It’s about time:

The Security Council unanimously approved a resolution on Thursday calling for a U.N. political presence in conflict-wracked Somalia for the first time in years and setting conditions for the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers.

The resolution urged the United Nations to move its Somalia political office from Kenya to the Horn of Africa nation. The council also said it will consider deploying U.N. peacekeepers to replace African Union troops now on the ground, subject to progress in improving political reconciliation and security conditions.

It’s a move that’s possible only because, for six months now, the African Union (pictured) has kept Mogadishu’s seaport and airport open and safe from insurgents’ attacks.

(Photo: me)

100,000 dead, maybe. Millions more at risk of dehydration, disease, starvation and — God is laughing — a potential SECOND cyclone building off the coast of Burma, aka Myanmar, in the wake of the first deadly storm two weeks ago.

The world is poised to pour aid into the battered, backwards country, but the military government, the junta, sees spies in every aid group, ulterior motives in every bag of rice. The aid admitted so far is woefully inadequate, prompting U.K. Foreign Minister David Millband to accuse the junta of “malign neglect.”

How malign? “There are all the factors for a public health catastrophe which could multiply that [100,000] death toll by up to 15 times,” one health official told The Times.

Air Force Captain Trevor Hall (pictured) flew the first U.S. Air Force C-130 into Rangoon loaded with 30,000 pounds of water and mosquito nets. What he saw on approach shocked him. “You could see the devastation the country faced.” He describes flooding, trees knocked down … “It looked like not much had been done to get cleaned up. One of other weird things,” he adds, “as we got down to a thousand feet getting ready to come into the airport, we saw no traffic on the roads.”

The Air Force crew had briefed on all the worst scenarios, like being threatened or detained on the ground. But Hall says the junta troops, some wearing t-shirts, were thrilled to see them. They unloaded the supplies by hand and speeded them off in military trucks. Where that aid will wind up, no one really knows. The Scotsman says the junta is hoarding at least some of the supplies.

What’s the world going to do? Galrahn over at Information Dissemination — always one of the more astute observers of naval activity — points out

an international naval force slowly increasing at sea off Myanmar. Among the few ships to make port in Myanmar, India’s INS Rana (D52) delivered humanitarian supplies earlier this week. The captain was quoted saying the region is in “total devastation.” It will be interesting to see where the situation sits when [the U.S. military exercise in Thailand] Cobra Gold completes, because there will be some 15.000 U.S. and French Marines in that theater potentially supported by a rather large international naval armada.

(Photos: Air Force)

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In the wake of the May 1 U.S. assassination of Adan Hashi Ayrow, leader of the Somali Al-Shabab insurgent group, extremists in Mogadishu have explicitly target “foreigners” — meaning white people. That was the cue for my friend Alex Strick van Linschoten, who had been shuttling between Nairobi and Mogadishu, to bail:

Have decided to cancel my second trip to Somalia as the situation there has become too difficult to work … and I didn’t really fancy shelling out several thousand U.S. dollars to sit in a hotel in Mogadishu for a week.

But he managed to squeeze in a very balanced story in The Times:

Al-Shabab, now an autonomous rebel group which has added an explosive element to the combustible mix of Mogadishu’s militias, enforces strict sharia (Islamic law) and uses tactics imported from the global jihadi movement. As in Afghanistan, those who work or trade with the government risk being branded as spies or collaborators and beheaded as a warning to others.

Members of Al-Shabab deliver “night letters” to businessmen and others they wish to intimidate. One such letter listed “traitors assisting the occupiers who attacked the country” and warned of action if they did not make amends in 48 hours.

The group has overrun at least eight towns this year and taken control of large swathes of Mogadishu. It is behind a spate of roadside bombings directed at convoys of Ethiopian troops.

Journalists are routinely harassed. Editors and broadcasters received a letter from Al-Shabab last week instructing them to stop referring to the government and to say “puppets” instead. They were told to call dead insurgents “martyrs”.

The government’s writ does not run far and the Ethiopian forces propping it up are widely loathed. They come under attack as soon as they leave their heavily fortified bases. Meanwhile, some militias regarded as pro-government have received no wages for months and are switching their loyalties to whoever pays them.

Mogadishu is at the epicentre of the anarchy. The threats posed by rival militias mean that to travel in the city is to be in constant fear of ambush or bombing.

