Maryland National Guard leadership takes historic turn

Maj. Gen. Linda L. Singh took command of the Maryland National Guard on Saturday, the first woman and the first African-American to hold the position, saying, "This is absolutely the best job I could hope for in the military and the best state in which to do it."

With some 250 uniformed troops in formation before her and hundreds of guests seated on both sides of the podium at the Fifth Regiment Armory in Baltimore, Singh, a 50-year-old combat veteran of Kosovo and Afghanistan, said, "When I think of the journey we have ahead, it's going to be tough, it's going to be challenging."

Minutes earlier the state's 29th adjutant general accepted the ceremonial blue flag representing the colors of command from Gov. Larry Hogan, who appointed her to succeed Maj. Gen. James A. Adkins, who has held the post since June 2008. The ceremony also marked Adkins' retirement from the military — 40 years to the month since he enlisted in the Army.

"And what a journey it's been," said Adkins, adding that the Maryland National Guard, a force of nearly 7,000, including volunteers and civilians, would be in good hands under Singh's command.

"Linda will continue to move this organization forward in these most challenging times," said Adkins, who was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal and the Maryland Distinguished Service Cross during the 50-minute ceremony.

The adjutant general serves as a member of the governor's Cabinet and is in charge of daily operations of the Maryland Military Department, an agency with a $314 million budget that includes the Army and Air National Guard, the Maryland Emergency Management Agency and the Maryland Defense Force.

A veteran of more than 30 years in enlisted and officer ranks, Singh told the gathering that after meeting with Hogan about the position, she knew she wanted to accept it.

"Sometimes, you know, you get that feeling … I knew it was the right thing," said Singh, who lives in Prince George's County with her husband, Raj Singh, and two daughters, Tara and Shaniece. She has been awarded the Bronze Star and holds an MBA in military management from Touro International College and a master of strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College.

After the ceremony, Singh stood for more than an hour shaking hands, accepting congratulations and posing for photographs at a reception. She said she'd spent the week at meetings in Washington and Virginia with adjutants general from around the country and was inspired by their support.

"I was amazed at all the passion and support and wanting you to be successful," said Singh, who, along with her military duties, also worked as a director of operations for Accenture, a management consulting firm in Rockville. "That just makes me feel that I'm not alone."

She said her short list of things to do includes meeting soon with members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives to talk about the National Guard.

"It's important they understand us," she said.

During the reception, Col. Janeen Birckhead, a brigade commander of the 70th Regiment at Aberdeen Proving Ground, pointed to the list of Maryland adjutants general on the ceremony program, noting that Milton A. Reckord, who held the position for 41 years between 1920 and 1965, had to be forced to integrate the guard during the 1950s, a few years after an order from President Harry S. Truman ended racial segregation of the military.

"To go from there to here, that's huge," said Birckhead, who said she has followed Singh in command positions a couple of times.

The significance of an African-American woman taking command of the guard was not lost on retired Lt. Gen. James F. Fretterd, who served as adjutant general from 1987 to 2003, and presided over a push to bring more diversity to the officer corps. He recalled a meeting with officers that took place at the Fifth Regiment Armory soon after he took command.

"I looked around the room — there was no woman above the rank of captain," said Fretterd, 84, who lives in Denton. "I said we've got to change this with minorities and women. … I had four women who became general officers under my watch."

There's more to do, he said. "If it wasn't for the women and minorities, we wouldn't have an Army, we wouldn't have an Air Force."

Asked to describe the meaning of the day, he called it a "dream come true."

Former Maryland Del. Clarence "Tiger" Davis of East Baltimore said he worked with Fretterd during his time in the legislature on getting more women and minorities into the Maryland National Guard.

"What you're seeing is the culmination" of those efforts, said Davis, 72. "It started back in the mid '80s and here we are. … Who could have imagined where we'd be today?"

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©2015 The Baltimore Sun

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Better plane tracking trialed after Malaysia plane mystery

SYDNEY — Australia, Indonesia and Malaysia will lead a trial to enhance the tracking of aircraft over remote oceans, allowing planes to be more easily found should they vanish like Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, Australia's transport minister said Sunday.

The announcement comes one week ahead of the anniversary of the disappearance of Flight 370, which vanished last year on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 people on board. No trace of the plane has been found.

Airservices Australia, a government-owned agency that manages the country's airspace, will work with its Malaysian and Indonesian counterparts to test the new method, which would enable planes to be tracked every 15 minutes, rather than the previous rate of 30 to 40 minutes, Australian Transport Minister Warren Truss said.

The trial is expected to use satellite-based positioning technology already on board 90 percent of long-haul aircraft that transmits the plane's current position and its next two planned positions, said Airservices Australia chairman Angus Houston, who helped lead the search for Flight 370.

The trial would boost the frequency in which planes would automatically report their position, allowing air traffic controllers to better track them, Houston said.

"This is not a silver bullet," Houston said. "But it is an important step in delivering immediate improvements to the way we currently track aircraft while more comprehensive solutions are developed."

There is no requirement for real-time tracking of commercial aircraft and ever since Flight 370 disappeared, air safety regulators and airlines have been trying to agree on how extensively planes should be tracked. The Boeing 777 veered sharply off-course and vanished from radar shortly into its flight on March 8.

An international team of experts who analyzed a series of hourly transmissions between the plane and a satellite later determined that the plane traveled for another seven hours before crashing somewhere within a remote 60,000 square kilometer (23,000 square mile) patch of the Indian Ocean. An extensive, monthslong search of that area is still underway, but nothing has yet been found.

Analysis: Mosul Museum video from Islamic State could be a staged drama

The Islamic State group wants the global community to know that there’s a new sheriff in town. So it wrecked a museum full of precious sculptures and on Thursday posted video of the vandalism on the Internet.

At least, that’s what their video wants you to think. The video quickly went viral, but there is reason for some skepticism.

Militants inside the Mosul Museum in northern Iraq are shown calmly going about the business of smashing 3,000-year-old statues from the ancient Assyrian empire and other historical dynasties. An on-camera narrator, citing verses from the Quran, confidently explains the destructive iconoclasm against pre-Muslim works of art as a necessary fulfillment of Muhammad’s dictum against the worship of false idols.

Earlier videos from Islamic State show the beheading of soldiers, journalists and humanitarian aid workers. The new video purports to show nothing less than the beheading of an entire civilization.

The question is: Does it really? Or is the video, instead, a grotesque perversion of performance art, cynically designed to inflate the image of Islamic State power?

However genuine their belief system, the chilling, five-minute video incorporates extensive fabrication. It may well be a carefully staged, falsified dramatic event performed to create an effective propaganda tool to achieve important Islamic State goals.

Look closely, and most of the toppling statues shatter in clouds of dust. Apparently they are plaster replicas of ancient statues, not carvings in alabaster and other durable stone with which authentic imperial sculpture was made. Toppled stone would break in cleaner chunks.

Stone is an enduring material. Impressive examples of ancient Assyrian art are held in many major museums internationally, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Five extraordinary alabaster reliefs from the inner walls of the palace of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 B.C.) in modern-day Nimrud, just south of Mosul, have been among the collection’s preeminent works since LACMA acquired them in 1966.

From the Great Sphinx of Giza to the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., its use in monumental sculpture embodies power. It is meant to express aspirations toward permanence, sometimes vainglorious and sometimes noble. Obliterating a revered stone edifice says — in no uncertain terms — that radical change has arrived.

Visit the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades, Calif., and count the ancient Greek and Roman marble sculptures whose noses are smashed, their pagan claim to enduring ideal beauty whacked by subsequent armies of the self-righteous. That erasure is also why the Taliban blew up the sixth-century Bamiyan Buddhas north of Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2001.

Stone is obdurate. Video is not. However, in YouTube culture digital art can be equally formidable. It spreads laterally and fast — then lingers in the electronic ether, available for endless replay.

Because Mosul is a war zone under Islamic State control, information on what actually happened at the museum is sketchy — and will remain so for some time. A similarly chaotic situation followed looting of the Iraq Museum in Baghdad during the 2003 American-led invasion.

Baghdad’s museum is a prime repository of civilization’s ancient cultural heritage, traced to the earliest settlements in the Tigris-Euphrates region. Invading American troops secured Baghdad’s massive oil ministry with 50 tanks and around-the-clock sharpshooters but, despite advance pleas from scholars, left the art museum defenseless. News of what was stolen, damaged or safe took months — and in some cases years — to discover.

Britain’s Channel 4 television gave the Islamic State propaganda video to archaeologists to examine. Mark Altaweel, an American scholar at the Institute of Archaeology at University College London, noted the modern iron rebar protruding from inside some of the smashed statues. It disproves their authenticity.

Nonetheless, the vandalism’s cultural insult strikes deep. The Iraqi people, Altaweel said, “are taking the destruction of their cultural heritage — their identity, essentially — just as seriously as the beheadings.”

And that is the point: The video is an incitement for its viewers, a blunt provocation for them to act.

