For almost 13 centuries, from the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 to the overthrow of the last Ottoman caliph in 1924, the Islamic world was ruled by a caliph. Translated from the Arabic ‘Khalifa’, the word ‘caliph’ means successor or deputy. The caliph was considered the successor to the Prophet Muhammad. It is a term that has, at times, been abused. In June 2014, an armed group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (known as ISIL or ISIS) declared the establishment of a caliphate and proclaimed its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, a caliph. This proclamation was rejected by the overwhelming majority of the world’s Muslims. ISIL had attempted to appropriate a title imbued with religious and political significance – and in doing so had cast a dark shadow over a rich history. This is the story of the caliph, a title that originated 1,400 years ago and that spanned one of the greatest empires the world has ever known.
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FURTHER PRODUCTION HAS BEEN STOPPED BY ALJAZEERA FOR THE REASONS BEST KNOWN TO THEM
On We The People, we look at the 7th Pay Commission recommendations which puts police and forest service at par with IAS, leaving military out in the cold. How seriously should government pay attention to the disquiet within the military over pay disparities? Can it damage and rupture the larger military-civilian relationship?We also speak to chairman of the commission Justice AK Mathur. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4vNgSFzDkc]
UNHAPPY WITH 7TH PAY PANEL, ARMED FORCES WRITE TO MODI
Ajay Banerjee
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, August 12
A letter from the services to Modi and Parrikar seeking better wages is not unprecedented. PTI file photo
A letter from the services to Modi and Parrikar seeking better wages is not unprecedented. PTI file photo
Ajay Banerjee
Tribune News Service
New Delhi, August 12
Seeking a quick redress against shortcomings of the 7th Central Pay Commission (CPC), the three armed services — The Army, IAF and the Navy — have collectively written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar.
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has not issued the notification in regard to enhanced pay like other Central Government employees, who will get higher wages from September 1. The notification has been held up as issues raised by the three services are being considered.
The three forces have recently sent a collective letter through the office of the Chairman of Chiefs of Staff Committee (CoSC) – the CoSC being the senior most among the Chiefs of the three services. Air Chief Marshall Arup Raha, the IAF Chief, is the present CoSC.
A letter from the services to Modi and Parrikar seeking better wages is not unprecedented. After the Sixth Pay Commission, the services had faced a similar “lowering of status”. The then CoSC, Admiral Sureesh Mehta (now retired) had shot off a letter to the UPA-I regime. A high-powered committee was set up in 2008 under Pranab Mukerjee (then a minister in Manmohan Singh’s Cabinet) to study the matter.
The services, in their letter, have pointed out four key issues that need to be addressed and lift the morale of the forces.
The first is how the salaries of the service officers have been “artificially suppressed”. The formula applied for basic pay fixation is different than the one applied to other Central Government employees. As a result, in each rank the service officers have ended up being lower in pay scales.
In the government, facilities like car, housing, or sanctions for air travel depend upon the basic pay.
The second is the non-acceptance of the demand for non-functional upgrade (NFU). After the last pay commission (the sixth), the government allowed “non-functional scale upgradation” and allowed Group-A officers to get the same scale as a Joint Secretary, but after 24 years of service.
Strangely, the armed forces are neither classified as group “A” services nor are they termed as “Central services” like the IAS or the IPS and did not get NFU. Now, with others getting NFU the gap gets widened. The third issue is higher military service pay (MSP) for junior commissioned officers (JCOs). They rise from the lower ranks (jawans). The 7th CPC has clubbed the MSP of JCOs and jawans at Rs 5,200. The demand is to have it at Rs 10,000 for the JCOs. The MSP for officers between Lieutenant-rank and Brigadier-rank is common at Rs 15,500.
The fourth main issue is lowering of disability pension. As per the new formula, okayed by the 7th CPC, soldiers/officers with 100 per cent disability will see their pensions reduced from the current levels. However, in case of the disabled of other services their perks will rise.
In March this year, the MoD had conveyed to an empowered committee headed by the Cabinet Secretary that the status, pay and allowances of the armed forces be kept above all other “fighting” arms of the government. Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar had also taken up the case that issues of status, pay and allowances for the forces have to be paramount.
Alexander Velez-Green is a research assistant with the Defense Strategies and Assessments Program and 20YY Future of Warfare Initiative at theCenter...
