Aura of Optimism Tangible at 49th Board of Advisors Meeting

The aura of optimism from the inauguration of President Daniel Oliver (right) and Executive Vice President and Provost Leonard Ferrari (center) was tangible at the 49th meeting of the Naval Postgraduate School Board of Advisors (BOA), held at NPS Apr. 22-23.  The entire NPS leadership team, including the president, provost and deans, actively took part in the sessions. “The Naval Postgraduate School Board represents a terrific cross section of military and academic expertise,” said the BOA Chairman the Hon. Kim Wincup. “All of us see NPS as a national asset.”  U.S. Navy photo by Javier Chagoya   Full story

by Barbara Honegger, Senior Military Affairs Journalist 

A Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) faculty-student team joined forces with 11 Navy Reservists in May and June to field test a rapidly deployable surveillance and tracking network in a drug interdiction exercise in Thailand, the longest standing U.S. treaty partner in Asia.  Data from unattended air, ground and underwater sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), balloons and speedboats was fed into a Tactical Operations Center (TOC) and Royal Thai Armed Forces command, control, computers and intelligence (C4I) centers.  

"A critical backbone of the Global War on Terror and Network Centric Warfare is the ability to rapidly field low-cost mobile wireless communications networks in hostile environments with our coalition partners," said NPS Information Sciences Research Associate James Ehlert, COASTS Project Director.  "In the post-9/11 environment, it's vital to maintain the technological edge and interoperably share technology and expertise with countries facing similar threats. 

“COASTS catalyzes this technology sharing while actively addressing the security needs of our key allies,” he added.  “It's a win-win, because sharing technology and expertise that makes our partners more secure also makes us more secure.  The Thais learn how to better secure their borders, interior and littorals, and Naval Postgraduate School students gain valuable thesis research opportunities.  For our DoD contractor partners, we operationally test cutting-edge commercial technologies in challenging terrains and climates and feed the results back to participating companies.”   

In addition to unattended air, ground and underwater sensors, the commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) broadband wireless network included four mini helicopters and two flying wing UAVs with video cameras; Thai Navy speedboats conducting maritime surveillance and interdiction; wearable computers with shared situational awareness displays; a networked tethered balloon surveillance node with high resolution video; a mountain top communications node with video camera and web cam; a full-color night vision camera; long haul, point-to-point 802.16 and satellite reach-back links to the Royal Thai Supreme Command and Royal Thai Air Force Headquarters in Bangkok; and a TOC staffed with U.S. and Thai personnel.  The heart of the system was a cutting edge environmental and security monitoring system that processes inputs from all local and remote sensors and instantly displays them on laptops as well as wearable and handheld computer screens in an easily readable 3-D format.  

“The COASTS surveillance and tracking network was able to transform visibility of only a few meters in hostile, humid jungle terrain into total shared situational awareness,” said Lt. John Richerson, COASTS-06 student team leader who coordinated and ran the riverine drug interdiction exercise from the TOC.  “From 2005 to 2006, the sensor-to-shooter grid has evolved into a mature testbed for C4ISR COTS technologies while providing our students and DoD contractors with unmatched learning and product development opportunities.”           

"The hardware is the easy part," Ehlert noted.  "The hard part is getting all the hardware, software and people to seamlessly work together.”     

To hone that teamwork, Ehlert directs a growing cadre of NPS officer students and Navy Reservists.  A detachment of 11 Reservists from the Office of Naval Research Science and Technology program participated in this year’s demonstrations.     

COASTS exercises have proven highly valuable for the Royal Thai Armed Forces.  The director general of the country’s Defense Research and Development Office, Lt. Gen. Apichart Timsuwan, and Royal Thai Air Force Group Capt. Teerachat Krajomkeaw, who heads the Combat Research and Development Organization within the Directorate of Operations at the Royal Thai Air Force Headquarters, sponsored the 2006 program.    

"The COASTS-06 field experiment program has been a great opportunity for science and technology information exchange and for exercising combined interoperability between the Royal Thai Air Force and the U.S. military," said Krajomkeaw at a Royal Thai Air Force headquarters after action meeting.  "We hope to build on the success of COASTS-06 next year in COASTS-07." 

“Next year’s exercise -- a terrorist interdiction scenario culminating in the Port of Honolulu -- will add Malaysia and U.S. Navy and Coast Guard assets in Hawaii as additional operational partners and provide major warfighting value to the Navy Expeditionary Combat Command recently charged with implementing the CNO’s vision for small boat patrol craft just taken over from the Marine Corps,” said Richerson.  “It will be an order of magnitude larger with multi-national partners, a multi-million dollar budget and major Congressional attention.”    

"The technologies and capabilities demonstrated in COASTS-06 would be extremely useful for our operations in Southern Thailand," said Royal Thai Air Force Air Marshall Suthichoti.  "And they’re applicable not just to the Air Force, but to the (Thai) Army and Navy as well."  

“This was a wonderful opportunity to engage in military-to-military contact with the upper echelon of the Royal Thai Air Force that I’ll be able to leverage throughout my career,” Richerson added.    

COASTS-06 was also of high value to the project’s 12 commercial participants, including leading design engineers and three corporate chief executive officers.     

“A big plus for COASTS commercial team members is that we can special engineer our equipment for worst case scenarios and test it in weather and terrain scenarios we wouldn't otherwise have access to, providing invaluable data for future product development,” said Mercury Data Systems’ COASTS liaison, senior network engineer and Navy Reserve IT3 Ryan Hale.  “The same communications system that has a ten-mile footprint in Monterey, California (site of the Naval Postgraduate School), for instance, has only a one-half-mile footprint in Thailand, due in part to the high temperature and humidity of the area.  You have to test in the actual environment to know how to configure the system.

"COASTS is one of the most unique programs connecting the military and commercial worlds," added Hale, also a former Information Sciences research assistant at NPS.  "It lets us work hand in hand with the military in the design and development of an all-COTS (commercial off the shelf) system with real world applications.  Being a full partner has also opened DoD doors for us, for example with the Office of Naval Research.  As a result of our participation, we now also have opportunities with the Naval Research Laboratories, the Special Operations Command, and others."         

Some commercial technology used in the project was originally developed for COASTS.  An example is Mercury Data Systems’ TrakPoint, a mobile shared situational awareness tracking program that uses software and inertial gyros to locate and visually display where the user has walked on a laptop or workstation screen.  By clicking map icons, a viewer can instantly see what is being recorded by cameras and other recording devices at multiple distant locations in near-real time, and access to the displays can be hierarchically controlled.         

COASTS-06 U.S. sponsors include the Office of the Secretary of Defense; U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM), with Mr. Chris Voght, USPACOM staff science adviser, as chief liaison; U.S. Coast Guard Monterey; U.S. Embassy Bangkok; Joint Interagency Task Force-West; U.S. Marine Corps Systems Command; Air Force Research Laboratory; and Lawrence Livermore National Labs.  Additional participants were the Joint U.S. Military Advisory Group Thailand and the U.S. Special Operations Command.  International sponsors and participants included the Royal Thai National Security Council; Royal Thai Defense Research and Development Office; Interagency Intelligence Fusion Center at Chiang Mai; Royal Thai Air Force Academy; Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency; Australian Defense Technology and Management Advisor, Thailand; and the National University of Singapore.  The program supports key USPACOM goals of regional maritime security, theater security cooperation, advancing the global war on terrorism, and supporting Homeland Defense.  

In addition to Ehlert, COASTS-06 NPS faculty members were Ed "Tuna" Fisher and networking expert John "J.P." Pierson, also a member of the NPS Innovation and Technology Center. 

NPS students participating in the NPS-Thai exercise were Lt. John "Swampy" Richerson, student team leader; Lt. Robert "Ho" Hochstedler, Lt. John Powers, Ens. Ryan "Red" Miller, Ens. Joseph Russo, and Ens. Michael Chesnut.  The eleven ONR Reservists were Capt. Paul Marshall, Officer in Charge; Cmdr. Paul Kling, UAV expert and Assistant Officer in Charge; Capt. (Sel.) Pete Gamerdinger; Cmdr. Scott Guinn, Assistant Air Boss; Cmdr. Dean Schmidt; Cmdr. Nathan Beltz; Lt. Cmdr. Steve Padget; Lt. Cmdr. Kevin Blenkhorn; Lt. Joe Berrios; Lt. Pitch Bencharit and AT1 Candido Gomez.   

In addition to being NPS’s inaugural COASTS partner, at any one time Thailand supports up to half a dozen officer students at the Naval Postgraduate School pursuing thesis research in support of their country’s security needs.  

For more information about COASTS, contact Capt. Paul Marshall at paul.g.marshall@saic.com, (858) 826-5465.  For more information about all Naval Postgraduate School programs, go to www.nps.edu.

Story by Barbara Honegger Senior Military Affairs Journalist

Capt. Starr King rose to Five Stars Tuesday -- one each for loving husband, father, son, brother and beloved Shipmate to the entire Naval Postgraduate School Family.

In a moving ceremony Aug. 1 in the Barbara McNitt Ballroom in Herrmann Hall, family and colleagues from across the country remembered the extraordinary character, capabilities, humor and heart of the late NPS Chair of Applied Systems Analysis and Programs Officer in Operations Research and Systems Engineering and Analysis.

Arthur Barber III, Deputy Director of the Assessment Division (N81), Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, flew to NPS from the Pentagon to deliver stirring words in remembrance of the former guided missile frigate commander and N81 IWARS Team Leader.

“Starr King stood a Great Watch guiding the Navy’s future,” Barber said.  “He was a leader in three Navy worlds -- at sea, in the Pentagon and here in Monterey.  As my Sea Strike branch head in N70, Starr changed the direction of billions of dollars of investments that will shape the Navy of the future.  But he was more than a superb analyst.  He was a passionate teacher of how to do, and to use, analysis the right way to fight the good fight.  As a leader of teams of young analysts, and as the trusted chief analytic advisor to aviation flag officers on strike issues, Starr was incomparable.     He patiently taught a whole generation of young action officers to do good analysis and a whole generation of flag officers to use it.  The influence of his work in the Pentagon was significant and will be long lasting.”

NPS Acting President Air Force Col. Dave Smarsh recalled the extraordinary officer and gentleman that King was.

“Capt. Stephen Starr King lived life to the fullest and our memories of him are forever,” Smarsh said.  “What a leader!  As I look across my career, I cannot think of a better leader and mentor who carried the core values of honor, courage and commitment on his shoulders.  Here at NPS he loved teaching and the mentoring of over 300 students.  He was our Chair of Applied Systems Analysis and simultaneously held the Naval Warfare Development Command’s Chair of Warfare Innovation.  As a skilled instructor, he won the Military Officers Association of America’s 2006 Leadership Award.  And as an innovative researcher, he led the NPS development of the Flag Billet Competencies Development Model which the Navy has adopted parts of.  I am grateful and honored to have been able to share part of Starr’s life. Starr, Thank You!”

At the ceremony, King was awarded the Legion of Merit “for exceptionally meritorious conduct in the performance of outstanding service” in his 30-year Naval career.  The citation reads in part:  “In the classroom, Captain King captivated his students with his experiences as a frigate sailor from division officer through commanding officer.  He replaced the colorless textbook methods of operations research with dynamic personal examples of fleet applications.”

Indeed, Starr King loved his ‘final assignment’ teaching the best and the brightest officer students at NPS.

“It is the capstone of my 30 years in the Navy that in my last three years of active duty I’ve had the privilege, opportunity and responsibility to stand in my uniform in front of classrooms of bright officer students wearing my credibility and experience in a form they respect:  a pin attesting to qualification as a Surface Warfare Officer, four stripes on my sleeves that they read as years, rows of ribbons they read as a travelogue, and, most importantly, a Command-At-Sea pin,” King said in a recent interview as NPS’s senior military faculty member.

And, the entire NPS Family would add, the one that matters even more -- the pin we carry on our hearts. 

In a graduation ceremony filled with the normal pomp and pageantry, a few differences right at the beginning showed that this was no ordinary commencement.  Naval Postgraduate School professors were in robes, but the president of the university, the guest speaker and most of the graduating students wore uniforms.  Some of the graduates wore battle ribbons from campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.  Another distinction - most were combat veterans earning master’s degrees, with a sprinkling of bachelor’s degrees. Two students graduated with Ph.D.s.  In all 285 students graduated Friday, June 16.

This was the Spring Quarter Graduation, normally the biggest of the four conducted each year.  In the ceremony, President of NPS, Rear Adm. Richard Wells had advice for the graduating students. 

“You know what’s expected of you as leaders,” he said.  “We expect a lot from you, and you should have expectations of your leaders.  You should expect them to not have a zero tolerance attitude.  Rather you should expect them to point out your errors, but still allow for creativity and initiative, both are essential to leadership.”

During the ceremony, Wells presented Provost and Academic Dean, Dr. Richard S. Elster, with the Meritorious Civilian Service Award for service from July 1995 through December 2005.  During his tenure, among other things, NPS received the highest score for all military value over the other upper level military schools.

Guest speaker for the graduation was Vice Adm. Stanley R. Szemborski, principal deputy director of Program Analysis and Evaluation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.  While relaying an important message, Szemborski also kept his speech to the graduates lighthearted.  He said for his speech preparation he had asked his wife what he should speak about, and she had came back with the comment, “speak about five minutes.”  The remark brought a collective chuckle from the audience.

After thanking Wells for the introduction, he turned to Dr. Jeffrey Knorr, who was seated on the stage, and thanked him, as he had been Szemborski’s thesis advisor 34 years ago. Szemborski, a Naval Academy graduate, earned his Master of Science in Electrical Engineering at NPS in 1972. 

Szemborski commented on how much has changed since his graduation.  The computer room at the time was located in what now is the library, and there was as much computing power in the entire space as one personal computer has today.

Szemborski told students the importance of learning tools of the trade, especially as junior officers. 

“As a mid-grade officer, you must sharpen your leadership skill, and grow in your ability to coordinate the effort of larger organizations,” he continued.  “My education gave me confidence to take this step.  As senior officers, you are expected to be able to direct very large organizations and more importantly to think.  You must be able to analyze complex problems through to logical conclusions.  It is in this area that I’m most grateful for my advanced education.”

“Finally and most importantly, I would like to talk about the importance of family,” Szemborski said.  In turn he had mothers, fathers and spouses stand and be recognized by the audience.  “If you remember nothing else, please remember to make time for your family. ”

Families were in full swing at the ceremony and pride in their graduates was the main emotion displayed by family members.

Gretchen and John Chrisafulli, parents of Army Maj. John R. Chrisafulli were here to see their son receive a master’s in Defense Analysis.  “I’m very proud, very emotional and very happy,” Gretchen said.  Chrisafulli’s wife, Anita, and baby daughter, Caleigh, also attended the ceremony.

Capt. Matthew Rosencrans, who has been in the Air Force for five years, received a master’s in Meteorology.  He called his graduation, “awesome.”  He added. “Finally, I have this big sense of relief.”  

Rosencrans’ parents, Gail and Richard Rosencrans, were at the ceremony.  “This was the proudest moment of my life,” Gail said.  “We’re extremely proud,” Richard added.

Lt. Cmdr. Aaron C. Young of the Royal Australian Navy graduated with distinction as his parents, wife and young child looked on.  He received a master’s in Physical Oceanography.  “This has been a great experience over seas,” he said.  “It’s been a great experience meeting people from different countries.”

The research was one of the best things about NPS, according to Young.  “The quality of the lecturing at NPS is excellent,” he added.

His parents, Roberta and John were honored to be able to visit from Perth, Australia.  Young and his wife are from Sydney, Australia.  His wife, Danielle called the experience here amazing.  It’s been fabulous,” she said.  “We have a very strong affinity with Americans.”  Their daughter Charlotte Grace was born here last October and has dual citizenship.

Lt. Cmdr. Jacqueline Meyer received her master’s in Business Administration.  She called her 18 months at NPS satisfying, but said, “It’s a relief to be done… finally.”

“You have a bright future,” said Szemborski at the end of his speech.  “Seize it!”

The Naval Postgraduate School boasts a diverse group of national and international students, but even now, after almost one hundred years, firsts are still happening here.  The June 19 graduation was the first time a student from Lebanon graduated from the school.

Lt. Col. Hassan A. Hamdar graduated with distinction, earning a Master of Science in Defense Analysis.  He also received the Naval Postgraduate School Outstanding Academic Achievement Award for International Students.

Hamdar was pleasantly surprised at receiving the award.  “I wasn’t expecting this one, though I was expecting something from Defense Analysis,” Hamdar said.  “I was surprised when I got the email from the Chair of the Department of Defense Dnalysis, Gordon McCormick, and I was a distinguished graduate for one thing.  Secondly, I was nominated for outstanding international Student for Academic Achievement.  It was really thrilling for me.”

Hamdar is actually in the Lebanese Navy, which is considered part of the Army.  “We use the Army ranks,” he explained.  “I’m a lieutenant colonel, which is equivalent to commander in the U.S. Navy.  The Army includes all three of the services, which in the air force, the ground forces and the navy.  That’s why we use the same ranks.”

A humble man, Hamdar is not one to boast about his accomplishments, which are many.  He lets his record speak., but he also questions himself to be sure his actions are the right ones.  “Usually I ask the question to myself,” he explained.  “When I‘m doing something, is that what I want?  If I’m satisfied with it, I just go with it and that‘s what I did on all my classes.

I graduated from OCS with distinction.  I graduated from the Naval Staff Course with distinction, so my standard became very high and it put on my shoulders a lot of responsibility.”

Getting into an international program is not easy according to Hamdar.  “The selection is very difficult.  It’s very tough,” he said.  “You have many officers who have to take an exam and they have to study a lot and they have to be among the top students in order to be sent overseas to the United States and other countries.  So I think you should expect all Lebanese officers to be excellent in different issues or fields.”

Hamdar had so many positive things to say about NPS.  “I talked to the president of NPS and I told him NPS is a place where different cultures meet, and here in NPS, contrary to Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilization and the Remaking of World Order,’ where he talks about a future clash between different cultures because of cultural differences, which are irreconcilable and hard to resolve, you can bring people together,” he said emphatically.  “They can talk.  Here you bring up new perspectives.  That’s the good thing about NPS.  You bring up inside you a new perspective, which you share with different classmates.  After you finish, you know how to look at something, how to analyze it, how to deal with it and how to see it in a different view.”    

Hamdar joined the Navy in December 1983 after graduation from Beirut University College, which is now Lebanese American University in Beirut, where he received a degree in computer mathematics.  “I joined the Navy as a civilian and I was sent to United States to Officer Candidate School in Newport Rhode Island."

The Naval Postgraduate School was familiar to Hamdar, because many of his countrymen came for short courses in resource management and they enjoyed it a great deal.  This made Hamdar want to get to NPS.  He finally arrived in December 2004 and after 18 months is now a proud graduate. While honored to be selected to come to NPS, Hamdar was understandably concerned. 

“I tell you what, I had three challenges facing me,” he said.  “First, I’m representing Lebanon for the first and NPS which is a different course from all other naval courses that I have taken.  Second, I’m representing the Lebanese Army and finally, I’m representing myself.  And all these came together to give me that much of challenge to do something and to be up to that challenge in fulfilling the academic requirements of NPS.”

According to Hamdar, NPS has changed him for the better. 

“I’m now more confident of everything I say, because I’ve done all the analysis I need,” he explained. “Of course it doesn’t end here.  Now when I want to argue, I know how to put my ideas and discuss it and support without getting offensive in certain areas.  I can accept the other’s ideas and putting my ideas into the argument.  It’s the art of persuasion.  The skill is how to persuade and how to change and how to accept others as well as you put your own ideas into it.”

Perspective is the biggest change Hamdar sees in himself. 

“It improved the way I look at things,” he explained.  “This is the best way.  Change - it needs time, because the mindset, it took me a long time to have this mindset, but to improve it, that’s the better way.  And I think NPS is the place where you improve your ideas and you enhance them and you polish them in a way that you present them in a better understanding.” 

Hamdar credits other people at NPS for this.  “You already have the experience from your classmates, from your professors, from the community for all the people you meet and of course in this way I say I’m very grateful to all the people who helped make this stay enjoyable and informative."   

Hamdar is married and has four children, two daughters, 17 and 15, and two sons, nine and six.  The time away from his family was not easy, but Hamdar was able to get them out to California during the summer of 2005.  

“They stayed with me about three months,” he said.  “They enjoyed every moment they spent here in Monterey.  We lived in La Mesa and they enjoyed California and every place else.”  The family visited several places in California and also went to Las Vegas.

Hamdar’s family has been in the U.S. before, as Hamdar has been to several Navy schools in the States.  “I’m a graduate of Naval Staff College also in Newport Rhode Island, so my family went there before and they visited me during the summertime here,” he said.

California was an enjoyable place, according to Hamdar.  “Each coast has its own flavor in the United States, and I think Monterey has all the best,” he said.  “I enjoyed everything, the weather, the community the school, everything.  Everything was exceptional for me.”

Like any parent, Hamdar has high expectations for all his children and wants the best for them, but he does expect them to work for it.  “They have to achieve the best that they can get from education in order to have a better life,” he said.       

Equal opportunity for all his children is important to Hamdar. He does not expect anything different from his daughters than he does from his sons.  “In Lebanon you will see women are competitive to men.  You will see them in different fields, even in the military,” he said.  “We have a few of them.  They work in administrative and medical areas and not in operational areas.”

While Hamdar’s daughters probably won’t join the military as they’ve already decided what they want to do, his youngest sons are a different story.  “It’s up to them,” he said.  “I leave it to the future.  I can’t guess right now.  They might feel like they like the way I live and they want to follow my steps.  I give them guidance more than I dictate what I want them to do.  I show them the way and they can choose, because it’s their life, not mine.”

As a father Hamdar knows to limit his expectations of his children.  “I try not to put my children in this position, but I have been living all my life challenging myself in any way,” he explained. “Sometimes it’s kind of tense.  I want them to excel, I want them to do well.  I like them to be among the top, but not the first, because this is very, very, very stressful.  It’s very stressing to keep on going that way, because people start looking at you and they expect constant higher achievement.  We have a new Lebanese student starting this quarter.  My professor said, ‘you set a very high standard for him and he’s going to suffer for this,’” he quoted laughing. 

Hamdar had only good things to say about his fellow students saying they were together so much, they had “kind of an understanding.” 

“We became familiar with each other, so putting our minds out, just exchanging ideas, saying whatever we felt like saying and this built a trust, and now I feel like I have many friends and I can correspond with them all,” Hamdar said.  “It’s nice to have friends all over the world, and NPS made this a possibility.”

Hamdar’s advice for his countrymen who will follow in his footsteps is simple.  “I think the best way to express yourself is to speak up your mind,” he said.  “At NPS that’s the best thing I learned is to speak up my mind.  If I have any idea, I can state it as long as I can support it academically.  It’s not just throwing words and throwing ideas.” 

Strength through interaction is a strong belief for Hamdar, and his ideas are expressed in that manner.  “Make it good, present it and speak your mind,” he said.  “Don’t keep it inside of you.  Don’t just question your professor.  Talk to fellow students and exchange ideas and views with them.  This way you can gain a lot and learn a lot. If you keep everything to yourself, you can’t make any progress at NPS.  Other students won’t know you. They will see you in the class, but they won’t know you, and that you have something to prove.” 

The Examiner.com article originally posted on May 11, 2006 by Ken Garcia

SAN FRANCISCO - Just to show you where to get your news first, I can tell you what one of the hyped headlines in the local papers will be next week. A word of advice — it will help to read between the lines.

“Audit blasts S.F. emergency officials for lack of preparedness’’ and other derivatives will be on display. And there is some truth in that — but it hardly tells the whole story.

For months now, The City’s budget analyst office has had a team of auditors poring over the books and files at San Francisco’s Office of Emergency Services/Homeland Security. The audit, scheduled to be released Monday, was ordered by Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin last year in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It was also politically motivated, because OES chief Annemarie Conroy is not a fan favorite among many supervisors, one of whom had already called for her firing.

The lengthy audit has been the subject of long discussions between auditors and staff in the mayor’s office in recent weeks, and some of the findings prompted Mayor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday night to issue an executive directive. Among the 19 items in the order is a mandate that each city department appoint a disaster preparedness coordinator, that OES provide a timeline to complete a new strategic plan and that each department submit a detailed spending plan for current allocations of Homeland Security funds.

But, behind the scenes, the audit has been a huge source of contention — in part because earlier versions of it were, to be kind, somewhat curious. Although it praised the emergency response agency for putting together most of the reforms in a highly critical 2003 civil grand jury report and for making significant improvements in emergency preparedness, the vast majority of the report focused on details large and small that were critical of OES. Many of the details are eyebrow-raising — such as pointing out that OES is no longer located in the mayor’s office — a decision made by former Mayor Willie Brown three years ago.

Indeed, even OES’s planned move out of its Turk Street headquarters to a new office on Van Ness Avenue was brought under scrutiny, even though city emergency officials say its current operations center is too small and antiquated.

The draft report also singled out Conroy’s decision to get a master’s degree in homeland defense and security at the prestigious Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey — in essence criticizing her for taking the time to get the training that she was earlier criticized for not having.

And it’s hard to know what to make of the news that the OES/HS department changed its name without any input from the public or our austere Board of Supervisors. But it was outlined in the draft audit nonetheless — showing that no small detail went unturned.

The agency was also dinged for not spending about $80 million in federal grants fast enough — a situation reflected in cities around the country that were suddenly inundated with hundreds of millions of dollars in Homeland Security funds after the new anti-terrorism agency was created.

Strangely, the draft report also said members of the Board of Supervisors were not aware of OES activities — even though a few of them sit on The City’s disaster council and my own newspaper reported that the mayor called for the board to hold a public hearing on emergency preparedness on the anniversary of the ’06 earthquake.

I guess that’s why you call them drafts.

Yet the bottom line, no matter what the final report says, is that The City’s emergency preparedness agency is vastly improved, has never had such a talented staff to run it and that it is leaps beyond almost any of its municipal counterparts in the Bay Area. Audits by their very nature are supposed to single out problems, but lost in all the minute details is that a large number of emergency response plans and training programs that never existed before now do — and that other cities are beginning to copy them.

Of course, it’s hard to adequately evaluate emergency coordination until a disaster strikes. And by issuing an executive order, Newsom is acknowledging that the system is far from perfect. He told me that he was committed to carrying out a vast majority of recommendations contained in the audit — without any knowledge that I had seen an earlier version.

It’s too early to tell the political reaction to the audit, since it won’t be out for several days. But I’m sure the spin cycle will be robust and reflected in the headlines.

They’ll be worth reading — as long as you get the full story.

Capt. Greg Silvernagel relieved Capt. Mike Williamson May 26, as program manager for Air Combat Electronics (PMA-209) during a combined change of command and retirement ceremony.

As a former PMA-209 project lead, Executive Assistant for Acquisition, and most recently Deputy Assistant Commander for Program Support, Acting and the deployment champion for NAVAIR AIRSpeed, Silvernagel comes to PMA-209 with a wealth of experience in Assistant Commander for Acquisition (AIR-1.0) programs.

A native of Newell, S.D., Silvernagel graduated from Newell High School in 1979 and attended the University of South Dakota graduating in 1983 with a bachelors in mathematics and a minor in computer science. In November 1981, while attending USD, he joined the Navy by enlisting in the Aviation Reserve Officer Candidate program.

After graduation he reported to NAS Pensacola, Fla. to begin Aviation Officer Candidate School (AOCS) and was commissioned in November 1983. He reported to VT-2 at NAS Whiting Field in February 1984 to begin flight training in the T-34C aircraft. After completing primary and intermediate training, he reported to VT-31 at NAS Corpus Christi, Texas to begin advanced training in the T-44 aircraft. He earned his wings in January 1985 and reported to VP-31 at NAS Moffett Field, Calif. for training in the P-3 Orion aircraft.

In August 1985, Silvernagel reported to Patrol Squadron 17 at NAS Barbers Point, Hawaii. While in VP-17 he made two deployments to the Philippines and one deployment to Adak, Alaska, with numerous Western Pacific and South West Asian detachments. In July 1989, he transferred to VP-30 at NAS Jacksonville, Fla., to train fleet replacement pilots and aircrew in the P-3 Orion. While at VP-30 he worked in the Foreign Military Sales Office, Avionics Branch Officer, Avionics and Armament Division Officer and as Assistant Safety Officer.

In June 1991, he reported to Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. In April 1993, Silvernagel was designated an aerospace engineering duty officer (AEDO). In December 1993, he graduated with a masters in electrical engineering with emphasis in computer system design. His next tour was with the Naval Aviation Depot in Jacksonville, Fla. serving as the P-3/S-3/E-6A project officer where he managed implementation of P-3 Phased Depot Maintenance. He also performed Post Depot Maintenance Test flights on P-3 aircraft delivering them to fleet, as well as, the countries of Greece, Thailand, and Pakistan.

In August 1997, Silvernagel reported to the Program Executive Office for Cruise Missile Programs and Joint Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Programs to work in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Tactical Control System program office. This program was developing a ground control station that had the ability to provide control to all the services' tactical UAVs. In January 2000, he reported to Air-1.0, NAVAIR, where he was assigned to PMA-209 as the integrated program team lead for Advanced Mission Computer and Displays developing a common computer and displays for the F/A-18E/F, AV-8B, and T-45 aircraft and subsequently reported to the AIR-1.0 staff.

His awards include the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, Navy Meritorious Service Medal, the Navy Commendation Medal and the Navy Achievement Medal.

Silvernagel is married to the former Kim Marie Ritz of Merrill, Iowa. They live in Lexington Park, Md. and have two boys, Brent, 20; and Alex,16.

Yes Weekly Magazine article originally posted on June 7, 2005 (Greensboro N.C.) by Jordan Green

Two Greensboro companies under contract with a military-university research program are testing a prototype of a tracking device that could help the military better coordinate forays into rugged terrain. The inventers are courting US legislators in a bid for political support that could determine whether the devices are manufactured in North Carolina or Pennsylvania.

The two companies, Mercury Data Systems and A3 IT Solutions, are developing a mobile tracking device they call a ‘TrakPoint’ to allow soldiers and emergency first responders to monitor each other’s position in areas where a global positioning system, or GPS, fails, such as rugged terrain, dense jungle or burning buildings. The TrakPoint utilizes computer software that processes information from a GPS, barometer, gyroscope and compass, and determines which is the most accurate measure, said Rich Guarino, a partner at A3 IT Solutions.

“I’ve got a military GPS device, but I have to go out into an open field to get a GPS signal,” said Guarino, noting that tall buildings disrupt communications in A3 IT Solutions, fifth floor office suite in the US Trust Center Building in downtown Greensboro.

Along with monitoring each other’s positions, the TrakPoint allows individuals to stay connected with a command center. The TrakPoint sends out a signal to announce the individual’s location, while a personal data assistant, or PDA device, allows the individual to know where he and the other members of the network are located. In an urban setting, a floor plan could be loaded into the system that would potentially be useful to firefighters or blind persons.

“We originally started working on this because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,” said John Taylor, president of Mercury Data Systems. “People saw the need for people to be able to trace their way into a cave. If they found something explosive in the cave, maybe they wouldn’t be the one to disarm it, but they would need to be able to retrace their steps so someone else could do it.”

The two companies received a contract worth about $6 million from Pennsylvania State University’s Electro-Optics Center in April, said Guarino. The Eletro-Optics Center, in turn, is funded through the University Strategic Partnership, a funding stream set up by the Defense Department’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency to encourage university and private sector research, said agency spokesman Clem Gaines. Greensboro’s NC A&T University is also a member of the University Strategic Partnership, he added.

Guarino returned from Thailand in late May from a field test of the TrakPoint prototype conducted with the Royal Thai Air Force and the US Naval Postgraduate School. The two companies plan to conduct more field tests and fine-tune the device’s engineering before they start manufacturing it for sale.

Taylor estimates it will be another year before production begins. Additional field tests will take place in the dense jungle of Thailand’s northern border and along its coast. The TrakPoint currently weighs a couple ounces and is the size of a box of business cards, but the companies plan to get it down to the size of a matchbox so it can be sewn into a soldier’s or emergency first responder’s uniform, Taylor said.

The two companies are courting members of Congress for support of the program in an elaborate dance that could determine the eventual location of a manufacturing facility. Leaders of the two companies also make no secret of their expectation of incentives from local and state government in return for creating high-tech jobs. Taylor named Rep. Bob Etheridge, a Democrat whose district includes parts of Raleigh and eastern North Carolina, and Rep. John Murtha, a Democrat who represents Johnstown, Pa. and the Pittsburgh suburbs, as legislators who have expressed an interest in supporting the technology with more federal funding.

He said he also expects a visit from the staff of Senator Elizabeth Dole, a Republican and North Carolina’s senior senator.

“A congressman is lobbying for their home jurisdiction,” Guarino said. “They don’t have direct say in any kind of [contract] award, but they’ll advocate for you. For doing that they try to make sure the jobs come there.”

Both Murtha, a vocal supporter of the Electro-Optic Center, which is located in his district, and Etheridge want any future manufacturing facility to be built in their home districts, Taylor added.

Taylor said he would favor building the factory in Greensboro, or at least somewhere in North Carolina, but he makes no secret of his expectation that state and local governments would step in with an incentives package to seal the deal.

“We would be looking for the right kind of economic development support,” he said. “It might be tax breaks, it might be training incentives, or it might be facilities and infrastructure.”

Two trends work in Mercury Data Systems and A3 IT Solutions’ favor. The Bush administration’s so-called Global War on Terrorism, which includes ongoing campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, wears on with no end in sight, making military procurement a bona-fide growth industry. And the state of North Carolina’s $242.5 million incentive package to get Dell to build a computer factory in Winston-Salem in 2004 set up an expectation that the state will subsidize other businesses that promise much-needed jobs.

The North Carolina Military Business Center, an economic development center in Fayetteville, announced a campaign to increase defense contracting in the state on June 1. A 2004 study commissioned by the Center found that while North Carolina has the 4th largest number of military personnel in the country, it ranks 23rd in the value of its defense industry contracts.

Recent statements by elected officials indicate that momentum in the Tar Heel State is growing behind the idea of taxpayer support for local companies that market their products to the military.

“We need the [North Carolina Military Business Center] to connect companies, military, elected officials and economic development organizations to work together to expand military contracts for North Carolina businesses,” a press release by the organization quotes Lt. Gov. Beverly Perdue as saying.

So far, Taylor is less than satisfied with the political support local companies like his have received from elected officials.

“I think it’s a problem that there’s a lack of political support for new companies,” he said. “In the state of North Carolina, less than one percent of DOD dollars go to local companies. If you go to western Pennsylvania — Congressman Murtha’s district — you would be amazed to see the number of local companies that receive DOD contracts. Our politicians need to do a better job of making sure that [Defense Department] money spent in North Carolina goes to local companies.”

To comment on this story, e-mail Jordan Green at jordan@yesweekly.com

Santa Cruz Sentinel staff report

The fourth and final installment of the Leon Panetta 2005 Lecture Series will feature two domestic policy experts, former U.S. Sens. Bill Bradley and Alan Simpson.

With moderator Leon Panetta, they will discuss the topic "Economic Policy — Borrow and Spend, Tax and Spend or Punt?"

In addition to the evening lecture, there will be a special forum at which the speakers will address Naval Postgraduate School and Defense Language Institute students.

Bradley, a former presidential candidate and a member of the NBA Hall of Fame, has been a national leader for more than 30 years.

He represented New Jersey in the U.S. Senate from 1979-97, and ran for president in 2000.

As a basketball player, he won an Olympic gold medal in the 1964 games in Tokyo and starred with the New York Knicks as a professional.

