GWOT update

[citizen k]

US general: We hacked the enemy in Afghanistan

The U.S. military has been launching cyberattacks against its opponents in Afghanistan, a senior officer says, making an unusually explicit acknowledgment of the oft-hidden world of electronic warfare.

Marine Lt. Gen. Richard P. Mills' comments came last week at a conference in Baltimore during which he explained how U.S. commanders considered cyber weapons an important part of their arsenal.

"I can tell you that as a commander in Afghanistan in the year 2010, I was able to use my cyber operations against my adversary with great impact," Mills said. "I was able to get inside his nets, infect his command-and-control, and in fact defend myself against his almost constant incursions to get inside my wire, to affect my operations."

Mills, now a deputy commandant with the Marine Corps, was in charge of international forces in southwestern Afghanistan between 2010 and 2011, according to his official biography. He didn't go into any further detail as to the nature or scope of his forces' attacks, but experts said that such a public admission that they were being carried out was itself striking.

"This is news," said James Lewis, a cyber-security analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. He said that while it was generally known in defense circles that cyberattacks had been carried out by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, he had never seen a senior officer take credit for them in such a way.

"It's not secret," Lewis said in a telephone interview, but he added: "I haven't seen as explicit a statement on this as the one" Mills made.

Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Damien Pickart declined to elaborate on Mills' comments, saying in an email that "for reasons of security . we do not provide specific information regarding our intentions, plans, capabilities or operations."

The email said that the Pentagon's cyber operations were properly authorized and that they took place within the bounds of international law and the "confines of existing policy."

U.S. defense planners have spent the past few years debating that policy, asking how and under what circumstances the Pentagon would launch a cyberattack against its enemies, but it's only recently become apparent that a sophisticated program of U.S.-backed cyberattacks is already under way.

A book by The New York Times reporter David Sanger recently recounted how President Barack Obama ordered a wave of electronic incursions aimed at physically sabotaging Iran's disputed atomic energy program. Subsequent reports have linked the program to a virus dubbed Flame, which prompted a temporary Internet blackout across Iran's oil industry in April, and another virus called Gauss, which appeared to have been aimed at stealing information from customers of Lebanese banks. An earlier report alleged that U.S. forces in Iraq had hacked into a terrorist group's computer there to lure its members into an ambush.

Herbert Lin, a cyber expert at the National Research Council, agreed that Mills' comments were unusual in terms of the fact that they were made publicly. But Lin said that the United States was, little by little, opening up about the fact that its military was launching attacks across the Internet.

"The U.S. military is starting to talk more and more in terms of what it's doing and how it's doing it," he said. "A couple of years ago it was hard to get them to acknowledge that they were doing offense at all — even as a matter of policy, let alone in specific theaters or specific operations."

Mills' brief comments about cyberattacks in Afghanistan were delivered to the TechNet Land Forces East conference in Baltimore on Aug. 15, but they did not appear to have attracted much attention at the time. Footage of the speech was only recently posted to the Internet by conference organizers.




USMC Lt. Gen. Richard Mills speaks during christening ceremonies for the USS Somerset at the Huntington Ingalls Industries shipyard Shipyard in Avondale, La., in this Saturday, July 28, 2012 file photo. The U.S. military has been launching cyberattacks against its opponents in Afghanistan, a senior officer said last week, making an unusually explicit acknowledgment of the oft-hidden world of electronic warfare. Marine Lt. Gen. Richard P. Mills' comments came at a conference in Baltimore during which he explained how U.S. commanders considered cyberweapons an important part of their arsenal. (AP Photo / Gerald Herbert, file)

USS Somerset -- third and final 9/11 tribute ship -- is christened

(LA Times)The USS Somerset, the last of three Navy ships dedicated to the sites of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, was christened Saturday in honor of the passengers and crew who diverted a hijacked plane and died in the crash that followed.

On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, as terrorists took over the cockpit on United Airlines Flight 93, passengers called family, friends and emergency hotlines from in-flight phones -- learning about the attacks on the World Trade Center in the process.

"Don't worry, we're going to do something," passenger Tom Burnett said in his last words to his wife, according to transcripts from plane recordings.

Passengers and crew members stormed the cockpit in an attempt to take control of the plane, which crashed into a wooded part of Somerset County in Pennsylvania. No one survived.

Flight 93, which originated in New Jersey, was the only plane that did not reach its intended target; investigators believe the terrorists were aiming for the White House or the U.S. Capitol.

"The men and women of Flight 93 ... thought they were going to San Francisco to work, to play, to learn; to live their lives in peace while others guarded them," Navy Rear Adm. David Lewis told the Associated Press. "Instead they found themselves in a war, on the front lines, in the opening battle. It was a new kind of war, one with new rules, maybe no rules at all. They had no preparation, no training, no guidance.

"And they performed superbly."

In a suburb of New Orleans on Saturday, about two dozen relatives of the victims listened to military and shipbuilding officials praise the bravery of Flight 93's passengers.

In the weeks after the attacks, recovery crews draped an American flag across a dragline, the crane-like portion of the heavy excavation machinery sitting on the crash site, the Navy said. In 2008, steel from the dragline was melted down and cast into the bow of the Somerset.

