Tulsi Gabbard resigning?  Apparently she has someone near to her heart to care for.  I can’t say I’m not disappointed.  I’m sure DJT will find someone suitable, if he hasn’t already.  Tulsi’s husband has some rare form of bone cancer and I’m sure she’s needed.

Apparently we don’t believe in climate change anymore.  Trump has appointed Kevin Warsh as Chairman to revitalize the Federal Reserve and hopefully, like Trump says, the economy will boom.  Without inflation going up.  Have we entered an era of prosperity?

The Pentagon just declassified a slew of UFO files, some of which show US fighter jets blasting various unidentified aircraft out of the sky. Biden let a Chinese weather balloon fly over sensitive locations and didn’t shoot it down until it was out to sea. There are many unanswered questions about these videos; we’ll keep you posted.

We wouldn’t know there was a war in Ukraine if not for the news, but people are still dying. I don’t know where this ends, but Europe has been at war for one reason or another forever. There’s no reason to blow up the world over Ukraine, so I hope the big powers stay out of it. Or is it too late?

Ilhan Omar is in trouble. Apparently these schemes were just a way to get the government to fund luxury, and Ilhan knew about the fraud, and may have participated in it. One woman just got a 40 year sentence and claims Omar knew what was up. Wouldn’t you hate to be in her shoes?  She thought she’d make a splash, but she’s in over her head.  Other Minnesota notables are in trouble too.  How would you like to be Tim Walz?

I remember back in the day, Muslims going to Minnesota for college.  It’s become a hotbed of fraud.  We’ll see how this turns out, but it won’t be pretty.  Why did they choose Minnesota?  The weather’s not nice, and they come from the desert. Sharia law? We don’t care about it.  But how many millions did they steal?  How many officials knew about it, or were benefiting from it?  They’ve figured out how to scam the government, and we’re just onlookers.

I think we can be thankful DJT is President.  He’s dedicated to righting the wrongs that have come our way.  

Pentecost is coming up this Sunday, so prepare.                                      

Mark Armstrong

The post Weekly Update by Mark Armstrong – May 22, 2026 first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

FIRST ON FOX: President Donald Trump will sign an executive order Friday to alter the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War, reverting to the agency’s former namesake, Fox News Digital has learned.

Both Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have recently indicated they want to change the name of the agency. It is one of several initiatives the Trump administration has spearheaded as part of its “warrior ethos” campaign within the Pentagon.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-rename-pentagon-restoring-historic-department-war-latest-military-move

The post Trump to rename Pentagon, restoring historic ‘Department of War’ in latest military move first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The Pentagon will rush about $300m in weapons to Ukraine after finding some cost savings in its contracts, even though the military remains deeply overdrawn and needs at least $10bn to replenish all the weapons it has pulled from its stocks to help Kyiv in its desperate fight against Russia, the White House announced on Tuesday.

It’s the Pentagon’s first announced security package for Ukraine since December, when it acknowledged it was out of replenishment funds. It wasn’t until recent days that officials publicly acknowledged they weren’t just out of replenishment funds, but $10bn overdrawn.

The announcement comes as Ukraine is running dangerously low on munitions and efforts to get fresh funds for weapons have stalled in the House because of Republican opposition. US officials have insisted for months that the United States wouldn’t be able to resume weapons deliveries until Congress provided the additional replenishment funds, which are part of the stalled supplemental spending bill.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/mar/12/ukraine-military-aid-package

The post White House announces $300m stopgap military aid package for Ukraine first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The Pentagon said an accounting error resulted in an overestimation of the value of weapons being sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the last two years, and as a result, there is a surplus of money available for future security packages.

Pentagon spokesperson Sabrina Singh told reporters on Tuesday the accounting error was the result of military services using replacement costs instead of the book value of equipment sent to Ukraine.