Bradley focused on large-scale reform while serving in the Senate. He was the driving force behind the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which lowered tax rates for millions of Americans and closed billions of dollars of special-interest loopholes.

Bradley is now managing director of investment bank Allen & Company Inc.

Simpson was elected to three terms in the U.S. Senate, serving as assistant majority leader for 10 years.

Among other committee positions, Simpson served as chairman of the Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy and as chairman of the Veterans Affairs Committee.

As chairman of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, he was the author of the Immigration Reform and Control Act, the first major immigration reform legislation passed in more than 30 years. Also a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, Simpson co-sponsored the Clean Air Act and the Superfund legislation.

Simpson began his political career in 1964 when he was elected to the Wyoming State Legislature. During his 13 years in the Wyoming House of Representatives, he held the offices of majority Whip, majority floor leader and Speaker Pro- Tem. Prior to his career as a legislator, Simpson served 10 years as city attorney and a short time as Wyoming assistant attorney general.

Simpson is a partner in the law firm of Simpson, Kepler and Edwards and also a consultant in the Washington, D.C., government relations firm The Tongour, Simpson, Holsclaw Group.

The event will begin 7 p.m. Monday at the Monterey Conference Center Steinbeck Forum, 1 Portola Plaza.

The lecture can be seen live on area cable television 7 to 8:30 p.m. on the evenings of each of the four scheduled lectures.

Viewers can also watch a Web cast of this program on the Panetta Institute Web site, www.panettainstitute.org, and on KAZU 90.3-FM radio.

The lecture will be broadcast in Santa Cruz County on Cable Channel 26 and in Capitola, Watsonville, Pajaro, Freedom and Day Valley on Cable Channel 72.

Monterey Herald monthly column posted on Mon, Jun. 06, 2005 by John Berteaux, who is an assistant professor of philosophy at CSU-Monterey Bay

What is progress? Is it social, is it economic, is it political, or is it something else?

As I settled into Fletcher's chair at The Hair Company a couple of weeks ago, he asked, "What are you thinking about for your next column?"

"With all the talk about base closings, it's hard to think about anything other than that," I thought.

I heard that Fort Ord's closing in 1993 was devastating for the African-American community on the Peninsula. What might closing the Naval Postgraduate School and the Defense Language Institute mean?

We chatted for a few minutes about Fort Ord closing, but our conversation quickly drifted off onto other subjects. After a while things seemed to get busy for Fletcher -- it was time for me to get out of the chair and out of his way.

Although my conversation with Fletcher was short, it left me in a quandary that led me to call my stepmother, Gladys. She lives in Bremerton, Wash., a small town nestled alongside Puget Sound. It is about the same size as Seaside. Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in downtown Bremerton is the area's major employer.

As usual, Gladys and I got directly to the issue. When I asked her about the base closings in 1993, she said, "Things were really tough for those people in California. The list came out one day and it seemed as though they closed those bases (in California) the very next day."

"That's it," I mused. In 1993, Bremerton dodged a bullet: it kept its shipyard, its jobs, and yet the city declined.

Presently, the shipyard is in business; Bremerton, however, is boarded up, closed. On the other hand, in 1993, the Peninsula suffered a devastating blow, losing Fort Ord, yet it seems to have prospered.

Given that these communities are similar, what led one to prosper while the other declined? What did Bremerton do wrong? What did the Peninsula do right?

Currently, NPS and DLI are to remain open. Has the area dodged a bullet? Or is this a community in decline?

I mentioned this to a friend on campus. She suggested that I look up Darryl Choates. Darryl owns the Fort Ord market and, although busy, he welcomed me into his office. We sat and talked about what happened in 1993 and some of the issues surrounding NPS and DLI. Choates is a member of the Seaside City Council.

Our discussion lasted quite a while, but Darryl didn't give up on me. You won't find the answers you're looking for, Darryl suggested, unless you broaden your focus. "You should ask, 'How the base closing affected the community.' Your original question doesn't take into account history, politics, land use, economics and a myriad of interconnected concerns that keep a community going.

"While the base closing was devastating, as a whole the community is better off now, given that we can settle a number of environmental issues," he offered. Darryl's remarks led me to revisit something Gladys said. "We kept the jobs, it was everything else that killed Bremerton."

In the information age, the age of 24-hour news networks, computers that pour out data, and the ubiquitous talking heads on television, ironically it's the questions we ask that determine what we see.

It is easy to forget that our talent at formulating provocative questions often shapes our perspective.

John Berteaux is an assistant professor of philosophy at CSU-Monterey Bay. His column appears monthly. He can be reached at john_berteaux@csumb.edu 

Monterey Herald article originally published on May 1, 2005

Samuel E. Buttrey of the Naval Postgraduate School is the recipient of the Allen Griffin Excellence in Teaching Award

Associate Professor Samuel Buttrey has been a faculty member in the Operations Research Department at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey for seven years. Before coming to Monterey, he taught Statistics at the University of California, Berkeley while earning his M.A. and Ph.D. in Statistics. He has taught Naval Postgraduate courses in Probability and Statistics, Statistics, Data Analysis, Manpower and Personnel Models, Time Series Models and Data Mining, and is said to be the finest teacher in the Operations Research Department. The scores from his Student Opinion Forms are consistently high and his enthusiasm, wit, and knowledge have made his classes the Department's most popular.

The same enthusiasm Professor Buttrey brings to the classroom is seen in his daily contacts with students as he's never hesitant to instruct, to offer guidance or to share his expertise. His willingness to tutor anyone on statistical procedures and techniques is unique in the Department. Some comments made by his students have been: "Unmatched dedication to his students and well known for being approachable at any hour", "Thoroughly knowledgeable on all aspects of subject matter with well-prepared and engaging presentation style", "Tackles difficult topics through humor. I benefited from the energy he displays in every class", "Incredibly knowledgeable in the field. A true gift for teaching. Actually makes statistics fun and interesting."

His accomplishments outside the classroom are also impressive. Professor Buttrey serves as the Operations Research Department's Associate Chair for Instruction, a post that involves both scheduling instructors and trying to measure and improve instructional quality. He assisted in the development and presentation of a new course on Data Mining in response to developments in that field and in student interest. He has also maintained a record of independent research that has resulted in publications in scholarly journals, presentations at conferences, invitations to speak, published software, and an impressive record of thesis advising. He has advised and co-advised more master's degree theses than any other faculty member in the Operations Research Department.

Professor Buttrey's teaching awards consist of: the Rear Admiral John J. Schieffelin Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2004; Commendation for Excellence in Teaching every year from 1997 to 2003; NPS Instructional Recognition Award in 1998; two Hamming Teaching Awards; and an award for best contributed paper, Statistical Computing Section, Joint Statistics Meetings in 2003.

Monterey Herald article originally posted on May 06, 2005 by staff writer Kevin Howe 

Navy Capt. Dan Bursch is a classic American hero: modest, self-deprecating and focused on big goals.

The astronaut, who holds the U.S. record for days in space -- 227 total, including 196 days aboard the International Space Station from December 2001 to June 2002 -- comes in a compact package whose boyish face belies his 47 years. He freely tells schoolchildren that he's trying to decide what he wants to be when he grows up.

Bursch spoke Thursday morning at All Saints Episcopal Day School in Carmel Valley to explain to the elementary and middle school-age students what life in space is like.

He told them that, at age 12, he heard about the first astronauts landing on the moon by radio while he was at summer camp.

"I really didn't know what astronauts did," he said, adding that he didn't apply himself for the space program until he had graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy and earned his naval aviator's gold wings. He was a student of aeronautics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey when he was accepted for astronaut training in 1990.

Bursch flew as a mission specialist on space shuttle missions in 1993, 1994 and 1996, and served as flight engineer on a joint U.S.-Russian expedition to the International Space Station from December 2001 to June 2002, where he and fellow astronaut Carl Walz logged the U.S. endurance record of 196 days in space.

He has returned to the Navy school as its astronaut-in-residence and is winding down his 26-year Navy career there. He plans to retire July 1 and may pursue a doctoral degree and teach. Meanwhile, with the oldest of his four children in college and the others at home, he and his wife plan to stay on the Monterey Peninsula in their Pacific Grove home.

Quoting Walt Disney, Bursch said, "The dreams of today are the reality of tomorrow. Focus on your dream. Focus on your goal."

Sometimes it's difficult for him to find analogies to describe the experience of space flight.

Asked what taking off in the space shuttle was like, Bursch said he has told people that "it's like a cat (catapult) shot off a carrier. My wife looked at me and said, 'Like everybody knows what that's like.' "

The condition called weightlessness in space is a misnomer, Bursch said.

"There is gravity -- it keeps the space station in orbit -- but you can't feel it," he said. He prefers the term "free-fall" to "weightlessness" because "you're constantly falling toward Earth, but you never get there."

Gravity "provides a sense of order" for people on Earth, he said, by holding things in place. The environment of space requires new skills and perspectives.

Bursch demonstrated an astronaut's launch position -- sitting on a chair whose back is resting against the floor -- with student Jack Margolis. Bursch pulled out packages of freeze-dried, ready-to-eat meals that were the space station crew's daily fare, wrapped and sealed in plastic with Velcro strips to hold them in place.

How do you go to the bathroom? "Very carefully." Toilets run on air flow rather than water and "if you make a mess, you have to clean it up."

How do you wash clothes? "You don't." How do you bathe? "With sponges." Where do you sleep? "In sleeping bags."

It's much like camping out, Bursch said, and to adult audiences he has compared long-term missions on the space station to "a six-month road trip in a motor home where you never get to go outside."

He said that after his six-month mission, "I wanted a shower, a pizza and a cup of real coffee."

Astronauts become adept while floating weightless inside the station at holding themselves in one place with one foot.

"We get to be like monkeys," he said.

A video showed the crew indulging in horseplay, launching one another weightlessly across the cabin. Sometimes the astronauts would shut off the fan that keeps air circulating in their enclosed world, just to hear the profound silence of the cosmos while looking out the spacecraft's windows at Earth and the stars.

Earth from space, Bursch said, "is very beautiful," and the astronauts could see city lights at night, "like spiderwebs, with a bright center and strings of light going out," and a variety of colors by day.

"What you can't see from space," he said, "are borders between countries."

"Days" and "nights" on the space station are 45 minutes long, he said, with a sunrise and sunset every 90-minute orbit. The air pressure in the station is constant, "so your ears don't pop," Bursch said.

Six months in space leaves the human body very weak on return to Earth, he said.

"My arms felt like they weighed 100 pounds," he said. "It was hard to lift them."

Another question on the students' minds was his reaction to the space shuttle Columbia disaster, when seven astronauts died as their spacecraft, which had been damaged on launch, burned up in the atmosphere as it was returning to Earth.

As a naval aviator, Bursch said, he has lost a number of friends in aviation accidents and he knew all of the Columbia astronauts.

But, he noted, at the same time Columbia crashed, two U.S. helicopters in Afghanistan also crashed, killing 14 people aboard.

In the military, Bursch said, "there are a lot of people who risk their lives for their country every day." The Columbia crew, he said, "would be the first to say, 'Let's keep flying.' " 

Primezone News article originally posted on May 3, 2005

LOS ANGELES, May 3, 2005 (PRIMEZONE) -- InterCommerceCorp (Pink Sheets:ICMC) has today announced that Mr. Glen Day has been appointed as CEO of the CipherPass Corp and will assume the role as CEO of the combined public company immediately upon completion of the pending merger/acquisition previously announced on April 26, 2005.

Mr. Day will also hold an active seat on the Board of Directors of the combined public company to be called CipherPass Corp. Mr. Day recently commented, "I'm extremely excited about joining CipherPass. I truly believe that the company's unique C-safe software suite and services have the potential to unlock the multi-billion dollar, nascent digital security market by delivering simple but very effective security solutions. C-safe takes electronic trust and privacy to new levels."

Since 2002, Mr. Day held the federally mandated position as the first Chief Privacy Officer for the County of Los Angeles in which he led the County's privacy compliance initiatives for the protection confidential information. With a strong emphasis on health and financial data, he was instrumental in implementing privacy policies and recommending applicable technical solutions to effectively safeguard sensitive information. His efforts directly impacted over 30,000 staff in 5 major departments, including all County hospitals and mental health clinics.

Previously, Mr. Day was a Senior Associate with Booz-Allen-Hamilton where he assisted the Navy in the information security design and implementation of its new $7 Billion classified IT infrastructure. While at Accenture, he was the lead technical and security advisor for various Fortune 1000 companies and federal agencies, which included Cable & Wireless, Best Buy and the State Department. Mr. Day also held the positions of Vice President of Networks/Chief Security Officer and Senior Director of Operations for two well-funded Internet startups. Additionally, he is a Commander in the US Navy Reserves supporting the Fleet Information Warfare Center in Coronado, CA.

Mr. Day is a graduate from the University of Southern California with a Bachelors of Science in Applied Mathematics. He holds a Master of Science in Management Information Systems from the Naval Postgraduate School (Monterey, CA).

About CipherPass Corp.

CipherPass Corp. (CipherPass), which earlier announces that it is being merged into InterCommerceCorp, is a digital security technology company that provides enterprise-class security solutions. Through its product and service portfolio, CipherPass enables businesses to securely share sensitive or confidential electronic information among internal staff, as well as with their business associates and customers. VeriSign (Nasdaq:VRSN), the world leader in the management and distribution of trusted digital certificates, is a strategic partner. The CipherPass and VeriSign relationship offers a cost-effective approach for deploying and managing digital certificates. CipherPass' C-safe security suite helps to simplify the process of users securing and sending private digital data within files and emails. C-safe is an effective solution for addressing companies' privacy and security compliance initiatives for HIPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley, GLBA and SB1386. For additional information regarding CipherPass Corp., please visit www.cipherpass.com

About InterCommerceCorp.

InterCommerceCorp is currently traded on the OTC (ICMC) and recently announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire 100% of the outstanding shares of CipherPass Corp. It is reorganizing its current operating subsidiaries and will change its name to continue operations as CipherPass Corp. InterCommerceCorp/CipherPass is a part of the global venture banking and investment portfolio of FutureVest, Inc. (Pink Sheets:FTVT).

Statements in this release are "forward-looking statements." Investors are cautioned that such forward-looking statements involve risk and uncertainties, including without limitation, acceptance of the company's products, significant levels of competition for the company and dependence on the performance of the management of the company.

Industry Week article by Tonya Vinas

Consider what the world must look like to Kevin Sharer. 
 
In 2000 he became CEO of Amgen Inc., the world's largest and most well-known medical biotechnology company. Eight years earlier, he had joined the Thousand Oaks, Calif., company, then 12-years-old, when it employed about 2,000 people and had revenues around the $1 billion mark. Amgen had two notable drugs at the time: Epogen (anemia therapy for people on dialysis), FDA-approved in 1989; and Neupogen (infection-fighter for chemotherapy patients), approved one-year earlier. 
 
This was all before the mapping of the human genome. The Internet and World Wide Web were unknown to all but a few fringe techies. Beepers were more commonplace than mobile phones. People with cancer, kidney disease, heart disease and other grievous illnesses were dying at a higher rate than today, and they were suffering more from symptoms and treatments.  
 
Biotechnology was a relatively new field, and it touched few lives outside of the patients taking a limited number of approved drugs and those working in the dense web of a research and development in California and a few other hot spots. It was a time when the world knew that technology would give birth to new solutions, but the most dramatic of those solutions and the speed with which they would become available was beyond the comprehension of most. Sharer came to Amgen from MCI Communications and had no experience running a biotech company. 
 
Fast-forward to 2004: Medical biotechnology has come of age. It now produces 40% of the drugs the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approves. Amgen employs more than 14,000 people worldwide; annual revenues have surpassed $8 billion, up about 500% from the early '90s; the company's stock price, which debuted at $18 a share in 1983, is selling around $60 per share; and the company has seven well-known drugs on the market (five selling more than $1 billion a year) and more than 20 products in the pipeline. 
 
"With the industry's largest revenues and market valuation, Amgen is a bellwether, one of a handful of firms people think of when they hear the word biotechnology," says Morrie Ruffin, vice president for business development at the Biotechnology Industry Association, a trade group based in Washington, D.C. 
 
Kevin Sharer has seen it all happen. He has been a frontline eyewitness to the eye-popping technological leaps of the past decade that have forever changed the landscape of drug-treatment and global manufacturing. And, yet, when describing the innovations of his company and how it keeps those innovations coming, he ends with a humble truism that goes hand-in-hand with leading such a company: "Mostly," Sharer says, "we struggle." 
 
Sharer embraces many of the philosophies IndustryWeek has identified as essential for modern manufacturing leaders, and for this reason, we've named him CEO of the Year. 
 
Some might say that Amgen is different from traditional manufacturing because it is a "technology-driven" company. And yet, what successful manufacturers are not driven by technology? Indeed, today's manufacturing executive should emulate Sharer because he understands:

    * The value of employees and employee development. 
    * The necessity of creating a culture of innovation. 
    * That achieving success involves risk-taking and, at times, failure. 
    * That operations and manufacturability are key elements of a successful "technology" company. 
    * How to meld science and capitalism to make profitable products that deliver new, valuable solutions.

While as recently as five years ago, CEOs at companies the size of Amgen received rave reviews and ample compensation for cutting costs, streamlining processes and building supplier and customer relations, today these are givens, not stellar achievements. The successful CEO of today, like Sharer, not only must build and maintain an efficient machine, but also must focus sharply on the fuel that powers it -- the right mix will lead to innovate products that drive success. "If you can hit it big in this business," Sharer says of medical technology. "The financial rewards are enormous." 
 
Last fall, Sharer was keynote speaker at a summit for medical-product manufacturers at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF) in Cleveland, Ohio. C-level executives from the largest medical equipment makers in the world were there. As Sharer spoke, the audience of 800 was silent, scribbling, learning, leaning in. 
 
"In terms of innovation and commercialization, Amgen and his [Sharer's] leadership clearly are a model for others," says Chris Coburn, head of the CCF's technology commercialization division. "He brings a combination off career and life experience that make him perfect to be an innovation leader." 
 
No. 1 on Sharer's must-do list for executives managing innovation: people -- and their unending link to new ideas. More than 10% of Amgen's employees are scientists with medical degrees. The company puts such a high premium on nurturing innovation, that its investment in R&D has grown faster than its revenues during the past decade; and in 2004, when Amgen opened its newest R&D center to date, $625-million "Helix" in Seattle, scientists and researchers had a hefty role in designing its layout and features in order to make their time there more fruitful. 
 
Although Sharer keeps an extremely tight schedule, he makes time to nurture the engine of innovation residing within his employees because he understands and reveres its connection to Amgen's success. 
 
"[You] have to give special nurturing guidance to that group. One way you don't do it is not be at home. You have to be there -- setting up reviews, encouraging people, setting up the metric system." 
 
In addition to atmosphere and attention, innovation demands cash. Manufacturers who skimp on R&D should take this lesson away from Amgen if nothing else -- innovation is like blood -- when you look at a person, you don't see it, but you'd sure notice if it weren't there. Whatever it takes, keep the blood flowing. 
 
"We try to create an environment where there's no such thing as a budget for innovation," says Sharer. "We'll find the money. As CEO, that's my job." 
 
Innovation is a management strategy, not just a tactic at Amgen. Sharer says the company "follows the science," meaning new product development is the cart, and new discovery is the horse. (In listing barriers to fostering innovation at a company, Sharer identifies capital market volatility, rigid organizational structures that limit room for initiatives and high burdens of proof to fund products.) 
 
In order to foster innovation at Amgen, Sharer encourages a high tolerance for failure but also practices speed and decisiveness when it comes to cutting off ideas that aren't going to perform to expectations. 
 
"You've got to understand that most of what you do won't work," he says. "So you've got to be prepared to decide early on what's worth pursuing and what's not." 
 
Case in point: In the late '90s, Amgen invested in research and development of weight-loss therapy using leptin, a hormone that humans make. Although leptin drugs helped people whose bodies fail to produce the hormone lose weight, and research has continued on it, it was a commercial flop for Amgen. But Sharer says if he had it to do over again, he would because it furthered the company's knowledge of obesity treatment. Today it has four drugs in the pipeline for metabolic disorders. 
 
In addition to the value placed on internal innovation, Sharer has championed several smart acquisitions that have added valuable products, people and facilities to his company. In 2002, Amgen completed the $16 billion acquisition of Seattle-based Immunex, adding Enbrel, an inflammation treatment, to its portfolio. In 2001, the drug had $762 million in sales. In 2003, Enbrel sales were $1.3 billion. In the third quarter of 2004, the drug had sales of $496 million, a 45% increase over the same quarter in 2003. 
 
Recently, Amgen purchased Tularik Inc., a San Francisco-based company with extensive knowledge in gene regulation. 
 
At the end of Sharer's presentation to medical innovators at the Cleveland Clinic Foundation, he summarized his thoughts on managing innovation: Systematic support is vital as is support from the top; it's expensive, challenging and takes time; most things don't work; and finally, the view is worth the climb. 
 
"Managing innovation at an industrial level is the most complicated industrial management task I know. You have to do 20 things simultaneously well, and you have to be a little bit lucky." 

About Kevin Sharer 
Kevin Sharer was elected Amgen's CEO in May 2000. He is Amgen's third CEO and became the company's third chairman of the board in January 2001. Sharer joined Amgen in October 1992 as president and COO and a board member. 
 
Prior, Sharer was executive vice president and president of the Business Markets Division at MCI Communications. Before MCI, he served in several posts at General Electric Co. and was a consultant for McKinsey & Co. 
 
Sharer received a bachelor's degree in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1970, a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in 1971, and also earned an MBA in business administration from the University of Pittsburgh in 1982. Sharer served on two nuclear attack submarines following graduation from Annapolis. 
 
Sharer sits on the board of directors of 3M Co., Northrop Grumman Corp., UNOCAL and the U.S. Naval Academy Foundation. He is chairman of the board of trustees of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and a member of The Business Council.

Monterey Herald article by Jonathan Segal

The Monterey Peninsula is vulnerable to giant waves similar to the ones that swamped Asian cities over the weekend, scientists and officials said Monday.

A tsunami, a surge of ocean water caused by underwater seismic activity or landslide, could raise the ocean levels as much as 30 feet, putting large areas of the Central Coast under water, including Cannery Row, Monterey Harbor, Spanish Bay, Del Monte Beach, Moss Landing, the Naval Postgraduate School and much of historic Pacific Grove. But federal, state and local officials said Thursday that county residents would have the benefit of some advance warning before such a cataclysm occurred.

"I think the big difference is that we have alert systems," said Dale Chessey, spokesperson for the Governor's Office of Emergency Services. "Sometimes we can be a little bit ahead of the ball in getting people to evacuate."

Monterey County is connected to a tsunami warning network managed by the National Atmospheric and Oceanic Administration. An observation station in Alaska uses a series of sensors and buoys to monitor ocean conditions.

If the network detects a tsunami, it notifies the Monterey County Office of Emergency Services and the county's 911 dispatch. Those agencies are then responsible for contacting police and fire departments, who will manage the evacuation, and local media to get the warning out to residents.

Still, the Central Coast could have as little as an hour's warning before a wave struck, said Harry Robbins, county director of emergency services.

The county is at risk of being hit by a major tsunami generated by two major faults. One of the faults, called the Cascadian subduction zone, runs under the water from Mendocino County to Vancouver, Canada. If a large earthquake struck there, it could cause a massive wave that would hit Monterey County within an hour.

The second area that poses a significant risk to the Central Coast is a fault running along the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. The Central Coast would have five or six hours of warning before a tsunami generated there would hit the coast.

An Alaskan earthquake in 1964 generated a tsunami that wiped out several Alaskan towns but also reached the Central Coast in a weakened form, causing some property damage and one injury in Moss Landing. The last catastrophic tsunami to hit Monterey County probably occurred in 1700, according to scientific evidence and Japanese records, said Robbins.

"We're about four years overdue," said Robbins. "They're low frequency but high risk. They're rare, but they can be devastating."

Distant faults aren't the only ones that pose a danger. An earthquake along one of the strike-slip faults just offshore in Monterey Bay could trigger undersea landslides leading to a localized tsunami with virtually no warning.

"If you're standing next to the water, and you feel an earthquake and it knocks you down, run like hell for high ground," Robbins said.

The county should be working to create a more detailed response plan to tsunami danger, Robbins said. It should also post signs in at-risk areas and designate official evacuation routes or shelters. The public, Robbins said, also has to be better educated.

"We have to start thinking in those terms," he said. "It's going to require the cooperation of all the emergency jurisdictions."

To prepare, the federal and state governments have been calculating worst-case tsunami scenarios and mapping projected areas that could be swamped. Still, it is hard to determine how much danger there is, said Richard Eisner, earthquake and tsunami program manager for the Governor's Office of Emergency Services.

"These are very infrequent events," he said. "We need to be better prepared and better aware. This can happen in California."

USA TODAY article by Julia Neyman

Homeland security has become a hot topic in American culture, and higher education has been jumping on the bandwagon.

Hundreds of community colleges, four-year universities and postgraduate programs have begun offering degrees and certificates in emergency preparedness, counterterrorism and security. Students study topics from political science and psychology to engineering and biotechnology to prepare for possible disasters.

"Homeland security will be the biggest government employer in the next decade or so," says Steven David, chair of the graduate certificate program in homeland security at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, which also offers a master's in government with a concentration in homeland security. "America continues to face threats, and terrorism will never go away," David says.

Interest in homeland security proliferated after the 9/11 attacks, but efforts to increase awareness in the field were underway long before, says William Kelley, a researcher working with the Office for Domestic Preparedness in the federal government's Department of Homeland Security.

The idea for a professional training program was born when Kelley and others realized there was insufficient training in more analytical aspects of homeland security.

"You have to go back to 1997 or 1998, to the (first) World Trade Center bombings, Oklahoma City, the Centennial bombings at the Atlanta Olympics," Kelley says. "A succession of events built up an interest, and 9/11 had a culminating effect."

Now, many companies have added homeland security sectors, and those educated in the field are in demand, says Mel Bernstein, director of university programs for the Department of Homeland Security.

"Some graduates will work in the financial sector, for the government, in insurance, for consulting companies. ... If you look across the country, almost every company or agency has something they call a 'homeland security initiative,' and they will need people."

One of the programs that the Department of Homeland Security sponsors is an 18-month, highly selective professional training effort at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. The school educates high-ranking emergency management and public safety officials about policy analysis, advanced strategy and information technology.

"We're taking the best and the brightest and giving them additional education so that they can go back to their cities and assume the highest positions," says Paul Stockton, associate provost at the school.

Most universities have not yet adopted full degree programs, partly because some are skeptical of the value of an entire degree focused on homeland security. So some offer certificate programs and concentrations within more traditional majors instead:

• At Ohio State University, students can get a degree in political science, sociology or computer science with a concentration in homeland security, in which they focus on such areas as network security and bioterrorism.

"In most cases, there is not yet a sufficiently well-developed body of knowledge that would declare (homeland security) to be a legitimate academic specialty," says Todd Stewart, director of the Program for International and Homeland Security at Ohio State.

• At George Washington University in Washington, D.C., certificates are offered in crisis and disaster management, telecommunications and national security; they're offered through the school's Homeland Security Policy Institute.

• Northeastern University in Boston offers programs in the law-enforcement aspect of homeland security through its College of Criminal Justice. Northeastern also received a grant from the National Institute of Justice to educate students about al-Qaeda banking and the "gray market," the practice of transferring money from abroad to other countries, possibly to finance illicit activities.

Compared with universities, community colleges are more comfortable giving degrees in homeland-security-related fields because they train first responders — police officers, emergency medical technicians, firefighters and others who are directly involved in their communities.

"Ours is likely to be a more hands-on approach," says Norma Kent of the American Association of Community Colleges.

Monroe Community College in Rochester, N.Y., for example, has a $26 million Homeland Security Management Institute complete with a crime scene simulator, forensics lab, hazardous-materials training area and aircraft simulator. It also offers training that educates community members on what to do if disaster strikes.

The diverse approach that schools are taking goes to show that the nature of the homeland security field does not lend itself to a uniform program, Bernstein says.

"We need people with many skills who can apply them to this particular area."

Science Daily SAN FRANCISCO – Engineers who were studying beach erosion got more than they bargained for recently when they discovered unexpected wave behavior in the water along an east coast shoreline.The finding could ultimately cause researchers to re-examine ideas about beach erosion and the repair of beaches that are damaged by tropical storms.

“It could just be that the physics of the system is a little different than we thought,” said Thomas Lippmann, a research scientist in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University.

When the Ohio State researchers utilized data collected by collaborators at Duck, NC, to calibrate a new remote sensing method for studying ocean currents, they expected to find some complex wave flow patterns in the water.

Researchers have long known that the surf contains many different currents that interact to affect how sand washes away from a beach. That’s why mitigating beach erosion is so difficult, Lippmann said.

But their close examination of the oscillating water flow at different depths revealed a surprisingly intricate system of patterns, with surface currents not always in sync with the bottom flow.

As Lippmann reported his team’s early results Monday at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, he declined to speculate on what causes the strange flow patterns.

For instance, they found regions where the water near the surface was rotating in one direction -- say, clockwise -- and the water just a meter or two below it was rotating counterclockwise.

Taken together, the unusual patterns make for a more complicated picture of water movement than most researchers suspected, Lippmann said.

Scientists may have to take the new findings into account when they design computer models of beach erosion, nearshore circulation, or water quality.

These topics are of particular interest to coastal towns, where erosion causes millions of dollars in property losses each year. Constant erosion, compounded by sudden beach loss during tropical storms, threatens the multibillion-dollar tourist industry.

Coastal residents have tried to counter erosion by adding sand to beaches or building artificial seawalls out of wood or rocks, but some studies have shown that these efforts do not provide a permanent solution -- and may actually increase erosion in certain situations.

Researchers need to better understand how erosion works in order to develop better mitigation strategies, Lippmann said.

That’s why researchers from many different institutions have planted special underwater sensors along the beach in Duck, NC. Although the sensors take very accurate measurements of water movement just above the sand, they are very expensive and require expert installation.

Lippmann and his colleagues recently came up with a less expensive method: a video camera system that tracks the foam from breaking waves. Once the system is fully developed, it could monitor wave motion for a fraction of the cost.

The engineers discovered the strange water flow patterns while they were attempting to verify measurements obtained from the camera system.

Back in 2000, their video-based measurements, which they then took from towers along the coastline at Duck, compared favorably with data from the in-water sensors.

Because their measurements didn’t precisely match up -- they found differences as large as 20 percent -- Lippmann wondered if the discrepancy wasn’t due to the fact that the camera system was looking at the surface of the water, while the sensors were measuring currents down at the seafloor.

To examine whether flows within the water column were affecting the results, Lippmann and colleagues from the Naval Postgraduate School re-examined some unique data that was collected at the US Army Corps of Engineer’s Field Research Facility in Duck in 1994. That experiment involved vertical arrays of sensors that measured water movement at different depths.

That data confirmed that the water on the sea floor was moving slower -- and, sometimes, even in the opposite direction -- compared to water on the surface. So it turned out that the video system was getting accurate measurements after all.

“We were feeling pretty good about that,” Lippmann said, “Then we noticed that there was a lot more going on in the water column than we first realized.”

If the engineers hadn’t been trying to calibrate the camera system, they may not have looked so closely at the oscillatory flow patterns, and may not have observed the strange behavior. Now, Lippmann said, researchers may have to re-evaluate how they study motions along the shoreline.

The Office of Naval Research funded this work.

SearchSecurity.com article by Shawna McAlearney, News Editor

Though he's giving up security speaking engagements following criticism that his image taints the security industry, former conman Frank Abagnale will still give a keynote presentation at February's RSA Conference.

"In 2005, I intend to separate myself from your industry. I will no longer accept any engagements from computer security firms, associations or organizations," Abagnale, now a Washington, D.C., secure document consultant, said in an e-mail exchange. "RSA would not relieve me of my obligation, so contractually I will speak at their conference." His executive assistant clarified that Abagnale is not leaving the document security arena, which he has been involved in for 30 years.

"I will end my relationship with Novell and Computer Associates that I have had for a number of years," he added. "I have done all I can on my part to remedy your dissatisfaction. I just hope everyone is satisfied."

"Everyone" includes some notable security experts upset with his inclusion in the recent CSI conference lineup and upcoming RSA keynote series. Two speakers, executive consultant Bill Murray and former U.S. cybersecurity czar Howard Schmidt, withdrew from speaking at CSI because of Abagnale. Both also are board members of the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium Inc., which is best known for its CISSP credential program sought by many security practitioners.

"We are an emerging profession, trying to deserve the trust of our employers and clients. To appear with rogues in any professional capacity or forum grants to them a degree of professional recognition that they have not earned and do not deserve; it identifies us with them," Murray, who works for Cybertrust and also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, said in a letter to Abagnale that Murray agreed to let SearchSecurity.com publish. It also "sends a message to the script kiddies that society is all too ready to forgive any 'youthful indiscretions.'"

Chris Keating, director of the Computer Security Institute, said those concerned "are right to worry about sending the wrong signals when it comes to ethics and information security. But a speaking slot at a conference like CSI does not mean the industry is holding them up as an example. Rather, it's an opportunity to contribute to the discussions of the security industry, where not everyone is in agreement on all issues."

This isn't the first time members of the industry has expressed such concern.

"We had a similar series of events," said Linda Burton, CEO of MIS Training Institute, which manages MISTI conferences, including InfoSec World in Orlando, Fla. Last year, that flagship conference featured a keynote by convicted felon Kevin Mitnick, who is now a security consultant. "It wasn't a big outcry, just a few people from the industry." She added: "We need to let our intelligent audience decide whether what they're hearing is useful."

The controversy began when Ira Winkler wrote in an upcoming Security Wire Perspectives column that he supports Abagnale as a speaker, but not as the National Cybersecurity Association spokesperson. "In my opinion, Frank Abagnale has been a huge benefit to the security community for the last few decades," Winkler wrote. "Unfortunately, he is not famous for that, nor is he really a household name. He is only known for his felonies and the Hollywood movie ending. This regrettably excludes an otherwise honorable person from being an appropriate spokesperson in this case."

Best known for his teenaged fraud spree nearly 40 years ago in the movie "Catch Me If You Can," Abagnale's scheduled RSA presentation is billed as a talk about his redemption after forging $2.5 million in checks by impersonating an airline pilot, physician, professor and even a U.S. attorney.

He tried to cancel his agreement with RSA earlier this week, but was not successful.

"We still want him to present," said Sandra Toms LaPedis, general manager of the RSA Conference, said earlier this week. "It is within this spirit of the security community that we provide different experiences and histories through our program of keynote speakers, and we continue to be excited about the scheduled appearance of Frank Abagnale -- a fascinating lecturer and well-known expert on identity theft."

Ray Komar, vice president of business development at Carlsbad, Calif.-based Preventsys Inc., is among those that believe Abagnale's presentations teach valuable lessons for security practitioners.

"I heard you speak at the Gartner conference this year, and found it to be one of the best presentations that I had ever heard at a conference," Komar wrote in a letter to Abagnale that he allowed to be published here. "In my humble opinion, your presentation was completely relevant as it demonstrated what a talented, creative person can do to manipulate the system. What part of that story/example does not apply to infosec?"

Mitnick, another lightning rod for controversy, says excluding those with intimate knowledge of the criminal element, such as reformed hackers and ID thieves, may hurt the industry in the end.

Security practitioners "are just shooting themselves and their colleagues in the foot," he said. "Hackers get intel from any reliable and accurate source; security professionals should do the same if they want to stay ahead with current developments."

U.S. Joint Forces Command article by JO1(SW/AW) Chris Hoffpauir

U.S. Joint Forces Command hosted a visit by one of the Navy's foremost scholars on innovation here Dec. 17.

