Day: October 28, 2024

Donald Trump ventured to Fayetteville, North Carolina, earlier this month — a Democratic city in a swing state with a large veteran population, a powerful cross-section of defense contractors, and, right down the road, Fort Liberty, one of the largest military bases in the world.

Before an audience dressed almost entirely in red, white, and blue, Trump pledged to revert Fort Liberty back to its original name, Fort Bragg, which honored a slave-owning Confederate general. He also vowed to increase defense spending and scrub the Pentagon of “woke generals.” Then he turned to the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Trump offered few true or tangible details on his record at the VA, which operates a robust health and benefits system that serves 9 million veterans — proclaiming, for instance, that his leadership team had purged thousands of “sadists” from the agency and replaced them with thousands more “good, loving people that love our patriotic heroes.” He insisted that the VA “was better before, and I hear it’s sliding,” chalking up this alleged deterioration to President Joe Biden’s VA team, which he derided as a “group of lunatics that don’t give a damn about the military.”

In truth, the people Trump chose to staff the VA and lead on veterans’ policy during his presidency constitute a rogues’ gallery of wild characters that rivaled, and perhaps even surpassed, the dysfunctional, self-serving appointees who ran rampant across various agencies on Trump’s watch. Few of them, however, did as much damage as two-little noted appointees who implemented Trump’s most controversial changes over the VA: Darin Selnick and Peter O’Rourke.

Selnick and O’Rourke were key to implementing the twin pillars of Trump’s veterans affairs legacy: the 2017 VA Accountability and Whistleblower Protection Act and the 2018 VA MISSION Act, which together served as a one-two punch to weaken the agency. First, the Accountability Act degraded conditions inside the VA — undermining labor power, gutting workplace protections, and leading to thousands of suspensions, demotions, and firings of front-line staff. From there, MISSION funneled millions of patients to appointments outside the VA, enriching the private sector while weakening the agency’s health care capacity, budget, and reputation.

That the pair managed to avoid infamy may owe only to the buffoonish crew that operated Trump’s single-term VA. This cadre includes a beer mogul who promoted snake oil PTSD treatments; a slick-haired “Fox & Friends” host who sought GI Bill money for predatory for-profit colleges; a longtime Marvel Entertainment executive who, along with two fellow Mar-a-Lago members, pushed a shoddy electronic health records system that’s been tied to the deaths of at least four veterans; a White House doctor accused of handing out prescriptions “like candy” and whose nomination to be VA secretary was derailed after he was credibly accused of drinking on the job; and a Lost Cause sympathizer alleged to have attempted to dig up dirt on a congressional staffer and Navy veteran after she reported being sexually assaulted at the VA hospital in Washington.

These characters and their chaos emerged from an election that Trump won on the backs of veteran voters. While the decorated Vietnam War veteran, the late Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., won the veteran vote by 10 percentage points during his 2008 presidential bid, Trump, who viciously insulted McCain on the trail, took veterans by a whopping 27-point margin. According to a political science analysis of 2016 voting data, Trump also received exceptionally high support in American communities with the highest combat casualty rates, which was key to his victories in three swing states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump racked up similar margins in 2020 and appears poised to again dominate among those who served in the military come November 5.

Trump has generally talked a lot less about veterans’ policy during this campaign than his first two. Few tangible policy VA proposals have emerged from Trump or the Republican platform. There are, however, some clues in Project 2025’s detailed section on veterans policy, which, according to a former senior VA official, is eerily reminiscent of the VA road map drafted during Trump’s first transition. This slate of radical proposals includes further privatization of core agency services, as well as major restrictions to VA’s disability rating system, which determines the compensation amounts that veterans receive for their service-related disabilities.

If Trump’s presidential term proved anything, it’s that personnel is policy. The figures who staffed his first term can help illuminate how a second one may play out. Many would surely return to the VA under what Trump has promised will be a government flushed of career officials and then stocked exclusively with the type of loyal ideologues who dominated the VA during his administration.

