Posts

Pentagon to Relax Rules On Personal Religious Wear — Including Beards, Turbans

/17 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Brett Flashnick / AP file

Photo Credit: Brett Flashnick / AP file

The Pentagon on Wednesday is expected to announce widespread changes to rules governing religious items and religion-based physical attributes that service members can maintain while in uniform — including beards, some religious tattoos, and turbans.

NBC News obtained an early draft of the new Department of Defense instruction which states that the military will make every effort to accommodate “individual expressions of sincerely held beliefs” (conscience, moral principles, or religious beliefs) of service members.

It goes on to say that unless doing so could have an adverse impact on military readiness, unit cohesion, good order and discipline, health and safety, or any other military requirement, commanders can grant service members special permission to display their religious articles while in uniform.

Requests for religious accommodation can be denied when the “needs of mission accomplishment outweigh the needs of the service member,” the directive will explain.

Read more from this story HERE.

Surrender: Obama Admin. Accepts China’s New Controversial Air Zone

/17 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Foreign PolicyTop Obama administration and Pentagon officials signaled a willingness to temporarily accept China’s new, controversial air defense identification zone on Wednesday. Those officials expressed disapproval for the way in which the Asian power has flexed its muscles, and cautioned China not to implement the zone. But they also carved out wiggle room in which the United States and China ultimately could find common ground on the issue, indicating that they may be willing to live with the zone for now — as long as China backs off its demand that all aircraft traveling through it check in first.

“It wasn’t the declaration of the ADIZ that actually was destabilizing,” said Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, America’s highest-ranking military officer. “It was their assertion that they would cause all aircraft entering the ADIZ to report regardless of whether they were intending to enter into the sovereign airspace of China. And that is destabilizing.”

That’s a change from just a few days ago, when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden demanded that China take back its declaration of the zone. And it’s another demonstration that China’s recent decisions have forced the United States to tread carefully. On Wednesday, Biden met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing for more than five hours, according to a senior administration official. In brief public remarks midway through the marathon session, Biden didn’t mention the air defense zone at all.

Japan, a vital American ally, has expressed fury over the Chinese move and ordered its commercial airliners not to provide information about their flight paths to the Chinese military. By contrast, the United States made a point of flying a pair of B-52s through it last week, but seems to have accepted that China will keep the zone in place indefinitely. U.S. officials have shifted their focus instead on preventing a potential military clash between Japan and China.

In meetings in Beijing on Wednesday, Biden laid out the U.S. position in detail, reiterating that the United States does not recognize the new zone and has deep concerns about it, a senior administration official said. Biden told Xi that the United States wants China to take steps to lower tensions in the region, avoid enforcement actions that could lead to crisis, and to establish communication with Japan and other countries in the region to avoid altercations, the administration official added. Privately, Biden did not call for the air defense identification zone it to be rolled back — something administration officials had done Monday while Biden was visiting Japan. Instead, the vice president asked the Chinese leader to be careful about how his country operated the zone going forward.

Read more from this story HERE.

China Scrambles Two Fighter Jets; Pentagon Continues Defiance of PRC’s Claimed Air Defense Zone

/5 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Master Sgt. Kevin GruenwaldThe Pentagon said Friday it will continue to operate in an air zone over the East China Sea that China recently declared as under its control.

“We have flights routinely transiting international airspace throughout the Pacific, including the area China is including in their [air defense identification zone],” said Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren.

“These flights are consistent with long standing and well known U.S. freedom of navigation policies that are applied in many areas of operation around the world. I can confirm that the U.S. has and will continue to operate in the area as normal.”

The statement comes after China sent two fighter jets to tail U.S. and Japanese warplanes that were flying in the airspace in defiance of China’s Nov. 23 announcement that all planes flying through the area would have to submit flight plans and other information to Beijing authorities.

Read more from this story HERE.

Department of Defense Reports False Data to Conceal Billions in Waste and Fraud

/2 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: REUTERS/TIM SHAFFERLinda Woodford spent the last 15 years of her career inserting phony numbers in the U.S. Department of Defense’s accounts.

Every month until she retired in 2011, she says, the day came when the Navy would start dumping numbers on the Cleveland, Ohio, office of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, the Pentagon’s main accounting agency. Using the data they received, Woodford and her fellow DFAS accountants there set about preparing monthly reports to square the Navy’s books with the U.S. Treasury’s – a balancing-the-checkbook maneuver required of all the military services and other Pentagon agencies.

And every month, they encountered the same problem. Numbers were missing. Numbers were clearly wrong. Numbers came with no explanation of how the money had been spent or which congressional appropriation it came from. “A lot of times there were issues of numbers being inaccurate,” Woodford says. “We didn’t have the detail … for a lot of it.”

The data flooded in just two days before deadline. As the clock ticked down, Woodford says, staff were able to resolve a lot of the false entries through hurried calls and emails to Navy personnel, but many mystery numbers remained. For those, Woodford and her colleagues were told by superiors to take “unsubstantiated change actions” – in other words, enter false numbers, commonly called “plugs,” to make the Navy’s totals match the Treasury’s.

Jeff Yokel, who spent 17 years in senior positions in DFAS’s Cleveland office before retiring in 2009, says supervisors were required to approve every “plug” – thousands a month. “If the amounts didn’t balance, Treasury would hit it back to you,” he says.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pentagon: Reports of Sexual Assaults Up 46 Percent

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: gregwest98Reports of sexual assaults in the military increased by an unprecedented 46 percent in the past fiscal year, the Pentagon said Thursday.