Capt. Terry Pierce, PhD., associate dean for the School of International Graduate Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, Calif., discussed disruptive innovation from a senior military leader's perspective. His recent book, "Warfighting and Disruptive Technologies: Disguising Innovation," addresses how senior military leaders can recognize and manage innovation.

His theory, called disruption innovation theory, holds that leaders must first recognize the type of innovation they are working with, evaluate the current circumstances and then develop a suitable strategy to implement the innovation.

According to Pierce, there are two types of innovation, sustaining and disruptive, which must be managed differently to be successful.

Sustaining innovations follow a traditionally valued path, such as refinements on existing technology, or new technologies that compliment or improve on existing processes. While the technology involved may be something completely new, the way it is used does not make for a radical change in doctrine.

An example of a sustaining innovation would be the evolution from diesel powered to nuclear powered submarines. While nuclear power was a major technological breakthrough, the overall operation of submarines was not radically changed by it.

Disruptive innovations, however, follow paths that are not traditionally valued. They are the result of architectural changes, or the way different parts of processes are linked together. Disruptive innovations do not always involve new technology, but they do involve radical changes to processes and doctrine.

"The components often essentially stay the same," Pierce said. "But the linkages between them change in novel ways."

One example Pierce used to illustrate the difference between the two was post-World War I France. When the French invested heavily in new technology to build the state-of-the-art fortifications in the Maginot Line as a barrier to invasion, they followed the established military doctrine of the day.

Germany, however, took "off the shelf" technologies (aircraft, armor and radio) and developed new ways to exploit them (motorized infantry and decentralized command and control). Blitzkrieg was a disruptive innovation, representing a radical change in doctrine.

German forces didn't directly assault the Maginot Line. They instead relied on mobility and air power to bypass it and strike at the heart of the country. The French, unprepared to defend against fast-moving aggressors in their own backyard, surrendered six weeks after the invasion started.

"The Maginot Line, from a technology point of view, performed as designed," Pierce said. "The Germans never penetrated it. They simply went around it.

"A disruptive innovation has new measures of effectiveness."

According to Pierce, a technology's inventor does not always exploit disruptive innovations that depend on the new technology.

"The British invented the tank, but they didn't invent blitzkrieg type armored warfare."

He compared those examples with how terrorists are using Internet technology today.

"Today, we look an awful lot like the British (before World War II)," he said. "We're inventing new technologies that are being used by our opponents to create a new way of warfighting. We have an enemy who's taken something we built, and is disrupting the way we fight."

Pierce found through his research that disruptive innovations most often fail when leadership tries to manage them like sustaining innovations. He contends that senior military leaders must nurture and protect disruptive innovations until they can become accepted and exploited.

To do this, disruptive innovations must sometimes be disguised as sustaining ones to protect them from those who see the innovation as a threat to the status quo. According to Pierce, disruptive innovations are allowed to mature as long as they're perceived to be inferior.

"Does the innovation have a different measure of performance that competes with the one we have now?" he asked. "That's how disruptive innovations go along. As long as the innovators are telling the establishment 'we're not here to put you out of business,' the innovation is allowed to survive."

According to Pierce, one of the greatest challenges facing USJFCOM is to recognize what new technologies being developed today are potentially disruptive innovations and properly managing them.

International Herald Tribune article by David E. Sanger and Richard W. Stevenson The New York Times

President George W. Bush has acknowledged that, 20 months after the fall of Saddam Hussein, the United States has encountered only "mixed" success in training Iraqi troops to secure the country, calling it "unacceptable" that some Iraqi units have fled as soon as they faced hostile fire.

With the first elections in Iraq six weeks away, Bush's public criticism of how the Iraqis had performed reflects mounting concern, voiced from the White House, the Pentagon and Capitol Hill, that the strategy for training 125,000 Iraqi forces to secure the country is failing.

On Sunday, Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, who serves as the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said a recent trip to the country convinced him that the Iraqi forces were "bottom level" and still had no effective leadership.

Several other Republicans, and many Democrats, have been highly critical of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his conduct of the war and how he dealt with questions from soldiers two weeks ago in Kuwait about the absence of effective armor on military vehicles to protect them from improvised explosives.

However, at a news conference on Monday that was expected to be his last before a vacation at Camp David and then his Texas ranch, Bush continued to express confidence in his secretary of defense.

"I know Secretary Rumsfeld's heart," Bush said.

"Beneath that rough and gruff, no-nonsense demeanor is a good human being who cares deeply about the military and deeply about the grief that war causes," Bush said.

Bush made no effort to argue with Warner's assessment of the Iraqi security forces. He said that in a meeting last week with the two military leaders in charge of the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq, General John Abizaid and General George Casey Jr., he learned that the problem extended well beyond shortcomings in training.

"They've got some generals in place and they've got foot soldiers in place, but the whole command structure necessary to have a viable military is not in place," Bush said. "And so they're going to spend a lot of time and effort on achieving that objective."

He also acknowledged that "no question about it, the bombers are having an effect" in sowing terror among Iraqis and said that they were trying to shake the will of Iraqis and of Americans who saw scenes of the resulting carnage on their television sets almost nightly. "Car bombs that destroy young children or car bombs that indiscriminately bomb in religious sites are effective propaganda tools," he said.

Nevertheless, Bush said he would not let the continued violence deter him from his stated goal of bringing democracy to Iraq, declaring that "we must meet the objective, which is to help the Iraqis defend themselves, and at the same time have a political process to go forward."

Taken together, Bush's comments amounted to his broadest acknowledgment yet that rebuilding Iraq's security forces, a central task in remaking Iraq, had run into severe difficulties, problems he resisted discussing during his re-election campaign.

The numbers alone released by the administration tell a story of a training program that has slowed to a halt. The State Department's weekly assessment of Iraqi security forces shows that the number of newly trained troops has stayed level since early November at about 114,000 and that more of those troops are being channeled to the police, to try to restore order to the streets of major cities.

Administration officials acknowledged that it was a measure of how bad things had become that an assassin photographed killing two election workers on Sunday on a street in Baghdad did not even feel the need to cover his face.

Asked about a "move away from democracy" by President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Bush conspicuously passed up an opportunity to criticize Putin for cracking down on civil liberties and centralizing power. Though Bush's aides have been highly critical of Putin, with some of them reassessing their earlier, favorable impressions of his intentions, Bush sidestepped the issue, reminding reporters that "Vladimir Putin and I have got a good personal relationship."

"It's important for Russia and the United States to have the kind of relationship where if we disagree with decisions, we can do so in a friendly and positive way," he said.

Bush also declined to state his position on a debate within his administration about whether the United States should be promoting a change of leadership in North Korea and Iran. He said again that "diplomacy must be the first choice" in ending the nuclear standoffs with both nations.

But he acknowledged that in Iran's case, "we're relying upon others, because we've sanctioned ourselves out of influence with Iran."

The issue of the training of Iraqis is hardly a new one for Bush, but it is one he has been reluctant to talk about publicly. In September, speaking in the White House Rose Garden with Prime Minister Ayad Allawi of Iraq, he talked of training 125,000 troops by year's end.

But those numbers mean relatively little, said Barak Salmoni, who has studied the training process at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California.

"There have been some improvements in recent months that are worthy of study and emulation," he said. "But the numbers tend to reflect who is on payrolls, not who is showing up the next day, or who is ready to fight."

Even as he parried questions on foreign policy, Bush repeated his intention to push for an array of domestic initiatives starting in January. He signaled that he intended to disclose more details in coming months about his approach to Social Security, saying he would "propose a solution at the appropriate time." But he dodged repeated questions about what those details might be.

Associated Press

Rodney Kennedy-Minott, a scholar, Democratic party activist and former U.S. Ambassador to Sweden, died Dec. 15 in Monterey. He was 76.

The cause of death was acute pancreatitis, his son, Rodney Minott Jr. said.

Kennedy-Minott was born in Portland, Oregon in 1928. He served in the Army from 1946 to 1953 before attending Stanford University, where he received his bachelor's, master's and Ph.D. degrees. He later taught at Stanford, California State University, Hayward, and Portland State University.

A longtime Democratic party activist, Kennedy-Minott was an early backer of former President Jimmy Carter, chairing Carter's 1976 northern California campaign committee. As president, Carter named Kennedy-Minot to be ambassador to Sweden, where he served from 1977 to 1980.

Until his retirement in 2002, Kennedy-Minott was a senior lecturer in national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. He was also a senior research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, where he specialized in U.S. history and international relations.

Kennedy-Minott authored several books, including "The Sinking of the Lollipop: Pete McCloskey versus Shirley Temple and the Politics of California Suburbia," which chronicled Rep. McCloskey's victory over the former child star in a Republican congressional primary in 1967.

Kennedy-Minott's marriage to Polly Berry Kennedy ended in divorce in 1982. He is survived by three children and two grandchildren.

Washington Post article by Patricia Sullivan

Vice Adm. Donald S. Jones, 76, the naval helicopter pilot who in 1969 plucked Apollo 11 astronaut Neil A. Armstrong from the Pacific Ocean after he returned from the moon, and who in 1986 was one of five Pentagon officials initially involved in the Iran-contra scandal, died of cancer Dec. 13 at the Essa Flory Hospice Center in Lancaster, Pa. He previously lived in McLean.

In the late 1960s, Adm. Jones was commanding officer of a helicopter anti-submarine squadron when he was ordered to develop night and all-weather astronaut recovery procedures for the Apollo program. He was designated the helicopter recovery pilot for the first moon flights of Apollo 8 and 11.  In 1986, he succeeded then-Maj. Gen. Colin Powell as military assistant to Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger. Four times in 1986, Weinberger secretly and illegally ordered his deputies, including Adm. Jones, Powell, Richard Armitage (then assistant defense secretary for international security affairs) and Deputy Defense Secretary William H. Taft IV to transfer Army TOW antitank missiles and Hawk antiaircraft components to the Central Intelligence Agency.

The weapons were shipped by the CIA to Iran in exchange for American hostages held in Lebanon. The profits from the sale went to Nicaraguan contras. Weinberger, who was charged with four counts of false statements and perjury, was pardoned before trial by President George H.W. Bush. Adm. Jones, who was not charged, retired from the military in 1987.

Adm. Jones was born in Madison, Wis. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin and received a master's degree from George Washington University. He completed the Naval Postgraduate School course in National Security Affairs and courses at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces.

He became a naval aviation cadet in 1950, beginning a career-long association with helicopter and fixed-wing antisubmarine warfare. He had seven command assignments at sea, and was commander of the 3rd Fleet, based in Hawaii, from August 1983 to September 1985. He flew more than 6,000 hours in 20 aircraft types and made more than 2,000 shipboard landings. He also worked from 1973 to 1975 at the Naval Intelligence Command as head of intelligence operations and as the deputy director of naval intelligence to the chief of naval operations.

He was the only officer to have been senior military assistant for both the deputy secretary of defense and secretary of defense.

Among his military awards were two Defense Department Distinguished Service Medals, two Navy Distinguished Service Medals and the Legion of Merit.

After his retirement, he was a consultant, a corporate officer with Tracor Inc. and a trustee of the Naval Aviation Museum Foundation, the Naval Helicopter Association and the Association of Naval Aviation. He was a past vice chairman of the Retired Officers Association. He also was a member of the board of Aeroflex Corp. He had lived in Pennsylvania since 2000.

Survivors include his wife of 52 years, Marilyn Turner Jones of Lancaster, Pa.; four children, Cary Meyer and Julie Northcote, both of San Diego, Gail Litrenta of Herndon and Todd Jones of Lititz, Pa.; and 10 grandchildren.

Born and raised in Marquette, Bennett returned to his hometown after he retired from the Navy in 1975 and built his home on Conway Lake in Powell Township.

His daughter, Lynn Bennett, said her father was more of a companion than a parent.

"Well, he hung the stars and the moon in my opinion. I lost my mom at the age of 19 and so he was my total protector and he made me feel like I was his companion," Bennett said. "We were always friends on an intellectual level and a father/ daughter level."

She said that her father was a different kind of a military man.

"He was a military man, you know tough and masculine, but he was also quite sensitive. He had an incredible love of the arts and he collected art. He was so full of energy and life and made me feel like I could do anything. I love him greatly."

Marquette resident Marion Sonderegger, a longtime friend, said Bennett was an enthusiastic man who loved art, people and cribbage.

"He was extremely interested in so many things," Sonderegger said. "Enthusiasm was his overriding characteristic and he had an incredible compassion for people. He loved to help young people, he was a natural mentor and he just really focused on them in a personal way."

Bennett graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1946. Afterwards, he took flight training at the Pensacola, Fla. and Corpus Christie, Texas Naval Air Stations. He also graduated from the Navy's Photo Interpretation School and earned a master's degree in Operations Research from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Cal.

Bennett served as Commanding Officer of the USS Firedrake and Patrol Squadron 42. He also served on the USS Hornet and USS Birmingham. His last command in the Navy was as Commanding Officer of the Naval Airfield in Misawa, Japan from 1972 to 1975.

Bennett was given medals for his active duty in World War II, Korean War and Vietnam War.

Bennett also attended Northern Michigan University prior to his naval service and was a co-founder of the Lee Hall Gallery after his naval service.

"He was very knowledgeable about art," Sonderegger said. "He knew about oriental art especially. He collected lots of maps, art and art books. He was also quite the cribbage player; he beat me often."

Lee Hall's gallery features portions of Bennett's Japanese wood block print collection.

After returning to the area, Bennett resumed his position within the community. During his service on the Rotary Club in Marquette, he was integral in the establishment of the Darter-Dace Memorial in honor of Captains David McClintock and Dulaney Claggett and the crews of the Darter and Dace submarines during World War II. The memorial is now at the Maritime Museum in Marquette.

He was also a member of the Big Bay Presbyterian Church, the Marquette County Republican Party and a founding member of the Conway Lake Association.

Bennett's funeral was scheduled for 2 p.m. today at First Presbyterian Church in Marquette. Burial will be in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Va.

Tech Central Station article by NPS Strategic Insights editor James Joyner

Army National Guard Specialist David Qualls and seven of his comrades filed suit against the Defense Department over what they charge is the unfair extension of their active duty obligation beyond the term they agreed to. Qualls signed up with the Arkansas National Guard under the "Try-One" enlistment option which, according to the recruiting pitch, "lets you try the Guard for one year without additional commitment." His year was up in June but his commitment was extended into next year under the Pentagon's stop-loss program, which allows the extension of enlistments during war or national emergencies as a way to promote continuity and cohesiveness. This policy, invoked in June, will keep tens of thousands of personnel in the military beyond their expected departure. The case raises questions of legality, military effectiveness, and basic fairness.

Qualls is not the first to sue over this issue, but no one has won yet. The Defense Department has won round one of this, with U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth ruling that, whatever their recruiters might have told them, their enlistment contract allows the government to do this. The dirty little secret of military recruiters is that, regardless of the length of the initial active duty contract, everyone who joins the military incurs an eight-year obligation under Section 10145 of 10 USC. This fact is buried in the long enlistment contract and certainly not emphasized by recruiters, who are under heavy pressure to meet monthly quotas. Under ordinary circumstances, soldiers who have served their initial active duty or drilling reserve contracts are permitted to serve the rest of their time in the Individual Ready Reserve. Most of these people, like myself, serve out their IRR commitment without ever putting a uniform on again.

During times of "national emergency," however, the military has the discretion to order these soldiers into active service. On September 14, 2001, President Bush issued a proclamation that, "A national emergency exists by reason of the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center, New York, New York, and the Pentagon, and the continuing and immediate threat of further attacks on the United States." Slate chief political correspondent William Saletan contends that, because the Iraq war is not against these terrorists, the government has no right to initiate the stop-loss policy. Whatever the philosophical merit of that position, however, the courts have historically been quite reluctant to interfere with presidents exercising their powers as commander-in-chief. The bottom line is that Qualls and others in his position can be required to serve until they have served their eight years. The eight year mark works both ways. Last month, the Army backed down from a lawsuit filed by Captain Jay Ferriola, to whom it attempted to apply the stop-loss policy even though he resigned from the service and his eight year commitment was fulfilled.

While it may be unfair that these people have to serve longer than they had planned while those who never enlisted in the first place have no obligation, it is sound military policy. Indeed, until Vietnam, it was standard practice to have soldiers serve "for the duration." There were many people in World War Two who served from the earliest days all the way through V-J Day and beyond. As we learned in Vietnam, having soldiers rotate in and out of combat zones as individuals is simply too disruptive. A professional fighting force depends on people training together and then fighting together. As an Army spokesman explained, "It is a management tool that's helping us to maintain combat effectiveness and readiness: we hold the team together. Stop loss is not about increasing end strength; it is about training, deploying and redeploying cohesive teams. Lt. Col. Karl Reed, an infantry battalion commander, told the Army Times that he would have lost a quarter of his unit within a year absent stop-loss. "I would have had to train them and prepare them to go on the line. Given where we are, it will be a 24-hour combat operation; therefore it's very difficult to bring new folks in and integrate them."

Of course, over-reliance on this authority could also undermine morale. Phillip Carter noted back in June that the Pentagon has to rely so heavily on reserve call-ups and involuntary active duty extensions because it is reluctant to field an adequate active duty contingent because of the exorbitant costs involved and thus is forced to rely heavily on the Reserve Component, including the IRR. As General Norman Schwarzkopf recently made clear on MSNBC's "Hardball," the military leadership sees little problem with this: "I think it is pay back time for an awful lot of these people who are in the IRR. They're in the IRR, because they were active in other times and held very good positions and got a lot of benefits from it. We can't have a standing army, a huge standing army. The nation can't afford one. And that's why they have the I.R.R. which [is] group of people that in the event of a national emergency, we can call them up to fill certain vacancies out there that otherwise, we don't have continuous people in them."

While Schwarzkopf's analysis may be correct when applied to short-term deployments such as Desert Storm, it might well not work in an open-ended conflict such as the war on terror. If the United States is going to be drawing down its force in Iraq within a few months after the elections in January, stop-loss and the massive reserve call-ups are the only feasible solution. If, however, the need for this expanded active force is going to continue, substantial increases in end strength will be necessary to avoid dangerous levels of fatigue, erosion of morale, and, eventually, a drop in enlistments.

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, responding to complaints about stop-loss from a soldier at Kuwait's Camp Buehring this past Tuesday, answered, "It's basically a sound principle, it's nothing new, it's been well understood" by soldiers, he said. "My guess is it will continue to be used as little as possible, but that it will continue to be used." While stop-loss is indeed a sound principle and nothing new -- and is certainly well understood by soldiers at this point -- it is quite debatable how well it is understood by those about to sign on the dotted line in the first place.

Soldiers sign up willing to make huge sacrifices, including putting their lives on the line. In exchange for this, we owe it to them to stop hiding the nature of this obligation from those who willingly volunteer for military duty. The military's recruiting pitch, as displayed on their website, is incredibly misleading. Here's what it says about the Guard and Reserve:

"You can serve your country without making any full-time commitment and receive many of the same benefits. In the Reserves and National Guard, your obligation is generally one weekend a month, plus two weeks of active duty a year."

While this was once typical in peacetime, it bears little relation to what reservists have been asked to do since 9/11 -- or, indeed, the early 1990s.

The eight year service commitment, spelled out in the enlistment contract, needs to be made clear up front. Here, for example, is what it says about the service obligation:

"Most first-term enlistments are four years, but services offer programs with two-, three- and six-year enlistments. It depends upon the service and the job that you want.

"Standard commitments for service academy graduates who do not receive rated follow-on training is five years. Graduates who accept pilot training are committed to active duty for nine years. ROTC also generally requires five-year payback while other active-duty commissioning programs usually require a minimum of three years."

Nowhere is the eight year figure mentioned. To be fair, as Judge Lamberth noted when he issued his ruling, "This wasn't in the fine print. It's only a two-page contract." But a smooth-talking recruiter can easily explain away contract language to an eager eighteen-year-old. Indeed, the Army recruiting pitch makes light of the gravity of the contract:

"Getting out of a contract is not easy, but there are ways. The difficulty varies with the needs of the nation and the availability of talent in your chosen career field. You should plan on fulfilling any commitment you make; if you have questions talk to your commander."

While this is technically true in most peacetime circumstances, it is simply farcical five months into stop-loss. Then there's this:

"Bonus Tip. The one year trial plan. Both the Army and Air National Guard offer the 'Try-One' enlistment option to active duty veterans and all prior service individuals who are joining or rejoining the Guard for the first time. This program lets you try the Guard for one year without additional commitment."

Specialist Qualls would beg to differ.

The United States has, since 1973, had an All-Volunteer military. It has worked superbly. Having only soldiers who want to be there and who have years of training has created the best fighting force the world has ever seen. For it to continue to work, however, we must make it clear to these people what they are volunteering for.

James H. Joyner, Jr., Ph.D. is Managing Editor of Strategic Insights, the journal of the Naval Postgraduate School. He writes about national security policy at the Outside the Beltway weblog. He is a frequent TCS contributor.

Naval Education and Training Command Public Affairs article by Jon Gagne

Four Executive Masters of Business Administration (EMBA) cohort degree programs will be available for mid- to senior-grade active-duty unrestricted line (URL) officers in the Norfolk and San Diego fleet concentration areas in 2005.

Instruction for two cohorts (25 students in each that function as a learning team) will begin the week of March 28, 2005, and the other two cohorts will start the week of Sept. 26, 2005.

The Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) defense-focused EMBA is a 24-month, Navy-funded, part-time graduate program that includes a financial management and acquisition concentration. This program is targeted at mid- to senior-grade active-duty URL officers (04-05) that are unable to attend NPS residential postgraduate programs. Non URL officers (O-4 and O-5) and civilians in grades GS-13 and GS-14 will also be considered for the program on a space available basis, with officers having first priority.

According to Douglas A. Brook, Ph.D., dean of the NPS School of Business and Public Policy, the EMBA cohort degree program can be extremely beneficial in building a career in the Navy as a mid- to upper-level leader and manager.

"Our defense-focused EMBA is a unique program, unlike any other in the country in its goal of providing high-quality relevant management education to a new generation of Navy leaders,” Brook said. “We are taking our NPS faculty expertise to officers in the fleet and preparing our graduates to take their future places managing complex organizations, large budgets and major programs."

The program begins with a one-week temporary additional duty (TAD) orientation at the NPS campus in Monterey, Calif. Funding for TAD travel must be provided by the student’s parent command and cannot be the responsibility of the individual. During orientation, students will take a two-credit-hour course in managing teams. Orientation for the March 2005 cohorts is scheduled for the week of March 21-25, and for the September cohorts the week of Sept. 19-23.

The NPS faculty will use video teleconferencing (VTC), the Internet and other distance learning modes to teach the follow-on courses. Students will meet in VTC-capable classrooms once a week during normal duty hours for six to seven hours of instruction. Norfolk and satellite locations in the fleet concentration area (FCA) will hold VTC classes on Tuesdays beginning March 29. San Diego area locations will conduct training on Thursdays beginning March 31.

Students will take two college classes per quarter for eight quarters, and take all classes as part of a learning team. While course absences due to military requirements are factored into the course planning, students are expected and required to attend classes with their learning teams and complete all degree requirements.

“The cohort model – in which students join and progress through their studies as group – fosters working effectively as a learning team by sharing experiences, knowledge and strengths,” said retired Capt. Pat Flanagan, EMBA program director at the Naval Post Graduate School. “Through this working relationship, the students are able to establish a professional network with their colleagues that endures, and adds real value, as they progress in their career as Navy leaders and confront Navy resource management issues and analyze investment opportunities.”

Eligibility requirements for the program include having an undergraduate degree from an accredited four-year college or university, a 2.6 (or higher) grade point average, department head or mid-level management experience, a strong potential for promotion and full command support. Officers selected for the program must be able to complete the full 24-month program at their FCA site. Officers who already have a graduate degree funded through any DOD assistance or veteran’s educational benefit program are not eligible for this program.

The application deadline is Jan. 28, 2005, for the March cohorts and July 15, 2005, for the September cohorts. Applications must be submitted in the format listed in NAVADMIN 268/04 and sent, along with a copy of undergraduate transcripts, via the candidate’s activity commanding officer to the Naval Postgraduate School, EMBA Director, Code GB/FL. See NAVADMIN 268/04 for specific details and other qualification requirements.

All potential EMBA applicants are encouraged to visit the NPS Web site and complete an online interest form at their earliest convenience. For additional information on the program or the Naval Postgraduate School, visit the school’s Web site at www.nps.navy.mil.

For related news, visit the Naval Education and Training Command Navy NewsStand page at www.news.navy.mil/local/cnet.

New York Times article by Vali Nasr and Ali Gheissari

As the Bush administration looks at its options in dealing with Iran's nuclear threat, it should consider some little-noticed but significant recent changes in that country's leadership. The assumption in Washington has long been that Iran is ruled totally by a clerical clique headed by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Behind the facade of theocracy, however, the balance of power between the religious elite and the military in the Islamic Republic has been changing.

The clerical regime's version of a praetorian guard, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has been growing in prominence in recent years, and may be poised to gain control of main levers of power. This has broad implications for Iranian politics, and for the future of American policy on Iran.

The Revolutionary Guards were formed in May 1979 by young rebels loyal to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini; their job was to combat the well-organized leftist militias that had challenged clerical control of the revolution. The guards evolved into a full-fledged military force during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, and were involved in many of the key campaigns.

While the guards had a lower profile in the 1990s, the victory of the reformist Mohammad Khatami in the presidential election of 1997 led the clerical leadership to give them new support. In exchange for the guards cracking down on advocates of reform, the government gave them generous financing for troop training and new heavy-weapons systems - including giving them oversight of missile and nuclear research programs. The guard corps now has almost 150,000 soldiers, about a third of Iran's military.

Today the guards are commanded by a group of ideological conservatives, notably General Yahya Rahim Safavi, who has even criticized the government for its willingness to negotiate with Europe over the country's nuclear activities.

Since 1997 the guards' leadership has become much more prominent in foreign policy, strategic decision-making and even economic policy. Its commanders more or less control the state police as well as national radio and television; they dominate the Ministries of Defense and Intelligence; and they are responsible for the personal security of the clerical leadership. Former members make up more than a third of the conservative Parliament elected this year.

Most important for America, the guards hold the key to the nuclear dispute. They control both the Shahab missile program and vital parts of the nuclear technology effort. Yet the guard leaders oppose strengthening Iran's regular military forces. They know that their conventional forces would never be strong enough to combat a determined America, and they fear that a strengthened regular army might challenge the corps' current status and drive for power. Thus they see nuclear weapons as the sole means of ensuring their survival and projecting their power in the region.

If America is going to change Iran's nuclear goals, it must influence decision-making not only among the clerical leaders but also in the Revolutionary Guards. Simply using a big stick - possible economic sanctions and military threats - would only lead the guards to dig in their heels, and would strengthen their political position by allowing them to play to nationalist sentiments.

The situation calls for a more nuanced policy that will complement the fitful negotiations on nuclear policy led by America's European allies. The objective should be first to slow down the Revolutionary Guards' monopolization of power and, second, to strain their alliance with the religious leadership. A key will be gaining more international support for democracy in Iran, strengthening reformist groups that continue to resist authoritarianism and can drive a wedge between the guards and the mullahs.

On the other hand, America must get the European countries with extensive commercial ties with Iran to use sticks as well as carrots. They must put pressure on the Revolutionary Guards' considerable business interests in a way that will enlarge fissures between the guards, the clerical elite and the various social groups that are tied to them through patronage.

In foreign policy, it is always easier to deal with a divided opponent than a united one. America and the West must not only recognize the growing political divisions in Iran, but also exploit them.

Vali Nasr is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Ali Gheissari is a professor of history at the University of San Diego.

Article published by Newswise

Engineers who were studying beach erosion got more than they bargained for recently when they discovered unexpected wave behavior in the water along an east coast shoreline.

The finding could ultimately cause researchers to re-examine ideas about beach erosion and the repair of beaches that are damaged by tropical storms.

“It could just be that the physics of the system is a little different than we thought,” said Thomas Lippmann, a research scientist in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and a researcher with the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State University.

When the Ohio State researchers utilized data collected by collaborators at Duck, NC, to calibrate a new remote sensing method for studying ocean currents, they expected to find some complex wave flow patterns in the water.

Researchers have long known that the surf contains many different currents that interact to affect how sand washes away from a beach. That’s why mitigating beach erosion is so difficult, Lippmann said.

But their close examination of the oscillating water flow at different depths revealed a surprisingly intricate system of patterns, with surface currents not always in sync with the bottom flow.

As Lippmann reported his team’s early results Monday at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, he declined to speculate on what causes the strange flow patterns.

For instance, they found regions where the water near the surface was rotating in one direction -- say, clockwise -- and the water just a meter or two below it was rotating counterclockwise.

Taken together, the unusual patterns make for a more complicated picture of water movement than most researchers suspected, Lippmann said.

Scientists may have to take the new findings into account when they design computer models of beach erosion, nearshore circulation, or water quality.

These topics are of particular interest to coastal towns, where erosion causes millions of dollars in property losses each year. Constant erosion, compounded by sudden beach loss during tropical storms, threatens the multibillion-dollar tourist industry.

Coastal residents have tried to counter erosion by adding sand to beaches or building artificial seawalls out of wood or rocks, but some studies have shown that these efforts do not provide a permanent solution -- and may actually increase erosion in certain situations.

Researchers need to better understand how erosion works in order to develop better mitigation strategies, Lippmann said.

That’s why researchers from many different institutions have planted special underwater sensors along the beach in Duck, NC. Although the sensors take very accurate measurements of water movement just above the sand, they are very expensive and require expert installation.

Lippmann and his colleagues recently came up with a less expensive method: a video camera system that tracks the foam from breaking waves. Once the system is fully developed, it could monitor wave motion for a fraction of the cost.

The engineers discovered the strange water flow patterns while they were attempting to verify measurements obtained from the camera system.

Back in 2000, their video-based measurements, which they then took from towers along the coastline at Duck, compared favorably with data from the in-water sensors.

Because their measurements didn’t precisely match up -- they found differences as large as 20 percent -- Lippmann wondered if the discrepancy wasn’t due to the fact that the camera system was looking at the surface of the water, while the sensors were measuring currents down at the seafloor.

To examine whether flows within the water column were affecting the results, Lippmann and colleagues from the Naval Postgraduate School re-examined some unique data that was collected at the US Army Corps of Engineer’s Field Research Facility in Duck in 1994. That experiment involved vertical arrays of sensors that measured water movement at different depths.

That data confirmed that the water on the sea floor was moving slower -- and, sometimes, even in the opposite direction -- compared to water on the surface. So it turned out that the video system was getting accurate measurements after all.

“We were feeling pretty good about that,” Lippmann said, “Then we noticed that there was a lot more going on in the water column than we first realized.”

If the engineers hadn’t been trying to calibrate the camera system, they may not have looked so closely at the oscillatory flow patterns, and may not have observed the strange behavior. Now, Lippmann said, researchers may have to re-evaluate how they study motions along the shoreline.

The Office of Naval Research funded this work.

Article by The KSBW News Channel

A ribbon-cutting ceremony was held Thursday to celebrate the opening of Hayes Park, the first new military housing to be built on the Monterey Peninsula in decades.

Thirty homes on the former Fort Ord are finished and another 230 are on the way.

Leaders from the Defense Language Institute and Naval Postgraduate School were on hand for the ribbon-cutting.

The Navy and Army worked together to complete the project -- the first housing project in the country that involved the two branches of the military.

Atlanta Journal Constitution opinion by deputy editorial page editor Jay Bookman

Parts of the U.S. government have been piecing together what could prove to be the winning strategy. The wisdom is coming from the bottom up, from within the ranks of government analysts and professionals, and a lot will depend on whether those at the top will be wise enough to use it.Signs of the emergent wisdom can be found in a new report by the Defense Science Board, an advisory group to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The DSB report suggests that while bullets and bombs will sometimes be necessary, progress will be measured more by poll results than by body counts.

"The United States is engaged in a generational and global struggle about ideas, not a war between the West and Islam," the group told Rumsfeld. And so far, we are not winning that war of ideas, in part because the invasion of Iraq "has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single digits in some Arab societies."

"The war has increased mistrust of America in Europe, weakened support for the war on terrorism and undermined U.S. credibility worldwide," the DSB concludes.

The DSB report can be read as a response to a plaintive Rumsfeld memo leaked in October 2003, in which the defense secretary complained that the United States had no long-range plan and was only reacting to terrorists. "The cost-benefit ratio is against us!" he lamented. "Our cost is billions against the terrorists' costs of millions."

"Today, we lack metrics to know if we are winning or losing the global war on terror," Rumsfeld told his staff. "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"

That's the question. Every terrorist we have to kill is in some way a measure of failure, because the real goal must be to prevent his creation in the first place. By that measure, the much-ballyhooed Israeli model must also be deemed a failure; almost 40 years after the '67 Arab-Israeli war, Israel still finds itself having to kill terrorists, with no end in sight.

Analysts have also come to understand that we are not facing a centralized opponent that can be defeated by capturing its capital city, occupying its territory or killing its leadership. We instead face a loosely connected network of groups and individuals linked by an idea. Against such an enemy, our own centralized, bureaucratic system is at a great disadvantage.

The classic example came Sept. 11, when the al-Qaida network launched an attack we could neither detect nor prevent. Within our bureaucracy, the FBI did not talk to the CIA, which did not talk to the FAA, which did not talk to the National Security Council.

"It takes a network to beat a network," says John Arquilla, a fellow at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., a pioneer in rethinking 21st century warfare. The DSB embraces that approach as well, urging government leaders to "think in terms of global networks, both government and non-government," in fighting this war of ideas. Those networks could include everything from international alliances to TV news organizations.

Even the military is trying to adapt.

"The bottom line is, if you're going to try to fight an adaptive, innovative enemy who is operating as a network with a hierarchy, a bureaucratic hierarchy that has got all of the tensions and frictions and all of the kind of things within the typical hierarchical structure, it's difficult, if not impossible, to operate that way," Army chief of staff Gen. Pete Schoomaker told Congress recently.

But as the DSB notes, "Only White House leadership, with support from Cabinet secretaries and Congress, can bring about the sweeping reforms that are required."

Monterey Herald article by AP writer Jim Wasserman

Potential for trouble with Pacific Rim countries was the top reason cited Wednesday by members of a new state council trying to protect California's military bases from being closed.

''I think we have to recognize if you're talking about future threats, you're talking about North Korea, you're talking about China, you're talking about threats in the Far East that for the future are going to demand that California play a very large role in our defense,'' said Leon Panetta, co-chair of the Council on Base Support and Retention.

The group of military, business and civic leaders convened for the first time to discuss strategies on how to protect the state's 62 military bases from closures being announced in May by the Department of Defense. The Pentagon is expected to recommend closing up to 100 of the nation's 425 bases, setting off competitive pressures among states to spare major centers of economic activity and jobs.

Several California bases are considered at risk by the state's congressional delegation, including El Segundo's Los Angeles Air Force Base, the Marine Corps Logistics Base in Barstow and the Monterey Peninsula's Defense Language Institute.

California lost 29 bases during the last round of 91 closures between 1988 and 1995, costing it thousands of jobs, but giving it a potential edge now over other states, said Panetta, a former congressman from Carmel and ex-chief of staff to President Bill Clinton.

''I think we've done more than streamline our defense operations in the state,'' he said.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed the 18-member council Nov. 9 to coordinate the state's response to a federal Base Realignment and Closure process scheduled to complete closings next November.

"We're glad to see the state take a leadership role in the base retention effort," said Fred Cohn, deputy city manager of Monterey.

Cohn and his boss, City Manager Fred Meurer, have long been involved in fighting to keep the Presidio of Monterey and the Naval Postgraduate School open in the city and have weathered previous BRAC cycles.

