Sunday, July 20, 2008
Book business (cont'd.)
I'm on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday to discuss the book with Liane Hansen. Tune in or listen online ...
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Nuclear Vacation on C-Span
Sharon and I will appear on C-Span Washington Journal tomorrow morning at 7:30 EST. Fourth of July festivities will continue throughout the day: Sharon will be a guest on NPR's Science Friday. Tune in!
Friday, June 13, 2008
Nuclear vacationing, cont'd.
A Nuclear Family Vacation hits the shelves this week. Sharon and I will be posting all week on Danger Room; we are also featured on NPR's Fresh Air with Terry Gross.
For listeners in New Zealand, an interview with Wammo of Kiwi FM.
And, for good measure: Our book site.
For listeners in New Zealand, an interview with Wammo of Kiwi FM.
And, for good measure: Our book site.
Monday, March 10, 2008
The Tour of Terror
This week on Slate: The ultimate activity holiday for defense and security professionals. Sharon and I are back on the road, reporting on the 'Ultimate Counter-Terrorism Mission' to Israel.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Saturday, July 28, 2007
Audible: Minnesota Public Radio
A call-in show with Peter Eisler of USA Today on the Pentagon's push for mine-protected vehicles. Listen here.
Saturday, July 07, 2007
Army of Green
Latest from from Foreign Policy magazine: the U.S. military hops on the environmental bandwagon. (Subscription only, sorry.)
Saturday, June 09, 2007
Friday, May 18, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Monday, January 15, 2007
Latest on Slate
Atomic Fallout
The administration dumps its nuclear chief, but can anyone else do better?
By Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger
Posted Monday, Jan. 8, 2007, at 12:06 PM ET
In June 2005, we walked into the Washington office of National Nuclear Security Administration chief Linton Brooks. He was leaning over his shoes, looking slightly flummoxed. He paused and looked up at the visiting reporters, still holding his shoelaces.
"Yes, there's the headline," he sighed. "The man responsible for nuclear weapons can't even tie his own shoes."
Brooks' fatalism was not unfounded. Recent news reports had not been kind to his agency, an arm of the Department of Energy that oversees the nuclear weapons complex. In particular, reporters were fixated on security woes at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the disappearance of classified computer disks had prompted a monthslong shutdown of the facility.
Those "missing" disks, in fact, never existed. But it was a major blow to the NNSA's credibility, and it amplified perceptions of mismanagement at Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
Unfortunately for Brooks, Los Alamos was unable to shed its image as the problem child of the nuclear labs family. In late October 2006, police stumbled upon thumb drives containing classified information from Los Alamos during a meth bust in a trailer park.
On Jan. 4, Brooks finally took the fall.
While news of his dismissal was overshadowed by a major shake-up in the top echelons of the military and the intelligence community, it came at a critical time for the future of the nuclear weapons complex. With very little public attention, the NNSA is embarking on a project called Complex 2030—an ambitious plan to modernize U.S. nuclear weapons facilities. That effort is about to build serious momentum with the selection of a design for the Reliable Replacement Warhead, a new nuclear weapon that some critics worry could lead to the resumption of underground testing.
For Brooks, the firing offense may not have been the security breaches but failing to inform his boss, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, about computer hacking that compromised the personal information of Energy Department contractors. Brooks learned in September 2005 that the computers were hacked, but he didn't inform senior Energy Department officials until months later.
Brooks' explanation for the delay was the political equivalent of fumbling with his laces.
"It appears that each side of that organization assumed that the other side had made the appropriate notification to the deputy secretary," Brooks told members of a congressional oversight committee.
"That's hogwash," replied Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who is now the committee's ranking minority member.
Barton and another Republican sent a letter to Secretary Bodman in June demanding Brooks' ouster. With usual Washington speed, six months passed before Brooks got the ax.