It wasn’t possible to know whether the spike represented an increase in assaults, an increase in the number of people reporting them, or both. Defense Department officials portrayed the sharp rise as a sign that people are more confident about coming forward now that improvements are being made to the military’s system for handling assaults.

The military received 3,553 complaints of sexual assault from October 2012 through June, compared with 2,434 reports during the same period the previous year, according to statistics presented Thursday at the start of a two-day public meeting of an independent panel looking into the issue

The report to the Response Systems Panel said an increase in complaints was registered across all service branches — Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines.

And it noted that more reports of sexual assault were made in the first three quarters of fiscal 2013 than the 3,374 reported during the entire 2012 budget year.

Read more from this story HERE.

Military Training Manual: “Healthy, White, Heterosexual, Christian” Men Hold an Unfair Advantage Over Other Races

/20 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: ARMY.MILA controversial 600-plus page manual used by the military to train its Equal Opportunity officers teaches that “healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian” men hold an unfair advantage over other races, and warns in great detail about a so-called “White Male Club.”

“Simply put, a healthy, white, heterosexual, Christian male receives many unearned advantages of social privilege, whereas a black, homosexual, atheist female in poor health receives many unearned disadvantages of social privilege,” reads a statement in the manual created by the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI).

The manual, which was obtained by Fox News, also instructs troops to “support the leadership of people of color. Do this consistently, but not uncritically,” the manual states.

The Equal Opportunity Advisor Student Guide is the textbook used during a three month DEOMI course taught at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida. Individuals who attend the training lead Equal Opportunity briefings on military installations around the nation.

The 637-page manual covers a wide range of issues from racism and religious diversity to cultural awareness, extremism and white privilege.

Read more from this story HERE.

Pentagon Admits Christian Ministry Not a ‘Hate Group,’ Says Label Does Not Reflect Official Doctrine

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: APThe Pentagon has admitted that information used in an Army briefing that labeled the American Family Association (AFA) as a domestic hate group was not acquired from official sources and does not reflect Army doctrine.

Meanwhile, the president of the well-respected Christian ministry says his organization may file a defamation lawsuit against the military.

“We are probably going to be taking legal action,” said Tim Wildmon, president of one of the nation’s most prominent Christian ministries. “The Army has smeared us. They’ve defamed the American Family Association.”

The AFA was listed alongside domestic hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, Neo-Nazis, the Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam during a briefing last week at Camp Shelby in Mississippi.

Read more from this story HERE.

Lawsuit Targets Atheist’s Influence with Pentagon

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

An anti-Christian activist who has such a close relationship with the Pentagon he had a piece of artwork removed from an Air Force base within 56 minutes of calling is now under scrutiny by a team of legal experts.

The non-profit government-accountability group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act suit in federal court in Washington seeking all records in the Department of Defense regarding conversations with Military Religious Freedom Foundation founder Mikey Weinstein.

Weinstein is well known for comparing evangelical Christians to al-Qaida and demanding the courts martial of Christian chaplains.

Further, he recently convinced the Air Force to remove a copy of a famous essay from a chaplain’s section of the website for Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson. It was a copy of the famed World War II essay “No atheists in foxholes: Chaplains gave all in World War II.”

He did, however, taste defeat shortly later when the military re-posted the essay, determining it was within a chaplain’s rights to express his faith.

Read more from this story HERE.

U.S. Military’s Battlefield Network Vulnerable to Hackers

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: Musadeq Sadeq

Photo Credit: Musadeq Sadeq

The Pentagon’s main battlefield intelligence network in Afghanistan is vulnerable to hackers — both the enemy or a leaker — and the U.S. command in Kabul will cut off from the military’s classified data files unless the Army fixes the defects in 60 days, according to an official memo obtained by The Washington Times.

The memo says the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS) flunked a readiness test and does not confirm the source of outside Internet addresses entering the classified database.

The Sept. 5 warning notice from the U.S. command in Kabul is another blow to the intelligence network, commonly called “D-Sigs.” It already had suffered a wave of bad news, such as soldiers panning its performance as unreliable and the Pentagon’s top tester judging it as not operationally effective.

The warning comes as the U.S. military is on heightened alert against unlawful entry into classified computer networks, not only by the enemy but also by “friendlies” such as Army Pvt. Bradley Manning and former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden. Both illegally downloaded reams of classified data that got widespread dissemination in the news media and, officials say, greatly damaged America’s security.

Read more from this story HERE.

Navy Yard Dropped Its Guard, Pentagon Inspector General Says

/0 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: Evan Vucci

Photo Credit: Evan Vucci

A soon-to-be-released government audit (Now public, see here) says the Navy, in an attempt to reduce costs, let down its guard to risks posed by outside contractors at the Washington Navy Yard and other facilities, a federal official with access to the report tells TIME.

The Navy “did not effectively mitigate access-control risks associated with contractor-installation access” at Navy Yard and other Navy installations, the report by the Department of Defense Inspector General’s office says. Parts of the audit were read to TIME by a federal official with access to the document.

The risks resulted from an attempt by Navy officials “to reduce access-control costs,” the report finds.

The audit comes as questions are emerging about how the alleged perpetrator, or perpetrators, of the attack at Navy Yard in Washington on Monday gained access to the facility. At least 13 people are dead in the attack, including the alleged attacker, Aaron Alexis.

Read more from this story HERE.