May 2008

Woman arraigned in courthouse bombing case

May 16, 2008

Woman arraigned in courthouse bombing case

The woman arrested Thursday in connection with the investigation into the federal courthouse bombing on May 4 in downtown San Diego has been identified as Rachelle Lynette Carlock, 31, according to U.S. Attorney Karen P. Hewitt.

Carlock was arraigned today after being driven to federal court in El Centro - more than 100 miles from where she was arrested - on a felony complaint charging her with using a false identification document to obtain explosive materials and being a felon in possession of explosive materials.

The investigation is ongoing and no person has yet been charged with the actual bombing, the FBI said.

The government asked that Carlock remain in custody based upon risk flight and danger to the community.

Carlock was arrested shortly before 3 p.m. Thursday near 35th Street and National Avenue in San Diego by members of the San Diego FBI SWAT team.

Search warrants were also served Thursday at two San Diego residences. Six people were detained at one of the houses, in City Heights, but were released shortly afterward.

Posted by Susan Shroder May 16, 2008 15:39 PM

Click here: Newsblog - Woman arraigned in courthouse bombing case:
http://weblog.signonsandiego.com/news/breaking/2008/05/woman
_arrested_in_courthouse_b_1.html

Mapping the Earthquake Zone: China

14 May 2008

Mapping the earthquake zone

Nearly 15,000 people have died in the devastating earthquake that hit China's Sichuan province on Monday. Click on the map to find out more about some of the worst-affected places...

Includes map and pictures, summary of dead and injured, in various cities near the epicenter of the quake:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7400614.stm

China Earthquake - Supplemental/Rescue Operations (Reference)

ESR12-134a - Addendum to Daily emergency service reports (ESR)

12:22 PM - 05/13/2008

SUBJECT: China Earthquake - Supplemental/Rescue Operations (Reference)

Following is a summary of some selected earthquake rescue articles previously produced by ERRI and EmergencyNet News:

1. BUILDING COLLAPSE RESCUE, By Clark Staten, EMT-P I/C
Asst. Chief Paramedic, Chicago Fire Dept. (ret.)
Former Chairman, National Society of EMS Administrators
Former Chairman, Emergency Management Committee, National Assn. of EMTs
Can be found at: http://www.emergency.com/bldgclps.htm

2. "The Politics of Disaster; Unnecessary Deaths Editorial," By: Paul Anderson ENN correspondent Chicago, IL, (ENN) June 7, 1995
Can be found at: http://www.emergency.com/dstr-pol.htm

3. "Major Earthquake Devastates Osaka, Kobe," Chicago, IL, January 16, 1995
Can be found at: http://www.emergency.com/jpnquake.htm

4. "Series of Continuing Emergencynet News Real-Time Reports Concerning A Major Earthquake in Turkey -- 16 Aug 99 to 17 Aug 99,"
Can be found at: http://www.emergency.com/1999/turkquak.htm

5. "Series of EmergencyNet News 'Real-Time' Reports Concerning a Devastating Earthquake in India: 25 Jan 2001 to 03 Feb 2001,"
Can be found at: http://www.emergency.com/2001/India_quake2001.htm

Additional references, links, and resources can be accessed at:
http://www.emergency.com/disaster.htm

Thousands killed in China by powerful earthquake

Published: May 12, 2008

Thousands killed in China by powerful earthquake

By Jim Yardley

BEIJING: A powerful earthquake struck a mountainous region of western China on Monday, reportedly killing more than 8,500 people, including as many as 5,000 people in a single county, and trapping more than 900 students beneath a collapsed high school as tremors shook buildings throughout China and were felt as far away as Thailand and Vietnam, according to interviews and reports in China's state media.

The 7.8 magnitude earthquake hit in Sichuan Province on Monday afternoon, and the death toll steadily increased throughout the evening, raising concerns that the number could go far higher.

