Russian Atomic Submarine to Reach Indian coast in Mid March

New Delhi: India will become the world's sixth operator of a nuclear-powered submarine next month when Russia's K-152 Nerpa attack vessel reaches the country's shores ahead of its formal induction into the Indian Navy.

The submarine, christened INS Chakra, is expected to reach the Indian shores, with its home base as Visakhapatnam, anytime in March, according to navy officers here.

The other global naval powers operating nuclear-powered submarines are the US, Russia, Britain, France and China.

The attack submarine was handed over to the Indian Navy by Russia at a ceremony in the Far Eastern Primorye territory on Jan 23.

Codenamed Akula-II by NATO, the Project 971 Shchuka-B class vessel will be on a 10-year lease with the Indian Navy till 2022 under a contract worth over $900 million signed in mid-1990.

Under the deal, Russia trained Indian submariners on operating the Nerpa for over a month in the Pacific Ocean ahead of its handing over.

With a displacement of over 8,000 tonnes, the vessel can touch a maximum speed of 30 knots and can operate at a maximum depth of 600 meters.

The vessel can lurk in the deep sea without having to surface for 100 days waiting for its prey to appear and to strike hard at will.

Manned by a 73-member crew, the vessel is armed with four 533mm torpedo tubes and four 650mm torpedo tubes.

The Indian Navy operated a nuclear-powered submarine 1987-1991 when it had a Soviet-origin Charlie class vessel, also named INS Chakra, in its fleet. The submarine was returned to Russia after the three-year lease ended.

Nuclear-powered submarines, being silent killers, are considered key weapon platforms in view of the surprise element in case of an attack. They are an important part of India's nuclear doctrine, as these can help in completing the nuclear-weapon triad or the capability to fire nuclear arsenal from platforms over the land, air, and under the sea.

Though Nerpa was originally scheduled to join the Indian Navy in 2009, an unexpected on-board explosion in November 2008 when it was undergoing sea trials in the Western Pacific by the Russian Navy sailors resulted in the death of 20-odd personnel due to a toxic gas release.

India will add another nuclear-powered vessel to its submarine fleet in the next six to 10 months when the indigenously built INS Arihant that is undergoing trials joins the fleet.

Two more Arihant-class submarines, with miniaturised nuclear reactors designed and developed with Russian help, will join the naval fleet in the next four years.

India currently operates 14 conventional diesel-electric submarines. Of them, 10 are Russian-origin Kilo class vessels and four are German HDW vessels

Read more at: http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/russian-submarine-to-reach-indian-shores-mid-march-180705&cp

Hollow Threats Again from Korea

On Monday, South Korea conducted two hours of live-fire exercises near its disputed boundary with North Korea in the West Sea, despite Pyongyang’s promises of “merciless retaliatory strikes” and “total war” for infringing waters it considers its own.

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The consensus is that these particular threats were “empty,” as the Associated Press termed them, but it’s far too early to say the matter is closed.
Why? Because the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as the North calls itself, apparently—and for good reason—believes that attacking South Korea and killing its citizens advances its national interests.
First, Pyongyang has been trying for years to move its West Sea boundary with South Korea, known as the Northern Limit Line, farther south to give it control of additional islands and waters. The line was unilaterally drawn by the US-led United Nations Command after the Korean War, and Pyongyang has attacked this South Korean territory from time to time in failed attempts to force a border adjustment. In 2010, there were two startling provocations in these same waters: the sinking of the South Korean frigate Cheonan in March (46 killed) and the November shelling of Yeonpyeong Island (four killed, including two civilians). The area will likely be home to trouble again in the near future.
Second, the North needs food, and the Kim family has traditionally provoked incidents to blackmail the international community into coughing up food aid. The tactic may be murderous, but Western leaders have made it an effective approach by routinely caving to the North’s extortion.
Third, Kim Jong Un may try to use an incident to undercut South Korea’s conservative politicians—who take a harder line against Pyongyang than their “progressive” counterparts—as the country heads into parliamentary elections in April and a presidential election in December. Kim doesn’t get to vote in the South, but it would be foolish to think he wouldn’t use force to influence the outcome of elections there. After all, horrific provocations are a specialty of the Kim family: the two attacks of 2010 look like they had some effect in undermining hard-line President Lee Myung-bak, contributing to the ruling party’s stunning loss of the Seoul mayoralty last October.
Fourth, Kim needs to solidify a somewhat precarious position as heir to his family’s regime, now entering its third generation in power. There are signs of turmoil inside Pyongyang. The commerce minister recently died in a helicopter accident that looks like it was anything but, and the new leader’s half brother, Kim Jong Nam, has, with a series of explosive comments, been evidently trying to destabilize the government from the safety of China. In the North’s twisted logic, unprovoked attacks against the South could well be seen as a way to unify and rally regime elements as well as boost the legitimacy of the latest Kim family dictator.
North Korea can be relied upon to carry through on its threats. It picks the time and the targets well, and it acts for maximum benefit. So just because Pyongyang has not immediately reacted to the most recent South Korean artillery exercise does not mean the matter is forgotten.
The North will strike the South. We just do not know when or where

