North Korea said on Tuesday it would restart its only nuclear reactor to provide plutonium for its weapons program, an announcement that added to already-heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula and drew swift international criticism.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he was “deeply troubled” by the rising tensions. “Nuclear threats are not a game,” he said at a news conference in Andorra. “The current crisis has already gone too far.”

Later Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry called the North’s recent belligerent rhetoric “unacceptable” and said the U.S. will defend itself as well as South Korea and Japan from any threat from the North, the Associated Press reported.

Read it all.

“My Fellow Americans:

“Last night, when I spoke with you about the fall of Rome, I knew at that moment that troops of the United States and our Allies were crossing the Channel in another and greater operation. It has come to pass with success thus far.

“And so, in this poignant hour, I ask you to join with me in prayer:

“Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity.

“Lead them straight and true; give strength to their arms, stoutness to their hearts, steadfastness in their faith.
“They will need Thy blessings. Their road will be long and hard. For the enemy is strong. He may hurl back our forces. Success may not come with rushing speed, but we shall return again and again; and we know that by Thy grace, and by the righteousness of our cause, our sons will triumph.

“They will be sore tried, by night and by day, without rest — until the victory is won. The darkness will be rent by noise and flame. Men’s souls will be shaken with the violences of war.

“For these men are lately drawn from the ways of peace. They fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate. They fight to let justice arise, and tolerance and goodwill among all Thy people. They yearn but for the end of battle, for their return to the haven of home.&

“Some will never return. Embrace these, Father, and receive them, Thy heroic servants, into Thy kingdom.

“And for us at home — fathers, mothers, children, wives, sisters, and brothers of brave men overseas, whose thoughts and prayers are ever with them — help us, Almighty God, to rededicate ourselves in renewed faith in Thee in this hour of great sacrifice.

“Many people have urged that I call the nation into a single day of special prayer. But because the road is long and the desire is great, I ask that our people devote themselves in a continuance of prayer. As we rise to each new day, and again when each day is spent, let words of prayer be on our lips, invoking Thy help to our efforts.

“Give us strength, too — strength in our daily tasks, to redouble the contributions we make in the physical and the material support of our armed forces.

“And let our hearts be stout, to wait out the long travail, to bear sorrows that may come, to impart our courage unto our sons wheresoever they may be.

“And, O Lord, give us faith. Give us faith in Thee; faith in our sons; faith in each other; faith in our united crusade. Let not the keenness of our spirit ever be dulled. Let not the impacts of temporary events, of temporal matters of but fleeting moment — let not these deter us in our unconquerable purpose.

“With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy forces of our enemy. Help us to conquer the apostles of greed and racial arrogances. Lead us to the saving of our country, and with our sister nations into a world unity that will spell a sure peace — a peace invulnerable to the schemings of unworthy men. And a peace that will let all of men live in freedom, reaping the just rewards of their honest toil.

“Thy will be done, Almighty God.

“Amen.”

You can listen to the actual audio if you want here.

Richard Bejtlich was a cyber-specialist for the U.S. Air Force in the 1990s, a time when the U.S. military was going on the offense in the cyberwar. He remembers the day he realized how important a software vulnerability can be to a cyberweapons designer.

“Myself and a couple other guys, we found a zero day vulnerability in Cisco routing equipment,” Bejtlich recalls. “And we looked at it, and we said, ‘Did we really find this? Can we really get into these Cisco routers?'”

They could, and so Bejtlich and his colleagues reported it to Cisco. They thanked him and said they’d fix it. Days later, he was talking to some friends who worked on the offensive side of the unit, and they had quite a different reaction to them reporting the bug to Cisco.

“They said, ‘You did what? Why didn’t you tell us? We could have used this to get into all these various hard targets,'” he says.

Read it all.

Nearly 70 years later, Chaney is among the dwindling number of South Carolinians who fought in World War II. And at 87, he may be among the oldest to receive post-traumatic stress disorder benefits for it.

After decades of nightmares and sessions with doctors, Chaney last year was approved based on his World War II experiences that, according to some of the paperwork involved, included much more than spanning Europe’s rivers and streams.

“My unit was involved in the release of prisoners of war at the Buchenwald concentration camp,” he said in one account his family provided to the Department of Veterans Affairs. “The prisoners looked like walking skeletons and some died while I was there. We used big earth moving machines to dig massive graves.”

Read it all.

It’s been more than a year since a military-induced massacre in Cairo, Egypt, killed 28 people””mostly Coptic Christians. But the only people convicted thus far have been the Christians themselves.

