Europe politics
fromwww.aljazeera.com
20 hours agoHow serious is the rift in NATO?
Trump is angry over European nations' refusal to support military action against Iran, causing rifts within NATO.
Lord Robertson stated, 'We need to sort of round up those who are available, fit, and willing to be able to do it.' This emphasizes the urgency of engaging former service personnel in the strategic reserve.
Retired Army Special Forces officer Mike Nelson criticized Hegseth's rhetoric, stating, 'That's a necessary end to achieve goals through military force - you have to kill people to achieve them. That's not the end. It's a weird obsession with death for the sake of it.'
The economics are hard to ignore. Shooting down a drone with AeroVironment's LOCUST laser system costs less than $10, using just two to five seconds of laser energy. Compare that to the interceptor missiles currently used against Iranian drone swarms, which cost orders of magnitude more and are in short supply across allied arsenals.
We've got no shortage of munitions. Our stockpiles of defensive and offensive weapons allow us to sustain this campaign as long as we need. Iran is hoping that we cannot sustain this, which is a really bad miscalculation.
Lead without authority. You may not have direct reports, yet you shape architecture, quality and the roadmap. Your leverage comes from artifacts, reviews and clear standards, not from title.I started by publishing a lightweight architecture template and a rollout checklist that the team could copy. That reduced ambiguity during design and cut review cycles by nearly 30 percent
It's anything but easy to keep guns, drones, and other equipment in the right conditions far above the Arctic Circle, where temperatures routinely drop below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and the heavy snow brings unwanted moisture that can cause jamming and other problems. NATO military personnel training in northern Finland told Business Insider during a visit to the region in late January that they can't afford to let their guns get too warm if they want them to work in this climate.
Much like the war in Ukraine, future battlefields could be drowning in electronic interference, so the US Army stress-tested new command-and-control tech against that threat. The need to maintain connections between command and deployed weapons and crews, or reestablish those links when they're lost, is shaping how soldiers train on the service's Next Generation Command and Control, a new software-driven system that's being developed for the Army.
As a veteran of the war on terror, I have spent the past year watching Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers expand their operations across the country on a heretofore unprecedented scale and with a new faux-military bearing. From equipment to weapons to tactics, ICE and other immigration enforcement bodies want to be seen as combat forces carrying out their missions.
On paper, many of the world's most famous weapons looked like reliable successes. In practice, desert sand, jungle humidity, and arctic cold often had other ideas. Systems that performed well in testing or early combat sometimes broke down once environmental stress became unavoidable. Here, 24/7 Wall St. is taking a closer look at how the environment, not enemy fire, can quietly expose limits that designers never fully anticipated.
The brazen attack on the international airport and nearby military airbase in Niamey, Niger's capital, came overnight between January 28 and 29. Balls of orange fire flew across the sky as the Nigerien army attempted to respond while residents ducked for cover and whispered prayers, as shown in videos on social media. ISIL (ISIS) in Sahel Province, or ISSP a Niger-based outfit earlier known as the ISIL affiliate in the Greater Sahara or ISGS has since claimed responsibility