Final calculations, she added, showed that in the current fiscal year there was an error of $3.6 billion, and in 2022 there was an error of $2.6 billion.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pentagon-accounting-error-overestimates-value-weapons-sent-ukraine-6-2-billion

The post Pentagon accounting error overestimates value of weapons sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Teixeira, 21, is charged with the alleged unauthorized removal, retention and transmission of classified national defense information, Garland said. He will have an initial appearance in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts.

“FBI agents took Teixeira into custody earlier this afternoon without incident,” Garland said. “We will share more information at the appropriate time.”

Teixeira is an enlisted member of the 102nd Intelligence Wing based in Cape Cod. He is also the leader of an online chat group who has shared an interest in guns and racist memes.

Continue reading HERE

Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2023/04/13/u-s-airman-named-suspect-online-leak-top-secret-documents/11657403002/

__________________________________________________________________

[Disclaimer]

The post Air National Guardsman arrested in Pentagon document leak investigation first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The officials said the Biden team has not been able to engage with leaders at the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and other military-run spy services with classified budgets and global espionage platforms.

The Defense Department rejected or did not approve requests from the Biden team this week, the officials said, despite a General Services Administration decision Nov. 23 clearing the way for federal agencies to meet with representatives of the incoming administration.

The delays came even as Biden advisers spent much of this week meeting with officials at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA, intelligence agencies that are independent of the Defense Department.

But Pentagon officials said their agency was taking steps required to provide outside officials access.

[Biden to nominate Avril Haines as next director of national intelligence; she would be the first woman to hold the position]

Sue Gough, a Defense Department spokeswoman, said Friday that the Biden team “has not been denied any access.” After being asked by The Washington Post about the apparent standoff, Gough said the requested meetings could take place as early as next week.

By then, Biden advisers will have waited more than a month since the election to have meaningful contact with intelligence agencies that have multibillion-dollar budgets, satellite networks that ring the planet, and vast surveillance authorities.

The delays have added to the unprecedented tensions surrounding the transition, fueled by a president who refuses to concede that he lost the election and spent much of his tenure accusing the nation’s spy agencies of disloyalty to him.

A Biden transition team spokesman declined to comment, as did NSA and DIA officials.

Current and former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter, said the delays have impaired the Biden team’s ability to get up to speed on espionage operations against Russia, China, Iran, and other U.S. adversaries.

The inability to meet with the NSA was described as particularly worrisome. The agency is the largest U.S. intelligence service, and its eavesdropping capabilities have been a critical source of intelligence on threats as varied as weapons proliferation and foreign interference in U.S. elections.

Officials said that rejections relayed this week to the Biden team cited seemingly petty procedural barriers.

One person said the Pentagon had asked repeatedly for rosters of those who would take part in a visit, lists of topics, and estimates of time to be allotted — information that in some cases had been provided at the outset.

“If they were in a cooperative mood, none of this would be happening,” said another person with knowledge of the interactions.

The Pentagon has been in significant turmoil since the election. Acting secretary of defense Christopher C. Miller was installed last month after Trump fired Mark T. Esper, his Pentagon chief.

Miller has presided over the removal of senior Pentagon officials, replacing them with perceived Trump loyalists including chief of staff Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen-Watnick, who is serving as interim undersecretary of defense for intelligence. In her statement to The Post, Gough indicated that Cohen-Watnick’s office has played a central role in matters related to the transition.

Pentagon officials, in turn, blamed Biden advisers. One defense official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the subject, said that Biden transition officials had improperly contacted agencies directly to arrange visits and briefings, and were told that they instead needed to submit requests to the Pentagon.

The result has been an awkward standoff in which former officials were spurned by agencies they formerly helped run. Among those ex-officials is Vincent Stewart, a retired three-star U.S. Marine Corps general who previously served as DIA director and is a leading member of the Biden intelligence transition team.

Other spy agencies have been far more receptive. At the CIA, for example, the Biden transition team has had extensive access to senior officials, computer equipment connected to the agency’s classified systems, and office space at “Scattergood,” a historic homestead on the CIA compound often used for hosting VIPs.

