The Daily Show – Jon Stewart interviews LTC John Nagl.
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Navy Times – This month, a photograph appeared on the Internet of the propeller on an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine at Trident Submarine Base in Bangor. A key to the submarine’s ability to deploy and remain undetected, propeller designs have been kept under wraps for years, literally. When out of the water, the propellers typically are draped with tarps. The propeller image appeared on Microsoft’s mapping tool, Virtual Earth.
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Aviation Week – The Office of Naval Research has been funding designs for a Heavy Air Lift Seabasing Ship (HALSS) – a monster high-speed trimaran with hangars on its Nimitz-sized deck for six C-130J transports.
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The Economist – Political power in Russia now lies with the FSB, the KGB’s successor
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New Yorker – Niall Ferguson reviews how much did the Marshall Plan really matter?
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New York Times Magazine – Americaís junior officers are fighting the war on the ground in Iraq, and the experience is making a number of them lose faith in their superiors.
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Foreign Affairs – Two new books discuss how Washington should fight the wars of tomorrow — and pay for them. But to balance the conflicting demands of strategy and finance, the next president ought to take a page from Eisenhower’s playbook.
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Wired – An excellent indepth look at the cyberwar waged against Estonia this spring.
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Daily Telegraph – A submarine-like vessel carrying an estimated five metric tons of cocaine worth over 350 million dollars has been intercepted by US border patrol agents off the Guatemalan coast.
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Daily Telegraph – Nato vessels are closely monitoring the sea trials of Russia’s latest submarine, following Moscow’s increasingly provocative tests of Western airspace.
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New York Times Magazine – After centuries of strife, the West has learned to separate religion and politics – to establish the legitimacy of its leaders without referring to divine command. There is little reason to expect that the rest of the world – the Islamic world in particular – will follow.
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City Journal – John Robb nicely summarizes his work on Global Guerrilas in this essay where he notes that for the first time in history, a majority of the worldís population is living in urban environments. Cities – efficient hubs connecting international flows of people, energy, communications, and capital – are thriving in our global economy as never before. However, the same factors that make cities hubs of globalization also make them vulnerable to small-group terror and violence.
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Virtual Worlds News – A look at the future of military training – the use of virtual worlds as “first person thinkers” for training.
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UPI – China is bent on the simultaneous development of both an aircraft carrier and a strategic nuclear submarine, or SSBN. Discussions over which should take priority are over, as a higher military budget allocation has accelerated the Peopleís Liberation Army navyís ambitious plan.

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Foreign Affairs – Robert Service’s Comrades! tells the story of world communism — but leaves the reader still hungry for explanations of why the movement lasted so long and what, if anything, it accomplished.
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BBC – Russia is resuming a Soviet-era practice of sending its bomber aircraft on long-range flights, President Vladimir Putin has said.
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Foreign Affairs – Sixty years ago, the National Security Act created a U.S. intelligence infrastructure that would help win the Cold War. But on 9/11, the need to reform that system became painfully clear. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence is now spearheading efforts to enable the intelligence community to better shield the United States from the new threats it faces.
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First Monday – David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, authors of Netwar, write:

As the information age deepens, a globe-circling realm of the mind is being created – the ìnoosphereî that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin identified 80 years ago. This will increasingly affect the nature of grand strategy and diplomacy. Traditional realpolitik, which ultimately relies on hard (principally military) power, will give way to the rise of noˆpolitik (or noˆspolitik), which relies on soft (principally ideational) power. This paper reiterates the authorsí views as initially stated in 1999, then adds an update for inclusion in a forthcoming handbook on public diplomacy. One key finding is that non-state actors – unfortunately, especially Al Qaeda and its affiliates – are using the Internet and other new media to practice noˆpolitik more effectively than are state actors, such as the U.S. government. Whose story wins – the essence of noˆpolitik – is at stake in the worldwide war of ideas
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Daily Telegraph – A new warship that can defend the entire city of London from missile and aircraft attack has completed its first Royal Navy sea trial.
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Foreign Affairs – Robert and Isabelle Tombs’ superb chronicle of 300 years of Anglo-French rivalry reveals how the love-hate relationship between France and the United Kingdom has left an indelible mark on today’s world.
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