That Brooks presided over a nuclear weapons complex with serious problems is not in doubt: Security lapses led to clampdowns, which in turn hurt morale at the labs. But it's hard to square the unceremonious dismissal of Brooks, a highly regarded public servant, with the treatment that other administration appointees got. After all, while New Orleans drowned, Michael ("heckuva job") Brown was praised by President Bush for his work at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Paul Wolfowitz—who predicted that Iraqi oil revenues could pay for reconstruction—sits comfortably at the World Bank. And even Donald ("freedom is untidy") Rumsfeld, the recently ousted Pentagon chief, won final commendations from Bush as a "superb leader in a time of change."
The signs pointing to the NNSA chief's downfall, it turns out, were there in our 2005 interview with Brooks.
"I've been a little surprised at the insatiable desire—a combination of the 24-hour news cycle and the Congress—to know everything now," he said of the security breaches. "In fact, when problems occur, the one thing you can almost always be certain of is that your initial understanding is wrong."
An example of that, Brooks continued, was the case of the "missing" Los Alamos disks.
"Almost everything we thought was true in the first 96 hours turns out not to have been true," he said.
Brooks was right. The disks never even existed; a simple clerical error—nonexistent bar codes—led officials to chase after phantom equipment. That same summer, the Project on Government Oversight, a frequent critic of the nuclear labs, had hosted a dramatic press conference featuring the tearful wife of Tommy Hook, a Los Alamos whistleblower who had just been hospitalized after a savage beating. The assault, it was hinted, was linked to upcoming congressional testimony on fraud at the lab. His wife's dramatic appearance sparked a flurry of press stories. Was Hook the victim of official reprisal? Were rogue operatives at work? Had nuclear weapons scientists taken matters into their own hands?
In fact, the truth was more banal: According to later accounts, Hook's night of whistleblowing activities included a lap dance and drinks at the strip club where he was beaten. Few papers reported the eventual unfolding of events.
NNSA is an obscure agency in a department that has long been considered a government backwater. Created in 2000 amid the fallout from the Wen Ho Lee scandal, NNSA's official status is "quasi-autonomous." That adjective gets to the heart of the problem: The agency has multiple lines of authority and overlapping responsibilities that make decision making hard and accountability elusive.
"In theory, it was a good idea to separate nuclear weapons from the day-to-day White House political considerations that encumber any Cabinet-level agency," said Phil Coyle, a former associate director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and now a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information. "But in practice it has only played into the perception that the NNSA and its contractors are not accountable to higher-level authorities, in this case the secretary of energy."
But firing Brooks won't fix the labs, and the administration has yet to answer a fundamental question: What would they have had him do differently? We suspect Brooks' answer would have been much like his response to our questions. When we asked him 18 months ago about why he was unable to persuade Congress to fund the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, a controversial push to design a bunker-busting nuke, he said, "I don't know what I would have done differently, but we'll see."
The critics were right: Linton Brooks failed to fix the labs, but who can? Like Charlie Brown in his eternal quest to kick the football, we wonder if Brooks ever really had a chance. As for why he was fired—and why now—we suspect that Brooks is asking the same question.
Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger are working on a book, called A Nuclear Family Vacation, about travels through the world of atomic weaponry. Last year, they wrote a series of dispatches about their travels to nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union; in 2005, they wrote another series about their tour of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2157150/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
The administration dumps its nuclear chief, but can anyone else do better?
By Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger
Posted Monday, Jan. 8, 2007, at 12:06 PM ET
In June 2005, we walked into the Washington office of National Nuclear Security Administration chief Linton Brooks. He was leaning over his shoes, looking slightly flummoxed. He paused and looked up at the visiting reporters, still holding his shoelaces.
"Yes, there's the headline," he sighed. "The man responsible for nuclear weapons can't even tie his own shoes."
Brooks' fatalism was not unfounded. Recent news reports had not been kind to his agency, an arm of the Department of Energy that oversees the nuclear weapons complex. In particular, reporters were fixated on security woes at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the disappearance of classified computer disks had prompted a monthslong shutdown of the facility.
Those "missing" disks, in fact, never existed. But it was a major blow to the NNSA's credibility, and it amplified perceptions of mismanagement at Los Alamos, the birthplace of the atomic bomb.
