Rao bulletin 1 October 2016 html edition this bulletin contains the following articles pg Article Subject
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- DoD Contractors ► Ingalls Might Subcontract China for Drydock
- Arlington National Cemetery Update 64 ► Proposed Vietnam Memorial
| Known for its distinctive strut, spiky tail and fluffy chest, the sage grouse is a chicken-like bird whose habitat covers 186 million acres in eleven western states. That habitat also overlaps significant oil and gas basins across the West, according to the Western Energy Alliance, which filed a lawsuit in August against the federal government over its conservation plans for the bird. Though the Obama administration agreed a year ago not to list the sage grouse as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, opponents argue the administration’s changes in land-management rules to protect the bird essentially achieve the same impinging effect. Private development interests and lawmakers aligned with them argue that state and local land-management plans, which tend to be more industry-friendly than federal plans, should take precedence. "This is a proxy battle in their fight for state control of federal land in the West,” said a Democratic staffer for the Natural Resources Committee. “They don’t want to see the federal government emplace conservation measures on federal lands anywhere. That’s an open secret.”
When the GOP party drafted its platform at the convention in Cleveland in late July, the sage grouse and lesser prairie chicken were included by name in an effort to protect the economic interests of western states. Now a GOP party plank, the professed fear is that the birds’ endangered status would “threaten to devastate farmers, ranchers, and oil and gas production.” “We’re talking 16 states,” Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach told fellow members of a GOP policy-drafting committee while making the argument. “I know drillers who are going out of business because they can’t drill, because those are in prairie chicken habitats. I know land owners who can’t sell their land because its in prairie chicken habitats. Similar things are about to happen in the mountain states because they are about to list the sage grouse.” During the House Armed Service Committee markup of the NDAA in late April, panel member and House Natural Resources Committee Chair Rob Bishop (R-UT)— a stalwart on the issue — successfully proposed the amendment that would block the federal government from declaring the sage grouse an endangered species until at least 2025. Though McCain and Democrats see the military nexus as a red herring, Bishop and other advocates insist the conservation efforts would have a negative impact on military readiness, range operations and military spending. “I recognize the military need, that some people want to overlook, and I also recognize the issues that are significant to those of us who live in the West,” Bishop told Defense News. For the NDAA to advance, a compromise conference report requires a majority of the roughly 25 conferees to sign off on it, and it is unclear how many lawmakers feel as strongly. At least Bishop and two other Republicans from the House Natural Resources Committee who have vocally opposed sage-grouse protections were named to the NDAA conference committee in July by House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI). Bishop would not say whether he or other lawmakers would withhold their signatures over the issue. “I don’t think it will ever come to that,” Bishop said. “I think it will be included in the NDAA because it is a military issue that affects ranges in the West and it is the right thing to do. I think that ultimately people will come to that conclusion.” Bishop’s camp, according to a staffer, has reached out to McCain and Reed, but “all calls and outreach to try and discuss an agreement [have] not been reciprocated. “The Senate is not even interested in a discussion, but in the interest of moving forward, I hope they would have the courtesy of returning calls,” the staffer said. House Democrats have used the impasse to publicly poke fun at Republicans. House Armed Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Ranking Member Jackie Speier (D-CA) in a floor speech last week, said House Republicans were “chicken for prioritizing politics over national security policy.” “A disagreement between House and Senate Republicans got egg all over the deal” to reconcile the pending defense bill, Speier said. “That’s right, a bill that authorizes over $600 billion in spending on wartime operations, service member benefits and many other provisions critical to the defense of our country was taken down by a bird.” The Defense Department’s position on the issue has been subject to competing interpretations of letters it sent Congress in April at the request of top Democrats on the HASC and House Natural Resources Committee. Acting Assistant Defense Secretary for Readiness Daniel Feehan said in one letter that existing law sufficiently protects DoD’s interests, “and we do not anticipate the need for additional legislation from Congress.” The military services have largely said the same. If the sage grouse were listed as an endangered species and the Air Force’s lands lose their exemption from “critical habitat” designation, the service would have to spend $500,000 annually to protect the sage grouse, up from the $200,000 it already spends. The other services also rely on this exemption. There are eight known military installations with confirmed populations of the