(Photo: me)

A couple months back, the Coast Guard contested my assertion in The Washington Times that problems with unsecured communications systems aboard the new flagship cutter Bertholf (pictured) would delay that ship’s entry into service. Three months later, the Coast Guard proudly announced that Bertholf had passed a rigorous Navy inspection … and would be accepted.

But the circumstances surrounding the over-budget vessel’s handover are worthy of the best mystery-novel whodunnit. For it appears that Coast Guard or contractor engineers, possibly acting on orders from Coastie HQ, engaged in some under-the-cover-of-darkness shenanigans to ensure the ship was ready for the Navy inspectors.

The first clue that something was amiss came when Defense News reported this little nugget in the wake of Bertholf’s May 8 acceptance:

[Admiral Gary] Blore took pains to point out that systems testing, grouped under the heading of “information assurance,” is continuing on the Bertholf and that, while progress is being made, the work won’t be completed for some time.

If the communications problems are ongoing, then why did the notoriously-strict Navy “InSurv” inspection board give Bertholf a pass?

Navy Times came up with a possible answer:

Much of the information systems gear was not yet installed when InSurv came onboard, according to the [Coast Guard’s acceptance] report, nor did Navy inspectors conduct full tests on the ship’s radios …

Aha! So the ship wasn’t even complete at the time of the inspection. That’s shady enough. But what if the ship had been complete … and then the Coast Guard realized that it would never pass in its current state? If that were the case, it would take some serious misdirection to avoid the inspectors’ sharp eyes. Unless, of course, the faulty comms systems somehow disappeared on the eve of the inspection, leaving the ship admittedly incomplete, but otherwise mostly flawless.

That’s exactly what happened, according to an anonymous tip relayed to me last week. The tipster, who left me no way to contact them, said that Bertholf’s communications systems had been fully installed as of this spring, but were yanked out of the ship in the weeks preceding InSurv’s visit … and then apparently re-installed after the inspectors had left.

In other words, the Coast Guard might have cheated on their biggest ship’s final exam, leaving us taxpayers owning a flawed, half-billion-dollar vessel. I want to know:

1) What were the circumstances surrounding the “un-installation” of Bertholf’s communications systems?

2) Who exactly yanked the systems, and when?

3) Who ordered the cheat, and what was their rationale?

I’ve asked the Coast Guard and the Navy, and both declined comment. So I’m putting out a call to all Coasties, Navy inspectors, shipyard workers and industry types who have any knowledge of the Bertholf inspections. Can anyone help me answer any of the questions outlined above? Better still, does anybody have documents or other proof to confirm the cheats? If so, contact me at david_axe-at-hotmail.com. I promise total protection and anonymity to any source.

It’s a mystery exactly how Bertholf went from hopelessly flawed to passing a Navy inspection with flying colors. Together we can solve it.

(Photo: Coast Guard)

Last week’s bloody food riots in Mogadishu, Somalia, were a sad setback for a part of the city that is vital to Somalia’s future. The riots, a spasm of the growing global food crisis, were centered on the central Bakara Market. Several people died when soldiers opened fire on protesters.

Prior to the late-2006 Ethiopian invasion of Somalia, Bakara was a thriving commercial center and the major engine for the country’s recovery from 15 years of war and anarchy. After the Ethiopians occupied Mogadishu, Bakara became the main battleground pitting the Ethiopians and their allies in the clan-based “transitional government” against insurgents from the Al Shabab nationalist group.

So much goods were left behind when vendors fled the market that many people had no choice but to sneak back into Bakara to salvage what they could. An associate of mine was caught in a crossfire while doing just that: one of his friends died. Every day, Mogadishu hospitals received a dozen patients wounded in Bakara. Even Ali Mohamed Siad, Bakara’s chairman, fled, leaving behind a once-thriving logistics business.

But now it appears Siad and others have negotiated a deal with the transitional government that might enable Bakara’s recovery. Just a couple weeks back Siad told me that government soldiers had withdrawn from the market: when they left, so did the insurgents, for the most part. Last week’s food riots signaled a slide back into violence, but hopefully not a permanent one.