Unfortunately for Brooks, Los Alamos was unable to shed its image as the problem child of the nuclear labs family. In late October 2006, police stumbled upon thumb drives containing classified information from Los Alamos during a meth bust in a trailer park.
On Jan. 4, Brooks finally took the fall.
While news of his dismissal was overshadowed by a major shake-up in the top echelons of the military and the intelligence community, it came at a critical time for the future of the nuclear weapons complex. With very little public attention, the NNSA is embarking on a project called Complex 2030—an ambitious plan to modernize U.S. nuclear weapons facilities. That effort is about to build serious momentum with the selection of a design for the Reliable Replacement Warhead, a new nuclear weapon that some critics worry could lead to the resumption of underground testing.
For Brooks, the firing offense may not have been the security breaches but failing to inform his boss, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, about computer hacking that compromised the personal information of Energy Department contractors. Brooks learned in September 2005 that the computers were hacked, but he didn't inform senior Energy Department officials until months later.
Brooks' explanation for the delay was the political equivalent of fumbling with his laces.
"It appears that each side of that organization assumed that the other side had made the appropriate notification to the deputy secretary," Brooks told members of a congressional oversight committee.
"That's hogwash," replied Joe Barton, the Texas Republican who is now the committee's ranking minority member.
Barton and another Republican sent a letter to Secretary Bodman in June demanding Brooks' ouster. With usual Washington speed, six months passed before Brooks got the ax.
That Brooks presided over a nuclear weapons complex with serious problems is not in doubt: Security lapses led to clampdowns, which in turn hurt morale at the labs. But it's hard to square the unceremonious dismissal of Brooks, a highly regarded public servant, with the treatment that other administration appointees got. After all, while New Orleans drowned, Michael ("heckuva job") Brown was praised by President Bush for his work at the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Paul Wolfowitz—who predicted that Iraqi oil revenues could pay for reconstruction—sits comfortably at the World Bank. And even Donald ("freedom is untidy") Rumsfeld, the recently ousted Pentagon chief, won final commendations from Bush as a "superb leader in a time of change."
The signs pointing to the NNSA chief's downfall, it turns out, were there in our 2005 interview with Brooks.
"I've been a little surprised at the insatiable desire—a combination of the 24-hour news cycle and the Congress—to know everything now," he said of the security breaches. "In fact, when problems occur, the one thing you can almost always be certain of is that your initial understanding is wrong."
An example of that, Brooks continued, was the case of the "missing" Los Alamos disks.
"Almost everything we thought was true in the first 96 hours turns out not to have been true," he said.
Brooks was right. The disks never even existed; a simple clerical error—nonexistent bar codes—led officials to chase after phantom equipment. That same summer, the Project on Government Oversight, a frequent critic of the nuclear labs, had hosted a dramatic press conference featuring the tearful wife of Tommy Hook, a Los Alamos whistleblower who had just been hospitalized after a savage beating. The assault, it was hinted, was linked to upcoming congressional testimony on fraud at the lab. His wife's dramatic appearance sparked a flurry of press stories. Was Hook the victim of official reprisal? Were rogue operatives at work? Had nuclear weapons scientists taken matters into their own hands?
In fact, the truth was more banal: According to later accounts, Hook's night of whistleblowing activities included a lap dance and drinks at the strip club where he was beaten. Few papers reported the eventual unfolding of events.
NNSA is an obscure agency in a department that has long been considered a government backwater. Created in 2000 amid the fallout from the Wen Ho Lee scandal, NNSA's official status is "quasi-autonomous." That adjective gets to the heart of the problem: The agency has multiple lines of authority and overlapping responsibilities that make decision making hard and accountability elusive.
"In theory, it was a good idea to separate nuclear weapons from the day-to-day White House political considerations that encumber any Cabinet-level agency," said Phil Coyle, a former associate director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and now a senior adviser at the Center for Defense Information. "But in practice it has only played into the perception that the NNSA and its contractors are not accountable to higher-level authorities, in this case the secretary of energy."