On one hand, it is a bombastic recruitment tool, which beckons the disaffected to join fundamentalist religious fanatics in their supposedly glorious adventure.

On the other, it is an outrageous stick with which to poke the bear — including and perhaps especially the United States. The enemies of Salafist Muslim militants are essential to engage, if the cult’s apocalyptic endgame is to unfold. Abu Bakr Baghdadi, leader of the Islamic State group, would be pleased if we were shocked into intervening — boots on the ground — to guard our global cultural heritage.

Important antiquities have certainly been damaged or destroyed, including a monumental Assyrian statue of a winged bull-man that stood watch at one of the 15 gates to Ninevah. (In the video it looks like a lamassu, a human-animal protective deity, at the Nergal Gate.) Nineveh, once the largest city in the ancient world and long since a storied ruin across the Tigris River from Mosul, has been one of the 12 sites listed since 2010 by the Global Heritage Fund as being on the verge of irreparable loss.

Public libraries are being ransacked, modern books and old manuscripts from the Ottoman Empire burned. Punishment is death for attempting to hide or save artifacts. The iconoclastic sympathies of the self-declared caliphate should not be doubted.

Still, it is also true that taking a power drill or sledgehammer to a monumental stone sculpture does not make for what could be called, perversely and with a dry catch in the throat, “good TV.” Toppling statues in museum galleries and watching them smash on cold stone floors certainly does. Grandiose bluster is demanded of effective warrior propaganda that seeks to provoke.

Islamic State militants began occupying the Mosul Museum nearly eight months ago. The iconoclasm video they produced wasn’t posted until this week. Exactly when the smashing took place is not known, but the big gap between occupation and posting is worth pondering.

If the plan is to catapult the propaganda, timing matters. The ugly video is unprecedented — iconoclasm as Digital Age show business.

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(Knight is the Times’ art critic.)

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©2015 Los Angeles Times

Visit the Los Angeles Times at www.latimes.com

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Ukraine said to risk losing support for aid if war escalates

WASHINGTON — Ukraine risks losing support from IMF member countries for a proposed $17.5 billion bailout if the conflict in the former Soviet republic continues to escalate, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The new four-year loan program is awaiting approval by the International Monetary Fund's executive board, which represents the lender's 188 member nations. Getting the panel's consent will become more challenging if pro-Russia rebels continue their advance and seize territory such as the strategic port city of Mariupol, one of the people said.

A second person said that while a worsening conflict would complicate approval, IMF country representatives are likely to maintain their support unless an open conflict with Russia breaks out affecting the majority of Ukraine. Both people asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential.

Any doubts over the IMF funds would increase pressure on Ukrainian allies including the United States and European Union to step up their own funding to prevent the country from becoming more vulnerable to Russian economic pressure and wider incursion by pro-Russia rebels. A worsening conflict would make it tougher for Ukraine to maintain economic commitments to the IMF and repay the money while deepening the fund's involvement in the worst standoff in Europe since the end of the Cold War.

Plugging Ukraine's financing needs and stabilizing its economy amid an armed conflict will be an "enormous challenge," said William Taylor, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009 who is now acting executive vice president at the U.S. Institute of Peace. "If they're going to exist as a nation, they're going to have to be able to defend themselves."

Last year's $17 billion, two-year bailout for Ukraine by the IMF had broad support from the fund's board, overcoming concerns at the time about the security risks in the country, one of the people said.

Ukraine's military signaled Thursday that the latest attempt at peace is taking hold, saying there were no cease-fire breaches after 12:45 a.m. and the nation would start withdrawing heavy weapons from the front lines. local time, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said the peace deal was showing tangible results and there are no "ideal truces." The rebels said some fighting continues.

Ukraine's decision this week to tighten capital controls amid a plunge in its currency, the hryvnia, may also complicate the IMF plans. IMF staff members are revising their economic projections in light of the restrictions, according to one of the people familiar with the situation.

The Washington-based IMF said in announcing the program Feb. 12 that Ukraine agreed to maintain or implement certain policies, including a flexible exchange rate. The lender said in a statement earlier this week that while capital controls may be necessary, the fund expects them to be eventually lifted.

Ukrainian officials will have to explain to the IMF why the central bank tightened capital controls, as well as how the government plans to revive the economy in general, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

The IMF's executive board will consider the aid package on March 11 and the loans will be front-loaded to help stabilize the economy quickly, the fund said in an e-mailed statement Wednesday without elaborating on how the conflict will influence the board's decision. The fund hasn't given any indication that members will reject the program.

The IMF also said it's ready to assist Ukraine in designing measures to address imbalances in the foreign-exchange market.

Gerry Rice, an IMF spokesman, said last week that the proposed aid for Ukraine isn't conditioned on an end to the fighting. "The conflict is something that we are concerned about and monitor, but the new program makes very conservative assumptions in its baseline scenario for 2015 to buffer a further impact of the ongoing conflict in the east," he told reporters.

Ukraine's Finance Ministry said in an emailed statement Thursday that the nation hasn't discussed with the IMF the influence of any issues on providing a new program to Ukraine, other than actions that the country should fulfill before the IMF board meets. The ministry said it's certain that the parliament will support the package of laws to pave the way for the IMF's loan.

The intensifying conflict has shattered the fund's economic projections. In April, the IMF forecast the Ukrainian economy would grow 2 percent this year after shrinking 5 percent in 2014. By September, the fund had cut its growth forecast to 1 percent this year, while assuming the conflict would subside "in the coming months."

The Ukrainian economy ended up shrinking as much as 7.5 percent in 2014 as the conflict took a "significant toll on the industrial base and exports," undermining confidence and putting pressure on the financial system, the IMF said this month. The economy will probably contract 5.5 percent this year, Finance Minister Natalie Jaresko said Feb. 16.

The recent drop in the hryvnia and other major shifts in money demand and supply could delay the IMF disbursement because they may "necessitate an overhaul of some of the IMF's program assumptions and targets," Goldman Sachs economists Andrew Matheny and Clemens Grafe said in an emailed note Wednesday.

Another possibility is that other international donors besides the IMF could provide emergency funds in the coming days or weeks ahead of the planned loans, recognizing that the lender's "timeframe may prove to be too slow to stabilize the currency," the Moscow-based analysts wrote.

Ukraine's gold and foreign-currency reserves plunged to $6.4 billion in January, the lowest since 2004, from $17.8 billion a year earlier, according to central bank figures.

"The situation is really serious and if there is any foreign donor help, it should be coming in a matter of weeks, not months," said Ondrej Schneider, senior economist at the Institute of International Finance in Washington and a former adviser to the Czech government. "It's a matter of weeks before they run out of reserves."

IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde said earlier this month that the aid program is subject to "high risks," with the main one being "geopolitical developments that may affect market and investor confidence."

The IMF-led program totals $40 billion when including bilateral deals with nations as well as about $15 billion in savings expected from negotiations the country is pursuing with bond investors. Achieving that level of savings from a bond restructuring is probably too optimistic, Schneider said.

The IMF has stalled payouts under the existing funding plan as the nation held presidential elections in October, lawmakers delayed the passage of this year's budget and the parties negotiated the revised bailout.

Reported with assistance from Daryna Krasnolutska in Kiev and Marton Eder in Budapest.

EU court sets high bar for US Army deserter’s asylum bid

44 minutes ago

André L. Shepherd, a U.S. Army deserter who applied for political asylum in Germany, answers a reporter's question at a press conference in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2011. Shepherd said he will appeal the ruling that rejected his application for asylum.
Michael Abrams/Stars and Stripes

By Matt Millham

Stars and Stripes

Published: February 27, 2015

KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — An American soldier who claimed asylum in Germany after deserting the Army to avoid the Iraq war will have to prove he would have been forced to take part in war crimes in Iraq to win refugee status, Europe’s highest court has ruled.

The ruling also said “it does not appear” that the possible court charge and punitive discharge that former helicopter mechanic Andre Shepherd would face if denied asylum amounts to “persecution,” the European court of Justice in Luxembourg ruled Thursday.

A German court in Munich requested the ruling more than a year ago. The Munich court is expected to continue hearing Shepherd’s asylum appeal.

The Luxembourg ruling appears to back Germany’s earlier rejection of Shepherd’s asylum request, which was turned down in 2011. Germany’s Interior Ministry then said the soldier’s fear of persecution for deserting was not substantial enough to merit refugee status under European law.

The European court ruling appears to back that decision.

Thursday’s ruling said Shepherd could qualify for asylum if he could prove his military service “would itself include … the commission of war crimes,” even if his participation were indirect.

“It does not exclusively concern situations in which it is established that war crimes have already been committed … but also those in which the asylum seeker can establish that it is highly likely that such crimes would be committed.”

But he will also have to demonstrate that his “refusal to perform military service” was the only means by which he “could avoid participating in the alleged war crimes” and that he attempted to follow procedures for obtaining conscientious objector status. Failing to avail himself of conscientious objector procedures could disqualify him from qualifying for asylum “unless he proves that no procedure of that nature would have been available to him in his specific situation,” the European court ruling said.

