• Details emerge about San Bernadino shooting suspects

    The FBI and police are searching the Redlands townhome tied to San Bernardino shooting suspect Syed Rizwan Farook. Late Wednesday night, police used a battering ram to enter the home and sent a robot in to sweep for possible explosives. Police have identified Farook, a 28-year-old American citizen born in Chicago and employee with the San Bernardino County Department of Health, and Tashfeen Malik, a 27-year-old female who is Farook’s wife, as the two suspects involved in the shooting. – CBS News

  • US military expanding Cyber and electronic warfare capabilities

    Across the military, the services are moving electronic warfare and cyberspace operations ever closer together as the two disciplines become increasingly intertwined, dependent on each other and a source of growing pains. And while that integration is happening across the Defense Department, it’s the battlefield effects that should be the focus, according to a top Air Force official. The push to combine EW and cyber is well established – at Fort Gordon, Georgia, the Army will co-locate its cyber and signals headquarters, and the service’s CIO/G-6 office currently is assessing integration of some cyber, signal and electronic warfare operations. But more than integration, it’s about synchronizing operations, effects and personnel. – C4ISR & Networks

  • DOD wasted $150 million dollars on housing employees in Afghan shanties

    WASHINGTON — The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction has sent a letter to Defense Secretary Ash Carter asking for a review of a now-defunct DoD task force’s pricey, upscale Kabul accommodations. John Sopko wrote in a Nov. 25 letter to Carter obtained by Defense News that he has learned the Task Force for Stability and Business Operations (TFBSO) in Afghanistan spent nearly $150 million — 20 percent of its budget — “on private housing and private security guards for its US government employees in Afghanistan, rather than live on military bases.” – Defense News

  • With US help, Saudi Arabia wipes out Yemen

    The terrifying power of a bomb is how it can alter life so dramatically, so completely, so instantaneously. How it can crush concrete, rip apart flesh and snuff out life. The moments before the pilot pulls the trigger and sends the missile screeching down choreograph the final dance with fate: another step forward into a room, a turn around a corner, a walk outside to get some air — trivial actions that determine everything afterward. This power is a fact of life in Yemen now. It is brought forth by a coalition of Arab countries led by Saudi Arabia and supported by the United States. The airstrikes have been relentless since March, a period now of eight months. They are supposed to be targeting a local rebel group, but appear largely indiscriminate, regularly hitting civilian targets. Thousands of people have been killed. Human rights groups say some of these strikes amount to war crimes. – PRI

  • Bombing ISIS back into the stone age won’t work

    Critics have long called the U.S.’s Syria policy feckless. But the Paris attacks brought this to a head, with renewed calls for escalation to end the Islamic State’s threat and prevent another Paris. But the critics’ policies won’t end the threat either. More than a decade of continuous warfare against militants in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and elsewhere have taught us a great deal about what works, what doesn’t, and why. And that experience suggests that to defeat the Islamic State — defined as eliminating its ability to carry out Paris-style terrorism — would require a vastly greater effort than almost anyone now proposes, and a vastly greater effort than the American public is likely to support. – The Washington Post

[Featured image: Ringo H.W. Chiu|Associated Press]