Biden recently named Avril D. Haines, a former top White House official and deputy director of the CIA, as his nominee to be director of national intelligence. Biden has made no other announcements about his intelligence team, but former deputy CIA director David S. Cohen is seen as a top candidate to be the director of that agency.

While scrutiny intensifies of the transition at Defense Department intelligence agencies, officials have taken steps to advance that effort at the Pentagon itself. The first virtual meeting between the Pentagon’s internal transition task force and the Biden team occurred Nov. 25. Since then, officials have taken administrative actions including granting access badges for the Biden team and completing non-disclosure agreements, Pentagon officials said.

missy.ryan@washpost.com

Ellen Nakashima, Shane Harris and Greg Jaffe contributed to this report.

Source: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/pentagon-blocks-visits-to-military-spy-agencies-by-biden-transition-team/ar-BB1bDYxq?ocid=uxbndlbing

The post Pentagon blocks visits to military spy agencies by Biden transition team first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the military was expecting formal orders in the coming days to go down to about 2,500 troops in Afghanistan by early next year from around 4,500 currently.

A NATO official also cited expectations of a 1,500 to 2,000 troop decline.

Trump fired his defense secretary, Mark Esper, and appointed other top Pentagon officials last week after longstanding concerns that his priorities were not being dealt with urgently enough at the Defense Department.

They included ending the 19-year-old Afghan engagement by Christmas, an ambitious target that opponents of the country’s longest war welcomed but which Trump’s critics warned could be reckless given ongoing militant violence plaguing Afghanistan.

Afghanistan has featured in a flurry of introductory calls by acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, Esper’s replacement, to U.S. allies’ defense ministers and chiefs of defense, a senior U.S. defense official told Reuters.

“It was a part of many of them because it is of great importance to our NATO allies, our allies in the region and also just global security and protecting the American homeland,” the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

But the official, speaking after the calls with allies, suggested that Trump would not push a withdrawal faster than conditions on the ground allow.

U.S. and Afghan officials are warning of troubling levels of violence by Taliban insurgents and persistent Taliban links to al Qaeda.

It was those ties that triggered U.S. military intervention in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks, which al Qaeda carried out. Thousands of American and allied troops have died in fighting in Afghanistan since then.

Some U.S. military officials, citing U.S. counter-terrorism priorities in Afghanistan, have privately urged Trump against going to zero at this point and want to keep U.S. troop levels at around 4,500 for now.

“The president has acted appropriately in this, has never said: ‘Hey, we’re going to zero. Let’s go tomorrow.’ It has always been a conditions-based effort and that effort continues,” the senior U.S. defense official said, without explicitly detailing future drawdown plans.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

‘SEE FIGHT TO THE FINISH’

Over the past four years, predicting Trump’s policy pronouncements has not always been easy.

On Oct. 7, Trump said on Twitter here “We should have the small remaining number of our BRAVE Men and Women serving in Afghanistan home by Christmas!”

But U.S. officials say he has yet to issue orders to carry that withdrawal out. On Monday the first U.S. official said the Pentagon had told commanders to start planning for the more moderate reduction to 2,500 troops.

A total withdrawal now would be difficult for the U.S. military to execute, especially given the reliance of NATO allies on the United States for logistical support, they add.

The NATO official, who asked not to be named, said the belief was the United States could soon announce a drawdown to 2,500 to 3,000 troops by Christmas.

National security adviser Robert O’Brien already raised such a possibility, saying last month the United States would go down to 2,500 by early 2021, in comments overshadowed by Trump’s Christmas timeline.

A NATO diplomat said Miller, in his introductory call with NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, did not suggest a complete withdrawal but instead a reduction of troops.

The senior U.S. defense official said U.S. withdrawals from Afghanistan had been carried out in an “educated way so as not to revisit the Iraq withdrawal that failed in 2011.”

Then-President Barack Obama withdrew troops against military advice, only to return them to Iraq three years later.

Regardless of what Trump might do, Taliban militants, fighting against the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, have called on the United States to stick to a February agreement with the Trump administration to withdraw U.S. troops by May, subject to certain security guarantees.

