Robert Farley

This is easily the greatest paragraph ever written on the F-22: The F-22 Raptor is sex on carbon fiber wings. This is America’s premier air superiority fighter, and it’s a bad, bad monkey. At an F-22 demonstration at the Reno Air Show in September, I nearly passed out from testosterone poisoning. That’s Dan Neil, writing […]

Feng at ID has a good discussion of the expansion of China’s military budget, and in particular its interest in building aircraft carriers. Coincidentally, I gave a talk last week at Campbellsville University which focused on these issues. My general thoughts run thus: There is no question that Chinese military capabilities are increasing, but this […]

Discussions of air superiority in both military and civilian circles too often concentrate of fighter technology. There are reasons for this: Jet fighters are really cool, as are the men who fly them. Mark Bowden allowed this coolness to overtake any good sense in evaluating the F-22, to disastrous effect. However, air superiority is determined […]

Part of the Bush administration’s strategy for “locking in” missile defense in case of a Democratic presidential victory was to conclude agreements with Poland and the Czech Republic that would be difficult for the Democratic victor to break. The thinking went that while Obama might be skeptical of missile defense, he probably wouldn’t jeopardize the […]

An Argentine magistrate has ruled that military officers who ordered torture against their own soldiers in the 1982 Falklands War can be prosecuted for war crimes. This is part of an ongoing coming-to-terms with Argentina’s military dictatorship past, something that many nations in Latin America and elsewhere have had to deal with. What’s different about […]

A New York Times article this morning investigates how Mexican drug cartels get their weapons: Drug gangs seek out guns in the United States because the gun-control laws are far tougher in Mexico. Mexican civilians must get approval from the military to buy guns and they cannot own large-caliber rifles or high-powered pistols, which are […]

Nikolas Gvosdev (along with Dan Twining and Peter Pham) is worried that the Obama administration may not be paying India enough attention: It’s still early, of course. But the new U.S. – India relationship, while it has progressed a great deal, still remains unconsolidated. New Delhi cannot be taken for granted by Washington. It would […]

White-owned farms are still being seized in Zimbabwe. Abstract questions of justice aside, the wages of this policy are fairly obvious: fiscal collapse, the collapse of agricultural production, and social disruption. The seizures are being blamed on members of Robert Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party. According to the BBC report linked above, members of the old regime […]

Would shutting down the Raptor really put 95000 people out of work? No. David Axe has the data: Problem is, that 95,000 number counts indirect employment at firms for whom the F-22 program is just one of many clients. And it also counts Lockheed assembly workers who are in high demand for other aviation projects. […]

Via Joyner, Judy Dempsey argues that the readmission of France to full member status in NATO is part of a project to pursue an independent European defense capability: At EU headquarters, France has often blocked the EU from working more closely with NATO, suspicious that Europe’s defense ambitions would be reined in by the United […]