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Iran
The Middle East is ablaze again, literally, and Israel is sending strong signals that it intends to attack Iran's nuclear complex with or without U.S. assistance. It would be nice to stay out of this latest round of regional violence -- most Americans have had their fill of foreign entanglements
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Date:
9/14/2012
The prevailing view among defense investors these days is that talk of budget sequestration is going to weigh down share prices until after the November election, and maybe longer. But a catalyst for re-evaluating sector equities has begun to appear on the horizon: the possibility that Israel will
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Date:
9/5/2012
Students of defense studies are routinely assigned Barbara Tuchman’s excellent study of the outbreak of the First World War, The Guns of August. The thrust of Tuchman’s analysis was that the stars were aligned in favor of war. Over a number of years national politics, alliance relationships,
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Date:
8/24/2012
If you thought the biggest news story between now and November 6 was going to be the U.S. presidential election, guess again. It looks like the Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is preparing to attack Iran's nuclear program well before election day in the U.S. That is not
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Date:
8/17/2012
Since the end of the Cold War, the basic metric for judging the adequacy of the U.S. military has been its ability to fight in two geographically separated regions of the world at approximately the same time. Referred to at different times as Major Regional Contingencies (MRC), Major Theater Wars
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Date:
8/10/2012
For more than four years, the United States, along with some allies, has been at war with Iran. It is not the kind of war we have come to expect in this region. There was no official declaration of hostilities, U.N. resolution or act of Congress. The war doesn’t involve the use of the armed forces
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Date:
6/1/2012
In his now infamous "open mike" moment with outgoing Russian President Dimitry Medvedev, President Obama expressed the not too surprising idea that he would have greater negotiating flexibility after the November elections. It is assumed that the President was addressing the subject of missile defenses,
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Date:
4/10/2012
Military sources say that Iran has begun to harass the ground-based air defenses of the U.S. Army and allies in the Persian Gulf region using swarms of unmanned aircraft. The aircraft, which appear to be of Chinese design or origin, are typically launched to exploit the operating pattern of U.S.
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Date:
2/17/2012
Date:
2/9/2012
Bloomberg News yesterday released a thoughtful analysis of how Persian Gulf developments are impacting global petroleum trade that puts U.S. security operations there in a new light. Reporters Indira A. R. Lakshmanan and Gopal Ratnam found that while America is leading military efforts to keep
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Date:
1/13/2012
According to The New York Times, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta is poised to reveal the Pentagon’s new leaner but not meaner defense strategy. As expected,
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Date:
1/3/2012
Over the last two weeks, the Iranian government's campaign to convince outsiders that it cleverly downed a secret U.S. spy drone has surpassed the production values of Ashton Kutcher's 2000 stoner comedy, Dude, Where's My Car? The Iranians apparently reassembled and repainted the damaged
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Date:
12/21/2011
Iran isn't likely to learn much from the loss of a top-secret U.S. spy drone over its territory, even though pictures shown on Iranian television indicate the Iranians actually are in possession of the intact drone. The basic principles of stealth aircraft design are well known, and designers would
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Date:
12/8/2011
A report that Iran had acquired several firing units of the much talked about Russian-built S-300 surface-to-air missile (SAM) system, allegedly from Belarus, sent a small shudder through the international defense community. Some commentators went so far as to claim that the presence of the S-300
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Date:
8/5/2010
If there is a war at sea in the near future, it will likely be in the Persian Gulf. It is the nexus of the geo-strategic, ideological and religious struggle between Iran on one side and the United States, the West and the non-Shia Muslim world on the other. It is also the one place where Iran can
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Date:
7/7/2010
The United States has a long history of being caught by surprise when other countries demonstrate their mastery of advanced military technologies, particularly nuclear weapons. The list of strategic surprises is remarkably long: the Soviet Union’s atomic bomb test in 1949, its launch of Sputnik
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Date:
7/1/2010
What everyone feared was the case has now been proven to be fact. North Korea deliberately sank a South Korean patrol boat, killing 46 sailors and risking a war between these two countries (and by extension the United States). This is not simply North Korea, as usual, behaving badly. It is the predictable
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Date:
5/19/2010
The first rule of arms control, as in medicine, is to do no harm. This is not the approach taken by the Obama Administration. Whether it is through its failure to create a new era of engagement with the Muslim world, the inability to impose meaningful sanctions on Iran, its policy of hostility towards
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Date:
5/4/2010
History repeats itself, but never the same way. The President and the Congress are at odds over placing sanctions on Iran. For the administration it is a complex issue involving not only trying to change Iran’s behavior but also the White House’s commitment to collective action. For Congress, it
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Date:
5/3/2010
Lest anyone be fooled by what seems to be slight progress in the Obama Administration’s effort to impose new sanctions on Iran, the situation is rapidly slipping beyond Washington’s ability to influence, much less control it. In the 15 months since assuming power, President Obama has stood by as
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Date:
4/27/2010
Yesterday, Iran’s minister of defense fired a verbal shot across the bow of the United States, warning that his country could attack our warships in the Persian Gulf in the event of any attack upon Teheran’s nuclear facilities. The chance of such a confrontation rose rather sharply recently with
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Date:
1/20/2010