Six F-16 fighter jets and 120 personnel from the 31st Fighter Wing, Aviano Air Base, Italy, will begin a joint training operation Thursday at Lask Air Base, Poland, through Oct. 8, Pentagon spokesman Army Col. Steve Warren announced Sept. 3. In addition to Air Force units headed to the Baltics, members from the 31st FW will also participate in Ample Strike, a NATO-led exercise with 11 other nations in the Czech Republic. Farther east, Rapid Trident — the first exercise to include 200 U.S. ground troops since the Kiev government began fighting pro-Russian separatists — will take place Sept. 15 to Sept.…
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Canada this week adopted a great sense of humor along with its Burger King takeover. @CanadaNATO tweeted this photo for the Russian soldiers stationed at the Russia-Ukraine border: Reuters reported Wednesday that Russian soldiers have been traveling into Ukraine “by mistake.” But who among us hasn’t accidentally refused to stop and ask for directions and ended up in a war zone…wearing a uniform of an enemy combatant? Right? No? The Kiev government said they had been on a ‘special mission’ “linked to the pro-Russian separatist rebellions in the east,” the report said. The flow of weapons and armored vehicles into…
Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen released a statement Wednesday on Russia’s alleged violation of the 1988-enforced Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, stating that Russia must now work “constructively to resolve this critical Treaty issue.” “The United States has briefed the North Atlantic Council on its determination that the Russian Federation is in violation of its obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty not to possess, produce, or flight-test a ground-launched cruise missile with a range capability of 500 to 5,500 kilometers, or to possess or produce launchers of such missiles,” the statement read. The Russian Foreign Ministry released a…
A military base in Poland could soon be repurposed to support NATO in its mission to reassure eastern European allies of its oversight amid the Ukraine-Russia conflict. NATO’s top commander in Europe, Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, told a briefing in Naples this week that he plans to recommend “having capability in the forward area — preposition supplies, preposition capabilities, and a basing area ready to rapidly accept follow on forces.” “How we man that in a rotational, or non-permanent, basis is what are we looking at now to propose in NATO, and we will be working on that with…
Brig. Gen. Stephen Clark of Air Force Special Operations Command has been tapped to get to the bottom of a NATO airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on Nov. 26. Marine Corps Gen. James N. Mattis, commander of U.S. Central Command, appointed the rated command pilot as the investigating officer who will lead the probe and deliver a report by Dec. 23, according to the Pentagon. Clark has been in the Air Force for about 25 years and previously served as the commander for the 27th Special Operations Wing at Cannon Air Force Base, according to his service biography. He…
So Col. Muammar Gadhafi hasn’t been captured (and it looks like his son, Saif, might not ever have been), but it’s not too early to look at the role NATO jets played in toppling the Libyan government. On Aug. 20, the day rebels first stormed Tripoli, NATO jets struck 22 targets inside the capital: three military facilities, one military storage facility, seven surface-to-air missile transloaders, one radar, one surface-to-surface missile, two armed vehicles, two armored fighting vehicles, three command-and-control nodes and two multiple rocket launchers. And that’s just the latest round. Since NATO took over operations on March 31, the alliance…
So how well are things going in the United States’ third war? Well, months of operating a no-fly zone over the no-fly zone, sanctions, interdicting ships entering port, striking at government forces and overall just supporting the rebellion has really started to put the heat on leader Moammar Gadhafi. And while some people might be following the news, how well do you know the geography? Do you know your Azzawiyas from your Sirtes? Well, we’ve got a pretty neat map showing how bleak things look for the Gadhafi government. Iyad El-Baghdadi — who identifies himself as an “entrepreneur, Austrian economist,…
Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates took some outgoing-defense-secretaryish shots at NATO last week. Among the shots at the trans-Atlantic alliance: It’s “two-tiered” and faces “a dim, if not dismal future.” And then there was this zinger: “The blunt reality is that there will be dwindling appetite and patience in the U.S. Congress — and in the American body politic writ large — to expend increasingly precious funds on behalf of nations that are apparently unwilling to devote the necessary resources or make the necessary changes to be serious and capable partners in their own defense,” he said.” Harsh words. So…
