"We have created a concept of 'infantry fighting vehicle of the future.' It will be specified on the results of design and experimental work on Kurganets-25 [modular tracked platform]. I can not reveal it for obvious reasons. I will only say that it will be highly mobile multirole digital unit," Aleksander Klyuzhev told RIA Novosti.

Our forces are advancing toward the government complex in the center of Ramadi," Al-Numani said, as cited by Reuters. "The fighting is in the neighborhoods around the complex, with support from the air force."

Iraqi intelligence believes there are between 250 and 300 IS terrorists in the center of Ramadi.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen has threatened severe reprisals against Houthi rebels, after they fired a fourth ballistic missile in as many days towards Saudi territory.

Brigadier General Sharaf Luqman said "300 Saudi military and vital targets" had been chosen.

The rebels and their allies still have "about 60 to 70 missiles, including Tochka missiles", Yemeni army sources say, despite coalition claims to have neutralised their ballistic capabilities.

British troops have been deployed to Afghanistan to help re-take a key town where more than 100 UK soldiers died fighting after it fell back under Taliban control.

At least one SAS unit of around 30 soldiers has reportedly been deployed to support U.S. special forces and the Afghan National Army to capture retake Sangin in Helmand province.

Around 65 percent of Helmand is now thought to be under Taliban control.

The United States Air Force has a little-known team of elite security commandos that are highly trained for a very particular job, protecting aircraft and crews from enemy assaults while on the ground in dangerous locales. They are called the Phoenix Ravens.

According to the Air Force, Phoenix Ravens’ unique training includes:

“The Phoenix Raven training course is conducted by the United States Air Force Expeditionary Center at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst, N.J. The intensive three-week, 12-hour-a-day course covers such subjects as cross-cultural awareness, legal considerations, embassy operations, airfield survey techniques, explosive ordnance awareness, aircraft searches, and unarmed self-defense techniques. Students are exposed to more than 70 use-of-force scenarios where stress is simulated using role players. Training includes instruction and realistic practical exercises in antiterrorism/force protection, weapon system security, verbal judo, combatives, tactical baton employment and advanced firearms proficiency.”

Analysts discovered the hack while monitoring IP addresses associated with disruptions to websites of US banking institutions. They found computers trawling the internet for vulnerable industrial infrastructure, and a couple of IP addresses were linked to a “Bowman” dam. The trouble? There are 31 dams with the name Bowman in the United States, and they didn’t know which one it was.

The Bowman avenue dam is a tiny 20 foot concrete structure. It could’ve been way worse: Initially, officials thought the compromised infrastructure was a much larger 235 dam in Oregon.

Here is the location of the dam shown on Google Earth. As you can see, there are excellent nearby dining options.

At this time the hack is classified and unconfirmed.

The Japanese coast guard released a photo of the ship sailing in the East China Sea. It was one of four Chinese coast guard vessels spotted in the waters on Tuesday, but was the only one that was armed. The ships didn't come close enough to the islands to violate what Japan considers to be its territorial waters.

It has responded by stringing a line of anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile batteries along 200 islands in the East China Sea, stretching 870 miles from the country’s mainland toward Taiwan, Reuters reported.

Over the next five years, Japan will increase its forces on islands in the East China Sea by about a fifth, to almost 10,000 personnel.

The plan amounts to a Japanese version of the “anti-access/area denial” doctrine, known as “A2/AD” in military jargon, which China is currently using to try to push the United States and its allies out of the region.

What happened, according to Hersh:

* The Joint Chiefs of Staff, America's senior-most military leaders, in summer 2013 discovered that Turkey had "co-opted" the CIA's rebel-arming program, redirecting the US aid to extremists including Jabhat al-Nusra (an al-Qaeda branch) and ISIS.

* The Joint Chiefs also discovered that viable moderate Syrian rebels did not exist and that the opposition consisted nearly uniformly of extremists.

* The Joint Chiefs decided in the fall of 2013 to begin secretly "providing US intelligence to the militaries of other nations, on the understanding that it would be passed on to the Syrian army." They sent US intelligence to Germany, Russia, and Israel, which sent it to Assad.

* The goal of their secret alliance with Assad was to subvert Obama's Syria efforts, prop up Assad, and aid him in destroying ISIS and other extremists.