Neither Shepherd, nor his lawyer could immediately be reached for comment.

Shepherd deployed to Iraq for six months in 2004-2005 and re-enlisted after returning from the deployment. He left his unit, the 12th Combat Aviation Brigade, in 2007 while it was preparing for another deployment and applied for asylum in 2008, becoming a vocal opponent of the Iraq war.

millham.matthew@stripes.com

Twitter: @mattmillham

Tuskegee airman tells students of his long journey

WASHINGTON — Original Tuskegee airman Calvin Spann flew 26 combat missions over Nazi Germany.

But after he returned from Europe, he never flew again.

Spann separated from active duty in 1946, but was enlisted in the Air Force Reserves until 1961. But even while keeping contractual obligations of being in the reserves, he was denied the opportunity to maintain his flying hours to keep his pilot’s license.

“Jim Crow was in the north — it was just undercover,” Spann’s wife, Gwenelle Johnson, told students from Charles Drew Model Elementary School in Arlington, Va. during a Black History Month celebration at the Reagan National Airport in Washington. “He would never get a plane to keep up his hours, and he really, really got frustrated.

“He just said ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ because every time he would go down to get a plane,” Johnson said, referring to the airport in Teterboro, New Jersey, “they would say, ‘There is no planes available’ and he would see the planes down there.

“And 50 years later,” she said, “they put him in their aviation hall of fame.”

Spann was inducted in to the New Jersey Aviation Hall of Fame in 2006. He is also a recipient of the Congressional Gold Medal and a Doctorate of Public Service from Tuskegee University.

He received his wings from the Tuskegee Flight School as part of the graduation class of 44G. The original Tuskegee Airman served in Europe during World War II as a fighter pilot for the 100th Fighter Squadron of the 332nd Fighter group.

He flew 26 missions before the end of the war, including the longest bomber escort mission in 15th Air Force history: a 1,600-mile round trip mission, from Ramitelli, Italy, to Berlin. The objectuive was to destroy Daimler-Benz manufacturing facility, and they were awarded Presidential Unit Citation for the mission, credited with destroying three German Me-262 jet fighters and damaging five more.

The 90-year-old Spann is frail, these days, and silently listened the program presentation at the Tuesday event, occasionally dozing off. Johnson said they struggled to attend the event because of his frequent visits to the hospital during the last six months.

“He made it here just by the grace of God,” she said. “He was actually in the hospital [Wednesday].”

The only time Spann addressed the audience during the program presentation was to speak about a replica of a US Airways Airbus presented to him as a gift of appreciation from American Airlines.

“I do want to mention something about this plane that I’m holding in my hand,” said Spann. “When I came out of the service most pilots got the opportunity to fly this type of plane. But we were denied that privilege.”

“I’m happy to be one of the persons that, later on, had American Airlines rescind that order.”

Johnson said that during the 30 years she has been around Tuskegee Airmen, she found that their feeling was that they did a job, they came home, and they got back into the routine before the war.

“If you talk to any Tuskegee Airman,” she said, “they will say ‘I fought because it was my country and I would do it again. We made changes in this country that needed to be made. We are proud that we did what we did.’”

Vasquez.rick@stripes.com

Twitter: @vmfiles

'Fireman' returns home from last deployment to surprise son

DOTHAN, Ala. — Staff Sgt. Brandon Bagwell has been deployed several times to serve in the nation's wars with Iraq and Afghanistan. Each homecoming has been relatively normal, but this one would be his last, and he wanted to do something memorable for himself and his 14-year-old son, Braidden.

Enter Northside Methodist Academy, the Dothan Fire Department, and a ruse of a fire prevention education program.

Bagwell, who is retiring from the military after six tours in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere as a member of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, Criminal Investigation Division, Southeast Asia Station, worked with the Dothan Fire Department to disguise himself in full turnout gear as part of a demonstration to students at the Northside Methodist gymnasium.

Braidden, a freshman at the school, was "randomly" selected to participate in the demonstration. His job was to help Bagwell remove his gear. When Braidden removed Bagwell's air mask and recognized his father for the first time Wednesday, he took a step back in surprise, tucked his head and smiled, then the two embraced.

The assembled high school student body at Northside broke out in applause.

Military homecomings never get old. This was one the Northside faculty and administration wasn't going to miss.

"I grabbed my tissue during the reunion moment," said Lisa Batchelor, marketing director for Northside Methodist Academy, who helped facilitate the homecoming. "I have had butterflies in the last few days in thinking ahead toward this, so when it actually happened I was overcome with emotion to be right here witnessing it in person. It was awesome."

Braidden, 14, is a typical freshman. He can be a cut-up at times but isn't 100 percent comfortable when that many eyes are on him. However, the reunion made it all worthwhile.

Because Bagwell has served in the special forces and been involved in several special operations, he hasn't had the opportunity to communicate with relatives via Skype or other social media while on assignment. That can make deployments even more difficult. Bagwell, who holds a degree from Liberty University, said he relied on his faith throughout his military career.

Braidden, meanwhile, has learned to adjust.

"I haven't seen him in a while. I'm glad he's here," Braidden said. "I don't get to see him that often, but when he was at Fort Leavenworth last year, I went over to stay with him before he went to Korea. That was the first time I really got to spend time with him. Now he's back, and I think he's going to retire, so I guess he is going to stay home."

Bagwell said this final homecoming provided the best opportunity to do something special.

"With our type jobs, we come and go, and you don't know when we get back until you show up. And, with clearance levels and things like that, you can't really have publicity. This time I'm out for good and wanted to do something for him because he's sacrificed a lot and certainly I think he deserved it. I'm looking forward to having some good days with him now."

Bagwell has served in various capacities involving several well publicized events. He was part of the security detail for the hanging of former Iraq leader Saddam Hussein. He was involved with the case of former Pvt. Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Edward Manning), who leaked classified military documents to a then little-known site known as WikiLeaks. Manning received a 35-year prison sentence.

Bagwell was also involved in working the mass shooting at Fort Hood that resulted in the death of 13 people. Nidal Malik Hasan was convicted and sentenced to death for the incident. He has also been involved with detainee operations at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. In addition to the Iraq and Afghanistan-related assignments, he also worked with the 20th Special Forces Group as part of a drug task force in South America.

Maryland lawmaker looks to allow younger troops to drink

Eighteen-year-old active-duty servicemembers can vote, smoke and fight for their country, but they can’t have a drink, and a Maryland senator is looking to change that in his home state.

Sen. Ronald Young, D-Frederick, has proposed a Maryland law that would allow active-duty servicemembers who are at least 18 years old to be served beer and wine at bars and restaurants.

Troops would be required to show military identification to be served.

Young introduced the bill because he believed those who put their lives on the line for the United States should be able to have a drink even if they are not 21 years old, the senator’s staff told Stars and Stripes.

The state’s general assembly scheduled a hearing Friday afternoon on the bill.

The Washington Regional Alcohol Program has spoken out against it.

Gregory Erickson, the organization’s president, told news radio outlet WTOP that the bill would violate a federal law on underage drinking, and as a result, could put $30 million in federal highway funds at risk.

Erickson said the law was enacted in the 1980s to stop youths from crossing state lines to drink, and driving afterward.

“The National Highway Traffic Safety [Administration] estimates that it saved almost 30,000 lives.”

But the bill has support from at least one influential veterans group.

Young’s staff said Friday that an amendment to the bill will require the Maryland Department of Transportation to get a waiver from the federal government ensuring highway money continues to flow before any change to the drinking laws goes forward.

A similar bill was voted down in the North Dakota statehouse earlier this month.

That bill would have allowed underage members of the military to consume alcohol on a military base if the commanding officer allowed it. The bill, introduced by Rep. Andrew Maragos, R-Minot, was amended to allow active military members to drink on “any premises licensed to sell alcoholic beverages.”

news@stripes.com

Love a man in uniform? Online dating scammers hope so

WASHINGTON — All together now: All you need is love. Love is all you need.

It seems like such a simple recommendation, and yet it can be awfully hard to find this essential component of a happy and fulfilling life. We spend a lot of time searching for The One, the person who will love us as much as we love him or her.

Dede (not her real name), who lives in Montgomery County, Md., thought she'd found him once. Well, twice. A mother of three, she divorced after 24 years of marriage.

"It was not my decision," Dede said. Still, she said, "it was something that needed to happen."

Dede had been out of the dating scene for a while. She's 60. "It's a tough age," she told me.

And it's made tougher, Dede thinks, by her job. She works in an industry that employs mainly women. Opportunities to meet men are scarce. Dede is looking for love in what researchers call a "thin market." That, as a 2012 paper on online dating in the American Sociological Review put it, is "when the cost of identifying multiple potential partners who meet minimum criteria may be large enough to present a barrier to relationship formation."

Dede joked that she'll have to pin her relationship hopes on a retirement community.

