5 Messages
Digest #5031
Messages
Thu May 22, 2014 5:21 am (PDT) . Posted by:
"Rick Rozoff" rwrozoff
http://www.defense.gov/news/
U.S. Department of Defense
May 21, 2014
NATO Military Chairman Opens Defense Chiefs’ Meeting
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
BRUSSELS: Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and NATO transformation are important topics for discussion as the alliance’s Chiefs of Defense conference gets underway here today.
Click photo for screen-resolution image
Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in Brussels to attend the conference.
First up is a discussion on the implications of Russia’s actions in annexing Crimea and threatening Ukraine, Danish Gen. Knud Bartels, the chairman of the Military Committee, said at the opening of the conference this morning.
“Russia’s annexation of territory, in a sovereign nation, on NATO’s borders has to cast a shadow of insecurity across the alliance’s Eastern flank and has potentially serious implications for the region and beyond,” Bartels said.
NATO nations, he said, will continue to urge Russia to de-escalate and move troops from its borders with Ukraine, and the alliance will continue to be resolute in its deterrence and commitment to collective defense.
On Afghanistan, he added, the NATO chiefs will join with the chiefs of defense from partner nations to review the security situation in the light of the recent successful first round of Afghan elections.
...
The end of the ISAF mission gives the alliance a chance to refocus its military capability towards a broader range of potential future threats, the general said.
“As we have seen in recent months, the global security situation remains fragile and unpredictable and the alliance is increasingly surrounded by an arc of instability from Ukraine, to Syria to the Sahel,” he said. “NATO must therefore ensure that it retains the capability, commitment and credibility to deliver against its three core tasks of collective defense, crisis management and cooperative security.”
Twelve years of combat in Afghanistan has made the alliance more interoperable and Bartels wants the member nations to build on that foundation.
“Both collectively and individually, NATO nations will also need to invest in the capabilities and training necessary to develop alliance readiness and maintain its qualitative advantage, which are its greatest deterrence to potential adversaries,” he said.
==============================
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==============================
U.S. Department of Defense
May 21, 2014
NATO Military Chairman Opens Defense Chiefs’ Meeting
By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service
BRUSSELS: Russia’s actions in Ukraine, Afghanistan, and NATO transformation are important topics for discussion as the alliance’s Chiefs of Defense conference gets underway here today.
Click photo for screen-resolution image
Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is in Brussels to attend the conference.
First up is a discussion on the implications of Russia’s actions in annexing Crimea and threatening Ukraine, Danish Gen. Knud Bartels, the chairman of the Military Committee, said at the opening of the conference this morning.
“Russia’s annexation of territory, in a sovereign nation, on NATO’s borders has to cast a shadow of insecurity across the alliance’s Eastern flank and has potentially serious implications for the region and beyond,” Bartels said.
NATO nations, he said, will continue to urge Russia to de-escalate and move troops from its borders with Ukraine, and the alliance will continue to be resolute in its deterrence and commitment to collective defense.
On Afghanistan, he added, the NATO chiefs will join with the chiefs of defense from partner nations to review the security situation in the light of the recent successful first round of Afghan elections.
...
The end of the ISAF mission gives the alliance a chance to refocus its military capability towards a broader range of potential future threats, the general said.
“As we have seen in recent months, the global security situation remains fragile and unpredictable and the alliance is increasingly surrounded by an arc of instability from Ukraine, to Syria to the Sahel,” he said. “NATO must therefore ensure that it retains the capability, commitment and credibility to deliver against its three core tasks of collective defense, crisis management and cooperative security.”
Twelve years of combat in Afghanistan has made the alliance more interoperable and Bartels wants the member nations to build on that foundation.
“Both collectively and individually, NATO nations will also need to invest in the capabilities and training necessary to develop alliance readiness and maintain its qualitative advantage, which are its greatest deterrence to potential adversaries,” he said.
==============================
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==============================
Thu May 22, 2014 6:23 am (PDT) . Posted by:
"Rick Rozoff" rwrozoff
http://www.mda.mil/news/
Missile Defense Agency
U.S. Department of Defense
May 21, 2014
Standard Missile Completes First Test Launch from Aegis Ashore Test Site
The Missile Defense Agency, the U.S. Navy, and sailors at the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex and Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF), successfully conducted the first flight test involving components of the Aegis Ashore system.
