The weak can be rash. The powerful must be restrained.– Secretary of State William Rogers, April 1969 For most of these past several weeks, international attention has been focused on the activities taking place near a peninsula on the north-east coast of Korea. There, despite protests and warnings from around the world, the…
Much discussion and analysis (or what some try to pass off as analysis) in the ‘verse. Many, most in fact, are focused on the specifics of the failure and potential threat to the US. But there is more to this than meets the (media) eye, so let’s break it down here. We’ll break this into…
Those dinosaurs amongst us remember them from another age – the ghostly lines that arced out from the geopolitical heartland of the Soviet Union. Head east from Norfolk or west from Pearl or San Diego and you’d trip the first one, established by the orbiting EORSAT and RORSATs, pricking interest in command centers back in…
Previous: The Missiles of Winter (I): International Conventions March 1985. In the high desert, west of Tehran, an element of the Islamic Revolution Guard Corps Air Force (IRGC AF) is going about their business in the early morning darkness. The object of their attention is a SCUD-B SRBM fixed to a MAZ-543P transporter-erector launcher, both…
perâ‹…specâ‹…tive (per-spek-tiv)-noun: A technique of depicting volumes and spatial relationships on a flat surface. The state of one’s ideas, the facts known to one, etc., in having a meaningful interrelationship; the faculty of seeing all the relevant data in a meaningful relationship. Perspective requires context. These days we see and hear a great deal about…
“War Is The Unfolding of Miscalculations” That quote, attributed to author Barbara Tuchman, is generally ascribed to the events that ran up to the First World War. However, it, along with other illuminating principles such as the Rule of Unintended Consequences find a wider, and sadly, more common range of applications including those events presently…
Russian Navy to return Kirov CGN to Service. The Russian Navy has stated its intent to return the nuclear-powered cruiser “Admiral Nakhimov” to service with the Northern Fleet. The vessel has been docked in the Sevmash shipyard in Severodvinsk for the last 9 years. The “Admiral Nakhimov” was taken out of service in 1990 and…
Catching our collective breath before heading out the door for a week of TDY, we pause to review some of the more noteworthy items making the rounds this past week beginning with one reaction to the 2008 DoD report to Congress on China’s Military Power… Inside The Ring – China Missiles (WASHINGTON TIMES 07 MAR…
Announced and made available this afternoon. You can read/download it from the Virtual Library here. Some highlights: The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is pursuing comprehensive transformation from a mass army designed for protracted wars of attrition on its territory to one capable of fighting and winning shortduration, high intensity conflicts along its periphery against high-tech…
Very little in the way of defense forces… 1.8% of GDP allocated to defense is a hard sum to work with these days – harder still if you decide to freeze it in place and not adjust annually for inflation. In such a coffin corner, what is one left with? If you are…