Of course, there's one sure-fire way of maximizing exposure to multiple potential partners, and that's by harnessing the power of the Internet.

Dede is not of the age that typically uses online dating. It's most prevalent among 25- to 34-year-olds, 22 percent of whom have used online dating sites or apps, according to the Pew Research Center.

"There's no stigma to it now," Dede said of online dating. In 2013, she joined Match.com. She went on a few dates as a result, but found the experience somewhat disappointing.

"One guy was half an hour late and didn't even apologize," she said. Others didn't look anything like their profile pictures.

Dede let her Match.com membership lapse and then rejoined last summer. Again, nothing seemed to click, but as her subscription was about to expire, Dede extended the geographic range of her searches. "I put it out farther, to include Baltimore," she said. "It came up with like 2,100 people."

One of those was a man named Mark Handle. In his profile photo, he is seated at a picnic table, his body turned toward the camera. He has a friendly face, salt-and-pepper hair, a nice smile.

According to his profile, Mark, 58, was from Killeen, Texas, but currently living in Baltimore.

"I'm thinking Baltimore's not too far away," Dede said.

What she especially liked about Mark was the age range of women he said he was interested in meeting: 50 to 68. "Many of these men who are 60 are going for 35-year-olds," Dede told me. "That just turns me off."

Dede sent Mark a note through Match's messaging system. He responded, and they fell into a casual online conversation.

"He was very kind," Dede told me. "He was very funny, very endearing. ... We got to the point where it was bantering and chattering back and forth."

Dede wrote about the horse she owned and about plans for her father's birthday. Mark shared information about his life. He said he was in the Army and had recently accompanied the body of Maj. Gen. Harold Greene back to the United States. (Greene had been killed by a gunman in August in Kabul.)

After about a week of communicating, Mark announced that he was being sent back to Afghanistan but would have access to the Internet there.

Mark sent photos, including some of him in uniform. In one, he was sliding an omelet off a pan into a plate held by a disabled soldier.

On Labor Day, Mark wrote about some of the things he enjoyed doing — swimming, golfing, camping — and lamented that he had to do them alone. He asked Dede if she liked the outdoors.

He asked something else, too.

"You really seem like the busy type," Mark wrote. "How about text messaging? That could save us some time."

And so Dede switched to text messaging, communicating back and forth via Yahoo Messenger with a man who increasingly seemed like he might be The One.

The first flag

Handle was coming home at last. No one was more excited about this than Dede, who had kept in touch with Mark, at his suggestion, via Yahoo Messenger. In January, Mark wrote Dede that he was coming home and even sent a PDF file detailing his itinerary. (He was flying on Lufthansa from Kuwait to Germany to Baltimore.) He'd floated to Dede the idea of staying with her, but that wasn't something she could agree to. Well, give me your address, Mark said, so I can find a hotel near you.

During one of their Yahoo Messenger chats not long before he was due to return, Mark raised something a bit odd. A box he was shipping home was unexpectedly held up in London. The contents were quite valuable, and the insurance was expensive.

"He didn't come out right away and say, 'I need $12,000,'" Dede said. "He just said the insurance was going to cost $12,000 and he didn't have it. I said, 'That's really a shame. I'm sorry I can't help you.' Then he just dropped it."

A red flag? To Dede, it was more like a pink one.

"He didn't press me for it," she told me. "I didn't feel threatened. That's when the chocolate and flowers came."

Mark sent a dozen and a half red roses and a box of candy to Dede's home. "I hope this makes you smile," read the note. "Can't wait to see you soon. — Mark." Later, he called her, but the phone connection was so staticky that Dede hung up.

In his next text message to Dede, Mark said he had found most of the money to ship the box (it supposedly contained diamonds). All he needed was $3,000. Could he count on her for it? He promised to pay her back.

"That's when I knew it was a scam," she said.

A long scam. "He emailed me for five months before he asked for anything," Dede said.

She assumes he was stringing along multiple women, each at a different part of the seduction. She can imagine him sitting at the computer with a spreadsheet so he could keep the myriad details straight.

"He was so smooth," Dede said. "He had this down pat. He had to have gotten money from women before."

Dede is glad he didn't get anything from her — and she even got 18 roses and a box of chocolates.

"He's out that money," she said with a laugh. "It makes me feel good."

Dede thinks online dating services should do more to screen out scammers, but she ignored many of the warnings that Match.com has on its site, including to be suspicious of anyone who asks to chat on an outside email or a messaging service, and to not share personal information such as phone numbers and addresses.

What particularly bothered Dede was the fact that her scammer draped himself in the patriotic mantle of the U.S. military, talking about his supposed service in Afghanistan.

I asked Dede to send me the correspondence between Mark and herself. She also forwarded me the photos he'd sent her. I did an image search on the photos and found a hit. The man with whom Dede thought she was corresponding — he of the salt-and-pepper hair and friendly smile — was closer than she knew. He worked at the Pentagon, where he was the Army's top enlisted soldier.

The man in the photos knew that women all over the world were falling in love with him, and he wished he could do something to stop it.

The many imposters

Despite being happily married for 13 years, Ray Chandler is one of the world's most eligible bachelors.

Single women can find him on the dating site DateMeMateMe.com, where he confesses to being "Very new to this dating thing and am looking to see where this takes me." At FishMeetFish.com, under the username RealChandler, he explains, "I would love my first date to be something special."

At GirlsDateforFree.com, Chandler describes himself as being 6-2 and weighing 158 pounds. At AdultSingles.com he is 5-11 and weighs a worrisome 85 pounds.

He is on Google+, LinkedIn and Facebook, where as recently as last week a Kentucky woman named Lois had posted a note: "Hi baby just calling to see what you was doing."

Literally hundreds of dating profiles and social media accounts are illustrated with photographs of the same handsome salt-and-pepper-haired military man.

Dede responded to just such a picture when she saw it on Match.com in August. The reverse image search turned up the real person in the photo: Raymond Chandler, who recently stepped down as sergeant major of the Army. When I sent Dede a link to Chandler's official Defense Department bio, she messaged back: "OMG! That is him! Does this guy know that someone is using his ID?"

Does he ever. And he's none too happy about it. Neither is his wife.

"The fact that people decided to use my image for their own personal gain, it felt like I was violated," Chandler told me last week.

He's a high-profile example of the military romance scheme, where West Africa-based scammers scour Pentagon websites, Facebook pages and other social media accounts to harvest photographs of troops. Using the images — and, often, real biographical information — they create fictitious profiles and prey on women.

"I've talked to people who've given up to $70,000 and never met the person," said Chris Grey, of the U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID).

Although these cases do not involve CID — military personnel are not the scammers or the victims — Grey has taken it upon himself to spread the word. "I'm a retired Marine," he said. "I don't want people to think a fellow service person is scamming them out of money."

The scammers typically work in teams and have different ways to extract their filthy lucre. Some, like Dede's, ask for money to ship something. Others tell their victims they desperately want to meet in person but must pay to go on leave. Grey has posted online dozens of examples of fake documents used by scammers, including a "Fiance Request Form" with a "registration fee" of $350.

Photos of senior Army leaders have proved so popular that the Army's public affairs office monitors misuse.

"They pop up in the 20s per day, usually with Facebook," Master Sgt. Michelle Johnson said.

Some victims have a tough time accepting that they've been scammed.

Said Grey: "It's really sad, because once you tell them this person has no idea their picture's been taken, they still want to talk to that person. They're emotionally attached to the thought of being in love."

Some are convinced that they've been scammed by the person in the photograph. Chandler said a woman in Poland went so far as to find the address of one of his adult sons and send an irate letter.

"We got the Army G-2 intelligence folks to get in contact with the Polish Embassy," Chandler said. "They had to go physically to her and tell her to stop."

Chandler said he was concerned because at the time he was on the hit list of an al-Qaida splinter group. If a broken-hearted Polish woman could find his son, well, that was worrisome.

Said Chandler's wife, Jeanne: "We heard about one lady, the guy was impersonating Gen. [David] Petraeus. She sold her house because she was going to go live in the general's house and sent the scammer the money."

"We heard about one lady, the guy was impersonating Gen. [David] Petraeus. She sold her house because she was going to go live in the general's house and sent the scammer the money."

While her husband served as sergeant major of the Army, Jeanne became adept at finding fake accounts. She would punch in a few search terms, see what popped up and then try to get the bogus pages taken down.

"It was satisfying in that I knew there would be a result, so that scammer's not victimizing anybody," she said. "It was like being a private eye."

But like a pernicious weed, every time an account is closed, more spring up in its place.

I sent Jeanne the photographs that Dede's scammer had sent her. Some were taken from Army websites, others from an official Facebook page. One had Chandler's head crudely Photoshopped on a different body.

The real Chandlers have a blended family, with six children and 12 grandchildren between them.

How did the couple meet? "I met him at the luggage carousel at the Shreveport airport," Jeanne said.