The Somerset is one of three specialty ships built in honor of  the nearly 3,000 Sept. 11 victims. The others are the USS New York and the USS Arlington; the latter is named for Arlington County, Va., the site of the Pentagon.

The USS Somerset, an amphibious landing dock, will be used primarily as a carrier for troops and equipment, the Navy said. It will also be used, when needed, to provide humanitarian assistance and fight pirates.

The ship is 684 feet long, 105 feet wide and displaces approximately 25,000 tons.  The ship can carry up to 800 troops, but will have a standing crew of 360 officers and sailors, as well as three U.S. Marines.

[CountDeMoney]

It's nice to see those ships christened after 9/11.


re: We hacked the enemy--it just points to who likes to talk when it comes to leaks: the military brass, as usual.

[CountDeMoney]

Here's a GWOT update for ya...Taliban goes squish

Senior Pakistani Taliban commander killed by NATO airstrike in eastern Afghanistan

KABUL, Afghanistan — A NATO airstrike in eastern Afghanistan killed a senior commander of the Pakistani Taliban who had close ties with al-Qaida, dealing a blow to the militants who operate on both sides of the countries' porous border.

Mullah Dadullah was killed Friday in Afghanistan's eastern Kunar province, which lies just across the border from the Pakistani tribal area of Bajur, the military alliance said. He was the Pakistani Taliban leader in Bajur, and NATO said Saturday that Dadullah also was responsible for the movement of fighters and weapons across the frontier as well as attacks against Afghan and coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Eleven other militants were also killed in the airstrike in Kunar's Shigal district, about 15 kilometers (9 miles) from the Pakistani border, including Dadullah's deputy, identified only as Shakir, the coalition said.

Dadullah's death will be a blow for the Taliban in Bajur, where the Pakistani military launched an offensive against militants in 2010, because he was an experienced commander and close to al-Qaida, said Mansur Mahsud, an Islamabad-based expert on Pakistani militants. But he said it's unlikely to have much of an impact on the broader Pakistani Taliban movement that operates in the rest the country's rugged, lawless tribal region along the Afghan border.

"He wasn't that senior in the group, and he wasn't that influential in the six other tribal agencies outside Bajur," Mahsud said.

Still, the killing of a foe of the Pakistani government is likely to be well received in Islamabad at a time when Pakistan's military is said to be preparing an offensive in North Waziristan, the base of the powerful Haqqani network that has been behind a string of high-profile attacks on Western targets in Kabul.

The militant hideouts along the Afghan-Pakistan border have long been a source of tension for Kabul, Islamabad and the international coalition, and Dadullah's killing could help ease the pressure that has built up.

Several times this summer, Afghan officials have said Pakistani shells have landed on Afghan territory, sometimes killing civilians. Pakistani officials have said their forces have been responding to cross-border attacks by militants from Afghanistan.

Islamabad has long demanded that NATO and Afghan forces crack down on Pakistani militants launching attacks from hideouts on the Afghan side of the border. At the same time, American military commanders have been pressuring Islamabad to launch military strikes on the Haqqani network in North Waziristan.

Crighton, however, said there was no coordination between Pakistan and NATO on the airstrike.

"This was an independent operation and not associated with any others," he said, adding that coalition forces detected the group of armed men moving through an isolated area of Kunar and targeted them with the airstrikes.

He would not say whether an unmanned drone or manned aircraft had carried out the strike.

A Pakistani Taliban spokesman, Ahsanullah Ahsan, said it was a drone that killed Dadullah. He said Maulana Abu Bakar was named the new Taliban chief of Bajur.

Dadullah became Bajur's Pakistani Taliban chief early this year after the Taliban removed his predecessor to punish him for holding unauthorized peace talks with Islamabad, Pakistani intelligence officials said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief the media.

Dadullah, who real name was Sayed Jamal, was a shop owner in Bajur before joining the Pakistani Taliban in 2008, and he was believed to be in his mid-30s or 40s, they said. He worked with al-Qaida prior to that and maintained close ties to the group.

As head of the Taliban's religious police unit in Bajur, he enforced a strict interpretation of Islam, and closed shops that sold CDs — music is deemed heretical — to close, according to the intelligence officials. Shop owners who refused were punished and their stores were bombed.

The Pakistani Taliban, one of many loosely allied extremist groups that operate in Pakistan's tribal region, wants to impose the same kind of hardline interpretation of Islamic law as the Afghan Taliban that ruled Afghanistan until the 2001 U.S.-led invasion ousted the hardline regime for sheltering al-Qaida's leaders. But the Pakistani branch primarily focuses its attacks on the Pakistani state, not international troops in neighboring Afghanistan.

The Pakistani intelligence officials said Friday's coalition airstrike occurred after a cross-border attack by Pakistani Taliban militants who came from Afghanistan. The Pakistani intelligence officials said the militiamen and army soldiers fought the militants for hours but eventually repelled the attack.

A Kunar provincial government spokesman, Wasifullah Wasifi, said four wounded Pakistani citizens have been hospitalized in Kunar and will be questioned about the activities of the Pakistani Taliban inside Afghan territory.

"We are trying to find out how long these people have been here and why they were here," Wasifi said.

[11B4V]