"It's something our communities have been working on for a number of years," he said, "and we're glad to see the state is emerging to get involved in this."

Experience has shown that the Defense Department is more receptive to arguments in favor of an installation's military value, cost savings and role in national defense, Cohn said, than in lobbying because a base closure will hurt the local civilian economy. He added that he hopes the state concentrates its arguments on those arguments.

In weeks ahead, the council plans community forums near bases, an extensive information gathering effort on the role of the state's military installations and then a report to Schwarzenegger on potential strategies. Similar efforts are under way in other states.

Council Co-Chair Donna Tuttle of Los Angeles, a former Commerce Department official during the Reagan administration, said the state's earlier losses made an unforgettable point in California.

''I think the local communities themselves are much more prepared in this round, having spent a lot of time on looking at the purpose of their bases, and trying to align it with this criteria the Department of Defense is using,'' she said.

Monterey Herald staff writer Kevin Howe contributed to this story

The Washington Times Op-ed article by Mike Walker

President Bush apparently agrees the next terrorist attack will not be stopped by Washington but by a local cop on the beat. That's what his nomination of a former New York City police commissioner to be secretary of homeland security really means.

The president chose wisely when he reached out to local law enforcement and decided to bring one of their own to Washington. Hopefully, it will result in refocusing homeland security policy on where the greatest threat is — Main Street America.

Tom Ridge has done a credible job of getting the federal interagency process better organized to meet the growing terrorist threat. He established new organizations and processes which, as they mature, will greatly strengthen the federal government's ability to help prevent and respond to terrorist attacks.

However, it is now time to turn our attention to building capacity at the state and local level to deal with this greatest threat to America and our children's future.

Washington must ensure that state and local police and first responders are not only trained to respond to attacks after they occur, but to prevent attacks before they occur. The new homeland security secretary must immediately work directly with state and local officials in finalizing achievable national standards and metrics for terrorism preparedness which emphasize prevention.

In this context Bernie Kerik brings impressive local credentials to the job. But his success is by no means guaranteed.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is still a work in progress. Some departmental directorates continue to operate like independent agencies as if DHS had never been created. Mr. Kerik's organizational skills will be tested as he strives to create one culture for DHS and continues to integrate the department.

He must recognize that overseeing the New York City police department is vastly different than leading DHS. He will need to surround himself with a strong deputy and chief of staff who understand the financial, organizational and administrative requirements of a major federal department. I assume the White House has already thought about how to surround the new secretary with subordinates who possess complimentary skills.

His political skills will also be tested as he seeks to reorient homeland security policy and resources on building state and local capacity to prevent attacks.

To succeed he must overcome two big challenges. First, as dedicated as the federal workforce is, it is a federal workforce. Fundamentally, bureaucracies at DHS, HHS, FBI, DOD and other agencies in Washington don't understand what it's like to be a cop on the street or a fireman responding to an alarm.

If Mr. Ridge failed at anything, he failed to bring to Washington the state and local talent needed to work directly inside DHS. Mr. Kerik, if confirmed by the Senate, should scour the country for the talent I know is out there. He should bring to Washington people who understand the challenges of America's police, fire services and other first responders and first preventers. Only then will we be able to develop a truly shared and integrated national homeland security strategy.

Second, he must instill a renewed sense of national urgency. With each passing day, America's memory of September 11 fades. Increasingly, people view terrorism as something that could happen, but only in New York and Washington. Many still don't believe it could happen in Toledo or Kansas City.

Mr. Kerik will need to remind all of us that while homeland security policy and resources should be based on risk, that risk is shared across America. For try as we will, we will never get into the minds of the terrorist enemies who threaten us. We will never know for sure when or where they may choose to attack.

Maybe only a former New York City cop can help us understand that the threat of terrorism is not just an East Coast problem; it confronts us all.

Mike Walker is a former assistant secretary of the Army, former deputy director of FEMA and currently visiting professor at the Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School.

The Monterey Herald article by Kevin Howe

Expeditionary forces are the nation's "fire brigades" in the global war on terror, and they need their own means to get to the scene of a crisis quickly and efficiently, according to a study by a team of Navy officers studying at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

"Firefighters don't take a bus to the fire," said Navy Cmdr. John Lemmon, who was among students and faculty who presented the findings of a joint study on how to move troops, vehicles and equipment swiftly where no nearby friendly countries will help.

These troops need "dedicated lift assets" -- ships and aircraft specifically designed for the mission of putting them on a hostile beach, he said.

The 50 students and 18 faculty members who took part in the six-month study project, titled SEA-6 (Systems Engineering and Analysis), came up with a solution: Build "maritime prepositioning ships" -- large freighters with a helicopter flight deck and cranes for lifting air-cushioned landing craft -- and adopt the V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft or something like it than can fly directly to an area, using midair refueling, and go into action immediately.

The study team's task was to find a way to put a brigade-sized force ashore within 10 days, sustain it for 30 days and withdraw it in 30 days, Lemmon said.

Now it takes 25 to 30 days to move such a force and it can only be sustained for about 15 days, he said. The students identified the current aging fleet of conventional helicopters as a major bottleneck in expeditionary operations -- the time it takes to take them apart, stow them on a ship, reassemble and flight test them before they can start putting troops and material ashore.

If the United States is going to continue sending troops to flare-ups around the world, it needs to think in terms of sea-basing enough forces to quickly land and seize the initiative on a hostile shore in a way that doesn't depend on the good will of neighboring countries in providing airstrips, harbors or supply bases, he said.

The Navy school's master programs require either a thesis or joint project, said Provost Richard Elster, and lately the school has been "emphasizing integrated projects" such as SEA-6 and the related Total Ship Systems Engineering program, whose students also took part in the study.

The report is an example of what NPS does that civilian universities don't necessarily do -- focus studies on subjects useful to national defense.

The Capital news article by Wendi Winters

One Naval Academy graduate in a family is cause for celebration. Having two can't be explained as merely luck; the family has to be focused on a common goal to achieve.

Agnes and the Rev. Rufus S. Abernethy, heads of a close-knit, African-American Annapolis family, have launched both of their sons into illustrious naval careers.

Their only daughter has fared just as well: She's a star in the academic world.

"I think for sure our commitment to education goes back several generations," said Alexis, 46. "All our grandparents and their siblings went to college. Our parents have advanced college degrees."

Tom, 48, noted his parents showed through example that "we shouldn't be afraid of hard work if we've got a goal we want to achieve."

Syd, Alexis' twin, recalled a childhood where "education was emphasized, as was hard work and sticking to schedule. We had time to do homework, but very little time for television. The emphasis was on going for broke to achieve an education."

On Oct. 13, Capt. Sydney R. Abernethy III, became commanding officer of Whidbey Island Naval Air Station in Oak Harbor, Wash. Mrs. Abernethy attended the change-of-command ceremony and displays press clippings of the event to visitors at her home on Arundel on the Bay.

Mrs. Abernethy, 75, is busy organizing holiday activities in Eastport when she's not selling real estate for Prudential or caring for her husband of 51 years, a resident at an assisted-living facility near Old Mill Bottom. He is a diabetic and has been in failing health for nearly a decade.

The son of a Methodist minister, he grew up in parsonages in North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland. He has a bachelor's in music education from Morgan State and did graduate work at Catholic and Boston universities.

Blessed with a basso profundo voice that sounds like rolling thunder, he was a music teacher in the county public schools from 1958 through 1986.

And for three decades beginning in 1962, he served as minister at Mount Zion United Methodist Church in Eastport. The Rev. Abernethy, 73, was a driving force in the contentious process of replacing the old church building with a modern one, but left to join the Gaithersburg United Methodist Church shortly after the new Eastport building was consecrated.

He only served in Gaithersburg for two years before his poor health forced him to retire.

The couple's oldest child, Tom, was the first African-American valedictorian from Annapolis High School. A 1974 Naval Academy graduate and holder of a master's degree from the Naval Postgraduate School, he is the commander of Destroyer Squadron 22, five ships based in Norfolk, Va. Previously, he managed all Tomahawk positions around the world.

A two-time All-American lacrosse player, Syd graduated from the Naval Academy in 1981 and received his wings two years later. He has two children from his first marriage and has recently remarried.

"I'm given an opportunity to lead. I've had accomplishments in life, but I don't dwell on the achievements," he said. "I just shoot to do better."

Alexis Deanne Abernethy holds a Ph.D in psychology and is a faculty member at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, Calif. She was the first African-American to attain tenure at the school.

She was recently inducted into the national black professional sorority, Delta Sigma Theta. Her mother has been a member for just over 50 years.

Agnes completed most of her requirements for a Ph.D in music education at Boston University, but she put dreams of a teaching career on hold to meet the demands of motherhood and as a minister's wife.

All three siblings credited their academic and career excellence to the educational foundation they received at Key School, then Annapolis High. "Key School was very instrumental in giving us a solid background in French and Greek languages and in appreciating diversity as an African-American in Anne Arundel County," said Alexis Abernethy.

Mrs. Abernethy modestly downplayed parental influence as a primary factor in her children's successes.

"I always say some people have done more for their children, but the blessing was not there," she said. "We were abundantly blessed not once or twice but three times by the good Lord. There are also so many people in this town that helped them. They are truly a product of the Annapolis community."

Tech Central Station article by NPS NSA expert Prof. James H. Joyner

The writer Matthew Yglesias makes a bold assertion in The American Prospect magazine:

"For months now, skeptics of George W. Bush's Iraq policy have been warning that the present path could lead to bloody civil war. More recently, proponents of continued U.S. military presence have been warning that bloody civil war would be the result of a withdrawal. Both sides can, perhaps, stop warning -- the civil war has already begun. Recent events in Mosul, a multi-ethnic city in northern Iraq that is the country's third-largest after Baghdad and Basra, lack the clear-cut structure of a Fort Sumter but otherwise bear all the markings of ethnic and sectarian warfare.

He cites a column by Peter Galbraith noting that so many leaders of Mosul's police department were collaborating with the insurgents that the city's Kurds had formed a parallel security and government system. Yglesias believes this case is far from atypical:

"The commander of police in Tikrit, a Sunni Arab town that's been relatively peaceful, recently claimed that Israel and Iran (which is to say the Kurdish and Shiite factions that they have respectively aided) were responsible for the terrorist violence in Iraq when, in fact, his Sunni Arab coreligionists are to blame. American soldiers and junior officers are widely skeptical of the loyalty of Iraqi security forces throughout Sunni-majority areas; though senior commanders don't put it this way, their clear preference for relying on Kurdish troops to do the heavy lifting indicates that they see the same picture."

Neither the fact that some members of the Iraqi security force are insurgent double agents nor that strong differences exist between the Shia majority, the Sunnis who once governed, and the independence-minded Kurds are news. There is an insurgency underway, one so intermingled with international jihadi terrorists as to make a distinction pointless. Iraqis are killing Iraqis as part of this insurgent-terrorist guerilla campaign. Does this constitute a civil war? As with most such questions, it depends largely on one's definition.

The Correlates of War project, which for decades has attempted to quantify information about conflicts for rigorous academic study, offers a very simple definition:

"An internal war is classified as a major civil war if (a) military action was involved, (b) the national government at the time was actively involved, (c) effective resistance (as measured by the ratio of fatalities of the weaker to the stronger forces) occurred on both sides and (d) at least 1,000 battle deaths resulted during the civil war."

By that rudimentary definition, a civil war does indeed exist in Iraq -- and a "major" one at that. The COW definition is rather broad, however, and would include any significant insurgency and could conceivably cover even large terrorist operations or criminal enterprises such as narco-terrorists in Latin America or Al Capone-style gangsterism. Stanford political scientists James D. Fearon and David D. Laitin offer a narrower definition that more closely mirrors the way most of us conceive of civil war:

"(1) They involved fighting between agents of (or claimants to) a state and organized, non-state groups who sought either to take control of a government, take power in a region, or use violence to change government policies. (2) The conflict killed or has killed at least 1000 over its course, with a yearly average of at least 100. (3) At least 100 were killed on both sides (including civilians attacked by rebels). The last condition is intended to rule out massacres where there is no organized or effective opposition."

While very similar to the COW definition, the qualification that the anti-government forces are fighting to gain control of the political apparatus is important. While the Kurds certainly have aspirations to a unified, independent Kurdistan, their actions as described by Yglesias and Galbraith are not aimed at that end but rather at establishing security and defeating an insurgent-terrorist movement that's working against their interests. The insurgents, meanwhile, are fighting primarily to coerce foreign interveners to leave Iraq. So, at present, civil war does not exist in the classic sense.

A more interesting question is whether such a conflict will break out in the near future. Yglesias argues that ethnic conflict is a likely outcome of the elections planned for January:

"Thus, contrary to the Bush administration's hopes, elections themselves will not solve Iraq's problems. The trouble is not merely that some factions within Iraq are opposed to the very idea of democracy (though no doubt some are), but that what's at stake in these sorts of disputes is the very nature of the political community to be governed democratically. A community that might be quite happy to govern itself democratically still has no reason to support a conception of majoritarian democracy that will guarantee its own subordination to a larger community to which it happens to have been yoked by the mapmakers of the British Empire."

This is a stronger possibility if, in the classic formulation, an election is merely a census, with the majority Shi'a winning power and ignoring the needs of the Sunni and Kurd minorities. Galbraith, too, believes this more likely than not:

"Any political settlement must take account of the fact that Iraq has broken apart and cannot be put back together again as a unitary state. The Bush administration has persisted in the belief that there is such a thing as 'the Iraqi people,' and that Iraq could become a multicultural democracy very much like the United States. As Paul Bremer, the former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, put it in an April 2004 speech, 'The path to a new Iraq [is one] -- where the majority is not Sunni, Shi'a, Arab, Kurd, or Turkoman but Iraqi.'

"Iraq is not like the United States. It was put together by the victorious allies at the end of the First World War out of three disparate Ottoman vilayets (or provinces): Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. The country never commanded the loyalty of its citizens. Further, the ethnic and confessional lines of 80 years ago remain in place. Kurdistan in the north is Kurdish, with Turkoman and Christian minorities. The center is Sunni Arab, and the south is Shi'a Arab. (The city of Mosul is majority Arab and is not considered part of Kurdistan.) Only the city of Baghdad has changed, where Shi'a and Kurdish immigration has made Sunni Arabs a minority. Even so, each community lives largely in its own part of the city.

"Iraq's divisions are not just ethnic and religious. They are compounded by a bitter history in which both the Kurds and the Shi'a have suffered grievously, and by very different value systems that place secular, Western-oriented Kurds at one end of a spectrum and religiously inclined Shi'a at the other."

The degree of division between the three Iraqi factions is daunting, indeed. But is civil war inevitable? International investment analyst Gregory Djerejian says No. First, he notes, quite correctly, that international pressure from Turkey and the United States will preclude a breakaway Kurdistan. However strong and legitimate the Kurdish nationalist impulse may be, they are not going to be willing to risk another bloodbath to get independence if they can secure substantial regional autonomy from the post-Allawi successor government, especially if backed by some security guarantees from the United States.

He cites Martin Indyk, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel and National Security Council staffer under the Clinton Administration and huge critic of Bush Administration's handling of the Iraq War, who argues that a sense of Iraqi nationalism is actually much stronger than most believe. He challenges a proposal by Leslie Gelb for ethnic division of Iraq, arguing that it is a non-starter.

"Sunnis and Shiites are Arabs, they are not ethnically distinct. The Kurds are ethnically distinct. But the Sunnis and Shiites are not looking to set up their own nation, their own states. The Kurds would like to, but they are realistic enough, over the decade of suffering, to have learned that their interests are better served by being part of an Iraqi federation, in which they have a federal arrangement, than they would be to separate. Now, I know that you also propose a kind of federal status for everybody, but I think it only really applies in the case of the Kurds, where I think they're already ready to accept that, and the others are ready to concede it to them.

"I think it's a fundamental mischaracterization of Iraq to say that it's been held together. The Shiites identify themselves as Iraqis, they fought Shiites in Iran, loyally, as Iraqis, for 10 years, and died in larger numbers than the Sunnis did. Yes, this was a state created by outside powers, as just about every state in the region has been created by outside powers, with the exception of, I think, Egypt. But, it's just a fundamental mischaracterization to say that this has only been held together by a strong man, and now we should basically take it apart, and return it to its natural state. The natural state that you seem to be describing never existed before."

Indyk and Djerejian also note that the ethnic dispersion of people in Iraq is hardly tidy, with "Sunni" Baghdad populated by nearly sixty percent Shi'a.

Iraq is not presently in a state of civil war. While there are parties who are hoping to fulminate one in order to preclude the establishment of a secular, pro-Western, democratic Iraq, the United States, its allies, and most Iraqis have a strong stake in preventing that eventuality. That the insurgents will be defeated, order established, and the Iraqis assisted in creating a workable democracy is hardly a given. Still, the Coalition is taking important steps in the right direction. The recent operations to retake Fallujah and Mosul, while certainly costly, have sent a signal to ordinary Iraqis that the terrorists are not going to be allowed free reign. The insistence on holding the elections as scheduled in January is vital to institutionalizing the rule of law.

Iraq's Interim Constitution, established March 8, can serve as a baseline for a future unified Iraq. It includes several measures recognizing the rights of minorities, including the recognition of the Kurdish language, along with Arabic, as an official language (Article 9) and the listing of several important "fundamental rights" (Chapter Two, Articles 10-23) that may not be taken away even by the act of the legislature. If the follow-on government that comes to power pursuant to the January 2005 elections maintains a similar model, civil war will be unnecessary.

James H. Joyner, Jr., Ph.D. is Managing Editor of Strategic Insights, the journal of the Naval Postgraduate School. He writes about national security policy at the Outside the Beltway weblog. He is a frequent TCS contributor.

JESSIE-LYNNE KERR

Associated Press

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - In large cities, the weather outlook can depend on the neighborhood. While those in one section of town slog through a frog-croaker of a thunderstorm, things can be hot and hazy just miles away.

That makes it hard to give Floridians accurate forecasts.

But the University of North Florida hopes that, within five years, its Advanced Weather Information Systems Lab will make Florida the first in the nation to forecast weather on a neighborhood level.

Weather forecasts now cover large geographic areas. The UNF project would make forecasts for everything except tornadoes for a 2-mile radius.

Pat Welsh, who recently retired as the science and operations officer at the National Weather Service office in Jacksonville, has been hired as executive director of the lab. The project is being financed by a $339,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"Weather impacts everybody's life in what we wear and what we do," Welsh said. "The economic value of knowing in advance what the weather will be right in your neighborhood is huge."

While modern Doppler radar can tell current conditions in specific neighborhoods, it can't predict the weather to come in six, 10 or 24 hours.

Assisted by six computer science and electrical engineering graduate students, Welsh and UNF assistant professor David Lambert are at work developing a high-resolution network of sensors that will enable people to learn up to a day in advance what the weather will do.

"It certainly is where we have all tried to take weather forecasting for years," said Tim Deegan, chief meteorologist for First Coast News.

"Particularly in the Southeast, where our weather is so different from the rest of the country, being able to be specific hours in advance, to be able to tell our audience what the weather will be, not at the airport but outside their living room, that is a big deal," Deegan said.

Welsh spent 20 years as a Navy oceanographer and meteorologist before beginning his decade with the National Weather Service. While in the Navy, Welsh earned master's degrees from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School and the University of Maryland.

In 1993, he earned his doctorate in physical meteorology from Florida State University as a NASA Florida Space Grant fellow. He has several areas of research interest and expertise including remote sensing of severe weather by radar and satellite, evolution of tropical cyclone-induced tornadoes and turbulent convective boundary layers.

He said the UNF lab is part of a large team that includes media forecasters, the National Weather Service, National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration forecasters and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research based in Boulder, Colo.

"Here at UNF, we are focusing on the information systems," Welsh said.

Before Florida's recent barrage of hurricanes, Welsh said, the students rushed to put up one of the wireless networked weather station prototypes - basically neighborhood weather sensors - on the UNF campus, adjacent to its athletic complex.

The small device containing the communications and power supply consists of a radio controller, solar panel, lightning arrester and a computer central processor the size of a postage stamp.

Another part of the cooperative effort is the placement of similar weather sensors on poles containing the Florida Department of Transportation's motorist aid system. There are 17 of them on Interstate 10 from Quincy to Jacksonville, on Interstate 75 from Jasper to Gainesville, and on Interstate 95 from Yulee to the Flagler County line. Ten more are likely in Central Florida along I-95, Interstate 4 and Florida 528, Welsh said.

To drive the forecasts to the neighborhood level, Welsh envisions setting up weather sensors about every 4 miles. Welsh and the graduate students are developing the newest generation of models, or simulations, that will analyze all the weather data to provide the forecasts.

"It's a lot closer than people think," he said.

San Francisco Chronicle article by Matthew B. Stannard

Army Reserve 1st Sgt. Michael Abbott had his doubts when he shipped out six months ago to apply the skills he normally uses to train American soldiers to the new Iraqi army.

He feared that the language and cultural differences between the Iraqis and the soldiers of the 91st Training Support Division out of Camp Parks in Dublin would be hard if not impossible to overcome. And, when he arrived in Iraq, he discovered that the Iraqi troops had the same reservations about the Americans.

But once they got past the stereotypes, the 32-year-old Sacramento resident said, both sides were surprised.

"There were a lot of similarities," said Abbott, who returned home through Oakland International Airport on Wednesday. "The soldiers we were with, they were just like any U.S. soldier."

That experience was echoed by the six other reservists who returned home Wednesday, all members of the 91st -- a division last activated for World War II. Normally, the soldiers of the 91st train and evaluate other Reserve and Army National Guard troops using high-tech simulators and the latest methods. Now, the division is helping to create a new Iraqi army from scratch.

That mission is among the most critical the Pentagon faces, analysts say, as U.S. and Iraqi military leaders struggle against an insurgency that is fed, in part, by wide discontent at the presence of foreign troops in Iraqi cities.

Military strikes against insurgent strongholds such as Fallujah cannot ultimately defeat the wider insurgency, analysts commonly say, unless the ordinary people who fuel the insurgency with recruits and support have reasons to support the new Iraqi government.

That means military action must be followed closely by civil reconstruction and the introduction of well-trained and reliable Iraqi soldiers and police who can maintain security in the absence of American firepower.

"The goal of Iraqization is a central element in our longer term strategy toward Iraq," said John Arquilla, co-director of the Center on Terrorism and Irregular Warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. "In many respects it is analogous to Vietnamization in the late '60s."

"Successful Iraqization means not necessarily the end of the insurgency in Iraq," he said. "What it means in practical terms is it allows the possibility of withdrawing American forces from the country."

The returning soldiers of the 91st, speaking between welcoming hugs from spouses and children, concurred with the analysts' assessment of their mission.

"It's very critical," said Sgt. 1st Class Lyndon Delago, 38, of Vallejo. "Their country is going to be depending on them."

The 91st dealt with the higher levels of the new security forces -- Delago spent his time working with experienced Kurdish peshmerga destined to serve as bodyguards for Iraqi generals. His fellow soldiers trained battalion- and division-level officers. The Department of Defense has said the new army ultimately will consist of 27 battalions, nine brigades and three divisions and will be complete by early 2005.

But there is a lot of work to do before then, the soldiers said. The officers and rank and file of the new army -- as well as the already active Iraqi national guard -- are subject to threats and lethal violence like the attack that killed 49 recruits last month.

At the same time, the new forces' morale, efficiency and reliability have been repeatedly questioned -- there have been reports of legions of troops fleeing under fire or joining the insurgents.The soldiers of the 91st did not dismiss those difficulties but insisted they could be overcome.

"They do pack up and run, but the reason is it's just new for them to take care of their country," said Sgt. 1st Class Howard Courney. "If 50 percent of them bolt ... that's still 50 percent of them present. And that 50 percent is going to grow."

The top officers the 91st trained will play an important role in raising that percentage, Abbott said, separating those wanting to fight for a new Iraq from those with more mercenary interests.

"It's leadership," he said. "If the leadership knows the soldiers, they know what their motivation is, if their heart is in it, or if they're in it for the money."

Delago agreed, with a touch of reservation.

"I think they're going to accomplish it," he said. "I think they're going to be successful. We won't know until they see action."

The trainers praised the Iraqi soldiers who do stand and fight, calling them good people who want a better future for their families and whose main concern is that their American allies will leave before the job is done.

It is a concern the American soldiers share.

"In America, we like quick fixes," Abbott said. "We have a path that we're walking on. It may be a long road, it may be a short road, but we need to stay on that path."

It will take years, the soldiers said, but most were confident that a new, reliable Iraqi army would emerge in the long run to defend a self-sustaining Iraq.

"It will happen, if for no other reason than we're going to stay at it," said Maj. Tom Harper. "I don't believe it will be a quick process, but I do believe it is an achievable process."

Tampa Tribune article by Keith Morelli

Hillsborough County Sheriff-elect David Gee announced his executive staff Friday, promoting four longtime sheriff's commanders.

Gee, who was chief deputy under retiring Sheriff Cal Henderson, won the office in the general election.

Friday, he promoted Col. Jose Docobo to be his second in command.

Docobo, currently a colonel over the executive support and enforcement operations and the chief financial officer, is a graduate of the FBI National Academy and the Program For Senior Executive Fellows at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Docobo also is a graduate of the University of South Florida who is working on his master's degree from the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in national security affairs. He has been with the office for 24 years.

Gee also announced the promotion of Maj. Carl W. Hawkins Jr. to colonel over the department of administrative services. Hawkins, a 30-year department veteran, currently commands the inspections services division.

He has a doctorate in public administration and a master's degree in criminal justice from Nova Southeastern University and is a graduate of the Southern Police Institute, the Senior Management Institute for Police and the Delinquency Control Institute.

Maj. Gary Terry, currently head of the special operations division, will be Gee's colonel over investigative services.

He is in his 34th year with the sheriff's office and is a graduate of the FBI National Academy. He holds a bachelor's degree from USF and is co-chairman for the National Advisory Board for the FBI's Violent Criminal Apprehension Program.

Maj. Greg Brown, who heads the department's District 1 office in north Tampa, was promoted to colonel over the department of patrol services.

Brown, who has been with the department for 26 years, is a graduate of the University of Tampa who majored in criminology and business management. He has served as a negotiator, tactical sergeant and as the public information officer.

Col. David Parrish will remain commander of the jails.

The officials will take their new positions Jan. 4.

Red Nova article

Air Force Space Command officials stood up a space education and training organization here recently that they said will provide the foundation to creating a new generation of space professionals. The National Security Space Institute will be the Department of Defense's single focal point for space education and training, complementing existing space education programs at Air University, the Naval Postgraduate School and the Air Force Institute of Technology.

"Through extensive space education and training programs, the (space institute) will help shape and create the growing team space professionals across the DOD and other stakeholder government communities," said Lt. Col. Ed Fienga, of the AFSPC space professional management office.

Its courses, when coupled with the operational qualifications demanded of space professionals, will secure the U.S advantage in space, said Gen. Lance W. Lord, commander of AFSPC. The Space Warfare Center's Space Operations School at Schriever AFB (Colorado) was redesignated as the NSSI, with an official activation ceremony held on 18 October.

The new institute incorporates the current programs provided by the Space Operations School, and eventually expand and integrate space-related education from other DOD activities. An Air Force Reserve associate unit, projected for fiscal 2006, will provide added support to NSSI programs.

About 2,500 students are expected to attend the institute annually, said Colonel Fienga, including servicemembers from all branches of the armed forces as well as representatives from the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA and other national agencies. Air Force students will comprise nearly 60 percent of the attendees.

The institute will conduct and coordinate space education, training, research and development programs for government space organizations, officials said. These programs will address space system capabilities, limitations, vulnerabilities and use; system acquisition; and space warfighting tactics and planning to provide full-spectrum professional development for space professionals in a variety of space missions and organizations. (Astronaut training will not be on the Institute's agenda.)

Colonel Fienga said the current courses taught by the Space Operations School will continue under NSSI a combination of "legacy" courses focused on space application to joint warfighting, as well as space professional development courses. Eventually, the institute will incorporate other courses, where appropriate, presented elsewhere in DOD to eliminate redundancy.

"Space warfighting systems and capabilities are integral to our success in fighting today's battles and the linchpin to all planning and execution for success in tomorrow's battles," General Lord said. "NSSI's integrated approach to space education and training will ensure optimum opportunities for the advancement of space systems knowledge and will ultimately enhance mission effectiveness."

Monterey Herald article by Kevin Howe

An officer serving at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey has been decorated by the an order of the Knights of Malta for his humanitarian service to the St. John's Eye Hospital in Jerusalem.

Navy Lt. Cmdr. Bennett Jon Solberg was invested Saturday in a ceremony at San Francisco's Grace Cathedral as a serving brother in the Most Venerable Order of St. John, a recognized branch of the chivalric religious and philanthropic Sovereign Military Order of Malta.

Solberg, who is assigned as an operations research student in the NPS Human Systems Integration curriculum, received a medal and was inducted into the Venerable Order by Prior John R. Drexel IV, along with other honorees.

He was honored for his work over a period of 14 months assembling surplus U.S. military medical supplies for the St. John's Eye Hospital.

He became aware of the need for medical care in under-served parts of the world, Solberg said, while serving as medical administrative officer aboard the helicopter carrier USS Kearsarge in 1999 off Kosovo and delivering humanitarian aid to Turkey following a major earthquake that same year.

The U.S. Priory of the Venerable Order of St. John has long supported the St. John Eye Hospital in Jerusalem through direct contributions of funds, service at the hospital, and providing equipment and supplies, he said.

The eye hospital opened in 1882, the only one of its kind in the Middle East, and has remained open since.

Services were provided free until recent years, Solberg said, but the fees charged to the 45,000 patients that are treated there each year still provide only 20 percent of operating costs. The rest comes from donations and grants.

The hospital performs 4,000 major operations each year and a quarter of its patients are children, Solberg said, many of them suffering from cataracts, glaucoma and traumatic injuries from accidents in the home and from the continuing civil and military conflict in the area.

Solberg's project consisted of scrounging wheelchairs, beds and other hospital furnishings languishing in military warehouses and arranging transfer of ownership and shipping of the property to the hospital.

"I worked with several people on this," he said, notably with Laird Mortimer, a Knight of St. John, who established a bush hospital in Nigeria, and Gary Krupp, a Papal Knight of the Pontifical Order of St. Gregory the Great who operates the Pave the Way Foundation, whose mission is finding peaceful resolutions to problems in the Middle East.

The Jerusalem project started in early 2003 and finished in June, Solberg said, but added that as a member of the Venerable Order, support of the hospital is "a lifelong commitment."

He himself was not knighted as a member of the order, Solberg said, and even if he was, "you can't call an American 'sir' something." Nor can he wear his medal on his Navy uniform. "We're not allowed to wear foreign decorations unless they're approved by Congress."

Solberg was nominated for the honor by retired Navy Adm. Phillip Whitacre, who advised him on how to navigate the policies and regulations of the Defense Resource Management Office, which disposes of surplus military property, in his quest to obtain the supplies for the hospital.

"He was kind enough to educate me and provide points of contact."

Solberg, a graduate of the University of Minnesota, was commissioned in the Navy 14 years ago through the university's ROTC program. He and his wife, Larissa, have two sons, Barrett and Aiden.

Toronto Star opinion/editorial by Glenn E. Robinson

The death of Yasser Arafat has opened a brief window of opportunity — and of danger — that will profoundly shape the Middle East for years to come. It is paramount that the international community help steer succession toward a fruitful conclusion in order to avoid catastrophe.

The Star-Ledger article by John Hassell

With his stubbly beard and checkered keffiya, his military fatigues and Kalishnikov rifle, Yasser Arafat never stopped dressing the part of the guerrilla, not even after he shared the Nobel Peace Prize. He was a walking bundle of such contradictions, an intensely polarizing figure and, in the end, a tragic character in the bloody drama of the Middle East.

Arafat died early today in a hospital outside Paris. His death at age 75 was announced by Palestinian Authority Cabinet minister Saeb Erekat in the West Bank town of Ramallah. "Officially, he is dead," Erekat told the news service Reuters.

A frail and sickly Arafat had entered Percy Military Hospital in Clamart Oct. 29. A top Arafat aide, Tayeb Abdel Rahim, said from Ramallah that Arafat died at 4:30 a.m. Paris time.

At the height of his influence, Arafat dined with monarchs and prime ministers and delivered impassioned speeches to the United Nations General Assembly. In his last days, he was surrounded by a small circle of family and friends in the hospital after his Israeli nemesis, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, permitted him to leave his battered compound in Ramallah.

For more than three decades, Arafat was the embodiment of the Palestinian independence movement, recognized as easily around the globe as the popes or the American presidents who came to power during his tenure. But for all his fame and notoriety, the portly revolutionary remained an enigma to the grave. Even the place and date of his birth remained in dispute.

Arafat has been described variously as terrorist, freedom fighter, martyr, murderer, statesman and villain. He was venerated, reviled, fired upon and feted. He turned failure into progress and success into disaster too many times to count. More often than most, he cheated death, and his ability to survive became part of the folk legend that surrounded him. Plane crash, stroke, assassination attempts: Arafat survived them all.

He did not, however, live long enough to realize his lifelong dream of an independent Palestinian state.

"He was, in a sense, a Moses- like figure, leading his people within sight of the Promised Land," said Glenn E. Robinson, an expert on Palestinian affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and author of "Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution." Ultimately, though, "Arafat couldn't get there himself."

Arafat's ability to influence negotiations with Israel waned in his final years, after Sharon's Likud government branded him "irrelevant" in September 2001, and the administration of President Bush followed suit, deeming him an unreliable partner for peace talks.

At the same time, attitudes hardened against Arafat in Israel, where many people held him personally responsible for the terrorist attacks that claimed at least 1,032 lives between September 2000 and Arafat's demise. (During the same period, Israeli forces killed an estimated 3,439 Palestinians.)

A typical Israeli view of Arafat can be found in the recent biography by Israeli scholar Efraim Karsh, "Arafat's War: The Man and His Battle for Israeli Conquest." In the book, Karsh describes the Palestinian leader as a "bigoted and megalomaniacal extremist blinded by anti-Jewish hatred ... and profoundly obsessed with violence."

Palestinians, for their part, were often frustrated with the corruption that afflicted nearly every level of Palestinian life, but they rallied around Arafat in the face of Israeli and U.S. criticism of their long-time leader. According to Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, "the harder Sharon and Bush tried to push Arafat aside, the more popular he became, despite his shortcomings or flaws."

Even with Israeli troops ringing his compound in Ramallah and the Bush administration refusing to come to his defense in the past couple of years, Arafat maintained a measure of behind-the-scenes control over Palestinian politics through a pair of successive, hand- picked prime ministers, Mahmoud Abbas and Ahmed Qurei.

"Arafat never really relinquished the reins, even as he devolved some power to Abbas and Qurei," said Naseer Aruri, a former member of the Palestinian National Council and a longtime critic of Arafat's leadership. "He was always in charge, even if his stature was diminished."

Arafat's extraordinary ability to manage the course of Palestinian affairs stemmed in part from the cult of personality he nurtured over the decades. It derived also from his firm grip on the levers of Palestinian institutions.

Among other roles, Arafat was president of the Palestinian Authority, the governing body in the West Bank and Gaza; president of the Palestinian state that was declared in 1988; chairman of the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization; and head of the Central Committee of Fatah, the PLO's dominant faction.

Largely by his own design, Arafat was the only Palestinian leader who combined international stature with local political credibility in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, an asset that allowed him to prevent the emergence of a natural rival -- or an obvious successor.

"He was a master at making himself indispensable," said Gideon Rose, managing editor of the journal Foreign Affairs and a former director of Near East and South Asian affairs at the National Security Council. "He created a situation where even people who disagreed with him found they had no option but to support him, because the alternative was pure chaos."

Like most things about Arafat, the facts of his early years are difficult to pin down. He was born in 1929 (on Aug. 4 or 14, or on Oct. 24, depending on the source) in either Cairo or Jerusalem, or possibly in Gaza. His birth name is disputed, too, but the Nobel Academy records it as Mohammed Abdel- Raouf Arafat As Qudwa al-Hussaeini. He received the nickname Yasser, which means "easy," as a young boy.

Arafat's father was a Palestinian textile merchant with some Egyptian ancestry, and until the day he died Arafat spoke Arabic with a slight Egyptian accent, even though he was never close to his father. He was related through his mother to the prominent Husseini family of Jerusalem, where Arafat was sent to live with a maternal uncle at age 5, following his mother's death.

Arafat rarely revealed anything about his childhood, but he told interviewers on a number of occasions that one of his earliest memories was of British soldiers breaking into his uncle's house in the early morning hours, beating members of his family and destroying furniture. That was during the years between World War I and 1948, when the land thenknown as Palestine was under British rule.

Arafat's penchant for secrecy about his private affairs -- driven mainly by security concerns -- lasted throughout his life. In 1991, he married a Palestinian Christian half his age, Suha Tawil, and managed to keep the marriage secret for 15 months. The couple had a daughter, named Zahwa for Arafat's mother, in 1995. (On Feb. 4, 1999, Suha Arafat earned the Quotation of the Day in the New York Times when she described Zahwa as being "totally her father: a real authoritarian.")

As a teenager, Arafat became involved in a Palestinian Arab nationalist group organized by several of his Husseini cousins. Then, after the 1948 war that led to the creation of the state of Israel, Arafat went to Cairo to study engineering. It was in Cairo that Arafat founded a Palestinian student union that years later would become one of the main constituent groups of Fatah, which in turn would come to dominate the PLO.

From the start, Arafat avoided the complex ideological battles that dominated Arab intellectual circles, focusing instead on the simple goal of Palestinian independence. He refused to become a stalking horse for existing Arab regimes trying to exploit the Palestinian situation, and insisted that local armed struggle was the most practical path.

After the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel devastated and embarrassed the armies of the Arab world, Arafat and his allies in Fatah took over the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. The PLO had been established by the Arab League three years earlier and, like the Arab regimes themselves, had been discredited in the war. Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO in 1969.

Arafat, who often operated under his nom de guerre Abu Amar, specialized at organizing militant cells that infiltrated Israel to strike at military and civilian targets, and he immediately began setting up guerrilla camps along the border in Jordan. But in September 1970, King Hussein of Jordan ordered his troops to attack the camps, killing many Palestinians in an episode that came to be known as Black September.

The PLO's center of gravity shifted to Lebanon, and the tactics of militant Palestinian factions focused more on terrorism -- including the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, committed by a Palestinian splinter group calling itself Black September. That group also was responsible for the assassination of a Jordanian prime minister and of the United States ambassador in the Sudan before it was reportedly disbanded in 1974.

Concerned about the image that Black September, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and other terrorist factions were presenting to the world, the Arab League in 1974 designated Arafat's PLO the "sole legitimate representative" of the Palestinian people, a move that catapulted Arafat to center stage in the Middle East conflict.

Less than two weeks after the Arab League's decision, Arafat made a dramatic appearance before the U.N. General Assembly, where he urged the international community to choose between "an olive branch or a freedom fighter's gun."

The difference, he said, "between the revolutionary and the terrorist lies in the reason for which each fights. Whoever stands for a just cause and fights for liberation from invaders and colonialists cannot be called terrorist. Those who wage war to occupy, colonize and oppress other people are the terrorists."

In 1982, the PLO was driven from Lebanon by invading Israeli forces led by then-Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, and this time Arafat escaped to Tunis, capital of the northern African nation of Tunisia. The years that followed were difficult ones for Arafat and the PLO, until the Palestinian intifada (literally, "a shaking off") of 1987 once again drew global attention to the Palestinian cause.

Not long afterward, in 1988, Arafat announced a major change of policy at a special U.N. session in Geneva, telling delegates that the PLO renounced terrorism and would support "the right of all parties concerned in the Middle East to live in peace and security."

This significantly improved the chances for a diplomatic solution and helped pave the way, despite some serious detours, for the Oslo accords of 1993, which secured the Nobel Peace Prize for Arafat, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres.

The failure of the Oslo accords and the beginning of a second Palestinian intifada in September 2000 have been scrutinized by scholars, journalists and politicians, and will no doubt be debated by historians for decades to come.

A central question in the debate is this: How much blame does Arafat deserve for walking away from a deal offered at Camp David by then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in July 2000, a deal that would have transferred 92 percent of the West Bank and all of Gaza to a Palestinian state, as well as some control over East Jerusalem?

Many analysts believe that may be an impossible question to answer, given the complex history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"In the end, Arafat's life has the hallmarks of a classic tragedy," said Henry Siegman, director of the U.S./Middle East Project at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. "He failed to deliver the one thing he professed to want, and he failed to deliver in part because of his own shortcomings, his inability to recognize opportunities to achieve independence. But what comes after Arafat? No one knows."

MSNBC News article by Tim Curry

American presidents since Richard Nixon and secretaries of state since William Rogers have had to deal with the reality of Yasser Arafat as Palestinian leader, even when they did not meet with him face to face.With the Arafat era coming to a close, President Bush and his diplomatic team are likely to confront an environment in the Middle East that is even more turbulent than usual, with the possibility that no dominant Palestinian leader emerges in the near term.

In an interview with the Financial Times published Tuesday, Secretary of State Colin Powell said the transition of power taking place due to Arafat’s illness was a chance to move a Palestinian-Israeli dialogue forward. “We are ready to seize this opportunity aggressively,” Powell said, calling the stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace process “one of the biggest overhangs in our foreign policy, the way it is perceived.”

Powell did not supply any details on post-Arafat strategy, and the president’s spokesman, Scott McClellan, has been unwilling to comment further on Arafat, much less on what landscape the Bush administration would face in the post-Arafat era.

Deep uncertainty ahead
Middle East experts outside the administration portray a situation of deep uncertainty once Arafat’s demise is confirmed.

Glenn Robinson, an expert on Palestinian politics, author of “Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution,” and teacher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., said the era of one-man dominance of Palestinian politics has ended. “That era is gone,” Robinson said. “The downside of the passing of the ‘Great Man Era’ is the potential danger of fragmentation, but no one will dominate Palestinian politics again as Arafat did.”

As for how long the Bush administration will wait to see if one new leader emerges once Arafat’s death is confirmed, Robinson said, “They should engage quickly, but we’ll see. There are some key people in the administration,” he said, who, like Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, “are not keen to restart Israel-Palestinian negotiations in a serious way, so they may advise holding back longer than is prudent.”

“The Palestinians are going to feel remarkably weakened and under siege as a consequence of Arafat leaving the scene, and there's going to be a determination that the time of maximum weakness is not the time to make concessions,” said Jon Alterman, director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

In a post-Arafat world, Alterman said he expects the Bush administration to open a dialogue with current Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qureia and his predecessor, Mahmoud Abbas. “But we'll be careful about how we do it. Anything that looks too much like an embrace will discredit them, not help them. The United States’ ability to hurt things is much greater than its ability to help things.”

Challengers to PLO?
Arafat and his associates have claimed leadership of the Palestinians, but while they were outside Palestine in the 1980s and 1990s and during the intifada, other Palestinian leaders came to the fore in Gaza and on the West Bank, many of whom reject the Oslo accords to which Arafat agreed in 1993.

While the U.S. government knows who these leaders are, Alterman said, “I’m not sure we would want to talk to a lot them; some have a fairly long track record of violence against civilians.”

One factor that will weigh in the leadership selection is the Israeli government’s building of the security barrier between Israel and the West Bank.

“President Bush has made it clear he sees the wall as a good thing. The wall is the most dynamic force changing the dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians” because “it is making facts on the ground,” said Reuel Marc Gerecht, formerly a Middle Eastern specialist for the Central Intelligence Agency and now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Since the building of the wall, he said, the number of terrorist attacks on Israel has dropped noticeably.

In Gerecht’s view, the wall will force Palestinians on the West Bank into closer relationship with Jordan and “it tells the Palestinians the border is no longer a subject for negotiation. The suburbs of Jerusalem are not going to be turned over the Palestinians. Once the wall goes up it is very unlikely it is going to be moved.”

Gerecht said the choosing of a post-Arafat leader “will be a fascinating thing to watch. To what extent will the Palestinians allow a democratic process to take place? I think you will find Hamas and Islamic Jihad insistent on representation within the Palestinian Authority — or else they will go into very effective opposition.”

He added, “It is entirely possible that a greater democratic process could lead to a more hard-line position” in negotiations with Israel by whatever Palestinian leadership emerges.

Process for electing new leader
Robinson said there is a specific process for electing a new leader for the Palestinian Authority. The speaker of the Palestinian parliament, Rauhi Fattouh, would become acting president for 60 days, during which time an election would be conducted.

“The rub is that an election needs active Israeli cooperation, since Israel controls the territory in which the election would take place,” Robinson explained. “Israel would need to redeploy out of populated areas and would need to allow Palestinians in east Jerusalem to vote, as they did in 1996. Both of these propositions contain serious considerations for the Sharon government, and are not foregone conclusions.”

Robinson added, “It is terribly important that the Bush administration not miss this historical opportunity. There is something like a six-month window of opportunity in which Palestinian governance can be rejuvenated and the peace process moved forward significantly. It will take active U.S. participation to make this happen. If we miss it, then other forces will likely coalesce, making future progress on either front more difficult.”

Milken Institute Review article on Marketwire

As the day-to-day headlines make clear, security is still the overwhelming concern in Iraq. But beyond security issues, a transition to stability and democracy depends on success in rebuilding the economy. And here, the legacy of American policy could prove very damaging, according to an economist writing in the latest Milken Institute Review.

As described by Robert Looney of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., efforts to bring free markets and prosperity to Iraq have gotten off to a rocky start.

"Iraq's current economic malaise has its origins in a series of miscalculations by the Coalition Provisional Authority," he writes. "Too many decisions were made without examining the economic dimension."

Also in the new Review, Martin Bailey, former chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, and Diana Farrell, head of the McKinsey Global Institute, offer a strong defense of one of the recent political season's hottest topics: outsourcing.

"Far from being a zero-sum game, offshoring is a story of mutual gain, benefiting both countries," they write. "Far from being bad for the United States, offshoring creates net value for the economy -- to the tune of $1.12 to $1.14 for every dollar that goes abroad."

Other highlights from the 4th Quarter Review:

--  Bill Gale of the Brookings Institution urges Washington to pay more
    attention to America's children.
--  Greg Rushford, editor of The Rushford Report newsletter on
    international trade and finance, throws some cold water on Washington's
    enthusiasm for preferential trade agreements with individual countries.
--  Gregg Zachary, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, offers his
    insight on foreign aid in Africa - what works and what doesn't.
--  Daniel Gross, the Moneybox columnist for Slate, explains why
    politicians haven't made many inroads in garnering support from America's
    investors.
--  Anthony Buzelli, regional managing partner at Deloitte, describes how
    businesses can protect themselves from the globalization backlash.
--  Rob Koepp, a research fellow at the Milken Institute, says China is
    quickly making the transition to a technology-based economy, relying on the
    "technology parks" to get the job done faster and more efficiently.
   

This issue includes an excerpt from "The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market," by economists Frank Levy of MIT and Richard Murnane of Harvard University, who describe how we can reap the benefits of computers without paying a heavy price in terms of displaced workers.

The Milken Institute Review is distributed to some 10,000 corporate and financial executives, policymakers, academics and journalists throughout the world. Its editor is Peter Passell, former economics columnist for The New York Times.

About the Institute: The Milken Institute is a nonprofit, independent economic think tank whose mission is to improve the lives and economic conditions of diverse populations around the world.

Monterey Herald article by Kevin Howe

Recovery of a long-lost mural hidden in the former Del Monte Hotel -- now Herrmann Hall at the Naval Postgraduate School -- has historic preservationists huddling on how to bring the work to light and make it available for public viewing.

Hidden behind a tile-and-mirror wall, the mural created by Carmel artist Moira Wallace in 1931 is apparently a precursor to the inlaid cloisonné technique Wallace was to use later in the inlaid trays that became famous under the name Couroc of Monterey.

"We always knew it was there," said Cynthia Vandenberg of the nonprofit Naval Postgraduate School Foundation.

David Wessel of Architectural Resources Group Conservation Services, a firm specializing in historic preservation, was hired by the Alliance of Monterey Area Preservationists to do a feasibility study on the mural and found it was intact and restorable, Vandenberg said.

Wessel will present his findings at an informational meeting at 1 p.m. Saturday at the Navy school, and a discussion of efforts to recover and restore the mural will follow.

The NPS Foundation and the preservationists' group want to coordinate restoring the mural with the remodeling of the El Prado Room, scheduled to begin in January, Vandenberg said.

"The problem is money," she said, noting that the Navy doesn't have a budget for the restoration in its building rehabilitation program and can't solicit funds for it. The NPS Foundation and AMAP, however, as nonprofit organizations, can raise money for the project, she said.

The El Prado Room "used to be the Bali Room in the heyday of the Hotel Del Monte," Vandenberg said, and Wallace, at age 21, created a room that was entirely painted with murals of Balinese life, and at one end, created the mosaic cloissoné mural using a mixed medium of paper, fabric, wood and other materials inlaid in a background of ebony-like material.

Wallace and her husband, San Francisco art dealer Guthrie Courvoisier, co-founded Couroc in 1948, showcasing Wallace's art in Courvoisier's technique that incorporated inlaid paper, metal and wood veneers on the signature black trays.

Courvoisier became internationally known in the 1930s for his "Courvoisier cels" that made animation art from Walt Disney Productions available to the general public, and his studio held the exclusive marketing rights to the Disney artwork for several years.

In 1952, when the Navy took over the hotel and moved the Naval Postgraduate School there from Annapolis, Md., the mosaic mural was covered up and the painted mosaics on the other walls were painted over, Vandenberg said.

Persons interested in attending the Saturday meeting should contact the NPS Foundation at 656-2339 before 5 p.m. Wednesday to arrange admission at the Navy school gates.

Afghan leaders appear eager to set up a system that will put the war-torn nation's military under civilian control when its new government is installed next year, according to an instructor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

Retired Army Col. Bob Tomasovic, manager of the leader development and education for sustained peace program at the Navy school's Center for Civil-Military Relations, took part in Afghanistan's first human resource development and personnel management conference in October.

The weeklong conference in Kabul was organized by the U.S. Office of Military Cooperation -- Afghanistan, which asked the Center for Civil-Miliary Relations to develop and execute a "focus workshop" for the country's Ministry of Defense, Tomasovic said, aimed at developing civilian control over it by recruiting, selecting, educating and training "a quality civilian workforce that is affordable and sustainable."

The group was able to agree on a policy that results in a 70,000-member Ministry of Defense, including 14,000 civilians, "large enough for security but not large enough to be an offensive weapon."

The civilians will work in areas like procurement, logistics, support, engineering, accounting, construction, "things even our military outsource today."

The demands for security in the 21st century, Tomasovic said, require "imaginative, highly motivated military and civilian personnel at all levels."

Conference topics, he said, included work force planning, job design and analysis, education and training, performance management, recruiting and retention, and compensation and benefits.

The attendees included representatives of the national government from several other ministries as well as the Ministry of Defense, Tomasovic said.

Afghanistan is still running on the old Soviet model set up during the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. "Our process was designed to give them a look at another model and see what pieces of it can be adapted to their needs," he said.

Tribal and ethnic issues were discussed and participants agreed that the ministry should recruit those best qualified for the job and achieve ethnic and gender balance as well, he said.

"Up front, ethnic balance was laced throughout the policy," Tomasovic said. "That was their request, not ours.

"The neatest thing about the workshop," he added, "was that I found all the participants were really engaged. They had a great attitude, they wanted to make this thing work and establish this interim policy."

The talent pool in Afghanistan is somewhat thin "and the people of Afghanistan recognize that," he said, and training and development of the workforce were also discussed.

"After six days they successfully drafted an interim policy for the Ministry of Defense, based on the draft national civil service law," Tomasovic said, that allows conditional employment of critical civilian personnel who would meet the standards set by the national law once it's ratified.

He said he and other center representatives expect to do a follow-up workshop in Kabul in February and a final workshop later next year.

San Fancisco Chronicle article by Mathew B. Stannard

The battle for control of Fallujah -- seen by U.S. and Iraqi authorities as crucial for the pacification of Iraq -- has begun with air strikes and a major buildup of force outside the Sunni city.

The next stage -- a potentially very violent, street-to-street struggle to take the city itself -- could begin at any time. It is likely to produce major casualties on both sides, a prospect that prompted the United States to abort a Marine assault on the city in April.

While officials on the ground in Iraq and others with knowledge of the operation were providing no details on the planned assault, military analysts say U.S. forces are likely to apply lessons learned from the disastrous experience in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993, when the bodies of U.S. soldiers being dragged through the streets caused a re-evaluation of urban warfare strategy.

Dave Dilegge, a retired Marine and an urban-warfare expert, said the rethinking suggested the likelihood of more-coordinated operations between air and ground forces, humanitarian capabilities in place and prepared for post- combat operations, and a greater emphasis on precision specialists, such as snipers.

"You take a 500-pound bomb, you can put it places, but the chances are you will have collateral damage (civilian casualties)," said Dilegge. "With a sniper, if he's trained, he will know what his target is."

Marine scout snipers have been used widely and effectively throughout the Iraq conflict, said Sgt. Owen Mulder, primary marksmanship instructor at Camp Pendleton's School of Infantry in San Diego County.

"They're probably the most dangerous individual on the battlefield right now," said Mulder, who served in Iraq during the initial combat phase.

Marine snipers go through 10 weeks of specialized training, focusing on firing high-powered M40A1 rifles from various distances and in different environments. Many of them are trained specifically in urban environments, learning to operate through windows and doorways and to distinguish enemy combatants from innocent civilians.

"A head will pop up in a window, they'll hit them, ranges up to 2,000 yards," said Mulder. "Very rarely will they miss. Especially in urban environments, where ranges rarely exceed 500 yards."

Snipers are likely to be a critical component in the assault on Fallujah, agreed John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a military research institute -- in part because a purely air campaign, while it could certainly subdue the city, could have negative repercussions.

"If we simply pulverize the city, it would look bad on TV," he said.

Pike also emphasized the need to distinguish between insurgent and ordinary civilian.

"If we can just get the people that can reconcile themselves to the new dispensation out of the way and then kill the few thousand people who can't reconcile themselves, then we can let the remaining 98 percent come back and live out their lives," Pike said. "If we bomb the place to the ground, those peace-loving people won't have a home to live in."

In the event of an assault, said Pike, U.S. forces would be likely to divide Fallujah into sectors and station two- to four-man sniper teams in each sector -- positioned for a wide field of vision -- as Marine patrols move through the city, checking building after building for insurgents, flushing them out into the snipers' field of fire. A similar tactic was used with considerable success last April before the earlier assault on Fallujah was called off, Pike said.

Artillery and air support would be on hand, enabling the patrols to call down 500-pound bombs on specific positions, although military analysts warn of the possibility of unintended casualties should such air support be summoned.

"One of the reasons that they are so reliant on snipers is precisely to minimize that," said Pike.

The patrolling Marines also will have access to a Dragon Runner, a four- wheeled surveillance drone with sensors and a camera that can "see around the corner" and is sturdy enough to be dropped from a humvee traveling 25 mph or thrown through a second-story window.

"A squad leader would go out, say on a foot patrol," said Capt. Kyle Patton, project officer for Dragon Runner at the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory in Quantico, Va. "He can employ the Dragon Runner to check out danger areas, areas of interest, on reconnaissance before he sends one of his own Marines. If they do spot something, they have a good rough idea where it's at. They can send Marines in to take out that threat or have a pretty good idea of coordinates to call in fire."

Additional assistance comes from another robot surveillance drone called Dragon Eye, a five-pound battery-powered aircraft launched by bungee cord or by hand that can fly at 35 knots for nearly an hour on one charge and can see with low-light and infrared cameras.

"You basically point and click where you want it to go on the map display on your laptop," said Maj. John Giscard, the device's project leader.

There are 35 Dragon Eye systems in Iraq, each with three aircraft, Giscard said. Reaction from the Marines has been "extremely positive," said Giscard. "They want more of them. They want them out there faster. They're flying three or four missions a day with them."

But the Marines, with their snipers and robotic assistants, are unlikely to go in before other tasks are accomplished, said Barak Salmoni, assistant professor in National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

Salmoni cited the current bombing campaign, designed both to obliterate insurgent command posts, armories and mined areas as well as to encourage civilians to leave the city before the ground assault -- something he said would probably be emphasized by cutting off water and other supplies.

There are also "information operations," such as the media tour of the new military morgue, the majority of which, Salmoni said, is more designed as a warning "for Iraqi consumption."

The campaign will also involve Iraqi forces, military observers say, but later in the operation -- a few carefully selected forces whose chief function might be to secure high-profile sites such as mosques and offer a welcoming, non-American face to returning Fallujans after the battle.

But all such plans might prove trickier in reality, warned Mark Burgess, a research analyst for the Center for Defense Information.

"If the insurgents are worth their salt, they will be doing their utmost to ensure that noncombatants do not just melt away, leaving combatants to fight it out with U.S. troops," he said. "It will also be difficult to ensure it is just noncombatants being filtered through any cordon the U.S. sets up."

Despite the threats, and the distinct possibility that an assault may end up being far bloodier than anticipated, Burgess and other analysts say the insurgency in Fallujah must be dealt with before it acquires even more symbolic importance.

"With the U.S. election safely out of the way, for Washington politically this may be the best window of opportunity to fix the Fallujah problem that has opened yet," said Burgess.

Unmanned vehicles aid military

Dragon Eye

UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle)

Dimensions: 45-inch wingspan, 36-inch length

Weight: 5 pounds

Range: 3 miles

Time aloft: 30-60 minutes

Cruising speed: 40 mph

Altitude: Up to 500 feet

Equipped with: Low-light and infrared cameras

How it works: The plane is launched either by hand or bungee cord and radio- controlled from a portable transmitter .

Dragon Runner

Robotic surveillance device

Dimensions: 15.5 inches long, 11› inches wide, 5 inches high

Weight: 9 pounds

Equipped with: Front mounted, tilting camera; wireless modem; UHF video transmitter

How it works: The vehicle is operated with the use of a hand-held controller that includes a 4-inch video display

Sources: United States Joint Forces Command; Military.com; Carnegie Mellon University

Monterey Herald article by Kevin Howe

The death of Yasser Arafat could open a window of opportunity for peace and progress in Palestinian lands, according to an expert on the area.

The passing of the longtime Palestinian leader will mark "a watershed," said Dr. Glenn Robinson, associate professor of defense analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

Robinson, an Arabic linguist who has lived and worked in Palestine and recently returned from a two-week visit there -- "I believe I was the last appointment he canceled because of his stomach flu" -- said cooperation between Palestinians and Israel will be key to moving toward peace and stability in the region.

"There will still be conflict if he does die," Robinson said, "but there is a wonderful opportunity here, opportunities and dangers associated with it."

New forces will emerge with Arafat's death, he said, and before they coalesce into entrenched positions, there is an opportunity "for good changes or a real mess.

"The key in this is how the various actors will play it out over the next two or three months."

The Palestinian Authority does have a legal process for succession for its president, Robinson said, with naming of the speaker of its parliament as interim president for 60 days, and then holding an election.

His impression is that Palestinians in general will want that to happen, but the Islamic extremist group Hamas may object to it.

Israel is still in effective control of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Robinson said, and the Jewish state will have to decide whether to cooperate with the election process. Part of that cooperation, he added, will be allowing Palestinians living in East Jerusalem to vote in such an election.

The United States and the international community could pressure Israel to allow a smooth election to take place, Robinson said.

A potential flash point of conflict looms with the question of where Arafat will be buried, he said.

Reportedly, the longtime Palestinian leader has stated that he wished to be buried near the Dome of the Rock, the Al Aqsa mosque compound in Jerusalem, but Israeli officials have stated they will oppose it.

"That may be an issue for some period of time," Robinson said, "a week to 10 days." Both Muslim and Jewish law call for the immediate burial of the dead, he noted, and one speculation is that Arafat is being kept on life support while that is negotiated.

"There is a huge Islamic cemetery at the Dome," and reinterment, while not common in the Middle East, might be possible in Arafat's case if the Palestinian state includes part of East Jerusalem sometime in the future.

One of the founders of the militant Palestinian nationalist faction Al Fatah in 1958, Arafat became chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1969 and has been its effective leader since.

But in recent years he's become "a drag on the Palestinian body politic," Robinson said, a man opposed to reform, and "comfortable, in a (Chicago) Mayor (Richard) Daley style," with government by cronies.

He remains "reasonably popular" among his countrymen, Robinson said, but the Palestinians in general are "fed up with the corruption and authoritarianism of the Palestinian Authority that reflects on Arafat."

His death will be a chance for reformers of the Palestinian Authority to push forward, Robinson said, as well as an opportunity to move forward with the peace process.

Arafat will be viewed as "a reverential figure" and founder of the nation in future Palestinian school textbooks, he said, though Israeli school children will undoubtedly be taught that he was a thug and terrorist.

In fact, Robinson said, "he's both. Founders of states often are."

Capt. William "Tim" Trainer relieved Capt. James Woolway as commanding officer of NAVAIR Depot North Island Tuesday. For the past 18 months, Trainer has served as the depot's executive officer.

Woolway, who has commanded the depot since April 2003, has orders to Commander Naval Air Systems Command headquarters, Patuxent River.

Born and raised in Durham, Conn., Trainer received his commission in 1979 through the NROTC program at Marquette University, Milwaukee, where he received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering. He then reported to the Naval Air Training Command, Pensacola, Fla., for flight training, and he was designated a naval aviator in October 1980.

His sea assignments have included Helicopter Combat Support Squadron (HC) 3 for Fleet Replacement Squadron training in the H-46 Sea Knight helicopter, and later as an FRS instructor; HC-11, where he completed two Western Pacific deployments aboard USS Flint and USS Wichita; and USS Inchon as safety officer and assistant air officer. While aboard Inchon, he was instrumental in integrating AV-8B and helicopter night vision goggles flight deck operations and led the ship's award winning electrical safety program.

Following jet transition training in Beeville, Texas, Trainer attended the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School at Patuxent River and graduated with "Class 88" in December 1985. He was assigned to the then Rotary Wing Aircraft Test Directorate as an engineering test pilot and H-46 program coordinator where he participated in more than 15 flight test projects involving H-46, H-53, and dynamic interface testing. He returned to Test Pilot School in 1986 and served as a test pilot instructor and H-46 staff monitor. During his tour of duty at TPS, he was selected for redesignation as an aerospace engineering duty officer.

Trainer attended Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, Calif., and received his master's degree (with distinction) in aeronautical engineering.

In 1992, he reported to the Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, where he served as the aircraft carrier-helicopter avionics system program officer. In this capacity, he was responsible for all SH-60F and HH-60H avionics including the development and initial testing of the Airborne Low Frequency Sonar system. In late 1995, he transferred to the staff of Commander Naval Air Force, U.S. Pacific Fleet, for duty as helicopter class desk officer and was responsible for the technical, program and logistics requirements of all Navy and Marine Corps helicopters in the Pacific Fleet.

He returned to Patuxent River in 1998 as deputy program manager for MH-60S development and procurement, including the Combat Search and Rescue and Airborne Mine Countermeasures variants. After being promoted to captain in August 1999, Trainer reported as the director of NAVAIR's Air Vehicle Engineering Department where he served until April 2001 when he was selected as executive assistant to the commander of Naval Air Systems Command.

He has accumulated more than 2,700 flight hours in 46 different aircraft. His personal awards include the Legion of Merit, three Meritorious Service medals, and the Navy Commendation Medal.

Tech Central Station article by CCC Strategic Insights managing editor James Joyner

By the time you read this, Senator Kerry will have done the honorable thing and conceded the election to President Bush. The Associated Press reported Kerry's call to the president thusly:

"Congratulations, Mr. President," Kerry said in the conversation described by sources as lasting less than five minutes. One of the sources was Republican, the other a Democrat. The Democratic source said Bush called Kerry a worthy, tough and honorable opponent. Kerry told Bush the country was too divided, the source said, and Bush agreed. "We really have to do something about it," Kerry said according to the Democratic official.

This step will go a long way to healing wounds that have not healed since the aftermath of the 2000 election and ended fears that we were about to see a repeat.

While there were predictions that Ohio would be the Florida of 2004, that did not happen because of several key differences.

The margin: Bush was only ahead by 200 or so votes after the first count in Florida, a bigger state than Ohio. Bush currently leads by nearly 150,000 votes with all precincts in. The math was incredibly improbable for Kerry -- virtually all of the provisional ballots would have to be ruled valid and they would have had to go almost exclusively to Kerry. Both were, to say the least rather unlikely.

Perhaps more importantly, there was a built in excuse in Florida in that the Butterfly Ballots, Hanging Chads, and other oddities actually created a plausible argument that, had these things not occurred, Gore would have carried the state. Under that circumstance, trying to overturn a razor thin margin was acceptable.

Moreover, the sheer size of the initial count -- with 100% of the precincts reported -- creates a psychological victory for Bush in Ohio in a way that he never had in Florida in 2000. Kerry trying to overturn this result would have seemed outrageous in a way that it never did in Florida.

The national popular vote: In 2000, Gore had a 500,000 plus plurality in the overall vote. While that doesn't strictly matter in our system for a variety of reasons that have been written about ad nauseum, it did give his attempt to overturn a tight election result in Florida more legitimacy. More Americans, after all, had voted for Gore than for Bush. That meant that 1) more people would have been happy with an overturn of the result than would have been angered by it and 2) even people who voted for Bush had some initial sympathy for his cause.

Given that Bush has a national margin roughly six times that enjoyed by Gore -- and even won a national majority - -the Ohio result has even more credibility. The majority of Americans would almost certainly have been outraged by any attempt to change the outcome of the election under these circumstances. Not only did that put pressure on both the Kerry camp and the judiciary to resolve this quickly, but it virtually assured that Kerry could never have been seen as a legitimate president.

The Nader factor: Gore had the additional argument in 2000 that more Floridians preferred him to Bush in 2000 but some of his vote was siphoned off by Ralph Nader. No such excuse existed this time: Nader wasn't even on the ballot in Ohio. Indeed, even if we make the odd presumption that those who voted for the minor party candidates in Ohio all preferred Kerry to Bush and thus added their totals to his, Kerry still comes up short.

John Edwards: Edwards clearly wants to be the main alternative to Hillary Clinton in 2008. He had to realize that 2004 was a lost cause and that a divisive effort to overturn the election would have destroyed his chances for the future.

We've already had one 2000: The fact that we went through this in 2000 mitigated against a repeat. People remember how bitter and agonizing it was last time and had no desire to do it again.

Because of these factors, and a simple realization that dragging out the inevitable would be bad for the country, the Kerry team reluctantly did the right thing. And, who knows, CNN might even call it for Bush before the Electoral College meets.

Syria, formally known as the Syrian Arab Republic, like many other countries in the Middle East, calls itself a republic but functions as a monarchy. After Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad died in 2000, the Baath Party nominated his son, Bashar al-Assad, for president. As Glenn Robinson, professor at the Navy Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, notes, the Bush Administration’s rhetoric about bringing democracy to the Middle East and transforming Iraq into a free nation is not popular in Syria.

"They don’t want the U.S. occupation of Iraq to go well," he says. "So they’re turning a blind eye to the comings and going on the border between Syria and Iraq. But on the other hand, they don’t want such looseness to get to such levels as to prompt military responses or indeed to rebound negatively within Syria."

To that end, Syria has begun to tighten control of its 600 kilometer-long border with Iraq. U.S. military commanders acknowledge Syria’s efforts, but note there are problems. Syria’s border outposts are poorly equipped and the soldiers manning them often lack basic surveillance equipment.

"The Syrians always like to the use the example of the United States and Mexico," notes Murhaf Jouejati, a Syrian-American professor of political science at George Washington University and scholar at the Middle East Institute. "The United States is unable to stem the tide of illegal immigration into the United States from Mexico. So how can the Syrians on their own do it?"

Mr. Jouejati says Syria needs to have a stable Iraq, despite what some extremists may think. "But in the overall Syrian national interest, I think Syria has an interest in having a stable Iraq," he says. "It’s not in the Syrian interest to have a civil war in Iraq or a fragmentation of Iraq or further strengthening of Islamic fundamentalists in Iraq. And that is partly why Syria is increasingly cracking down on those elements that infiltrate its border."

Former U.S. Ambassador to Syria Talcott Seelye says that in addition to stepping up border security, Syrians have been helpful in other ways. "For example, they have shared with us information on Al-Qaida," he says, "and they’re in a position to help us on that because the Syrian government had its threats from the Islamic fundamentalists some 20 years ago and effectively took care of it. So they have pretty good information on that. They’ve tipped us off about an imminent attack on our naval facility in Bahrain. Gestures like this have been positive and tend to counter the impression that the Syrians are working against us."

Although Syria has worked with the United States to track Al-Qaida, Talcott Seelye says overall the U.S.-Syrian relationship is somewhat strained. The U.S. State Department includes Syria on its list of countries that are state sponsors of terrorism because of its continued support of Palestinian militant groups like Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, groups Syria sees as offering legitimate resistance to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza strip.

And in May 2004, the U.S. Congress passed the Syrian Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Act, which imposes sanctions on Syria until it stops developing chemical and biological weapons, providing safe haven for Palestinian militant groups and occupying Lebanon. Talcott Seelye says the sanctions are mostly symbolic, but still irritating.

"Now these sanctions have little effect on Syria because the only important American firms operating in Syria are oil companies, which are exempted," he says. "But from a Syrian standpoint I would say the Syrians are not happy, of course, with the sanctions. They certainly have declared several times that they desire to have good relations with the United States."

While the United States has made clear that it appreciates Syria’s cooperation against Al-Qaida and its efforts to tighten its border with Iraq, analysts say it’s unlikely U.S. Syrian relations will improve any further given the close U.S.-Israeli alliance, Syria’s occupation of Lebanon and the continuing U.S. occupation of Iraq.

Monterey Herald article by Brandy Underwood

It was clear early today that Monterey Mayor Dan Albert would win another term and that Councilman Clyde Roberson was a likely victor, but the identities of two other council members remained a question.

In the race for two long-term seats, Jeff Haferman and Libby Downey topped a crowded field, followed closely by Frank Sollecito, who trailed Downey by a handful of votes.

Henry Ruhnke, Barbara Bass and Dick Vreeland, trailed by wider margins

In the mayor's race, Bob Oliver and Joseph Aiello Jr., challenged the incumbent, but Albert, seeking his 10th mayoral term, held onto his seat by a landslide.

"We're really pleased that the citizens of Monterey would like to see us for another two years," Albert said. He thanked all the people in the community for electing him and those who helped him campaign. "I'm looking forward to the next two years."

Balancing the city's budget will be a major priority for Albert. Another major concern, he said, will be keeping the Defense Language Institute and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey. Albert will also welcome the council's two new members.

"There will be new faces and I'm sure they'll have the best interest of the city at heart," Albert said. "The big thing is that we all work together."

Several candidates stepped forward this election to battle for three seats on the Monterey City Council by either filling the opening created by Councilwoman Theresa Canepa's retirement or challenging two incumbents up for re-election.

Incumbent Roberson, a former mayor and longtime councilman, had a solid hold on the council's two-year term that was up for grabs. Roberson, a former teacher, was challenged by Lou Haddad and Dan Presser.

Haferman, a satellite weather analyst for the Navy, had a commanding toward capturing one of two four-year terms being contested. He previously ran unsuccessfully for a council seat, but has remained active in city politics.

Downey, a Monterey County public health nurse and Monterey's Parks Commission chairwoman, was close behind Haferman. She has pushed in the past for the Sports Center and Recreation Trail.

Monterey Herald article by Kevin Howe

Soldiers can now go into battle with a combat laptop.

It's called the Scorpion HTU (hand-held terminal unit) made by DRS Technologies, one of more than 100 exhibitors showing their wares at MILCOM 2004, a three-day trade show that began Monday at the Monterey Conference Center.

DRS Technologies designs and manufactures "rugged computers," including the Scorpion, a unit about the size and weight of a coffee table book contained in an olive green case, said company representative Christopher Campbell.

"What we do isn't rocket science," Campbell said. They just make sure their combat laptop can sustain rain, dust, heat, cold, altitude, vibration and power surges.

And, as could happen in combat, being dropped.

"A soldier would carry this in his rucksack," Campbell said. The unit acts as computer, digital radio frequency finder and global positioning device, he said, "the solution to mobile computing in any demanding environment."

The conference, co-hosted by Lockheed Martin and Hewlett Packard, is sponsored by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Communications Society. Attendance is being closely monitored by security personnel because many of the sessions are classified.

The Scorpion was one of many high-tech innovations showcased at the event.

Intercommunication among the armed forces is a major subject of the trade show, which has drawn about 1,500 industry and military representatives.

"The next generation of tactical radios will have software that can be programmed on the fly," allowing field radios to search for frequencies that let them communicate from the ground to air to headquarters, said James Bickford of the Department of Defense's Joint Tactical Radio System program.

In another part of the room, Tectronics offered a variety of electronic testing systems to calibrate units using the Joint Tactical Radio System which "adapts to whatever technology it can access" to send and receive messages from the field, said exhibitor Wayne Newitts.

Marway Power Systems offered the ultimate line of surge protectors, exhibitor Rick Schade said, "backing up everything" from power surges to the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion.

Electrobit of Finland was showing a display of radio channel simulators to demonstrate its "smart antenna" for the Joint Tactical Radio System.

"We're the world leader in wireless development," representative Juha Auer said.

EMS Industries of Atlanta and Ontario, Canada, has created a new military group to handle defense projects "because of the market demand," said company representative Halina Sejdak-Rydel. Its communications systems have been incorporated in 25 types of U.S. aircraft, including Air Force One, she said.

Visitors to the Avtec Systems booth get a chance to drive a model M-1 Abrams tank around a course. Those who navigate it without crushing anything win a prize.

Company representative Siragan Ozkan said the exhibit demonstrates the company's satellite digital information and imaging system, complete with the expected seconds-delay from command to execution of a movement by the tank.

The exhibits are "the art of the possible," said Navy Vice Adm. James McArthur Jr., commander of the Naval Network Warfare Command in Norfolk, Va.

"Information technology goes from concept to practical demonstration almost in a nanosecond," McArthur said. His command has set a goal of rationalizing the Navy's 1,500 networks into a single system, "global, freely accessible, reliable, secure, interoperational and affordable."

Part of that, he said, is "speeding to market" concepts developed in private industry.

The Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey "is a big part of that," he said. The Navy school developed a data collection plan and system to measure the feasibility of technology concepts and help make choices among them.

Star-Telegram.com opinion article by David Henderson of the Hoover Institution

A recent New York Times article on the shortage of vaccines stated that "the heart of the problem, experts say, may be that no one person or agency is in charge of making sure the United States has an adequate vaccine supply." In fact, the heart of the problem is too much centralized government control.

No one person or agency is in charge of making sure the United States has an adequate supply of bread. Do you line up for hours for bread? No one is in charge of making sure we have an adequate supply of VCRs, TVs or computers, yet anyone willing to pay the price can get one easily.

The reason that markets work so well is precisely that no one is in charge. Instead, thousands of producers and millions of customers make decisions that mesh.

Vaccines aren't special. It's true that flu vaccine not used this year must be thrown out. But bread not used this week must be thrown out, and there's no shortage of bread.

Indeed, the countries in the world that have done the worst are those in which one person or agency is in charge. In the Soviet Union, one agency was in charge of making sure people had an adequate supply of bread. The result was that bread lines were common.

And lesser attempts at central planning, such as government-set price controls, have also caused shortages. Richard Nixon's price controls on gasoline in 1973 and Jimmy Carter's in 1979, for example, caused long lines for gasoline.

Similarly, price controls threaten the supply of vaccines. In 1993, Congress passed former first lady Hillary Clinton's Vaccines for Children program, under which the government now purchases more than half the national supply of children's vaccines at a forced 50 percent discount and then distributes it to doctors who administer it to the poor and uninsured -- despite a General Accounting Office report at the time stating that "vaccines are already free" for the truly needy.

One result of price control programs and liability laws has been that the number of vaccine producers has fallen in 30 years from 25 to five. For some vaccines, there is only one producer.

Tommy Thompson, secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, has urged state attorneys general to go after those who think the price of influenza vaccines is "too high." The vaccine business is already a high-risk one because of a limited product shelf life, uncertain demand and lawsuits. Do threats of price controls make being in the vaccine business more attractive?

The solution to our vaccine problems is not to put one agency in charge but, instead, to reduce the role of government so that the vaccine market acts more like the U.S. bread market and less like the Soviet one.

GAITHERSBURG, Md., Nov. 1 /PRNewswire/ -- Sodexho announced today the formation of a business advisory board to examine key aspects of the company's operations in North America and make recommendations to guide the company's future strategic direction. The board will be chaired by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Alexis M. Herman.

"The members of this advisory board are highly-respected leaders, academicians and entrepreneurs who bring together a wealth of expertise and vision in the various market segments in which we operate," said Sodexho Chief Executive Officer Michel Landel. "Their extensive experience is drawn from both the private and public sector and they will provide an independent, objective voice in guiding our growth, development and long-term success." The board members will provide advice and counsel to Sodexho's executive management team, including Landel and President and Chief Operating Officer, Richard Macedonia.

"I look forward to helping build on the aggressive strategic imperatives set forth by Sodexho and continue the momentum to meet the company's overall business objectives," Herman said. "I am excited to be joined by my fellow board members who bring a broad range of proven skills and talents and a high level of expertise."

In addition to Ms. Herman, the appointees to the advisory board include: Douglas A. Brook, Ph.D., dean of the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.; Judy George, founder and CEO of Domain Home Fashions; Neil R. Grabois, vice president and director for strategic planning and program coordination for the Carnegie Corporation of NY; Irene Hirano, president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles; George Munoz, president of Munoz Investment Banking Group LLC in Arlington, Va.; David R. Pitts, chairman and CEO, Pitts Management Associates Inc. in Baton Rouge, La.; and Joshua I. Smith, chairman and managing partner of The Coaching Group LLC in Washington, D.C.

Sodexho (http://www.sodexhoUSA.com) is the leading provider of food and facilities management in the United States, with $5.8 billion in annual revenue and 110,000+ employees. Sodexho offers innovative outsourcing solutions in food service, housekeeping, grounds keeping, plant operations and maintenance, asset management, and laundry services to more than 6,000 corporations, health care, long term care and retirement centers, schools, college campuses, military and remote sites in North America. Headquartered in Gaithersburg, MD, Sodexho proudly serves as the official food service provider for the U.S. Marine Corps.

Alexis M. Herman, who chairs the Sodexho Advisory Board, served as the nation's 23rd Secretary of Labor and was the first African American to lead the department. Currently, Herman serves as chair and CEO of New Ventures Inc., and chairs The Coca-Cola Company's Human Resources Task Force and the Toyota Diversity Advisory Board. Herman serves on the boards of Cummins Inc., MGM/Mirage Inc., and Entergy. She is also a member of the advisory committee for Public Issues for the Advertising Council and sits on the board of her alma matter, Xavier University, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Douglas A. Brook, Ph.D. is the dean of the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. Before joining NPS, Brook was vice president of government affairs for The LTV Corporation and also served as acting director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and Assistant Secretary of the Army for Financial Management. Brook served on active duty as a Navy Supply Corps officer and was an active member of the naval reserve for 30 years.

Judy George is founder and CEO of Domain Home Fashions and is a co-author of two books, "The Domain Book of Intuitive Home Design" and "The Intuitive Businesswoman." George's Domain Home Fashions is ranked 201 among Working Woman magazine's "Top 500 Women-Owned Businesses" and 79th among the top 100 furniture stores in the country. George ranked 12th of 100 Top Women Led Businesses in Massachusetts and was also voted Entrepreneur of the Year in 2003 by Ernst and Young. George currently sits on the board of Aga Foodservice Group and Daffy's Clothing.

Neil R. Grabois directs strategic planning and program coordination for the prestigious Carnegie Corporation of New York. Grabois has also served as the president of Colgate University and provost and chair of mathematical sciences at Williams College. Grabois currently sits on the boards of Swarthmore College, The Jewish Foundation for the Education of Women and the Michael Wolk Heart Foundation.

Irene Hirano is president and CEO of the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles. She has served as a board member of the American Association of Museums and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History and was an appointee to President Clinton's Committee on Arts and Humanities. Hirano currently serves on the Smithsonian Institution National Board, the Toyota Diversity Advisory Board, the Accreditation Commission of the American Association of Museums, and chairs the Kresge Foundation Board.

George Munoz is the president of Munoz Investment Banking Group, LLC, and an attorney with the law firm of Tobin, Petkus & Munoz of Chicago and Washington, D.C. Munoz has served as president and CEO of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation and as chief financial officer & assistant secretary for the U.S. Department of Treasury. Munoz currently sits on the board of Marriott International, the MHW board, the advisory board of Frito- Lay, Inc., the Board of Governors -- Certified Financial Planners Board of Standards, and is a National Geographic Society trustee. Munoz is also a past president of the Chicago Board of Education.

David R. Pitts is the chairman and CEO of Pitts Management Associates, Inc. one of the nation's premier strategic advisory firms in the health care industry. Pitts has also served as CEO of the Ochsner Foundation Hospital, in New Orleans, LA., and executive officer for health affairs for the Office of the Secretary of Defense. Pitts currently chairs the Church Pension Group in New York City, and the Business Bank of Louisiana. He also serves on the boards of the General Health Systems, The Powell Group, AMEDISYS, Access Pt., Clark Consulting and Health Insights, Inc.

Joshua I. Smith has been chairman and managing partner of The Coaching Group since 1998. Previously he was founder, chairman and CEO of The MAXIMA Corporation, a 20-year-old firm that achieved a national reputation as one of the top African-American owned firms in the United States. Smith currently serves on the boards of Caterpillar, Inc., FedEx Corp., and Allstate Insurance Corp., as well as the Canadian-based Cardiocomm Solutions, Inc. Smith was appointed by former President George H.W. Bush to chair the U.S. Commission on Minority Business Development from 1989 to 1992, and served on the Executive Committee of the 1990 Economic Summit of Industrialized Nations, the Board of Trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and the George H.W. Bush Memorial Library Board of Trustees.

Business Week Online article by Stan Crock

Soon after September 11, it became axiomatic that Islamic schools known as madrassas should be a key target in the war on terrorism. The venomous sermons that some madrassa preachers were known to give made these institutions prime suspects for jihadism's growth. The oft-expressed solution: Government crackdowns to eliminate the religious schools and sending students in Muslim nations to public schools instead.

But research into the sources of Islamic militancy indicate that trying to suppress the schools may be a fool's errand -- and won't address the roots of terrorism. What's more, the public educational system may be more likely to produce suicide bombers. "All of this whooping and hollering about the madrassas is misplaced criticism," says Christine Fair, a South Asia specialist at the U.S. Institute for Peace who has studied the origins of terrorists.

NOT NECESSARILY MILITANT.  To understand why, you need to know some history about these schools. Madrassas range from elementary schools to the equivalent of Koranic Sunday schools to seminaries that train religious leaders. Parents prefer madrassas because they're better funded, and some give stipends to offset the loss of child labor.

Politics played a major role in financing these schools. And nowhere has the growth of madrassas been more of an issue than in Pakistan. Saudi Arabia and Gulf States with majority Sunni populations wanted Pakistan to serve as a buffer against the Shiites who had come to power in Iran in the late 1970s. So they bankrolled madrassas in Pakistan. The Saudis in particular exported Wahhabism, a particularly rigid expression of the Islam faith that relies on strict interpretation of the Koran. But while religion plays an important role in the schools, jihadism by and large doesn't.

"They may train people who are more bent on a religious view of things, but that doesn't necessarily mean a militant curriculum," says Vali Nasr, a professor of Middle East and South Asia politics at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, Calif. (It's believed that few of the Wahabbi madrassas teach violence. However, they're extremely conservative.)

JIHADISM'S OTHER FACTORS.  In fact, madrassas don't give students the kind of education needed to be terrorists, argues Fair. Most of these schools focus on reciting the Koran and learning the duties of the maulvi, the people who run mosques' day-to-day operations. To be a terrorist, you need to know where to get bomb components, how to read labels -- a set of skills madrassas don't teach. "If you think about this as a labor market, it makes no sense [that these schools are supplying al Qaeda recruits]," Fair says.

Fair and Nasr agree that only a tiny percentage of madrassas taught students about both the Koran and Kalishnikovs -- and that was mostly to fight the Soviets when they had invaded Afghanistan. That's still true. So to say all madrassas foment terror is like saying all Catholic priests violate vows of celibacy because a few do.

When the Pakistan economy was so dismal that madrassa graduates joined terrorist groups because no jobs were available, it was easy -- but wrong -- to conclude that the madrassas were responsible for nurturing terrorists. A country's military, foreign powers, war lords, and the local economy all play major roles in the growth of jihadism -- certainly more significant roles than the religious-based schools.

ILL-PREPARED STUDENTS.  To be sure, the madrassas that prepare imams have produced their share of hot-headed preachers who can get a crowd going. But for an average guy who attends these schools, "the impact on recruitment for terrorism is much more difficult to prove," says Nasr. Fair says the typical recruitment process involves friends, networks, and door-to-door preachers who recruit through lectures on alleged Hindu or Christian perfidy.

Stamping out madrassas may prove nearly impossible, simply because state-run schools are not yet an alternative for the middle and upper classes. Ironically, it's state-run schools that are more likely to give students the skills they need to be terrorists, though how much anti-Western sentiment is taught varies from country to country.

That's not to say that the madrassas don't merit criticism. Their curriculum doesn't prepare students for the modern economy. And they produce religious conservatives who are likely to vote that way if democracy comes to their countries. Only now are these schools starting to buy computers and teach such subjects as English, chemistry, and physics. While those are the skills terrorists need, it will be less of a problem if the economies in these countries improve so that they offer a source of income other than joining al Qaeda.

The schools still have a long way to go. Nasr says Pakistan has only 80 math teachers for 8,000 madrassas. So yes, there are problems with madrassas. But contrary to conventional wisdom, fueling terrorism may not be the most troublesome one.

Santa Cruz Sentinel article by Genevieve Bookwalter

Despite his 11 years in office, incumbent U.S. Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, faces five challengers for his 17th Congressional District seat.

While the candidates from smaller parties said they’re running to encourage discussion and debate, Republican Mark Risley wants voters discouraged with Washington "politics as usual" to choose him to serve.

"I really want to be an activist and make some noise," Risley said.

Other candidates include Ray Glock-Grueneich of Soquel for the Green Party; Joel Smolen of Pebble Beach for the Libertarian Party; Joe Williams of Santa Cruz for the Peace and Freedom Party; and write-in candidate David Munoz of Salinas.

The 17th Congressional District covers parts of Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties. Of the 100,615 registered voters, Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 3-to-1, according to the Santa Cruz County Elections Office.

Besides belonging to the prevailing party’s ticket, Farr said his accomplishments over the years should persuade voters to keep him in Washington.

"I think that the voters in this district have always shown that they judge candidates on their commitment to public service," Farr said. "In order to win their approval, the candidates have to demonstrate that they’ve done something."

Affordable housing is the biggest challenge facing his district, Farr said. While much of that responsibility is left to local government, Farr said he has played a small role in finding a solution by working with the Fort Ord Reuse Authority to ensure at least 20 percent of the new homes built on the former base are affordable for middle-income residents.

Along with those challenges, Farr said he plans to continue his focus on the three E’s — environment, education and economy.

In his las term, Farr said, he is proudest of securing money for a Center for Stabilization and Reconstruction Studies at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

That center should teach students how to stabilize and rebuild war-torn countries, Farr said.

Despite his opponent’s popularity, Republican Risley point to what he says are Farr’s trouble spots — approving military spending and taking money from special interests.

If elected, Risley said, he would work to improve international relations, protect the environment and decrease the United States’ dependence on foreign oil.

He said he would discourage vacation-home sales, to make housing more affordable for residents, and would keep refusing campaign donations from corporations, Risley said. He accepts money only from individuals in the district.

Risley faced some controversy recently when ads in newspapers, including the Sentinel, directed voters to "stop person-per-minute Calif. Growth," and cast their ballot for Risley. He said he has no idea who paid for them.

"I denounce the racial profiling that is so apparent in this ad," Risley said.

Other candidates offer their own ideas on Iraq, minimum incomes and why current U.S. policies don’t work.

Peace and Freedom Party candidate Williams said he wants the United States to immediately withdraw troops from Iraq, and to secure a basic income guarantee for all Americans, ensuring no one’s income falls below a certain level.

"It would free up people’s time. Instead of polluting our air and the environment on the way to work, they can devote more time to their family, to creative activities, to the environment," Williams said.

Libertarian Party candidate Smolen said he espouses the basic Libertarian principles — conservative spending with liberal values.

"The same old programs and plans are not working. New and creative thinking is needed," Smolen said.

Green Party candidate Glock-Grueneich said he would like to impeach President Bush on charges of lying about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction.

Also, he said, "I would immediately require that we bring home American contractors. Not troops, contractors."

Iraqis should be the ones making money from restorating their country, Glock-Grueneich said.

Write-in candidate Munoz wrote in a statement that, as a 30-year-old living in the district’s largest city, he represents the average constituent.

"If someone really has the support of the people then those people should be able to remember the name of the person they want representing them and be able to write it down on a piece of paper," he said.

Monterey Herald News article by Larry Parsons

Monterey Bay views. More than 40 models featuring three to five bedrooms and studies wired for high-speed Internet.

These homes under construction -- if up for sale on the pricey Monterey Peninsula real estate market -- wouldn't go for a song, or even a thick songbook, for that matter.

"I imagine they would be very, very expensive," said Francis Coen of Clark Realty Capital. "Especially the ones up on top of the hill with great views of the bay."

Behind the hill, earth movers on Monday were shaping the contours of baseball and soccer fields, tennis and basketball courts, while carpenters framed the walls of a new neighborhood center.

Welcome to a new generation of military housing.

The 160 homes going up in Hayes Park on Fort Ord are among about 2,200 Peninsula residences to be built over the next decade to replace existing military housing.

The 10-year, $420 million project -- which teams the military with private builders and real estate managers -- will replace and renovate housing on Fort Ord and at La Mesa Village, the Presidio and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

Hayes Park is the first neighborhood being rebuilt. Construction started there in June with the demolition of 174 flat-roofed, ranch-style homes built in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Crews began working on 90 new homes at La Mesa Village in August after tearing down 44 old homes.

The first batch of new homes -- 49 in Hayes Park and 40 in La Mesa Village -- should be ready by December, said Pat Kelly, residential communities director for the Army's Presidio of Monterey.

The Hayes Park homes, most of them two-story models with nice architectural touches, are going up just north of the upscale Seaside Highlands subdivision, where some homes are priced at more than $1 million.

But the military homes will be rented to families of junior grade enlisted service men and women, most of whom will be students at the Army's Defense Language Institute or Naval Postgraduate School.

Students will be able to hook into the schools' computer systems with the new homes' Internet links.

"It doesn't even look like military housing," said Josephine Thagard, whose husband is studying Spanish at DLI. They lived four years ago in the old Hayes Park homes.

"I've lived in military housing in Virginia, Washington, D.C., all over," Thagard said, stopping to check measurements at the new home her family will move into next month. "This is the best I've seen."

Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, toured the site Monday and said the Hayes Park homes buttress his long call for more affordable housing on former Fort Ord properties.

"There's no reason this can't be done between the government and private sectors outside the military," Farr said.

Col. Jeffrey Cairns, garrison commander at the Presidio, stood in a spacious room of one of the homes and recalled his earlier days in military housing.

"I was at Fort Bragg with four kids and 900 square feet," he said.

The Hayes Park homes average 1,750 square feet. The designs are based on several architectural styles found on the Peninsula. One of the goals was to make new military housing compare favorably to private market homes, Kelly said.

"We want to get away from military construction," Kelley said, noting the Hayes Park homes feature 42 different exterior facades.

The project is funded by Monterey Bay Military Housing, a partnership between the military and Clark Pinnacle, a team of private builders and real estate managers chosen by the Army in 2002.

In all, 2,177 existing homes will be razed and replaced with 2,168 new homes, two recreation centers, four neighborhood centers and a town hall. Forty-one historic homes will be renovated.

The project is part of the Army's Residential Communities Initiative, which allows private firms to build and manage military family housing.

Kelly said veterans of the old Hayes Park homes are astonished by the development. "They just can't believe it when you tell them they are going to (low-ranked enlisted personnel)," he said.

About 90 percent of local military housing is occupied. The goal is to raise that to 98 percent by placing 200 to 300 more families in the new housing, Kelly said. About 800 local military families live in civilian housing, he said.

There are 300 to 400 construction workers employed daily on the Hayes Park and La Mesa Village projects, said Michael Holk, construction vice president for Clark Realty Builders.

About 70 percent of the subcontractors are local firms. "We've made a great effort to get the whole community involved," Holk said.

Monterey Herald community page

Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, will speak to the Monterey County chapter of the MilitaryOfficers Association of America today on issues including the situations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the intelligence reform bill before Congress, TRICARE and developments at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

Farr's speech begins at 6 p.m. at the Elks Lodge, 150 Mar Vista Drive, Monterey.

by Capt. Johnny Rea
Air Force Space Command Public Affairs

10/18/2004 - PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. (AFPN) -- Air Force Space Command officials stood up a space education and training organization here recently that they said will provide the foundation to creating a new generation of space professionals.

The National Security Space Institute will be the Department of Defense's single focal point for space education and training, complementing existing space education programs at Air University, the Naval Postgraduate School and the Air Force Institute of Technology.

"Through extensive space education and training programs, the (space institute) will help shape and create the growing team space professionals across the DOD and other stakeholder government communities," said Lt. Col. Ed Fienga, of the AFSPC space professional management office.

Its courses, when coupled with the operational qualifications demanded of space professionals, will secure the U.S advantage in space, said Gen. Lance W. Lord, commander of AFSPC.

The Space Warfare Center's Space Operations School at Schriever AFB, Colo., was redesignated as the NSSI on Oct. 1 with an official activation ceremony here Oct. 18.

The new institute incorporates the current programs provided by the Space Operations School, and eventually expand and integrate space-related education from other DOD activities. An Air Force Reserve associate unit, projected for fiscal 2006, will provide added support to NSSI programs.

About 2,500 students are expected to attend the institute annually, said Colonel Fienga, including servicemembers from all branches of the armed forces as well as representatives from the National Reconnaissance Office, NASA and other national agencies. Air Force students will comprise nearly 60 percent of the attendees.

The institute will conduct and coordinate space education, training, research and development programs for government space organizations, officials said. These programs will address space system capabilities, limitations, vulnerabilities and use; system acquisition; and space warfighting tactics and planning to provide full-spectrum professional development for space professionals in a variety of space missions and organizations.

Colonel Fienga said the current courses taught by the Space Operations School will continue under NSSI -- a combination of "legacy" courses focused on space application to joint warfighting, as well as space professional development courses. Eventually, the institute will incorporate other courses, where appropriate, presented elsewhere in DOD to eliminate redundancy.

"Space warfighting systems and capabilities are integral to our success in fighting today's battles and the linchpin to all planning and execution for success in tomorrow's battles," General Lord said. "NSSI's integrated approach to space education and training will ensure optimum opportunities for the advancement of space systems knowledge and will ultimately enhance mission effectivenes

Monterey Herald article by Jonathan Segal

Scattered in clumps along Ocean View Boulevard, the soaked spectators for Sunday's Big Sur Half Marathon lived for the moment.

As daybreak came, they stood along the side of the road, watching hundreds of runners go by in the rain, to give a friend or family member a boost on a 13.1-mile journey. Although it rained, nearly 4,000 runners turned out for the 2nd annual loop around downtown Monterey to Asilomar and back.

"It's exciting," said Andrew Bemant, 44, who waited with his two yellow-slickered sons for his wife, Melissa Marsted, to pass.

After they saw her and cheered, the Santa Barbara family hopped into its sport utility vehicle and drove to the finish line, hoping to find parking in time to catch Marsted.

"We will get back to the finish," said Bemant.

Farther down the course, Nanci Bruton of Santa Rosa waited for her daughter Trina Stoughtenborough, with her twin granddaughters, Ryce and Madison Stoughtenborough, aged 7.

Ryce said waiting was not very fun. But a power outage in Pacific Grove left few options for entertainment, Bruton said.

"Since the lights are out in the hotel, there's nothing we can do, anyway," she said, contradicting her granddaughters. "We're having a good time. This is fun."

Pacific Grove resident Renee Kezarian, 51, was wet but happy as she waited for her daughter and brother to pass.

"It has been pretty drizzly, but it's all been worth it," she said.

She got a charge out of the athletes' exertion.

"It's been very exciting," she said. "I get a vicarious pleasure from watching these people. I'm even cheering for strangers."

Cooling down after running, Naval Postgraduate School student Dan Walter, 28, said his wife Amy's momentary support encouraged him as he ran. She saw him twice.

"It's pretty motivating," he said. "You want to impress 'em."

Capt. Steve Smith took command of Air, Test and Evaluation Squadron 1 from Capt. Thomas R. Mehringer at a change-of-command ceremony Friday.

Smith was born into a Navy family at NAS Corpus Christi, Texas. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy and was commissioned in May 1981. He was designated a Naval Aviator in June 1982 and reported to the "Shooters" of Training Squadron 6 (VT-6) as a primary flight instructor under the Selective Return Graduate program.

In August 1984, Smith joined the "Battlecats" of Helicopter Anti-Submarine Squadron Light 43 (HSL 43) as a commissioning plankowner and made deployments to the Indian Ocean as the Operations Officer of the first SH-60B Seahawk detachment embarked in USS Crommelin (FFG-37) and as the officer-in-charge embarked in USS Curts (FFG 38) as part of the USS Missouri battleship battle group. He also served as the squadron's line division officer, quality assurance officer, and NATOPS officer. In November 1988, Smith received orders to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., where he earned a Master of Science degree in Financial Management.

Smith reported to HSL 45 in August 1991. During his tour with the "Wolfpack" he served as the safety officer, operations officer, and was the OIC of a detachment deployed to the Persian Gulf in USS Cowpens (CG 63). During this cruise Cowpens participated in a Tomahawk cruise missile strike against Iraq and the detachment conducted cross deck flight operations with the Russian destroyer RNS Admiral Tributs and its two Helix helicopters. From October 1993 to June 1996, Smith was assigned to the CNO Staff as the deputy assistant for the Flying Hour Program under the director, Naval Air Warfare (N88). He then reported to Maxwell AFB for studies in National Security Affairs at the Air War College.

In November 1997, he assumed the duties as HSL 47's executive officer and took command of the "Saberhawks" in June 1999. During his tenure the squadron conducted their first Hellfire missile live fire exercise, deployed three (including their first) armed-helicopter detachments, and deployed the first LAMPS MkIII detachment embarked in an aircraft carrier for an extended deployment.

In November 2000, he reported to Naval Air Systems Command as the deputy for operations on the staff of the deputy commander for Acquisition and Operations, (AIR-1.0). In February 2002, Smith transferred to NAVAIR's program office for Aviation Training Systems, PMA-205, as the executive officer and program team leader for the Air Combat Training System.

Smith has over 4,500 flight hours of which 3,500 are in the SH-60B. His decorations include the two Meritorious Service Medals, two Navy Commendation Medals, two Navy Achievement Medals, and various service and unit awards.

He is married to the former Laura Arlene Herman. They have two children, daughter Morgan (12) and son Sean (10).

Pacific Business News article

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is scheduled to address top government leaders, senior business executives, and security, technology and anti-terrorism experts at the 2004 Asia-Pacific Homeland Security Summit & Exposition Nov. 14-17 week in Waikiki.

The summit, at the Hilton Hawaiian Village, will consist of four tracks, with one on counterterrorism regional outreach organized and led by U.S. Pacific Command.

"Last year's inaugural event was the region's premier homeland security conference," said Gov. Linda Lingle. "The 2004 summit will build on several of last year's topics, including a review of significant changes in regional security over the past twelve months. We expect a large international audience of leaders from all sectors, as well as world-renowned experts and senior front-line responders."

Confirmed speakers include:

Rohan Gunaratna, professor, Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, Singapore.

Ong Keng Yong, secretary-general, Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

Philippine Ambassador Albert Del Rosario. Laotian Ambassador Phanthong Phommahaxay.

Dean Elizabeth Reinskopf Parker, McGeorge School of Law, University of the Pacific.

Ilana Kass, professor of military strategy, National War College.

Dorothy Denning, professor, Department of Defense Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School.

Steven Martinez, deputy assistant director, Cyber Division, FBI.

Rich Wilhelm, vice president for information security, Booz Allen Hamilton.

William Cheswick, chief scientist, Lumeta Corp.

Duane Gubler, director, Asia-Pacific Institute of Tropical Medicine and Infectious Diseases, University of Hawaii.

Bart Aronoff, chief, Bio-terrorism Preparedness & Response Branch, State of Hawaii.

Scott Lillibridge, professor and director, Center for Biosecurity and Public Health Preparedness, University of Texas.

Rear Admiral Charles Wurster, commander, 14th Coast Guard District, Honolulu.

Concepcion Clamor, assistant director general for research and analysis, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency, Philippines.

Commissioner Jean-Paul Rouiller, Swiss Federal Police Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Director General Hermogenes Ebdane, Jr., National Security Advisor, Philippines.

The Governor's office is organizing the summit in collaboration with the U.S. Pacific Command, the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies, the US-ASEAN Business Council and the Chamber of Commerce of Hawaii.

KITTERY, Maine — On the eve of the ceremony that will see him replaced as commander of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Capt. Kevin M. McCoy offered praise for his more than 4,000 employees.

"The Navy needs this yard," McCoy said, describing the role Portsmouth employees have in training workers at other yards, both public and private, throughout the country.

McCoy departs following the end of the standard three years stay overseeing the yard. He will be replaced by Capt. Jonathan C. Iverson of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Since September 2001, Iverson has served as the operations officer at the Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard, managing the maintenance for 18 submarines and 12 surface ships homeported in Pearl Harbor.

Iverson’s tenure in the Navy spans about 25 years. He obtained his commission at Officers Candidate School in Newport, R.I., in 1979 and, after attending submarine officer basic training, he reported to the USS Sargo at Pearl Harbor.

From 1982 to 1985, he was the new construction project officer for several Los Angeles-class nuclear submarines including the USS Norfolk, USS Buffalo and USS Honolulu. He was also the launching officer for the USS Chicago in Newport News, Va.

Iverson completed his engineering and master’s of science in mechanical engineering degrees in 1988 at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

He was later assigned to Mare Island Naval Shipyard and, in 1991, was selected by the chief of naval operations to be part of the total quality leadership training team.

Between 1997 and 1999, while assigned to Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Iverson led the largest off-yard availability ever conducted by any shipyard, completing the USS John C. Stennis on time and returning over $2 million back to the Navy for other maintenance programs.

In August 1999, he began serving as chief engineer on the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, completed a successful deployment in 2000 and prepared the ship for entry into its refueling overhaul in Newport News.

Monterey Herald article by Kevin Howe

The final military construction bill passed by Congress at its closing session Saturday contains provisions for cleaning up explosives in the burned-out area of Fort Ord and construction of a dental clinic at the Presidio of Monterey.

The bill also contains language written by Rep. Sam Farr, D-Carmel, that designates Fort Hunter Liggett's 165,000 acres as open space in the event the post closes.

Farr, a member of the House Military Construction Appropriations Committee, negotiated language in the bill that will ensure additional cleanup of unexploded ordnance at Fort Ord where fire burned away brush in October 2003.

That fire began as a controlled burn in the former Army post's range impact area, but it got out of control and burned more than three times the acreage planned.

Farr's addition to the bill described that event as an unexpected opportunity for the Army to go in and make a thorough cleanup of unexploded shells, bombs and grenades that might be buried in the soil, and calls for that work to be completed before the end of next year, in addition to any previously scheduled or ongoing cleanup work.

The bill contains a $6.7 million appropriation for construction of a 14-seat dental clinic in a separate building at the Defense Language Institute at the Presidio of Monterey.

The post dental clinic currently shares space with the medical clinic, which serves a population of more than 8,000 active duty military personnel from DLI and the Naval Postgraduate School.

Farr said the regional Army Medical Command can't assign more dentists to the medical clinic currently because there isn't enough space for them to work.

Fort Hunter Liggett in South County is surrounded by U.S. Forest Service land and the National Park Service has declared it a "relatively unchanged landscape" from the earliest settlement of California, with "no equivalent" in terms of protected, undisturbed habitat, and a "rarity" in its cultural and natural history features, which include Mission San Antonio, the Indians Caves rock paintings, and other early sites.

"Fort Hunter Liggett is still a very active military base, and I expect it to remain open through the upcoming Base Realignment and Closure round," Farr said, but added that if the Army ever deems the post lands surplus, it should remain undeveloped and in public ownership.

The construction bill has been approved by the House and Senate and is being sent to President Bush for signature.

Seattle Times article By Mike Carter

Groups of men, including one tied to a federal terrorism investigation, have videotaped Washington ferry operations, prompting federal authorities to conclude the system has been under surveillance as a possible target for an attack.

U.S. Attorney John McKay, officials in the U.S. Coast Guard and other members of Seattle's Joint Terrorism Task Force all share in that conclusion.

"We may well be the target of preoperational terrorist planning," McKay said.

A confidential FBI assessment of the threat to the state ferries is partly behind an increase in security for large-capacity ferries nationwide, McKay and others say.

The state ferry system is the nation's largest, carrying 26 million passengers last year. It began implementing new security requirements — including tripling the number of cars screened for explosives — this weekend.

For its assessment, the FBI gathered 157 incidents on or near ferries that law-enforcement officers, ferry workers and passengers have reported as suspicious since Sept. 11, 2001. The Seattle Times obtained a document detailing those incidents.

The agency ranked the incidents according to the perceived threat, with most deemed a low or moderate risk. Many involved reports of passengers who appeared to be Middle Eastern and were simply using a camera or cellphone. Other reports gave such little detail that they were difficult to investigate.

But the FBI determined 19 incidents were highly likely or extremely likely to involve terrorist surveillance of the ferries, with individuals asking probing questions about ferry operations or taking photos of stairwells, car decks and workers going about their jobs.

Three incidents involve one man who is a known subject in an FBI terrorism investigation.

Law-enforcement officials have heard about the ferry system's security shortcomings from other sources as well.

In the spring, a team of Navy and Marine officers, as part of a military graduate-school assignment, scouted targets in San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle that could be vulnerable to terrorists. The officers concluded terrorists could attack all three cities, and likely could detonate bombs and cripple as many as five ferries simultaneously in Puget Sound's frigid waters.

