The U.S. State Department appears to be warning companies to not think they can use plausible deniability to do business with North Korea:

The United States issued an advisory Tuesday warning that those who aid North Korea’s procurement of equipment and materials for its nuclear and missile development programs, even inadvertently, could face United Nations and U.S. sanctions.    
   
In a rare move, the State Department, Treasury Department and Commerce Department jointly issued the 19-page “North Korea Ballistic Missile Procurement Advisory,” which identified problematic North Korean entities and warned of possible deceptive techniques employed by the regime to support its ballistic missile programs.  
   
“The United States is committed to disrupting North Korea’s ballistic missile procurement network and promoting accountability for entities and individuals assisting or providing support to North Korea’s ballistic missile program, regardless of the location or nationality of those providing such assistance or support,” the advisory read. 

Joong Ang Ilbo

You can read more at the link.

This is a pretty strong storm with wind speeds at roughly 100 mph; be safe everyone effected by this typhoon:

Typhoon Maysak was barreling toward South Korea on Wednesday, putting the country on high alert over what was forecast to be one of the most powerful typhoons in years.

The typhoon was moving at 19 kph over seas some 190 kilometers south of Seogwipo in Jeju as of 3:00 p.m., according to the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA). Its maximum wind speed was 45 meters per second.

Maysak was forecast to make landfall between Busan and Geoje at around 1:00 a.m. Thursday before moving northward to the country’s eastern coastal regions. It was then expected to travel to North Korea before downgrading near the North’s eastern city of Chongjin on Thursday night.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

The Japan Times has a long article discussing the legacy 75 years later of the U.S. occupation of Japan. It is good read, here is an excerpt:

What is the Occupation’s legacy? 

The early phase is usually viewed by historians as being a policy and diplomatic success, especially by American officials. On a personal level, Japanese who were children during the era still tell stories of American G.I.s passing out gum, ice cream and chocolate.

American popular culture that arrived with the Occupation troops, from movies to music, blossomed, which added to the view, especially in the U.S., that it was successful. The peaceful reaction to the presence of so many Allied troops by the Japanese people also meant the Occupation did not have to worry about putting down armed rebellions as it attempted to carry out its policies.

Historians in Japan and abroad generally agree that the Occupation accomplished many of its early goals, including disarmament, the repatriation of Japanese forces abroad, the ratification of a new Constitution rooted in democratic values, land reforms, more equal rights for women and a foreign policy that made Japan a close U.S. ally.

But the censorship exercised by the Occupation, the release and return to power of those arrested for war crimes and the crackdown on socialists and communists created problems that lingered long after the Occupation ended. The decision by MacArthur not to try Emperor Hirohito as a war criminal provoked anger among other allied nations.

Japan Times

You can read more at the link, but the article also discusses the continuing legacy of Russia’s occupation of the Kuril Islands that continues to plague relations between the two countries.

Not the smartest way to start your Army career:

Army officials are investigating an anti-Semitic social media post shared Friday by a second lieutenant based at Fort Stewart, Ga., who said he shared it as a joke. 

Army officials said Monday that they had suspended 2nd Lt. Nathan Freihofer from his duties and launched an investigation into a post on the controversial TikTok platform by the 23-year-old field artillery officer. In the short video, Freihofer said he would never become a “verified” user because of the content that he shares before telling his so-called joke, which was about the Holocaust and Jewish people. 

“If you get offended, get the f— out, because it’s a joke,” he then said in the video. In text alongside the video, he added: “For legal reasons this is a joke.” 

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but this lieutenant has 3 million TikTok and 220,000 Instagram followers so clearly being an Army officer is not his top priority.

It seems like every few years someone in the media recycles the same criticism against the military about the lack of diversity in the higher officer ranks:

The lack of Black officers in the Army’s key combat commands has diminished the chances for diversity in senior military leadership for years to come, resulting in a nearly all-white leadership of an increasingly diverse military and nation. 

The Army, the largest of the armed services, has made little progress in promoting officers of color, particularly Black soldiers, to key commands in the last six years, a USA TODAY analysis finds.

Black people make up 22.7% of enlisted soldiers, 16.5% of warrant officers and 11% of officers on active duty as of July 2020. At the officer levels, this is actually a decrease from 21%, 18.4% and 12.6%, respectively, in 2010. The stakes of fairness and equity are manifest. So, too, is military’s ability to defend the nation. (……)

But not enough, some argue. Consider the new commanders of what the Army considers its operational brigades, including front-line units such as infantry, artillery and armor. There are 96 such brigades of around 4,000 soldiers led by a colonel. Just two of the incoming commanders of those units are Black

In 2014, when USA TODAY first began collecting such data, the Army had no Black colonels leading its combat arms units. Command at battalion and brigade level is practically a prerequisite to leading the Army’s legendary divisions such as the 82nd Airborne, 10th Mountain and 1st Armored. Not coincidentally, the last five Army chiefs of staff have commanded infantry or armored divisions.