“Government is serious business for serious people,” said Kayla Williams, an Iraq War veteran who served as a senior VA official during the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. “And that’s what I feel like is missing from these Trump people’s core understanding of the world. Government matters, people’s lives are at stake, and putting in charge figures who think government is a game or a joke or a way to enrich their buddies, or a way to score political points, is dangerous and misguided and deeply tragic.”

Selnick, an Air Force veteran brought into politics by the Koch network, helped write MISSION and oversaw its implementation. O’Rourke, an Air Force and Navy veteran with a background running a Republican political action committee, became the founding director of the VA’s Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection. (The MISSION and Accountability acts were top priorities for the Koch network, which has, since the Obama years, cynically cast the VA as a failing bureaucracy as part of its broader libertarian agenda.)

Four former senior VA officials said Selnick and O’Rourke were leaders in what they described as a pack of Trump-backed goons who worked to “break” or “blow up” the VA. (For this story, The Intercept spoke to five former senior VA officials, all of whom, apart from Williams, requested anonymity to insulate themselves from professional backlash.)

Two of the former VA officials singled out O’Rourke, who also briefly served as chief of staff and acting VA secretary, as being woefully unprepared for the job. Before the VA, O’Rourke helmed Strong America Now, a now-defunct Republican PAC that pushed presidential candidates to embrace a business-efficiency model known as “Lean Six Sigma.” Neither O’Rourke nor Selnick responded to press queries.

As head of the accountability office, O’Rourke pledged to target misconduct and fire poor leaders, but VA data I analyzed at the time showed that his office and authority were weaponized to discipline thousands of low-level employees, many of whom were veterans. (Roughly a third of all VA employees have a history of military service.)

Under the new law, a veteran employee at the VA medical center in Pittsburgh was recommended for dismissal and charged by the VA Police with disorderly conduct after he took away a television remote from a patient who had entered the dining hall after hours and demanded to watch television. The employee had gotten sober through his VA job, and he said his life would be ruined if he lost it. “It was good to get in — it gave me a sense of purpose and a chance at life,” he explained. “But it seems that now management spends more time getting rid of people than helping them.”

While the accountability office targeted front-line workers, it failed to scrutinize a senior official who’d advised staff to keep quiet about an outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease at the hospital, which killed at least six veterans and sickened more than a dozen others. 

This slanted approach to justice was personally embodied by O’Rourke who, according the VA’s Office of Inspector General, personally interfered in an investigation against his VA golf buddy, Peter Shelby, who had been accused of retaliation, harassment, and discrimination. According to the watchdog, O’Rourke personally pulled a seasoned investigator off the Shelby case and replaced him with someone directly under his control. O’Rourke’s office also launched an investigation into one of the whistleblowers who raised concerns with Shelby. 

Then came MISSION. One year after Trump ratified the Accountability Act, he signed the law that would push millions of patients out of the VA and into private care. “As a candidate for President, I promised to make reforming the VA one of my absolute highest priorities,” Trump said at the ceremony, beaming. “And from the first day of my administration, that is exactly what we’ve done.”

Getting the law passed had required a delicate approach. Studies consistently show that VA health care outperforms the private sector on quality and wait times while, in surveys, veterans express support for VA care and opposition to agency privatization. Trump allies pledged that MISSION would only supplement VA care, not replace it, and they sweetened the deal by injecting the law with a massive expansion of VA caregiver benefits — long a priority of veterans’ groups.

Yet core promises were broken immediately after the law was signed. Hours after Trump’s Rose Garden ceremony, the White House announced it would ignore some of the law’s key oversight statutes, including one that granted congressional input over future pilot programs with private partners. They also began freezing out veterans’ groups and lawmakers from the regulatory and rollout processes. One internal report I obtained at the time claimed Hill staff faced “coordinated and unprecedented obstruction” by national VA staff in their oversight efforts of MISSION Act implementation. “We have some concerns that whoever they are collaborating with might be running this thing off the tracks, and pushing for privatization,” a senior legislative staffer told me at the time.