During the test, a simulated ballistic missile target was acquired, tracked, and engaged by the Aegis Weapon System. At approximately 7:35 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time, May 20 (1:35 a.m. EDT, May 21), the Aegis Weapon System fired a Standard Missile (SM)-3 Block IB guided missile from the Vertical Launch System. Several fire control and engagement functions were exercised during the test. A live target missile launch was not planned for this flight test.
The primary purpose of the test, designated Aegis Ashore Controlled Test Vehicle (AA CTV)-01, was to confirm the functionality of Aegis Ashore by launching a land-based SM-3. The Aegis Ashore system uses a nearly identical configuration of the Vertical Launch System, fire control system, and SPY-1 radar currently in use aboard Aegis cruisers and destroyers deployed around the world.
This flight test supports development of the Aegis Ashore capability of Phase 2 of the European Phased Adaptive Approach, planned to begin operations in Romania in 2015.
==============================
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==============================
Missile Defense Agency
U.S. Department of Defense
May 21, 2014
Standard Missile Completes First Test Launch from Aegis Ashore Test Site
The Missile Defense Agency, the U.S. Navy, and sailors at the Aegis Ashore Missile Defense Test Complex and Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF), successfully conducted the first flight test involving components of the Aegis Ashore system.
During the test, a simulated ballistic missile target was acquired, tracked, and engaged by the Aegis Weapon System. At approximately 7:35 p.m. Hawaii Standard Time, May 20 (1:35 a.m. EDT, May 21), the Aegis Weapon System fired a Standard Missile (SM)-3 Block IB guided missile from the Vertical Launch System. Several fire control and engagement functions were exercised during the test. A live target missile launch was not planned for this flight test.
The primary purpose of the test, designated Aegis Ashore Controlled Test Vehicle (AA CTV)-01, was to confirm the functionality of Aegis Ashore by launching a land-based SM-3. The Aegis Ashore system uses a nearly identical configuration of the Vertical Launch System, fire control system, and SPY-1 radar currently in use aboard Aegis cruisers and destroyers deployed around the world.
This flight test supports development of the Aegis Ashore capability of Phase 2 of the European Phased Adaptive Approach, planned to begin operations in Romania in 2015.
==============================
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==============================
Thu May 22, 2014 10:00 am (PDT) . Posted by:
"Rick Rozoff" rwrozoff
http://en.ria.ru/world/
RIA Novosti
May 22, 2014
OPINION: Biden in Romania Talks Reveals Extramundane Nature of US Push for War
Rick Rozoff
MOSCOW: US Vice President Joseph Biden appeared at a military base in the capital of Romania on May 20 and, against the backdrop of this year's annual Carpathian Spring joint military exercises, announced that Washington's willingness to go to war over the mutual military support clause of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the founding document of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is not only clear and unwavering, but indeed of a mock-religious - extramundane and sempiternal - nature.
In his precise words: "America's commitment to collective defense under Article 5 of NATO is a sacred obligation in our view - a sacred obligation not just for now, but for all time." In aeternum, in saecula saeculorum and in line with eschatological imperatives.
Biden, the once, (near) future and perennial candidate to succeed the current commander-in-chief of the world's sole military superpower (the exact words of his current superior, President Barack Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech of five years ago), an abrasive and pugnacious Walter Mitty of a malign bent who has often experienced difficulties distinguishing between fact and fiction, campaign claims and occurrences in the real world, and his own modest abilities and megalomaniacal inflation thereof, began his speech in Romania upbraiding his hosts for not providing him the clement weather a personage of his elevated stature deserves and had, moreover, been promised, querulously and inconsistently grousing, "it's very hot in here. I was supposed to - I was told it was going to be cooler here, but thank you for the great weather."
A Roman emperor, Trajan for example, the conqueror of Dacia (modern-day Romania), would have severely chastised and as severely punished the leaders of a subjugated province for not having secured nicer weather for a visiting imperial dignitary of Biden's rank.
Though his modern avatar did commend the military prowess of Romanian troops serving under NATO command in Afghanistan, martial values serving in lieu of miracle-working ones, evidently. The American satrapy, a NATO member for a decade, maintains one of the largest troop contingents remaining in Afghanistan, 1,000 soldiers, and Bucharest will continue to provide NATO with cannon fodder in South Asia even after the formal completion of troop withdrawal at the end of this year.