Officer of 17 yrs Whistle-Blows on Afgan War

WASHINGTON — On his second yearlong deployment to Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis traveled 9,000 miles, patrolled with American troops in eight provinces and returned in October of last year with a fervent conviction that the war was going disastrously and that senior military leaders had not leveled with the American public.       

Since enlisting in the Army in 1985, he said, he had repeatedly seen top commanders falsely dress up a dismal situation. But this time, he would not let it rest. So he consulted with his pastor at McLean Bible Church in Virginia, where he sings in the choir. He watched his favorite movie, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” one more time, drawing inspiration from Jimmy Stewart’s role as the extraordinary ordinary man who takes on a corrupt establishment.

And then, late last month, Colonel Davis, 48, began an unusual one-man campaign of military truth-telling. He wrote two reports, one unclassified and the other classified, summarizing his observations on the candor gap with respect to Afghanistan. He briefed four members of Congress and a dozen staff members, spoke with a reporter for The New York Times, sent his reports to the Defense Department’s inspector general — and only then informed his chain of command that he had done so.

“How many more men must die in support of a mission that is not succeeding?“ Colonel Davis asks in an article summarizing his views titled “Truth, Lies and Afghanistan: How Military Leaders Have Let Us Down.” It was published online Sunday in The Armed Forces Journal, the nation’s oldest independent periodical on military affairs. “No one expects our leaders to always have a successful plan,” he says in the article. “But we do expect — and the men who do the living, fighting and dying deserve — to have our leaders tell us the truth about what’s going on.”

Colonel Davis says his experience has caused him to doubt reports of progress in the war from numerous military leaders, including David H. Petraeus, who commanded the troops in Afghanistan before becoming the director of the Central Intelligence Agency in June.

Last March, for example, Mr. Petraeus, then an Army general, testified before the Senate that the Taliban’s momentum had been “arrested in much of the country” and that progress was “significant,” though fragile, and “on the right azimuth” to allow Afghan forces to take the lead in combat by the end of 2014.

Colonel Davis fiercely disputes such assertions and says few of the troops believe them. At the same time, he is acutely aware of the chasm in stature that separates him from those he is criticizing, and he has no illusions about the impact his public stance may have on his career.

“I’m going to get nuked,” he said in an interview last month.

But his bosses’ initial response has been restrained. They told him that while they disagreed with him, he would not face “adverse action,” he said.

Col. James E. Hutton, chief of media relations for the Army, declined to comment specifically about Colonel Davis, but he rejected the idea that military leaders had been anything but truthful about Afghanistan.

“We are a values-based organization, and the integrity of what we publish and what we say is something we take very seriously,” he said.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Petraeus, Jennifer Youngblood of the C.I.A., said he “has demonstrated that he speaks truth to power in each of his leadership positions over the past several years. His record should stand on its own, as should LTC Davis’ analysis.”

If the official reaction to Colonel Davis’s campaign has been subdued, it may be partly because he has recruited a few supporters among the war skeptics on Capitol Hill.

“For Colonel Davis to go out on a limb and help us to understand what’s happening on the ground, I have the greatest admiration for him,” said Representative Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina, who has met with Colonel Davis twice and read his reports.

Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, one of four senators who met with Colonel Davis despite what he called “a lot of resistance from the Pentagon,” said the colonel was a valuable witness because his extensive travels and midlevel rank gave him access to a wide range of soldiers.

Moreover, Colonel Davis’s doubts about reports of progress in the war are widely shared, if not usually voiced in public by officers on duty. Just last week, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at a hearing that she was “concerned by what appears to be a disparity” between public testimony about progress in Afghanistan and “the bleaker description” in a classified National Intelligence Estimate produced in December, which was described in news reports as “sobering” and “dire.”

Those words would also describe Colonel Davis’s account of what he saw in Afghanistan, the latest assignment in a military career that has included clashes with some commanders, but glowing evaluations from others. (“His maturity, tenacity and judgment can be counted on in even the hardest of situations, and his devotion to mission accomplishment is unmatched by his peers,” says an evaluation from May that concludes that he has “unlimited potential.”)

Colonel Davis, a son of a high school football coach in Dallas and who is known as Danny, served two years as an Army private before returning to Texas Tech and completing the Reserve Officer Training Corps program. He served in Germany and fought in the first Iraq war before joining the Reserve and working civilian jobs, including a year as a member of the Senate staff.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, he returned to active duty, serving a tour in Iraq as well as the two in Afghanistan and spending 15 months working on Future Combat Systems, an ambitious Army program to produce high-tech vehicles linked to drones and sensors. On that program, too, he said, commanders kept promising success despite ample evidence of trouble. The program was shut down in 2009 after an investment of billions of dollars.

In his recent tour in Afghanistan, Colonel Davis represented the Army’s Rapid Equipping Force, created to bypass a cumbersome bureaucracy to make sure the troops quickly get the gear they need.

He spoke with about 250 soldiers, from 19-year-old privates to division commanders, as well as Afghan security officials and civilians, he said. From the Americans, he heard contempt for the perceived cowardice and double-dealing of their Afghan counterparts. From Afghans, he learned of unofficial nonaggression pacts between Afghanistan’s security forces and Taliban fighters.

When he was in rugged Kunar Province, an Afghan police officer visiting his parents was kidnapped by the Taliban and killed. “That was in visual range of an American base,” he said. “Their influence didn’t even reach as far as they could see.”

Some of the soldiers he interviewed were later killed, a fact that shook him and that he mentions in videos he shot in Afghanistan and later posted on YouTube. At home, he pored over the statements of military leaders, including General Petraeus. He found them at odds with what he had seen, with classified intelligence reports and with casualty statistics.

“You can spin all kinds of stuff,” Colonel Davis said. “But you can’t spin the fact that more men are getting blown up every year.”

Colonel Davis can come across as strident, labeling as lies what others might call wishful thinking. Matthew M. Aid, a historian who examines Afghanistan in his new book “Intel Wars,” says that while there is a “yawning gap” between Pentagon statements and intelligence assessments, “it’s oversimplified to say the top brass are out-and-out lying. They are just too close to the subject.”

But Martin L. Cook, who teaches military ethics at the Naval War College, says Colonel Davis has identified a hazard that is intrinsic to military culture, in which a can-do optimism can be at odds with the strictest candor when a mission is failing.

“You’ve trained people to try to be successful even when half their buddies are dead and they’re almost out of ammo,” he said. “It’s very hard for them to say, ‘can’t do.’ ”

Mr. Cook said it was rare for an officer of Colonel Davis’s modest rank to “decide that he knows better” and to go to Congress and the news media.

“It may be an act of moral courage,” he said. “But he’s gone outside channels, and he’s taking his chances on what happens to him.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/06/world/asia/army-colonel-challenges-pentagons-afghanistan-claims.html?pagewanted=all

