2013-12-13 by Kenneth Maxwell President Francois Hollande has just completed a two day State Visit to Brazil. He was returning from South Africa where he had attended the ceremonies in Pretoria for Nelson Mandela. He stopped over in the Central African Republic on the way to Brazil where he has committed French troops.…
2013-12-13 South Africa has one of the most capable naval forces on the continent, but it is geared towards battles and not patrol capability, argues Magnus Lewis-Olsson, chief executive of Saab Grintek Defence (SGD) South Africa. This year, with the SA National Defence Force’s (SANDF) mission in the Democratic Republic of…
12/12/2013: A Marine F-35B Lightning II breaks left out of a formation flight with United Kingdom F-35B aircraft over Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., Dec. 4. The joint-program reached a new single-day record for F-35 sorties Dec. 4 with 45 training missions between all three models of the aircraft. The…
2013-12-12 One hundred and thirty-five Chinese peacekeepers arrived in Mali’s capital Bamako last week in China’s first deployment of forces for a peacekeeping mission. The personnel complement that arrived last Tuesday includes 35 engineers, 65 medical staff and 35 soldiers. They are the first of 395 personnel that China is sending…
2013-12-10 by Guy Martin France is deploying a sizeable number of aircraft, including transport and combat helicopters, to the Central African Republic (CAR) as part of its intervention force there, which aims to improve the fragile humanitarian situation in the country. Other nations, including the United States and United Kingdom,…
2013-12-09 By Robbin Laird Recently, Lt. General (Retired) Deptula chaired a key fighter conference in London. He underscored that a new innovative approach to thinking about the future of airpower was needed. According to Deptula “the future needs an agile operational framework for the integrated employment of allied military power.” And he…
2013-12-05 We first met with Captain Hall at the time of the christening of the latest large deck amphibious ship for the USN-USMC team. Recently, we were able to discuss the progress of the ship and the next phase of the ship’s preparation for deployment. The Captain is an experienced CRUDES…
2013-12-08 by Robbin Laird and Ed Timperlake In our book on shaping a 21st century Pacific defense strategy, we have focused on the emergence of a template for distributed operations. Forward presence, indeed persistent presence, with an understanding that the allies are always forward deployed, with scalable forces with significant…