That method might not work for everybody. If you're involved with online dating, remember: Be suspicious, be vigilant, be careful. And never — never — send anyone money.

Kelly is a columnist for The Washington Post's Metro section.

Americans in Germany express relief, anger at resolution of driver’s license issue

KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany — Americans caught up in the driver’s license dispute between the German and U.S. governments expressed a mix of relief and anger Friday at news that Germany will again recognize the U.S. forces license without an accompanying valid stateside license.

Most frustrated were those who had spent hundreds of dollars to fly back to the U.S. to obtain or renew a stateside license. German authorities said they would recognize only a legal a combination of a valid stateside license and a U.S. Army Europe license. The new policy was enforced starting in January in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz, home to the largest U.S. military community in the country.

“The German government has put me through about six weeks of anxiety and torture, of being worried about driving and a lot of money to get this resolved,” said Jennifer Sherbert, an Army civilian financial counselor in Kaiserslautern.

Sherbert estimates the ordeal cost her $1,500 in airfare: for her own trip to Virginia, to get a license, and for her father’s flight to Germany, where he drove her around and stayed with her daughter while she went back to the States.

“Some people still drove, but I wasn’t willing to take that chance,” she said. “It was too much of a risk for me.”

Had she known Germany was going to drop the new policy, she would have waited to get her license until moving back to the States.

“I’m happy for the people that did not jump on a plane and go spend their money. It caused a lot of anxiety and confusion for a lot of people,” Sherbert said. “I think it could have been avoided.”

U.S. military officials said Thursday that German authorities had agreed to go back to the old policy, under which Americans in the country under the Status of Forces Agreement are entitled to drive, even if their stateside licenses have expired, as long as they have valid U.S. forces licenses.

The issue centered on the interpretation of an article in a supplemental agreement to the SOFA. USAREUR disputed Germany’s unilateral change to an interpretation that had been agreed to in 1993.

Last month, German police in Rheinland-Pfalz began enforcing a new interpretation. Some Americans without a valid stateside license who were pulled over during random traffic stops had their keys taken by police on the spot and faced a steep fine or possible court hearing for breaking German traffic laws. USAREUR said Thursday that cases initiated solely because of an expired license would be dropped.

So far, German officials have not said what prompted the decision to return to the initial interpretation of the SOFA supplement.

Uwe Marx from Rheinland-Pfalz’s Land Office of Mobility said only that the Federal Transportation Ministry checked the driver’s license issue and concluded “that everything has to go back to the way it was before the change.”

His office informed all the driver’s licensing offices in the state about the news, he said.

Air Force civilian Michael Spears was at the driver’s license office in Kaiserslautern Thursday, applying for a German license when he heard he would no longer need one to be a legal driver.

A week ago, Rheinland-Pfalz had relaxed some of the new rules, announcing that it would allow U.S. forces license holders who went through a defunct driver training program before March 29, 1998, to apply for a German license.

Spears, who obtained his USAREUR license in 1991, was seeking a German license through that accommodation.

“I don’t know how long this situation is going to last,” Spears said, “until somebody else tries to put their nose in somebody else’s business.”

U.S. Army Europe spokeswoman Hilde Patton said the statement USAREUR released Thursday about the German policy reversal “was a quick, early announcement.” The command is still seeking clarification on certain details, she said.

“We’re still saying it’s always a good idea to get your proper (stateside) license,” she said. But she confirmed again that Americans with expired stateside licenses are now legal to drive in Germany as long as their USAREUR licenses are current.

“Right now, that’s the way it looks,” Patton said.

Sherbert and other Americans said a valid stateside license in hand feels like an insurance policy against capricious German bureaucrats tinkering with the policy again.

“I felt stupid, actually, when I heard the news — gosh, if I had just waited,” said Michelle Irwin, an Army civilian employee in Kaiserslautern who spent 600 euros to fly back to Indiana to renew her driver’s license in early February. “Then again, what if it goes back the other way? I’m covered.”

Irwin expressed frustration at both the German and U.S. governments for how they handled the situation.

“I feel angry at all parties involved,” Irwin said. “I had just been in the States in September of 2014. Had I known (of the policy change) I would have gotten a license then. I felt communication wasn’t there from our government and I felt it was arbitrarily enforced right outside the places I had to work.”

Irwin used up four days of leave to get her expired Indiana driver’s license renewed. The journey there took 27 hours because of a snowstorm. A request to take administrative leave was denied.

“I’m angry all around. I want my money back and my leave,” she said.

One silver lining: “Indiana normally does four-year licenses. They gave me an eight-year license” because she lives overseas, Irwin said.

Reporter Marcus Kloeckner contributed to this report.

svan.jennifer@stripes.com

Prince William strikes a friendly contrast to Japan's prince

TOKYO — Britain's Prince William, on his second day of his four-day trip to Japan, is having tea Friday with Crown Prince Naruhito. Both princes may be equally charming, but it is no contest which one is seen as more approachable.

Members of the Japanese imperial family lead a highly cloistered life, guarded by the moat-surrounded stone walls of the palace. Their media coverage is just as tightly orchestrated and controlled.

And that has created a respectful distance between the family and the general public.

Don't count on regular Japanese clamoring to get the same dress or jewelry spotted on Naruhito's wife Masako in the same way many around the world do for Kate's.

Comments from the family are few and far between — sometimes in a poem issued here, a speech while waving behind bullet-proof glass on a balcony there.

Crowds have appeared for William, 32, waving to him, snapping cell-phone photos and eager to shake his hand.

"Compared to Japanese royalty, he is so friendly," said Naoyuki Tajima, who is overseeing an exhibit about British technology and culture in Tokyo, where William is scheduled to visit.

Tabloid-type gossip rampant for the British royals is taboo for their counterparts in Japan. Part of it is caused by the general docility of the mainstream media here. But much of it is the prevalent social sentiments about seeing the Imperial Household as shrouded in secrecy.

Until Japan's defeat at the end of World War II in 1945, the emperor was seen as divine. No one believes that today, but that hasn't changed the deeply rooted view they aren't really regular folks.

Ingrid Seward, editor in chief for Majesty Magazine, a London-based monthly that covers European royalty, said the Japanese emperor and his family could become more of a plus for the country's image by "modernizing" and becoming more visible.

William wins praise for his views on the environment and symbolizes "hope for the monarchy of the future," she said.

"They should take a look at Prince William and how he responds to the people he meets and how he is able to talk to the crowd, like his mother did before him," she said, referring to Diana.

On Friday, William laid a wreath at a cemetery in Yokohama, near Tokyo, where British, Australian, Indian and other Commonwealth servicemen are buried who died in Japan as prisoners of war or with the occupying forces after the war. His mother visited the same cemetery when she visited Japan.

He is scheduled to visit northeastern Japan, devastated by the 2011 tsunami and earthquake, which left tens of thousands of people homeless and killed almost 19,000 people.

Robert Dujarric, a professor at the Institute of Contemporary Asian Studies of Temple University in Tokyo, thinks the princes' differing status stems from the contrasting historical backgrounds, as well as the more powerful and independent political role the British monarchy plays today compared with Japan's.

"Over recent decades, many members of the House of Windsor, though not the Queen herself, have received the same treatment as actors, soap opera personalities," he said.

The interaction among William and the popular Kate with the public contrasts sharply with Japanese royal family, whose activities are governed by the Imperial Household Agency. But the agency has been criticized for isolating them from the public and for imposing traditions that some see as outdated.

For example, the Harvard- and Oxford-educated Masako — only the second commoner to wed into the imperial family after her mother-in-law Empress Michiko — used to be a fashionable career diplomat.

As soon as she married in 1993, she fell out of touch with trendy looks and has also been largely kept out of public view.

Masako, 51, has suffered bouts of depression for the past decade, a sickness the Imperial Household Agency acknowledges is stress-related, and the public speculates is the sign of the toll her insular and rigid life has taken.

No wonder William is, for Japanese, a prince closer to the people than their own.

"He is cool and handsome. And very tall," exclaimed Akane Ebihara, an employee of the Tokyo Fire Department, after shaking hands with William as he passed by with his entourage.

Asked by a reporter about his receding hairline, she vehemently denied that was a drawback.

"Oh, no. No problem," she said. "His smile is good. His hand was very warm."

Group says family doctors may opt out of troubled Veterans Choice program

WASHINGTON — Doctors may opt out of a program providing outside health care to veterans caught up in long waits at the VA because the department is not paying high enough reimbursements, a national association of family physicians said this week.

Family physicians approached to participate in the multi-billion-dollar Veterans Choice program reported they were offered rates far below the benchmark set by Medicare, the American Academy of Family Physicians wrote Tuesday in a letter to Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Bob McDonald.

The Veterans Choice program began in November but is already drawing criticism from Congress for the very low number of veterans who have made appointments for outside health care. The letter from the AAFP — one of the largest U.S. medical associations — indicates the VA may also have trouble drawing in providers.