Violence has been rising throughout Afghanistan, with the Taliban attacking provincial capitals, in some case prompting U.S. airstrikes.

In Kabul, there is growing fear of a precipitous withdrawal that could further embolden the Taliban and undercut already sputtering peace talks, sources say. Miller, in a message to the U.S. armed forces chrome-extension://oemmndcbldboiebfnladdacbdfmadadm/here released over the weekend, echoed Trump’s desire to end America’s overseas engagements by saying “it’s time to come home.” But he did not offer a timetable and stressed the need to finish the fight against al Qaeda.

The Taliban harbored al Qaeda’s leaders and the U.S. special envoy for Afghanistan said the Taliban had not fulfilled their February accord commitment to break ties with al Qaeda.

“We are on the verge of defeating al Qaeda and its associates, but we must avoid our past strategic error of failing to see the fight through to the finish,” wrote Miller, a former Green Beret and counter-terrorism official.

Source: https://in.reuters.com/article/usa-afghanistan-withdrawal/trump-poised-to-settle-for-partial-afghan-withdrawal-despite-pentagon-shakeup-sources-idINKBN27W2BR

The post Trump poised to settle for partial Afghan withdrawal, despite Pentagon shakeup – sources first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

Democrats set a Tuesday deadline for Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Giuliani and the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to turn over documents related to Ukraine.

Three House committees also requested Vice President Pence hand over documents by Tuesday, though no subpoena had been issued.

The refusals from top administration officials were unsurprising after the White House counsel’s office sent a letter to top Democrats last week making clear that the administration would refuse to cooperate with the impeachment inquiry.

Matthew Morgan, counsel to the vice president, wrote in a letter to the three committee chairmen that Pence would not comply with their request, citing the lack of a vote establishing formal procedures for the impeachment inquiry and questioning the fairness of the process.

A letter from Giuliani’s lawyer to the House Intelligence Committee dismissed the subpoena, saying it is “overbroad, unduly burdensome, and seeks documents beyond the scope of legitimate inquiry.”

The Pentagon said in a letter to the three committee leaders that it has taken steps to identify and preserve potentially relevant documents, but that the subpoena “raises a number of legal and practical concerns” and the department would not comply “at this time.”

A senior administration official said that OMB and acting Director Russ Vought “are not participating in the sham impeachment process.”

House Democrats could move to hold those defying the subpoenas in contempt, though it is unlikely the Justice Department would prosecute them.

Democrats are leading an impeachment inquiry into whether Trump abused his office when he urged Ukraine to look into Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden during a July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president.

As part of the investigation, the Oversight and Reform, Intelligence and Foreign Affairs committees are seeking documents and communications among administration officials related to the call, as well as documents pertaining to the administration’s handling of military aid for Ukraine.

White House counsel Pat Cipollone wrote in a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) last week that the administration would refuse to cooperate with requests for documents and communications, decrying the impeachment inquiry as an “invalid” effort to “overturn the results of the 2016 election.”

Cipollone argued in his letter that the House had yet to hold a vote on the impeachment inquiry and therefore the White House did not have to comply with their requests.

It’s unclear whether such a vote would change the White House’s stance. Trump has said he would cooperate if the established rules for the investigation were “fair.”

Democrats have also issued subpoenas to Energy Secretary Rick Perry and indicted Giuliani associates Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman as part of their investigation.

In recent days, a host of current and former administration officials have testified privately to the House committees leading the impeachment inquiry, alleging that Giuliani and others were conducting a shadow influence campaign in Ukraine that undermined official channels.

Source: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/465973-white-house-pentagon-giuliani-reject-impeachment-subpoenas

The post White House, Pentagon, Giuliani reject House subpoenas first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

HONG KONG – Recent visitors to the bay surrounding a submarine base on the southern coast of China’s Hainan Island describe a curious nocturnal phenomenon. Powerful spotlights are sometimes trained directly on the ocean frontages of neighboring hotels at night, making visibility out to sea virtually impossible. Some of the lights are mounted on land and others on passing naval patrol boats.

