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Visiting Sweden, NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer said that Sweden is one of NATO’s most important partners and is welcome as a member in the rapid reaction force, should Sweden decide to join. On Friday Morning, NATO’s Secretary General met Sweden’s Defence Minister Sten Tolgfors to discuss the situation in Afghanistan, one of the two places where Swedish troops come under NATO command as part of the ISAF force. They also discussed possible participation in NATO’s rapid reaction force (NRF), with Sweden saying a decision may be reached by the spring. Jaap de Hoop Scheffer also promised to...

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Faced with a threatening military buildup by China, an increasingly outgunned Taiwan is quietly pushing ahead with plans to develop missiles that could strike the mainland, defense and security experts say. Taiwan successfully tested its first cruise missile with that kind of range this year, one that could send a nearly 900-pound warhead more than 600 miles, to targets as distant as Shanghai, military analysts said. Some Taiwanese military specialists have argued for decades that Taiwan should develop offensive weapons, including missiles, as a deterrent to the mainland, which has threatened to attack the self-governing island if...

ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam — To take part in its annual exercises with the United States Air Force here last month, Japan practiced dropping 500-pound live bombs on Farallon de Medinilla, a tiny island in the western Pacific’s turquoise waters more than 150 miles north of here. The pilots described dropping a live bomb for the first time — shouting “shack!” to signal a direct hit — and seeing the fireball from aloft. “The level of tension was just different,” said Capt. Tetsuya Nagata, 35, stepping down from his cockpit onto the sunbaked tarmac. The exercise would have been...

"A slipping gear could let your M203 grenade launcher fire when you least expect it. That would make you quite unpopular in what's left of your unit." - Army's magazine of preventive maintenance ------------------------------------------------------ "Aim towards the Enemy." - Instruction printed on U.S. Rocket Launcher ------------------------------------------------------ "When the pin is pulled, Mr. Grenade is not our friend." - U.S. Marine Corps ------------------------------------------------------ "Cluster bombing from B-52s is very, very accurate. The bombs are guaranteed always to hit the ground." - USAF Ammo Troop ------------------------------------------------------ "If the enemy is in range, so are you." - Infantry Journal ----------------------------------------------------- "It is generally...

  Rakkasan Armament Program Saves Lives Welders add armor to Humvees to protect troops from improvised explosive devices. By U.S. Army Sgt. Waine D. Haley 133rd Mobile Public Affairs Detachment TIKRIT, Iraq, July 20, 2006 -- A safety innovation has hit the battlefield in the form of heavy armor added to Humvees and is now on the roads of Iraq. The 626th Brigade Support Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, created the Rakkasan Armament Program, known as RAP, in January 2006. This program is intended to provide shielding between the soldiers and the number one killer of...

From Myanmar to Russia with love By Sergei Blagov MOSCOW - Russia has never let human-rights abuses get in the way of a good bilateral relationship. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union overtly supplied arms and concessionary loans to anti-Western allies such as Iraq, Syria, Vietnam and North Korea. Although the Soviet collapse in 1991 undermined those ties, President Vladimir Putin's accession to power in 2000 has seen Russia move to re-establish itself as a military ally to small countries that are willing to stand up against the United States. So when Myanmar's General Maung Aye recently visited Moscow,...

A secret Pentagon study has found that as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor. Such armor has been available since 2003, but until recently the Pentagon has largely declined to supply it to troops despite calls from the field for additional protection, according to military officials. The ceramic plates in vests now worn by the majority of troops in Iraq cover only some of the chest and back. In at least 74 of the 93 fatal wounds...

Rafael wins $70m contract with Polish Army Rafael beat leading manufacturers of remote controlled weapon stations. Hadas Manor 14 Nov 05 12:29 The Polish Army has chosen Rafael Armament Development Authority Ltd. to supply cannon stations in a $70 million contract. Rafael won the contract when the Polish Ministry of Defense and WZM decided to equip the Polish Army with Patria Armored Modular Vehicle (AMV) equipped with Rafael cannon stations. Rafael’s Remote Controlled Weapon Station (RCWS) enable troops to direct and fire cannons from inside armored cars, without being exposed. The cannon station has fire control system includes a high-performance...

Since it opened its doors on May 1, 1909, Walter Reed Hospital in Washington has been a healing destination for hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, several presidents and luminaries like Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur, Gen. George C. Marshall, King Hussein of Jordan and the exiled shah of Iran. But last month, Walter Reed became a casualty of the Pentagon's plan to shut, reduce or reorganize military facilities in all 50 states. If Congress accepts the recommendation to close the medical center, most of its 113-acre campus will be razed. Some have suggested preserving the complex's most historic buildings for...

