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Archive for the ‘Strategy’ Category.
By AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
Published: 4 Oct 13:04 EDT (17:04 GMT)
BEIJING - China denounced proposed U.S. arms sales to Taiwan worth $6.5 billion, according to state media on Oct. 4, warning “there is only one China in the world, and that Taiwan is a part of China.”
Continue reading ‘China Denounces Proposed U.S. Sales to Taiwan’ »
02/10/2008 02h01
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The US Senate on Wednesday endorsed a landmark US-India nuclear agreement, removing the final legislative hurdle for resumption of civilian nuclear trade between the two countries after three decades.
Continue reading ‘Indian nuclear deal passed in US Senate’ »
Friday, September 19, 2008 - ?2005 IranMania.com
LONDON, September 19 (IranMania) - Iran’s fleet has the capacity to inflict crippling damages on any US vessels in the Persian Gulf, a French newspaper reports, PressTV reported.
Continue reading ‘Iran speed boats lethal to US navy: report’ »
By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst
Published: Sept. 17, 2008 at 4:01 PM
WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 (UPI) — Russia keeps upping the ante in its retaliatory moves for the greatly expanded U.S. and NATO presence in the Black Sea to support the former Soviet republic of Georgia. On Monday, the two Tupolev Tu-160 White Swan nuclear bombers it sent to Venezuela Sept. 10 carried out a six-hour patrol over the Caribbean Sea.
Published: September 11, 2008
By ARNAUD DE BORCHGRAVE (UPI Editor at Large)
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 (UPI) — Alarm bells suddenly went off in government offices from Washington to Ottawa to London to The Hague when Pakistan’s newly minted democratic government, after almost nine years of military rule, suddenly closed the border to all NATO resupply traffic to Afghanistan.
NATO and U.S. troops in Afghanistan are resupplied by endless convoys of trucks that snake over 1,200 miles through Peshawar and the Khyber Pass to reach Kabul and points north and east, and over 600 miles for the more direct route through Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan, and Chaman on the border to reach Kandahar and points south and west in Afghanistan. Oil, food, heavy equipment, hospital supplies — all are trucked at a cost of $1 million a day in Pakistani road tolls.
Continue reading ‘Commentary: Pakistan’s existential crisis’ »
by Staff Writers
Tokyo (AFP) Sept 4, 2008
An increasingly assertive Russia is staging more frequent military drills near Japan, including with nuclear submarines, the defence ministry here warned in a report Friday.
Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda’s cabinet approved the annual “white paper” on defence policy, which also reiterated Japan’s longstanding unease about China’s rapid military buildup and the threat of North Korea.
The report came as tensions rise between Russia and the West over the conflict in Georgia, which some pundits fear could open the door to a new cold war.
Japan, a close US ally, has never formally ended World War II with Russia due to Moscow’s continued control over four islands off Japan’s northern coast seized in 1945.
By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst
Published: Sept. 4, 2008 at 10:45 AM
WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 (UPI) — The striking success of even relatively small forces of Russian Main Battle Tanks in the five-day conflict with Georgia proves once again how crucial tanks remain to the conduct of modern war.
Russia used a concentration of its state-of-the-art T-90 Main Battle Tanks, which also have been sold in large numbers — 657 in all — to India, backed up by significant numbers of older, supposedly obsolete but still highly effective models, especially the more than a quarter-century-old T-72. The Georgian army, which had been significantly strengthened over the past two years by an influx of U.S. military equipment augmented by training from American military advisers, fell apart and offered no significant resistance whatsoever.
Continue reading ‘Georgia-Russia conflict shows tanks are still crucial in modern war’ »
By Aziz Malik ‘Pakistan Times’ Federal Bureau Chief
ISLAMABAD: Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani on Friday said Pakistan is a peace loving country which believes in maintaining minimum credible deterrence for ensuring durable peace and stability in the region.
Talking to Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Mohammad Afzal Tahir at PM House, the Prime Minister said Pakistan’s defence policy is based on peaceful coexistence in conformity with the prevailing geo-strategic environment and national aspirations.
Continue reading ‘Pakistan believes in minimum credible deterrence for peace: PM’ »
By Serge Halimi
Le Monde Diplomatique
The question of responsibility for the hostilities in the Caucasus shouldn’t worry us too much. Less than a week after Georgia’s invasion, two well-known French commentators said it was old stuff. An influential neo-conservative from the United States backed that view: knowing who started things “is not very important”, wrote Robert Kagan. “This war did not begin because of a miscalculation by Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili. It is a war that Moscow has been attempting to provoke for some time” (1).
One hypothesis deserves another. If, on the day of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics, somebody else than Saakashvili, a graduate of New York’s Columbia Law School, had started a war, would western capitals and their media have been able to contain righteous indignation at such a symbolic act?
History is easier to follow when goodies and baddies are decided in advance. The goodies, such as Georgia, have the right to defend their territorial integrity against the separatist struggles of their neighbours. The baddies, such as Serbia, must accept the self-determination of minority communities or expect to be bombed by Nato. The moral of this story is even more enlightening when, to defend his country’s borders, the charming pro-American Saakashvili repatriates some of the 2,000 soldiers he had sent to invade Iraq.
By MARTIN SIEFF, UPI Senior News Analyst
Published: Aug. 27, 2008 at 5:35 PM
WASHINGTON, Aug. 27 (UPI) — Everyone is focusing on those anti-ICBM GBI interceptors the United States will deploy in Poland, but the 96 Patriot interceptors to be based there to protect Polish installations will play a crucial role in defending Western Europe, too.
The Polish government’s decision to allow the United States to build a base to house 10 Ground-based Mid-course Interceptors in its territory infuriated Russia, which has responded with very serious threats against Poland. There has been a widespread discussion in the Russian media, as we have monitored in these columns over the past two years, that Russia may deploy its formidable solid-fuel, short-range, pinpoint-accurate Iskander quasi-ballistic missiles in its Kaliningrad oblast, or region, which juts menacingly into Poland.
The Polish government of Prime Minister Donald Tusk was not surprised by this Russian reaction. That was why, in large part, it held off from making the fateful commitment to host the GBIs for so long. But the major Russian military incursion into the former Soviet republic of Georgia earlier this month concentrated the minds of policymakers in Warsaw wonderfully, and the Polish government approved the GBI base deal.
Continue reading ‘96 Patriot PAC-3s will boost Polish defenses’ »