Selnick played a key role. Along with his allies, he pushed MISSION to create what one of the former VA officials called “extreme eligibility” for private care. “[Selnick] bragged about passing MISSION by including the caregiver support elements to get veterans groups on board as a trick,” Williams said. “It was sabotage,” added another official. “They wanted to create an opportunity to dismantle VA without any concern for what happened in the interim.”

The severe consequences of MISSION were starkly laid out earlier this year in a VA Red Team Report authored by a bipartisan panel of health care experts. They detailed how the cost of VA care outsourcing has more than doubled in recent years, to nearly $30 billion annually, with 40 percent of all VA patients now getting some private sector care. The report deemed this trend an “existential threat” to the VA system, warning that, without a course correction, VA clinics and service could soon cease to exist, thereby “eliminating choice for the millions of Veterans who prefer to use the [VA] for all or part of their healthcare needs.”

One of the former officials, echoing others, told me that veterans were not factored into key decisions. Instead, ego, politics, and deception often dominated work and decision-making. As one example, two officials recounted that Selnick had a habit of parking in handicapped spots near the entrance of medical centers he was visiting. Once, when a security guard informed Selnick that he could not park there, he answered by saying: “I’m from the White House.”

O’Rourke and Selnick also faced allegations of misusing taxpayer resources. Selnick landed in hot water after ProPublica reported that he was commuting between his California home and D.C. on the taxpayer dime. O’Rourke was forced to resign after officials complained to the Washington Post that he was doing little work for his $161,000 salary.

In July 2018, Tim Walz, then the ranking member of the House Veterans Affairs Committee, led a letter to the Department of Justice, alleging that O’Rourke had lied and withheld information from Congress and demanding a criminal probe, though this probe never came to pass.

Today, this pair is now leading a think tank, Veterans 4 America First, a semi-active 501(c)(3) staffed with a number of former Trump VA officials, promulgating policies and apparently waiting in the wings should Trump win reelection. From this perch, O’Rourke and Selnick recently published an op-ed entitled “Biden’s Big Lie on Veterans.” (An email seeking information on the nonprofit’s finances and goals to the group’s only listed address bounced back.)

Dozens of competent people ran for the doors during the Trump administration as well. Responding to this staff exodus, a VA spokesperson at the time said, “We understand that not everyone is ready for this level of reform.”

In the past four years, Biden’s appointments to the VA have reasserted a level of professionalism throughout the agency, and the PACT Act, passed in 2022, secured a major increase in veterans’ benefits. But even as Biden’s VA officials express support for VA services in public, they’ve continued to carry out the privatization dictated by the MISSION Act, putting the VA and its patients in increasingly precarious positions.

Another four years of Trump could reshape the VA beyond recognition. “The danger now is that they’ve been vetting people, and doing more prep work,” Williams said. “And the stakes are high. Veterans die when terrible decisions are made at the largest integrated health care system in the world.”

The post Trump’s Cronies Threw the VA Into Chaos. Millions of Veterans’ Lives Are on the Line Again. appeared first on The Intercept.

The reliability of the US nuclear arsenal is based on the “never-always rule.” This means that the nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3) system must never permit nuclear weapons use unless authorized by the president, while always enabling their use in the specific ways the president authorizes. There must never be doubt about the United States’ ability to command and control its nuclear forces under any circumstances. Even perceptions of weaknesses in the US NC3 system can undermine deterrence and assurance.

But that’s exactly what Washington is facing right now, as the comprehensive modernization of the US nuclear triad continues. Despite warnings from top national security officials, important improvements to NC3 have been fragmented; in 2017, then US Strategic Command Commander General John Hyten testified that “NC3 is my biggest concern when I look out towards the future.”

An important part of the United States’ NC3 is space-based equipment, such as communications and early warning satellites. Efforts to modernize these space-based components have started, such as eliminating exploitable cyber and supply chain vulnerabilities and reducing overreliance on a small number of satellites. These efforts are part of the Department of Defense’s work to deploy a resilient, hybrid architecture to support all national security space missions. But the Department of Defense’s efforts so far have not focused enough on NC3, and it is not clear that the modernizations currently underway will meet the stringent requirements for nuclear surety.

