Robert Farley

AN ODD REQUEST. I wonder if this means anything: North Korea’s military proposed Friday holding direct talks with U.S. forces, an unusual plea amid recent progress on the nuclear standoff between the two countries. The North’s Korean Peoples Army proposed the talks, also be attended by a U.N. representative, “for the purpose of discussing the […]

BENCHMARK ROUND-UP. Nobody with any sense is pleased by the President’s performance. Winslow Wheeler, Defense Tech: While the Iraqis are assessed in the White House’s report to have achieved “satisfactory progress” on only eight of 18 “benchmarks” (six are rated “unsatisfactory”; two are given mixed ratings, and two are rated unable to be rated), it […]

CHINA’S PROGRESSIVE ERA? Joseph Kahn had an interesting piece in the New York Times Week in Review Sunday, musing about whether China, given the recent food quality scandal, needed to go through a “Progressive Era”. His answer was yes and no, which I pretty much agree with. Some of the same factors that slowed the […]

GOOGLE EARTH=AWESOME A commercial satellite recently spotted the first Jin boat, China’s new class of ballistic missile submarines. The Jins will carry 12 or 16 missiles (no one is quite sure, yet) with a range of about 8000km. Combined with the further development of Chinese ICBMs, the days in which only West Coast residents need […]

AND ON THE TAPPED SPORTS BEAT… I missed the extinction of NFL Europa last weekend. Having shifted over the years from the World League of American Football (WLAF, or “we laugh”) to the World League, to NFL European League, to the catchy NFL Europa, the NFL finally decided that the league couldn’t make any money […]

WOULD YOU LIKE SOME ALARMISM WITH THAT? So, I wake up this morning, sip my morning coffee, then find out from the LA Times that Syria is about to attack Israel: The United States and its allies would do better to turn quickly to the urgent matter of preventing war between Syria and Israel. War […]

SAPPING OUR PRECIOUS CONVENTIONAL CAPABILITIES. Via Noah at Danger Room comes this from Inside the Army:”The poobahs are worried that ‘the new emphasis on… counterinsurgency may be undermining conventional [big war] capabilities.’” “The major concern is, while we’re doing all this COIN [counterinsurgency] . . . do we have battalions that can still do an […]

CIVILIAN CASUALTIES. It should go without saying that when an organization refuses to count civilian casualties, argues that civilian casualty counts are irrelevant to an evaluation of war aims, and either ignores or disputes the most sophisticated methodology for counting civilian casualties, that claims such as this… American and Iraqi officials said Sunday that they […]

FAREWELL TO UNMOVIC. From the final report of UNMOVIC: Despite some skepticism from many areas within the international community, in hindsight, it has now become clear that the UN inspection system in Iraq was indeed successful to a large degree, in fulfilling its disarmament and monitoring obligations. Crucial to the inspection system was the underlying […]