greater sage-grouse, according to a fact sheet from the Defense Department and the US Fish & Wildlife Service. They are Dugway Proving Ground and Tooele Army Depot in Utah; Sheridan Training Area and Camp Guernsey in Wyoming; Hawthorne Army Depot and Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada; Yakima Training Center in Washington, and Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. This week, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. James Brindle said he does not expect the Fish & Wildlife Service to list the bird as threatened or endangered in the near future. Though if it did, DoD may need to take steps beyond those already included in its natural resources management plans, and “any such mitigations would be manageable,” Brindle said. “We seek to strike an appropriate balance between our Endangered Species Act responsibilities and our military mission obligations,” Brindle said. “Historically, we have been very successful in this regard. Overall, DoD would not expect a significant impact to military training, operations, or readiness.” [Source: Defense News | Joe Gould, | September 27, 2016 ++] ***************************** DoD Contractors ► Ingalls Might Subcontract China for Drydock Senior executives from a major U.S. defense contractor toured China last month as part of their search for a foreign company to build a dry dock for U.S. Navy ships, with the help of the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. The trip raised eyebrows both inside the Pentagon and among experts who don’t believe a Chinese company should be involved in U.S. military-related projects. The company, Ingalls Shipbuilding, is a division of Huntington Ingalls Industries, which advertises itself as “America’s largest military shipbuilding company” and has built more U.S. Navy ships than any other military shipbuilder. Ingalls is based in Mississippi. The problem is, it needs a new dry dock to build ships there and says there are no American companies that can do it. So Ingalls is looking abroad for help. Last month, senior Ingalls executives traveled to China for two weeks to visit several different ports. They also met with officials at the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai, a meeting facilitated by a very powerful Mississippi lawmaker. “The staff of Sen. Thad Cochran (R-MS), the Chairman of the Appropriations Committee, has requested that Consulate Shanghai meet with a Mississippi constituent company Ingalls Shipbuilding,” wrote an official from the State Department’s legislative affairs bureau in a 19 JUL email I obtained. “The constituent is looking for a new Chinese vendor to build a new drydock for their shipbuilding company. They would like advice from the Consulate to walk them through how to do business in China.” Ingalls executives met with U.S. officials in Shanghai, including Cameron Werker, the principal commercial officer at the consulate. In a follow-up email, Werker said Ingalls executives were planning to visit seven ports in China. The company has already conducted technical evaluations of proposals, and “China is the leading candidate,” Werker wrote. The other candidates are South Korea and Japan. Ingalls’s only client is the U.S. Navy, according to Werker. He wrote that the plan is to build ships to about 50,000 tons in Mississippi and then float them out to the dry dock for adding another 20,000 tons of exterior work. The dock would then be used for “launch and retrieve.” After the Ingalls executives left China, the defense liaison officer in Shanghai, Steve Angel, alerted the Pentagon, the Navy and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing about the trip. “Ingalls Shipbuilding was here looking at Chinese shipbuilding companies to build a dry dock for USN ship construction,” Angel wrote. “Lobbied for by a U.S. Senator (Cochran). Not sure what Big Navy’s or OSD’s awareness are, but wanted to flag this for awareness.” Larry Ferguson, China country director for the Office of the Secretary of Defense’s policy shop, responded to Angel’s email: “I think it’s fair to say we’ll want to do some fact finding.” The Pentagon declined to comment about whether it has concerns about a Chinese shipbuilding company potentially building a dry dock that will then be used to build and maintain U.S. Navy ships. “As many other shipyards in America, including those that also build Navy ships, have done in the last decade when needing to replace a large dry dock, Ingalls Shipbuilding is looking across the world market for a solution,” said Bill Glenn, a spokesman for Ingalls. “Since no decision has been made, it is premature to discuss this effort further.” Chris Gallegos, a spokesman for Cochran, told me that the senator’s office didn’t actually lobby for Ingalls to get meetings with U.S. officials in China, but only forwarded a request for a point of contact at the U.S. Consulate in Shanghai from Ingalls to the State Department. As for whether there is a security concern about having a Chinese company help build U.S. Navy ships, Gallegos said, “Senator Cochran expects all security precautions to be in place to protect U.S. national security.” According to its public filings, Huntington Ingalls spent $4.8 million on lobbying in 2015. One of Huntington Ingalls’s in-house lobbyists, Carolyn Apostolou, spent 26 years as a professional staffer on the Senate Appropriations Committee before joining Huntington Ingalls in 2013, according to the Center for Responsive Politics’ Open Secrets project. Gallegos said Ingalls employees have also supported Cochran financially. “Ingalls