On March 1, agents nabbed 44-year-old Erdal Kuyumcu of Woodside, New York—the CEO of Global Metallurgy, a self-described “provider of specialty metal products

That Iranian government agencies or companies were allegedly trying to get their hands on cobalt-nickel powder

despite having agreed to suspend its nuclear program, is still trying to develop ballistic missiles optimized for carrying an atomic warhead

Iran’s armed forces—and the industries supporting them—are notoriously compartmentalized and prone to roguish behavior, even doing some initial work on weapons programs without official permission from the capital

Cobalt-nickel powder could, for example, help Iranian engineers build their own jet engines for passenger planes

In October, Iran test-launched a new Emad rocket with a reported range of more than 1,000 miles, a modest improvement over most of Iran’s existing ballistic missiles

Captain Crunch was put into operation in August 1993 as an efficient way to destroy unwanted firearms. Located at Anniston Army Depot in Alabama and operated by the Defense Logistics Agency, the Captain is an enormous shredder using intertwined blades that turns weapons made of wood, steel, aluminum and plastic into large pieces of junk.

Guns are fed onto a conveyor belt, which then dumps them into The Captain's gnashing maw. What's left is cut up with blowtorches to make sure it cannot be used to assemble a firearm and turned into scrap. The part with the serial number—the firearm's receiver—must be totally obliterated for the gun to be officially considered destroyed. The scrap in turn is sold to civilian buyers, which by 2007 was generating $12 million a year in sales.

Up to 2,500 weapons a day can be scrapped by Captain Crunch. Within just six months of commencing operation, Captain Crunch had ground up 300,000 firearms, including 110,000 M1911A1 semiautomatic pistols, 132,000 rifles, and 20,000 M3 "grease gun" submachine guns. The average cost of destroying each weapon was a mere $3.26. By 1995, the total was up to 600,000 guns.

Fox News reports that Captain Crunch has destroyed one million firearms, a number it could have achieved after just its third year of operation. The Captain is a hungry beast.

Islamic State militants have planned attacks in Malaysia including a plot to kidnap three of the country's top officials last year, a report said Tuesday, a week after Prime Minister Najib Razak vowed an unrelenting anti-terrorism fight

"On Jan. 30, 2015, a total of 13 people with ties to Daesh [Islamic State group] had planned to kidnap the leaders, including the prime minister, home minister and defense minister," Zahid, who is also the home minister, said.

The Islamic State group also planned to attack places of worship, as well as entertainment outlets in Malaysia

And last year, a Malaysian bomb expert called Marwan, who was on the list of terrorists wanted by the United States, was killed by troops

However, an official Army contract document identifies the plane as an MC-12W Enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System — a.k.a., EMARSS — based at Hunter Army Air Field in Georgia as of July 2015.

It’s not clear when the ground combat branch took charge of N6351V. The Air Force was clearly the original owner. Starting in 2009, the flying branch bought a fleet of more than 40 MC-12W spy planes to help meet ever-increasing demands for intelligence over battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.

It called the Beechcrafts after their project code name, “Liberty.” As the U.S. presence in Afghanistan wound down, the Air Force decided to give away the Liberty planes. Beginning in October 2015, the Army took a batch of eight of the MC-12Ws in order to convert them to the EMARSS standard, adding some additional surveillance equipment.

Somewhere along the line, some of the MC-12Ws apparently also adopted civilian guises. Aviation enthusiast Joe Baugher’s detailed database of U.S. military aircraft serial numbers notes that the particular aircraft that wound up in pieces in northern Iraq adopted its nebulous private registration on Aug. 8, 2012.

By 2019, the Army expects to have four different types of EMARSS planes, all with various types of surveillance gear, according to one unclassified briefing. Unless the plane has received additional modifications, this particular MC-12 sports — at the very least — gear that can scoop up enemy radio chatter and powerful video cameras for scanning down below.

The ex-Air Force MC-12Ws will get new Army-specific computer systems and other equipment. The spy systems will remain largely unchanged for the original. When the conversions are finished, the service plans to rename these particular aircraft “MC-12S-2.”

Still, we don’t know what unit owns the aerial spook or what it was doing near Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish autonomous region. Hunter is home to both the 224th Military Intelligence Battalion and the 3rd Battalion, 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment.

A spokesman at the public affairs office for Fort Stewart and Hunter told War Is Boring that the aircraft does not belong to the 224th. They offered no additional information about the plane or its assignment.

Pike was referring to Area 6, a top secret military base in Yucca Flat. Located roughly a dozen miles southwest of the infamous Area 51, the site was once a testing ground for the US nuclear weapons program. While the base is operated by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), it is used jointly by both the US Defense Department and Homeland Security.

"They come here to test their own sensors," NNSA spokesman Darwin Morgan told the Las Vegas Review.

"We have controlled airspace and that gives them opportunities to test various types of platforms," he added. "We do a wide variety of work for others…supporting people with sensor development activities. It evolved from the nuclear testing program. We had to have very good sensors to collect data in a split second before they were obliterated."

