Free Republic

At a time when U.S. special operations are devising plans for the mission of accepting women into the male domains of SEALs, Green Berets and Army Rangers, the terrorist-fighting community is facing a looming readiness problem. The new challenge is tucked inside President Obama’s 2017 defense budget. It states that U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and its 69,000 personnel are up against “training challenges” and is seeing “minor impacts to the forces’ ability to accomplish missions” that could grow worse. Army Green Berets and Navy SEALs face some limits on training due to cutbacks in fleet and training range operations,...

I sat down Monday evening and pondered connecting the dots on something I consider a national security issue: the growing list of military officers being prosecuted for questionable reasons. When I’m out traveling, many folks ask me if there is a targeted “purging” of military leaders. I’m never one to join in on conspiracy theories, but there have been some recent instances that we should pay attention to — and perhaps there are more, of which you our astute readers are aware. Perhaps the most recent is Army LTC Jason Amerine. LTC Amerine, who is according to CNN, “a Special...

Seven Southwestern states will soon be infiltrated by 1,200 military special ops personnel as part of a controversial domestic military training in which some of the elite soldiers will operate undetected among civilians. Operation Jade Helm begins in July and will last for eight weeks. Soldiers will operate in and around towns in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah and Colorado where some of them wil drop from planes while carrying weapons loaded with blanks in what military officials have dubbed Realistic Military Training. ....snip....

Washington - The American military command in Afghanistan on Monday abruptly reversed its decision to classify details about the Afghan Army and police, information that it had said could pose a grave security risk if disclosed. The data, which includes figures like the number of Afghan soldiers and what it costs to feed them, had been readily available for the past six years. But last week word leaked that the information would be kept secret going forward, a move the American command insisted was needed to safeguard Afghan and American lives. Many in Kabul and Washington, including members of Congress,

For the first time in modern history, the Obama administration has forced insurance companies to withhold 2015 prices until after the election. So he can shield Democrats. In the past, new prices were announced 60 days before the first day of the year. Not this year. Warner Todd Huston reported: Barack Obama is again playing political games with our health insurance industry and has turned in another underhanded move against it by forcing insurance carriers, brokers and agents to withhold their 2015 prices until after the 2014 midterm elections are over all so that the news of higher prices won’t...

It’s good to know that the Iraqi forces are doing their own humanitarian effort onto Mount Sinjar where the Yazidis are stranded, instead of just depending on America. In this video from Rudaw, a Kurdish news organization, a reporter goes along with the helicopter that drops off food and water from Iraqi charity services, and shows the danger they have to ward off from ISIS trying to shoot them out of the air. Watch the video from the Washington Post below:

The Obama administration’s interest in creating a streamlined application process for Medicaid, CHIP, and subsidized health insurance via the state Obamacare exchanges has come at the expense of effective security and fraud prevention. As of January 1, 2014, this easing of requirements now includes the mandate that states accept applications completed entirely via telephone. Rather than require such applications be later accompanied by the electronic or mailed transmission of a signed document, HHS instead requires states to accept a spoken assent on a telephone call as the equivalent of an actual signature. Says J. Christian Adams, PJ Media legal editor...

Facing the Palestinians’ continued defiance of the very notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel, Kerry is planning to present his own peace deal next month and try to force Israel to accept it. There was a ghoulish creepiness to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Israel last week. Here we were, beset by the greatest winter storm in a hundred years. All roads to Jerusalem were sealed off. Tens of thousands of Jerusalemites and residents of surrounding areas were locked down in their houses, without power, heat, telephone service or water. And all of the sudden, out of...

"Most" of the hostages who have been holed up at an upscale shopping mall in Kenya's capital after it was attacked by members of an Al Qaeda-linked Somali militant group on Saturday have been freed, Kenya's military says. Kenya's armed forces launched a "major" assault on the militants on Sunday night -- about 30 hours after the Islamists stormed the Nairobi mall in an attack that left at least 68 dead and 175 injured. At around midnight local time, Kenya's Defence Forces said it had rescued most hostages and had taken control of most of the mall, but declined to...

Indiana University is firing 50 maintenance and custodial workers and shifting them to a temp agency to avoid incurring Obamacare costs. WRTV Indiana says Indiana University already spends $215 million on healthcare annually.

the Obama administration prepared for a possible military response by moving naval forces closer to Syria. Obama discussed the situation in Syria by telephone with British Prime Minister David Cameron, the White House said. It was Obama's first known conversation with a foreign leader about Syria since the reports this week that hundreds of Syrians had been killed by the alleged chemical attack in a suburb of Damascus, the capital.

