There are few statistics as stunning
as the following simple, single number: The United States spends
two times more on its military than all the other countries of the world,
combined.
Yes, that's right. All 200 or
so of them. Combined.
OMG, pirates! Headlines around the country squealed with glee as our Navy SEALS - the Easter SEALS - took out the Somalian baddies, freed the newest American hero and helped President Obama with the "dodging of a PR bullet," as USA Today put it.
Meanwhile, "Pirates around the Indian Ocean vowed revenge," the New York Daily News chimed in, letting us know that we could have an exciting new war on our hands, as speculation continues that at least one of the old ones will be cancelled (someday). And if you think this sounds kind of like reality TV, well, it is. E!
WASHINGTON - Military researchers have dressed live pigs in body armor and strapped them into Humvee simulators that were then blown up with explosives to study the link between roadside bomb blasts and brain injury.
Mass strandings of dolphins and whales could be caused because the animals are
rendered temporarily deaf by military sonar, experiments have shown.
Tests on a captive dolphin have demonstrated that hearing can be lost for up
to 40 minutes on exposure to sonar. Hearing is the most important sense for
dolphins and other cetaeceans, and losing it is likely to cause them to
become disorientated and alarmed.
WASHINGTON - Secretary of Defense Robert Gates unveiled the U.S.'s much-anticipated new military budget Monday, which aims to reorient the armed forces toward irregular and counterinsurgency warfare while proposing cuts in several major weapons programs.
The budget is viewed as a major step in the ongoing debate within the U.S. military about whether to focus primarily on conventional warfare against other states or on counterinsurgency operations against non-state actors.
People in every country want to see their soldiers as acting nobly. So perhaps it's no surprise that Israeli propagandists have tried to claim first place by calling the IDF the "most moral army in the world." The problem with this phrase is not just that it is risible in the case of the IDF, but that it implies the possibility of any army being moral. On the contrary, by virtue of how they are organized and what they inevitably do, all armies are moral failures.
WASHINGTON - Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates will announce "a fundamental shift" in the military's weapons budget on Monday, unveiling a series of cuts to big-ticket programs that he deems ill-suited to meeting current national security threats, the Pentagon said yesterday.
"These are not changes to the margins. This is a fundamental shift," Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell told reporters yesterday, though he declined to provide specifics of the plan, which Gates will unveil after briefing key members of Congress over the weekend.
MOSCOW - A senior U.S. official said Friday that Kyrgyzstan and Washington have agreed to continue talks over a key American air base that American forces had been told to leave within six months.
A Kyrgyz presidential spokesman reiterated that the base decision was final, but said the Central Asian country was still open to a new deal with the United States.
WASHINGTON - The unmanned bombers that frequently cause unintended civilian casualties in Pakistan are a step toward an even more lethal generation of robotic hunters-killers that operate with limited, if any, human control.
The Defense Department is financing studies of autonomous, or self-governing, armed robots that could find and destroy targets on their own. On-board computer programs, not flesh-and-blood people, would decide whether to fire their weapons.
