ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

In recent weeks Russian President Vladimir Putin attended a meeting of top generals in Moscow to discuss his vision for upgrading his military. According to published accounts, he gave a largely boring talk about defeating U.S. missile defense systems to top military brass that also appeared to be bored by the talk. However, as reported by  Foreign Policy , Russian TV cameras happened to catch a glimpse (see above) of a new nuclear weapon platform that, should Moscow decide to build, could be a game-changer. The system? Status-6: An underwater sub-like drone that is designed to transport a thermonuclear weapon into foreign ports. If detonated, the weapon is capable of extinguishing major port cities like New York with blast and  massive amounts of radioactive fallout . “At the risk of understating things, this project is bat-shit crazy,” writes Jeffrey Lewis for  Foreign Policy . “It harkens back to the most absurd moments of the Cold War, when nuclear strategi...

Credit: Reuters/Khaled Abdullah According  to The New York Times, 450 Latin American fighters have been contracted by private US companies and directly by the government of the UAE to join hundreds of Sudanese soldiers whom Saudi Arabia has recruited to fight there as part of the coalition. It is the first combat deployment for a foreign army that the Emirates has built over the past five years The program was once managed by a private company connected to Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater Worldwide, but the people involved in the effort said that his role ended several years ago and that it has since been run by the Emirati military. Colombian, Panamanian, Salvadorean and Chilean soldiers arrived to battle the Houthi rebels who have pushed the Yemeni government out of the capital, Sana. Most of the soldiers are Colombian, as Emirati officials consider them more battle tested in guerrilla warfare, having spent decades battling gunmen of the Revolutionary Armed Forces o...

FILE IMAGE North Korea has been conducting rare mass evacuation and blackout drills throughout the country. According to the South Korean  NKNews , several cities on the east coast of North Korea undertook the war-preparation drills, including blackout and evacuation scenarios, last week. The tests did not include Pyongyang. Such exercises have reportedly been rare in recent years. “I have never heard of this type of training exercises before in North Korea, but am not surprised,” Chun In-bum, a recently retired three star lieutenant general from the South Korean army, told NKNews. “They must realise how serious the situation is.” However, a North Korean defector told the news service that he remembered such drills from when he lived in Pyonyang “sometimes three times a year … especially at the time of military exercises of ROK and US army.” The report notes North Korea may need to conduct at least one more ICBM test, this time on a long-range trajectory, to prove it ...

The anti-drone combat unit was formed on the basis of a special radio warfare unit in Western Military District in Russia. The unit will be stationed in Kursk region. The core of the unit is formed of radio warfare specialists that will use their knowledge to combat drones. “This is a somewhat unique unit,” said the unit commander  colonel Alexander Vostrikov. “The best specialists in the field are all here. Every serviceman has unique professional skills and technical know-how in the area of radio warfare. The amount of training they receive is comparable to one a special operations unit would go through. In a way, they are the special operations unit of radio warfare”, he added. Various types of remotely piloted aircraft are used in training, including the old war drones and special flying targets. There exist about 20 special units in the Western Military District. They include aircraft defense systems, sniper units and aviation.

A screenshot from the video The Egyptian Air Force has destroyed 6 militant vehicles that were trying to infiltrate the country from Libya.

A military airport of the Ukrainian military On October 29, 40 “unidentified persons” raided a military airport of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the city of Odessa. The persons entered the territory of the military unit “A3571” and stole the property stationed there, the press service of the Ukrainian Air Force Command said. “Today, in Odessa, at about 8:45 am, unidentified persons, about 40 people in balaclavas attempted the raider capture of a part of the territory of the military facility, which belongs to the Defense Ministry of Ukraine. Unknown persons who position themselves as representatives of the Commerce and Entertainment CITI CENTER partially dismantled the fence of the military unit A3571, and took out military equipment in an unknown direction,” the statement reads. Meanwhile, the local police said that the representatives of the CITI CENTER entered the area thanks to a decision of legal authorities that allegedly allowed the company to build a parking ther...

On Sunday, an official of the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates told the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) that Raqqa city is still occupied. The Syrian official added that the US-led coalition claims of liberating Raqqa city from ISIS are “mere lies aiming to divert international public opinion from the crimes they committed in Raqqa province”. “More than 90% of Raqqa city has been leveled due to the deliberate and barbaric bombardment of the city and the towns near it by the [US] alliance, which also destroyed all services and infrastructures and forced tens of thousands of locals to leave the city and become refugees,” the official told SANA. The official added that  Syrian citizens who were forced to leave Raqqa city are now living on the roads and in camps due to the practices of “the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces [SDF]”. Moreover, the source accused the US-backed SDF of stealing the humanitarian aid meant to save the lives of Raqqa locals, and...

Click to see the full-size image On October 29, ISIS fighters attacked the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) positions in the strategic Omar oil fields in the southeastern Deir Ezzor countryside, according to the ISIS-linked news agency Amaq. Six fighters of the SDF were killed during the attack, according to Amaq. Click to see the full-size image Click to see the full-size image Click to see the full-size image From its side, Kurdish sources said that the SDF repelled ISIS attack on Omar oil fields. The sources said that the SDF fighters killed 18 fighters of ISIS. Moreover, the SDF destroyed an armored vehicle, and two vehicles armed with 23mm guns of ISIS during the clashes in the oil fields. Click to see the full-size image Click to see the full-size image Meanwhile, the US-led coalition announced that its warplanes destroyed a position, and a vehicle of ISIS near al-Bukamal city on October 26. US-led coalition warplanes also destroyed a VBIED fa...