Iran Leader Warns of War with U.S

(CNN) -- The supreme leader of Iran issued a blunt warning Friday that a war would be detrimental to the United States.
"You see every now and then in this way they say that all options are on the table. That means even the option of war," Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said during Friday prayers in Tehran. "This is how they make these threats against us.
"Well, these kinds of threats are detrimental to the U.S.," he said. "The war itself will be 10 times as detrimental to the U.S."
His comments came after stern comments Friday from Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.
"Today, unlike in the past, there is a broad global understanding that it is crucial to stop Iran becoming nuclearized and that no options should be taken off the table," he said.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has come to the conclusion there is a growing likelihood Israel could attack Iran sometime this spring in an effort to destroy its suspected nuclear weapons program, according to a senior administration official.
The official declined to be identified due to the sensitive nature of the information.
The United States and its allies have warned that Iran is trying to make a nuclear weapon. Iran insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful, civilian purposes

http://www.cnn.com/2012/02/03/world/meast/iran-warning/

Russia Holding Firm against Military intervention in Syria

Reporting from Beirut—

As diplomats attempted to craft a compromise, Russia remained firm Wednesday in its pledge to veto any U.N. Security Council resolution that could open the door for international military intervention in Syria.

Meanwhile, fighting raged anew in the troubled Middle East nation, with nearly 70 additional deaths reported by opponents of Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose bloody crackdown on street protests has led to calls from the Arab League and Western powers for him to step aside.

After a closed-door meeting, U.N. diplomats said progress had been made to overcome Russia's objections. "But there are a lot of difficult issues and we are not there yet," said British Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant, according to the Associated Press.

Russian Ambassador Vitaly Churkin said, "I think we have a much better understanding of what we need to do to reach consensus."

But Moscow continues to oppose any U.N. move that calls for Assad to step down or would slap new economic penalties or an arms embargo on Damascus.

Behind Russia's resolute stance is its longtime relationship with Assad and his family, who have run Syria for four decades, as well as a web of business and security interests, and deep discomfort in Moscow with the concept of foreign-mandated change in leadership. Russian diplomats say they were deceived last year when a U.N. resolution designed to protect Libyan civilians morphed into a Western-led bombing campaign that doomed the long-ruling government of Moammar Kadafi.

Moreover, opposition to the resolution will not cause significant damage to relations between Russia, the West and the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf, predicted Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the journal Russia in Global Affairs. Other concerns, such as the situation in Iran and Afghanistan, keep Washington and its allies engaged with Russia, he said, and Moscow's relations with gulf countries are already bad.

"Russia has nothing to lose," Lukyanov said.

U.N. action could help determine the future of Syria as it nears the one-year anniversary of a protest movement that was met by the government crackdown and has since evolved into armed rebellion that has left the country on the precipice of civil war.

A draft U.N. resolution circulating in New York would authorize unspecified "further measures" should Syria not comply with its terms, including a "political transition" in which Assad would cede power.

The Arab League and its Western allies, including Washington, are pushing the proposal. But Syria, backed by Russia and other nations, calls the scheme an affront to its sovereignty.

Moscow, which last year joined with China to veto a U.N. resolution that would have condemned the Syrian crackdown on dissent, is concerned that the revolt in Syria, along with other "Arab Spring" movements, are part of a Western conspiracy to dominate the Middle East, Russian analysts say.

Vladimir Chizhov, Russia's envoy to the European Union, said the current U.N. draft was "missing the most important thing: a clear clause ruling out the possibility that ... [it] could be used to justify military intervention in Syrian affairs."

"For this reason," he said, "I see no chance this draft could be adopted."

Violence continued to ravage Syria on Wednesday, with an opposition coalition, the Local Coordination Committees, reporting at least 68 more deaths, more than half in clashes outside Damascus. The military has been clearing armed rebels from towns near the capital after insurgents brazenly advanced to within a few miles of the capital, embarrassing the government.

The official government news agency reported that four military officers, including a brigadier general, were killed Wednesday and six were wounded in a confrontation with an "armed terrorist group" outside Damascus.

The United Nations has reported more than 5,000 deaths since protests against Assad's rule broke out in March.

Casualty figures cannot be independently verified because journalists' access is limited in Syria.

Also on Wednesday, Iran reported that 11 Iranian pilgrims had been abducted in Syria, the latest in a series of kidnappings of Iranian citizens. Iran is a close ally of Syria, but Tehran has advised its citizens to hold off on bus tours to the nation.

Kidnappings, mostly of Syrians, have become a regular feature of the conflict, reflecting a generalized breakdown in law and order, human rights activists say. Abductees are often used as bargaining chips to gain the release of kidnap victims held by the other side, observers say.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-syria-violence-20120202,0,7233234.story