The vice president acknowledged that Romania, with whom then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed an agreement in 2005 for the acquisition of bases and the stationing of military personnel and equipment, is housing a permanent force of US Marines at the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base near Constanta on the Black Sea. That base is also home to US Army Europe's Task Force East and the US Marine Corps' Black Sea Rotational Force, the latter a Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force (SPMAGTF) used as the model for US Africa Command's SPMAGTF.
Biden also obliquely pressured Romania in regard to demands of the US (and at least implicitly NATO, because of interoperability exigencies) for the country, like neighboring Bulgaria, to replicate the purchase of American F-16 Fighting Falcons by Poland at the beginning of the century - 48 in all, the largest military outlay in Polish history - by reminding the Romanian officials present that "You're building a fleet of F-16s." Bucharest like Sofia was being pressured to purchase 24-36 apiece of the General Dynamics-manufactured warplanes before the US-generated economic downturn of six years ago led to a scaling back of that number.
With characteristic bravado and brusqueness, he also stated:
"America and our NATO allies have urgently stepped up our military presence in the air, land and on the sea of NATO's eastern flank. In just the past weeks we've had ships visit. The USS Truxton, Cook, Taylor, as well as the Dacian Viper F-16 exercise. And in the coming days, new ships - the Vella Gulf will enter the Black Sea to conduct port visits and maritime training. Period."
The four US warships mentioned are guided missile vessels and part of the US Navy's Aegis Combat System, which is being integrated into the US-NATO European Phased Adaptive Approach interceptor missile system to cover all of Europe west of Russia, the Mediterranean Sea Basin and the South Caucasus.
USS Truxton and USS Donald Cook are Arleigh Burke class destroyers, USS Taylor is a Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate and USS Vella Gulf a Ticonderoga class cruiser.
With an anachronistic martial ethos more suitable to a - much - earlier epoch, say, the late Roman Empire, the deputy commander-in-chief of the world's sole military superpower flattered US military personnel at the event as "the greatest generation of warriors the world has ever produced." He immediately added, "And that is not hyperbole," though of course it is.
Last month's Dacian Spring joint US-Romanian week-long exercise he alluded to consisted of drills with US F-16s and host country MiG-21 Lancers.
At the end of his ex officio declamations, Biden shifted from sub-imperator to pontifex maximus in tone, dispensing benedictions broadcast: "May God bless Romania, may God bless America, and may God protect our troops." It is uncertain which deity, of the underworld or other sphere, has conferred on him the office of bestowing blessings, as it were on the eve of a campaign, a war.
Adjectives like grandiose, magniloquent, millenerial and bombastic come to mind in reference to the pronouncements of Mr. Biden. But they, even, are too generous and elevated in tone.
Having recently had occasion to re-read Imperial Purple (1892), a series of belletristic sketches of the first twenty-five Roman emperors by American-born writer Edgar Saltus, I am more reminded of one or more of the later of those the author, a friend and colleague of such fellow writers as Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symonds during his London years, limned with a combination of urbane bemusement and visceral repugnance. Commodus, say, or Heliogabalus.
==============================
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==============================
RIA Novosti
May 22, 2014
OPINION: Biden in Romania Talks Reveals Extramundane Nature of US Push for War
Rick Rozoff
MOSCOW: US Vice President Joseph Biden appeared at a military base in the capital of Romania on May 20 and, against the backdrop of this year's annual Carpathian Spring joint military exercises, announced that Washington's willingness to go to war over the mutual military support clause of the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the founding document of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is not only clear and unwavering, but indeed of a mock-religious - extramundane and sempiternal - nature.
In his precise words: "America's commitment to collective defense under Article 5 of NATO is a sacred obligation in our view - a sacred obligation not just for now, but for all time." In aeternum, in saecula saeculorum and in line with eschatological imperatives.
Biden, the once, (near) future and perennial candidate to succeed the current commander-in-chief of the world's sole military superpower (the exact words of his current superior, President Barack Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech of five years ago), an abrasive and pugnacious Walter Mitty of a malign bent who has often experienced difficulties distinguishing between fact and fiction, campaign claims and occurrences in the real world, and his own modest abilities and megalomaniacal inflation thereof, began his speech in Romania upbraiding his hosts for not providing him the clement weather a personage of his elevated stature deserves and had, moreover, been promised, querulously and inconsistently grousing, "it's very hot in here. I was supposed to - I was told it was going to be cooler here, but thank you for the great weather."
A Roman emperor, Trajan for example, the conqueror of Dacia (modern-day Romania), would have severely chastised and as severely punished the leaders of a subjugated province for not having secured nicer weather for a visiting imperial dignitary of Biden's rank.
Though his modern avatar did commend the military prowess of Romanian troops serving under NATO command in Afghanistan, martial values serving in lieu of miracle-working ones, evidently. The American satrapy, a NATO member for a decade, maintains one of the largest troop contingents remaining in Afghanistan, 1,000 soldiers, and Bucharest will continue to provide NATO with cannon fodder in South Asia even after the formal completion of troop withdrawal at the end of this year.
The vice president acknowledged that Romania, with whom then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice signed an agreement in 2005 for the acquisition of bases and the stationing of military personnel and equipment, is housing a permanent force of US Marines at the Mihail Kogalniceanu Air Base near Constanta on the Black Sea. That base is also home to US Army Europe's Task Force East and the US Marine Corps' Black Sea Rotational Force, the latter a Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force (SPMAGTF) used as the model for US Africa Command's SPMAGTF.
Biden also obliquely pressured Romania in regard to demands of the US (and at least implicitly NATO, because of interoperability exigencies) for the country, like neighboring Bulgaria, to replicate the purchase of American F-16 Fighting Falcons by Poland at the beginning of the century - 48 in all, the largest military outlay in Polish history - by reminding the Romanian officials present that "You're building a fleet of F-16s." Bucharest like Sofia was being pressured to purchase 24-36 apiece of the General Dynamics-manufactured warplanes before the US-generated economic downturn of six years ago led to a scaling back of that number.
With characteristic bravado and brusqueness, he also stated:
"America and our NATO allies have urgently stepped up our military presence in the air, land and on the sea of NATO's eastern flank. In just the past weeks we've had ships visit. The USS Truxton, Cook, Taylor, as well as the Dacian Viper F-16 exercise. And in the coming days, new ships - the Vella Gulf will enter the Black Sea to conduct port visits and maritime training. Period."
The four US warships mentioned are guided missile vessels and part of the US Navy's Aegis Combat System, which is being integrated into the US-NATO European Phased Adaptive Approach interceptor missile system to cover all of Europe west of Russia, the Mediterranean Sea Basin and the South Caucasus.
USS Truxton and USS Donald Cook are Arleigh Burke class destroyers, USS Taylor is a Oliver Hazard Perry class frigate and USS Vella Gulf a Ticonderoga class cruiser.
With an anachronistic martial ethos more suitable to a - much - earlier epoch, say, the late Roman Empire, the deputy commander-in-chief of the world's sole military superpower flattered US military personnel at the event as "the greatest generation of warriors the world has ever produced." He immediately added, "And that is not hyperbole," though of course it is.
Last month's Dacian Spring joint US-Romanian week-long exercise he alluded to consisted of drills with US F-16s and host country MiG-21 Lancers.
At the end of his ex officio declamations, Biden shifted from sub-imperator to pontifex maximus in tone, dispensing benedictions broadcast: "May God bless Romania, may God bless America, and may God protect our troops." It is uncertain which deity, of the underworld or other sphere, has conferred on him the office of bestowing blessings, as it were on the eve of a campaign, a war.
Adjectives like grandiose, magniloquent, millenerial and bombastic come to mind in reference to the pronouncements of Mr. Biden. But they, even, are too generous and elevated in tone.
Having recently had occasion to re-read Imperial Purple (1892), a series of belletristic sketches of the first twenty-five Roman emperors by American-born writer Edgar Saltus, I am more reminded of one or more of the later of those the author, a friend and colleague of such fellow writers as Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symonds during his London years, limned with a combination of urbane bemusement and visceral repugnance. Commodus, say, or Heliogabalus.
==============================
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==============================
Thu May 22, 2014 10:00 am (PDT) . Posted by:
"Rick Rozoff" rwrozoff
http://www.presstv.ir/detail/
Press TV
May 22, 2014
Republicans, Democrats 'exploiting' Benghazi attack ahead of elections
Audio at URL above
The two major political parties in the US are “exploiting” the deadly 2012 terror attack on US consulate in Benghazi, ahead of this year's midterm elections, a political analyst said.
“Both ruling political parties in the United States, the incumbent-- that is in the White House at least-- the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are really playing political football with the Benghazi issue,” Rick Rozoff from Stop NATO International Network told Press TV on Thursday.