But firing Brooks won't fix the labs, and the administration has yet to answer a fundamental question: What would they have had him do differently? We suspect Brooks' answer would have been much like his response to our questions. When we asked him 18 months ago about why he was unable to persuade Congress to fund the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, a controversial push to design a bunker-busting nuke, he said, "I don't know what I would have done differently, but we'll see."
The critics were right: Linton Brooks failed to fix the labs, but who can? Like Charlie Brown in his eternal quest to kick the football, we wonder if Brooks ever really had a chance. As for why he was fired—and why now—we suspect that Brooks is asking the same question.
Nathan Hodge and Sharon Weinberger are working on a book, called A Nuclear Family Vacation, about travels through the world of atomic weaponry. Last year, they wrote a series of dispatches about their travels to nuclear sites in the former Soviet Union; in 2005, they wrote another series about their tour of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2157150/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
Thursday, October 12, 2006
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Livin' la guerra privada
Army for Hire
Two new books on the global market for armed force.
By Nathan Hodge
Slate Posted Thursday, Aug. 31, 2006, at 12:39 PM ET
A piece of popular wisdom passed around by contractors working in Iraq says, "You know you've been in Baghdad too long when hearing Afrikaans at the pool is normal."
That observation speaks to the outsize presence of South Africans in Iraq's wartime contracting boom. Security costs have soaked up a massive chunk of Iraq reconstruction funds, and former South African soldiers and police, often veterans of the country's apartheid-era border wars, have found their skills in high demand.
Exact numbers are hard to come by, but an estimated 2,000 to 4,000 South African expatriates are in Iraq, a sizeable number of whom work as armed guards. Several South African-based or -dominated security companies such as Reed, Safenet, and Omega Risk Solutions are registered with the Iraqi ministry of the interior.
But that bubble may soon burst. The South African parliament is pressing ahead with new legislation, the Prohibition of Mercenary Activity Bill, which would tighten oversight of South African citizens and residents who work in war zones.
The repercussions are already being felt. Erinys, a U.K.-based security firm that does work for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, pre-emptively dropped over 100 South Africans from its payroll; other companies are waiting see how sweeping the final law may be. (Aid groups are also concerned that the bill might restrict South Africans from performing humanitarian work in other countries.)
Iraq is only one reason for the new law. The official summary of the anti-mercenary bill also states another rationale: the involvement of a number of South African citizens in an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea. For most U.S. newspaper readers, the Equatorial Guinea "coup plot" may spark only the faintest glimmer of recognition, but it caused a media furor in the United Kingdom, in large part because it involved Margaret Thatcher's son.
The story in brief: In March 2004, Zimbabwean authorities detained a planeload of men from South Africa. The men claimed they were on their way to guard a mine in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but the government of Equatorial Guinea soon after announced that they were involved in a coup attempt against President Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo; several more men supposedly connected to the plot were arrested in Equatorial Guinea.
It all came down to control of Equatorial Guinea's oil. In his well-researched new book, The Wonga Coup: Guns, Thugs and a Ruthless Determination To Create Mayhem in an Oil-Rich Corner of Africa, Economist correspondent Adam Roberts describes how the purported plotters of "assisted regime change" in Equatorial Guinea stood to win control of one of the richest patches of oil and gas in Africa.
Simon Mann, the alleged leader of the coup attempt, is still cooling his heels in a Harare prison. Roberts traces Mann's ties to Executive Outcomes, a corporate army based in South Africa that won a reputation in the mid-1990s for security work in war-torn (and resource-rich) places like Angola and Sierra Leone. Mann, as Roberts describes him, "was as likely to wear a crumpled business suit and rimless spectacles as camouflage or chest webbing. He was an early example of a new sort of mercenary, the type as familiar with company law, bank transfers and investor agreements as with the workings of a Browning pistol."
Educated at Eton and Sandhurst and heir to a brewing fortune, Mann seemed perfectly cast for the role of white mischief in Africa. (After his detention in Zimbabwe, he appealed to his backers to come through with a "splodge of wonga," English schoolboy slang for a bundle of cash.) His story was also one of colossal arrogance. In Roberts' account, Mann led plotters to believe that they could combine an arms buy in Zimbabwe, a newly acquired Boeing 727, and an exiled politician to depose Equatorial Guinea's president—and make a splodge of wonga in the process.
