Taiwanese Navy – Taiwan still can’t decide if it wants to buy the Kidd-class destroyers from the US.

• Taipei Times: MND asks navy to cut missiles in bid to save Kidds deal

US Coast Guard – Coast Guard members on board the USS Chinook have located
and secured a cache of Iraqi military equipment and weapons hidden in
coastal caves in southern Iraq.

• Daily Press: Yorktown-based Coast Guard patrol finds Iraqi weapons

US Coast Guard – They live a weird, watery, Mad Max kind of life, the
39 U.S. Coast Guard reservists who have landed the unlikely job of guarding
the Mina al Bakr oil rig 13 miles off the coast of Iraq. Commandeered by
Navy SEALs on March 19, the nearly milelong rig-a ramshackle, rusty
contraption overrun with cockroaches and connected to Iraq’s southern oil
fields by underwater pipeline-was Iraq’s only legal export point for oil
before the war.

• US News: Offshore security
  – A new role, and a different coast, for the Coast Guard

Background – Unmanned Aerial Vehicles – The pilotless planes that hovered over Baghdad are the cusp of a technological revolution that could change the way wars are fought ó with fewer soldiers and smarter machines. But within the military itself, the idea persists that all wars eventually have to be won on the ground, with blood and guts.

• New York Times Magazine: The Unmanned Army