“Simply put, any public or private payer health plan contract that does not at least meet the Medicare payment rate will remain financially impossible for most medical practices that already operate on extremely thin margins,” Reid Blackwelder, chairman of the AAFP board, wrote to McDonald.

The group said doctor reimbursement rates under the federal government’s Medicare health insurance system are used as a benchmark for public and private payers.

Some of its nearly 116,000 members are reporting that the VA approached them about being in the Veterans Choice program and offered rates that were 30 percent below Medicare.

“If the VA continues to offer contracts at less than the Medicare rate, the AAFP is concerned that most practices will not be able to participate in the program, which undermines the law’s intent of expanding access to veterans,” Blackwelder wrote.

On Thursday, Senators said the Veterans Choice program appears not to be working and that it is “shockingly underutilized” by VA beneficiaries. After 500,000 calls, only about 30,000 appointments or requests have been resolved so far.

The program is designed to provide outside health care to veterans who are having trouble getting appointments in the nationwide system of VA hospitals and clinics. Last year, the department was mired in a scandal over tens of thousands of vets waiting months to receive needed care.

The program was passed last summer as part of a massive federal law overhauling the VA following a nationwide scandal of long patient wait times and records manipulation. The VA began mailing out Veterans Choice cards to beneficiaries in November and completed those mailings in January.

tritten.travis@stripes.com

Twitter: @Travis_Tritten

Pendleton Marines train for large-scale deployment

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. — At the northwestern tip of this massive base, hundreds of Marines spent the last 10 days preparing for full-scale war. It’s the first time in more than a decade they are training for this type of combat, all aligned with new guidance from the commandant.

Gen. Joseph Dunford expects all Marine units to be “physically and mentally ready” to deploy anywhere, at any time, he said in planning guidance released last month. But instead of having every platoon, company and battalion involved in constant training for everything, he has outlined broad responsibilities for each of the three Marine Expeditionary Forces. Commanders and Marines can now focus on core competencies related to specific operations they might be involved in. This rebalance will help address shortfalls in personnel, equipment and training in nondeployed units, he said.

It’s also the first exercise of its size in more than a decade. More than 1,800 Marines and sailors were involved in the training, which simulated the deployment of more than 50,000 U.S. troops. The countries in the exercise are fictional, and no one mentioned a specific threat, even though talk of “anti-access area denial” conjures images of Russia and China.

Inside the sprawling combat operations center — a maze of tents serving as the nerve center for the enormous operation — members of I Marine Expeditionary Force monitored communication lines, pored over intelligence and studied computer screens, planning an enormous battle designed to push invading troops back into their own country and restore international borders.

“We don’t know what’s coming,” said Lt. Col. Doug “Lucky” Luccio, deputy current operations officer for I MEF, as he walked through the command center, pointing out an Army Ranger, civil affairs officers, logistics Marines and intelligence troops. Marine aviation units participated from an operations center at Miramar, 32 miles south.

“We have to make sure [the training scenario] is big enough,” he said, so that everyone and every process is tested.

The last time an entire MEF deployed was the march to Baghdad in 2003. Since then, the Marine Corps has deployed smaller forces to Iraq and Afghanistan and other spots around the world. Now, Luccio said, Marines must return to what they call their “core competencies,” instead of focusing solely on counterinsurgency.

Under the new guidance, the California I MEF, which encompasses virtually all of the troops stationed at Camp Pendleton and Twentynine Palms as well as the Marine Corps air stations in Miramar and Yuma, Ariz., is charged with maintaining proficiency in “major operations and campaigns.”

North Carolina-based II MEF will focus on maintaining proficiency for smaller unit crisis response, in the 12,000 to 20,000-troop range, while the Okinawa-based III MEF will focus on “the full range of military operations” in the Pacific, according to the guidance.

The MEF-level exercise, dubbed MEFEX, means I MEF “is well on [its] way to meeting the commandant’s intent,” said Brig. Gen. Joaquin Malavet, deputy commander of I MEF.

A Marine Corps training group of about 60 service members and contractors drove the exercise, acting as the enemy and as the higher headquarters – a sort of “boss” command that pushed information down to the MEF and approved battle plans created by the MEF.

On Wednesday, the I MEF staff began a simulated air and ground attack on the occupying force, which involved not just enveloping the enemy and calling in air strikes, but also keeping the simulated troops supplied and warding off cyberattacks and attacks on the base at Camp Pendleton.

The exercise built on training last year that focused on getting Marines from sea to shore, touching on another piece of Dunford’s guidance: naval integration.

Malavet said it just makes sense, because in a real-world situation, the Navy and Marine Corps work together to cover all domains — space, cyber, sea, undersea and ground.

“You have to put in place a series of training exercises that methodically gets at the kind of capabilities and refines and strengthens those capabilities for interoperability that we would need across those domains,” he said. “And the way that you bring that together is with exercises like this MEFEX.”

Athletes know there is a difference between studying game tape and getting out on the field, he said.

“This is about mental memory, muscle memory, unit cohesion,” Malavet said. “The key is to always be prepared, across the full range of military operations.”.

The training wasn’t just for Marines inside the command center. Col. James Herrera’s units were tasked with building, sustaining and protecting the expeditionary base.

That included food, generators, communications, mail, sleeping quarters, restroom and shower facilities, chaplain services and base security, said Herrera, commander of I MEF Headquarters Group.

It’s a lot of work, but he said it’s critical for building relationships, improving communication and learning to get things up and running quickly.

“It’s very hard to do that on PowerPoint,” he said.

hlad.jennifer@stripes.com

Twitter: @jhlad

‘Jihadi John’ named as Kuwaiti-born west Londoner

The masked Islamic State militant who appears to have beheaded several foreign hostages in Islamic State group videos has been identified by British security services as Mohammed Emwazi, a Kuwaiti-born British citizen from west London, according to the BBC.

Emwazi, 27, grew up in West London in a well-to-do family and graduated from the University of Westminster with a degree in computer programming, The New York Times reported.

He was previously known to British security services, but they had not disclosed his name earlier for operational reasons, the BBC wrote.

Known in the news media as “Jihadi John,” he is said to have gone to Syria in 2012. His name was first published Thursday on the website of The Washington Post.

He first appeared in a video in August, in which the American journalist James Foley was beheaded.

Emwazi was later thought to have been pictured in the videos of the beheadings of U.S. journalist Steven Sotloff, British aid worker David Haines, British taxi driver Alan Henning and American aid worker Peter Kassig.

In each video, the man appeared dressed in a black robe with a black balaclava covering all but his eyes and top of his nose.

Speaking with a British accent, Emwazi taunted Western powers before holding his knife to the hostages’ necks, and the video stopped. The victims’ decapitated bodies were then shown.

Earlier this month, the militant featured in a video in which the Japanese journalist Kenji Goto appeared to be beheaded.

Hostages released by IS said he was one of four British jihadists guarding Westerners abducted by the group in Syria. They were known collectively as “the Beatles.”

Emwazi apparently became radicalized after being detained by the authorities after a flight with friends to Tanzania in 2009 for a safari after graduation. He was detained and accused by British intelligence officers of trying to make his way to Somalia.

Friends of his told The Post that Emwazi and two others — a German convert to Islam named Omar and another man, Abu Talib — never made it to the safari. On landing in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in May 2009, they were detained by the police and held overnight before eventually being deported, they said.

Asim Qureshi, a research director at CAGE, a British advocacy organization opposed to what it calls the “war on terror,” met with Emwazi in the fall of 2009. “Mohammed was quite incensed by his treatment, that he had been very unfairly treated,” Qureshi told The Post.

Emwazi then moved to Kuwait, his birthplace, worked for a computer company and returned to London at least twice, Qureshi said. British counterterrorism officials detained Emwazi in June 2010, fingerprinting him and searching his belongings.

USS Makin Island returns to San Diego after 7-month deployment

ABOARD THE USS MAKIN ISLAND – As the USS Makin Island made its way around Point Loma and into San Diego Bay on Wednesday morning, sailors took advantage of the cell phone signal to text loved ones eagerly awaiting their arrival.

As a tugboat pulled the amphibious assault ship into Pier 13, family members on shore shouted, waved and held up signs for their sailors, who stood at parade rest along the edges of the flight deck. When they were released from formation, sailors cheered, and a few began singing the theme song from “Team America: World Police.”

About 1,900 sailors with the Makin Island Amphibious Ready Group had returned home to Naval Base San Diego after a seven-month deployment that sailors called rough but rewarding.

The deployment was the first for Petty Officer 3rd Class Lindsey Thompson, an aviation ordnanceman from Jefferson, Ore. While it was cool to see other parts of the world, she said, it “also gave me a greater respect for America.”

But port calls weren’t the only high point for Thompson and co-worker Seaman Kately Boardman. The two helped build bombs that were used in air strikes against the Islamic State in Iraq.

Both said they didn’t know what the bombs were going to be used for when they were building them, but were excited when they found out they had made a contribution to Operation Inherent Resolve.