In a letter just sent Speaker of the House John Boehner, President Obama notifies Congress that U.S. forces were "recently deployed to Jordan." "Certain U.S. forces recently deployed to Jordan solely to participate in a training exercise. This exercise ended on June 20, 2013. At the request of the Government of Jordan, a combat-equipped detachment of approximately 700 of these forces remained in Jordan after the conclusion of the exercise to join other U.S. forces already in Jordan," Obama writes. This detachment that participated in the exercise and remained in Jordan includes Patriot missile systems, fighter aircraft, and related support,

NSA leaker Ed Snowden claimed to have broken both of his legs while training for Special Forces. "In 2003, he enlisted in the US army and began a training program to join the Special Forces. Invoking the same principles that he now cites to justify his leaks, he said: "I wanted to fight in the Iraq war because I felt like I had an obligation as a human being to help free people from oppression"." That is simply not true as the statement from the Special Warfare Center & School below clearly points out. "Snowden was never a student at...

<p>A Potentially explosive confrontation over Gov. Cuomo’s tough new gun law was avoided over the weekend as 1199 SEIU, the hospital workers union, abruptly canceled a Thursday rally designed to challenge some 10,000 opponents of the governor’s measure, The Post has learned.</p>

On the eve of a Senate vote to confirm Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense, a 2009 report co-authored by Hagel has surfaced titled “A Last Chance For A Two-State Israel-Palestine Agreement.” It called for Israel to make “the hard compromises and painful concessions for peace” without asking anything comparable from the Palestinian side. Indeed, the report warned against “the Jewish-American and Christian Zionist groups that feel comfortable amplifying the positions of Israeli politicians hostile to hard compromise and painful concession.” One of Hagel’s principal co-signatories on the report was Zbigniew Brzezinski, who had advised Obama on foreign policy during...

KABUL, Afghanistan -Afghanistan´s president says all U.S. special forces must leave eastern Wardak province within two weeks because of allegations that Afghans working with them are torturing and abusing other Afghans. Presidential spokesman Aimal Faizi says Sunday´s decision was taken during a meeting of the National Security Council because of the alleged actions of Afghans who are linked to the U.S. special forces. He said the government wants the individuals, whom he did not identify, to be handed over to the government. Wardak is a restive province next to Kabul and has been the focus of counterinsurgency efforts.

Government forces have fired at least a half-dozen short-range ballistic missiles at rebel groups in northern Syria over the past several days, according to U.S. officials, a potentially significant escalation of a civil war that has killed more than 40,000 people. U.S. officials and the group Human Rights Watch also alleged Wednesday that Syrian government forces are dropping incendiary devices similar to napalm weapons on rebel fighters in populated areas. The officials described the tactics as acts of desperation as rebels gain momentum in the nearly two-year-old fight to oust President Bashar al-Assad.

Dr. Dilip Joseph and two colleagues were kidnapped by a group of armed men while returning from a visit to a rural medical clinic in eastern Kabul Province, according to a statement from their employer, Colorado Springs-based Morning Star Development. The statement said the three were eventually taken to a mountainous area about 50 miles from the border with Pakistan. Morning Star's crisis management team in Colorado Springs was in contact with the hostages and their captors almost immediately, the statement said. On Saturday evening in Afghanistan, two of the three hostages were released. Morning Star did not release their...

•Strategic Rocket Forces: 334 missiles with 1092 warheads 55 R-36M2 (SS-18) with 550 warheads 35 UR-100NUTTH (SS-19) with 210 warheads 150 Topol (SS-25) with 150 warheads 56 Topol-M silo (SS-27) with 56 warheads 18 Topol-M mobile (SS-27) with 18 warheads 18 RS-24 mobile with 108 warheads •Strategic Fleet: 96 missiles with 336 warheads 3 Delta III with 48 R-29R with 144 warheads 3 Delta IV with 48 R-29RM with 192 warheads •Strategic Aviation: 66 bombers with ~200 cruise missiles 55 Tu-95MS (Bear H) with up to 16 Kh-55 (AS-15A) 11 Tu-160 (Blackjack) with up to 12 Kh-55SM (AS-15B)

The Turkish news is reporting that Iran Quds forces are marching into Syria to quash the rebellion. The Tatler reported: According to the Turkish newspaper, Sabah, the commander of the Quds forces, Qassem Soleimani and 15,000 of his fighters have entered Syria with the mission of assisting in the suppression of the Syrian protestors. The Quds forces will act as a firewall for the Assad regime as the Syrian army is finding itself in a difficult situation where many officers are joining the opposition because they do not approve of the mass killings of the civilians, which so far has...