Last week, a Cairo court sentenced Michael Farag and Michael Shaker to three years in jail, charging them with inciting violence, destroying military vehicles, and deliberately attacking soldiers. Farag and Shaker were among the more than 30 Coptic civilians arrested following the massacre, 12 of whom were given life sentences last May.

Read it all.

Senior U.S. officials are pressing to mark for the killing or capture of the self-proclaimed mastermind of last month’s attack on an Algerian natural-gas facility that claimed the lives of 37 foreign hostages, including three Americans.

Adding the Algerian militant Mokhtar Belmokhtar to a U.S. targeted-killing list would represent a significant U.S. expansion into northwestern Africa, extending the reach of the U.S. program of drone strikes and other lethal counterterrorism operations, which have concentrated on Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan.

Read it all.

A proposal to arm Syrian rebels was backed by the Pentagon, the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, but the White House decided not to act on the plan, reflecting the extent of divisions over the U.S. role in the bloody conflict.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Marine Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Mr. Obama’s top military adviser, revealed publicly for the first time at a Senate hearing on Thursday that they supported a proposal last year by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and then-CIA director Gen. David Petraeus.

Read it all.

Iran’s supreme leader has dismissed a US offer of one-to-one talks on Tehran’s nuclear programme.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a speech posted online that the US was proposing talks while “pointing a gun at Iran”.

On Saturday, US Vice-President Joe Biden suggested direct talks, separate to the wider international discussions due to take place later this month.

Read it all.

Budget constraints are prompting the U.S. Navy to cut back the number of aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf region from two to one, the latest example of how contentious fiscal battles in Washington are impacting the U.S. military.

According to Defense Department officials, the USS Harry S. Truman, which was set to leave for the Persian Gulf region on Friday, will now remain stateside, based in Norfolk, Virginia.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ordered the change to the department’s “two-carrier policy” in the Persian Gulf region early Wednesday.

Read it all.

The U.S. military was closely tracking a one-eyed bandit across the Sahara in 2003 when it confronted a hard choice that is still reverberating a decade later. Should it try to kill or capture the target, an Algerian jihadist named Mokhtar Belmokhtar, or let him go?

Belmokhtar had trained at camps in Afghanistan, returned home to join a bloody revolt and was about to be blacklisted by the United Nations for supporting the Taliban and al-Qaeda. But he hadn’t attacked Americans, not yet, and did not appear to pose a threat outside his nomadic range in the badlands of northern Mali and southern Algeria.

Military commanders planned to launch airstrikes against Belmokhtar and a band of Arabs they had under surveillance in the Malian desert, according to three current and former U.S. officials familiar with the episode. But the ambassador to Mali at the time said she vetoed the plan, arguing that a strike was too risky and could stir a backlash against Americans.

Read it all.

According to the Assad regime, Israeli warplanes have violated Syrian airspace and bombed a scientific research facility. According to Western security sources, the attack was against a convoy of sophisticated heavy weapons destined for Lebanon and Hezbollah. Israel itself is saying nothing; nor, officially, is the US. For all the obfuscation and confusion, however, what is chillingly clear is the danger of Syria’s vicious civil war spilling over into a regional conflict.

The situation inside the country is dismaying enough. More than 60,000 people have been killed in the near two years since the rebellion against Bashar al-Assad began. Although the regime’s grip is weakening, the fight only gets bloodier; and as many as four million civilians have been displaced ”“ many of whom are now starving, freezing and dying from disease.

Read it all.

Russia has expressed concern at an alleged Israeli attack on Syria, saying such a strike would be an unacceptable violation of the UN Charter.

Syria’s army said Israeli jets had targeted a military research centre north-west of Damascus on Wednesday.

It denied reports that lorries carrying weapons bound for Lebanon were hit.

Russia has steadfastly refused to denounce Syrian President Bashar al-Assad during the 22-month conflict that has killed more than 60,000 people.

Read it all.

Prime Minister David Cameron has said the international community should use “everything at its disposal” to fight terrorism, on a visit to Algeria.

The recent hostage crisis, in which some 37 foreigners died, was “a reminder that what happens in other countries affects us at home”, he said.

He also defended Western intervention in the conflict in neighbouring Mali.

Read it all.

The $1.2tn in automatic spending cuts that Barack Obama once promised to avert are looking increasingly likely to occur because of entrenched politics in Washington, threatening a shock to confidence in the US economy.

Economists have long assumed that the so-called sequester ”“ a budgetary mechanism passed in 2011 that takes effect on March 1 and slashes the Pentagon’s budget by $600bn over 10 years while cutting discretionary spending for government programmes by another $600bn ”“ would be replaced or reversed by Congress.

Many saw a recent move by Republicans on Capitol Hill to extend the US borrowing authority as a sign of greater co-operation with the White House. But conservative lawmakers have recently made it clear that they were simply gearing up for another fight, and are prepared to take a hard line on the $1.2tn in cuts even amid objections from military hawks.

