The F-35: Built with Gear-Heads in Mind

09/01/2012
The F-35 JSF was designed from conception to be easily and cost effectively maintained. It has been built with parts arranged in a modular fashion, with ninety-five percent of the field serviceable parts being “one deep”. In addition, the radar absorbing skin is easier and more cost effective to maintain…

Iran’s Nuclear Program Charging Ahead: The Latest IAED Reports

08/31/2012
2012-08-30 by Richard Weitz  The key sentence in the today’s IAEA report on Iran is that the agency is "unable to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities." And…

Russia as a Pacific Power: Tensions with Japan

08/30/2012
2012-08-30 By Richard Weitz Relations between Russia and Japan have remained strained throughout the post-Soviet period. Despite the end of the Cold War, Moscow and Tokyo have been unable to resolve their territorial dispute over what the Russians call the Southern Kurils and the Japanese label their Northern Territories. The 1875…

F-35 Opens the Door to True Cooperation of Forces

08/30/2012
by Col. Chelsea Anderson (Excerpt) August 28, 2012 The potential for cooperation among U.S. armed forces as well as coalition forces all using the F-35 variants is significant. In fact, the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force are working on their own F-35 variants and eight other countries have…

Iraq and its Gulf Neighbors: A Troubled History

08/28/2012
2012-08-28 by Richard Weitz Iraq’s relations with other Arab countries are complex and often troubled. Arabs and others consider Iraq a core Arab state despite its peripheral location on the eastern flank of the Arab world, where it borders two large non-Arab countries, Iran and Turkey. Yet, Iraq’s diverse population…

Japan, the Iraq War, and More on the Coming Out Party

08/28/2012
2012-08-28 By Richard Weitz In explaining their government’s December 2003 decision to support Operation Iraqi Freedom, Japanese officials cited the imperative of supporting their country’s bilateral military alliance with the United States. They considered the deployment of ground troops to the Iraqi theater as especially important in demonstrating Japan’s reliability to…