North Korea launches medium-range missile
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — In its latest effort to develop its ballistic and nuclear weapons, North Korea fired a medium-range missile Sunday that appeared to be similar to one the country tested earlier this year, U.S. and South Korean officials said.
The rocket was fired from a n a r e a n e a r t h e N o r t h Korean county of Pukchang, in South Phyongan Province, and flew eastward about 310 miles, South Korea’s Joint Chi e f s of S t a f f s a i d. The U.S. Pacific Command said it tracked the missile before it fell into the sea.
White House officials traveling in Saudi Arabia with President Donald Trump said the system that was tested had a shorter range than the missiles fired in North Korea’s most recent tests.
The missile appeared to be similar in range and maximum altitude to the missile that North Korea testfired in February, an offi- cial from South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said. The missile launched on Sunday reached an altitude of 347 miles, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing office rules.
The February test involved using a launch truck to fire a solid-fuel missile that North Korea calls the Pukguksong (Polaris)-2, a land-based version of a submarine-launched missile the country revealed earlier. That missile traveled about 500 kilometers before crashing into the sea, according to South Korean and U.S. officials.
The February launch, the North’s first missile test after Trump took office, alarmed neighbors because solid-fuel missiles can be fired faster than liquid-fuel missiles, which need to be fueled before launch and require a larger number of vehicles, including fuel trucks. Those vehicles could be spotted by satellites.
In an interview with “Fox News Sunday,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said it was too early to know whether diplomatic and economic pressures being exerted on the North Korean government are having an impact in the wake of the latest missile test.
“We’re early in the stages of applying the economic pressure as well as the diplomatic pressure to the regime in North Korea,” Tillerson said. “Hopefully they will get the message that the path of continuing their nuclear arms program is not a pathway to security or certainly prosperity. The ongoing testing is disappointing. It’s disturbing.”
South Korea’s new president, Moon Jae-in, held a National Security Council meeting to discuss Sunday’s launch, which came hours after he named his new foreign minister nominee and top advisers for security and foreign policy. He did not comment after the meeting.
In Tokyo, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called the launch a “challenge to the world.” WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has generated almost $6 billion over the past seven years by charging the armed forces excessive prices for fuel and has used the money — called the “bishop’s fund” by some critics — to bolster mismanaged or underfunded military programs, documents show.
Since 2015, the Defense Department has tapped surpluses from its fuel accounts for $80 million to train Syrian rebels, $450 million to shore up a prescription-drug program riddled with fraud and $1.4 billion to cover unanticipated expenses from the war in Afghanistan, according to military accounting records.
The Pentagon has amassed the extra cash by billing the armed forces for fuel at rates often much higher — sometimes $1 per gallon or more — than what commercial airlines paid for jet fuel on the open market.
Under a bureaucracy that dates to World War II, the Defense Department purchases all of its fuel centrally and then resells it at a fixed price to the Air Force, Navy, Army, Marine Corps and other customers, who pay for it out of their own budgets. The system is intended to reduce duplication and promote efficiency.
The Defense Department is the largest single consumer of fuel in the world. Each year, it buys about 100 million barrels, or 4.2 billion gallons, of refined petroleum for its aircraft, warships, tanks and other machines.
The practice of exploiting fuel revenue to plug unrelated gaps in the defense budget has escalated in recent years, prompting allegations - and official denials - that the accounts are being used as a slush fund.
P e n t a g o n o f f i c i a l s defended the arrangement.
Congress has routinely approved their requests to skim off the fuel-purchasing accounts as a straightf o r ward way t o b a l a n c e the Defense Department’s books. Lawmakers, however, are increasingly questioning the budgeting methods that have enabled the Pentagon to accumulate large windfalls from fuel sales in the first place.
The obscure accounting policy exemplifies the enormous scale and complexity of the U.S. military’s business operations, and how waste and inefficienc y in the defense bureaucrac y can dwarf what Washington spends on other parts of the federal government.
I n r e c e n t mont h s , f o r e x a mp l e , t h e P e n t a g o n has struggled to explain to Congress why it buried an internal study that exposed $125 billion in administrative waste, including skyhigh salaries for legions of defense contractors.
Such fiscal problems are deeply rooted. For the past quarter-century, the Defense Department has failed to meet a congressional mandate to clean up its books so it can pass an audit — the only federal agency that has failed to do so.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is preparing for a military buildup. President Donald Trump has said that he will ask Congress to add $54 billion to next year’s defense budget, about a 10 percent spike over current spend- ing caps.
Some senior leaders with the armed forces accused the Pentagon of intentionally overbilling the Air Force, Nav y, Ar my a n d Mar i n e Corps for fuel and pocketing the difference to pay for other priorities.
“We’ve been complaining about this,” Ray Mabus, who served as Navy secretary for eight years during the Obama administration, said in an interview. “But if we do it too loudly, oh man, they come back on us really hard.”
Officials with the Navy, who have been the most vocal in their opposition, said the pot of money derived from fuel sales is known as a “bishop’s fund,” an unofficial reserve account controlled by the office of the defense secretary.
“Another word for it is ‘slush fund,’ ” said Mabus, who left office in January.
He and other officials said artificially high fuel prices have left the Navy, at times, with less money for military training, operations and maintenance. The Air Force and Army have not complained publicly about the arrangement.
In a statement, the Pentagon acknowledged that it accumulated $5.6 billion in “enterprise gains” from fuel purchases bet ween 2010 and 2016, but said the surplus was the result of falling oil prices.
“What has happened in the last two years is we have been blessed by lower fuel prices,” Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work, the Pentagon’s second-ranking civilian official, said. “Sometimes you overestimate what the price will cost and you get an asset, and sometimes you underestimate and you get a deficit.”