Read it all (may require subscription).

NARRATOR: Depending on the situation, the decision to kill comes from an intelligence officer who could be anywhere, a battle commander on the ground, or sometimes the pilot.

JEFFREY BROWN: Since the Obama administration came to power four years ago, the United States has vastly increased the number of drone strikes against suspected terrorists.

Just today, Reuters reported that six suspected al-Qaida militants were killed in Yemen. But their use has been highly controversial, on a number of levels.

And we move to that debate now, with Seth Jones, who worked for the commander of U.S. special forces in Afghanistan from 2009 to 2011 and is now a senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, and Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union….

Read or watch it all.

Police dogs checking for explosives at St George’s Anglican Church, Tunis, on Sunday, were “a healthy reminder that we live in volatile times”, the Area Bishop for North Africa, Dr Bill Musk, said on Tuesday. He spoke in the wake of an attack by Islamist terrorists in Algeria in which 37 hostages were killed, and a warning by the Prime Minister that North African states had become “a magnet for jihadists”.

Addressing Parliament on Monday, Mr Cameron said that the “murderous violence” perpetrated by the terrorists at the remote Tigantourine gas complex in the Saharan desert last week required a “strong security response”. Britain was engaged in a “generational struggle against an ideology which is an extreme distortion of the Islamic faith”.

Clergy had mixed views on the implications of Mr Cameron’s speech for Christians.

Read it all.

US Defence Secretary Leon Panetta has decided to lift the military’s ban on women serving in combat, a senior Pentagon official has said.

The move could open hundreds of thousands of front-line positions and elite commando jobs to women.

It overturns a 1994 rule prohibiting women from being assigned to small ground-combat units.

Read it all.

Every day there are small reminders, and here was one: Julia would hang the ornament because her father, Lt. Col. Paul J. Finken, died in Iraq six years ago, killed by a roadside bomb on the final patrol of his yearlong deployment….

The moment capsulized one family’s self-guided journey through loss. Over six years, Mrs. Finken and her daughters, ages 14, 12 and 10, have struggled through different phases of mourning, sometimes together, sometimes on individual calendars. But the one constant has been their determination to remember, without letting memory become a millstone.

“I don’t want to squeeze the life out of the memories, because I want them to still be precious and mean something,” Mrs. Finken said. “I also don’t want the memories to drag us down. Because memories can do that sometimes.”

Read it all.

The personal and the pastoral…both inform Ms. [Rita] Brock’s work. She writes about her father in her recent book “Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War.” Her co-author, Gabriella Lettini, is a theologian whose extended family includes veterans emotionally damaged by wartime experience. In the Soul Repair Center, Ms. Brock collaborates with the Rev. Herman Keizer Jr., who was an Army chaplain for 40 years.

Over the past three years, Ms. Brock and Ms. Lettini have spoken about moral injury and soul repair at the American Academy of Religion’s annual meeting and at denominational gatherings of Presbyterians and Unitarian Universalists.

Now, with a $650,000 two-year grant from the Lilly Endowment and the formal support of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the Soul Repair Center is beginning to teach congregational leaders how to address moral injury in veterans. The first such training session will take place in early February.

Read it all.

The military isn’t simply a profession””it’s a life. The line between public and private is vanishingly small. (This is one reason why the military can still punish misbehavior like adultery.) Mr. Page therefore has a powerful point when he complains that he had no way to avoid proselytizing comments and prayers by chaplains at formal West Point events. But his Christian colleagues are in a similar bind. There is nowhere else for them to take their faith.

Military chaplains are a key player in this matter. Isn’t it a First Amendment-violating “establishment of religion” for the military to appoint religious officials? No, it isn’t, because if the military didn’t provide chaplains, religious believers would be cut off from public worship in many military settings. The chaplains exist not for the military or the government generally, but to give military men and women access to their religion.

The problem is how to achieve this objective without creating an environment that seems to associate the military with particular religious views.

Read it all.

Update: A NY Times obituary has been published this morning–read it all.

A war in a measure unexpected, a war whose reality was unanticipated, a war which some thought would be over in a short time, became all too soon a reality. English public schoolboys and others who had compared shooting the enemy to a pheasant shoot, soon discovered a very different and terrible reality. Movements of troops took time. My father, when a boy in the brewery town of Alton in Hampshire, remembered the troops which had marched from the garrison town of Aldershot, camping on the Butts Green, as the first stage on their three day march before they prepared to move on to Southampton or Portsmouth to embark for France and Flanders. The journey to the front took time ”“ as it took time as the first Christmas of the war approached for Christmas greetings and Christmas gifts to be brought to those at the front….