When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Iraq last year to tour the Abu Ghraib prison camp, military officials did not rely on a government-issued Humvee to transport him safely on the ground. Instead, they turned to Halliburton, the oil services contractor, which lent the Pentagon a rolling fortress of steel called the Rhino Runner. State Department officials traveling in Iraq use armored vehicles that are built with V-shaped hulls to better deflect bullets and bombs. Members of Congress favor another model, called the M1117, which can endure 12-pound explosives and .50-caliber armor-piercing rounds. Unlike the Humvee, the Pentagon's vehicle...

Nine years ago, the Navy set out to build a new guided missile for its 21st-century ships. Fiascoes followed. In a test firing, the missile melted its on-board guidance system. "Incredibly," an Army review said, "the Navy ruled the test a success." Recently, the Navy rewrote the contract and put out another one, with little to show for the money it already spent. The bill has come to almost $400 million, five times the original budget. Such stories may seem old hat. But after years of failing to control cost overruns, the most powerful officials at the Pentagon are becoming...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 24 - In what American military officials said was the largest Iraqi-led operation to date and evidence that the country's fledgling army was up and running, hundreds of Iraqi soldiers fanned out Sunday and Monday in a dangerous western suburb here, arresting 437 people they accuse of having ties to the insurgency. The officials said Tuesday that more than 2,000 Iraqi soldiers and special police commandos carried out the operation, which was aimed at rooting out insurgents and closing down car bomb assembly lines in Abu Ghraib, which is predominantly Sunni Arab and has been a hotbed...

London I think that this could still fail." Those words - uttered by a senior American officer in Baghdad last week - probably gave opponents of the war in Iraq, particularly those clamoring for a hasty exit, a bit of a kick. They should be careful what they wish for. For history strongly suggests that a hasty American withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster. "If we let go of the insurgency," said another of the officers quoted anonymously last week, "then this country could fail and go back into civil war and chaos." As many of the war's opponents...

A rendering of a DD(X) destroyer. The Navy's new destroyer, the DD(X), is becoming so expensive that it may end up destroying itself. The Navy once wanted 24 of them. Now it thinks it can afford 5 - if that. The price of the Navy's new ships, driven upward by old-school politics and the rusty machinery of American shipbuilding, may scuttle the Pentagon's plans for a 21st-century armada of high-technology aircraft carriers, destroyers and submarines. Shipbuilding costs "have spiraled out of control," the Navy's top admiral, Vern Clark, told Congress last week, rising so high that "we can't build...

IRKUK, Iraq, April 16 - Equipment plundered from dozens of sites in Saddam Hussein's vast complex for manufacturing weapons is beginning to surface in open markets in Iraq's major cities and at border crossings. Looters stormed the sites two years ago when Mr. Hussein's government fell, and the fate of much of the equipment has remained a mystery. But on a recent day near the Iranian border, resting in great chunks on a weedy lot in front of an Iraqi Border Patrol warehouse, were pieces of machine tools, some weighing as much as a car, that investigators say formed the...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR OF the Pentagon's $419.3 billion budget request for next year, only about $10.5 billion - 2 percent - will go toward basic research, applied research and advanced technology development. This represents a 20 percent reduction from last year, a drastic cutback that threatens the long-term security of the nation. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld should reconsider this request, and if he does not, Congress should restore the cut. These research and development activities, known as the "technology base" program, are a vital part of the United States defense program. For good reason: the tech base is America's investment...

WASHINGTON, April 8 - After two senior-level meetings between North Korean and Chinese leaders over the last two weeks to discuss the North's nuclear-weapons program, the Chinese have failed so far to persuade North Korea to rejoin nuclear disarmament talks, senior administration officials and diplomats said Friday. As a result of the continuing deadlock, informal discussions have begun among the five parties to the talks on new, more aggressive strategies that could be used if and when it is decided that the talks have reached a dead end. Among the steps being discussed, the administration officials and diplomats said, are...

Nelson Ching for The New York Times Chinese Navy sailors took part in a welcoming ceremony for the flagship of the American Seventh Fleet at a port call last month in Zhanjiang, China. A buildup by China's navy presents new concerns at the Pentagon. ZHANJIANG, China - At a time when the American military is consumed with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, global terrorism and the threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, China is presenting a new and strategically different security concern to America, as well as to Japan and Taiwan, in the western Pacific, Pentagon...

For over two decades, a compact, powerful warhead called the W-76 has been the centerpiece of the nation's nuclear arsenal, carried aboard the fleet of nuclear submarines that prowl the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But in recent months it has become the subject of a fierce debate among experts inside and outside the government over its reliability and its place in the nuclear arsenal. The government is readying a plan to spend more than $2 billion on a routine 10-year overhaul to extend the life of the aging warheads. At the same time, some weapons scientists say the warheads have...

