A News Aggregator That Covers The World's Major Wars And Conflicts. Military, Political, And Intelligence News Are Also Covered. Occasionally We Will Have Our Own Opinions Or Observations To Make.
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* Long-range interceptor blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base
* Was testing thrusters on the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle
* Craft designed to crash into enemy missiles and destroy them
* Later this year will try to destroy an intercontinental ballistic missile
A missile defense rocket designed to smash incoming missiles out of the sky has been successfully launched from a military base in Central California.
Authorities say a long-range interceptor blasted off from Vandenberg Air Force Base.
The launch was testing thrusters on the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle, which is designed to crash into enemy missiles and destroy them.
Mystery gunman credited with shooting three of the terror group's leaders in their new "Caliphate" in Colonel Gaddafi's home city of Sirte
As befits all the best practitioners of his shadowy trade, no-one is quite sure whether he is one man or many, or even simply an urban legend.
But after a string of assassinations of its local henchmen, the Islamic State's new "Caliphate" in the Libyan city of Sirte is abuzz with talk that an anti-Isil sniper is at work.
In recent weeks, no fewer than three Isil commanders in Sirte have been shot dead from long range, according to local media.
WNU Editor: This sounds more like a special ops mission with the objective being to get rid of top ISIS commanders and leaders. The question that needs to be asked is .... who is ordering these "hits"?
Andrey Bezrukov, Mikhail Mamonov, Sergey Markedonov, and Andrey Sushentsov, National Interest: How to Avoid War With Russia
The year ahead could bring conflict or cooperation in these key areas.
Much has been said recently about the unpredictability of Russian foreign policy, and the resulting uncertainty. In reality, Moscow’s interests are quite limited and focused on its near abroad. Understanding how Russia prioritizes its security challenges and how it assesses the security situation on its borders is a start to clearing up much of the uncertainty in Eurasia today. This analysis focuses on critical situations that may develop this year into vital challenges to Russian interests, triggering a response from Moscow.
It has been two years since Russia found itself in the middle of a geopolitical tornado. Could it deliberately stay out of it? We believe not. In nature, wind emerges because of differential pressures between regions. Similarly, in politics, conflicts emerge from a change in the balance of power and destruction of the status quo. The collapse of regimes in Ukraine and in the Middle East created low-pressure zones, drawing neighboring countries into the regional storm. Having found itself in a hurricane, Moscow made its choice. It could have lowered its sails and followed the wind, but it preferred to keep to its course even if it meant sailing against the wind.
U.S. Defense Department map shows Coalition and Ground Forces in Syria and Iraq fighting Islamic State, or Daesh, fighters in the Anbar Corridor from Hadithah to Ramadi. (Courtesy: United States Central Command)
The borders of the Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria are steadily eroding, but it will likely be months before U.S. and coalition-backed forces are ready to take on the terror group’s strongholds in Mosul or Raqqa.
New estimates from U.S.-led Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR) show Islamic State (IS) fighters have lost 40 percent of the territory they once held in Iraq and five percent of the territory they once held in Syria.
“We’ve seen small dust-ups in both the Euphrates and Tigris River valleys but no significant tactical action,” OIR spokesman Col. Steve Warren told Pentagon reporters from Baghdad regarding IS activity in Iraq.
Forget the sonic boom—the U.S. military’s new F-35 stealth fighter just hit massive turbulence that could delay its release yet again.
The U.S. military’s new F-35 stealth fighter is again falling behind schedule in its 16-year, $60 billion development. The problem this time—the radar-evading plane’s 8 million lines of computer code, amounting to arguably the most complex software suite ever installed on a warplane.
The code delay is the latest—and possibly most damaging—setback for the Pentagon’s ambitious and controversial plan to replace almost all of its Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps fighters with three different versions of the F-35 at a cost of more than a trillion dollars over the next 50 years.
Damaging, because the military and F-35-maker Lockheed Martin have increasingly sold the F-35 as a sort of “flying computer” whose software can outthink enemy pilots even when the enemy’s own planes fly faster, maneuver better and carry more weaponry than the F-35 does.
From Wikipedia: Sergeant Brock (Gene Barry) and Goldie (Nat King Cole) are American Korean War veterans now serving as French Foreign Legion mercenaries in the First Indochina War. Angie Dickinson plays Brock's wife, a "half caste" Chinese Eurasian named "Lucky Legs" who resorts to smuggling to feed her five-year-old son she had with Brock. Brock abandoned her and the child when it was born with Asian features, feeling a "half breed" would not be welcome in America; an attitude towards miscegenation prevalent (in some quarters) at the time. Lucky is recruited by the French high command to use her knowledge to guide a demolition squad of Legionnaires led by Brock to blow up a hidden Viet Minh ammunition dump on the border with Red China. In return for her services, Lucky is promised by the French that they will arrange for her son's evacuation to America.
The patrol is filled with animosity between the former lovers, booby traps, and Viet Minh patrols. On arrival at the ammunition dump hidden in a mountain, Dickinson discovers the commanding officer is a former friend Major Cham (Lee Van Cleef) who wants to take her and her son to a new life in Moscow. Van Cleef plays his role as a high flyer corporate executive (in the manner of Fuller's gangsters in Underworld USA) marked for great things in the world of international communism. The sabotage mission is successful but at great cost; Lucky dies blowing up the dump. Brock reconciles with his child and is last seen walking along holding his hand in preparation for returning to America, as Cole reprises the title song.
U.S. officials are currently “looking at military options” to combat the spread of ISIS in Libya, according to a Pentagon spokesman. These options would most likely involve U.S. special forces coordinated with militias on the ground to fight the group, which has established a stronghold around the coastal city of Sirte, also the hometown of Muammar Qaddafi.
The challenges facing any such military intervention are similar to those in Syria—a lack of reliable partners to act as a ground force, and the fact that ISIS’s enemies are also fighting against each other. While there have been no U.S. combat operations in Libya since the fall of Qaddafi in 2011, U.S. military personnel have been paying periodic visits to the country to make contact with potential partners. One incident in December didn’t bode well for this effort. A group of commandos who were making contact with the Libyan army were asked to leave the country after the air force posted a picture of them on its Facebook page, claiming that the visit was unauthorized. The incident was likely a result of a lack of communication between Libya's air force and army.
The main Syrian opposition grouping agreed to attend United Nations-sponsored peace talks which began in Geneva on Friday, reversing a boycott that had threatened to wreck the first attempt to find a diplomatic solution to the war in two years.
On the ground, opponents of President Bashar al-Assad said they were facing a Russian-backed military onslaught, with hundreds of civilians reported to be fleeing as the Syrian army and allied militia tried to capture a suburb of Damascus and finish off rebels defending it.
U.N. envoy Staffan de Mistura has invited the Syrian government and an opposition umbrella group to Geneva for "proximity talks", in which they would meet in separate rooms.
EXCLUSIVE: The intelligence community has now deemed some of Hillary Clinton’s emails “too damaging" to national security to release under any circumstances, according to a U.S. government official close to the ongoing review. A second source, who was not authorized to speak on the record, backed up the finding.
The decision to withhold the documents in full, and not provide even a partial release with redactions, further undercuts claims by the State Department and the Clinton campaign that none of the intelligence in the emails was classified when it hit Clinton's personal server.
I have been involved in numerous computer science projects since the 1980s, as well as developing numerous web projects since 1996.
These blogs are a summation of all the information that I read and catalog pertaining to the subjects that interest me.
