Free Republic

Russian Aggression: Instead of a foreign policy that's a blend of Neville Chamberlain and Monty Python, the U.S. should trade flexibility for some backbone, scrap the reset button and start digging some missile silos. It takes a lot to make Jimmy Carter look like Winston Churchill. But President Obama, who bats not an eye as a Russian warplane buzzes a U.S. warship in the Black Sea, has accomplished that with his pusillanimous policy regarding Moscow's creeping anschluss in Ukraine. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's comparison of current events to the days before World War II is on the mark. On...

Defense: The Air Force airborne laser program successfully completes a simulated kill from a plane able to find, track and destroy a live ballistic missile. We can shoot down enemy missiles. Instead, we're shooting down the laser program.The Aug. 10 effort was the third such test — sort of like a sniper sighting the target with the red dot of a laser without actually pulling the trigger. In early June, the airborne laser (ABL) program engaged two un-instrumented missiles. This was the first in-flight test against an instrumented target missile. A modified Boeing 747-400F aircraft took off from Edwards Air...

ST. LOUIS, June 26, 2006 -- A Boeing-led [NYSE: BA] industry team and the U.S. Missile Defense Agency (MDA) took a major step toward demonstrating the capability of the Airborne Laser (ABL) by successfully firing surrogate lasers from inside the aircraft. During recent ground tests at Boeing facilities in Wichita, Kan., the team placed the lasers in the ABL aircraft, a modified Boeing 747-400F, and fired them repeatedly into a measuring device called a range simulator. The tests verified that the ABL team properly aligned the optical beam train, a series of optical components, steering and deformable mirrors, and sensors...