“It’s something that has been exploited by both political parties; Republicans, because they are outside the White House, to make points against the ruling party and the Democrats of course are trying to put out the fire and exonerate themselves,” Rozoff stated.
After weeks of internal debate, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday appointed five members to the newly-formed Select Committee that will investigate the Obama administration's handling of the attack that killed US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans.
Rozoff dismissed the move as just a political game. “The maneuvering by the Democratic Party to dispatch a delegation to Libya is not enough to get to the truth, however much we hear that from either political party, but it’s simply a taxpayer-funded junket to do damage control for the party in the White House right now as the opposite party is trying to score political points ahead of the next presidential election.”
Rozoff described the 2011 US-led bombing campaign of Libya as “one of the more lopsided wars in history” where NATO, with a collective population of 900 million, conducted over 26,000 air missions against the government of a country with a population of just six million.
The analyst pointed out that Ambassador Stevens was himself in Benghazi instigating and later coordinating efforts to aid the rebels against Muammar Gaddafi.
“Stevens was somebody who three years ago was in Benghazi before the overthrow of the government of Muammar Gaddafi and was meeting with some of the various types of so-called rebels and securing for them weapons and other support they could use against the government,” he said.
“Rather than get to the bottom of who was perhaps negligent in protecting the US ambassador, he himself was involved in creating the debacle that now is Libya, we have to take note of the fact that even as we’re speaking there’s armed conflict occurring in the two largest cities in the country, in Tripoli and Benghazi,” Rozoff noted.
==============================
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http://groups.yahoo.com/group/
Stop NATO website and articles:
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==============================
Press TV
May 22, 2014
Republicans, Democrats 'exploiting' Benghazi attack ahead of elections
Audio at URL above
The two major political parties in the US are “exploiting” the deadly 2012 terror attack on US consulate in Benghazi, ahead of this year's midterm elections, a political analyst said.
“Both ruling political parties in the United States, the incumbent-- that is in the White House at least-- the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are really playing political football with the Benghazi issue,” Rick Rozoff from Stop NATO International Network told Press TV on Thursday.
“It’s something that has been exploited by both political parties; Republicans, because they are outside the White House, to make points against the ruling party and the Democrats of course are trying to put out the fire and exonerate themselves,” Rozoff stated.
After weeks of internal debate, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi on Wednesday appointed five members to the newly-formed Select Committee that will investigate the Obama administration's handling of the attack that killed US ambassador, Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans.
Rozoff dismissed the move as just a political game. “The maneuvering by the Democratic Party to dispatch a delegation to Libya is not enough to get to the truth, however much we hear that from either political party, but it’s simply a taxpayer-funded junket to do damage control for the party in the White House right now as the opposite party is trying to score political points ahead of the next presidential election.”
Rozoff described the 2011 US-led bombing campaign of Libya as “one of the more lopsided wars in history” where NATO, with a collective population of 900 million, conducted over 26,000 air missions against the government of a country with a population of just six million.
The analyst pointed out that Ambassador Stevens was himself in Benghazi instigating and later coordinating efforts to aid the rebels against Muammar Gaddafi.
“Stevens was somebody who three years ago was in Benghazi before the overthrow of the government of Muammar Gaddafi and was meeting with some of the various types of so-called rebels and securing for them weapons and other support they could use against the government,” he said.
“Rather than get to the bottom of who was perhaps negligent in protecting the US ambassador, he himself was involved in creating the debacle that now is Libya, we have to take note of the fact that even as we’re speaking there’s armed conflict occurring in the two largest cities in the country, in Tripoli and Benghazi,” Rozoff noted.
==============================
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==============================
Thu May 22, 2014 2:31 pm (PDT) . Posted by:
"Rick Rozoff" rwrozoff
NATO in the Caucasus: Alliance advances Armenia's integration
Rick Rozoff
The defense and foreign ministers of the Republic of Armenia, respectively Seyran Ohanyan and Edward Nalbandian, visited North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels, Belgium on May 20 where they met with the military bloc's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
The latter and the two Armenian ministers discussed the ongoing participation of the South Caucasus nation's troops in the Atlantic bloc's Kosovo Force (KFOR) mission in Kosovo and in the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Armenia had earlier assigned troops to the NATO-assisted Multi-National Force - Iraq as well.