By 9 p.m. local time, the state news agency Xinhua quoted provincial disaster relief officials as saying that 3,000 to 5,000 people were feared dead in Beichuan County. Roughly 80 percent of the buildings in the county were reportedly destroyed. Later, it reported 8,533 dead in Sichuan Province alone, The Associated Press reported.

Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, who arrived in the earthquake region on Monday night, described the situation as a "severe disaster" and called for "calm, confidence, courage and efficient organization..."

-- Source/continues: http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/05/12/asia/13china.php

Reference/USGS report: http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/recenteqsww/Quakes/us2008ryan.php

Reference: Most Destructive Known Earthquakes on Record in the World
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/world/most_destructive.php

Analysis: Hybrid Wars

May 1, 2008

Hybrid Wars

By Greg Grant, Government Executive Magazine

What if the battles of the future are neither conventional nor irregular, but a combination of both?

The October 1973 Arab-Israeli War featured some of the largest set-piece battles fought since the end of World War II. For American defense planners, the conflict provided a bounty of information on the performance of the latest military hardware from Western and Soviet arsenals that had been sold to the Israeli and Arab armies, respectively. After the war, U.S. defense officials went to Israel and picked over the battlefields, searching out lessons from the fighting.

The United States was busy extricating itself from the disaster of Vietnam, and many in the U.S. military, particularly in the Army, saw the big battles fought on the Golan Heights and in the Sinai as an opportunity to refocus their intellectual efforts away from fighting shadowy guerrillas in jungles and back to the conventional, big battles they preferred. The 1973 war displayed the lethality of new precision weaponry. It was the first war to feature large numbers of guided missiles, launched from both the air and the ground. Egyptian and Syrian troops, for example, used vast numbers of Soviet-built Sagger portable anti-tank missiles to savage attacking Israeli tanks.

Now, in a touch of deja vu, American defense planners are examining another Arab-Israeli clash - this one from 2006, when Israel's army faced off against fundamentalist Muslim organization Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In a war that lasted 34 days, Hezbollah fought the vaunted Israeli Defense Forces, considered one of the most technologically advanced militaries, to a standstill. The outcome sent shock waves through the world's military establishments, particularly the Pentagon. Ever since, Defense Department planners have been trying to discover how Hezbollah guerrillas could have defeated a conventional army outfitted with U.S. equipment.

High-Tech Guerrilla Tactics

The Lebanon fighting, said Army Chief Gen. George W. Casey in a January speech in Washington, featured "3,000 or so Hezbollah [fighters] embedding themselves in the population, in the urban areas north of Israel . . . attacked by some 30,000 Israeli troops. That's the type of operation that we all need to be thinking about in the future and be preparing for." The fighting, he added, exemplified a new type of war that would become increasingly common in the future: "a hybrid of irregular warfare and conventional warfare."

Hybrid wars, according to retired Marine officer Frank Hoffman, who has written extensively on the subject, blend the lethality of conventional warfare with the tactics and fanaticism of irregular warfare.

In the 2006 case, Hezbollah, a quasi-state within a state, fought like a guerrilla force. But it was armed with high-tech weaponry, such as precision guided missiles, that nation-states typically use. Hezbollah forces shot down Israeli helicopters, severely damaged a patrol boat with a cruise missile and destroyed heavily armored tanks by firing guided missiles from hidden bunkers. The organization also used aerial drones to gather intelligence, communicated with encrypted cell phones and watched Israeli troop movements with thermal imaging night-vision equipment.

Hezbollah's members fought in small, dispersed cells from concealed bunkers hidden in mountainous and urban terrain. Their decentralized command-and-control system frustrated repeated Israeli attempts to decapitate the organization. Israel followed a war plan suited for a conventional campaign against organizations with hierarchies and nodal structure, says Hoffman. "Hezbollah is hierarchical at the strategic level, it s political and social structure are very hierarchical, but at the tactical level they fight like guerrillas, in small cells."

