2014-06-23 By Stephen Blank On June 3 Moscow announced that it was lifting its earlier embargo on arms sales to Pakistan and negotiating with Islamabad to supply the Pakistanis with Mi-35 Hind attack helicopters (a helicopter already being used in Afghanistan by the US with its Afghan allies as well).…
2014-06-19 With the first Russian Mistral completed and with the second ship on its way, the key moment has arrived to train the Russians to operate the ship. Training is crucial because the ship is so different from any ship the Russians have operated in the past. The Mistral is…
2014-06-22 by Robbin Laird The crisis in Iraq is the latest chapter in the post-Arab spring narrative. But Iraq is not an-itself crisis but part of a wider context starting with Benghazi, to Egypt, to Syria, to Iran and back again. Actions across any one part of the region reverberate…
2014-06-22 By Ed Timperlake In 1966 the US Navy made a short movie about what was then called an “Attack Carrier.” The movie describes going to flight quarters and conducting combat air operations from an aircraft carrier off Vietnam. The political maneuvering by a President and Secretary of Defense who…
2014-06-21 In a recent presentation at the Air Force Association, Col. Michael Orr, the CO of VMX-22, provided a look at how the USMC is shaping its combat cloud approach for the MAGTF. At the heart of the approach is working the following challenge: “We are working to push increased…
2014-06-15 by Robbin Laird The discussions of the USS America, although few and far between, have really focused on one of two issues: What it does not have, namely a well deck Or that it is an aircraft carrier at 50,000 plus tons and competes with the large deck carrier…
2014-06-20 by Oscar Nkala, Friday, 20 June 2014 The head of United Nations peace-keeping operations Herve Ladsous says the organization will soon deploy unarmed Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) surveillance drones to help the peacekeeping mission in Mali. Ladsous revealed the details of the surveillance program in a briefing to…
2014-06-20 By Stephen Blank It appears that we are reaching an inflection, if not a decisive, point in Russia’s war against Ukraine. Even as Presidents Putin and Poroshenko are directly communicating with each other about Poroshenko’s proposed peace plan, the level and intensity of fighting has escalated. On June 18-19…