The United States needs to ensure it has a secure and effective NC3 because of the devolving threat environment challenging nuclear surety, as China is aiming to join Russia as a nuclear peer of the United States at the same moment that Moscow and Beijing are strengthening their counterspace capabilities.

Evolving threats

The geopolitical situation has fundamentally shifted since space-based NC3 systems were first deployed in the 1960s. The United States and the Soviet Union pursued strategic arms control, sought to constrain the dangers of inadvertent use, and often considered limited nuclear use to be easy to prevent so long as overall strategic deterrence held fast. Today, two evolving threats pose new challenges for NC3.

First, China is improving the quality and quantity of its nuclear arsenal, which raises the two-nuclear-peer problem: NC3 must now enable the United States to deter or, if deterrence fails, restore deterrence against, two nuclear peers—Russia and China—that may attack the United States or its allies in coordination, in sequence, or in overlapping timeframes. Beijing may also lack understanding of, or appreciation for, the idea that deliberate attacks on NC3 constitute a “red line” (meaning an unacceptable action that could trigger a nuclear war). Unlike Russia (at least during the Cold War), China has avoided arms control talks, has only recently deployed missile warning/missile tracking satellites, and may see value in uncertainty over red lines.

Second, it is imperative that NC3 better cope with the growing potential of limited nuclear use, given Beijing’s evolving nuclear doctrine and recent reports that raise concerns about what Moscow might do with its weapons, including the possibility of it deploying a nuclear weapon in space.

Countering Russia and China in space

Space systems provide three essential NC3 capabilities: missile warning, assured communications, and nuclear detonation detection. Infrared sensors on space-based missile warning can detect missile launches worldwide and indicate an attack first. The Space-Based Infrared System currently provides missile warning, and several complex upgrades have begun. Assured, survivable communications are essential for the president to convene with senior leaders and command and control nuclear forces globally. Today, the Advanced Extremely High-Frequency system provides communication links for nuclear command and control; this system is to be augmented and then replaced by the Evolved Strategic Satellite system during the 2030s. Finally, the US Nuclear Detonation Detection System supports adaptive planning in the event of a nuclear conflict using sensors across several satellites to locate nuclear detonations in the atmosphere and space.

But much more needs to be done, as Chinese and Russian counterspace capabilities increasingly challenge the ability of space-based NC3 to deliver nuclear surety. For instance, if Russia wanted to disable satellites currently supporting Ukraine, it would only need to detonate one nuclear weapon in low-Earth orbit (LEO). A high-altitude nuclear detonation would raise radiation in LEO, causing failure in as little as weeks of most, if not all, LEO satellites that have not been specifically hardened against this nuclear-pumped radiation. Direct financial damages could approach five hundred billion dollars, and potentially over three trillion dollars in overall economic impact. With Russia apparently on the verge of violating its Outer Space Treaty obligations by orbiting a nuclear weapon, this scenario is no longer hypothetical. The United States must counter this daunting challenge multidimensionally, including by ensuring that LEO satellites supporting NC3 address high-altitude nuclear detonation threats.

Meanwhile, China’s new Aerospace Force now fields a range of significant and comprehensive counterspace capabilities, including satellites with rendezvous-and-proximity and robotic arm capabilities in geostationary Earth orbit (GEO). This is particularly threatening, as Chinese counterspace assets could grab noncooperative satellites belonging to its adversaries, including crucial US NC3 satellites in GEO. For its part, Russia has long developed doctrine and capabilities to target US satellites, including NC3 systems. Russia is also fielding several counterspace systems, such as Nudol direct-ascent antisatellite missiles. Moscow tested this system against a defunct Russian satellite in November 2021, creating thousands of pieces of potentially lethal LEO debris that still threaten spacecraft and astronauts.