The defense and foreign policy chiefs also met with the North Atlantic Council, NATO's top governing body, consisting of the permanent representatives (ambassadors) of its 28 member states.
Rasmussen commended Armenia for the latest version of its Individual Partnership Action Plan, a bilateral agreement between the U.S.-dominated military alliance and assorted partners within the broader Partnership for Peace arrangement, which currently includes, in addition to Armenia, fellow South Caucasus nations Azerbaijan and Georgia and every other European nation not already a full member of NATO except for Russia: Austria, Belarus, Bosnia, Finland, Ireland, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine, with Cyprus in the process of joining, and Central Asia's Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are also members of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, and as such nations the West is striving to lure away from that bloc in favor of NATO integration.
Armenia regularly hosts NATO and Partnership for Peace military exercises as well as supplying troops and equipment for such exercises in other nations.
==============================
U.S. Preparing New Military Intervention in Libya
Rick Rozoff
With the increasingly deadly internecine fighting in Libya's two largest cities, Tripoli and Bengazhi, spinning out of control, the U.S. has deployed military personnel and hardware to the U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily for intervention on the ground in the North African nation still devastated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's six-month air war and naval blockade of three years ago.
American armed forces online news media report that the U.S. Air Force has transferred seven vertical takeoff Osprey aircraft, three KC-130s transport aircraft (capable of aerial refueling) and 180 Marines and sailors from the Morón Air Base in Spain to the Italian facility mentioned above, where there are already an estimated 250 U.S. Marines.
Although the official explanation for these deployments is that they may be used in the event that American and other foreign nationals require evacuation as the situation in Libya further devolves into sanguinary chaos, the lessons of 2011 should remain fresh in the minds of the international community.
In March of that year, under the first military operation ever conducted by the Pentagon's latest, indeed first post-Cold War regional unified combatant command, Africa Command (AFRICOM), the U.S. and Britain launched well in excess of 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles from ships and submarines in the Mediterranean Sea in only the opening hours of Operation Odyssey Dawn on the 19th. On the 31st the one-sided war was passed on from AFRICOM to NATO, which flew over 26,000 air missions over the nation of barely over six million inhabitants, almost 10,000 of those flights described by the military bloc as strike sorties.
Given the propensity of Washington and its NATO allies to launch disproportionate military attacks against defenseless countries under the pretext of mock-humanitarian concerns, and given that just this scenario occurred in Libya three years ago, the U.S. military build-up in Sicily is cause for serious concern.
==============================
U.S. Rapid Reaction Combat Troops Dropping From the Baltic Sky
Rick Rozoff
The website of U.S. Air Forces in Europe/Air Forces Africa reported on May 21 that 350 members of the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team parachuted into the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania over a five-day period between May 17-21. Another 150 or so troops from the airborne force have been deployed to nearby Poland.
The 173rd team is based in Vicenza, Italy, but like many U.S. and NATO units and commands may be also heading east on a permanent basis. NATO's Allied Land Command was moved to Izmir, Turkey in 2012 and the U.S. has begun rotating F-16 fighter jets assigned to the 31st Fighter Wing in Aviano, Italy to the Polish air base at Powidz, where there currently are a dozen of the Fighting Falcons.
The American airborne combat troops are exercising with their Baltic counterparts in the unprecedented deployment as part of what the U.S. Air Force describes as a "demonstration of America's partnership to NATO." That is, it exhibits the readiness of Washington to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter - "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence" - in view of the largely U.S.-crafted armed conflict between the regime in Kiev and its eastern provinces.
The U.S. and its Western allies are turning the propaganda mills overtime to evoke hysteria over alleged Russia attempts to apply a putative Crimean model to the Baltic states; a contention as patently fantastical as it is unnerving to those not in the know and hence susceptible to that variety of panic-mongering, and eminently self-serving from the vantage point of Washington, manipulation,
Surely there are more pacific, certainly more aesthetically gratifying, ways of adorning the skies of the Baltic than with armed-to-kill American expeditionary combat troops itching for a fight.
Rick Rozoff
The defense and foreign ministers of the Republic of Armenia, respectively Seyran Ohanyan and Edward Nalbandian, visited North Atlantic Treaty Organization headquarters in Brussels, Belgium on May 20 where they met with the military bloc's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
The latter and the two Armenian ministers discussed the ongoing participation of the South Caucasus nation's troops in the Atlantic bloc's Kosovo Force (KFOR) mission in Kosovo and in the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Armenia had earlier assigned troops to the NATO-assisted Multi-National Force - Iraq as well.
