* US SecDef Chuck Hagel and Acquisition defense chief Frank Kendall met with Indian Prime Minister Modi. They have a list of potential cooperative projects, but Kendall downplayed [Reuters] expectations of any immediate major announcements. There’s indeed not much in yesterday’s official joint statement.
* Just in case, state-owned People’s Daily Online has a whole article dedicated to undermining prospects of a stronger relationship between the US and India. This patronizing tone will probably not be well received by Modi’s government. At least China finally acknowledged there had been a standoff between its troops and the Indian military in the Ladakh region, which now appears to have been resolved [Times of India].
* People’s Daily is not just patronizing but downright threatening in its editorial [in Chinese] chiding pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong [AFP]. The parallel [Quartz] with an editorial they ran before the Tiananmen crackdown is chilling, which is precisely the point.
* China is also increasingly tone deaf with Taiwan [The Diplomat].
UK Naval Sustainment
* The UK’s Ministry of Defence said it awarded £3.2 billion ($5.2B) in naval base investment, sustaining thousands of UK jobs. The Financial Times retorts that these 2 contracts consolidate earlier agreements and actually amount to a £350M ($567M) cut.
Procuring Software the Right Way – Or Not
* GitHub is a software company selling source control tools [note: we’re customers here at DID], so their agenda here is obvious, but they’re also very right about the self-defeating way the government orders software:
“Today, you’d be hard pressed to find a startup, small business, or respectable corporation that doesn’t version day-to-day changes to their software projects via a version control systems, and likewise expect their external contractors to do the same. […] Despite this shift, when the government asks for code, it still asks for emailed zip files. The contractor simply won’t get paid if they deliver the code in any other form. So government contractors take the software, maintained in a version control system, rich with context and pedigree, and simply gives the government a neutered snapshot of its current state, a tiny fraction of the work developed under the contract.”
* 4 hackers have been indicted by the US government for allegedly stealing software ranging from Xbox combat games to a program used in the real world by the US Army for Apache training.
Middle East
*Turkey moves to use force, establish safe haven in Syria and Iraq: USA Today | Hurriyet.
* The UK’s Royal Air Force executed its first strikes against ISIS in Iraq, launching a Paveway IV bomb from one of their Tornados. Video below:
