Michele Flournoy???

Private Commercial Satellite company spots Chinese Aircraft carrier in Yellow Sea

Alan Boyle writes
A commercial satellite operator says it has captured a rare image of China's first aircraft carrier as it sailed through the Yellow Sea, after going through an exercise that's the 21st-century equivalent of finding a needle in a haystack.

DigitalGlobe said the aircraft carrier showed up on a cloud-filled picture snapped on Dec. 8 by its polar-orbiting QuickBird satellite from a height of 280 miles (450 kilometers). An analyst spotted the ship while checking the image on Tuesday, said Stephen Wood, the director of the company's analysis center.

"There is something that is always indispensable about having people involved," Wood told me. The ship was identified "using a combination of the satellite imagery plus open-source material on the Internet, and geography," he said, but "at the end of the day, it still comes down to a person."

Experts have been hoping for months to get a glimpse of the aircraft carrier at sea. The former Soviet Union started building the ship, originally known as the Varyag, but never finished it. After the Soviet breakup, the Varyag ended up in the hands of the Ukrainian government. The ship was auctioned off to the Chinese in 1998. Since then, the Varyag, which has reportedly been rechristened the Shi Lang, has been under refurbishment for sea service.

"This is a ship and a story that has had legs for many years," Wood said.


DigitalGlobe said this picture was taken during the carrier's second sea trial, approximately 62 miles (100 kilometers) south-southeast of the port of Dalian. Wood said the picture indicates that the ship is "moving at a decent rate of speed, which would be expected in the middle of the ocean." The U.S. military could no doubt glean more information about the Shi Lang's status, from QuickBird's pictures as well as from classified, higher-resolution imagery.

China says the Shi Lang will be used for research and training, and the project is thought to be part of the country's strategy to expand its presence as a naval power. The Chinese military is expected to build more copies of the ship in coming years. In fact, sources told Reuters in July that a second aircraft carrier was under construction.

"China's next moves have to be watched carefully, or there eventually could be a negative impact on maritime safety in Asia," Yoshihiko Yamada, a professor at Japan's Tokai University, told Reuters at the time.

QuickBird's view of the Shi Lang serves as today's offering from the Cosmic Log Space Advent Calendar, which features an image of Earth from space every day from now until Christmas. Here are the past offerings in the series:

Source-Tamilnet.com: China to build it's own Indian Ocean Naval Base in Seychelles Islands-Countermeasure against Diego Garcia!

China announces Indian Ocean naval base in Seychelles
[TamilNet, Tuesday, 13 December 2011, 01:04 GMT]
China on Monday announced setting up its first naval base abroad at Seychelles in the Indian Ocean.  The former British colony, Seychelles, lies in parallel to the Maldives and the US-British base Diego Garcia in the East, the Somalian coast of Africa in the West, Gulf of Aden/ entrance to the Red Sea in the north, and Indian dominated Mauritius as well as the French colony Reunion in the South. While the Chinese defence ministry announced that its Navy would seek supplies and recuperate facilities through the base, the Seychelles foreign minister said that his country had invited China to set the base to fight against piracy. The base gains significance, as China is about to launch its first aircraft carrier, Hindustan Times said. Tamils are one of the peoples of Seychelles, locally known by the name Malba (from Malabar, a term common to Tamils and Malayalis in colonial vocabulary).

China struck the deal to set its first foreign naval base in Seychelles, when the Chinese defence minister Gen Liang Guanglie visited Seychelles earlier this month.

But playing down its significance, China compared it to the facilities it presently gets from the harbours of Djibouti, Oman and Yemen in the region, Hindustan Times said.

Meanwhile, revealing the plans on the base, the Seychelles foreign minister Jean-Paul Adam was quoted saying, "We have invited the Chinese government to set up a military presence on Mahe to fight the pirate attacks that the Seychelles face on a regular basis."

"For the time being China is studying this possibility because she has economic interests in the region and Beijing is also involved in the fight against piracy," the foreign minister further said.

According to China’s news agency Xinhua, during the visit of the Chinese defence minister, the two sides exchanged views on the cooperation of their militaries as well as on the global and regional situation.

Seychelles appreciated China’s efforts to maintain safe navigation on the Indian Ocean and the support it had granted to Seychelles, Xinhua said.

For several decades when the people of Somalia suffered from war and famine the world couldn’t bring in any solutions to the suffering people and their nation. But Somalian piracy, who ever orchestrates it behind the scenes, has now become an excuse for all the powers to bring in their resources and military presence to the region, commented an Eezham Tamil political analyst.

Genocidal Sri Lanka’s defence secretary and presidential sibling Gotabhaya Rajapaksa too harps on ‘piracy’ to expand a Sinhala navy, ostensibly to complete the genocide of Eezham Tamils and eventually to check Tamil Nadu as well as any future moves coming from India in favour of Eezham Tamils.

Occupying Sinhala military in Jaffna was recently heard bragging of their ‘diplomacy’ of granting the KKS harbour to India, but bringing in a Chinese corporate to occupy the coastal belt around the harbour through a Malaysian company.

China seems to have opted Maldives out for its naval base to avoid direct confrontation with India. The cultural milieu of Maldives is also not conducive to China. Seychelles has better resources to make use of and better location to enter into Africa. Besides, there is a small population of people of Chinese origin in Seychelles.

However, China is making its importance felt in the Maldives in some other way.

Apart from Chinese development projects and a newly established embassy in the Maldives, Chinese tourists have become the main source of income to the Maldives in recent times, with the decline of Western tourism due to economic recession. In a way China has now become indispensable to the economy of Maldives.

In the meantime, China acquired 10,000 sq.km of seabed in the international part of the Indian Ocean, by signing a contract with the International Seabed Authority of the UN, for exploring minerals over the next 15 years.

Seychelles archipelago, having 115 islands of volcanic and coral origin, was largely uninhabited in historical times. Stray archaeological evidences indicate that there were perhaps occasional visits of Austronesian seafarers, Maldivians and Arabs.

An early archaeological remain found in Seychelles is a Maldivian boat of 12th century CE. Seychelles and Diego Garcia (Chagos) are remembered in Maldivian folklore as the islands of magical double coconut and Bolha-vehi respectively.

The islands were noticed by the Portuguese in the 16th century and were colonized by the French in the 18th century. The British captured it in the early 19th century.

Seychelles became independent from Britain in 1976.

Having a population of less than 100,000, all the peoples of Seychelles today are of immigrant origins. Apart from the descendants of the French and the British, there are peoples of African, Indian and Chinese origins. People of African origin and mixed ethnicities make the largest part of the population, while Malbas (Tamils/ Indians) and Chinese are small in number.

People speak Seychellois Creole (a mixture of languages) besides English and French.

Seychelles had a one-party socialist government between 1979 and 1991, giving way to the present multi-party democratic constitution of presidential system of government.

The Malbas or Indians, who are largely people of Tamil origin, have not preserved their language, but the identity is mainly retained through the Tamil shade of Hindu religion.

Where's our "Special Forces" women?

Washington Post-Top Female Pentagon Official to step down



Michele Flournoy, the Defense Department’s undersecretary for policy and one of the most senior women civilians ever to serve at the Pentagon, said Monday that she is stepping down early next year.

Flournoy, 50, has a relatively low public profile but has been influential since the start of the Obama administration in shaping defense policy toward emerging threats and formulating counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. In recent months, she has assembled a team to plan for the future U.S. military role in Afghanistan after the departure of combat troops at the end of 2014.

In an interview with the Associated Press, Flournoy said she wanted to “rebalance” her life and spend more time with her three children. “Right now I need to recalibrate a little bit and invest a little bit more in the family account for a while,” she said. “We’ve been going flat out for more than three years.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta called her a “treasured colleague.” In a statement issued to reporters traveling with him aboard a military aircraft, Panetta said he would “personally miss her valued counsel. But I understand the stresses and strains that holding senior administration positions can have on families.”

Flournoy’s resignation, effective in February, follows the departure last summer of former defense secretary Robert M. Gates, and the likely departure of others as the end of Obama’s term approaches.

At least three senior administration officials have left in recent weeks, including domestic policy director Melody Barnes and the former chief White House liaison to Congress Phil Schiliro. Virtually the entire leadership of his economic policy team has departed in the past year, and several other senior political advisers have left more recently to run the Obama re-election campaign.

Flournoy was part of Obama’s national security transition team, and said that she plans to work in support of the president’s re-election effort. Panetta said he was “confident that she will have many years of service in her future,” and several people close to Flournoy who did not want to be named said that her departure would both enable her to take a break, and position her for a more senior position in a second Obama term.

In 2007, Flournoy became the founding president of the Center for a New American Security. In the administration of Bill Clinton, she served as a deputy assistant secretary of defense.

Flournoy’s husband, W. Scott Gould, is deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs. They have three children, ages 14, 12 and 9.

By Karen DeYoung  |  05:47 PM ET, 12/12/2011

China Times-Flournoy meets with Chinese Military

Source-NY TIMES: Michele Flournoy-highest ranking female officer in U.S. Military History???

WASHINGTON

MICHÈLE A. FLOURNOY, one of the highest-ranking women in the history of the Pentagon, did not have a childhood that would immediately suggest a future as a defense policy intellectual who is rethinking how America fights its wars.

Her mother was an actress and singer who performed at the Copacabana, the legendary New York nightclub, and was the understudy to Vivian Blaine in “Oklahoma!” on Broadway. Her father was a cinematography director in television at Paramount Studios. She is a 1979 graduate of Beverly Hills High School who spent her summers playing, she said, “a lot of beach volleyball.”

But Ms. Flournoy, who went on to Harvard and then Balliol College at Oxford (“I majored in rowing”), has spent her entire professional life immersed in the theory and practice of war, from the arms control debate of the 1980s to the counterinsurgency doctrine of today.

Now one of the most senior officials at the Pentagon, with the title of under secretary of defense for policy, she holds the job considered the “brains” of the building. Her portfolio includes matters like Iraq and Afghanistan and pirates off the Horn of Africa, but her immediate task is the sweeping military strategy reassessment, called the Quadrennial Defense Review, which the Pentagon is required by Congress to produce every four years.

The undertaking boils down to this: assess the threats against the United States, propose the strategy to counter them, then put it into effect by allocating resources within the four branches of the armed services. A major question for the Q.D.R., as it is called within the Pentagon, is how to balance preparations for future counterinsurgency wars, like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, with plans for conventional conflicts against well-equipped potential adversaries, like North Korea, China or Iran.

Another quandary, given that the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan have lasted far longer than the American involvement in World War II, is how to prepare for conflicts that could tie up American forces for decades.

“One of the things we’ve learned over the past eight years is that some of the greatest demands, the most difficult challenges, are sustaining operations over time,” Ms. Flournoy, 48, said in a recent conversation in an unused office at the Pentagon. (For security reasons, Ms. Flournoy’s real office, in the Pentagon’s E Ring of top officials, is off limits to audio recorders and therefore taped interviews.)

Already Ms. Flournoy is a driving force behind a new military strategy that will be a central premise of the Q.D.R., the concept of “hybrid” war, which envisions the conflicts of tomorrow as a complex mix of conventional battles, insurgencies and cyber threats. “We’re trying to recognize that warfare may come in a lot of different flavors in the future,” Ms. Flournoy said.

The report, due to be delivered to Congress early next year, will be the first broad look at the new administration’s military thinking. But Ms. Flournoy is a window into President Obama’s no-drama Pentagon. Meticulous, academic and reserved, Ms. Flournoy is in sharp contrast to the primary occupant of her job in the previous administration, Douglas J. Feith, who used what is now known to have been faulty intelligence to make an impassioned case for war with Iraq.

LIKE the Republican defense secretary she meets with almost daily, Robert M. Gates, Ms. Flournoy is a centrist who advocates a strong defense but a less aggressive American stance overseas. She was behind the development of Mr. Obama’s new strategy for Afghanistan, which called for an increase in development experts as well as troops.

During the 2008 campaign, she was one of the few Democrats to say something nice about the “surge” in troops in Iraq under President George W. Bush, calling that one of “four elements” that had reduced violence in the country.

“There were people like myself who were committing political suicide,” said Michael E. O’Hanlon, a Democrat and military expert at the Brookings Institution who was excoriated by critics on the left, among others, for more bluntly supporting the surge after a government-guided tour of Iraq in 2007. “But Michèle was masterful.”

Ms. Flournoy, who served in a lower-level Pentagon policy job in the Clinton administration and is sometimes mentioned as a years-from-now possibility as the first female defense secretary, said she began to make the transition from beach volleyball to throw weights when she spent a summer in Europe as a high school exchange student. “It was Belgium, of all places,” she said. “It was like opening up my eyes to the rest of the world.”

She pursued international relations at Harvard and Oxford, but the other factor that got her interested in defense policy, she said, was her marriage in 1990 to W. Scott Gould, a career naval officer who is No. 2 at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

“Marrying into the military family was a pretty profound experience and gave me a much greater appreciation for the human dimensions of the institution,” she said.

Then, too, there was her father, who served as a bombardier in World War II, although as a child Ms. Flournoy knew little of his experience. Her parents were divorced when she was young, and her father died when she was 14. Ms. Flournoy’s mother, who gave up show business after marrying, moved one block inside Beverly Hills so her children could go to its public schools.

GROWING up, Ms. Flournoy said she heard family talk that her father was decorated for a war exploit, but “nobody knew if it was true, and nobody had seen the medal, and he didn’t talk about it, and then he died.” It was not until last year that a fellow at the research institution she helped found, the Center for a New American Security, looked into her father’s war record and gave her documents that told an astonishing tale about one of his missions.

“They were flying a nighttime bombing raid in Germany and the plane was shot up on coming back, and the co-pilot and pilot were either incapacitated or unconscious,” Ms. Flournoy said. “So there was nobody to land the plane. And he’d never landed a plane. And he got behind the controls and got talked down and landed the plane and saved the entire crew.” He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, she said.

Ms. Flournoy worked after Balliol as a senior analyst at the Washington-based Arms Control Association and as a research fellow in nuclear weapons policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

But she made her first big mark on military thinking when she wrote a scathing report at the Pentagon on the Clinton administration’s failures in Somalia in 1993, when 18 American servicemen were killed in the infamous attack retold in a series of articles for The Philadelphia Inquirer titled “Black Hawk Down.”

Since then, she has become the mother of three children under the age of 12 and a mentor to other women at the Pentagon. “The thing I feel the most is wanting to do well by the younger women who are counting on me to kind of open doors and blaze a trail for them,” Ms. Flournoy said. Although she said she had not experienced her gender “as any kind of barrier,” motherhood appears to have taken some predictable tolls.

Ms. Flournoy, normally exacting about detail, became sheepish when she found she could not remember the title of a book by her bedside. “I read about five minutes before I fall asleep,” she said.

Source-Yahoo news-Chinese President urges navy to be ready for combat!

Chinese President Hu Jintao on Tuesday urged the navy to prepare for military combat, amid growing regional tensions over maritime disputes and a US campaign to assert itself as a Pacific power.

The navy should "accelerate its transformation and modernisation in a sturdy way, and make extended preparations for military combat in order to make greater contributions to safeguard national security," he said.

Addressing the powerful Central Military Commission, Hu said: "Our work must closely encircle the main theme of national defence and military building."

His comments, which were posted in a statement on a government website, come as the United States and Beijing's neighbours have expressed concerns over its naval ambitions, particularly in the South China Sea.

Several Asian nations have competing claims over parts of the South China Sea, believed to encompass huge oil and gas reserves, while China claims it all. One-third of global seaborne trade passes through the region.

Vietnam and the Philippines have accused Chinese forces of increasing aggression there.

In a translation of Hu's comments, the official Xinhua news agency quoted the president as saying China's navy should "make extended preparations for warfare."

The Pentagon however downplayed Hu's speech, saying that Beijing had the right to develop its military, although it should do so transparently.

"They have a right to develop military capabilities and to plan, just as we do," said Pentagon spokesman George Little, but he added, "We have repeatedly called for transparency from the Chinese and that's part of the relationship we're continuing to build with the Chinese military."

"Nobody's looking for a scrap here," insisted another spokesman, Admiral John Kirby. "Certainly we wouldn't begrudge any other nation the opportunity, the right to develop naval forces to be ready.

"Our naval forces are ready and they'll stay ready."

State Department spokesman Mark Toner said: "We want to see stronger military-to-military ties with China and we want to see greater transparency. That helps answer questions we might have about Chinese intentions."

Hu's announcement comes in the wake of trips to Asia by several senior US officials, including President Barack Obama, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

US undersecretary of defence Michelle Flournoy is due to meet in Beijing with her Chinese counterparts on Wednesday for military-to-military talks.

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao last month warned against interference by "external forces" in regional territorial disputes including those in the South China Sea.

And China said late last month it would conduct naval exercises in the Pacific Ocean, after Obama, who has dubbed himself America's first Pacific president, said the US would deploy up to 2,500 Marines to Australia.

China's People's Liberation Army, the largest military in the world, is primarily a land force, but its navy is playing an increasingly important role as Beijing grows more assertive about its territorial claims.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon warned that Beijing was increasingly focused on its naval power and had invested in high-tech weaponry that would extend its reach in the Pacific and beyond.

China's first aircraft carrier began its second sea trial last week after undergoing refurbishments and testing, the government said.

The 300-metre (990-foot) ship, a refitted former Soviet carrier, underwent five days of trials in August that sparked international concern about China's widening naval reach.

Beijing only confirmed this year that it was revamping the old Soviet ship and has repeatedly insisted that the carrier poses no threat to its neighbours and will be used mainly for training and research purposes.

But the August sea trials were met with concern from regional powers including Japan and the United States, which called on Beijing to explain why it needs an aircraft carrier.

China, which publicly announced around 50 separate naval exercises in the seas off its coast over the past two years -- usually after the event -- says its military is only focused on defending the country's territory.

Source-Department of Defence



Her "position" regarding China from last year.

Michèle Flournoy was confirmed by the U.S. Senate as the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy on February 9, 2009.  She serves as the principal staff assistant and advisor to the Secretary of Defense and the Deputy Secretary of Defense for all matters on the formulation of national security and defense policy and the integration and oversight of DoD policy and plans to achieve national security objectives.

Prior to her confirmation, Ms. Flournoy was appointed President of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) in January 2007.  Before co-founding CNAS, she was a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where she worked on a broad range of defense policy and international security issues.

Ms. Flournoy previously served as a distinguished research professor at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at the National Defense University (NDU), where she founded and led the university’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) working group, which was chartered by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to develop intellectual capital in preparation for the Department of Defense’s 2001 QDR.

Prior to joining NDU, Ms. Flournoy was dual-hatted as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Threat Reduction and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy.  In that capacity, she oversaw three Policy offices in the Office of the Secretary of Defense: Strategy; Requirements, Plans and Counterproliferation; and Russia, Ukraine and Eurasian Affairs.

Ms. Flournoy was awarded the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service in 1996, the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service in 1998 and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Joint Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 2000.  She is a former member of the Defense Policy Board and the Defense Science Board Task Force on Transformation.

Ms. Flournoy earned a bachelor’s degree in social studies from Harvard University and a master’s degree in international relations from Balliol College, Oxford University, where she was a Newton-Tatum scholar.

Source-Breitbart.com: Senior Israeli Official-Iran must choose a bomb, or survival!

A senior Israeli cabinet minister on Monday said Iran must be forced to face an existential question over its nuclear drive: choose between getting an atomic bomb, or survival.
"We believe that in order to stop the Iranian military nuclear project, the regime in Tehran should face a dilemma -- whether to have a bomb or to survive," Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon told reporters in Jerusalem.

Yaalon said however it was for the international community, rather than Israel, to apply what he called an "achievable" policy.

"We prefer that the international community led by the United States will bring about this dilemma in order to convince the regime to give up its military nuclear programme," he said, stressing the need for political isolation and economic sanctions aimed at the banking and oil sectors.

Israel and much of the international community fear that Iran's nuclear programme masks a drive for a weapons capability.

Tehran denies any such ambition and says the programme is for peaceful civilian energy and medical purposes only.

"Our policy is very clear -- by one way or another, the military nuclear project in Iran should be stopped," Yaalon said, indicating it "might be 12 months, might be 24 months" until Iran was able to reach a military nuclear capability.

Israel has pushed Washington and the European Union for tough sanctions against Tehran, but has repeatedly warned it would not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons.

Yaalon, a member of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's inner circle of eight ministers, also reiterated the line that while a military option was still on the table, as "the last resort."

He declined to comment on what was behind a deadly explosion at a Iranian military base near Tehran last month, which a top Israeli intelligence official reportedly said was a site where ground-to-ground missiles were being developed.

"They had some blow to the missiles project in the last incident in which a missile site absorbed a significant blow -- especially regarding long-range missiles," Yaalon said.

Media reports have suggested the blast was part of a covert effort by the United States, Israel and other states to disable Iran's nuclear and missile programmes.

Last month, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency said it had "credible" information Iran was carrying out "activities relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device."

Source-Haaretz: Brave Thinking former Mossad Chief



Former Mossad chief: Israeli attack on Iran must be stopped to avert catastrophe
Meir Dagan speaks out against military offensive on Iran, expresses concern that Defense Minister Barak believes Israel only has less than a year to carry out an attack.

By Amos Harel

Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan warned Thursday against an Israeli attack on Iran, saying such a move would likely lead to a regional war involving Hezbollah, Hamas, and Syria.

"I'm concerned about possible mistakes and I prefer to speak out before there is a catastrophe," Dagan said in an interview on the Israeli television program “Uvda."

"I think that engaging, with open eyes, in a regional war is warranted only when we are under attack or when the sword is already cutting against our live flesh. It is not an alternative that should be chosen lightly."

Dagan stressed that though he cannot predict how many casualties an attack on Iran would yield, he said, "I have to assume that the level of destruction, paralysis of every-day life, and Israeli death toll would be high."

He said that he has no interest in hiding his fervent opposition to an Israeli attack on Iran from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

Dagan said he was worried about Barak's past comments on Iran, saying Barak believes Israel has less than a year to carry out an military strike.

"I am very concerned," he said. "My understanding of Barak's comments is that Israel must act within this timeframe, but I don't believe this is accurate."

Earlier Thursday, Barak responded to comments by U.S. Joints Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, who said that he did not know whether Israel would alert the United States ahead of time if it decided to take military action against Iran.

Barak said Israel isn't looking for war with Iran and said that he would be pleased if diplomatic moves and sanctions sway Tehran away from its contentious nuclear program.

Barak's comments came after Israeli intelligence sources told the Times of London on Wednesday that a recent explosion in the western Iranian city of Ishafan was not an accident, as Iranian officials had claimed, and that the local uranium conversion plant had been damaged in the blast.

The intelligence officials told the Times that updated satellite images showed smoke billowing from the direction of the conversion plant.

According to the Israeli sources, there was "no doubt" that the blast had damaged the nuclear facility, and that the explosion was not an "accident."

"This caused damage to the facilities in Isfahan, particularly to the elements we believe were involved in storage of raw materials," one source told the Times.

Read this article in Hebrew: דגן מודאג: מדברי ברק עולה שישראל חייבת לפעול באיראן תוך פחות משנה