“The effect is incredible,” said one recent visitor. “The glare is so great you can hardly stand it on the balcony. You go inside and draw the curtains tight.”

The blinding lights cannot obscure something of intense interest to the world’s military intelligence agencies: evidence that China has made a breakthrough in its drive to rival America and Russia as a nuclear arms power.

Satellite imagery reveals the regular presence of nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines at the strategic base near the resort city of Sanya. Specialized surface warships and aircraft designed to protect the subs are prowling key waterways off the coast. Facilities at the base appear to have been built to store and load ballistic missiles. Antenna arrays that support the hunt for foreign submarines have appeared on Chinese-held islands in the hotly contested South China Sea. And a veteran submariner has been appointed to command Chinese forces in the south of the country.

Taken together, this means China has a force of missile submarines that can launch nuclear attacks from beneath the waves and now appear to be heading out on patrols, according to serving and retired naval officers, diplomats and security analysts. That gives Beijing something it has until recently lacked: a more reliable “second strike” capability if its land-based nuclear arsenal comes under attack.

After six decades of battling to master complex and challenging subsea military technologies, China has joined the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom and France in the nuclear ballistic missile submarine club. In its most explicit assessment so far of this Chinese capability, the Pentagon in its latest annual report on China’s military, published in August, said that Beijing now has a “credible” and “viable” sea-based nuclear deterrent.

An effective fleet of nuclear ballistic missile submarines, known as SSBNs, marks a dramatic boost to China’s nuclear capabilities. Each of China’s four Jin-class submarines is armed with up to 12 ballistic missiles that can carry a nuclear warhead with an estimated range of 7,200 kilometers (about 4,500 miles), according to the Pentagon. That would put the United States within striking distance from the Western Pacific. Analysts at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies estimate these missiles could fly at least 8,000 kilometers. The U.S. believes China has up to 100 nuclear missiles based on land.

Beijing’s enhanced nuclear capability is one of the hallmarks of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ambitious revamping of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the world’s largest fighting force. China’s nuclear submarine fleet, Western strategists say, has added to the challenge that the increasingly powerful Chinese military poses to U.S. dominance in Asia.

“The opposing side can never be exactly sure that it knows where all of the submarines are,” said Peter Horobin, a retired Australian submarine commander and veteran of the Cold War battles to detect and monitor Soviet subs.

China’s Ministry of National Defense, the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Pentagon did not respond to questions from Reuters.

It is still unclear if the Chinese are deploying fully armed submarines to maintain a round-the-clock deterrent, as the other ballistic missile submarine powers do. Some analysts doubt China has advanced that far.

But the United States and its allies are behaving as if China has. Western military officials say privately that in operational terms, America and its allies — including Japan, Australia and the United Kingdom — are already attempting to track the movements of China’s missile submarines as if they are fully armed and on deterrence patrols.

Asked about their role in tracking Chinese subs, Japan and the United Kingdom said they don’t comment on operational details.

“China’s military modernization is consistent with its rapid economic growth,” the Australian Department of Defense said. “As with all countries, we encourage China to be transparent about its military capabilities and strategic intentions to provide greater assurance to its neighbors.”

Growing stockpile

“An armed Jin-class SSBN will give China an important strategic capability that must be countered,” Adm. Harry Harris, then head of the U.S. Pacific Command, told a congressional committee last year.

That response appears to be happening. The United States and its allies are expanding their anti-submarine naval deployments across East Asia. This includes stepped-up patrols of America’s advanced, sub-hunting P-8 Poseidon planes out of Singapore and Japan.

With its relatively small force of nuclear missiles, Beijing has always worried that it might be vulnerable to a debilitating first strike. These fears were magnified as Chinese military planners watched Washington employ precision-guided weapons in conflicts like the Gulf wars, Afghanistan, Syria and the Balkans.