The Army's plan to transform itself into a futuristic high-technology force has become so expensive that some of the military's strongest supporters in Congress are questioning the program's costs and complexity. Army officials said Saturday that the first phase of the program, called Future Combat Systems, could run to $145 billion. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said the "technological bridge to the future" would equip 15 brigades of roughly 3,000 soldiers, or about one-third of the force the Army plans to field, over a 20-year span. That price tag, larger than past estimates publicly disclosed by the Army, does not...

Ernest Childers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for knocking out two German machine-gun nests in Italy in World War II, died on March 17 in Muskogee, Okla. He was 87 and lived Coweta, Okla. The cause was complications of a stroke and a heart attack, said his wife, Yolanda Chadwell Childers. On Sept. 22, 1943, after securing the beaches in Salerno, Second Lt. Childers's unit, the 45th Infantry Division, began an assault on the mountain town of Oliveto Citra. When the division came under heavy machine-gun fire, he rounded up eight soldiers for a mission, despite having slipped...

COMMAND POST TANGO, South Korea, Sunday, March 20 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stepped off her airplane in Seoul on Saturday evening, boarded an Army Black Hawk helicopter and immediately flew to this underground command bunker from which military commanders would direct any war against North Korea. "I wanted to come here to thank you for what you do on the front lines of freedom," she told more than 100 service members in the war room, carved deep inside a mountain south of Seoul. "I know you face a close-in threat every day." The visit, a strong reminder of...

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR Aboard U.S.S. Benfold, in the North Pacific AS the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln returned home to San Diego this week from its relief mission in Indonesia, the main lesson of the United States military's remarkable tsunami relief effort has yet to be acknowledged: that the global war on terrorism, rather than distracting the military from performing humanitarian deeds, has made it far more effective at them. This is worth bearing in mind, especially now that President Bush's request for $82 billion in emergency military spending has re-opened the argument over Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's longstanding plan for...

WASHINGTON, March 1 - Senior members of Congress from both parties emerged from a meeting with President Bush on Tuesday warning Europe that if it lifts its ban on arms sales to China, the United States may retaliate with severe restrictions on technology sales to European companies. The warning came after Mr. Bush, on his trip to Europe last week, twice cautioned the Europeans not to lift the restrictions, in place for 15 years. His insistence was based, at least in part, on a new American intelligence assessment that Beijing is rapidly becoming better equipped to carry out a sophisticated...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 - The nation's fledgling missile defense system suffered its third straight test failure when an interceptor rocket failed to launch Sunday night from its base on an island, leaving the target rocket to splash into the Pacific Ocean, the Pentagon said Monday. The target rocket was launched from Kodiak, Alaska, at 9:22 p.m. Sunday (1:22 a.m. Monday, Eastern Standard Time), but the interceptor that was supposed to go up 15 minutes later remained on its pad in the Marshall Islands, the Missile Defense Agency at the Pentagon said. The target rocket fell into the ocean near Wake...

Andi Grant's modest 1,100-square-foot home in Connecticut is overflowing with beef jerky, tuna in pouches, socks, DVD's and other goods that she and a band of volunteers stuff in care packages for American troops. She does not take everything. She checks all packaged food, for instance, to make sure there has been no tampering. She will not forward pen pal letters, she said, because they create a sense of obligation and because too many are written by women looking for a spouse. "If it's pork, we can't send it because it might end up in the hands of kids who...

THE INSURGENCY WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 - The expulsion of Iraqi guerrillas and foreign fighters from Falluja has provided the American military with a treasure-trove of intelligence that is giving commanders insights into the next phase of the insurgency, and helping them reshape the American counterinsurgency campaign, senior Pentagon and military officials say. Documents and computers found in Falluja are providing clues to the identity of home-grown opponents of the new Iraqi government, mostly former Baathists. The intelligence is being used to hunt those leaders and their channels of financing, as well as to detect cracks, even feuds, within the insurgency...

LOCKHEED MARTIN doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it. Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest military contractor, has built a formidable information-technology empire that now stretches from the Pentagon to the post office. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft. Of course, Lockheed, based in Bethesda, Md., is best known for its weapons, which are the heart...

The Army has encountered resistance from more than 2,000 former soldiers it has ordered back to military work, complicating its efforts to fill gaps in the regular troops. Many of these former soldiers - some of whom say they have not trained, held a gun, worn a uniform or even gone for a jog in years - object to being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan now, after they thought they were through with life on active duty. They are seeking exemptions, filing court cases or simply failing to report for duty, moves that will be watched closely by approximately 110,000...

The Pentagon is building its own Internet, the military's world wide web for the wars of the future. The goal is to give all American commanders and troops a moving picture of all foreign enemies and threats - "a God's-eye view" of battle. This "Internet in the sky," Peter Teets, under secretary of the Air Force, told Congress, would allow "marines in a Humvee, in a faraway land, in the middle of a rainstorm, to open up their laptops, request imagery" from a spy satellite, and "get it downloaded within seconds." The Pentagon calls the secure network the Global Information...