* In return, the Joint Chiefs asked that Assad 1) "restrain" Hezbollah from attacking Israel; 2) renew negotiations with Israel over the Golan Heights, a territory that Israel had seized from Syria decades earlier; 3) agree to accept any Russian assistance; and 4) hold elections after the war ended.

* In summer 2013 the Joint Chiefs tricked the CIA into shipping obsolete weapons to Syrian rebels. Hersh says this was intended as a show of good faith to Assad, to convince him to accept their offer.

* The secret Joint Chiefs alliance with Putin and Assad, we are told, ended this September when its chief architect, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey, retired.

Seymour Hersh, an investigative journalist famous for uncovering the 1968 My Lai massacre and the mid-2000s Abu Ghraib scandal, says there's another scandal afoot, and it's bigger than anything he's previously reported. Perhaps even bigger than his story from this May alleging that the US staged its mission to kill Osama bin Laden.

Like its Mi-8/17 “Hip” cousin, the Mi-24/35 “Hind” series of Russian helicopters has a slew of unique configurations. Yet one of the most puzzling is the Mi-35MS, a de-armed advanced Hind derivative that has been converted into an aerial taxi for military VIPs.

Although the Mi-24—primarily an attack helicopter—was designed with a small cabin able of carrying around eight combat troops, the type does not come to mind as a candidate for a VIP transport conversion. Russia has the Mi-8MTV configuration for that exact role, this is the same Mi-8 configuration that President Putin flies on regularly. Additionally, high-up Russian Ministry of Defense officials use similar configurations in the field, some of which have enhanced command and control capabilities.

Even with much more logical options available, this odd and shadowy Hind conversion somehow happened, and the most modern version of the Mi-24, the Mi-35, was used as the platform for this new sub-type. There are at least four of these helicopters in inventory, and they have been seen coming and going from the Kremlin’s helipad and at the newly remodeled Ministry of Defense. It’s possible they are operated by the Russian Border Guards or the Russian Ministry of Defense.


The type wears a green paint job, but it’s not anything like the glossy emerald tone found on America’s VH-3D’s (Marine One); instead it’s a flat, no-frills livery.

The Mi-35MS carries no armament. In the place where rocket pods and missiles are usually hung, there are long-range fuel tanks and missile approaching warning sensors. Where the Hind’s chin-mounted gun is traditionally mounted under the cockpit, a large radar fairing exists, and communications suite is installed along the helicopter’s spine. This antenna farm includes a large Raduga-MB satellite communications installation behind the helicopter’s main rotor. Other enhancements native to the Mi-35 are night vision flying compatibility, multi-function displays, and a GLONASS/GPS navigation suite. Uprated engines, improved rotor design and other elements also differentiate the baseline Mi-35 from the Mi-24.

Finally, the interior of these unique helicopters show a modern and luxurious cabin, although it can only accommodate a handful of people due to its small size. (You can see photos at this Russian aviation site) The sheets shown in the pictures covering the seats are likely there to protect the leather. Like other military VIP helicopters, it has flat-screens displays,and a phone system. The couch seating may also be used as a bed. In total it looks like the cabin can comfortably carry only about five passengers.

Throughout the early years of this decade, China rapidly and inexorably altered the maritime status quo in East Asia, wresting control of Philippine-claimed Scarborough Shoal and deploying a giant oil rig into Vietnamese-claimed waters in the South China Sea.

In an influential article for the journal International Security, Segal underscored China’s strategic opportunism. He argued that “China’s [foreign] policy will remain softer only if pressure is maintained,” so a constrainment strategy is “intended to tell [China] that the outside world has interests that will be defended by means of incentives for good behavior, deterrence of bad behavior, and punishment when deterrence fails.”

Today, we are beginning to see the emergence of a “constrainment” strategy against China. Smaller powers like the Philippines have resorted to lawfare in order to leverage relevant provisions of United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) against China’s blatant disregard for the very convention it has signed up to (see my analysis of the arbitration case here).

Non-claimant states such as Singapore, which has welcomed permanent American naval presence on its soil as a hedge against China, have repeatedly called for the resolution of the South China Sea disputes in accordance with international law.

The core of a constrainment strategy against China, however, lies in the determination of America and its key allies to push back against growing Chinese military presence on the ground, which threatens freedom of (especially military) navigation and overflight in the area.

