ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

The  US military budget is $824.6 billion . US military spending is larger than the  next nine countries combined . The 2018 year budget of the Russian Defense Ministry  will total $46 bn . Despite the huge difference in expenditure, the military potentials of the two great powers are compared without offering indisputable conclusions. This is a very interesting phenomenon and many people wonder how it is possible. Launching a program of developing a new weapon system is a great responsibility – success is never guaranteed and there are always snags on the way. It’s an open secret that Russia’s R-30 Bulava submarine launched ballistic missile (SLBM) has been plagued with problems. It was not design but rather production quality. Thorough study has been done to overcome the  difficulties . It’s all over now as the recent tests show and the missile with enhanced ability to evade enemy anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defenses has entered service.  Another ...

Written by  Wayne Madsen ; Originally appeared at  strategic-culture.org One of the more welcomed outcomes of the paring back of the US State Department bureaucracy is the elimination of scores of “status quo enthusiasts.” Since the end of World War II, the State Department’s ranks have been populated by foreign service officers and career diplomats who have championed the international status quo. These minions of Foggy Bottom received encouragement for their protective stance on post-World War II and Cold War in President George H. W. Bush’s speech on September 11, 1990, which was titled, “Toward a New World Order.” Under the “new world order,” regional and global security concerns would supplant democratic independence movements. The immediate effect of this “order” was brutal crackdowns on secession in the periphery of the former Soviet Union, including Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, as well as in Somalia, the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Turkey...

Click to see the full-size image On January 13, Saleh Muslim, a leader of the Syrian Democratic Council (SDC), revealed during an interview with the Hawar News Agency (ANHA) that the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) is planning to enter the northern Idlib governorate to fight “terrorism”. “The plan to enter Idlib is on the agenda of many countries and forces, including our forces [the SDF], and Idlib is a geographical area characterized by mountains, valleys and plains, and we will be up to the responsible of expelling all terrorist forces from it,” Muslim told ANHA. Muslim predicted that all forces in Syria will participate in Idlib’s battle and claimed that Turkish-backed armed groups will not fight against the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) unless Turkey directly participated in the fight. Moreover, the SDC leader stressed that no one can stop the SAA from capturing the strategic Abu Duhur airbase in the eastern Idlib countryside as it is a Syrian land. Muslim also cla...