Last week, the U.S.-led Multi-National Force-Iraq (MNF-I) had nothing but praise for Shiite theocrat-wannabe Moqtada al-Sadr. Prefacing his name with “al-Sayyid” (the Honorable), the United States acknowledged al-Sadr’s legitimacy in the Iraqi political scene as U.S. commanders warmly embraced his decision to maintain a ceasefire between his roughly 60,000-strong illegal militia (Jaish al-Mahdi or JAM) and Iraqi government and coalition forces. With a tenuous domestic political situation in Iraq, the United States had no choice but to shake hands with the devil. Without question, the short-term effects of the U.S. surge strategy have been highly positive: significant reductions of violence […]

A debate is raging in Israel over what to do to stop the relentless attacks on Israeli civilians launched from Hamas-controlled Gaza. On Wednesday, 30 rockets slammed into Israel, killing a college student and injuring several others. Just a few days earlier, another barrage into the beleaguered town of Sderot injured a mother, her baby and her 10-year-old son, whose arm was partially severed by the blast. A couple of weeks before that, an 8-year-old Israeli boy lost his leg to a rocket attack from Gaza. The urgency of the problem is clear, but the search for a solution poses […]

GULU, Uganda — After one-and-a-half years of rocky peace talks between the government of Uganda and the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), northern Ugandans are cautiously courting freedom. Although many internally displaced people are still sleeping in the camps they’ve called home for about a decade now, they’re beginning to move furniture and farming tools back to their village homes. Meanwhile, in the northern town of Gulu, new hotels and apartment buildings are being constructed and buses are now leaving for Kampala, the southern capital, at 11 p.m. (A late-night trip was unthinkable just three years ago, when rebels could be […]

The U.S. Army is slated to publish a new operations manual this month that equates achieving success in stability operations with winning offensive and defensive battles. The new Army manual is in line with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ vision for military transformation. In a speech delivered last November at Kansas State University, Secretary Gates stressed the need to balance military force with political and economic resources in order to “integrate and apply all of the elements of national power to problems and challenges abroad.” Gates added that the experience of recent years, as well as his decades of public […]

Turkey’s Iraq Incursion: Barzani Draws the Line

There are conflicting reports about just how many troops Turkey has sent into northern Iraq, with the general trend being bearish. Initial Turkish TV reports (passed on by the press) put the number at 10,000, citing unnamed military sources. Reuters put the number at 8,000, or two Turkish brigades. Later television reports lowered it further to 3,000, which the Iraqi government today bid down to 1,000, only to be undersold by the American military command in Iraq which claimed that only a few hundred Turkish troops took part. The Turkish military, meanwhile, closed the bidding by warning that “media reports […]

A U.S. warship prowling the Pacific Ocean has officially ushered in the Missile Defense Age, firing an SM-3 missile-killing rocket to destroy a satellite tumbling toward Earth. “The intercept occurred, and we’re very confident we hit the satellite,” Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calmly reported. Like the Rocket Age, which terrified Americans when Sputnik orbited the globe and then transfixed the world when Armstrong took his giant leap on the lunar surface; like the Jet Age, which turned the skies over Korea into a killing field and then opened the way to inexpensive, high-speed […]

Under normal circumstances, it’s nearly impossible to get countries to restrict the use of widely available weapons that are seen as militarily advantageous. At the moment, however, two groups of countries are competing to sharply cut back on one type armament that humanitarian groups claim pose a particular danger to civilians in war zones: cluster munitions. Cluster munitions are bombs, rockets, and artillery shells that disperse smaller submunitions over broad areas. These grenades or bomblets, sometimes numbering as many as 600 submunitions from a single munition, can fail to detonate immediately yet maim or kill if disturbed later. Officials of […]

Turkish Forces Reportedly Enter Northern Iraq

A few days ago, Turkish FM Ali Babacan reiterated that Turkey still reserved the option of cross-border incursions into northern Iraq, weather permitting, to complement the artillery and bombing campaign they’ve been using to target PKK rebel camps in the Qandil Mountains. I figured the remarks were geared towards preparing public opinion for a spring offensive, since the winter weather in the Qandil Mountains is not very conducive to ground operations. But this morning come reports that the Turkish Army just sent 10,000 ground forces into northern Iraq following an artillery and air barrage. According to Hurriyet (Turkey), the U.S. […]