Little is known about secretive location. Satellite imagery from Google Earth shows three separate hangars, as well as four small buildings. Stretching 5,000 feet into the desert is a runway.

“If it [Russia] didn’t intervene, Syria would be a country of the so-called Islamic State [IS, ISIS/ISIL],”

“Russia should be in the military aspect involved in the protection of Syria at the request from Syria, as it would mean protection from terrorism, and it is much better to be protected from it in Syria than in Russia,”

Commenting on the breakthrough ceasefire deal brokered by Russia and the US, he called it “a very encouraging sign” and urged both parties to curb Turkey’s posture in the region, which he said was “the master” while “staying in the shadow.”

The Saudi Council of Ministers headed by the Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Salman bin Abdulaziz entrusted the Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who is also Second Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence, or whoever he delegates, with discussions with the Djibouti government about a draft agreement on military cooperation between the two countries. On his part, Djibouti’s ambassador in Riyadh Ziauddin Bamakhrama said his country is looking forward to the signing of an agreement with Saudi Arabia to establish a Saudi military base on Djibouti territory.

Ahmad Zahid revealed that apart from the prime minister, he himself and Hishammuddin had also been the targets.

The deputy prime minister said besides the plot to kidnap, the group also planned attacks on places of worship and public places, steal firearms from army camps, as well as robbing cash to finance their activities.

As such, Hishammuddin gave assurance that all military camps, especially those with firearms store, would be tightly controlled to prevent trespassing by the so-called militants.

Last month, Business Insider sat down with George Friedman, the founder of Geopolitical Futures. Friedman is also the author of “The Next 100 Years” and founder of STRATFOR, the influential geopolitical forecasting firm

Friedman warned that in the modern era, every period of peace has been a built-up towards a violent reckoning. “There has never been a century that has not had a systemic war — a systemic war, meaning when the entire system convulses,” Friedman continued, citing the Seven Years War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the world wars

“When you have the countries like Germany, China, and Russia decline, and be replaced by others, that’s when systemic wars start,” Friedman explains. “That’s when it gets dangerous, because they haven’t yet reached a balance. So Germany united in 1871 and all hell broke loose. Japan rose in the early 20th century, and then you had chaos. So we’re looking at a systemic shift. Be ready for war.”

Well the most likely emerging countries are Japan, Turkey, and Poland. So I would say Eastern Europe, the Middle East and a maritime war by Japan with the United States enjoying its own pleasures.

But every time new powers emerge they have to find their balance. New powers are emerging, old powers are declining. It’s not that process that’s dangerous, it’s the emerging position that’s dangerous.

The USS Reuben James, which was also featured in the filmed version of Clancy’s The Hunt For Red October, went down after being hit by an anti-surface warfare variant of the Raytheon Standard Missile-6 as part of a test of the U.S. Navy’s new “distributed lethality” warfighting concept. The ship had already been decommissioned in 2013.

The vertically launched supersonic SM-6 missile, originally designed to intercept incoming aircraft and cruise missiles, was fired from the Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer USS John Paul Jones on January 18, hitting the USS James Reuben anchored at the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility off the coast of Hawaii.

“The test was a demonstration of the U.S. Navy’s concept of ‘distributed lethality,’ employing ships in dispersed formations to increase the offensive might of the surface force and enabling future options for the joint force commander,” according to a Raytheon press release.

“Distributed lethality is about having such overwhelming offensive superiority that no potential threat would consider attacking. And if for some reason they did attack, they would lose decisively and rapidly,” said former U.S. Navy Surface Warfare Officer William J. Parker III, one of the minds behind the distributed lethality concept, in an interview with The Diplomat.

Part of the Navy’s distributed lethality concept has been to modify existing weapon systems and employ them in missions for which they were not originally designed. It was obviously with that in mind that U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter told reporters in February 2016: “We are going to create a brand-new capability. We’re modifying the SM-6 so that in addition to missile defense, it can also target enemy ships at sea at very long ranges.”

The Mach 3.5+ SM-6 has an effective range of approximately 200 (some say 250) nautical miles (around 370 kilometers) outranging the U.S. Navy’s other major anti-surface weapon, the Boeing RGM-84 Harpoon anti-surface missile. The SM-6 provides U.S. fleets with an over-the-horizon engagement capability.

The program was initially suggested to help in recruitment, but a spokesperson for the Department of Defense said that keeping women in the military was a key factor in deciding the program’s effectiveness.

“The pilot is designed as a two-year trial, with an option to renew it up to five times based on the impacts, efficiency, and effectiveness of the program on women’s retention,” the spokesperson said, adding that the department has budgeted $150 million for the program. “We do believe … that this new benefit will have positive effects on women’s retention, over time.”

Major General Jeffrey Harrigian, director of the F-35 Integration Office, explained the problem being with the fighter's "radar stability—the radar's ability to stay up and running," according to analysts at IHS Jane's Defence Weekly. "What would happen is [pilots would] get a signal that says either a radar degrade or a radar fail—something that would force us to restart the radar."

