Free Republic

The US sailors who were detained by the Iranian navy last winter provided their name, rank and serial numbers - and pretty much everything else their captors demanded, the US Navy said in a blistering report Thursday. The 10 crew members, captured at gunpoint in the Persian Gulf on Jan. 12 by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, improperly revealed passwords for laptops and cellphones and even sensitive technical details about their two ships, including their top speed, capabilities and missions, the report said. [Snip] The Navy report blamed the incident on a combination of poor planning, clueless leaders who did...

Thornberry Fears Bureaucracy Hamstrings Cyber Vs. ISIS WASHINGTON: Why does the internet still work in Raqqa? That simple question about the Syrian capital of Daesh, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, posed today by retired fighter pilot Rep. Martha McSally, goes to the heart of how the military will use — or refrain from using — cyber weapons. It goes to deep suspicions that President Obama’s swollen National Security Council staff is micromanaging the military. No less a figure than House Armed Services Committee chairman Mac Thornberry voiced deep concern that we are bureaucratizing the cyber force at birth. All too often...

The Pentagon wants to reboot a failed program designed to train Syrian rebels in the fight against the Islamic State, even though this same $500 million dollar program had almost nothing to show for itself. The goal was to train 5,000 fighters, but the first class of 54 melted and scattered after being attacked by the al-Nusra front, the al-Qaida affiliate in Syria. The second class of so-called moderate rebels handed over at least 25 percent of their U.S. military gear to al-Nusra. Pentagon officials now say they’ve identified what elements of the program to tweak to make sure they...

Across the world, the War with ISIS is exploding; in Paris, Brussels, in the Middle East and at the US/Mexican border. ISIS continues to attack, attack, attack, following George Patton’s motto of “l’audace, l’audace, toujours l’audace (audacity, audacity, always audacity). While the world seems to be continually shocked by one ISIS atrocity after another, in the White House, one thing is crystal clear, President Obama has chosen to fight rising seas and disappearing glaciers before taking the fight to the marauding maniacal murderers of ISIS. While the President has been pelted for two weeks for having no strategy to fight...

More than 50 intelligence analysts working out of the U.S. military’s Central Command have formally complained that their reports on ISIS and al Qaeda’s branch in Syria were being inappropriately altered by senior officials, The Daily Beast has learned. The complaints spurred the Pentagon’s inspector general to open an investigation into the alleged manipulation of intelligence. The fact that so many people complained suggests there are deep-rooted, systemic problems in how the U.S. military command charged with the war against the self-proclaimed Islamic State assesses intelligence. “The cancer was within the senior level of the intelligence command,” one defense official...

That lukewarm reception Barack Obama received at West Point last week was indicative of the widely held view among the troops that the man is a truly incompetent commander in chief, or as the language-mangling Al Sharpton might say, “the Commander of the Chiefs.” Notice that I said the troops, not their senior leadership. If our Pentagon weren’t currently occupied by the perfumed princes of political correctness, we might be seeing some courageous generals and admirals falling on their swords and exposing this failure of leadership instead of enabling it. Those ambitious cowards should ponder the reality that neither “I...

The Pentagon is preparing for a longer bombardment of Syria than it originally had planned, with a heavy barrage of missile strikes followed soon after by more attacks on targets that the opening salvos missed or failed to destroy, officials said. The planning for intense attacks over a three-day period reflects the growing belief in the White House and the Pentagon that the United States needs more firepower to inflict even minimal damage on Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces, which have been widely dispersed over the last two weeks, the officials said.

<p>Jihadists in Egypt's lawless Sinai Peninsula are using U.S. weapons to carry out attacks against the temporary government in the wake of the military's ouster of President Mohammed Morsi, according to the embattled nation's Interior Ministry.</p>