As it strengthens and improves its nuclear arsenal, Beijing is the only major nuclear power to be adding warheads to its stockpiles. China is developing an air-launched ballistic missile and plans to build a long-range stealth bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons. With the sea-based second-strike deterrent in place, those programs suggest Beijing eventually intends to field a triad of air, sea and land-based nuclear weapons like the United States and Russia.

In the past two decades, the PLA Rocket Force, the service which controls China’s nuclear and conventional missiles, has invested heavily in expanding its stockpile of nuclear warheads and boosted the range and accuracy of the missiles that deliver them. It has also hardened the protection of its silo-based nuclear weapons, according to reports in China’s state-controlled media. The Pentagon and official Chinese military publications have reported that China has also deployed modern, road-mobile missiles that are more difficult for an adversary to find and attack.

Still, China lags far behind the United States and Russia in overall nuclear firepower. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute estimates that China has a total of 280 nuclear warheads. China does not disclose how many of its warheads are deployed and ready for conflict. The United States has 1,750 deployed warheads and Russia 1,600, the institute’s 2018 report said. The United States and Russia each have thousands more warheads held in stockpiles, according to the report.

Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project of the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, said he had yet to see hard intelligence suggesting China had placed fully armed ballistic missiles on its submarines at sea, despite the intense activity. Just because the submarines exist, he said, “that doesn’t mean that they have the weapons aboard the vessels.”

While acknowledging that China has significantly enhanced its nuclear deterrence, the Pentagon isn’t convinced that Chinese subs are yet conducting around-the-clock patrols. In a January report, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency said the Chinese Navy would need a minimum of five Jin-class submarines to maintain a continuous nuclear deterrence at sea. China now has four.

Undersea duels

A fleet of nuclear missile submarines hidden in the vast expanses of the ocean would help offset Beijing’s nuclear shortcomings, say Chinese and Western strategists.

Chinese naval designers and nuclear technicians have been working to build a force of nuclear missile submarines since the late 1950s. A single vessel was launched in the 1980s, but it was never fully operational. This submarine served as a test bed as Chinese technicians and designers struggled to overcome problems with nuclear propulsion technology, missiles and excessive noise that would have made the vessels easier for an adversary to detect and target.

To maximize its second-strike capability, China’s missile subs would need to be stealthy enough to go undetected as they sail to their patrol areas in the open ocean. U.S. and other foreign naval analysts say the Jin-class submarines are a sharp improvement over China’s earlier efforts, but they remain less stealthy than their U.S., Russian, French and British counterparts.

The 11,000-ton Jin-class submarines are stationed on the southern coast of China’s Hainan Island, close to deep water channels leading into and out of the South China Sea. The geography of China’s coastal waters has forced Beijing to base its missile submarines in this area, astride one of the world’s most important shipping lanes.

In the north, the Yellow Sea is too shallow to conceal big, ballistic missile submarines. The East China Sea is deeper but it’s confined by the Korean Peninsula, Japan’s island chain and Taiwan.

And Japanese and U.S. forces can deploy advanced anti-submarine warfare ships and aircraft based in Japan to closely monitor these waters and the channels that pass out into the Western Pacific, where the submarines are ultimately headed. The Chinese need to reach these waters to be in a position to fire on the United States.

The South China Sea, by contrast, is much bigger and in parts deeper, making it more suitable for concealed submarine operations, according to Western submariners with extensive experience of patrolling in this area.

China would need to get its submarines out of Hainan, past surveillance and into seas east of the Philippines for their missiles to be in striking range of the United States. This is a key reason why China has gone to such lengths to reclaim and fortify islands and reefs in the South China Sea that are expanding Beijing’s control over this area, according to Western submariners and military attaches.

The sub fleet’s vulnerability to detection also explains China’s extreme sensitivity to the surveillance operations of the United States and its allies in these waters. A Chinese destroyer sailed within 45 meters of the American destroyer USS Decatur in late September, as the U.S. warship patrolled in the Spratlys, a highly contested island chain where China has expanded its foothold in recent years. It was the latest in a series of close encounters in the past decade.