Most of the time, they’re just down in the magazine, they said, which is a stressful environment without a lot of connection to the outside world.

“It’s nice to know what you’re doing is really important,” Thompson said.

During the seven months away from home, the Makin Island made stops in Hong Kong, Singapore, Oman and Hawaii, but also spent 115 straight days at sea, sitting off the coast of Yemen. Typically, a ship on deployment goes into port every 30 days or so, said Capt. Jon Rodgers, the ship’s commander.

The Makin Island, USS San Diego and USS Comstock also rescued 11 researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who were trapped on Pacific atolls during a hurricane in August.

Not all rescue attempts were successful.

In October, a Marine Osprey crew member was lost at sea after he and another Marine had to bail out shortly after takeoff from the Makin Island. In December, Navy SEALs were able to reach an American journalist and a South African teacher being held in an al-Qaida compound in Yemen, but both were shot by their captors. One died on the rescue aircraft, the other during surgery on the Makin Island.

Yet despite the hardships – and the fact that 65 percent of the crew, including Thompson and Boardman, were on their first deployment – the sailors and Marines stayed focused, Rodgers said.

“They knocked it out of the park,” Rodgers said. “America should be very proud.”

The deployment was Petty Officer 2nd Class David Wright’s third. He said it wasn’t bad but felt longer than usual because they spent so much time at sea.

The younger of Wright’s two sons is very ill and has undergone a liver transplant, so it is hard to be on the other side of the world, he said – particularly when the ship is at sea and there is no way to do a video call.

“But the whole point of what I do is for my children,” he said. “My son calls me his superhero.”

Petty Officer 1st Class Hubert Bell said the deployment was his fifth, but the first time he was away from his wife and three children. It took “a lot of patience and calmness” to deal with the stress of being at sea for such a long stretch of time, he said.

“I’m ready to be home,” he said Tuesday, standing in the hangar deck less than 24 hours before the ship docked. “I can’t wait.”

Seaman Justin Talbert’s wife Mary won a contest to get the “first kiss,” meaning Talbert was first to leave the ship. He seemed a little nervous as he waited on board with a bouquet of red roses but was beaming as he embraced his wife.

“It’s been a long deployment,” he said. “I’m just glad to be home.”

hlad.jennifer@stripes.com Twitter: @jhlad

NATO coalition convoy struck in Kabul

19 minutes ago

By Josh Smith and Zubair Babakarkhail

Stars and Stripes

Published: February 26, 2015

KABUL, Afghanistan — A suicide attack struck a NATO coalition convoy in downtown Kabul on Thursday, killing two people.

At about 8:30 a.m., a suicide bomber in a Toyota Corolla attacked two vehicles belonging to Turkish members of the NATO-led Resolute Support mission, Kabul police spokesman Hashmat Stanikzai said.

The blast killed at least one Turkish individual and one Afghan civilian bystander, as well as the attacker, he said.

Coalition officials confirmed it was one of their convoys but did not release any information on casualties.

The attack occurred deep in the heart of Kabul in an area that hosts the embassies of Turkey and Iran, among other government buildings.

Some local media reported that the recently appointed NATO civilian representative to Afghanistan, Ismail Aramaz, was the target of the attack. But NATO spokesman Chris Chambers told Stars and Stripes that Aramaz was at his residence, not in the vehicles, at the time of the blast.

smith.josh@stripes.net Twitter: @joshjonsmith

European concern over Russia not reflected in defense spending

Russia’s intervention in Ukraine may have been a “game changer” for NATO, but the concern voiced in capitals across Europe has not been reflected in defense spending, which in many cases is decreasing, according to an analysis released Thursday.

While some countries, notably those who feel most directly threatened by Russia — the Baltic nations, Poland and Romania — have been gradually increasing spending, major member states such as Germany and the United Kingdom are continuing to cut spending, raising questions about the state of alliance readiness, the London-based European Leadership Network stated in an analysis of alliance spending plans.

“What we’ve done is try and shine a light on the follow through since Wales, and there is little sign that there has been any,” said Ian Kearns, director of the think tank focused on military and security issue.

At the NATO summit in Wales in September, leaders agreed to “reverse the trend of declining defense budgets.”

The report, titled “The Wales Pledge Revisited,” looked at spending trends in 14 of the alliance’s 28-member countries and how they are faring in meeting NATO’s guideline for each country to spend at least 2 percent of gross domestic product on defense.

In recent years, only four countries — the U.S., United Kingdom, Estonia and Greece — have met that requirement.

“(T)he figures presented in this document do not reflect NATO’s rhetoric about events in Ukraine being a ‘game-changer’ for European security,” the report concluded.

In Germany, Europe’s economic and political powerhouse, defense spending this year is set to drop to 1.09 percent of GDP, down from 1.3 percent two years earlier, according to the report.

For Europe as a whole, relatively modest spending gains by a handful of small countries such as Lithuania, with a 2015 defense budget of $474 million or Latvia, $283 million, will do little to bolster Europe’s overall defense investment if Germany and the U.K., which last year spent $44 billion and $55 billion respectively, continue to shrink their budgets, Kearns said.

Poland, with a budget of about $10 billion, “is the most important of those countries that are increasing, but after that you’re dealing with very small countries, with very small defense budgets,” Kearns said. “The big players in Europe aren’t doing that.”

For years, the U.S. has been critical of its European partners for cutting defense spending, which has steadily declined since 1990. U.S. defense spending far outpaces its allies’ at roughly $580 billion.

For that reason, the European Leadership Network elected not to examine U.S. spending in its report, saying it already carries “the largest share of the burden.”

In 2014, European allies spent around $250 billion on defense, which was a reduction of $7 billion or about 3 percent from the previous year, according to NATO data.

“We still have a serious mismatch between the security challenges we face, and the resources we are dedicating to our defense, and continuing imbalances — both across the Atlantic, and within Europe itself,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said in January.

Still, NATO spending far outpaces that of Russia. While Russia’s military has been growing at a rapid pace in recent years — Moscow’s defense budget is projected to be larger than those of France and Germany combined by 2016 — Europe as a whole still spends four times as much on defense, according to the defense publication IHS Janes.

Despite the spending cuts, challenges from Russia and Islamic State militants threatening its southern flank have spurred NATO to take steps to become more agile and responsive.

However, questions remain about NATO’s long-term viability and ability to respond to threats should the cutbacks continue.

“(T)he freeze of, or decrease in, the defense budgets of these countries is resulting in dangerous underfunding for infrastructure and equipment projects and is damaging what is left of the European pillar of NATO,” the report stated.

Germany in particular has suffered a series of high-profile equipment failures and shortages in the past year, ranging from forced delays in military flights out of Afghanistan to postponed humanitarian anti-Ebola missions.

Such shortfalls call into question “the extent to which Germany will be able to contribute to NATO’s overall defense needs,” the report said. “Technical problems and lack of qualified personnel could also seriously diminish Germany’s ability to fulfill all of its NATO commitments, something acknowledged even by” Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen.

Another challenge for Europe, however, is that it also is not getting enough capability out of what it already spends, with too much funding being directed toward non-deployable military personnel rather than equipment upgrades and bolstering expeditionary units, Kearns said.

“In many of these European countries, it’s skewed toward manpower costs, but it’s politically toxic to talk about laying people off,” Kearns said.

vandiver.john@stripes.com

Judge halts Sept. 11 Guantanamo terror case

42 minutes ago

By Erik Slavin

Stars and Stripes

Published: February 25, 2015

A military judge halted all proceedings Wednesday in the Sept. 11 terror case at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, ruling that a Pentagon edict requiring trial judges to live there for the trial’s duration constituted unlawful influence.

Army Judge Col. James Pohl, chief of the Guantanamo military commission, issued the stay after a defense motion calling for a dismissal of charges against Khalid Shaikh Mohammad, Al Qaeda’s second-in-command at the time, and four others accused as accomplices.

The order requiring judges to remain in Guantanamo constitutes “at least the appearance of, an unlawful attempt to pressure the military Judge to accelerate the pace of litigation and an improper attempt to usurp judicial discretion,” Pohl wrote.

The order could conceivably be viewed by outside parties as an attempt to compromise the judiciary’s independence, Pohl added.

The story is developing. Check back later for updates.

slavin.erik@stripes.com Twitter: @eslavin_stripes

Troop, family groups split on Tricare overhaul

WASHINGTON — Troop and military family associations were divided Wednesday over a proposal to abandon the Tricare health insurance system in favor of a larger privatized system with higher fees.

The Military Officers Association of American, which was among the groups testifying before the Senate, said the Defense Department should focus on saving consolidating and reforming Tricare. But others such as the National Guard Association told lawmakers it is open to an overhaul.

Congress is weighing changes now that would raise average annual health insurance premiums from about $500 to over $1,700 over the next 15 years. But a panel appointed by lawmakers to review ballooning costs of the system said changing over to a fully privatized system will increase access and quality of care beyond the fee increases.

