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October 29, 2013  

ISO Mideast strategy | SOF hunts Kony | Flipflop over NSA

FSA rebels cleaning their AK-47s in Aleppo, Syria. (VOA News)

FSA rebels cleaning their AK-47s in Aleppo, Syria. (VOA News)

Dan Drezner tries to discern a grand-strategy approach to the Middle East, and lays out a few things he hopes the administration and DoD strategists are taking into consideration. (Foreign Policy)

Read this for a glimpse into today’s SOF operations — and the “under-the-radar U.S. campaign” to capture Joseph Kony of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Rajiv Chandrasekaran embedded with a Special Forces unit and filed this dispatch. (Washington Post)

“GPS navigation: Can’t live without it, can’t trust it. That’s the problem facing military planners…” (Defense News)

Combine the USAF Reserve and Air National Guard? They’re thinking about it. (Defense News)

And finally, we can’t resist a hearty wha?? over Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s about-face over NSA surveillance. Feinstein, who has been pushing a bill to explicitly authorize some of the agency’s controversial information-gathering on U.S. citizens, yesterday expressed outrage at revelations that NSA is also listening in on friendly foreign leaders. As Noah Schachtman put it on Twitter, “Shorter DiFi: Mass surveillance of Americans… cool beans! Snooping on Angela Merkel… stop everything!” Here’s Shane Harris’s full story on the flipflop. (Foreign Policy)

Warlord’s Quote

“I think character is permanent and issues are transient.” — Vice Adm. James Stockdale

Contributed by Maj. Ryan Kranc, formerly aide to the Saudi National Guard Modernization Program Manager, now Operations Officer for the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, Fort Irwin, Calif. From a list compiled by the Warlord Loop, a private email forum for national security experts.

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