So what was the deal Siad negotiated? According to one Somali pundit, Bakara businessmen agreed to hop off the fence and take a firm stand against Al Shabab, declining to harbor them or overlook their activities:

The Mogadishu business communities … who are mainly represented by the Bakara Market, had finally seen the light by taking full responsibility for the security of their own interests: the unfettered daily transactions of business and its bottom-line profit and livelihood making. In doing so, the terrorists are denied any support from those quarters; as a result, no attacks from in and around the Bakara Market against the government/ally begets no military response from the government.

Obviously, this has been a 360-degrees turn around by the Bakara business establishment from their early days of being duplicitous with bandits or feigning ignorance about their own collusion with the terrorists; what made them change is the damage they had incurred by the crushing firepower of the Somali government.

I’m not convinced that Siad and his associates were truly in “collusion” with Al Shabab — it’s more likely they were simply trying to appear neutral in a bloody fight between equally unpopular combatants. Nor am I convinced that the transitional government’s “firepower” motivated any changes of heart among merchants.

Based on my conversations with Siad, I think Bakara merchants — and many Somalis, for that matter — are simply tired of war. With the African Union peacekeepers growing in strength and effectiveness, and with the U.S. (for better or worse) targeting extremists south of Mogadishu, it probably seems a safer bet these days to side with the transitional government and international forces than to balance between them and the insurgents. It’s risky, to be sure: U.S. air strikes could backfire by stoking hatred of foreigners; and the transitional government just might turn out to be the worst kind of ally: brutal, unreliable and ineffective. And to the individual businessmen who now oppose Al Shabab, there is the risk of violent reprisal.

Still, there’s reason to hope. Bakara just might return to its pre-invasion vitality, driving slow but steady improvement in Somalis’ daily lives.

(Photo: me)

U.S. Navy port visits are some of the most important, yet largely unheralded here, tools of day-to-day international diplomacy. In the States you only ever hear about them if they go bad, as in the case of China blocking a planned visit by the USS Kitty Hawk aircraft carrier. But overseas, even uneventful visits by American warships can be cause for heady press coverage.

Case in point: the USS Stethem destroyer dropped in on the Russian port of Vladivostok last week to help the Russian military commemorate the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany. The Navy Times quoted the ship’s commander:

“Our visit to Vladivostok is an outward gesture of the United States and Russian Federation’s commitment to a peaceful and stable Asian Pacific region,” Cmdr. Paul Lyons, Stethem commanding officer, said …

Russia’s Zvedza News, by contrast, was a bit more sensationalist, according to one Russian-speaking WIB reader who summarizes their story:

The report is mostly boilerplate and notes the origin of the name Stethem, reports on a sandwich making cook off between American and Russian cooks, notes that the Stethem was a test bed for a new Tomahawk guidance system and continues the Russian fascination with American service women who are actually in positions of real responsibility and don’t expect bouquets of flowers on 08 March [International Women’s Day]. The title of the piece is “Secrets of the American Navy.”

(Photo: Zvedza News)

Five hours into their assault on West Point, the hackers got serious. The SQL [structured query language] inserts that came earlier were just pablum intended to lull the Army cadets into a false sense of security. But then the bad guys unleashed a stealthy kernel-level rootkit that burrowed into one workstation, started scraping data and “calling home.”

It was a highly sophisticated attack, but this time the bad guys were really good guys in wolves’ clothing.

For four days in late April, the National Security Agency — the nation’s most secretive repository of spooks, snoops and electronic eavesdroppers — directed coordinated assaults on custom-built networks at seven of the nation’s military academies, including West Point, the Army university 50 miles north of New York City.

It was all part of the seventh annual Cyber Defense Exercise, a training event for future military IT specialists. The exercise offered a rare window into the NSA’s toolkit for infiltrating, corrupting or destroying computer networks.

Read the rest at Wired News.

(Photo: Army)

The Virginia-based aircraft carrier George Washington (pictured) and her strike group of cruisers, destroyers and submarines is heading around South America, bound for the Pacific. Along the way, the 100,000-ton carrier is playing war with Argentina, Brazil and Chile — all to show off the Navy’s new Latin American “4th Fleet,” and to boost the sea service’s new maritime strategy, which aims to “build confidence and trust among nations through collective security efforts.”