Since that exercise, the ferries have boosted security to meet new federal mandates, but the system likely remains vulnerable, said the class instructor, who presented the group's findings to local law enforcement and ferry officials in a closed meeting last spring, and again to U.S. mayors in Washington, D.C., last week.

If terrorists successfully attack the system, casualties could be high. Ferries with a full load of passengers don't have enough lifeboats or rescue platforms for everyone aboard. And while there are several rescue slides on each car deck, an explosion could disable them or make them unreachable.

One man, three incidents

He is subject of FBI terrorism investigation

Three of the incidents in the threat-assessment analysis of ferries involved the man who is the subject of the FBI investigation.

On Sept. 25, 2003, ferry employees reported they had seen "four Middle Eastern males videotaping the car deck and surroundings" while on board the ferry Cathlamet on its run from Mukilteo to Clinton. One of the men was later identified as "the subject of an FBI terrorism investigation," the report said. The four men were in a rented van with California plates.

The next morning, that man, this time with two companions and driving the same van, drew the suspicions of employees on the ferry Puyallup on its way from Edmonds to Kingston. This time, they videotaped loading and unloading procedures, the report said.

Ferry employees approached the men, who said they were taking the "scenic route back to California on Highway 101." While two men talked, ferry workers told investigators a "third Middle Eastern male was standing nearby and was visibly trembling."

The subject of the terrorist investigation also was spotted just two days after Sept. 11, 2001, videotaping a number of nonferry locations — all on the same day. They included the Tesoro oil refinery in Anacortes, flight operations at Whidbey Island Naval Air Station and the bridge at Deception Pass State Park, according to the report, which listed that sighting as an incident in the analysis even though no ferry was involved.

"It's hard to say this is all a coincidence," said Patrick Adams, Seattle FBI special agent in charge.

The individual — who is not identified by name in the document — remains under investigation, Adams said, adding he does not think the man poses "an immediate threat to anyone here in the Seattle area."

Adams declined to elaborate.

Five other incidents also were ranked as extremely likely to involve terrorist surveillance:

On June 24, 2002, ferry employees reported that four clean-cut, well-dressed middle-aged men "presumed to be of Arabic descent" took consecutive round trips on the Edmonds / Kingston run aboard the ferry Spokane. The men took notes as they walked around the ferry and one talked on his cellphone, the report said.

"They were not interested in the scenery, only in ferry operations," the FBI analyst noted.

That incident prompted a fleet advisory instructing crew members to be on the lookout for suspicious activities, according to news reports at the time.

On Nov. 30, 2002, a State Patrol trooper on board the ferry Puyallup on the Edmonds / Kingston run said he noticed two Middle Eastern men, accompanied by a woman with three children, videotaping on the top passenger deck. Both men had cameras and one of them was talking on a cellphone.

"He was holding (the camera) like a football but appeared to be walking and turning carefully as though he was also videotaping," the trooper said of the man on the phone.

The analysis said the group left the ferry in a vehicle registered to a man linked to subjects of two FBI terrorism investigations.

On April 4 this year, a passenger saw four men, described as East Indian or Pakistani, videotaping from an Argosy cruise boat. One was later identified as a member of a group suspected of surveilling Washington ferries. On other occasions, he was seen watching the Coast Guard pier and videotaping in the Seattle bus tunnel, the report said.

On April 22, a passenger on the Seattle / Bremerton ferry run told the Coast Guard that two men were taking video and still photographs of the interior of the ferry, the report said. After about 10 minutes, one of the men spoke on a cellphone "in a foreign language."

"At the conclusion of the call," according to the report, one man turned to the other and said, in broken English, " 'We have to go get pictures of the front of the boat.' "

The passenger alerted ferry employees, but by then the boat had docked and the men were gone.

On May 10, a State Patrol trooper noticed a man at the Mukilteo ferry terminal dropping off two briefcases at a business and then asking a ferry ticket agent about a sightseeing trip to Whidbey Island. The man was "driving [a car] registered to a person ... associated with the subject of an FBI terrorism investigation," the report said.

Causes for concern

Unofficial test of ferry security, deadly ferry bombing in Philippines add to worries

There is a precedent for concerns that ferries are a target for terrorists.

On Feb. 27, a man boarded a 1,747-passenger ferry bound from Manila to Bacolod in the Philippines. He carried eight pounds of TNT in a cardboard box onto the ship, left it on a bunk, then slipped off the ferry, according to news reports.

An hour after departure, an explosion ripped through the ship, starting a fire that killed more than 100 people and left the ship foundering. Authorities have arrested a man who admitted to the bombing and is a member of an Islamic separatist faction with ties to al-Qaida.

In June, dozens of law-enforcement, ferry and Coast Guard officials from Puget Sound learned more about the risks to ferries here when they attended a presentation that highlighted how easily ferry security can be compromised.

Marine and Navy officers, as part of a class at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., determined they could attack the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, an unidentified nuclear submarine in San Diego, and Washington ferries, said Raymond Buettner, an associate professor of information sciences at the Naval school.

The officers used only an al-Qaida terrorist-training manual and agreed not to break any laws. Their findings do not represent official opinions of the Navy, the Department of Defense or any other government agency, Buettner said.

Buettner was so startled by the results of the exercise that he contacted law-enforcement agencies in each of the targeted cities to share the information.

In Seattle, he told his audience that the ferries were "the casualty component," the target with a big body count.

Buettner, a retired lieutenant commander in the Navy, concedes that the project was done before the Marine Transportation Security Act took effect in July, mandating new security measures. Plus, security requirements have been increased again beginning this weekend.

He also acknowledged that all but one of his students were white men with crew cuts — unlikely to draw attention.

Security is tighter now, said Edmund "Ned" Kiley, chief of security for Washington State Ferries.

Thousands of cars every day are screened by explosives-detection dogs. Walk-on passengers — such as the man with the box on the ferry in the Philippines — are observed as they board by a ferry employee at the gangplank who has undergone "security-awareness training," he said.

State Patrol troopers have an "increased presence" in terminals, Kiley said.

Plainclothes troopers also are riding some ferries, according to a Patrol document.

But Buettner pointed out, for instance, that security focuses mostly on vehicles, looking for car bombs. Requirements for walk-on passenger security are low — just 5 percent of walk-on riders are to be screened, according to a law-enforcement official familiar with the new mandates.

New video cameras and other security systems are being installed in terminals and ferries but are not yet working. Even when they are up and running, the system could be vulnerable, Buettner said.

At Buettner's request, The Seattle Times is not disclosing additional details to avoid providing terrorists a road map.

Camera or surveillance systems also can be used by both sides. Before ever coming to Seattle, the officers in Buettner's class used real-time video images accessible through the Washington State Ferries' Web site to familiarize themselves with the docks and watch for security.

"We're not suggesting these things not be used," Buettner added. "All we're saying is that you need to be aware that they have multiple uses, and maybe not always the intended one."

Ferry security officials are discussing the findings by the officers in Buettner's class, said Scott Davis, the ferries' safety-systems manager. He declined to elaborate.

Buettner also questioned the effectiveness of camera surveillance in general.

"We have really nice photographs of the terrorists getting onboard the planes on 9 / 11," he said.

Who could be saved?

Rescue system doesn't envision al-Qaida-type attack

Before Sept. 11, the possibility of a terrorist attack on a Washington ferry was considered remote. In a 52-page risk assessment commissioned by the ferry system and published in 1999, the word "terrorism" is never used. The panel that wrote it noted that consequences of sabotage could be severe but found that there was "no evidence of a serious threat of sabotage or attack against the Washington State Ferries."

That panel was commissioned partly in response to news reports revealing that ferries did not carry enough life rafts for everybody on board.

Evacuation slides and large inflatable rescue platforms have mostly replaced the smaller life rafts. In an emergency, passengers could slip down slides to rescue platforms, each of which can carry up to 150 people. Most boats have four slides, located forward and aft on the car deck, on both sides of the ships.

But only four of the systems' 28 ferries have rescue-platform capacity for all of their passengers. The Coast Guard requires the remainder of the ferries to have rescue platforms for just half of their passenger capacity. Ferry routes almost always have two boats operating, and the second ship would provide additional rescue platforms or life boats, according to Coast Guard requirements.

What the system doesn't anticipate is the sort of assault devised by the officers from the Naval school and known to be favored by al-Qaida terrorists — coordinated attacks on multiple targets, which could overwhelm rescue efforts.

Ferry authorities are re-evaluating rescue systems, said Davis, the safety-systems manager.

"We are having ongoing conversations with the Coast Guard about it," he said.

For its part, the Coast Guard is "doing preliminary work on dealing with a mass rescue response," said Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Michael Drier, with the Seattle division's Marine Safety Office. "We are better prepared than we were."

KSBW news article

The race for mayor of Monterey pits the incumbent, Dan Albert , who is seeking an unprecedented 10th term, against two local businessmen.

Washington Times article by S.A. Miller

Too many details on municipal Web sites can tip off terrorists to security weaknesses and vulnerable targets, a military researcher told a conference of U.S. mayors in the District yesterday.

"The sites tell too much," said Gerald G. Brown, distinguished professor of operations research at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

Mr. Brown was a featured speaker yesterday at the Mayors' Technology Summit on "Homeland Security, Safety and Economic Development."

About 60 mayors and city officials from across the country attended the symposium, which was sponsored by Temple University's Fox School of Business and Management and the D.C. government.

Before his presentation at Stephen Decatur House, Mr. Brown said municipal leaders must not confuse "sunshine" laws, which require public access to some government data, and the allure of "really cool Web sites."

Many officials rushed to embrace the new Internet culture and hired people to design elaborate Web sites to show off their cities without considering potential consequences, such as aiding enemies in the terror war, he said.

About 95 percent of U.S. towns and cities with more than 10,000 residents have Web sites, said Curt J. Anderson, president of Municipal Web Services, a Birmingham, Mich.-based firm that designs Web sites for local governments.

Mr. Anderson disagreed that such Web sites are leaking sensitive information. "About three months after 9/11, all our clients had us take off all information about well heads or any type of engineering drawings of buildings," he said.

"I don't think there is much of that on the Web any more." Still, Mr. Brown insisted that seemingly innocuous information, such as budget data, can become fodder for terrorist plots.

"Frequently these sites are used to ask for things: 'We need a firetruck. We need a hazmat crew,' " Mr. Brown said. "If I'm attacking you, that's pretty good information." With rudimentary technology, terrorists can surf the Web and often find out everything they need to know to plan an attack on American cities, he said.

The conference also delved into topics such as developments in wireless infrastructure, cybersecurity and emergency communication technologies for first-responders.

Peter Verga, principal deputy to the assistant secretary of defense for homeland defense, summed up the problem facing government officials as they prepare for a terrorist attack — the same quandary they also seem to face when posting Web sites.

"It's those things we haven't thought about that we have to worry about," Mr. Verga said in his keynote address to the conference over lunch at the Hamilton Crowne Plaza Hotel.

Rocky Mountain News article by Julie Poppen

Aerobatic pilots in Colorado were shocked by the death of an experienced colleague whose single-engine plane crashed during an air show in Santa Fe this weekend.

Rick Bobbitt, 46, of Parker, was a fixture in the Rocky Mountain Aerobatic Club, said the group's secretary, Roz Jones. The former Navy pilot also flew for United Airlines.

Bobbitt's 1993 Sukhoi SU-29 went into a spin Saturday afternoon during a vertical stunt known as a hammerhead. The plane crashed near hundreds of observers at Santa Fe Municipal Airport, New Mexico state police and witnesses said.

The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.

Jones said she flew with Bobbitt a year and a half ago in the same plane in Nebraska.

"It was just exhilarating," Jones said Sunday. "I never felt uneasy with him. He was just a very skillful pilot, very safety conscious."

Jones said Bobbitt will be greatly missed.

"He was just really, really well-liked," Jones said. "He was humble, he was good-natured. This came as a shock to everybody."

Bobbitt is survived by his wife, Randi, and two children, Michael and Stephanie.

Bobbitt was a retired Navy pilot who learned to fly in college by skipping lunch and using the money to pay for flying lessons on weekends.

In the Navy, Bobbitt flew a P-3 Orion, a four-engine aircraft used to track Soviet submarines during the Cold War. He was also a veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, according to his biography on the 2004 Rocky Mountain Regional Fly-In Web site.

Bobbitt earned a master's degree in aeronautical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School and joined United Airlines in 1994.

Albuquerque Journal article by Rick Nathanson   

 As the United States continues its war on international terrorism, the country is finding itself in dire need of "super analysts," said Capt. Vicente Garcia, U.S. Navy Reserve and a former employee of the National Security Agency.
"I'm trying to groom a new generation of intelligence analysts to protect America," Garcia said. "They will be super analysts and will have a foundation in engineering, physics, math and computer sciences."

Garcia, who continues to serve as a Naval Reservist, is the senior technical adviser at the National Reconnaissance Office for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, Washington, D.C. He is also a professor of electrical engineering and physics at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, and is director of NMSU's Information Operations Laboratory.

Garcia will be the Oct. 16 keynote speaker at the annual fall luncheon hosted by the New Mexico Chapter of the 8th Air Force Historical Society. Garcia will provide insights into intelligence, information operations and homeland security for an audience of mostly former military personnel.

The need for super analysts is a direct result of the increasingly sophisticated technologies being employed by America's enemies, and by the "knowledge transfer gap" that the U.S. intelligence community is currently facing, Garcia said.

"Us older guys are retiring and need replacement. I can put a physical body in there, but is that body trained enough to take over the job? The answer is no, not yet. That's what I'm doing at NMSU. I'm grooming these young people to be super analysts. It's more than just learning foreign languages— and there is a language gap— but what I'm doing is on the technology side. I'm training these young people to do important work in the military, in the civilian sector, and in government."

Garcia, 51, was born in El Paso and raised in Anthony. He was the seventh child in a family of 14 kids. He graduated from Gadsden High School in 1972 and from NMSU in 1978, the same year he entered the Navy. In 1982 he earned a master's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Central Florida and second one in 1984 from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

During his years in the Navy, and his years at the NSA, Garcia served in an assortment of operational and research positions in the field of cryptology. He is the recipient of a number of commendations, medals and awards from the Navy, the Naval Reserve, the U.S. secretary of defense, the NSA, and numerous academic institutions.
    
    Capt. Vicente Garcia, U.S. Navy Reserve and a professor at NMSU, will be the keynote speaker at the annual fall luncheon hosted by the New Mexico Chapter of the 8th Air Force Historical Society. The Oct. 16 luncheon, which is open to the public, will be held at the Albuquerque Petroleum Club, 500 Marquette NW, starting at noon. The cost is $15. For reservations call Al Schwery, 856-1834.

Monterey Herald story by Kevin Howe

As momentum builds for a manned expedition to Mars, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration faces a decision whether to return to the moon and use it as a steppingstone for interplanetary exploration or go directly to the Red Planet.

Former astronauts, deep ocean explorers, aerospace industry executives and NASA officials and scientists from the Ames Research Center in Palo Alto gathered at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey this week for a three-day conference to talk about the risks and benefits of exploration. The conference ended Wednesday.

The last man to walk on the moon, astronaut Harrison Schmidt, is firmly in the lunar colonization camp. He proposes that not only is it possible, but a base on the moon could pay its own way as a source of cheap energy for use both on Earth and in space.

Schmidt, now an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin, was a member of the three-man Apollo 14 mission in 1971, the last Apollo flight, and was tasked as the geologist who gathered the last moon rock samples in the crater of Frau Mauro.

A human on the moon weighs only a sixth of what he or she weighs on Earth, but has the same muscle strength, Schmitt said, and walking on the moon "felt good; like walking on an infinite trampoline. Running is a lot like cross-country skiing; you're gliding above the surface."

The moon "is the fastest way to Mars," he said, "and the resource is there to help pay for it -- energy."

Earth's satellite is rich in a light isotope of helium called Helium 3, Schmidt said -- the type used on Earth for balloons is Helium 4 -- which is "an ideal fuel for fusion power reactors."

The moon has been collecting Helium 3 from the sun for the past 4 billion years, he said, and 220 pounds of it is worth the equivalent of $100 million in coal and could provide enough energy to run a 1,000-megawatt power generating plant for a year.

A Helium 3-fueled fusion reactor would be "an ideal rocket propulsion system," he said, for future interplanetary missions to Mars and beyond.

The moon can also be a training ground for future astronauts who will face similarly hostile environments on other planets, said Dave Leestma, a graduate of NPS who went on to fly on three space shuttle missions.

"It's a lot closer," he said, than any other body in the solar system, so getting there is cheaper. It also can serve as a low-gravity launch pad for future missions to the planets and space explorers can use the resources there to prepare missions.

Exploring space is inherently difficult and dangerous, Leestma said.

"The reality is that it is not as easy once you leave the atmosphere. You're in a hostile environment no matter where you go."

The Apollo missions proved that humans can explore space beyond Earth orbit, he said. "We know we can do it. Now we have to make it easier, safer, cheaper."

A historic model for deep space exploration can be found in the Antarctica expeditions of the late 19th century and the long ocean voyages of exploration before that, said Jack Stuster, vice president and principal scientist at Anacapa Sciences Inc., who has made a study of the human factor in explorations, particularly those confined to an ice station, nuclear submarine, offshore oil drilling platform or exploration ship for long periods of time.

A trip to Mars, he said, would be like traveling in a motor home with five people for three years -- 18 months each way.

"You can't go outside for the first year and a half, and when you do, you have to wear a space suit."

Diaries and accounts of early explorers stuck with one another over long periods show common factors, Stuster said: "Days blend one to another; the tiniest things get on your nerves. Trivial issues are exaggerated all out of proportion."

His studies indicate that successful missions hinge more on personal interaction skills than the technical abilities of the crew members, he said.

The conference at the Navy school brought together a number of explorers, not just of space, but of extreme ocean depths, mountain heights and remote places of the Earth.

"We have a lot to learn from each other," Leestma said. "It's risky business, no matter what you're doing."

Air Force Times article by Gordon Trowbridge

Senior Air Force officials are working on plans to provide lieutenant colonels who don’t make the list for Air War College or equivalent education with more chances for schooling and development.

That would be the latest in a sweeping set of changes to officer career paths as part of the Air Force’s Force Development initiative. The service already has overhauled its officer assignment system, reformed and expanded education offerings for majors and introduced new development opportunities for enlisted troops and civilian employees.

Now, according to the two officers most responsible for force development policy, Chief of Staff Gen. John Jumper has asked for ways to boost the development of those lieutenant colonels who don’t receive in-residence slots for Air War College or one of the other senior service schools.

The goal is to make sure the Air Force gets maximum value from those officers — and that they realize their own value, said Lt. Gen. Roger Brady, the Air Force’s deputy chief of staff for personnel.

“What do we do for them?” is the question the Air Force is now asking, Brady said. “We need to continue to grow them.”

Little has been decided, but the idea is evidence that the Air Force intends to continue reforming a development culture that many senior leaders have said too often uses one-size-fits-all policies and fails to reward or develop those troops who don’t check off all the proper boxes.

“We’re going to burn the bridges behind us,” said Brig. Gen. Richard Hassan, director of the Air Force Senior Leader Management Office, which has developed much of the new policy.

Though Jumper has been a key proponent of the reforms, Hassan said, force development is so solidly established that it should become a permanent part of the Air Force culture.

“This is not going to change with a leadership change,” he said.

Brady and Hassan said the change is reflected in a number of leadership assignments at major commands, maintenance depots and the Pentagon. Positions traditionally filled by uniformed officers have gone to civilians, and vice versa, which they said signifies a new willingness to fill jobs based on the proper fit for both the service and the member rather than simply relying on past practice.

The changes began in 2003 with a class of majors selected for intermediate professional military education. Traditionally an in-residence slot to Air Command and Staff College has been the gateway to future advancement, but the changes sent several officers to the Air Force Institute of Technology, Naval Postgraduate School and other less traditional venues. And more officers are getting those opportunities: More than 850 will get what the service now calls intermediate developmental education this year, up from 480 in the 2002-03 academic year.

At the same time, Jumper declared an end to the era of master’s degrees for their own sake, saying too many officers had spent their own time away from home and family to earn degrees that did little to improve those officers or the Air Force.

Brady and Hassan also said the Air Force is making progress with the new development teams responsible for officer assignments. Those teams depend heavily on input from officers and their commanders to figure out what assignment would provide the right experience; Brady said as force development becomes better understood through the Air Force, the value of that input will improve.

The latest possible changes would fit with another goal of force development: placing greater value on those officers who aren’t on the fast track to colonel and beyond, or who prefer to stay within their functional community at the expense of promotion opportunity.

Officers promoted to lieutenant colonel, Hassan said, represent an enormous investment on the part of the Air Force, and a valuable resource. Making sure they continue to grow and develop only makes sense, he said.

Monterey County Herald article by Kevin Howe

Balancing risks and benefits often depends on who's taking the risks and who's seeking the benefits.

On the anniversary of the space shuttle Columbia disaster, former astronauts, aerospace industry representatives and officials from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are meeting this week at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey to discuss that issue.

The opening session Monday came down on the side of exploration.

Both NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe and exploration research scientist Jack Stuster cited the decision by China's imperial court to cease deep ocean exploration in the 15th century because the emperor considered such exploration "an indulgence."

China, O'Keefe said, had given up the chance to "be the world maritime power."

"We'd all be speaking Chinese today," Stuster said, showing a slide of Adm. Zeng He's eight-masted flagship when he was master of a 300-ship fleet that plied the oceans to India and Africa. "What would world history be like if the emperor hadn't ordered the ships to be burned and no ships with more than two masts constructed?"

Space flight remains a very risky venture, O'Keefe said, and it's NASA's task to "manage the risk in a diligent manner," adding that NASA's history has been one "of great triumph and unbelievably deep tragedy."

The space agency was founded in the same decade that Edmund Hillary conquered Mount Everest and Jacques Cousteau began his epic deep ocean explorations in Calypso, O'Keefe said, and explorers of all stripes in the last century "took tremendous risks for great purposes."

Both the space shuttle Columbia's loss as it burned up on re-entry into the atmosphere last year, and the explosion of the shuttle Challenger on launch in 1986, were shocking events but they did not sour the public on space exploration, according to Miles O'Brien, CNN anchorman and reporter.

Government agencies and Congress may be squeamish about risks, he said, but the general public "is not as wimpy as we might think." The public will accept risks "as long as they feel the risk is worth the cost."

People willingly take risks driving cars or boarding airliners, he said, but unusual events rivet their attention, even if the actual danger to them is minuscule.

"Fear, greed and curiosity" motivate exploration, O'Brien said, and when fear of Soviet dominance of space ebbed with the landing of men on the moon in 1969, so did interest in the space program.

So far there doesn't seem to be any money to be made in space, so greed is out, O'Brien said, "which leaves curiosity."

Meanwhile, he said, astronauts and engineers at NASA speak of roaring aloft into space as though "it was another day at the office. Their lives are different from our 'Dilbert' lives."

Astronaut Jim Lovell, command pilot of the Apollo 13 mission, which managed a safe return to Earth after an oxygen tank exploded on board while en route to the moon -- the astronauts' ordeal was dramatized in the Tom Hanks movie "Apollo 13" -- commented that "everything in life involves a degree of risk" and Hollywood stuntmen, investors, brides and bridegrooms all take them.

The lessons of Apollo 13, he said, were to strive for maximum reliability and maintainability in spacecraft, build in redundant systems and train rigorously.

He told the tale of two laboratory mice placed in a V-2 rocket nose cone during the dawn of space exploration.

"A mouse could get killed doing this!" complained one. "It sure beats cancer research," replied his seatmate.

Monterey Herald Staff Report

Retired Air Force Gen. John Gordon has been inducted into the Naval Postgraduate School's Hall of Fame, officials announced.

Gordon joins a group that includes Secretary of the Air Force James Roche and former Secretary of the Army Thomas E. White.

Gordon served in the Air Force for 32 years, focusing on intelligence, ballistic missile research and development and strategic planning. He served with the National Security Council from 1989 through 1993 and later served as director of operations at the Air Force's Space Command. His last assignment was as deputy director of the CIA.

He completed his master's in physics from the postgraduate school in 1970.

Richmond Times-Dispatch article by JUAN ANTONIO LIZAMA

Lt. Courtney Minetree, 26, went off to the U.S. Naval Academy eight years ago without any particular idea of standing out.

"I was hoping to be somewhere in the middle," the Dinwiddie County native said in a recent interview while on leave between Navy assignments.

She graduated in 2000 in the top fifth of her academy class.

Since then, Minetree has gone on to earn the respect of her comrades and praise from her commanding officers.

In July, she was announced as the winner of the Navy's 2004 Capt. Joy Bright Hancock Leadership Award in the junior-officer category. Three other Navy women won the annual award in other categories.

"She would not accept anything less than outstanding for herself or from her sailors," wrote Cmdr. Donald D. Hodge, commanding officer of the USS Crommelin.

Minetree most recently was assigned as surface-warfare officer on the Crommelin, a guided-missile frigate based at Pearl Harbor.

In nominating her for the Bright award, Hodge describes Minetree as a leader a bold, professional, dedicated officer, extremely likable and approachable.

"She leads by example, by her encyclopedic knowledge of surface warfare and by her ability to consider all possible courses of action and by consistently [recommending] the most effective and prudent one," he wrote.

The award honors the visionary leadership of Navy and Marine Corps women officers and enlisted personnel on active duty or in the reserves.

"I didn't even know I was nominated," Minetree said.

Minetree, who finished second in her class at Dinwiddie High School, said she feels she didn't deserve the award but is glad she received it.

"I was doing what everybody else was doing," she said.

Her next challenge is pursuing a master's degree in oceanography at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

Minetree has always had a passion for the water. She began swimming at age 8 in the Virginia Association for Competitive Swimming (VACS). Putting in time in the pool six days a week as a schoolgirl gave her an early lesson in discipline rising early, budgeting her time and staying organized. That made her life easier when she went to the Naval Academy, she said.

When time came to apply for college, Minetree wasn't even thinking about the Naval Academy. She was looking forward to the traditional college experience of partying and relishing freedom from her parents.

"But my mother told me, 'No, no, no. [The Naval Academy] is what you should be looking into.'" Her parents were going through a divorce, and there wasn't enough money for college, she said. The Naval Academy was a solution.

She visited Annapolis, talked with the swimming coach and liked what she heard. The idea of having a job in the Navy for five years after graduation was also attractive. She enrolled.

"I was worried," she said. "I was nervous. I was very scared."

Minetree said she knew the first summer at the academy would be hard. Some days she wondered whether she belonged there.

But she persevered and graduated in 2000 with a bachelor's degree in oceanography. She was given a two-year assignment as surface-warfare engineer aboard the Pearl Harbor-based USS Hopper.

In 2003, she became one of the first three women to serve on the Crommelin. She was in charge of 30 enlisted men as the Crommelin patrolled the eastern Pacific Ocean in search of drug shipments. Minetree said gender differences took some adjustment.

"After about a month, we all blended in," she said.

Minetree has also been awarded the Commendation Medal and the Navy and Marine Corps Achievement Medal.

Receiving the Joy Bright award has encouraged her to stay in the Navy, but she is not sure if she wants to make a career of it, she said.

She is currently pursuing a master's degree in oceanography with a concentration in undersea warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School, which commits her to at least four more years in the Navy.

Minetree reflects on the decision she made eight years ago to attend the Naval Academy.

"It was probably one of the best decisions that I made."

Minetree's mother, Jeanne, agrees wholeheartedly. Her daughter has gained a sense of assurance from her service in the Navy, she said.

"I do feel that she has matured, and because of that she is confident in her leadership abilities."

About.com article by Laurel Miller-Daly

Recently the military, especially the United States military, has been dominating the news . No matter how you feel about the increased military presence in certain areas of the world, the US Military one is only organizations presently able to invest heavily in Web 3D and virtual reality for simulation and training.

At SIGGRAPH 2002 I sat down with Don Brutzman (of the Naval Postgraduate School and The MOVES Institute in Monterey, California) to discuss how Web3D and virtual reality is being used in the Military. Don is a long time Web3D guru who has been a guiding hand in the development of open-source Web3D. Over Texas steaks we discussed where the military is headed in relation to VR and Web3D. After that interesting conversation, I took a look around the Web to find out more about what is happening in this area.

In this two-part article, I will explore how the military is using 3D technologies, highlighted with useful insights from my interview with Don Brutzman.

Visual Simulation

Although most military organizations have been known to be strongly traditional and uninterested in change, recently the US military has been at the forefront in both funding and creating virtual reality and Web3D. No other organization in the world has been so eager to embrace these new technologies for training and simulation.

According to Don Brutzman, "They are starting to get it. The military is usually a slow, conservative adopter, but when they are locked onto something they lock onto it big-time. It's really a very big market for the future."

Visual simulation is often grouped with VR training in the military and indeed any useful VR trainer requires good visual simulation. But visual simulation can also be added to a scenario based simulator to provide for the testing of tactical plans, decision making and resource allocation.

The military has also begun using virtual reality simulation in their wargames. During the recently concluded Millennium Challenge 02, which was the largest military/war game experiment in history, military units across the US conducted the evaluations using a unique mix of computer-simulated and live forces.

"Experiments like Millennium Challenge are very important to future battlefield successes. It will help us create a force that is not only interoperable, responsive, agile and lethal, but also one that is able of capitalizing on the information revolution and the advancements in technology that are available today," said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said during a press briefing at USJFCOM July 29, 2002.

Training

Soon after the military began to use aircraft, flight simulators were also put into active use. (For a great overview of the history of flight simulators, see "A Brief History of Aircraft Flight Simulation" in the linkbox.) And as the use of flight simulators was proven to be highly effective, the military has moved virtual training into other areas. It is interesting to note that the United States military partly credits its low causalities in Iraq and Afghanistan to virtual reality training.

Today the United States military, as well as the military organizations of many other countries, use virtual reality to train personnel in nearly every area. A short list of Army training and simulation contractors shows the variety of products in use.

The realism and overall effectiveness of ground forces' combat training has also been enhanced significantly by laser-based weapons effects simulators. The US Army led the way in the 1980s with the establishment of the National Training Centre (NTC) at Fort Irwin, California, for up to brigade-sized training exercises using the MILES Tactical Engagement Simulation (TES) system. This concept has since been copied by the British Army and the German, Swedish and French armies are looking closely at adopting similar systems.

This article can only scratch the surface of everything that is going on in this area. To get a more complete overview of military simulation, training and virtual reality, a great conference to attend, according to Don Brutzman, is the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) held every December in Orlando, Florida. "It's just like a half-size SIGGRAPH, but for the military." Brutzman said.

Military organizations are very involved in VR and Web3D these days, especially the US military. In the first part of this article we looked at how the military is using Web3D and VR for training and simulation. Here we look at military reconnaissance, telemedicine, teleoperation, recruitment and games to see how Web3D and VR are being used to help military orgainzations.

Reconnaissance

3D and VR are already being used by the military for reconnaissance. According to Don Brutzman, "One of the most interesting and exciting things happening lately is turning Op Orders (Operations Orders) into more then just a Word document. Some of our recent students (at the Naval Postgraduate School) have shown that if you take those op orders and encode them into XML you have a structured document. You have tag elements in there so you know how to look up the who and the where and what you're supposed to do.

 "Not only is (this new document) compatible with just about all systems, but we have shown you can auto-generate virtual environments directly from these documents. Guys are going into a dangerous situation. What if they could actually visualize where they were going? It could save lives." (Note: An example of this technology was shown during the Web3D Showcase by James Harney from the Naval Postgraduate School. The example showed a scenario on the "Uss Cole Terrorist Attack" that Harney is in the process of developing for his thesis.)

Remote control vehicles and drones are also being put to use for reconnaissance. Remote technologies are being used to provide-up-to-the-minute reconnaissance in war zones. During the war in Afghanistan, the Pentagon used both un-manned surveillance aircraft (Predators) and ground-deployed robots for surveillance. The Predators were also used successfully by the CIA to deploy armed missiles in the war zone.

Telemedicine and teleoperation

The US military has a problem with training medics. The goal of the Department of Defense (DoD) is to have trained medics ready at all times in the event of a conflict. Gunshot wounds can be observed in some inter-city hospitals (though allowing medics to practice in these places is usually prohibited for legal reasons), but most medics never see or treat shrapnel or land mine wounds until they are actually in a war zone. The DoD is also interested in developing methods of using telepresence to allow doctors the ability to perform teleoperations from remote, safe locations far from the front. 

To help meet these challenges, the DoD has been working with industry and academic partners for more than a decade to harness the potential of telemedicine. Between 1993 and 2000, DoD committed approximately $500 million to fund more than 200 telemedicine-related research projects.

This money has been well spent. For instance, Sandia Labs has created two training applications for medics. The first one is called MediSim and is used to train medics for casualty care on the battlefield. The second, BioSimMER, is a virtual trainer on how to respond to biological agents used in terriost attacks.

And SRI has created teleoperation systems by combining recent advances in stereo imaging, telerobotics, sensory devices, video and telecommunications. The telepresence system provides surgeons with the full sensory experience of conventional hands-on surgery. Auditory, visual and tactile sensations, including the force of pressure felt while making an incision, are communicated directly to the surgeon performing the operation without distortion or delay.

The benefits of developing telepresence surgery technology are immense. The new technology provided surgeons with tools that perform a wider range of minimally invasive procedures with much greater ease and at reduced overall cost. Telepresence technology will also bring great benefit to the field of microsurgery, where it will enhance surgeons' skills by dramatically improving their precision and dexterity in delicate and complex procedures.

Recruitment

Because of their focus on new ways of waging war virtually, the military is also very interested in recruiting video game players to control all of their new virtual reality tools.

So it makes perfect sense that The MOVES Institute has devised a Web3D game to use for recruitment, public relations and even training. Called "America's Army: Operations", it is a squad-based multi-player game that has received a lot of attention for many reasons, not the least of which is that it is a well made game that is fun to play. The game was one of the major hits at the E3 game conference last spring, and those hardened gamers are a tough crowd to please.

The game is available free to download and free to play, but anyone can also receive a free CD of the game just by wandering into their neighborhood Army Recruitment Office. The game CD includes special missions not available online, which is a strong inducement for many of America's Army's over 600,000 registered players to pay their recruitment office a visit.

The Army has also found an added PR bonus in the game. Some America's Army players are not located in the US and so are not suitable for recruitment, but the hours spent playing this game can't help but influence the way the players in other countries view the US Army.

The game includes an amazing amount of realism and attention paid to recreating the way things happen in the Army. New game 'recruits' attend basic training and are given standard issue weapons and equipment that they have to learn about. All of this leads neatly into the virtual training aspect of the game. True Army recruits who have played the game will not be nearly so 'raw' as recruits have been in the past and will be much more ready for life in the Army.

The game does include a lot of killing of bad guys and has a new twist on team verses team game play. The Army doesn't want anyone playing as the bad guys (in this case terrorists, of course) or shooting at US soldiers. So both teams that enter the playing field see themselves as the Army and see the other team as the terrorists, something that is only possible in a virtual game. This insures that the Army's values are intact, while still allowing team vs team game play on the Web.

This is only the first of two planned recruitment games being devised by the Moves Institute but considering the popularity of America's Army, there may be many more in the works soon.

Military organizations seem poised to continue to push the envelope with regard to VR and Web3D with plans already in place to expand the use of drones, VR training, Web3D recruitment, as well as virtual reconnaissance and simulation. Anyone interested in the future of virtual reality would do well to keep an eye on where the military is going in VR and Web3D.

STENNIS SPACE CENTER - A formal Assumption of Command Ceremony for Rear Adm. Timothy McGee as commander of the Stennis-based Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command was held on Sept. 14.

