The Turkish Shootdown of a Russian Aircraft: Hardly a Surprise

11/27/2015
2015-11-27 Readers of Second Line of Defense were not surprised by the Turkish shootdown of the Russian aircraft. Hardly, an unpredictable event, the shootdown is a function of the evolving situation and Turkish objectives. With regard to context, Professor Amatzia Baram highlighted two important data points going into this phase of developments…

Brazil Faces Environmental Disaster: President Dilma Rousseff Does a Fly-By

11/24/2015
2015-11-23 By Kenneth Maxwell Last week, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, released a digital text of a newly discovered poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, first published in London anonymously in 1811.  Shelley was 18 years old at the time. The poem was long lost. It has now been made public for the first time in…

A South African Perspective on the Evolution of Electronic Warfare

11/24/2015
2015-11-24 Our strategic partner, defenceWeb, which is based in South Africa, recently, published three very good articles on the evolution of electronic warfare. We are reprinting them here with their permission to provide an overview of the dynamics of change associated with electronic or tron warfare. Electronic Warfare Offers Advantages…

Russian Information Ops: Up Close and Personal

11/23/2015
2015-11-23 By Richard Weitz Second Line of Defense had the opportunity to attend this year’s 12th annual meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club in Sochi, where more than one hundred foreign and Russian participants heard President Vladimir Putin and other senior Russian officials and various international experts discussed recent international developments.…