sale of counterfeit software. This law enforcement mission still can often lead the FBI to advocate a divergent response to cybersecurity threats from that of the other main Cybersecurity agencies.
In particular, whereas the other agencies typically want to shut down a cyber attack as soon as possible, the FBI often wants to allow it to operate for a while longer until the bureau has acquired enough evidence to win a contested court case. The FBI’s cyber threat personnel are also more interested in identifying the person behind the keyboard so that the individual can be prosecuted than the other U.S. cybersecurity agencies, who have effectively given up hope of being able to attribute a cyber incident to a particular individual.
The FBI’s broad mission can enable the bureau to detect malicious cyber threats initially overlooked by other agencies. “The FBI is both a law enforcement and national security agency, which means we can and must address every angle of a cyber case,” FBI Director Robert Mueller explained in 2009. “This is critical, because what may start as a criminal investigation may lead to a national security threat. … At the start of a cyber investigation, we do not know whether we are dealing with a spy, a company insider, or an organized criminal group.” It can happen, Mueller added, that, “Something that looks like an ordinary phishing scam may be an attempt by a terrorist group to raise funding for an operation.”
The FBI has developed other unique capabilities and partnerships for fighting cyber criminals. A Cyber Division at the FBI’s Washington Headquarters aims “to address cyber crime in a coordinated and cohesive manner.” The FBI also has specially trained cyber squads based at FBI headquarters as well as in each of the FBI’s 56 field offices. These employ more than 1,000 specially trained agents, analysts, and digital forensic analysts who protect and investigate computer intrusions, theft of intellectual property and personal information, incidents of child pornography and exploitation, and online fraud. The squads run complex undercover operations and share information with federal, state, and local law enforcement and intelligence partners. Furthermore, FBI Cyber Action Teams “travel around the world on a moment’s notice to assist in computer intrusion cases” and “gather vital intelligence that helps us identify the cyber crimes that are most dangerous to our national security and to our economy.”
Throughout the United States, 93 Computer Crimes Task Forces “combine state-of-the-art technology and the resources of our federal, state, and local counterparts.” Presidential directive gives the FBI the lead role in the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force, which includes 18 law enforcement and intelligence agencies whose members try to predict and prevent cyber attacks. The task force operates through Threat Focus Cells—smaller groups of agents, officers, and analysts from different agencies, focused on particular threats. For instance, the Botnet Focus Cell investigates high-priority botnets and attempts to reverse-engineer them to identify and stop those running the botnets. The FBI also has a lead role in investigating the unauthorized disclosure of classified or proprietary information, especially insider threat capabilities to gather data through unauthorized disclosure as well as the recent WikiLeaks incident.
(Credit: Bigstock)
The FBI tries to cooperate with foreign government law enforcement agencies to address international cybercrime. Within the United States, the Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section, its Office of International Affairs, and Assistant U.S. attorneys throughout the country, has worked tirelessly to create relationships and coordinated investigations with our international partners. In addition, the FBI itself has embedded specialized agents in the police units of several foreign countries who focused on cyber issues. These agents currently work in Estonia, Ukraine, Romania, Colombia, and the Netherlands and the FBI hopes to establish additional embeds in the future.
Furthermore, the FBI also has more than 60 legal attaché offices in foreign countries that cooperate with foreign law governments on a range of international criminal activities, including cybercrime. The FBI claims that these international partnerships have contributed to the arrest of hundreds of cybercriminals who have engaged in transnational criminal activities against Americans.
The FBI has cooperated with foreign governments on a range of cyber-related operations. The FBI has collaborated with the Chinese Ministry for Public Security to convict some individual criminals found producing and distributing pirated Microsoft software worth several billions of dollars. In October 2009, the FBI worked with Egyptian authorities to dismantle a computer intrusion and money laundering scheme operating in the United States and Egypt. In March 2010 the FBI closed the Mariposa information-stealing botnet that infected millions of computers, from Fortune 1000 companies to major banks. In collaboration with law enforcement agencies in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Turkey, the FBI dismantled Darkmarket, a sophisticated cybercrime syndicate that used the Internet to buy and sell stolen financial data. After several American companies threatened to cut cyber ties with Romania because of the rampant hacking originating from that country, the Romanian government launched a comprehensive partnership between the FBI and the Romanian National Police that resulted in the arrest of more than one hundred Romanian nationals.
Critics complain this cooperative orientation makes the FBI avoid confronting foreign governments over cybersecurity issues. They note that some foreign officials may be working for cyber criminals, or providing sanctuary for cybercriminals that pledge to leave their host nation alone. They further warn that some foreign governments may actually sponsor seeming cybercrime groups that actually are engaged in surveying of potential Internet battlefields.
In his book Cyber War, Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism chief with the National Security Council, writes that foreign nations have established “trapdoors” in electronic industrial-control systems in the form of nearly invisible software “rootkits.” They could give the attacker access and control over industries’ computer networks, which could later be used to disrupt or destroy operations – for example, of the US power grid. Critics such as former Clarke want the FBI to treat cybersecurity the same way it treats terrorist financing or WMD proliferation activities—pressure foreign governments to enforce model cybersecurity laws and crack down on cyberthreats or lose access to U.S. banks and other U.S. economic services. They also recommend that U.S. officials try to expand U.S. unilateral sanctions into more comprehensive economic sanctions.
According to Symantec’s most recent Internet Security Threat Report, private businesses are already under sustained assault in the cyber world due to three trends: (1) malicious activity is increasingly flowing out of countries where broadband and information technology penetration is growing the fastest (2) so-called “advanced persistent threats” focused on large enterprises are becoming more common as thieves seek customer data, financial information and intellectual property assets; and (3) mass-market attacks—those that small businesses and consumers usually fall prey to—continue to evolve in their sophistication.
Yet, private businesses sometimes are wary of sharing too much information with the government for fear their proprietary information will leak or that they could become liable for any flawed policies. They also have an incentive to keep cyber incidents secret so as not to alarm their customers and investors. Historically, the most effective public-private partnerships have had:
Inclusive private sector membership, unified in the pursuit of common goals
A single responsible and accountable government partner organization
Clearly delineated roles for both public and private entities.
Information sharing with the private sector must be a two-way street and sensitive commercial data must be explicitly protected. Confidentiality and liability protection will encourage the private sector to implement desired activities.
Collective national cybersecurity can only be effectively addressed through a partnership approach between the government and private industry. The government has the legal authority required to organize markets, enforce laws and protect citizens’ privacy and property. On the other hand, the vast majority of cyberspace infrastructure is privately owned and operated. Private industry has most of the expertise in the field of cybersecurity as well as the various critical infrastructure sectors that could be threatened by cyber threats. Whereas the federal government will have the most comprehensive knowledge of potential terrorist threats, the operators of the private sector networks will likely first know when something is amiss with them.