The issue apparently started cropping up in late 2015, and with coders diverted to fixing the problem, Lockheed Martin is hoping for a reboot-free fix by the end of the month.

This isn't the first knock on the F-35's software. Internal memos from the Department of Defense have highlighted fears that the fighter's software might not be sufficiently shielded against cyber attacks. There have also been an assortment of sensor issues that, if not quickly fixed, stand to push back a declaration of combat readiness for the Air Force's F-35A variant from August 1st until later in the year.

We believe that the Lebanese armed forces deserve the support of the international community," State Department spokesman John Kirby said.

"Assistance to the Lebanese armed forces and to other legitimate state institutions is essential to help diminish the role of Hezbollah and its foreign patrons," he said, in an implicit swipe at Iran.

"We've raised our concerns about the reports of aid cut off with the Saudi authorities. I'm not going to talk about the details of that."

Al-Shishani is the nom de guerre of Tarkhan Batirashvili, an ethnic Chechen from the former Soviet state of Georgia who has a $5 million US bounty on his head. He is widely known as “Omar the Chechen".

Known for his flowing red beard, he is believed to be one of IS's top military commanders

A US official speaking on condition of anonymity said al-Shishani "likely died" in the assault by waves of US warplanes and drones, along with 12 other IS fighters.

We're in the process of talking about rotational forces, bombers and tankers out of Australia and it gives us the opportunity to train with Australia," Commander of US Pacific Air Forces, General Lori Robinson, told journalists in Canberra as cited by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"The Enhanced Air Cooperation Initiative, which is part of the Force Posture Initiative, is in development and will result in increased rotations of US Air Force elements through northern Australia," she said.

While America has no territorial claims of its own, it insists that the area in question should be considered international space with no nation able to restrict access to it. US warships and planes conduct regular ‘Freedom of Navigation’ missions trough the China-claimed waters and airspace, which Beijing rebukes as provocative.

Russian president Vladimir Putin pointed out the need for Russia to pass contractor-friendly legislation

The right-wing A Just Russia Party proposed a draft of the PMC bill in November 2014, but the Duma defense committee rejected it

The FSB security agency and the Ministry of Defense both voiced concern of one day seeing “tens of thousands of uncontrollable Rambos turning their weapons against the government.”

Only a few months after Putin’s speech in favor of PMCs, the Russian president dismissed Minister of Defense Anatoly Serdyukov for his involvement in an outsourcing scandal.

RSB Group, arguably the most important Russian PMC, offers a wide array of services, from the protection of oil and gas installations and airports, to the provision of escorts for convoys in conflict zones or cargo vessels in piracy-stricken waters.

RSB also provides mine-clearing services, military training, intelligence and analysis. Moran Security Group, another first-rate Russian PMC, offers teams for hostage-rescue and cargo-retrieval.

In eastern Ukraine in 2015, several local separatist warlords died violently in apparent assassinations.

numerous separatists point to a single culprit — the TchVK (that’s Russian for “private military company”) Wagner, a band of Russian contractors who allegedly also took part in the battle of Debaltseve in February 2015

The TchVK Wagner saga does not end in the Donbass region. On Dec. 18, 2015, The Wall Street Journal revealed that at least nine contractors, allegedly members of this armed group, died in western Syria

In the autumn of 2013, the Slavonic Corps, 267 men strong, traveled to Syria to help defend an oil installation in the sector of Homs

Badly equipped and misinformed, the contractors decided to return to Russia

Furthermore it seems the Russian army in Syria does not make use of these two PMCs. For sure, these companies do employ droves of former FSB agents, and one can easily imagine that they offer piecemeal services to the Russian state while on duty abroad, especially in Africa

Russia already has perfectly suitable pawns — and need not legalize private military companies to staff its shadowy foreign forays. “History has shown it is far more simple to use ‘volunteers’ in order to resolve problems abroad,” Krinitsyn says. “It is always possible to disown them.”

Houthis have freed a Saudi soldier in return for seven detained Yemenis as part of a tribal-mediated border truce agreed by both sides

The Houthis had sent a delegation to Saudi Arabia on Tuesday to discuss a truce along the frontier

"There will be talks between Saudi and Houthis to seek a way to build trust and end the war in Yemen because all previous negotiations with UN mediation saw lots of things lost in translation, so it is better to meet directly for all side to talk about steps to stop the war,"

More than 90 people - both military and civilian - have been killed on the Saudi side of the border by fire from Yemen during the conflict

North Korea’s state-news agency claimed early Wednesday that the country has successfully miniaturized nuclear warheads that are able to fit atop ballistic missiles. The claim came a month after the Hermit Kingdom reported a successful nuclear test that again rattled the international community. In new photos released by the state-run news service, leader Kim Jong Un is shown meeting with nuclear scientists and technicians while standing next to a purported warhead. CNN reports that analysts say North Korea does not yet have the ability to launch a strike on U.S. soil, despite fears of the nation’s progress.

Russia has warned Kim Jong-Un to stop threatening to launch nuclear weapons on foreign powers, as it could create 'a legal basis' for military action against North Korea.