The Wonga Coup makes for a sorry epilogue to the story of Executive Outcomes, once the model of the successful mercenary firm. One only wishes that Roberts was able to delve more fully into the consequences for the foot-soldiers recruited for the job, mostly black veterans of South Africa's fearsome 32 Battalion.
Post-colonial soldiers of fortune are now making way for a new kind of corporate warrior. In his book, Licensed To Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror, writer and adventurer Robert Young Pelton offers a fascinating and fast-paced look at the post- 9/11 world of private military contractors.
Licensed To Kill takes Pelton from the Afghan-Pakistan border, where private companies are part of a shadow war against al-Qaida, to a Dallas trade show, where a new breed of contractors—employees of companies like DynCorp, Triple Canopy, and Blackwater—swap war stories and look for their next jobs. But the most pulse-quickening passages in Licensed To Kill describe the work of security contractors in Iraq. Pelton spent a month on the road with Blackwater's Mamba team, ferrying passengers on the Baghdad airport road during a time of constant insurgent attack. What emerges is a unique glimpse into the culture and management of a secretive firm.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, Blackwater was an obscure target-manufacturing company that ran a shooting range on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp; founder Erik Prince, an ex-Navy SEAL, ran the company more out of passion than for profit. Within a few years, Prince has not only turned the company into a major player in the private-security world but has also created an effective brand. Today, in addition to its work in Iraq and Afghanistan, Blackwater runs training operations in Azerbaijan, is planning a jungle-training facility in the Philippines, and operates its own fleet of aircraft.
Licensed To Kill is a glimpse of the industry's future. Blackwater has already advertised its ability to raise a brigade-sized force, ready to deploy anywhere on a moment's notice. In theory, such a force could be used to protect relief work in Darfur—but it would also cross a line from defensive security into overt combat operations.
That's an important distinction. In Iraq, the strictly defensive role of private security companies protects their status as noncombatants (in U.S. Central Command's definition). Employing a private firm to take out the Janjaweed may present a tempting option, but it raises a host of questions about legality and accountability. Under whose mandate would those private soldiers operate? Would they enjoy the same kind of blanket immunity from local law that U.S. proconsul Paul Bremer gave contractors in Iraq when he issued Order 17?
One of the most common criticisms leveled at the private security industry is a lack of transparency. Blackwater, in fact, has made a concerted public relations effort of late, opening its gates to selected members of the press; other companies have invited reporters to ride along with them. More troubling is the tendency of the government—in industry parlance, the "client"—to use private companies to shield policies from public scrutiny and create additional layers of secrecy.
When contractors are killed in Iraq, the Department of Defense issues no casualty announcement; likewise, when contractors take lives, the incidents are rarely publicized. A federal judge recently rejected a Freedom of Information Act request by the Los Angeles Times seeking to identify the names of private security firms involved in serious shooting incidents in Iraq, on the grounds that the disclosure might tip off insurgents. The Army had released a number of such reports to the newspaper but blacked out the names of companies involved.
And then there was the precedent of Order 17. As Pelton observes, "Order 17 established a virtually nonexistent standard of accountability for security contractors in Iraq that has persisted, though the specific legal grounds may have since shifted."
It's important to add here that Pelton writes admiringly of contractors who perform their jobs with professionalism and restraint. But he worries that "if a particularly negligent or intentional attack on civilians was publicly exposed, it is unclear what legal avenues would be used to hold the perpetrators accountable."
On Aug. 16, a federal judge overturned a jury verdict against Custer Battles, a security company accused of defrauding the government on Iraq reconstruction work. While the judge found there was sufficient evidence that the company submitted inflated invoices to the Coalition Provisional Authority, he also concluded the CPA was not a U.S. government entity. As a consequence of this ruling—and myriad other decisions made by U.S. officials—we may never know the full scope of the private sector's involvement in the war on terror.
Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2148608/
Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC
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