China’s assertiveness in the South China Sea — embodied by its notorious “cabbage strategy” and various forms of “salami-slicing tactics” against smaller claimant states — entered an intensified phase throughout the early years of the Obama administration. But for long, U.S. Pres. Barack Obama held back, relying instead on diplomacy and bilateral engagement with China.

Almost half a decade into the “Pivot to Asia,” the Obama administration has gradually — but with delays and seeming reluctance — stepped up its efforts to directly challenge Chinese expansionism in East Asia. After much hesitation, the United States finally cleared the deployment of destroyers well into the 12-nautical-mile radius of Chinese-claimed features in the Spratly chain of islands.

But one can’t deny that a storm is gathering against China’s revanchist maneuvers in the South China Sea. The Royal Australian Air Force has joined maritime patrols in the area, and the Japanese Maritime Self Defense Forces could soon join the fray.

The JF-17 has one thing going for it that none of its competitors can match: price. However, there is one crucial element which will undoubtedly be an important factor in Malaysia’s choice of aircraft: its relationship with China. Considering that China and Malaysia are currently parties to the territorial disputes in the South China Seas, it is probable that Beijing will have some kind of say in the potential sale.

On December 12 and 13, violence broke out in Zaria, in Nigeria’s northern Kaduna state, between the military and members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria (IMN).

An analysis from Lagos-based SBM Intelligence suggests that members of the Islamic Movement had blockaded a highway, impeding a local military chief’s motorcade. The situation rapidly escalated after IMN members refused to move and began throwing rocks at the military chief when he exited his vehicle.

Smyth explains that the IMN, with its host of social and religious organizations and distrust of secular authority, shares many characteristics with other Iranian-supported Shiite groups around the world.

As an analysis from SBM Intelligence explains, the Islamic Movement has a “perpetual siege mentality” because of its status as the only Shiite movement in a region that has lately become a crossroads for hardline or reformist Islamic groups. “The Zaria/Kaduna/Kano axis is the melting pot of various Islamic movements in West Africa, many of whom are often violently opposed to, and despise one another,”

The government might also be nervous about the possibility of yet another hardline sectarian Islamist groups emerging in northern Nigeria. As the SBM Intelligence analysis notes, Boko Haram is “a sect much smaller than Zakzaky’s group,” meaning the IMN has an existing base of support and organization to sustain it if it ever transitioned into violent insurgency.

Shia in Nigeria, contrary to the reputation they have, largely want to be left alone, and are not really interested in imposing their own views on others by force,” Nwanze told Business Insider by email. He also pointed out that “all the violent Islamist movements” in Nigeria’s recent history have been Salafist in nature. A native strain of violent Khomeinism hasn’t arrived in

Saudi forces some time think they have so many high end weapon, E3 AEW, F15, M1, APC, strong SPH unit,  Apache, UAV, so many bomb, maybe 10x power full than our arm forces also can't take down Yamen, ISIS, there top military official also get kill ....   
some time really can't believe there Saudi force is for so weak ...... and how claim there is stronger force in Arabian spend more than usd 10 billion military budget

"The Sand People are easily frightened but will return in greater numbers...."

PETALING JAYA: The remains of the 13 Malaysians who perished in Sunday's bus crash in Chiang Mai were received by family members at the RMAF base in Subang early Wednesday.

The coffins bearing the remains of the victims arrived in a Royal Thai Air Force Hercules C130 plane which left Chiang Mai Military Airport at 10.55pm Tuesday and arrived at the base at 3.30am.

An RMAF Hercules C130 touched down minutes later with the next-of-kin of the deceased and a 61-year-old female survivor.

Volunteers from the Taiwan Tzu Chi Foundation Malaysia were at the base to comfort the bereaved family members.

The caskets were brought out of the plane with the last one at about 4.20am. Each were placed in a hearse which later made their journey to Batu Pahat, Johor where all the victims came from.

Saudi forces some time think they have so many high end weapon, E3 AEW, F15, M1, APC, strong SPH unit,  Apache, UAV, so many bomb, maybe 10x power full than our arm forces also can't take down Yamen, ISIS, there top military official also get kill ....   
some time really can't believe there Saudi force is for so weak ...... and how claim there is stronger force in Arabian spend more than usd 10 billion military budget

12 variants for the AV8 is too much in my opinion. Why the need for 12 variants? Even the new British Scout-SV if i'm not mistaken only have 6 variants.