A lot of things can and should be automated —but nuclear bombers are not one of them. Unfortunately, it’s not clear that Moscow agrees.Reports surfaced in July that Russia has begun development of a hypersonic nuclear bomber that can deliver nuclear strikes from outer space. Unnamed officials quoted in the semi-official Russian news organ Pravda say that the bomber will have an unmanned variant. Their statement has not been confirmed, but the idea that Russia would pursue an unmanned nuclear bomber is not new. The commander of Russia’s long-range aviation fleet, Lt. Gen. Anatoly Zhikharev, stated in 2012 that Russia was considering developing a“pilotless” sixth-generation nuclear bomber. While it’s too soon to know for sure whether or not the new Russian bomber will be unmanned, it’s apparent that Russian military officials have been considering that option for some time. And Russian policymakers have made no public promises that the nuclear mission would only be carried out by a manned version of the bomber. This development is deeply concerning. Deploying a highly autonomous unmanned nuclear bomber would significantly raise the risk of inadvertent or uncontrolled nuclear war. As the world prepares forwar in the robotic age, the United States must take steps to ensure that the nuclear mission remains manned.
An unmanned nuclear bomber?
The announcement from July of this year leaves much room for skepticism. One thing that should not be taken lightly, however, is the possibility that future Russian nuclear bombers may come with unmanned variants. The recent statement that Russia’s latest bomber will be capable of being unmanned has not been confirmed, but it would align strongly with influential Russian military strategists’ emphasis in recent years on the need for the Russian military to embrace unmanned and autonomous military systems in order to win future wars.
There are plenty of reasons why Russian military thinkers might consider de-manning their nuclear bomber. Most boil down to one thing: Russian policymakers think that having an unmanned nuclear bomber might one day be useful, if not necessary, to protect their country. Looking at the future air and space operating environments, they foresee the possibility that rapidly-improving enemy air and space defenses will make it impossible for manned aircraft—or small numbers of unmanned aircraft, for that matter—to get in range of their targets. To launch nuclear strikes from air or space, then, they might need to uselarge swarms of robotic systems capable of autonomously navigating to the target; evading or defeating any US and NATO countermeasures they encounter on the way; and releasing their nuclear payloads against previously designated targets. Given Moscow’s history of automating nuclear strike platforms, this calculus has clear precedent.
The problem with autonomy.
Assigning the nuclear mission to highly autonomous, unmanned bombers would create an unprecedented risk of inadvertent or uncontrolled nuclear war between the United States and Russia. No matter their sophistication, autonomous systemscan behave unexpectedly for a wide variety of reasons, including system malfunction; unanticipated interaction with the air, space, or cyber environments; or hacking by the enemy. This creates two types of vulnerabilities when it comes to a nuclear bomber. The first is located early in the kill chain—the series of steps taken to find and ultimately destroy the enemy—at the point where the unmanned system is ordered to begin a nuclear strike mission. Due to any of these unexpected inputs, the unmanned bomber could initiate a nuclear strike mission completely against the will of its earthbound operators. The second vulnerability is located near the end of the kill chain, where the bomber would launch its ordnance at pre designated targets. A frightening number of unforeseen inputs could cause the unmanned system’s original target coordinates to be scrambled or replaced. This could lead it to launch nuclear weapons at targets that were previously off-limits, like major cities.
Having a pilot onboard would create a “human circuit breaker” that could intercede to manually halt operations if something went awry, such as if orders were received to launch a nuclear strike during peacetime, or to hit civilian centers early on in a limited nuclear war. Soviet colonel Stanislav Petrov played this role in 1983 when the sun’s reflection off of the tops of clouds caused an automated early warning system to falsely report that the United States had launched a nuclear attack on Russia. Without a pilot, the bomber would be quite vulnerable to such manipulation.
It may be possible to design automated fail-safes for these systems. But automated fail-safes would be vulnerable to the same types of failures due to technical malfunction, environmental triggers, or hacking. And, depending on when and how the aircraft’s fail-safe engaged—for instance, if it kicked in after the bomber had already begun its final approach on to a target—it may be too late to prevent the defender from initiating its own retaliation sequence. The potential ramifications of such unexpected behavior would be quite severe indeed. An unauthorized nuclear first-strike by an unmanned bomber would almost certainly trigger retaliation, rapidly forcing the United States and Russia down a path towards nuclear war. A similar effect would occur if a limited nuclear war were ongoing and an unmanned system struck a site beyond the designated set of targets, leading to unintentional escalation. And the potential for a third party to hijack an unmanned bomber in order to trigger nuclear war between the United States and Russia is increasingly real, particularly as advanced cyber capabilities become available to a greater number of state and non-state actors.
Keep the nuclear mission manned.
