Feral Jundi

Friday, July 29, 2011

Military News: Military Retirement Is More Generous And Expensive Compared To Private Sector

Hat tip to Thomas Ricks over at Foreign Policy for pointing this one out. Data like this seems to be missed when we discuss the costs of a standing government army, versus the private industry.  So stuff like this really points out the differences between public and private.

I have yet to work in a company that had any security contractor retirees. Hell, I would be lucky to have a retirement package offered, and most gigs these days seem to be all independent contractor stuff. That is the reality of today’s ‘disposable workforce’. So for me, I just assemble my own retirement plan and continue put into it from the various contracts I work.  Sometimes I was lucky enough to work a contract with a 401K plan, but those were few and far between.

The government seems to be the only industry left that actually has folks that work 20 years or 30 years, and has retirees under that system. It is actually a pretty good deal and many retirees collect pensions and go on to work other jobs.

In the security contracting industry, you see a lot of retired military folks who do exactly that.  They collect a nice pension after working 20 years in the military, and then go on to be a private contractor and make even more money.  So I could understand why the Pentagon and today’s cash strapped US government is taking a second look at this system. You could also guess the reaction of guys in the military that would construe this study as a threat to their good deal. The question to ask is will the government modify the current military retirement system to match that of the federal government, and get a few more years of service out of their soldiers? Or will they succumb to the politics of the matter, and realize that a ton of military retirees and current soldiers vote.

Who knows, but I do know that the US government is in the process of making some adjustments to the budget and spending. So they are looking at all and any options of cutting costs, and the military is no exception.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I certainly hope these statistics are factored into future cost benefit analysis between government military forces and private military forces.  There are so many costs to consider when maintaining a standing army during times of peace and war.  Not to mention that all of these retirees in the military are also drawing healthcare benefits, and the legacy costs of that must be equally as high.  I mean if a guy retires at age 40 give or take, and the average life expectancy of a human these days is around 75, then that can add up to a lot of money that tax payers will be paying over the course of that individual’s life.

Here is the report that goes into more detail about military retirement and it’s costs. –Matt

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

China: The Cyberwar Between Google and China

Filed under: China,Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Matt @ 5:59 AM

   Interesting deal between Google and China.  Although the real winner here will be China’s search engine called Baidu.  You can bet that any telecom stuff that Google was planning on doing in China, will probably suffer as well.

   The real story though, is the whole concept of a mega corporation like Google, taking on a super power like China?  Thomas Ricks was pretty intrigued by the concept as well.  Time to break out the pre-Westphalia rule book, and start implementing cyber privateer hacking to go after these state sponsored hackers. –Matt

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Security specialist ‘has evidence of Chinese attack on Google’

A US computer expert says he has found the ‘digital fingerprints’ of Chinese authors on the tools used to launch recent attacks against Google

By Claudine Beaumont, Technology Editor20 Jan 2010

Joe Stewart, a security specialist with SecureWorks in the US, told the New York Times that he had analysed the software used to attack Google, and found that the main program used by the hackers contained a module based on an algorithm that appeared in a Chinese technical document that has been published exclusively on Chinese-language websites.

Google last week announced that the accounts of human rights activists and political dissidents had been hacked, and that it believed the attacks had originated from China. However, details about the precise nature of the attacks were not revealed, although security experts broadly agreed that Google was probably correct in its suspicions.

It is thought that a Trojan virus, known as Hydraq, was responsible for opening a “back door” in to compromised computers, which could then be used by hackers to access and take control of a machine without the owner’s permission or knowledge.

Stewart uses a method known as a “reverse engineering” to unravel malicious software, viruses and Trojans to identify how and where they originated. He looks for patterns in the code, and for unusual algorithms used by hackers to error-check transmitted data.

However, Stewart said that he could not rule out the possibility that the programmers behind the Google hack had laid a false trail that pointed to Chinese involvement in order to disguise the fact they originated from another country or government.

“But Occam’s Razor suggests that the simplest explanation is probably the best one,” he told the New York Times.

Story here.

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Hackers create opportunity for military firms

Attacks on Google boost the market for cyber-security just as government weapons spending is expected to slow. Military firms are retooling for rising demand by corporations as well as government.

By W.J. Hennigan

January 19, 2010

For U.S. military firms, the latest revelations of highly sophisticated hacker attacks on Google Inc. are highlighting a new reality, and a potentially lucrative business: The battlefield is shifting to cyberspace.

(more…)

Monday, October 19, 2009

Afghanistan: Interview With Thomas Ricks on Wanat, COP’s and Strategy

Filed under: Afghanistan,Video — Tags: , , , — Matt @ 12:05 PM

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