USMC Captain Eric Schmidt sentenced to 6 years by federal judge for skimming nearly $2 million using fraudulent military equipment orders.
Would you like some Bubba Gump Shrimp?: The US Defense Commissary Agency is buying up Gulf seafood to serve at 72 base commissaries along the East Coast to boost the Gulf’s fishing industry.
L-3 Communications to redeem $650 million in notes due 2015.
US administration has been slow to implement cybersecurity protection for critical infrastructure, CSIS says [PDF].
DJ Elliott is a retired USN Intelligence Specialist (22 years active duty) who has been analyzing and writing on Iraqi Security Forces developments since 2006. His Iraqi Security Forces Order of Battle is an open-source compilation that attempts to map and detail Iraqi units and equipment, as their military branches and internal security forces grow and mature. While “good enough for government use” is not usually uttered as a compliment, US Army TRADOC has maintained permission to use the ISF OOB for their unclassified handouts since 2008.
This compilation is reproduced here with full permission. It offers a set of updates highlighting recent changes in the ISF’s composition and development, followed by the full updated ISF OOBs in PDF format.
After a long series of combat losses riding in flat Humvees, the US military finally began to get serious about the #1 killer in theater, ordering and fielding blast-resistant vehicles that could survive land mine attacks. The MRAP program, and derivative efforts like the MMPV engineer vehicles and MRAP All Terrain Vehicles (M-ATV), have ordered over 25,000 vehicles since then, from a variety of firms.
Each firm has arrangements for field support of their vehicles, and also handles upgrade contracts. Over a number of years, those contracts usually grow to be larger than the original purchase prices. Nor are these the only maintenance niches to be filled. Some immediate repairs and support, depth maintenance, and maintenance coordination are all possibilities for internal and contractor personnel. ManTech International has helped fill some of these roles since 2003…
Latest updates: Unit standup; CH-47D lost; Canada to sell its Chinooks again?
Afghanistan drop-off
In December 2005, “Canada Purchases $200M in Equipment for Operation ARCHER in Afghanistan” noted 2 things: the wide variety of emergency equipment that Canada was buying prior to its second Afghan deployment, and the critical omission of battlefield support helicopters from that list. Canada’s absence of helicopter support capability would prove costly in the field, and came up again during Canada’s delayed RFP for 16 CH-47F helicopters. This issue was also discussed in Parliament. The January 2008 Manley Report [PDF] recommended that Parliamentary approval for Canada’s continued participation in the Afghan mission should hinge on having Canadian battlefield transport helicopters available by February 2009. Since Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party government was a Parliamentary minority government, that recommendation became a de facto requirement.
In order to be adequate, however, any helicopters bought would need to deliver useful loads despite Afghanistan’s performance-sapping hot weather season and consistent high altitudes. Which led to the problem: where to get the helicopters? The problem was simple. Available helicopters weren’t adequate. Adequate helicopters weren’t available.
