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Marine assault vehicles key to Afghan strategy As U.S. and Afghan troops prepare for an offensive in Helmand province, the Assault Breacher Vehicle - a cross between a tank and a bulldozer - is intended to conquer the terrain and roadside bombs. By Tony Perry January 31, 2010 Reporting from Camp Pendleton Weighing 70 tons, traveling up to 45 mph and possessed of a smash-mouth name, the Assault Breacher Vehicle is the Marine Corps' latest answer to a perennial problem of offensive warfare: how to push through the barriers and booby traps of an enemy's outer defenses. Over the decades,...

A great - and still growing - divergence appeared in 2009 between public statements by leaders and their public performance. The politicized, romanticized theater of increasingly populist “democratic” leaders and media seemed to be of a different planet from activities taking place in the real world. While a large part of the global population appears still transfixed by words, there is a growing perception that great fissures already rend the global strategic architecture. This is a trend which will compound during 2010. There is a widespread belief that the world has “ducked the strategic bullet” of global economic collapse, but...

As the uses of force in Somalia, Kosovo and Iraq show, Western armies are very concerned about protecting the lives of their soldiers, and to that end are willing to risk many civilian lives. They also find acceptable the notion that civilian lives can be forfeited in order to attain important military goals. Israel’s Gaza operation clearly shows that Israeli commanders successfully followed the requirements of the administrative model of the principle of proportionality. The IDF required commanders to take humanitarian law into account in the planning stages of the operation. Legal advisors were involved in the planning of many...

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The American Red Cross says a plan to bring 45,000 evacuees from Haiti to Florida, and 4,000 of those to Orange County, is not set in stone. The Red Cross clarified Friday who could be involved in a plan to move people out of Haiti. The Red Cross is preparing for two things: the repatriation of Americans living in Haiti and the possibility of a mass migration of Haitian nationals. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- VIDEO REPORT: Haitian Refugees Could Come To Orlando HELP OUT: Local Organizations | National Organizations SPECIAL SECTION: Quake Recovery Updates, Donation Info -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The American Red...

Alexander's men wore linothorax, a highly effective type of body armor created by laminating together layers of linen, research finds. A Kevlar-like armor might have helped Alexander the Great (356–323 B.C.) conquer nearly the entirety of the known world in little more than two decades, according to new reconstructive archaeology research. Presented at the annual meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America in Anaheim, Calif., the study suggests that Alexander and his soldiers protected themselves with linothorax, a type of body armor made by laminating together layers of linen. "While we know quite a lot about ancient armor made from...

A New Viet Nam? thelastcrusade.org U.S. residents are split over whether the country can achieve its goals in Afghanistan, according to a Gallup poll released this weekend. Almost three-quarters of those surveyed, 73%, say they fear spending in Afghanistan will interfere with domestic goals. Just over half, 51% , stated their support for the president's strategy, while 48% said they oppose it.

Rosenberg: Class Warfare Coming Your Way Joe WeisenthalNov. 16, 2009, 11:28 AM With the Dow just a couple of good days away from hitting 11,000, David Rosenberg's message is as harsh as ever. ---- CLASS WARFARE COMING YOUR WAY We have to admit that we cannot recall a time when the potential returns in Canada looked so attractive compared to the U.S. while the risks are so much lower — fiscal, economic, financial and political. Now we see that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is planning a slate of tax rate hikes on the upper class (defined to mean anyone...

Spare Change Day of Reckoning: My Two Cents on Learning from 9/11 David J. Aland 11 Sep 09 I survived 9/11 without a scratch. I didn’t even get my uniform dirty. Through nothing less than the grace of God, I was not where I was supposed to be when the terrorists slammed an airliner into the Pentagon. Friends, colleagues, and shipmates of mine died that day, but I lived. In the hours, days, and weeks that followed, my hands joined the thousands that picked up, reconstituted, and continued the work of those that had been killed. To this day, I...

The age of cyber-warfare has arrived. That, at any rate, is the message we are now hearing from a broad range of journalists, policy analysts, and government officials. Introducing a comprehensive White House report on cyber-security released at the end of May, President Obama called cyber-security “one of the most serious economic and national security challenges we face as a nation.” His words echo a flurry of gloomy think-tank reports. The Defense Science Board, a federal advisory group, recently warned that “cyber-warfare is here to stay,” and that it will “encompass not only military attacks but also civilian commercial systems.”...

Facebook Inc. is providing new details of how an attack aimed at a Georgian blogger Thursday disrupted its site and crashed others, including Twitter Inc. and LiveJournal Inc. The company rooted out the cause of the massive denial-of-service attack, said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt, after noticing that the compromised computers that began flooding its site Thursday morning were directing traffic to the profile page of a single pro-Georgian blogger, who uses the account name "Cyxymu," the name of a town in the Republic of Georgia. The Cyxymu blogger couldn't immediately be reached. In a blog post Friday, Twitter co-founder Biz...