The defense and foreign policy chiefs also met with the North Atlantic Council, NATO's top governing body, consisting of the permanent representatives (ambassadors) of its 28 member states.
Rasmussen commended Armenia for the latest version of its Individual Partnership Action Plan, a bilateral agreement between the U.S.-dominated military alliance and assorted partners within the broader Partnership for Peace arrangement, which currently includes, in addition to Armenia, fellow South Caucasus nations Azerbaijan and Georgia and every other European nation not already a full member of NATO except for Russia: Austria, Belarus, Bosnia, Finland, Ireland, Macedonia, Malta, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland and Ukraine, with Cyprus in the process of joining, and Central Asia's Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.
Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are also members of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization, and as such nations the West is striving to lure away from that bloc in favor of NATO integration.
Armenia regularly hosts NATO and Partnership for Peace military exercises as well as supplying troops and equipment for such exercises in other nations.
==============================
U.S. Preparing New Military Intervention in Libya
Rick Rozoff
With the increasingly deadly internecine fighting in Libya's two largest cities, Tripoli and Bengazhi, spinning out of control, the U.S. has deployed military personnel and hardware to the U.S. Naval Air Station Sigonella in Sicily for intervention on the ground in the North African nation still devastated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's six-month air war and naval blockade of three years ago.
American armed forces online news media report that the U.S. Air Force has transferred seven vertical takeoff Osprey aircraft, three KC-130s transport aircraft (capable of aerial refueling) and 180 Marines and sailors from the Morón Air Base in Spain to the Italian facility mentioned above, where there are already an estimated 250 U.S. Marines.
Although the official explanation for these deployments is that they may be used in the event that American and other foreign nationals require evacuation as the situation in Libya further devolves into sanguinary chaos, the lessons of 2011 should remain fresh in the minds of the international community.
In March of that year, under the first military operation ever conducted by the Pentagon's latest, indeed first post-Cold War regional unified combatant command, Africa Command (AFRICOM), the U.S. and Britain launched well in excess of 100 Tomahawk cruise missiles from ships and submarines in the Mediterranean Sea in only the opening hours of Operation Odyssey Dawn on the 19th. On the 31st the one-sided war was passed on from AFRICOM to NATO, which flew over 26,000 air missions over the nation of barely over six million inhabitants, almost 10,000 of those flights described by the military bloc as strike sorties.
Given the propensity of Washington and its NATO allies to launch disproportionate military attacks against defenseless countries under the pretext of mock-humanitarian concerns, and given that just this scenario occurred in Libya three years ago, the U.S. military build-up in Sicily is cause for serious concern.
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U.S. Rapid Reaction Combat Troops Dropping From the Baltic Sky
Rick Rozoff
The website of U.S. Air Forces in Europe/Air Forces Africa reported on May 21 that 350 members of the 173rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team parachuted into the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania over a five-day period between May 17-21. Another 150 or so troops from the airborne force have been deployed to nearby Poland.
The 173rd team is based in Vicenza, Italy, but like many U.S. and NATO units and commands may be also heading east on a permanent basis. NATO's Allied Land Command was moved to Izmir, Turkey in 2012 and the U.S. has begun rotating F-16 fighter jets assigned to the 31st Fighter Wing in Aviano, Italy to the Polish air base at Powidz, where there currently are a dozen of the Fighting Falcons.
The American airborne combat troops are exercising with their Baltic counterparts in the unprecedented deployment as part of what the U.S. Air Force describes as a "demonstration of America's partnership to NATO." That is, it exhibits the readiness of Washington to invoke Article 5 of the NATO charter - "The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all and consequently they agree that, if such an armed attack occurs, each of them, in exercise of the right of individual or collective self-defence" - in view of the largely U.S.-crafted armed conflict between the regime in Kiev and its eastern provinces.
The U.S. and its Western allies are turning the propaganda mills overtime to evoke hysteria over alleged Russia attempts to apply a putative Crimean model to the Baltic states; a contention as patently fantastical as it is unnerving to those not in the know and hence susceptible to that variety of panic-mongering, and eminently self-serving from the vantage point of Washington, manipulation,
Surely there are more pacific, certainly more aesthetically gratifying, ways of adorning the skies of the Baltic than with armed-to-kill American expeditionary combat troops itching for a fight.
