BREAKING WORLDWIDE

The US military is reportedly in talks with Boeing Defense, Space & Security over the terms of a $3.3 billion contract to purchase 275 AH-64E Apache helicopters. This comes a month after US Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter approved the Army’s proposed multiyear procurement plan. Col. Jeffrey Hager, the Apache program manager, told Inside Defense that a signed agreement can be expected by early 2017. The Senate and House versions of the fiscal 2017 National Defense Authorization Act have both been approved, but concerns over the cost efficiency of production and procurement programs has kept any bill from being passed. Loading... The director of defense pricing for the Pentagon's acquisition directorate, Shay Assad, approved the Apache proposal. Assad told Politico in April that his years spent as an executive at Raytheon showed him how companies often overpay for multi-year defense contracts. As a result, Assad claims th...

NATO has rejected air-safety proposals made by Russia which would have ensured all military planes flying in the Baltic region would operate with their transponders switched on. This makes no sense. According to the Wall Street Journal, NATO officials said the proposals “would do little to improve” air safety — a strange response, given that NATO has repeatedly scolded Russia for allegedly flying its military jets over the Baltic with transponders switched off. Headlines about ‘dangerous’ and ‘unsafe’ Russian military flights have been ten-a-penny over the last couple of years. Such stories have become so ubiquitous — and the media so obsessed with blowing them out of proportion — that at one point a woman in Cornwall became convinced that she saw Russian bombers overhead one day when she was out for a driving lesson. One would imagine then, given NATO’s repeated criticisms and concerns over safety in the Baltic region, that they would have welcomed any kind of common-sense prop...

Bowing to demands for greater transparency into the circumstances surrounding a fatal shooting that sparked protests in Charlotte, North Carolina this week, the city’s police department on Saturday released video of the deadly encounter recorded by its officers. Kerr Putney, chief of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg police, told reporters that the video was recored on two police cameras — one mounted on the dashboard of a police car and another on the uniform of an officer — after an undercover unit observed Keith Lamont Scott sitting in his car on Tuesday afternoon with marijuana and a gun. “When you are in possession of marijuana and then you have a gun, that’s a public safety issue that our officers were going to address,” Putney said. Neither of the video clips makes it clear if Scott was, in fact, holding a gun when he was shot, but it does appear to cast doubt on previous statements from the police that he posed an imminent threat to their safety, since he appears to have ...

Our day job is to read about Russia-related stuff and then write about it. So imagine our surprise when we learned that "a NATO air chief says he's concerned by Russia's increasing deployment of surface-to-air missile systems in and around Europe." That's huge! Russia deployed the S-400 to Prague? When did this happen? And what is Russia hoping to gain by deploying surface-to-air systems into the heart of NATO-controlled Europe? We had so many questions in need of answers. Originally appeared at russia-insider. loading... In recent years, the Russian military has deployed S-300 and S-400 surface-to-air missile (SAM) systems not only within Russia and Kaliningrad, the Russian city in a territory between Poland and Lithuania, but Crimea and areas encircling the Ukraine, and even Latakia, Syria. A lot of redundant information here. Let's help our friends at Military.com: After editing out the decorative bullshit, we get: In recent years, ...

She's BEAUTIFUL! Introducing Dusty Rose Levine! Adam and wife Behati Prinsloo welcomed their first kid this week -- and just shared the ADORABLE first photo!

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama has vetoed a bill that would have allowed the families of 9/11 victims to sue the government of Saudi Arabia. The move sets Obama up for a possible first veto override by Congress. Both chambers passed the bill by voice vote. The House sent Obama the bill just before the 15th anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001. Obama says the bill would “upset longstanding international principles regarding sovereign immunity.” The bill would have given 9/11 families the right to sue in U.S. court for any role that elements of the Saudi government may have played in the attacks. Fifteen of the 19 men who carried out the attacks were Saudi nationals.

What, precisely, is the US military for, and what, precisely, can it do? In practical terms, how powerful is it? On paper, it is formidable, huge, with carrier battle groups, advanced technology, remarkable submarines, satellites, and so on. What does this translate to? Military power does not exist independently, but only in relation to specific circumstances. Comparing technical specifications of the T-14 to those of the M1A2, or Su-34 to F-15, or numbers of this to numbers of that, is an interesting intellectual exercise. It means little without reference to specific circumstances. For example, America is vastly superior militarily to North Korea in every category of arms–but the North has nuclear bombs. It can’t deliver them to the US, but probably can to Seoul. Even without nuclear weapons, it has a large army and large numbers of artillery tubes within range of Seoul. It has an unpredictable government. As Gordon Liddy said, if your responses to provocation are wildly out ...