So what happened at the Christmas Truce in 1914? It was conditioned by the new situation of industrialised warfare, and in particular trench warfare. No longer were battles charges of cavalry, whirling swords and thrusts of spears, knights in armour, or even the firing of cannon balls.

Read it all.

One of my friends sent me this this week, and it moved me to tears. Please do take the time to watch it all (in the ten minute range)–KSH.

In Fort Stewart, Ga., soldiers from the Third Infantry Division are honored with wreaths laid by their graves. NBC’s Matt Taibbi reports.

A ery important reminder–watch it all.

The Marine Corps’ top officer is meeting with all the service’s generals to talk ethics in the wake of recent scandals that have taken a toll on the reputation of the nation’s military leaders.

Gen. James Amos, the commandant, told USA TODAY he doesn’t believe standards among the Marine Corps’ top officers are slipping, but said the recent publicity has presented an opportunity to discuss standards and the public perceptions recent scandals have generated.

In the first such meeting, held near the Pentagon, Amos cautioned against a complacency that could lead to ethical lapses. “You reach a point where you become insensitive,” Amos said. “It’s not so much a sense of entitlement I think as much as you just forget.”

Read it all.

Colonel James S. Ketchum dreamed of war without killing. He joined the Army in 1956 and left it in 1976, and in that time he did not fight in Vietnam; he did not invade the Bay of Pigs; he did not guard Western Europe with tanks, or help build nuclear launch sites beneath the Arctic ice. Instead, he became the military’s leading expert in a secret Cold War experiment: to fight enemies with clouds of psychochemicals that temporarily incapacitate the mind””causing, in the words of one ranking officer, a “selective malfunctioning of the human machine.” For nearly a decade, Ketchum, a psychiatrist, went about his work in the belief that chemicals are more humane instruments of warfare than bullets and shrapnel””or, at least, he told himself such things. To achieve his dream, he worked tirelessly at a secluded Army research facility, testing chemical weapons on hundreds of healthy soldiers, and thinking all along that he was doing good.

Today, Ketchum is eighty-one years old, and the facility where he worked, Edgewood Arsenal, is a crumbling assemblage of buildings attached to a military proving ground on the Chesapeake Bay. The arsenal’s records are boxed and dusting over in the National Archives. Military doctors who helped conduct the experiments have long since moved on, or passed away, and the soldiers who served as their test subjects””in all, nearly five thousand of them””are scattered throughout the country, if they are still alive.

Read it all.

Military counterterrorism officials are seeking more capability to pursue extremist groups in Africa and elsewhere that they believe threaten the U.S., and the Obama administration is considering asking Congress to approve expanded authority to do it.

The move, according to administration and congressional officials, would be aimed at allowing U.S. military operations in Mali, Nigeria, Libya and possibly other countries where militants have loose or nonexistent ties to al Qaeda’s Pakistan headquarters. Depending on the request, congressional authorization could cover the use of armed drones and special operations teams across a region larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined, the officials said.

Read it all.

Asia will wield more global power than the US and Europe combined by 2030, a forecast from the US intelligence community has found.

Within two decades China will overtake the US as the world’s largest economy, the report adds.

It also warns of slower growth and falling living standards in advanced nations with ageing populations.

Read it all.

Some cyberattacks over the past decade have briefly affected state strategic plans, but none has resulted in death or lasting damage. For example, the 2007 cyberattacks on Estonia by Russia shut down networks and government websites and disrupted commerce for a few days, but things swiftly went back to normal. The majority of cyberattacks worldwide have been minor: easily corrected annoyances such as website defacements or basic data theft — basically the least a state can do when challenged diplomatically.

Our research shows that although warnings about cyberwarfare have become more severe, the actual magnitude and pace of attacks do not match popular perception. Only 20 of 124 active rivals — defined as the most conflict-prone pairs of states in the system — engaged in cyberconflict between 2001 and 2011. And there were only 95 total cyberattacks among these 20 rivals. The number of observed attacks pales in comparison to other ongoing threats: a state is 600 times more likely to be the target of a terrorist attack than a cyberattack. We used a severity score ranging from five, which is minimal damage, to one, where death occurs as a direct result from cyberwarfare. Of all 95 cyberattacks in our analysis, the highest score — that of Stuxnet and Flame — was only a three.

To be sure, states should defend themselves against cyberwarfare, but throwing vast amounts of money toward a low-level threat does not make sense.

Read it all.

Congratulations to Navy and especially Keenan Reynolds who won the game with his arm. My heart goes out to Army Quarterback Trent Steelman, it was hard to watch him after the game–KSH.