But is a lumbering, $15-billion aircraft carrier group, with more combined destructive power than most of the world’s militaries, the right choice for exercising alongside the tiny coastal navies of South America? That’s a mission that might best be performed by smaller, cheaper warships, right?

The admiral in charge of the group, Phillip Cullom, says no. “An aircraft carrier is the perfect platform to bring down here because it can cover the entire spectrum of activities … [with] the ability do both the high-end and the low-end spectrum of training. Plus they don’t see carriers here very often.”

Sure, it’s a treat for the Argentines to see the world’s most powerful class of warship up close, and it’s fun to pretend there’s a Soviet-grade naval threat down south, but are those compelling reasons to send a carrier to do a frigate’s job? Cullom points out that his carrier group is doing the training on the fly, while en route to its “real” job. Using a carrier is “cost-effective,” he says, “because we have to get from here to the Pacific anyways.”

But a more persistent presence would certainly benefit South America, and everyone else whose trade passes through southern waters. That would mean making training a full-time mission rather than something we do on the side. And it would mean getting more small, independent “cruisers” into a fleet that seems destined to concentrate more and more power into fewer, larger ships, “denying the Navy exactly what the surface combatant force needs for a peacetime maritime strategy,” according to naval blogger Galrahn.

(Photo: Navy)

by Zach Rosenberg

The Mexican military of gets about .5% of the GDP, putting them on relative par with such, ahem, heavily notoriously militarized, violent nations as The Bahamas, Moldova and Gambia. The budget, about $4 billion in 2006, has recently received a $500 million boost from the Merida Initiative, which is mainly to be dedicated to reconnaissance and interdiction equipment. The result is a slow upgrade from their weird hodgepodge of outdated systems into a relative modernity. This is not to insult the Mexican military, but seriously, nobody really uses T-33s anymore.

Recent purchases of weapons and associated systems from Israel, Germany and the U.S. will likely result in a real upgrade in capability. However, in a country like Mexico, which has major problems with inequality (Gini coefficient of .54) where citizens have little faith in their governmental institutions, with a history of forceful intervention in domestic affairs (pdf!), military modernization can be controversial. Recent proposals to buy Russian Su-27s for the Navy, for instance, were rejected.

Mexico, surrounded by weak military powers and bordering a world superpower, has long been oriented towards domestic operations, which are now, under significant pressure from the U.S., anti-drug in nature. President Felipe Calderon ordered the military to intervene directly in northern Mexico, superseding and sometimes directly replacing heavily corrupt or ineffective police forces and putting emphasis on national counter-drug operations — despite these measures the military has been generally ineffective in increasing security. This is not unexpected given the level of corruption within the military.

Indeed, Los Zetas, as one of the more notorious drug hit squads are known, is composed partially of deserters from Mexican special forces units. Men in Mexican Army uniforms have been seen (pictured) and fired upon escorting drug shipments over the U.S. border. That said, they are trying. The Army can now be seen all over northern Mexico, backed by heavy weapons, helicopters and surveillance aircraft (from the U.S. as well). While corruption almost certainly means that these resources are being used selectively against a limited range of targets, they are there. The strength of the drug cartels and level of support (and terror) they inspire likely mean that the status quo will not change drastically, but their effectiveness remains to be (publicly) seen.

Those bastards. They went and did it. Cue press release!

The U.S. Coast Guard today accepted delivery of the first National Security Cutter, USCGC Bertholf (WMSL 750), a 418-foot vessel built by Northrop Grumman and equipped by Lockheed Martin with integrated communications, sensors and electronics systems. Acceptance signifies transfer of ownership from industry to government and the start of operational test and evaluation.

Bertholf, which is months late and $200 million over budget, had a surprisingly painless inspection process prior to delivery, showing just 2,800 faults — far fewer than many Navy vessels. But the crankiest part of the ship’s design, her communications suite — which leaks classified data — was deliberately omitted from the inspection process. And the comms might never work as advertised.

But now it’s too late to do anything about it. If the Coast Guard were truly responsible stewards of the taxpayer’s money, the service would have rejected the ship, returned it to builder Northrop and electronics maker Lockheed, and demanded a refund. But in an age when senior officers are all salivating over lucrative post-retirement industry jobs, that kind of integrity is rare. So the Coast Guard — and the taxpayer — now owns Bertholf, problems and all.

(Photo: Coast Guard)