Robert Farley

This can’t be right; I was led by Party of Defeat to believe that Jimmy Carter held sole responsibility for the fall of the Shah of Iran: A new report based on previously classified documents suggests that the Nixon and Ford administrations created conditions that helped destabilize Iran in the late 1970s and contributed to […]

NATO appears to be taking seriously the threat that airstrikes pose to civilians in Afghanistan: Brig. Gen.Richard Blanchette, NATO’s chief spokesman in Afghanistan, said commanders are now under orders to consider a “tactical withdrawal” when faced with the choice of calling in air support during clashes in areas where civilians are believed to be present. […]

Galrahn has some thoughts on what Obama‘s Navy might look like: Will Barack Obama walk in with his own preconceived notions based heavily on the opinions of advisers to guide him? Repeating George Bush mistakes doesn’t seem to be the Obama template. There is barely anything written from a liberal think tank regarding naval power, […]

President Bush delisted North Korea as a state sponsor of terror on Saturday. In response, North Korea has resumed disassembly of its nuclear infrastructure. The central U.S. concession was that surprise inspections of undeclared facilities suspected of housing nuclear infrastructure can only be performed with the consent of the North Koreans. The United States wanted […]

Check out this great New York Times article from yesterday on the curious case of Michael Cantrell, an engineer who bilked the government out of millions of dollars in missile defense money. Much of the money went to a useless alternative missile defense project, while the rest went into the pockets of Cantrell and an […]

Pirates are claiming that an $8 million ransom has been arranged for the return of MV Faina, a ship hijacked off Somalia while carrying 33 Ukrainian T-72 tanks and a collection of other weapons. I’m skeptical of an accord on two levels. First, I simply don’t think it’s a good idea to pay the pirates […]

David Petraeus will be CENTCOM chief no matter who ends up in the White House. As such, I’m not surprised that, in the context of a talk at the Heritage Foundation, he’s making nice towards Obama: Petraeus also came out unambiguously in his talk at Heritage for opening communications with America’s adversaries, a position McCain […]

Edward Hugh at Fisftul of Euro’s has an extended post on Russia’s economic downturn. Read the whole thing, but long story short, Russia is suffering a series of pretty serious economic problems. Not all of these can be blamed on the South Ossetia War, but the war didn’t help; it indicated to investors that Russia […]

A few years back, Gal Luft wrote an article in Foreign Affairs on something called the “piracy-terrorism nexus.” The idea was that piracy (which at that time was on the increase in Southeast Asia) might contribute to terrorism; terrorists and pirates might use the same funding sources, terrorists might employ tactics of piracy to attack […]

As viewers of The Matrix will recall, an EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) results from a nuclear explosion, and has the effect of briefly shutting down the electronics systems of our would-be robotic overlords. EMP was taken fairly seriously in the Cold War, because it posed a threat to US defense systems in the context of a […]