Rear Adm. Steven Tomaszeski, the Oceanographer of the Navy in Washington, D.C., spoke at the ceremony.

The U.S. Senate confirmed McGee's promotion to his current rank on July 22, and he was promoted to the rank of rear admiral during a ceremony at Stennis Space Center on July 30.

A native of Washington, D.C., McGee most recently served as Special Assistant to the Oceanographer of the Navy. He was previously vice commander, Chief of Naval Research, Arlington, Va. He is a 1978 graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and holds a master's degree from the Naval Postgraduate School.

The Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command, based at Stennis Space Center, is a worldwide organization comprised of approximately 3,000 men and women military and civilian personnel in about 60 locations. The command provides forecasts of weather and ocean conditions, necessary for safe and successful operations, to all Navy ships, submarines and aircraft operating defense forces. It is Mississippi's only operational Navy command headed by an admiral.

Forbes article by Robert Lenzner Nathan Vardi

Four years ago al Qaeda operatives were taking flying lessons. Today they are honing a new skill: hacking. How much damage could a cyberterrorist do to an electric grid or the Internet? We don't know yet.Jason Larsen is a master hacker. He sports the de rigueur black shirt, black slacks, glasses and ponytail. A 31-year-old programmer at the secretive Idaho National Engineering & Environmental Laboratory in Idaho Falls, he obsesses about the ways in which a terrorist intruder might go online and trip circuit breakers on the electrical grid or open valves at chemical storage tanks.

"I could easily turn off the power in a couple dozen cities by the end of the day," says Larsen. He has hacked into the automated control systems at several big utilities; usually it takes him all of a week.

Experts like Larsen make a living by stoking cyberfear in the rest of us. They say that terrorists could shut down chunks of the Internet, the phone system or the electric grid by hacking into computers. We're not spending enough on computer security, they say, and the consequences could be devastating.

These experts have an ax to grind. But they might be right. As the Internet spread like a virus in the 1990s, hundreds of utilities, chemical factories, wastewater plants and the like went online to enable remote monitoring and more instant communications. Yet their antiquated control systems lack protection against digital intrusion, providing an easy target.

The most destructive terrorist act in history began with Islamic radicals going to flight school and ended when they turned airliners into flying bombs. As the third anniversary of Sept. 11 passes, the next threat could be aNet threat:Solid evidence shows that al Qaeda agents and other terrorists are trying to attain the online skills needed to wage cyberwar. Terrorists could use the Internet to disrupt the communications systems of the military's Pacific Command or turn off the lights in Los Angeles or Chicago; they could open the massive floodgates of Arizona's Roosevelt Dam or disable huge parts of the World Wide Web.

Yet in the U.S. and elsewhere no urgent crusade has emerged to fix the flaws. The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace, signed last year by President Bush, proposes a sweeping overhaul of U.S. networks. In it the White House's former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, urged a wholesale reboot of government computer systems and new security rules for electric utilities and Internet access providers. But few of his proposals have been adopted, Clarke says. "All the regulated industries--the electric utilities, the gas pipelines and oil refineries, the water and transportation systems--are still vulnerable to cyberattack."

Washington lacks any consensus on what to do about the Net threat--or whether it even constitutes a threat. "The idea that hackers are going to bring the nation to its knees is too far-fetched a scenario to be taken seriously," asserts James Lewis, a former State Department and Commerce Department official. He has dismissed cyberterror in reports for the nonpartisan Center for Strategic & International Studies.

Patching the holes could easily cost billions of dollars. Some 80% of the nation's infrastructure is owned by corporations, but government and business can't even agree on who should cover the cost. "We haven't developed a comprehensive strategy for addressing this weakness in our critical infrastructure," says Congressman Adam Putnam (Republican-Florida), who sits on a subcommittee on tech issues. "America must not be so focused on preventing physical attacks that we leave our cyber-backdoor wide open and unattended. The tragedy of 9/11 has taught us that we must imagine the unimaginable."

The unimaginable is looking ever more plausible. The FBI says the cyberterrorism threat to the U.S. is "rapidly expanding." "Terrorist groups have shown a clear interest in developing basic hacking tools, and the FBI predicts that terrorist groups will either develop or hire hackers," Keith Lourdeau, an FBI deputy assistant director, told the U.S. Senate earlier this year. Material found in Afghanistan by U.S. forces in 2001 showed that al Qaeda was trying to develop cyberterrorists, says John Arquilla, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Computer systems that control the water supply and wastewater systems "have been the targets of probing by al Qaeda terrorists," says Representative Putnam, who cites U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. Unwanted intrusions have occurred in some 50 incidents over the past ten years to automated systems that control important physical equipment through the Net, says Joseph Weiss, a security consultant in San Jose, California. "Not enough people are taking this seriously," he laments.

Al Qaeda previously has used the Net to circulate propaganda and communicate with operatives. The terror alert in August, detailing al Qaeda plans to attack financial institutions inNew York and New Jersey, came after the arrest in Pakistan of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a computer engineer. Elsewhere, Abu Anas al-Liby, one of al Qaeda's ranking computer experts, trained agents in computer surveillance techniques, according to testimony in 2001 in the Nairobi embassy bombing trial.

For now most e-jihadists can barely even mess up an obscure Web site, but they are learning. Some two dozen online terrorist discussion groups and Arabic-language hacking forums are now tracked online, up from only four a year ago, says IDefense, a Reston, Virginia firm. IDefense spotted jihadist hackers unsuccessfully trying to take down the Bank of Israel's Web site (see box, p. 110).

Hacking tools and talent are readily available online. "If al Qaeda can't do it, they can go buy it," says John Watters, IDefense's chief. Last year at a hacking conference in Birmingham, U.K., a techie presented a detailed paper on cracking into water systems. The U.S. National Security Agency says foreign governments already have developed such computer attack capabilities. U.S. officials believe Iran, North Korea, Russia and China have trained hackers in Internet warfare.

U.S. military computer networks have proved easy to penetrate. In 1998 hackers started using stealthlike attacks that, over several years, cracked open Pentagon computers and downloaded thousands of sensitive technical files. A federal investigation, dubbed Moonlight Maze, traced the intrusions back to dial-up Internet connections near Moscow. The hackers have never been caught.

Online, America's aching Achilles' heel is the wide-open automated control systems that run the nation's networks for electricity, water, gas, oil and more. The control systems were designed years ago when each utility was an island, without any thought given to bulletproofing against online intrusion once everything was linked together.

"There is potential vulnerability throughout industry where control systems are connected to the Internet," says Clarke, the former White House head of counterterrorism. Yet the feds often aren't even told when an online event has affected some control system; no mechanism has been developed to report such incidents.

Clarke is, admittedly, a grandstander who wrote a tell-all book and made headlines questioning the Bush Administration's urgency in responding to the terrorism threat. But even the staid GAO has weighed in similarly, underscoring the danger to "our nation's critical infrastructure."

"Control systems can be vulnerable to a variety of types of cyberattacks that could have devastating consequences--such as endangering public health and safety," warns a report issued in March by the GAO (which now stands for Government Accountability, rather than General Accounting, Office).

Utilities are particularly defenseless. A total 270 utilities that generate 80% of the nation's electricity use control systems that are ripe for hacking, according to research by Ted G. Lewis for the Navy Postgraduate School. "We have visited 15 utility companies and been able to penetrate all of them," says Brian Ahern, chief executive of Verano, a provider of cyberdefense systems for utilities.

Microsoft's software is both ubiquitous and vulnerable. In January 2003 the Microsoft SQL Server worm, known as Slammer, infected a private computer network at David-Besse nuclear power plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio, disabling a safety monitoring system for nearly five hours, says the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The dormant plant's process computer failed, and it took six hours to get it up and running again. At another utility, in an undisclosed city, Slammer downed the computer network controlling vital equipment. Other times the attacks are more personal:In 2000 a discontented consultant, rejected for a job at a water treatment plant in Australia, remotely hacked into a sewage treatment system and released 264,000 gallons of raw sewage into rivers and parks.

Many of these systems are known as Scada, for Supervisory Control & Data Acquisition, and are made up of computers, networks and sensors that control industrial activity over large geographic areas. Another kind of system, known as DCS, or Distributed Control Systems, is often used in isolated areas such as a chemical plant.

Most control systems lack any encryption, and they have proved simple to manipulate once a hacker gets inside. In a recent test Steven Schaeffer, a software engineer at the Idaho National Engineering & Environmental Laboratory with no Scada experience, easily figured out how to outsmart a General Electric Scada system running a mock utility. It took Schaeffer only five months to analyze the setup and write code that would let him, from his laptop, tell the Scada system to open and close enough breakers to bring down the mock utility--without letting the legitimate operator see what was going on.

"What if this was a chemical plant? You want to start a Bhopal incident?" Schaeffer asks, referring to the accidental chemical leak at a Union Carbide plant in India that killed 3,800 people in 1984. "It's fairly trivial to do this. Anyone with some software experience can."

The Internet has brought these plants online and made them more vulnerable, and the foundation of the Net itself is susceptible to attack, too. "Someday someone will find a packet of death to bring down the Internet," warns Ken J. Silva, former National Security Agency official now at VeriSign, the main operator of the Internet-address database that directs billions of digital packets around the world every day.

Some weaknesses, already well-known to hackers, foreign governments and, most likely, jihadists, have been exposed in two areas: the Domain Name System that VeriSign oversees and the Border Gateway Protocol, which governs how Internet service providers and large networks exchange routing information. The millions of computers and Web sites linked to the Net are identified by distinct serial numbers; the DNS converts these tags into identifiable Web addresses. The DNSrides on top-level servers around the world, which in turn are guided by the true pillars of the Internet:13 root servers, most of them run by volunteers.

Often these big servers are poorly secured. In 2002 they were flooded with traffic from tens of thousands of infected computers in an unsolved "distributed denial of service" attack. It lasted for about an hour and took down 9 root servers; had all 13 gone down, the entire Internet might have crashed for hours or days.

Richard Clarke believes a debilitating attack on the Internet could be mounted by manipulating routing information via the Border Gateway Protocol, corrupting it to "send everything down a black hole." In April router vendors like Cisco and Internet service providers like AT&T and AOL had to quickly fix two security holes exposed in BGP protocols. The feds worried a hacker could exploit the new gaps and affect "a large segment of the Internet community."

More often, however, the response of government and business is sluggish or nonexistent. A year ago a new cybersecurity standard for electric utilities was set by an industry advisory group, the North American Electric Reliability Council, which was formed in 1968 after the blackout in New York City. Earlier this year the utilities filed reports revealing their level of compliance--but the council won't release the results.

"My guess is the results of those self-audits were real poor," says John O'Shea, who recently quit as chief of ABB's $200-million- a-year business selling control systems to electric companies. "After the big blackout [in 2003] there was so much energy to secure the grid, but we have lost that drive."

Government officials could press industry for more urgent measures, but they, too, are behind on the issue. The Department of Homeland Security has appointed a cyberczar to focus on the online world:Amit Yoran, the founder of information security firm Riptech. But Yoran himself admits that mobilizing a response from industry and government "has been a more challenging process than I ever anticipated."

"There is more infighting and yapping than action," complains Congressman William (Mac) Thornberry (Republican-Texas), chairman of a House subcommittee on cybersecurity. "I'm disappointed it took so long for the Homeland Security people to be in place."

Even if the powers that be could agree on a response, it would raise the stickier question of who should pay for it. Homeland Security Under Secretary Frank Libutti, in a speech to corporate tech executives in June, declared: "The private sector must belly up."

And indeed it must; securing corporate networks is a corporate responsibility. But many of the companies behind America's infrastructure are tightly regulated and can't easily pass on new costs to customers. Others are in bad financial shape or must compete in unforgiving markets where price hikes are all but undoable.

"Companies have to justify the decision to spend money on security," says Representative Thornberry.He favors using tax breaks to coax corporate spending rather than imposing new rules that require it. "We need a system of incentives for liability protection and tax incentives to energize industry," he says, "but no legislation has been proposed."

As the government hesitates, industry dithers. Utilities say their vendors are late in providing better security; the vendors say the utilities are unwilling to pay for it. "We have a catch-22," says Joseph Weiss, the security consultant in San Jose. "Vendors are reticent to spend millions to develop secure control systems, because the market won't buy it."

Fixing this mess would be incredibly difficult. Thousands of old and already-installed systems are in place but can't be updated in one fell swoop. Because of the way they are designed, a simple software patch for one could disrupt others. New gear is better protected but not widely available.

"We have lobbied hard with our suppliers to put more reliable systems in place," says David Kepler, Dow Chemical's chief information officer. "The vendors are not providing them as fast as we would like."

But the giant companies that make control systems--General Electric, Siemens, ABB and others--say that even when they offer new wares with digital armor, customers balk. "No matter what you do, the customer always wants everything for free," says Paul Skare, the manager of Scada development at Siemens. Adds O'Shea:"There are lots of people who would love to jump on the solutions we are offering, but what Iam hearing is, ‘How am I going to pay for it?'"

Yes, it costs a lot of money to armor-plate software, as Microsoft discovers with each new version of Windows. ABB enlisted the professional hackers in Idaho to find holes in an early version of a new $1.2 million Scada system. Sure enough, it was riddled with weaknesses.

Invensys, which sells $1.4 billion a year of control systems and related services to chemical and oil conglomerates, has dispatched 30 specialists to visit clients and help them assess and tighten their control systems. At first Invensys covered the cost, but now it's charging for the service.

In the end, though, someone has to pay to stave off the bad guys; the question is whether American business will take the lead or wait for government--maybe--to force it to act. After the Sept. 11 attacks exposed gaping holes in airline security, the feds took control of the nation's 55,000 airport screeners. The new Department of Homeland Security formed the Transportation Security Administration, which awarded $8.5 billion in contracts and is requesting another $5.3 billion next year. Homeland's cybersecurity division, by contrast, will have a budget next year of less than $80 million.

If another unimaginable attack on America occurs, this time a devastating raid on our networks, what will Congress do? It will commission a panel to look into why we failed to anticipate the threat.

Monterey County Weekly Feature by Andrew Scutro

Blond and crewcut with a chestful of badges and medals, Stephen Henderson loves the Army. He’s been a paratrooper and a Ranger and he’s taught new soldiers how to rappel down a rope off hovering helicopters. As he puts it, he loves crawling around in the dirt. He’s been to the Middle East. And if there’s an adventure to be had in the Army, Staff Sergeant Henderson has found it and lived it.

But for now and for the next few years, he’s no longer airborne. He, like many of us, sits chairborne. Fresh into what will be a three-year assignment, Henderson recruits prospective soldiers out of local colleges and high schools from an office in a Seaside strip mall. Besides the Air Force, Navy and Marine outposts down the hall, his neighbors are a nail salon, a package shipping center, a hot sandwich shop and an electronics store. Cheap tobacco and cheap hamburgers can be had across the parking lot.

Late in the afternoon in the beginning of September, Henderson has a recruit parked in front of a corner computer taking one of several screening tests required to join the service. Cigarette smoke wafts in from the open back door.

The office features a corkboard of Polaroids showing recruits and telling when they joined and what they’ll be doing, from fixing helicopters to cooking lunch. A display rack is festooned with literature from the Army’s “Army of One” recruiting campaign, which emphasizes the power of the tech-savvy individual in an organization that lives and breathes teamwork.

An effort to capture the prospective soldier who spent his youth playing indoor video games instead of backyard football, the “Army of One” campaign comes with a revolutionary recruiting tool: a free, government-designed, Internet-accessible, interactive video game called America’s Army. Henderson’s relationship with the Army’s very own video game is intimate and uncanny.

“I’m in it,” he says from behind his desk.

America’s Army is a game that uses something gamers call “avatars”—electronic facsimiles of real people—and Henderson is one of them. In the part of the game where players go through training in a technique the Army calls “air assault”—that is, attacking via helicopter—a computerized version of Henderson appears as the instructor he recently was. When the game’s creators traveled from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey to his base in Kentucky to take very detailed digital photos of the facility and its characters, they captured Henderson in electronic form.

“When you’re on the rappelling tower, there’s me and my voice,” he says. “The bench the instructors sit on when we’re taking a break, it’s there.”

In July 2002 when the game was launched to accompany the “Army of One” recruitment campaign, Henderson and his crew were in Los Angeles, rappelling off the side of the Staples Center to promote America’s Army at a national electronic entertainment exposition known as E3. When experienced players saw the game, they went gaga.

Now, when he sets up his table at a county fair or a jobs symposium, Henderson gives away free discs containing versions of the game, which is so advanced no one can believe there’s no charge. And when a recruit has signed the papers to join the Army, he or she will get a “care package.” One of the contents is a copy of America’s Army.

“I tell them it’s something to check out,” he says.

But now that he’s stuck in a chair in Seaside for a few years while his friends are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Henderson plays the game too.

America’s Army is designed to be a realistic imitation of life in the Army, where good deeds mean advancement to better assignments and rogue behavior means punishment. But Henderson says his Internet self will never measure up.

“I am so much better than my game,” he says. “I’m horrible with computers.”

Henderson plays America’s Army along with three million people around the world—three million people who have created a hundred different virtual communities orbiting around a war game. America’s Army is one of the most popular video games in history.

When Henderson was hanging off a rope on the side of an arena in Los Angeles, the official Web site was being launched, taking some hundreds of thousands of hits from the get-go. Apparently a vast number of people around the world want to pretend they’re in the Army on a computer.

But as a free, downloadable, virtual world of combat created by the government to be a “strategic communications tool,” the game America’s Army raises serious concern among some critics, who ask about the appropriateness of a government imitating an ongoing real war with a free public game war. By creating an engaging virtual world so close to the serious, real one, it’s as if a blurry, third interworld—where reality and fantasy cross over each other—has been created. At the same time, America’s Army leads the way in an evolution of the military-industrial complex into what’s dubbed by some the “military-entertainment complex.”

America’s Army is what’s called in the gaming world a “first person shooter” (FPS). A new player, inducted as a recruit, starts off shooting virtual bullets to advance from virtual training to virtual war.

Details of weapons and uniforms are faithful and accurate because they’ve been simulated from the real thing. The rifle used for marksmanship training looks the same as the M-16A2 rifle a real recruit would use.

From the beginning, the player is involved with the other simulated people. At the rifle range, the sergeant mocks a player for being slow. As the mouse is moved left and right, up and down, so too does the player’s perspective.

Birds chirp in the background, making it feel like morning. Motions like loading a rifle are accompanied by the correct metallic clinking and sliding.

To aim a gun, a player looks down a gun sight at a target. To shoot, you click your mouse.

PC Gamer magazine gave it an “excellent” review for being “immersive and realistic.” Playing the game, you get the sense that you are in that virtual world. Of course, getting shot in America’s Army is like getting shot in a backyard came of cops and robbers: you just have to sit it out until the end of the game.

If America’s Army looks like the real thing, it’s intentional. One of the common compliments—and it’s the goal of many video games—is the realism. What the game does is bring in a player as a recruit. Using the fundamentals of what the Army calls its “core values” of teamwork, leadership, honor and so on, players progress from a realistic-

looking rifle range to other training, like Staff Sgt. Henderson’s rappelling tower. If they’re successful and refrain from shooting the drill sergeant, they are deployed into virtual combat scenarios from shooing saboteurs away from a snow-covered oil pipeline to rescuing a helicopter crew crashed in a place that looks remarkably like Somalia (à la Blackhawk Down) to rescuing hostages from a hospital (Jessica Lynch?). Players play online against other players, often scheduling tournaments.

Like the old role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, a player styles himself with his own taste in weapons and gear. The creators are careful to point out that although virtual killing is involved, killing an allied player or a civilian means virtual detention in virtual military prison—again, enforcing the Army’s value system.

To make the game very realistic, “enormous amounts of digital imagery from Iraq and Afghanistan” has been fed into the program to set up virtual battlegrounds that look, in one example, eerily like the city of Baghdad. When the game was still being developed in Monterey, special operations troops returning from Afghanistan were brought into the lab to be digitally photographed for reproduction in the game.

For a guy like Henderson, who used to carry a gun for a living, the game is right on, in that you can’t just spray a target with bullets because the virtual carbine works like the real thing; when it jams there are several steps to get it working again.

Game designers operated under some serious political restraints. Even if the virtual battleground looked just like Baghdad, it’s not called Baghdad. The enemy are not exact copies of Fedayeen or guerilla Republican Guard or Taliban. But they’re close.

“The Army knows,” Henderson says. “In Afghanistan, who’s your enemy one day is your friend the next. The Army is not depicting any enemy.”

One evolution of the game has been the change in the style of combat. Although the recent showdown in Najaf was a startling example of the sort of urban combat that commanders dread, a lot of the enemy contact in Iraq has been guerilla-style ambushes and hit-and-run roadside bomb attacks. Like the war and the Army, the virtual war is adapting.

“The game was designed before the Iraq war started. With it has come some unconventional combat, IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) and individual insurgents, and not a platoon of the enemy,” Henderson says. “It has been reflected in the game, but they are trying to incorporate that into the broader scope.”

In his second-floor corner office at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS), Mike Zyda is not shy at all about his role in the military-entertainment complex. If some call him the father of this phenomenon, he’s happy to let others know it. Wired magazine mentions him in its September issue and The New York Times magazine gave him a nod in mid-August.

As director of the MOVES (Modeling, Virtual Reality and Simulation) Institute at NPS, Zyda could be any guy in America in perpetual dress-down Friday. A civilian through and through, he shows up for work in New Agey slipper-shoes and khakis while his military counterparts at the Navy school are spit-and-polish.

He grew up in the San Fernando Valley with Disney executives for neighbors. The closest he got to military service was at age 18, asking a co-worker what to expect in the draft. That was 1972, he had a high lottery number, and the draft was abandoned a year later.

Rather than get sucked into the dreadful tail end of the Vietnam-era military, Zyda went to UC San Diego, where he got a degree in bioengineering in 1976 and subsequent computer science degrees from the University of Massachusetts in 1978 and Washington University, St. Louis in 1984.

Working for the military is, to Zyda, who uses the appropriate mythical analogy, like being “on Mars.”

Rewind back to the mid-’90s, when Zyda was chairman of the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board, part of the National Research Council. He wrote a report called “Modeling and Simulation: Linking Entertainment & Defense.”

The report points out that the relationship between Hollywood and the Pentagon goes way back. It’s no secret that the Department of Defense (DOD) is willing to lend aircraft carriers, helicopters, weapons, soldiers and whatever, for a movie with an acceptable script. But in his report, Zyda points out that, while certain societal obstacles between the military and the Hollywood and Silicon Valley subcultures will need to be overcome, a relationship could be mutually beneficial.

“The entertainment industry was going in some very interesting directions, faster than DOD was investing in,” Zyda says.

In the study, he wrote:

Both the entertainment industry and DOD are interested in developing immersive systems that allow participants (whether game players or soldiers) to enter and navigate simulated environments. For DOD, such systems can be used to train groups of combatants or, increasingly, individual combatants for particular missions when access to the actual location is either hazardous or just not possible…For the entertainment industry, such systems are the basis for virtual reality (VR) experiences being incorporated into location-based entertainment, theme parks and video game centers.

The Army’s chief scientist noticed. “He called me on the phone and said, ‘I love this study you wrote,’” Zyda says.

With that, work on America’s Army began.

What Zyda and a crew of computer programmers and artists created is one of the most popular video games ever.

One purpose of the game is to solve a major problem for the military: post-Vietnam, post-draft estrangement from the American public. Where military service was expected of previous generations, it’s been a career option—and not necessarily the most appealing option—since the draft ended in 1973.

Even a post-Cold War shrinking military needs volunteers, and although the video game generation might have become familiar with virtual combat, they had little conception of what life in the Army might really be like. Zyda’s new project set out to change that, hence the emphasis on realistic training and ethics.

It’s a money-saver for recruiting too. Compared to the Army’s $1.2 billion annual recruiting and marketing budget—which includes the Army’s NASCAR racing team—America’s Army costs $4.4 million a year, he says.

Although no studies have been done to survey incoming soldiers about the effectiveness of the game, Zyda and others believe the game has been effective.  

“The goal is to communicate a message about the Army to the general public,” he says. “And I think it’s been very successful.”

The game has brought government game programming up to speed with the multi-billion dollar electronic entertainment industry. At one point in the mid and late-’90s, the kind of graphics available to consumers was better than what trainees or war-gamers were getting.

“By the fall of 1999, there were a lot of people who recognized that the entertainment industry was moving much faster than the defense laboratories,” Zyda says. “The cutting edge in computing is driven by games and entertainment. We have to be there. For national security that means we either have to keep up or do the research and development on our own.”

Now, with America’s Army and its offshoots, the Pentagon is back in the game.

In May, the whole operation was shifted away from Zyda and MOVES solely into the Army, which wants to grow it into a game with many more options. Zyda is diplomatically optimistic.

“The Army is going their own way and we’ll see where they get,” he says. “We wish them the best of luck.”

Asked about the appropriateness of using government resources to spread a game that involves combat into the public sphere, Zyda gets philosophical. He mentions the notorious game Grand Theft Auto, in which players are rewarded for committing virtual murder. At what point does media shift from portraying violence to offering a how-to seminar on killing without consequence?

“There’s a fine line there,” Zyda says.

For Jack Thompson, who calls himself “Public Enemy No.1 for the video game industry,” it’s a clear line.

A Miami lawyer specializing in medical malpractice defense, Thompson also serves as an ever-present talk show critic of violent video games. In 1988, he ran unsuccessfully for Florida attorney general against future US Attorney General Janet Reno.

He spoke by telephone from Florida while awaiting the onslaught of Hurricane Frances. A self-described conservative, pro-military Republican, Thompson nevertheless aligns himself with the warnings from President Dwight Eisenhower, who cautioned against the dangers of a “military-industrial complex” that profits by the spread of war.

Whether it’s America’s Army or the new Army-developed game Full Spectrum Warrior, Thompson has deep concerns about the blending of military-funded games with public entertainment.

“The Defense Department’s placement of what I call ‘killing simulators’ into the civilian population is questionable,” he says. “I think there’s a problem with the Army in two respects. They are subsidizing with our tax dollars the creation of games which start out as simulators. And second, if these games teach people to kill, why would they facilitate the dumping of this technology into the public setting?”

Thompson is often called to speak about video game technology as a kind of violence training. He predicted that the Beltway sniper, Lee Malvo, as well as the alleged Ohio highway sniper Charles McCoy, had been using video games to practice. He was right. He’s just been called on by the Alameda County prosecutor for a case involving a criminal gang that claims to have played a video game with carjacking scenarios by day and then jacked cars at night.

When it comes to America’s Army, Thompson fears that there could be unintended consequences to what’s now a very popular government-financed game.

“War is hell and I think there’s something profane about portraying war as something entertaining, glamorous and cool,” he says.

Sharing some of Thompson’s concern is James Der Derian, professor of international relations at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The author of Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media-Entertainment-Network, as well as several publications on national security and politics, Der Derian has questions about programs like America’s Army.

“I see the need for simulation for training purposes,” he says in a telephone interview. “The risk, and this one that the military has not investigated  sufficiently, is that as they increase the “reality” of video games, there comes to be a blurring of the reality principle. That is, confusing the games for the real thing.”

One danger he notes is the substitution of real instincts and impulses with less-than-natural behavior learned through games. He points to testimony from veterans of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, who had a hard time comparing the chaotic reality of urban combat in the Third World with the sterility of the video war games they’d grown up with. And beyond that, he asks about the appropriateness of the entertainment industry working so closely with national defense organizations.

“When you bring together all these forces in these new alliances,” he asks, “you get a blurring of what’s our overall goal. Is it to entertain? Is it to triumph? Is it to protect?”

Der Derian showed up in a 2003 masters thesis by Zhan Li, then a student of comparative media studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of a 112-page treatise on “The Potential of America’s Army the Video Game as Civilian-Military Public Sphere.”

“I came to America’s Army as the first major state-produced game sphere, and one that’s explicitly political,” Li says in a telephone interview.   

What interested Li was the cross-over between the game and reality, considering for one, that active duty soldiers like Henderson play the game even from places like Iraq. He has gotten connected with several online player groups—which are known as “clans” and take on handles like “Drunks with Guns” and “Men of God.”

“This isn’t just the government producing a game,” he says. “It’s also the first time the Army has produced a product for public consumption.”

If that’s true—and besides commercialized military products like Hummers and certain camping gear, it’s hard to think of any Army-birthed consumer products—we have already entered a new realm. It’s this realm of the military-entertainment complex, where three million people, some of them soldiers and some civilian, hop back and forth between two worlds (one of them made and monitored by the military, the other one less so), dodging and shooting virtual bullets in one and real bullets in the other.

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise. The video game feel of the news bomb run footage from the first Persian Gulf War, stood in stark contrast to the  bloody television coverage from Vietnam. A public once horrified by war became numb to it and were even entertained by the gee-whiz image of a bomb whistling down a chimney.

Military-funded video games packaged as strategic communications tools are an evolution of the same government trying to present itself in the best light possible by creating a fantasy world, despite the ugly truths in the real world.

As Mike Zyda at the MOVES Institute moves on to other projects and the Army takes full control of its game, the plan now is to turn the entire Army experience into a video game, and create a complete, virtual replication of the institution. But when his ideas were first presented, he says, the gray-haired generation of officers scoffed at such games being trivial kid-stuff. Now it’s dead serious.

“They want to build the whole Army in game form,” he says. “It’s a grand plan, which is, America’s Army will not die.”

One must ask, of course, when will the game be over?

MONTEREY, Calif. - Thousands of miles from the rain and wind of Hurricane Ivan, a model of the storm swirls in the memory and processors of a supercomputer that can predict its likely course and strength.

Working through complex mathematical equations that describe the atmosphere's behavior across the globe, hundreds of microprocessors perform billions of calculations each second on observations collected by sensors dropped by aircraft and other monitors.

The result, after more than an hour of number crunching at the U.S. Navy's Fleet Numerical weather computing center, is just one of the many predictions generated by supercomputers around the world that help frame such life-or-death decisions as whether to order evacuations and where to safely set up shelters.

The programs that model the atmosphere and the high-performance computers that do this work have revolutionized weather forecasting, improving our ability to predict the paths of hurricanes and fluctuations in their intensity.

In fact, the hurricane track error in the National Hurricane Center's three-day forecasts has been cut in half since 1998, and since last year the center's meteorologists have been issuing five-day forecasts with increasing confidence and accuracy.

"It's one of the most remarkable improvements in forecasting that I've seen in my career," said Russ Elsberry, professor of meteorology at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

The forecasts aren't perfect, particularly when it comes to long-term tracking and intensity. A few days ago, Ivan was thought to be headed for the Florida peninsula. Earlier this month, Hurricane Charley's intensity unexpectedly jumped just before slamming into Punta Gorda, Fla.

Still, emergency officials were able to order 2 million people to evacuate for higher ground once Ivan turned toward the Gulf Coast, thanks in part to the models run by supercomputers and the confidence forecasters have in the results.

Improving predictions is not just a matter of buying more hardware, though that helps. The numerical models themselves undergo continuous revisions as researchers learn more about the atmosphere and improve the accuracy of their algorithms.

The models - actually complicated software written in a computer language called Fortran - attempt to account for everything happening in the atmosphere on a global basis.

"You don't just sit down and produce one overnight," said Mike Clancy, chief scientist at the Navy's Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center in Monterey.

The programs incorporate laws familiar to anyone who passed a high school physics course, then factor in the chaos of the atmospheric developments over time - an infinitely complicated process.

To organize it all, a three-dimensional grid - a virtual net - is layered over the Earth. At each point where the grid intersects, initial observations of air pressure, humidity, temperature, wind speed and other factors are processed by the computer to figure out how they will change at future fixed points in time.

Just as a 5-megapixel digital camera more accurately depicts reality than a 1-megapixel device, higher resolution grids can capture a better picture of the atmosphere and help produce accurate forecasts.

That, of course, requires more computing power.

"You're always trying to make the resolution higher and higher. What limits that is the power of the supercomputer," Clancy said. "At the same time, you have to do these computations in a reasonable amount of time."

Still, the initial observations - usually extrapolated from the readings made by instruments called dropsondes that are tossed into storms by the crews of hurricane-hunter aircraft - are often just approximations themselves - a factor that can cause results to be less reliable.

To increase confidence, there are several different types of models, each of which produces different results. Emergency planners can then make their own judgments.

In the next few years, researchers at the National Atmospheric and Oceanographic Administration plan to unveil a new, higher resolution model that better addresses the interaction of the sea, land and atmosphere.

Among other measurements, it will use data from NOAA's Gulfstream IV jet, which is being outfitted with a Doppler radar that will provide a three-dimensional description, from sea level to the top of a storm.

"We believe this is of fundamental importance in addressing and improving the intensity forecast," said Naomi Surgi, advanced project leader for hurricanes at the National Weather Service's Environmental Modeling Center.

It also should help scientists better understand and predict behavior when there aren't strong steering currents in the atmosphere.

The new model will run at a Maryland supercomputer facility that currently ingests 116 million observations each day to provide guidance, not just for hurricanes but for all forecast models, said Surgi.

The new facility consists of clusters of IBM Corp. servers with hundreds of microprocessors of the type used in personal computers. The Fleet Numerical computers, which were mostly built by SGI, also are based on so-called commodity chips.

Such systems can cost from $1 million to $30 million, but the extra computing muscle will be needed as researchers struggle to do evermore calculations, evermore quickly.

"The data we predict is very perishable," Clancy said. "If we took three days to do a three-day forecast, it wouldn't be relevant."

Statesman article by Stanley Theodore

From this month, here’s how American troops will train for battle, instead of live settings and dummy bullets and bombs

‘WE race down the mountain under heavy fire and find a new position. Three trucks in the distance look like enemy vehicles, and Stehling types in a code to target them. But at the last moment, he learns they're civilian and gets a dressing down from the sergeant for depending too much on the network and not maintaining a ‘mental picture of the battle space’ at all times. Seconds later, as we pull out from behind a ridge, we spot multiple dust plumes on the move — enemy tanks tearing southeast toward Charlie Company. Stehling taps in the grid coordinates to call for an air strike. Just then we’re attacked, mortars thunder all around us, and the ground ahead of us erupts in flames. My heart pounds as the Humvee grinds into a new position, the sergeant reacquires the target on his laser rangefinder, and Stehling calls out, ‘Ten seconds… four, three, two, one!’ In the valley below, the tanks explode in sequence and Stehling shouts, ‘We’re getting everything in the zip code!’ The backlit exfoliations of smoke and debris are almost too beautiful.”

The last line, especially the word “backlit”, gives the story away. The narrative is not about a live war zone but a virtual war room where American soldiers have begun training. Steve Silberman is the first person to visit this virtual war zone and has put out a riveting account of the network centric warfare model in The Wired’s September issue.

The US department of defence’s keenness to use technology to the maximum in real life war plans (as it, in any case, would be an inherent part in cyber warfare) has not begun yet. In fact, it has been using flight and tank simulators for decades now — in fact back since 1929 when the first simulator with a wooden cockpit was created. Soon after Gulf War I, Wired in 1993 reported in-depth on the Combined Arms and Tactical Training Center in Fort Knox, Kentucky, where sol-diers entered SIMNET — “a virtual war delivered via network links”. Then the troops began engagement on a virtual replica of the harsh Mojave Desert, the replication made possible by US defence agencies including Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, who held the precursor of today’s Internet.

Silberman saw how the US Army recreated war-torn Baghdad in a battle lab in Fort Sill in Lawton, Oklahoma. In an airconditioned lab they had a river, bridge, civilian traffic, bombs, birds and Sergeant Prado — each one created by simulation generated by flat panel display on the wall, sub woofers in the floor for total surround sound effect, and around six computers running on