Hezbollah, Hoffman says, exemplifies an emerging trend. Future opponents of the United States, particularly non-state opponents, will wage a hybrid style of warfare because they've learned they can't take on the U.S. military, with its high-tech targeting sensors and overwhelming firepower, in a stand-up fight.

"Lebanon is going to become the Grozny of this decade in terms of case studies," Hoffman says, referring to the Chechen city where Russian forces took a beating in 1994 at the hands of guerrilla fighters. Chechen rebels fought in a traditional tribal style of small dispersed cells, using widely available, yet fairly advanced, weaponry to take a heavy toll on Russian armored columns that became ensnared in the city's urban canyons. Tomorrow's hybrid wars, Hoffman says, will be fought with a rapidly changing blend of tactics and advanced weapons in the "dense urban jungle" of developing world cities.

Israel's plan to defeat Hezbollah relied too heavily on air power, says retired Army major general Robert H. Scales, who advises the service on new weapons and forces to battle hybrid enemies. Precision air strikes can take out an enemy like a nation-state with a fixed structure built around interconnected nodes. But "what if the enemy builds a method of war that is non-nodal?" Scales asks.

This poses a particular challenge to a U.S. war machine that has focused on targeting and destroying an enemy's key command centers and supply lines, usually through bombing campaigns. In Lebanon, even though the IDF fighters controlled the skies, Hezbollah was able to move men and equipment around the battlefield. "To have relatively free rein on the ground under air dominance, literally with fighter aircraft hanging over you, that to me is the essence of hybrid warfare," Scales says.

A hybrid enemy is extremely adaptable. But the U.S. military's weapons buying process is highly bureaucratic. The military lays out requirements that are approved by various oversight bodies. Then manufacturers provide specialized weapons. Hybrid enemies use what's available, most often on the open market, and adapt the weapons to their enemy and the terrain. Suicide bombings confound Western minds, but they are acceptable among hybrid enemies who adhere to what are considered primitive tribal notions of revenge or the heroic warrior. "A diabolical enemy will take you on in an irregular war in order to leverage the best pieces of your technology, but use it the best way he can," Scales says.

An unpublished Defense Science Board report completed last year notes that hybrid enemies are better armed today because lethal conventional weapons can be bought at bargain prices. Staying at a transaction level below that of major weapons' sales, armed groups can rapidly share weaponry and easily exchange knowledge. The availability of commercial technologies means that weapons development costs are virtually nonexistent. Cell phones and digital networks provide advanced command and control. Hybrid adversaries require few of the costly reconnaissance and surveillance systems that travel with U.S. forces to foreign battlefields, such as aerial drones and radar aircraft, because they're fighting in their own territory - often in their own neighborhoods. The report also notes that these potential adversaries use "human guidance" - that is, suicide car bombers - rather than more expensive technical guidance.

One lesson from Lebanon that worries some U.S. military thinkers is that in the many years Israeli Defense Forces spent policing the occupied territories, they lost important skills for conducting major combat operations. IDF units did not train for combat above the small unit level, and key elements such as armor and artillery lost much of their major combat capacity. Army Lt. Col. Gian Gentile has warned that the same thing could be happening to the U.S. military, particularly the Army. At the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., the focus is on counterinsurgency, and large unit maneuver operations are a thing of the past.

Gentile notes that neighborhood policing is different from large-scale maneuver warfare with mechanized units supported by artillery and air power. He says the demands of operations in Iraq mean Army units don't have time to do anything but prepare for counterinsurgency. "If we can ever get through Iraq, then the Army could try to restore some kind of balance and go back to at least partly focusing on conventional war," he says. The lesson of the Iraq war has been not that the U.S. military is weak, rather that it is optimized for a specific task: fighting large conventional armies. And during the past five years it has acquired a new competency - counterinsurgency. The idea of hybrid warfare is to fight in the seam between the two...

-- Source/story continues at: http://www.govexec.com/features/0508-01/0508-01s1.htm