On Jan. 12, 1984, two weeks after the West German defense ministry announced that the first nine U.S. nuclear-tipped intermediate-range Pershing II ballistic missiles were operable on West German soil, then-Massachusetts Lt. Gov. John Kerry found himself in West Germany's Black Forest on an acid-rain fact-finding mission. Someone had awakened the ambitious Kerry at 3 a.m. to tell him that Paul Tsongas would not run for re-election to the Senate. "The issue of war and peace was on the table again," Mr. Kerry later told the Boston Globe, and he jumped into the race before the end of January.

WASHINGTON, Oct. 18 - A Pentagon-sponsored study of weapons made from depleted uranium, a substance whose use has attracted environmental protests around the world, has concluded that it is neither toxic enough nor radioactive enough to be a health threat to soldiers in the doses they are likely to receive. In a five-year, $6 million study, researchers fired depleted uranium projectiles into Bradley fighting vehicles and Abrams tanks, in a steel chamber at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, and measured the levels of uranium in the air and how quickly the particles settled. The conclusion, said Dr. Michael E....

WASHINGTON, Oct. 8 - The Bush administration's handling this week of a report on Saddam Hussein's attempts to purchase weapons and buy influence has angered French officials and set back a year of American efforts to repair the rupture caused by the Iraq war, French and other European officials said Friday. The anger of France and others is focused on the assertions in the report by Charles A. Duelfer, the top American arms inspector in Iraq, that French companies and individuals, some with close ties to the government, enriched themselves through Iraq's efforts to gain influence around the world in...

BOSTON — There were so many military men at the Democratic convention I almost expected John Kerry to mount the stage in full body armor and recite the war speech from "Henry V." As it is, he called for bulking up the military, doubling the size of the Special Forces and crushing the terrorists. He hit Bush from the right, and when he got around to bashing the Saudis, I thought I'd wandered into a big meeting of The Weekly Standard editorial board. Not only that, Kerry's speech followed an all-hawk medley. Gen. John Shalikashvili called for appreciably increasing the...

IZHEVSK, Russia, July 24 - The bazaar in this industrial city shows why Western companies regard Russia as a land of piracy. Bootlegged copies of new American movies - "King Arthur,'' "Troy'' and "Spider-Man 2'' - sell for $3. Photoshop CS, a $600 program in Western stores, fetches $2.75. Markets like this, found throughout Russia, have been a longstanding subject of diplomatic complaint. Washington contends Russian intellectual-property pirates cost the United States more than $1 billion a year. Now Russia is striking back. A Russian industry and product designer are asserting that the United States has been abetting intellectual-property pirates...

Show-and-Tell Item Evacuates School By Laura Arenschield The Winchester Star What one Frederick County student thought would be an innocent way to show a teacher a part of history turned into a major disruption at Robert E. Aylor Middle School in Stephens City on Monday afternoon. About 1,000 people were evacuated from the building after school officials discovered a seventh-grader had brought an artillery shell to school. “Any time you see something like that, you never know the shape or condition it’s in, if it’s a live round or not,” Aylor Principal Donald Williams said. “The student brought it...

ARMAMENT WASHINGTON, April 29 — The airstrikes in Falluja in the past three days by American warplanes and helicopter gunships have been the most intense aerial bombardment in Iraq since major combat ended nearly a year ago, military officials said Thursday. In the past 48 hours, Air Force F-15E and F-16 warplanes, and carrier-based F-14 and F-18 fighter-bombers, have dropped about three dozen 500-pound laser-guided bombs in three different sections of Falluja, Air Force officials said, destroying more than 10 buildings and 2 sniper nests identified by troops as sources of attacking fire, and other targets. By day, AH-1W Super...

DURHAM, N.C. The murderous attack on four American civilians in Falluja, Iraq, brought home gruesome images of charred bodies dangling from a bridge over the Euphrates River. It also introduced Americans to a company few had heard of: Blackwater USA, which was providing security for food delivery convoys when its employees were ambushed. Blackwater, which operates from a 5,200-acre training ground in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, is a private military firm that provides an array of services once performed solely by military personnel. The company trains soldiers in counterterrorism and urban warfare. It also provides the American...

"Inquiry Suggests Pakistanis Sold Nuclear Secrets" By THE NEW YORK TIMES Published: December 22, 2003 "Western agencies have been investigating Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan's bomb." This article is by William J. Broad, David Rohde and David E. Sanger. "WASHINGTON, Dec. 21 — A lengthy investigation of the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, Abdul Qadeer Khan, by American and European intelligence agencies and international nuclear inspectors has forced Pakistani officials to question his aides and openly confront evidence that the country was the source of crucial technology to enrich uranium for Iran, North Korea and other nations. Until...