Russian readers might receive this criticism with indignation and point out that the United States hasn’t firmly rejected the possibility of de-manning the nuclear mission either—and they’d be right. Indeed, the US Air Force hasoffered only ambiguous languageon this point, suggesting that it is keeping its options open to de-man nuclear strike assets in the future. This is particularly concerning, given reports that the US Air Force is considering designing an unmanned variant of its own nuclear bomber—the Long-Range Strike Bomber—in the coming years. But the United States is not immune to the same vulnerabilities that would imperil a Russian unmanned nuclear bomber. For example, it remains unknown why the US RQ-170 stealth drone went down in Iran in 2011. But there have been claims that it was brought down by enemy hacking —something that could not have happened with a pilot onboard. What if the RQ-170 had been a US unmanned nuclear bomber on patrol? The truth is that no state is immune to the vulnerabilities inherent to autonomous systems—vulnerabilities that would dramatically undermine the reliability of the bomber leg of the nuclear triad. Now is the time to avoid needless catastrophe and set the precedent that the nuclear mission must remain manned during the robotic age. The United States should clearly and unequivocally reject the possibility of using unmanned nuclear strike assets. It should state forcefully that no potential operational benefits afforded by an unmanned nuclear bomber could outweigh the potential costs of a nuclear conflict driven by the unexpected behavior of a highly autonomous unmanned system. The Defense Department should focus insteadon developing ways to penetrate enemy air defenses using manned nuclear bombers, perhaps escorted by highly autonomous, unmanned wingmen.
Washington should then engage Moscow directly on these points. Its objective should be to secure Russia’s entry into an international agreement banning the automation of nuclear strike assets. The agreement should be premised on a mutual understanding of the risks of automating the nuclear mission and confidence-building measures assuring each state of the other’s continued adherence to the agreement. And the United States should not stop there. With Russia and other partners’ support, the United States should lead arms control negotiations with China, India, Pakistan, and other nuclear-armed states to craft an international agreement prohibiting the de-manning of the nuclear mission. These talks will undoubtedly face significant hurdles, not the least when it comes to defining “autonomy.” But with the automation of nuclear strike assets just over the technical horizon, these discussions must begin now. If the world’s nuclear-armed states wait for real-world events to demonstrate the folly of integrating greater autonomy into their nuclear strike assets, it may be too late.
Produced by a global consortium of mountain research organisations, the altas illustrates changing climate and water flow in the region’s major river basins
The new atlas, released at the UN climate summit, is based on years of data from five of the ten main river basins in the Himalayas: the Brahmaputra, Ganges, Indus, Mekong and Salween. It uses maps and infographics to show how the region’s climate is changing now and into the future, with severe consequences for populations, both local and downstream
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“Mountains are beautiful but we shouldn’t forget that they are the most fragile landmass on earth and need more care,” said David Molden, director general of the Kathmandu based International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD). The Hindu Kush- Himalayas are known as the water tower of Asia. Snow, glaciers and rainfall from the mountains feed the ten largest river systems in Asia. Together these rivers support the drinking water, irrigation, energy, industry and sanitation needs of 1.3 billion people living in the mountains and downstream. “This atlas is an initiative to simplify complex scientific information generated for decades and allows policymakers to understand the real picture of threats due to climate change,” said Björn Alfthan, project manager of the Polar and Cryosphere Division atGRID-Arendal, Norway.
Data gaps The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’sfourth assessment report called the region a “white spot” because of the lack of information and experts say the situation has not improved much. “Data gaps in the Hindu Kush Himalayas are still very large and most of the analyses are based on modelled data. Countries should come together to share data and undertake more rigorous,” added Molden. The atlas recommends theUnited Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change should initiate a comprehensive assessment of the Himalayan glaciers and river flow to fill the remaining gaps. “Although the total amount of water flowing within some of Asia’s biggest rivers such as the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Indus is not expected to decrease until 2050, we can expect higher variability and more floods and droughts,” the report concluded.
Temperatures across the mountainous Hindu Kush Himalayan region will increase by about 1–2°C (in some places by up to 4–5°C) by 2050.
Glaciers will continue to suffer substantial ice loss, with the main loss in the Indus basin.
Precipitation will change with the monsoon expected to become longer and more erratic.
Extreme rainfall events are becoming less frequent, but more violent and are likely to increase in intensity.
Communities living immediately downstream from glaciers are the most vulnerable to glacial changes.
Despite overall greater river flow projected, higher variability in river flows and more water in pre-monsoon months are expected, which will lead to a higher incidence of unexpected floods and droughts, greatly impacting on the livelihood security and agriculture of river-dependent people.
Changes in temperature and precipitation will have serious and far-reaching consequences for climate-dependent sectors, such as agriculture, water resources and health.
This is really worth watching. The rotten and cowardly so-called news media is suppressing this, but it’s exactly what the US of A public needs to understand.
“The Snake" is going viral in Europe. Donald Trump began reciting the lyrics to a song entitled The Snake at his rallies a few weeks ago.Naturally this was not reported by the liberal mainstream media.