China now appears to be on guard against foreign subs attempting to detect and shadow its ballistic missile fleet. As China’s Jin-class vessels put to sea, they appear to be flanked by protective screens of surface warships and aircraft on station to track foreign submarines, according to military officers and analysts familiar with allied surveillance of the Chinese coast.

Serving and former senior naval officers also point to the extensive, frequent deployments of the Chinese navy’s latest Type 056A corvettes into key waters south of Japan and east of the Philippines. The Type 056A is China’s most advanced submarine hunter. It is able to tow sonar arrays and other listening equipment deep beneath the surface to detect enemy submarines — advanced technology that China did not have just five years ago.

China has also installed an array of sensors, antennas and satellite communications installations on islands in the Spratlys, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. The PLA is tracking the foreign undersea hunters from the air, too. It has formed a squadron of Y-8GX6 aircraft on Hainan with the ability to comb vast areas of the sea surface for magnetic anomalies. The turboprop planes have already been seen landing on Woody Island, China’s key offshore holding in the South China Sea. These patrols are not the infrequent exercises of the past, but now near-constant deployments, shadowing foreign warships as well.

“We’re looking at them looking for us,” said one Western military attache.

Furtive force

The submarine base near Sanya is now under direct control of the Central Military Commission, the top military decision-making body, chaired by Xi himself. The new communications installations in the South China Sea have helped knit together the new command structure, allowing tighter control from Beijing, right down to individual vessels.

In 2017, Beijing appointed a veteran submariner, Vice Adm. Yuan Yubai, to head the Southern Theater Command, which is responsible for the South China Sea. His promotion was a clear indication of the importance China attaches to supporting nuclear sub operations, according to Chinese naval experts. Yuan is the first naval officer to head a command of this type, a promotion that’s part of a sweeping overhaul of the military structure by Xi.

Commercial satellite images of the submarine base give insight into the furtive force stationed there. They appear to show missile submarines regularly tied up alongside long piers in the harbor. Satellite images from Google Earth in June last year show what appear to be three Jin-class missile submarines at the base.

The vessels have a distinctive shape, with a hump-like structure that houses the missile tubes behind the sail, the vertical structure that rises from a submarine’s hull. Clearly visible in the images: a partially submerged entrance to what appear to be underground submarine pens, beneath a hill next to the harbor.

Construction at the base near Sanya also points to the PLA’s ability to stealthily arm submarine-launched missiles with nuclear warheads.

Western intelligence analysts familiar with satellite imagery of the area say a covered railway has been completed that runs into a hillside bunker — the suspected warhead arsenal. The railway in turn is linked by tunnels to the pens built for the submarines. This, they say, means the missiles can be armed and loaded on the submarines — without detection.

Source: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/05/07/asia-pacific/chinas-furtive-fleet-nuclear-missile-laden-submarines-tests-pentagon/#.XNJ1fKBKiUk

The post China’s furtive fleet of nuclear missile-laden submarines tests the Pentagon first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.

The fencing, which will be 18 feet high, is to be erected in the Yuma and El Paso sectors, the statement read. The Pentagon’s announcement was notable. A reporter from the New York Times tweeted that it is the first time the funds will be transferred under section 284 for the border wall.

Section 284 allows the Pentagon to “construct roads and fences and to install lighting to block drug-smuggling corridors across international boundaries of the United States in support of counter-narcotic activities of Federal law enforcement agencies,” the statement read.

The Pentagon’s announcement was made as Trump nears a victory over Democrats as the House tries to override his first veto, a vote that seems certain to fail and allow his declaration to stand. The vote, which is set for Tuesday, would keep the border emergency intact, which for now, would allow the president to shift an additional $3.6 billion from military construction projects to work on a barrier along the southwest boundary.

The post Pentagon authorizes up to $1B to start 57 miles of border wall construction first appeared on Garner Ted Armstrong Evangelistic Association.