All military Analysts, civilian observers, and professional soldiers now talk of hybrid warfare. The phrase got currency after the annexation of Crimea by the Russian Federation when the US observers believed Moscow demonstrated for the first time hybrid warfare capabilities using various platforms including social media to penetrate western audiences for its narrative acceptance. Russia …
Continue reading Be Warned – Pakistan Is Losing the Narrative War
Months of unprecedented California wildfires keep raging – the most destructive and deadly in state history, so far around 1.7 million acres destroyed. Through Saturday, 76 fatalities were reported, nearly 1,300 others missing – the number rising from 265 on Friday. Official numbers keep increasing. The death toll already likely exceeds 1,000. Countless bodies remain …
Continue reading Hell Hath No Fury Like Raging California Wildfires
Saudi sports diplomacy is proving to be a mirror image of the kingdom’s challenged domestic, regional and foreign policies. Overlorded by sports czar Turki al-Sheikh, Saudi sports diplomacy, like the kingdom’s broader policies, has produced at best mixed results, suggesting that financial muscle coupled with varying degrees of coercion does not guarantee success. Mr. Al-Sheikh, …
Continue reading Saudi Sports Diplomacy: A Mirror Image of the Kingdom’s Already Challenged Policies
One day after vice president Mike Pence and China's president Xi Jinping clashed after exchanging sharply worded barbs in a showdown between the two superpowers, on Sunday the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit ended in unprecedented chaos and disarray, without agreement on a joint communique for the first time in its history as the escalating …
Accidents happen. For Norway at the conclusion of NATO’s Trident Juncture 2018 military exercises, such an accident occurred with its Lockheed Martin Aegis-equipped frigate, HNoMS Helge Ingstad. After a collision with an oil tanker, the frigate’s captain ordered the ship aground to prevent a total loss. The quick thinking may have saved the lives of …
President Donald Trump has one ace up his sleeve if worse comes to worst. Many people in America would gladly support First Lady Melania Trump for the new position as Queen of the United States. The same lady we saw ushering the new president on inauguration day has now commanded Deputy National Security Adviser Mira …
Continue reading Three Cheers for the Queen of the United States of America
Introduction In the Department of Defense authored summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United States for 2018, Secretary James Mattis quite succinctly sets out the challenges and goals of the U.S. military in the immediate future. Importantly, he acknowledges that the U.S. had become far too focused on counter-insurgency over the past two …
Continue reading Why the U.S. Military is Woefully Unprepared for a Major Conventional Conflict
There are now overt indications that this planet is becoming uninhabitable. Not only are increasing numbers of humans migrating from near the Equator, northward toward nations that have more temperate climates, but also there are stronger and more frequent hurricanes and longer droughts and spreading desertification and larger and more frequent forest fires, all of …
The USSR’s Christmas 1979 intervention into Afghanistan was foreseen as a swift, near-costless and necessary conflict. Days after the military move, Soviet president Leonid Brezhnev assured his diplomat Anatoly Dobrynin that, “we will end this war in three or four weeks”. It continued for almost a decade in fact, outlasting by over six years Brezhnev …
Continue reading War Very Rarely Unfolds as Planned. The Soviet-Afghan War