How the US can ensure nuclear surety

Many of the Department of Defense’s bureaucratic structures that have acquired current NC3 systems have changed. Primary acquisition responsibility for space-based NC3 systems is now divided between the Space Systems Command, the Space Development Agency, and the Missile Defense Agency. None of these acquisition organizations are focused on nuclear surety, and this structure makes it more difficult for the Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center to meet its overall responsibility to acquire and sustain the NC3 weapons system. A hybrid national security space architecture with commercial, international, and government systems clearly benefits most missions but is not necessarily optimal for NC3.

Before overly committing to a hybrid architecture for space-based NC3, the Department of Defense should better understand how new approaches can be certified to meet stringent nuclear surety requirements. In particular, it must consider the benefits and drawbacks of disaggregated nuclear communications, and it should carefully assess how proliferated space and ground architectures, such as the Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution and Rapid Resilient Command and Control, can integrate data from many systems. If proliferated LEO architectures cannot be made sufficiently resilient to nuclear attack at an acceptable cost, then the Pentagon should not entrust these systems with the crucial NC3 mission.

The United States must field space-based NC3 that matches today’s and tomorrow’s threats, appropriately harnesses hybrid national security space architectures to strengthen deterrence, and meets nuclear surety requirements across a range of increasingly challenging scenarios. The Department of Defense should recognize the challenges and incompatibilities it faces in rapidly and simultaneously modernizing space-based NC3 and fielding an overall hybrid national security space architecture. It should not rush to deploy space-based NC3 that is not well integrated, suffers from avoidable supply chain and cybersecurity vulnerabilities, or contains other weaknesses that adversaries and hackers could exploit during the decades in which the next generation of space-based NC3 is likely to operate.

Peter L. Hays is an adjunct professor of space policy and international affairs at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, senior fellow for the Prague Security Studies Institute, space policy advisor for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, and senior associate (nonresident) for the Aerospace Defense and Missile Defense Projects at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Sarah Mineiro is the founder and CEO of Tanagra Enterprises, a defense, intelligence, space, science, and technology consulting firm. 

This article was adapted from the authors’ previously published issue brief, “Modernizing space-based nuclear command, control, and communications.”

The post How the US can counter Russian and Chinese nuclear threats in space appeared first on Atlantic Council.

Italian police arrested four and are investigating dozens, including Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio, for alleged unauthorized access to state databases.

Italian authorities have arrested four individuals as part of an investigation into alleged illegal access to state databases. The police are also investigating dozens of other individuals, including the son of Luxottica founder Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio.

The charges being pursued by investigators include criminal conspiracy for unauthorized access to computer systems, illegal interception, falsification of electronic communications, disclosure of confidential information, aiding and abetting, and extortion.

“[Leonardo Maria del Vecchio] eagerly awaiting the completion of preliminary investigations to be able to prove he has nothing to do with the events in question and that charges laid against him have no basis.” reads a statement from a lawyer for Del Vecchio. “He seems to be rather a victim given initial allegations and the negative outcome of the search conducted”

The criminal activity was allegedly carried out by prominent Italian individuals, including a former high-profile policeman. The organization amassed a huge trove of sensitive data that was offered to its customers who used it for different purposes.

The data may have been used to spy and blackmail politicians and businesses, however, we cannot exclude that foreign intelligence agencies had access to this data.

“Milan prosecutors allege the business intelligence agency tapped into three key databases: one gathering alerts over suspicious financial activities; one used by the national tax agency with citizens’ bank transactions, utility bills, income statements; and the police investigations’ database, the person said.” reported Reuters citing a source with the knowledge on the matter.

A cache of 800,000 records was obtained by illegally accessing a range of state databases, in some cases third parties specifically commissioned the accesses. Italy’s national anti-mafia prosecutor Giovanni Melillo has shed light on a complex network of digital espionage professionals, investigating 60 individuals, including hackers, IT consultants, private intelligence agencies, and law enforcement members. Melillo, who spoke alongside Milan’s chief prosecutor Marcello Viola, said that authorities have uncovered “a massive market of confidential information.”

The investigation follows another clamorous case in Italy, the bank Intesa Sanpaolo is under investigation by prosecutors after a former employee illegally spied on account data of thousands of its customers

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, state databases)