The story is only slightly better an echelon below brigade. At the battalion level, where lieutenant colonels are in charge of about 700 soldiers, there are 13 Black battalion commanders out of 231 combat units, or 5.6%.

USA Today

You can read much more at the link, but the biggest initial hold up to becoming an officer is attending college and completing the ROTC program or going through OCS. In 2019, 29% of the African-American population aged 25 to 29 held a bachelor’s degree or higher, compared to 45% of the white population in the same age range. Until this gets fixed the pool of available African-Americans to become officers remains lower than for whites.

The next issue buried deep in the article is how so few African-American officers want to branch into combat arms:

Parents, clergy, coaches, even soldiers often discourage aspiring minority officers from joining combat units, Beagle said. Heavy casualties among African Americans, particularly early in the Vietnam War, and the prospect of better post-military employment options made non-combat units such as logistics a preferred choice. 

From my experience joining support branches to develop job skills is why so many African-Americans do not join combat arms compared to white soldiers. I have seen many friends of mine in non-combat arms branches receive some great job opportunities after their military service.

Another issue briefly buried in the article is how an assignment to lead an ROTC battalion can be considered as delaying an officer’s career. Having promising African-American officers recruiting and training college students in ROTC could encourage more African-Americans students to become Army officers. The easy fix is to make an assignment to an ROTC unit a position which gives battalion command credit. This would then enhance and not delay an officers career.

Something else that should be considered is opening up Division command to officers other than the usual Infantry, Armor, Field Artillery, and Aviation branches. For example why can’t a successful Logistics officer be a Division commander? This would increase the pool of African-American applicants for senior leadership positions in the Army.

This would definitely make the combat arms branches unhappy since they have a stranglehold on these senior leadership positions. If something like this is not done it is likely that the USA Today will be recycling this same article ten years from now explaining the same problem.

This seems to be a trial balloon to judge reaction to possible future plans to be able to use U.S. forces in South Korea for rotational deployments in the great Indo-Pacific theater:

U.S. troops are concentrated in Northeast Asia and should be distributed to better respond to evolving security challenges, including China, a senior Pentagon official has said.

“We are heavily concentrated in Northeast Asia,” David Helvey, assistant secretary of defense for Indo-Pacific affairs, said, according to a news report by the U.S. Department of Defense news on Monday.

“We’d like to be able to make our presence more geographically distributed, more operationally resilient,” Helvey said. “Maybe, the future is going to be less about bases and more about places — being able to operate across a multiplicity of locations, which give us the flexibility and the agility to respond to a variety of different threats and challenges.”

His comments came when the U.S. has been pushing for greater “strategic flexibility” for its forces deployed around the world amid speculation that it could consider pulling some troops out of South Korea.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link, but maybe this could be a compromise in regards to the ongoing cost sharing issue. The U.S. could say that since South Korea does not want to increase funding to support USFK, the Pentagon will deploy U.S. troops stationed in South Korea to support larger regional security objectives. I guess we will see what happens in the coming years.

This rollover accident happened last year during the 1st Cavalry Division’s deployment to South Korea:

The 1st Cavalry Division has moved to oust three junior leaders and ordered reforms to its driver’s training program after a 20-year-old infantryman was killed last year in a rollover accident involving a Bradley Fighting Vehicle at Camp Humphreys, the soldier’s mother said Saturday.

The Fort Hood, Texas-based Army division acted after finding that Spc. Nicholas Panipinto had no license or classroom instruction and had received only six hours of hands-on training when he died during a Nov. 6 road test of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. Two other soldiers were injured.

However, the changes are not enough for Panipinto’s mother, Kimberly Weaver, who said her son’s death had been preventable, and she believes the soldiers being punished are being used as scapegoats.

“This whole thing has just so many problems on so many different levels,” she told Stars and Stripes on Saturday in a phone interview.

“Why are these three lower-level unit soldiers being thrown under the bus while the higher-ups are not being accountable when all these failures happened under their watch,” she added.

Stars & Stripes

You can read more at the link, but the Company Commander, Platoon Leader, and Vehicle Commander have all been reprimanded and being processed for discharge from the Army. I can understand that the mother is upset, but, this is pretty significant punishment for what happened. The accident according to the article was caused by the track coming off, but the article does not specify if something the driver did caused this or was it a mechanical issue.

When these accidents do happen the investigation always looks back at the Driver’s Training program and it was discovered that SPC Panipinto was driving the bradley without completing all the requirements. This is company commander level business to ensure everyone is properly licensed before conducting an operation.

However, what I find most troubling is how it took two hours to get a medical evacuation helicopter to the site of the accident. I really hope that whatever caused that gets fixed.