02/18/2013: Marines and Sailors of Company C., Battalion Landing Team 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit, execute a helicopter raid alongside their Thai counterparts as part of exercise Cobra Gold 2013. The U.S. and Thai Marines inserted together via CH-53E Super Stallion and CH-46E Sea Knight helicopters…
According to a Lockheed Martin Press release: FORT WORTH, Texas, Feb. 15, 2013 [caption id="attachment_50938" align="alignnone" width="300"] CF-6 First Flight Photo by Angel DelCueto Carroll Credit: Lockheed Martin[/caption] The first Lockheed Martin production model F-35C carrier variant, known as CF-6, flew its first sortie Thursday. Upon delivery later this year,…
2013-02-16 by Col. Bradley Weisz In December of 2009, President Barack Obama ordered the build-up of an additional 30,000 U.S. forces to Afghanistan in support of the 8-year-old war officially known as Operation ENDURING FREEDOM. The primary objectives for this large troop surge were to reverse the Taliban momentum that…
02/15/2013: Approximately 1,000 Marines and Sailors of the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit offloaded from three ships of the Navy's Amphibious Squadron 11 to begin the multinational exercise Cobra Gold 2013 in the Kingdom of Thailand. The unit was brought ashore using the Navy's landing craft utility, landing craft air cushions,…
With the North Korean nuclear weapons test a keen reminder of the challenges of the 2nd nuclear age, the need to get missile defense right is increasingly pressing. https://sldinfo.com/the-challenge-of-deterrence-in-the-second-nuclear-age-a-discussion-with-paul-bracken/ [caption id="attachment_50869" align="alignnone" width="200"] PACIFIC OCEAN (Feb. 13, 2013) A Standard Missile-3 (SM-3) Block 1A interceptor is launched from the guided-missile…
02/13/2013: The USS Blue Ridge is one of two special USN flagships. As Col. Weisz noted about the Blue Ridge and Mount Whitney: Both the BLUE RIDGE and MOUNT WHITNEY offer a great capability for enabling and supporting distributed operations. In fact, I don’t know of any other ship in…
2013-02-13 Major challenges are provided to the modern state by trans-national forces, among the most powerful of which is trans-national crime. http://sldinfo.wpstage.net/emerging-alliances-for-the-21st-century-part-vii/ The bad guys can innovate more rapidly with the use of modern technology, can the states which acquire technology more slowly, and tend to be more hierarchical than a…
02/12/2013: The aircrew of an Air Station Houston MH-65 Dolphin helicopter return after locating and rescuing a boater that had run aground Dec. 14, 2012, near Port Arthur, Texas. A 33-year-old man was rescued by a Coast Guard aircrew when his boat ran aground, Friday, approximately 7 miles southeast of…