“The one thing we all agree upon is the status quo is not acceptable,” said Vice Adm. Norbert Ryan, president and CEO of MOAA. “We believe the problems Tricare has can be address in a systemic manner without resorting to its elimination.”

The system has been veering toward less choice and access since the 1990s and now is stuck in a “death spiral,” falling far behind other networks in its number of providers and ability to incorporate new types of medical care, according to the Military Retirement and Compensation Modernization Commission, which released a voluminous report to Congress this month with reform recommendations.

The commission has proposed provided a health care allowance and giving servicemembers, military families and retirees access to an expanded network of about 250 coverage plans, which is similar to what federal employees are offered.

Ryan said the true problem with the health care system and insurance is that it is spread over three departments. MOAA has proposed creating a unified medical command that has a single budget authority to wring costs and efficiencies out of Tricare.

But Maj. Gen. Gus L. Hargett, president of the National Guard Association, said an overhaul would likely be “well-received” by members who have become frustrated by shortcomings in the current system.

“I think if we continue to do the same thing with the same system we will get the same results,” Hargett said. “I think we need to look at change.”

The National Military Family Association is open to the ideas but would prefer giving the Defense Department more time to study the Tricare proposal and decide what course to take, said Joyce Raezer, the group’s executive director.

The Senate Armed Service Committee is holding a series of hearings on reforming Tricare and the military retirement system as it stares down a defense budget cap this year and needs options to save money. The military has targeted personnel costs such as health insurance as a prime area for reducing costs.

So far, senators have been warm to the reform proposal.

“I think they need to get over that hurdle that something needs to give … we need to pay more [for Tricare premiums] or the system is gong to collapse over time,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said.

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said there is widespread agreement that the health insurance must be overhauled to a more private system and it is up to lawmakers to explain to the public why it will be a positive change.

He said an overhaul will mean beneficiaries pay more but get more from their health insurance. Sticking with the current system will still mean paying more and result in deteriorating service and access as time goes on, Cotton said.

tritten. travis@stripes.com Twitter: @Travis_Tritten

Fear of the Islamic State spawns a renegade Afghan militia

MAZAR-E SHARIF, Afghanistan — The 25 men who gathered last week in a poor enclave of this ancient city bore the scars of a lifetime of war. One lost four fingers fighting Taliban militants. Another lost his right leg fighting the Soviets. Now, seated in a bare room on a cold morning, they declared readiness to make even greater sacrifices against a new enemy: the Islamic State.

To accomplish that, they have taken the law into their own hands.

The men, mostly former mujahideen commanders, have created Afghanistan's newest militia — Margh, or "Death," in the local Dari language. It's so named because they vow to fight to the end to prevent Syria- and Iraq-based extremists from establishing a foothold in their country.

"We are ready for martyrdom," proclaimed Haji Mohammad Mahabiyar, their leader, as his comrades nodded in agreement.

The danger posed by the Islamic State to Afghanistan is minimal at the moment. Yet that hasn't stopped fears from swirling through the nation and the corridors of power. American and Afghan officials say they view the group as a serious potential threat. Now, the specter of the Islamic State is driving vigilante behavior, particularly by ex-mujahideen fighters who feel sidelined by the government.

The Margh militia is the latest of the many irregular armed groups brazenly forming across the nation, seldom challenged by authorities even as President Ashraf Ghani has vowed to disband them. With most U.S. and NATO forces gone and Afghanistan's security forces struggling to fill the void, such renegade militias pose a major obstacle to Ghani's promise of creating a new Afghanistan where the rule of law is respected.

In previous years, militias were fueled by ethnic rivalries, warlords or a desire to oust the Taliban. Now, human rights activists and analysts worry that the Death militia — whose masked fighters wear ninja-like outfits in the red, black and green colors of the Afghan flag and claim to have 5,000 fighters — could portend the rise of another generation of unofficial armed actors.

The militia has yet to fight a battle. But the concern is that it will unjustly target people they suspect of ties to the Islamic State, even if the group never takes root here. Or that it could become a tool of regional strongmen or neighboring powers with their own agendas.

"The experience we've had in the past in our country, without any doubt, is that such an illegal armed group creates problems for the people." said Qazi Sayed Mohammad Sami, head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission in this northern provincial capital. "We don't know who is supporting them or who they are working for. This is our fear."

Since the war began in 2001, many pro-government militias have operated with little oversight or accountability. As they fight the Taliban, they have committed extrajudicial killings, rapes, abductions and other abuses, according to human rights activists.

To be sure, the paramilitary forces are nowhere near as lethal as the Taliban — but they are getting deadlier. Last year, they killed 53 civilians and injured 49 others, an 85 percent increase in casualties from 2013, according to a recent U.N. report that urged the government to promptly demobilize militias.

"The Afghan security forces are suffering thousands of extra casualties every year now that the international forces have mostly pulled back from the battlefields," said Graeme Smith, Afghanistan analyst for the International Crisis Group, "so there's a strong temptation to raise pro-government militias to serve as a buffer against the rising insurgency."

Mahabiyar's mud-walled house, where the Death militia's founders had gathered, was not far from the Blue Mosque, which some Muslims believe is among Islam's most sacred sites. Over steaming cups of green tea, the men railed against the Islamic State.

"They are not real Muslims," said one thick-bearded commander.

"They are burning people alive!" declared another, referring to the video released last month by the Islamic State that showed the immolation of captured Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh.

A few weeks earlier, they had sat in this room and created their force. They didn't seek permission from the central government or local authorities. It was around the time the Islamic State — also known as Daesh — announced its expansion to Khorasan, an area that encompasses Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Last week, Gen. John Campbell, the top American commander here, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Islamic State's presence in Afghanistan is "nascent." There has been some recruiting, he said, and a few disgruntled Taliban have claimed allegiance to the Islamic State to gain resources or media attention.

His comments came three days after a U.S. airstrike in southern Helmand province killed Mullah Raouf Khadim, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee and Taliban commander who had aligned with the Islamic State. It was the first known targeting of an Islamic State operative by the United States in this region.

"We're all driven to prevent Daesh from establishing a meaningful foothold in Central Asia," Campbell said.

For the Death militia, the potential threat is local. In neighboring Sar-e Pol province, a few Taliban factions have replaced their white flag with the black Islamic State flag and are actively recruiting, said militia members from Sar-e Pol.

Many Death fighters are ethnic Hazaras and Shiite Muslims, including Mahabiyar, a wiry 40-year-old. Some Afghan officials speculate that the militia is backed by Iran, which supports the Shiite militias in Iraq fighting the Sunni Islamic State.

But the militia's leaders insist the driving force here is not sectarian. Their members also include ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Pashtuns, who are all Sunni. They share outrage over the Islamic State's brutality — and a historic dislike of foreign invaders.

"Daesh is not just against Shiites. In Iraq, they have killed more Sunnis than Shiites," Mahabiyar said. "They are against all human beings. For Afghans, no matter what ethnic group they are, once they see foreign invaders, they will be united as they did during the Russian invasion."

What's also fueling them is a sense that the government is incapable of protecting them and their families. Militia members criticized former president Hamid Karzai as well as Ghani for failing to stop the growth of the Taliban.

"In the last 13 years, there have been so many killings, so many kidnappings, so much lawlessness. And the Taliban was not destroyed," Mahabiyar said. "The people cannot sit and do nothing. They don't want to wait for another terrorist group to base itself in Afghanistan."

The militia, he added, will stand by the government. But they want to fight outside the security forces because, they say, they would be more effective. And they want Afghan forces to arm them.

A senior Afghan Ministry of Defense spokesman, Brig. Gen. Dawlat Waziri, dismissed the militia as nothing but a "group of villagers concerned about Daesh." The security forces, he said, had no intention of arming the group. But he added that Afghans have a right to use weapons to defend themselves.

"There are no militias in Afghanistan," Waziri said.

The Death militia also represents another development: Amid the growing fears of the Islamic State, former mujahideen who fought the Soviets are sensing a moment to become relevant again.

For the past 13 years, many have felt ignored by the government — deprived, they say, of political and military appointments. But their legacy is mixed: While they were praised for fighting the Russians and the Taliban, most Afghans haven't forgotten that their grab for power plunged the country into a brutal civil war in the early 1990s.

On Sunday, Aburrab Rasul Sayyaf, a powerful Islamist politician and anti-Taliban commander, publicly blasted the government for isolating the former guerrillas and vowed to fight the Islamic State.

"If Daesh arrives to our doors, you'll be knocking on the doors of the mujahideen once again," said Sayyaf, speaking at a rally to commemorate the 26 th anniversary of the departure of the last Soviet troops.

If the government doesn't arm it, the Death militia will find other ways to acquire weapons, members said. Some were seated with Kalashnikov rifles. One commander said his men fought the Soviets by hurling molotov cocktails made from cans, then seized their weapons to use against them.

Others said they would use knives, swords, shovels, and axes — any tools they can find — against the Islamic State.

"Their graveyard will be Afghanistan," Mahabiyar vowed.