ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

PLAN Naval Aviation Matures and Practices Catapult Launches Written by Brian Kalman exclusively for SouthFront; Brian Kalman is a management professional in the marine transportation industry. He was an officer in the US Navy for eleven years. He currently resides and works in the Caribbean. The Liaoning CV-16 aircraft carrier and assigned naval aviation units conducted their first live fire training exercises in the Bohai Sea sometime last week. The drills exhibited the J-15 Flying Shark’s ability to carry both PL-12 air-to-air missiles and YJ-83 anti-ship missiles aloft, despite the weight limitations imposed by the ski-jump STOBAR operations inherent in the Liaoning’s design. STOBAR, or Short Take Off-But Arrested Recovery, is a form of aircraft carrier operation that requires an angled ski-jump ramp to aid aircraft in getting airborne on take-off, and uses a series of cables to arrest the aircraft upon landing. The Liaoning also engaged aerial targets with close-in defense systems,...

The Kurganets-25 is a tracked, modular platform developed for the Russian military. It’s expected that the Kurganets-25 will evolve into various models replacing tracked armored platform that are now in service with the Russian Army.

Videos, showing an al-Nusra terrorist and his wife, sending their little daughters to blow themselves up in Damascus, have been published online. Photo: twitter.com / Syria_Protector On Friday last week, a police station was bombed by a child suicide bomber in Midan neighborhood of  Damascus , the Syrian state-run Ikhbariya news channel reported. According to the Reuters news agency, citing an unnamed witness in the area of the blast, a young girl of about nine years of age entered the police station and, after asking to go to the toilet, blew herself up. As it was reported, the bomb on the child might have been detonated remotely by someone else, and the child was just used. Later, a video, showing consequences of the explosion and the body of the child after the bombing, was published online by the Ruptly video news agency. A few days later, it became known that the suicide bomber was a 7-years-old girl named Islam, who, along with her 9-years-old sister Fatimah, ...

The situation in Debaltsevo direction has stabilized by December 21. The People’s Militia of the Luhansk People’s Republic (LPR) has managed to recapture several heights. By December 21, the situation in Debaltsevo direction has stabilized, the Colonelcassad blog reported. The Ukrainian Armed Forces did not manage to achieve significant progress in the direction of the villages of Logvinovo and Kalinovka and moved away from the most part of the occupied territory after the suffered losses. At the moment, the fights have a positional character that is enough typically for episodic escalations, which gradually fade after several days of hostilities and turn into a standard situation for the war in Donbass of 2015-2016. Using the superior artillery fire, the Donbass People’s Militia tries to oust the enemy from the positions, which are still controlled by Ukrainian troops, and then come into them with the infantry forces and restore the status quo, which existed before the offensive o...