Space Warfare and Defense

The key factor in early 21st-century American national security policy has justifiably been the U.S. Government’s responses to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This has been demonstrated by controversial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; acrimony over the USA Patriot Act; contentious debate over the treatment and legal status of terrorist detainees; disputes over the legal and constitutional propriety of the National Security Agency’s wireless surveillance program; and other affiliated topics such as homeland security, the complexities of counterinsurgency warfare, and U.S. relations with Islamic countries. As these words are being written, public attention is riveted on the release of the Iraq Study Group’s 2006 report containing possible suggestions for dealing with what has become an increasingly frustrating situation in that country, and which has claimed significant U.S. military casualties and financial resources.

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The Geography of War and Peace – from Death Camps to Diplomates

According to many, we live in a time of war that was ushered in by the attacks of September 11, 2001. Paradoxically, in the prior three years, between 3.1 and 4.7 million people had been killed in conflict in the Congo alone. Numerous other wars raged across the globe. Clearly, to say that a time of war has emerged only since 9/11 is, on the one hand, ethnocentric and plain wrong. On the other hand, awareness of war among the general population of the Western world emerged after 9/11; perception rather than reality drives commentators to define the current period as one of conflict and not peace.It seems almost certain that the current generation of young adults will grow politically mature in a time when the whole world is aware of war. War has been a prevalent occurrence; in the last few decades one can cite Vietnam, the Falk-lands, Chechnya, Iran and Iraq, Sierra Leone, Nicaragua, and Kashmir, to name only a few. The attacks of 9/11 were, from a global perspective, just one more horrific instance of human carnage. However, geopolitically, targeting the United States on its own homeland has created significant changes. War, the “hot war” on terrorism rather than the Cold War, is dominating global geopolitical imperatives and the national debates of many countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Iraq, Iran, North and South Korea, and others). As the sole superpower, the United States has set the agenda.

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The Victorians at War 1815-1914

“Whlist the armies of other European powers can only gain annually some insight into war with the blank ammunition fired during autumn manoeuvres” observed British Army General (later Field Marshal) Viscount Garnet J. Wolseley in 1890, “Queen Victoria’s soldiers learn their less on with ball-cartridge fired in real warfare, and with almost annually recurring regularity. It is the varied experience, and frequent pr actice in war, provided for our officers by the nature of our wide-extending empire, which makes them what I believe them to be — the best in the world.” Wolseley wrote this at the height of the Pax Britannica, or British peace, the century-long period that began with the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and continued until World War I broke out in 1914. Th is era, as Wolseley alluded, was anything but peaceful, with the British Army participating in “real warfare” almost every year.

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World War II in the Pacific

From the Japanese point of view at the time, war with the United States was almost entirely unprovoked. For they knew that it was the Americans who had despised Japanese immigrants and insultingly segregated than in West Coast schools. It was the Americans who had gone on about the “Yellow Peril.” It was the United States which had imposed a state of naval inferiority on Japan at the Washington Naval Conference of 1922. And it was the United States government which, for its own imperialistic purposes, objected to Japan’s attempts to bring order (from Japan’s point of view) to a “decadent” and “corrupt” Nationalist China. In the war games played out on the polished floors of the U.S. Naval War College, Japan was the most likely enemy. These war games, of course, assumed that the U.S. Navy was by far Nippon’s most worrisome opponent; both nations fortified their Pacific island territories against each other. Yet the Japanese had never, certainly in public, brandished their swords against the Americans and their Pacific possessions, although they inveighed against European and American colonialism in Asia. Up to 1931 the provocation and the inflammatory rhetoric was almost entirely American.

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Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works

As with all accomplished companies of its ilk, Lockheed takes great pride in its success and in the simple fact it not only has persevered, but has succeeded during a time when many other similar companies have failed. With a history that can be traced back to 1913, Lockheed is a rare survivor in a field littered with the debris of the mismanaged and politically inept. This success is directly attributable to the guidance provided by the likes of such gifted corporate chiefs as Carl Squier (who was never a chairman of the company), Robert and Courtlandt Gross, Dan Haughton, Bob Haack, Roy Anderson, Larry Kitchen, and Dan Tellep. These men, married to a corporate philosophy that has remained flexible enough to weather a variety of bankruptcy (1932), cash flow (1971), and questionable ethics (1975) assaults, have successfully guided Lockheed through tumultuous storms that would have sunk lesser corporate ships. Lockheed’s history is lengthy, and from a corporate perspective, typically complex. Like most major capitalist organizations, it has had good and bad fiscal years while persevering in an industry notable for its financial instability and a roller coaster business climate. Through good times and bad, over a period now spanning some eight decades, nearly sixty distinct aircraft types have kept Lockheed’s widely distributed production facilities operating with noteworthy consistency.

