FBI Director Christopher Wray issued a dire warning about China's growing influence during a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday.Read it all here.
He said there were a variety of ways China was implementing a plan to replace the US as the foremost global power, including by infiltrating academia.
Recent reports have suggested that while China's Confucius Institutes are ostensibly language-learning centers, they often serve as vehicles for Chinese propaganda at universities around the world, including the US.
Intelligence experts have also cited Chinese cybersecurity threats as a major concern in 2018.
FBI Director Christopher Wray on Tuesday reiterated a commonly held view among US intelligence officials that China is seeking to become a global superpower through unconventional means - but he framed it as both a governmental and a societal threat to the US.
Speaking before the Senate Intelligence Committee alongside the heads of other US intelligence agencies, Wray said that to undermine the US's military, economic, cultural, and informational power across the globe, China was using methods relying on more than just its state institutions.
"One of the things we're trying to do is view the China threat as not just a whole-of-government threat, but a whole-of-society threat on their end," Wray said. "And I think it's going to take a whole-of-society response by us."
In response to a question from Sen. Marco Rubio about whether China was planning to overtake the US as the world's most dominant power, Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence, echoed Wray.
"There is no question that what you have just articulated is what's happening with China," Coats said. "They're doing it in a very smart way. They're doing it in a very effective way. They are looking beyond their own region."
Bell Helicopter's Air Vehicle Concept Demonstrator aircraft, funded under the Joint Multi-Role Technology Demonstration program, was flown for the first time by an Army pilot Feb. 7.
Chief Warrant Officer 3, Tom Wiggins, of the U.S. Army Special Operations Aviation Command conducted the flight at the Bell Flight Test Facility in Amarillo, Tex.
During the flight, he performed Hover In Ground Effect repositioning, pattern flight and roll-on landings.
The Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK)-affiliated People's Defense Forces (HPG) confirmed it carried out an attack on a Turkish military base in Zakho district northwest of Duhok on Tuesday (February 13).Story here.
HPG Press Center said in a statement on Wednesday that its fighters carried out “an extensive operation” against a Turkish military base at 8:40 a.m. on Tuesday in Gire Biye near Begova town in south of Zakho.
The HPG fighters conducted the attack from eight directions on the military base of the Turkish army, the statement added.
“Effective strikes left two tanks and two armored vehicles destroyed … According to information obtained by our side, 22 enemy soldiers were killed and more than 10 others were wounded in this action,” it added.
NRT reporter Ahmed Zakhoiy said PKK fighters attacked the Turkish military base in Gre Biye village in the sub-district of Batifa in Zakho on Tuesday.
Following the collapse of a two-year ceasefire in 2015, the Turkish military has regularly conducted air raids against PKK bases in the Qandil mountain area of Kurdistan as well as many other rural areas in the Region.
For many years, the 13-man rifle squad has been the lynchpin of how combat power is built and organized within a ground combat element or Marine infantry unit.Story here.
But now Marine Commandant General Robert B. Neller is considering big changes to the size and tasking of the rifle squad, a move likely to have a major impact on the Corps’ culture and operations.
And beyond the rifle squads, Neller also plans to add an additional eight Marines to the scout sniper platoons that support infantry battalions, expanding the platoons up to potentially 28 Marine snipers.
Neller is considering new rifle squad configurations that include 11-man, 12-man and 14-man options. While Neller hasn’t yet decided on the size of the rifle squad, it’s likely he will add a drone operator.
“The 13-man rifle squad has served us very very well over time,” Brig. Gen. Christian Wortman, the commanding officer of the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, said Tuesday. “But with new technology and new capabilities developing, there’s a recognition that there’s an opportunity to better exploit that technology and that capability and to adapt how we structure the rifle squad.”
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| A U.S. Air Force Republic F-105D Thunderchief trailing fire and smoke just after interception by an SA-2 missile on February 14, 1968. The SA-2 did not actually hit an aircraft — the warhead was detonated by a command from the tracking radar or by a proximity fuse in the missle when it neared the target, throwing deadly fragments over a wide area. The pilot, Robert Malcolm Elliot (1929-1968), was killed. His body was not recovered until 1998. http://wrhstol.com/2BrKEyC |
With the acknowledged benefit of 20/20 hindsight, some in Israel are wondering where the F-35 was.Story here
“They were sure the F-16I could easily survive the environment, as it has done so many times before,” a retired Air Force major general told Defense News.
Another former officer surmised that the weaponry Israel used in that initial strike on the T-4 airfield in central Syria was not yet integrated into the weapons bay of the F-35 stealth fighter. “If it was determined to use our own special weapons for this particular scenario and this specific formation, what good would it do to hang it under the wings? You’d lose the stealth,” the officer said.
The Israel Defense Forces, or IDF, refused to specify which missiles were used in the initial attack on the Iranian command-and-control trailer, but multiple sources point to the Israeli SPICE, an autonomous, all-weather, precision-attack weapon that the Air Force is well-practiced in delivering at standoff range.
In conjecture officially denied by Conricus, the IDF spokesman, one officer suggested Washington may have discouraged or even vetoed Israel’s use of the F-35 at this point in the multinational program out of concern that Russian and Iranian specialists in Syria could gather information on its radar-evading capability and other characteristics.
