US Marines – Problems Stall Pentagon's New Fighting Vehicle

Posted on by

Washington Post – After 10 years and $1.7 billion, this is what the Marines Corps got for its investment in a new amphibious vehicle: A craft that breaks down about an average of once every 4 1/2 hours, leaks and sometimes veers off course???And for that, the contractor, General Dynamics of Falls Church, received $80 million in bonuses.

more…

Iraq – Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

Posted on by

Washington Post – Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals — including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders — in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.
more…

Iraq – US Army report got Iraq right

Posted on by

UPI – A month before the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, a team of military and Middle East experts at the Army War College published a 60-page booklet that laid out in detail the problems the U.S. military would likely encounter and how to mitigate them.

Here is the report: Reconstructing Iraq: Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario.
more…

Geopolitics / Health – The Challenge of Global Health

Posted on by

Foreign Affairs – Thanks to a recent extraordinary rise in public and private giving, today more money is being directed toward the world’s poor and sick than ever before. But unless these efforts start tackling public health in general instead of narrow, disease-specific problems — and unless the brain drain from the developing world can be stopped — poor countries could be pushed even further into trouble, in yet another tale of well-intended foreign meddling gone awry.
more…

Editorial Note – Naval Year in Review 2006

Posted on by

2006

World Naval Operational News Highlights

The ten most significant naval news stories / themes this year included:

  • The continued irrelevance of the US Navy to Fourth Generation Warfare. Nearly 4 years after the invasion of Iraq, the US Navy is finally ready to send a brown water / riverine unit to Iraq to patrol the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. What took so long and why was there no sense of urgency?
  • The rising awareness within the US military on the best ways to conduct the war in Iraq, evidenced by the new joint manual by the US Marines / US Army entitled FM 3-24 / MCWP 3-33.5 – Counterinsurgency.
  • The first successful naval attack by a Fourth Generation entity (Hezbollah) against an Israeli naval vessel with a land-based antiship missile, showing how Fourth Generation opponents can reach out and strike naval targets successfully.
  • The rise of Iran as a preeminent regional power in the Persian Gulf, and the implications that could have in a naval conflict in the Persian Gulf.
  • The continued slow but steady rise of the Chinese Navy – will it be peaceful – or not?
  • The increasing ballistic missile defense capability being forward-deployed at sea by the US Navy.
  • The failure of the SeaSwap manning initiative in the US Navy, which shows that too much efficiency can sometimes be a bad thing.
  • The successful use of lawfare, by environmental groups, to impede US Navy use of low frequency active sonar systems.
  • The slow fading away of the Royal Navy, due to continued deep budget cuts.
  • The US Marine Corps devising ways to (literally) shoot troops anywhere around the Earth in a few hours using rockets, showing that long-term planning and thinking is still thankfully alive and well in the Marine Corps???

Statistics
In 2006, there were news stories linked to on 270 / 365 days – that is on 74% of the days.

In 2006, NOSI linked to 556 articles covering 505 news stories.

In 2006, 171 of these stories (34%) were related to the U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Coast Guard, or U.S. Military Sealift Command.

In 2006, 201 of these stories (40%) were background stories and 17 stories (3%) were historical stories.

The remaining 116 news stories (23%) covered the operational activities of 20 nation’s navies, coast guards, and marine corps:

Australia, Canada, China, France, Germany, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Norway, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, United Kingdom

In 2006, 216,179 pages of information were read on NOSI by 119,473 users.

more…

Geopolitics / Long War – Civil Rights, Uncivil Wrongs:The War on Terrorism's Toll on the U.S. Constitution

Posted on by

Foreign Affairs – Much of the already voluminous commentary on the war on terrorism centers on the question of whether it is a war at all. Here is an analysis of three books that are willing to stipulate, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, that it is. They differ dramatically, however, over what tactics this war allows and, more broadly, what it means for governing within the limits of the U.S. Constitution.
more…