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F-4 Phantom II in Detail and Scale part 1

McDonnell’s engineers had already begun work on its first jet fighter before the war ended. Design work on the XFD-1, later to become the FH-1 Phantom, began in 1942. However, it was not until after the war that the aircraft took to the air. As the first Phantom lifted off from the USS Franklin D. Roosevelt in July 1946, McDonnell Aircraft Corporation and U.S. Naval Aviation entered the jet age in earnest. The change from pistons to jet turbines as the means for aircraft propulsion carried many problems with it, but the use of jets in naval aviation, posed even more problems. Indeed, these problems jeopardized the very existence of naval carrier-based aviation. Jets, with their high landing speeds, heavier weight, longer take-off rolls, and ability to make crispy critters out of unwary deck personnel, seemed to spell the obsolescence of the aircraft carrier which had ruled the seas in World War II. Although powerful new catapults, new arresting gear, canted (or angled) decks, proper aircraft design to minimize approach speeds, and new handling procedues solved the problems of using jets onboard ship, these solutions took years to evolve, and admittedly, early naval jet fighters suffered from limitations imposed by considerations for shipboard operations. This was in contrast to the war years when the Navy’s F4U Corsair was the equal of, if not better than, the best fighters in the Army Air Corps.

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Scale Aviation Modeler International 2003 01

The first job is to assembly the interior and here is where the first error is apparent. Either the Z-9 has a very small interior fit, or the cockpit parts in this kit are way underscale! I certainly think the latter is the case as the seats etc are so small as to be almost invisible once inside the fuselage and the glass has been installed. Also this interior is very ‘civil’ in guise with none of the military equipment (e.g. cabin-mounted IR sight) that you would associate with an attack helicopter. Having built up the under-size interior 1 set about building up the fuselage halves with it trapped inside. Be warned that the cabin windows (F1, 2, 3 & 4) do not fit at all well and some modification to the vertical beams (B7 & 10) will also be necessary. The upper engine assembly (stage 3) goes together well, but once installed on the fuselage you will see that there is quite a large gap all around that needs attention. Fitting the forward windscreen sections (P5 & 6) was a nightmare, as they fit where they touched, and did not touch often! I tried various ‘tweaks’ but got little further, so I left it for a while and moved on to the rotor assembly.

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Germany’s Tiger Tanks – VK45.02 to Tiger II

On 4 February 1942, Wa J Rue (WuG 6) Vllld awarded contract SS-210-5806/41 to Fried.KruppAG, Essen for 100 VK 45.01 (P2) armor hulls and 100 armor shells for turrets. The armor hulls were to be delivered to Nibelungenwerk GmbH, St.Valentin (Niederdonau) for assembly as complete operational chassis under contract SS-210-5911/41. The armor shells for the turrets were to be delivered to Fried.KruppAG, Essen (Ruhr) for assembling operational turrets under contract SS-210-5910/41. Krupp was to start fabricating and delivering the 100 armor bodies for the VK 45.01 (P2) upon completion of the 100 armor bodies for the VK 45.01 (P1) under contract SS-210-5803/41. The first eight armor hulls were to be delivered to Nibelungenwerk in August 1942, followed by 15 per month starting in September. The first six operational turrets completed by Krupp were to be delivered to Nibelungenwerk in November 1942, followed by 15 per month starting in December. Wa J Rue informed Krupp on 5 March 1942 that they were to assemble 100 Geraet 5 Gr 808 (the drawing number for the 8.8 cm Kw.K.43 L/71) and DHHV (Dortmund-Hoerder-Hutten-Verein) was to assemble 150. Delivery was to start upon completion of their order for Geraet 5 Gr 38 (the drawing number for the 8.8 cm Kw.K.36 L/56) with delivery of the first 15 from Krupp to occur by 1 September 1942.

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Conflict in Afghanistan

Afghanistan came to the fore on the international scene in recent decades with the Soviet intervention in 1979, the guerrilla war waged against the Soviets and the Communist regime in Kabul, the civil war after the collapse of the Marxist government, and the rise of the Taliban with its fundamentalist regime, its human rights abuses, and its harboring of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda terrorists. However, the country was really thrust into the limelight with the launching of Operation Enduring Freedom in October 2001 by an alliance of Coalition forces—mainly composed of U.S. and British troops but with special forces from other participating countries—and Afghan anti-Taliban forces; their objectives were to overthrow the Taliban regime, capture Osama bin Laden, and destroy al-Qaeda in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001. An understanding of contemporary events in Afghanistan requires a grasp of the country’s geopolitical situation, its ethnic composition, and the impact that these two factors have had on its history.

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Automatic Control of Aircraft & Missile

The seventeenth of December 1903 marked the date of the first successful flight of a powered aeroplane. The Wright brothers, in their efforts to succeed where others had failed, broke with tradition and designed their aeroplane to be unstable but controllable. This break with tradition resulted in a more maneuverable and controllable vehicle that was less susceptible to atmospheric gusts. The approach taken by such pioneers as Lilienthal, Pilcher, Chanute, and Langley in the design of their flying machines was to make them inherently stable, leaving the pilot with no other duty than to steer the vehicle. The price paid for this stability was lack of maneuverability and susceptibility to atmospheric disturbances. The lack of stability introduced by the Wright brothers naturally made the pilot’s job more difficult and tiring and more than likely hastened the development of the automatic pilot, often called simply an autopilot.

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