It sounds so simple: Just tax the few to pay for social programs that benefit the many. Yet no political idea — embodied by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s call to tax the wealthy to cover health care for everyone else — has ever proved more contentious. The country was founded on the principle of unlimited and unbounded opportunity. Despite what poll questions often appear to say, class warfare language, outside the Democratic primary electorate, has always been politically counterproductive, because it divides Americans from one another and from their own aspirations and dreams. And class warfare could be especially problematic...

The human body, much like a computer, contains myriad data processors. They include, but are not limited to, the chemical-electrical activity of the brain, heart, and peripheral nervous system, the signals sent from the cortex region of the brain to other parts of our body, the tiny hair cells in the inner ear that process auditory signals, and the light-sensitive retina and cornea of the eye that process visual activity.[2] We are on the threshold of an era in which these data processors of the human body may be manipulated or debilitated. Examples of unplanned attacks on the body's data-processing...

A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE In sixteenth-century Paris, a popular form of entertainment was cat-burning, in which a cat was hoisted in a sling on a stage and slowly lowered into a fire. According to historian Norman Davies, "[T]he spectators, including kings and queens, shrieked with laughter as the animals, howling with pain, were singed, roasted, and finally carbonized." Today, such sadism would be unthinkable in most of the world. This change in sensibilities is just one example of perhaps the most important and most underappreciated trend in the human saga: Violence has been in decline over long stretches of history,...

The head of America's National Security Agency says that America needs to build a digital warfare force for the future, according to reports. Lt Gen Keith Alexander, who also heads the Pentagon's new Cyber Command, outlined his views in a report for the House Armed Services subcommittee. In it, he stated that the US needed to reorganise its offensive and defensive cyber operations. The general also said more resources and training were needed. The report, part of which was outlined in an Associated Press news agency story, is due to be presented to the subcommittee on Tuesday. During the past...

WASHINGTON, March 6, 2009 – Portable electronic devices such as iPods and cell phones have provided U.S. adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan with lethal capabilities, the Army’s chief of electronic warfare said this week. “They may be living in rough terrain and may not have all the comforts that we do, but they have the same access to technology,” said Col. Laurie Moe Buckhout, chief of the Army’s Electronic Warfare Division in the Operations, Readiness and Mobilization Directorate. She explained the Army’s efforts to increase ground electronic warfare capabilities during a March 4 “Armed with Science: Research and Applications...

When the servant of the man of God got up and went out early the next morning, an army with horses and chariots had surrounded the city. "Oh, my lord, what shall we do?" the servant asked. "Don't be afraid," the prophet answered. "Those who are with us are more than those who are with them." And Elisha prayed, "O LORD, open his eyes so he may see." Then the LORD opened the servant's eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha. 2 Kings 6:15-18 Every so often in the...

Judaism And Warfare , Steven Plaut Dear Dr. H: You write about how Judaism is devoted to the pursuit of peace. You bring assorted citations from the Bible and Psalms about how nice peace can be. You emphasize that Judaism grants peace priority over competing goals. You find biblical quote after biblical quote about how good peace is. You then conclude that Israel is behaving in a manner that contradicts Jewish tradition when it wars against Hamas barbarism and Gaza terror. Israel must pursue "negotiations" with Hamas, you insist, citing the biblical desire for peace as the over-riding consideration. That...

Note: The following text is a quote: http://www.defenselink.mil/releases/release.aspx?releaseid=12449 IMMEDIATE RELEASE No. 040-09 January 17, 2009 Detainee Transfer Announced The Department of Defense announced today the transfer of six detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Four detainees were transferred to Iraq, one to Algeria and one to Afghanistan. These detainees were determined to be eligible for departure following a comprehensive series of review processes. The transfer is a demonstration of the United States’ desire not to hold detainees any longer than necessary. It also underscores the processes put in place to assess each individual and make a determination about their detention while...

Roman soldiers defending a Middle Eastern garrison from attack nearly 2,000 years ago met the horrors of war in a most unusual place. Inside a cramped tunnel beneath the site’s massive front wall, enemy fighters stacked up nearly two dozen dead or dying Romans and set them on fire, using substances that gave off toxic fumes and drove away Roman warriors just outside the tunnel. The attackers, members of Persia’s Sasanian culture that held sway over much of the region in and around the Middle East from the third to the seventh centuries, adopted a brutally ingenious method for penetrating...

Modern conventional weapons, deadly as they are, have no monopoly on terrorizing soldiers and civilians. Many military innovations of the past scared the enemy senseless — especially when only one side got to use them. "When you defeat someone psychologically, that's really how you win battles," says Pentagon spokesman and artillery officer Lt. Col. Mark Wright. "If [enemy forces] think they've been beaten, they're going to turn and run." Here, then, are five of the most terrifying conventional weapons of all time. Each was effective because it was a surprise introduction to a conflict, permitted essentially no defense, and only...