is the single largest private employer in Mississippi. Given Senator Cochran’s strong record of support for industry in Mississippi, I suspect many Ingalls employees have supported his campaigns,” he said. Some Asia experts believe that there’s a real security risk in having a Chinese company build a dry dock for U.S. Navy ships because all large Chinese companies have deep ties to the Chinese government.. “Any time you have an entity like that working on U.S. military systems, common sense tells you there’s likely a security risk,” said Michael Auslin, Asia scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. “We know that there are connections, we know there is influence, we know there is government assistance. The Chinese government will have the plans.” The Chinese government could use the project to implant surreptitious recording devices or other surveillance equipment near where sensitive U.S. Navy operations are ongoing, he said. U.S. intelligence agencies suspect that China uses projects of its largest telecom company, Huawei, as a means of spying on foreign countries. Moreover, the Ingalls project would be a boon to the Chinese defense industry at the expense of the defense industry of U.S. allies, Auslin said. The money is essentially coming from the U.S. taxpayer because the U.S. government is Ingalls’s only client, he said. “Wouldn’t it be better to go with an ally like Japan or South Korea?” Auslin said. “In an environment like this, you are basically subsidizing the Chinese defense sector. Is that something we want to do?” It’s a shame the United States can’t handle 21st-century shipbuilding with its own domestic industry. But if U.S. defense contractors have to go abroad, they might want to think twice before subcontracting to America’s biggest naval competitor. It’s either a security risk or an economic subsidy that could better benefit an allied country. Either way, it’s a bad idea. [Source: The Washington Post | Josh Rogin | September 15, 2016 ++] ***************************** Arlington National Cemetery Update 64 ► Proposed Vietnam Memorial An effort to establish a memorial at Arlington National Cemetery for helicopter pilots and crewmembers killed in the Vietnam War could be thwarted because of diminishing burial space. “I think we have an uphill battle,” said Bob Hesselbein, president the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association. “We’re fighting to get just a small memorial, and it’s been a struggle.” The VHPA first proposed a national memorial in early 2014 dedicated to the nearly 5,000 pilots and crewmembers who were killed during the Vietnam War, about 450 of whom were interred in Arlington. But a cemetery advisory committee and former Secretary of the Army John McHugh rebuffed the idea. They contested the memorial would take up precious space at Arlington. “We felt disappointed when the Secretary of the Army said no. We felt it devalued the deaths,” Hesselbein said. So the VHPA took its fight to Congress. Rep. Mark Amodei (R-NV)is sponsoring legislation to order the memorial be allowed in Arlington. The bill was first heard 15 SEP before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel. During the hearing, Rep. Joe Heck (R-NV) subcommittee’s chairman, said the panel would “take the matter under advisement.” Arlington inters about 30 veterans, spouses and dignitaries every week day. If the current rate of internment maintains, Arlington will have to cease all burials there in the 2030s, said Patrick Hallinan, the cemetery’s executive director. Though plans are being discussed for a 38-acre expansion, Hallinan reiterated the space was needed for burial plots. The cemetery advisory committee recently received five other requests for memorials, Hallinan said. Only two memorials -- the Battle of the Bulge Memorial and the Jewish Chaplain’s Memorial – have been installed since 2002. 
The proposed VHPA memorial would stand four feet high and have a base of five square feet. A helicopter and insignias of all branches of the military would be etched on the granite façade. VHPA would pay $5,000 to make and ship the memorial, and the group would leave behind an endowment for future maintenance, said VHPA member John Powell. “The reality is that space is finite,” Hallinan said. “I understand it’s only five feet, but five feet is a gravesite.” Amodei questioned whether Congress should alter the memorial request process for Arlington because it “lacks transparency.” “When only two memorials without associated remains have been installed in Arlington in the last 25 years, I believe that this should be taken as a sign that the process needs to be revised,” he said. [Source: Stars And Stripes | Nikki Wentling | September 9, 2016 2016 ++] ***************************** Directory: uploads uploads -> 587 Return function, r i(X) r i(0) r i(1) r i(2) r i(3) 1 0 2 4 6 Thermal Station, I 2 0 1 5 6 3 0 3 5 6 10 uploads -> Department of science and humanities department of mathematics part-a questions and answers uploads -> The Case Against the nypd’s Quota-Driven ‘Broken Windows’ Policing What Is It? uploads -> For want of a nail uploads -> Ownership Models There are two different types of ownership models uploads -> Police Militarization uploads -> City of rising star regular meting thursday, july 14, 2016 uploads -> Township of winfield uploads -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 uploads -> The Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program What We Want Now! Download 7.71 Mb. Share with your friends:
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