NOSI is taking a summer break and will next update on July 1.
During this time, please consider visiting our related site and downloading the War Studies Primer for an introductory course on the study of war.
Look at slides 2 and 3 in the War Studies Primer for its Table of Contents, and then choose a lecture to read and enjoy.
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The Atlantic – An interesting article that puts the material discussed here in a different perspective by describing a poorly understood but serious threat to mankind.
The odds that a potentially devastating space rock will hit Earth this century may be as high as one in 10.
So why isnít NASA trying harder to prevent catastrophe?
And why is the US Air Force interested in working this problem?
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Foreign Affairs – Marc Sageman claims that al Qaeda’s leadership is finished and today’s terrorist threat comes primarily from below. But the terrorist elites are alive and well, and ignoring the threat they pose will have disastrous consequences.
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Armed Forces Journal – The Navy today is overly focused on the tactical employment of its combat forces, in its doctrine and practice. This might not be a problem in case of a conflict with numerically and technologically inferior forces. However, the Navy would have a much greater problem and possibly suffer a major defeat in a war with a relatively strong opponent that better balances the employment of his forces at the tactical and operational levels of war. The Navyís superior technology and tactics would not be sufficient to overcome its lack of operational thinking.
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Daily Telegraph – Russia has raised the stakes in the international scramble for the Arctic by announcing it will boost its military presence in the region to protect its “national interests”.
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Foreign Affairs – The Bush administration’s new strategy in Iraq has helped reduce violence. But the surge is not linked to any sustainable plan for building a viable Iraqi state and may even have made such an outcome less likely — by stoking the revanchist fantasies of Sunni tribes and pitting them against the central government. The recent short-term gains have thus come at the expense of the long-term goal of a stable, unitary Iraq.
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Armed Forces Journal – It might be tempting to dismiss the U.S. Navyís potential focus on China as a passing fad ó part of the now-familiar phenomena of ìChina fever.î Another perspective holds that this focus can best be explained by a simple case of enemy deprivation syndrome. While there is a kernel of truth in both of these intellectual approaches, facts on, above and especially under the water increasingly belie these conclusions and demand serious attention from American strategists.
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New York Magazine – With a nuclear North Korea and Iran on the way, the geopolitical situation is evolving in unpredictable ways. Can a hypersophisticated World War II simulation teach us 21st-century global strategy? Eminent historian Niall Ferguson rates the state of play.
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Economist – Asia’s main powers are building up their navies. Is this the start of an arms race?
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Associated Press – For decades the world relied on the powerful U.S. Navy to protect a vital sea lane in the Indian Ocean. But as India and China gain economic heft, they are moving to expand their control of the waterway, sparking a new ó and potentially dangerous ó rivalry between Asia’s emerging giants.
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Foreign Affairs – While the crisis in Darfur simmers, the larger problem of Sudan’s survival as a state is becoming increasingly urgent. Old tensions between the Arabs of the Nile River valley, who have held power for a century, and marginalized groups on the country’s periphery are turning into a national crisis. Engagement with Khartoum may be the only way to avert another civil war in Sudan, and even that may not be enough.
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Associated Press – The U.S. military intercepted a ballistic missile Thursday in the first such sea-based test since a Navy cruiser shot down an errant satellite earlier this year.
The military fired at the target, a Scud-like missile with a range of a few hundred miles, from a decommissioned amphibious assault ship near Hawaii’s island of Kauai.
The USS Lake Erie, based at Pearl Harbor, fired two interceptor missiles that shot down the target in its final seconds of flight about 12 miles above the Pacific Ocean.
The $40 million test showed that Navy ships are capable of shooting down short-range targets in their last phase of flight using modified missiles, the military said.
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Foreign Affairs – The United States’ unipolar moment is over. International relations in the twenty-first century will be defined by nonpolarity. Power will be diffuse rather than concentrated, and the decline as that of nonstate actors increases. But this is not all bad news for the United States; Washington can still manage the transition and make the world a safer place.
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Defense Technology International – No less than three NATO submarines are ending up on the bottom off the southern coast of Norway this week. Not that you’ll see this as Breaking News on any major news network. ???
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CNN – U.S. Navy ships loaded with supplies for victims of Myanmar’s cyclone will sail away from the country’s coast on Thursday, after the ruling junta refused for three weeks to allow them to deliver aid.
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Defense Technology International – The customer sounds happy as the first EA-18G Growler reaches the operator.
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New York Review of Books – Ahmed Rashid reviews the current state of the jihad against the West.
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BBC – The UN Security Council has unanimously voted to allow countries to send warships into Somalia’s territorial waters to tackle pirates.
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StrategyPage – The Russian Navy’s shipbuilding plans are still mostly plans. For the last seventeen years, most of their construction effort went into finishing a few subs, and building for export.
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The Times – The man who located the wreck of the Titanic has revealed that the discovery was a cover story to camouflage the real mission of inspecting the wrecks of two Cold War nuclear submarines???When Bob Ballard led a team that pinpointed the wreckage of the liner in 1985 he had already completed his main task of finding out what happened to USS Thresher and USS Scorpion.
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The Times – Prince William is to go into action fighting the modern-day pirates of the Caribbean. He may be armed if he joins Royal Navy boarding parties that stop cocaine traffickers trying to smuggle drugs in fast launches.
The role is a consolation to the prince after he was banned from going to war in the Gulf with the Royal Navy because of fears his presence could provoke a terrorist attack on British ships.
Daily Telegraph – Prince William to take on Caribbean drug lords
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Reuters – The United States has no plans to sell an ageing aircraft carrier to India, US Defence Secretary Robert Gates said Saturday.
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