Spy Satellite Intercept Video

Below is the Pentagon’s video of last night’s apparently successful shoot down of a failing spy satellite: If the embedded video won’t play, click here. For more, see “Spy Satellite’s Scheduled Destruction Raises Concerns About Diplomatic Fallout“

The neighborhood militias that are the lynchpin of the U.S. counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq have a new name, but the problems these groups present are as old as the Iraq war. In recent weeks, the U.S. military has begun calling the groups by the patriotic moniker “Sons of Iraq,” which Baghdad proposed to replace the difficult-to-translate “Concerned Local Citizens.” But the re-branding has done nothing to resolve the poor vetting, sectarian divisions and murky motives that make the groups a potential security risk in coming years. Three years after Iraq’s Sunni minority mostly boycotted national elections, the Sunni-dominated Sons of […]

Drug Smuggling Submarines ‘in Vogue’

The U.S. Coast Guard Feb. 18 captured a surface-skimming submarine called “Big Foot” off the coast of the Florida Keys. According to this Pentagon video report, the sub was carrying four tons of cocaine and had unidentified “new technology” that allowed it to elude drug enforcement radar and sonar. The Pentagon Channel news reader calls the sub “one-of-a-kind.” Judging by a number of recent news reports, however, the clean-cut former drug smuggler quoted in the video appears to be more on target when he says that subs are “in vogue” for the international drug smuggling crowd. Back in August 2006, […]

The Pentagon’s decision to shoot down a failing U.S. spy satellite has prompted speculation about why the orbiter must intentionally be destroyed and has reignited debate regarding the military and diplomatic implications of using weapons in space. Last week, Pentagon officials said that a three-ship convoy just north of the Hawaiian Islands would track the satellite and shoot it down in the next two weeks using a modified SM-3 missile fired from an Aegis cruiser. The satellite, launched just over a year ago, experienced a technical failure almost immediately after reaching space and is currently circling in a low orbit, […]

The recent African Union summit originally intended to concentrate on accelerating Africa’s industrial development. By the time they met from Jan. 31 through Feb. 2, however, the 52 African heads of state who attended the 10th Ordinary Session of the AU Assembly of Heads of State and Government in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, abandoned consideration of this and other planned agenda items in order to address the conflicts in Chad, Kenya, Sudan, and Somalia, which dominated their discussions. Although the need to manage urgent problems can often stimulate institutional capacity building, in this case the crises prevented AU governments from grappling […]

Pentagon Planning to Shoot Down Rogue Satellite

Wired’s Danger Room has the scoop and links galore. As Danger Room notes, a key question is: Will China view this as a response to their January 2007 anti-satellite test? A related question: How might this affect recent joint Russian and Chinese efforts to restrict the deployment of weapons in space. WPR contributor Richard Weitz recently examined those Russian-Chinese initiatives. Here’s an excerpt: The publication of an unclassified version of the new U.S. National Space Policy in October 2006 evoked deep concern in Moscow and Beijing. Although the policy acknowledges the value of international cooperation in space and the right […]

At 10:45 p.m. on Tuesday night, a loud explosion rocked the neighborhood of Kafr Soussa in Damascus. Residents rushed to see the gruesome spectacle left by the explosion of a car bomb. It was the kind of scene that has become eerily common not in this, the Syrian capital, but in Beirut, where the victim of this attack, terrorist mastermind Imad Moughniyah, found most of his followers, and more than a few of his many enemies. Moughniyah was the No. 2 — some say No. 1 — man in Lebanon’s Hezbollah organization. The group reported his death declaring it was […]

With Pakistan’s much-anticipated Feb. 18 elections fast approaching against the backdrop of mounting jihadist activity in the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), questions about the stability of the region and the strategic implications of the activity there for U.S. interests seem to be growing more urgent by the day. While Pakistan has been considered a “key ally” in the war on terror for many years now, receiving at least $10 billion since 9/11 for its support in hunting down top al-Qaida operatives, this partnership has become dramatically more complex of late, and American decision makers are now facing difficult […]

For months, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has had only limited success in generating greater contributions for NATO’s military operations in Afghanistan by appealing directly to European governments. As a result, Gates has now decided to pursue the risky strategy of appealing directly to their skeptical publics for support. The Afghan war dominated the two-day meeting of NATO defense ministers in Vilnius, Lithuania. The government of Canada had provoked a mini crisis by warning beforehand that that it would withdraw its forces from the insurgent-prone province of Kandahar next January unless other NATO countries agreed to send at least […]

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