ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Two corvettes “Boiky” and “Soobrazitelnyy”, a part of the Russian Navy’s Baltic Fleet, escorted the USS Gravely and USS Porter destroyers, which had entered the Baltic Sea,  the Russian National Defense Management Center told reporters on January 21 st . The USS Gravely is an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer and is the flagship of NATO’s First Permanent Naval Group. In addition to guided missiles, the destroyer is armed with a missile defense system. It became the flagship of the Standing NATO Maritime Group (SNMG) 1 during a ceremony in  Copenhagen, Denmark, January 14 th , 2019. Gravely was previously in the U.S. 6th Fleet area of operations in May 2018 to participate in exercise Joint Warrior 18-1, an 11-day, semi-annual training exercise conducted in the coastal waters of the United Kingdom. The USS Porter is also an Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyer. On April 7, 2017, the destroyer participated in the strike with Tomahawk cruise missiles at t...

In January 2019, the U.S. military has finally released  a unclassified version  of the Missile Defense Review. The report outlined plans to improve and expand the US missile defense shield, as well as add additional layers with space-based sensors and interceptors, technology to track and defeat hypersonic weapons, unmanned aircraft with lasers to shoot down threats and missile-hunting F-35 stealth fighters, among others. “Missile defense is accorded a high priority in our investment plans because the need to do so is evident from our rigorous diagnosis of the strategic environment and  detailed intelligence forecast of potential adversaries’ emerging and projected offensive missile developments. They seek to use offensive missile threats to coerce us, our allies and partners, and are adding new and unprecedented types of offensive missile capabilities to their arsenals. In the past several years, for example,  North Korea rapidly advanced and expanded its i...