USMC Invades Costa Rica! 7000 Storm the Beaches!

Oh yeah, wait... they were invited to help fight drug trafficking. GlobalPost reports:

Costa Rica doesn’t ‘officially’ have an army – but apparently it will be home to one for the rest of 2010.
A flotilla of 46 United States Navy warships capable of carrying 200 helicopters, along with 10 Harrier vertical take-off and landing fighter jets, and 7,000 combat ready marines available for land based operations is on its way to this Central American country with no standing army.

On July 1, 2010 the Costa Rica Legislative Assembly voted 31-8 to grant the U.S. military full in-country access through the end of 2010 to help fight drug trafficking.

As of this writing the new administration of President Laura Chinchilla -- who was previously Costa Rica’s Vice-President, Justice Minister and Minister of Public Security -- has not commented in great detail as to what the U.S. troops will be trying to accomplish with their new right of entry other than to say there will be a combination of anti-drug and humanitarian operations.

This type of deal is a growing trend in Latin American countries.

Columbia has for the last decade been increasing its commitment to full-time anti-narcotic U.S. support.

In September 2009, ten years after the last U.S. troops had ‘officially’ left Panama soil due to the canal treaties, the United States entered into a new agreement to open 2 new U.S. military bases on their Pacific coast in exchange for $7 million to fight organized crime associated with illicit drugs.

April 2009 Honduras opened a new Navy base near the border of Nicaragua with $2 million from the U.S. and most recently announced July 10, 2010 another new military base will be constructed on the Caribbean with U.S. funding to help fight drug trafficking.

By: Brant

BUB: Coups de Grace!

Not staging a coup in your country? You might be the only one...


There are a variety of political motivations behind the arrests in Turkey, but prosecution doesn't seem to be among them.

For the last several decades, the Turkish military was untouchable; no one dared to criticize the military or its top generals, lest they risk getting burned. The Turkish Armed Forces were the ultimate protectors of founding father Kemal Ataturk's secular legacy, and no other force in the country could seriously threaten its supremacy. Not anymore.

On Feb. 22, 49 officers -- including active-duty generals, admirals, and former commanders of the Turkish navy and air force -- were arrested on allegations of plotting a coup against the government. Specifically, the officers were charged with authoring a 5,000-page memo that was later published in Taraf, a paper whose editorial policy is singularly dedicated to bashing the military. Among other things, the memo stated that the Turkish military was planning to bomb Istanbul's historic mosques and shoot down its own planes to justify a coup. When I asked a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey for his views on the news, he thought the scenario was ridiculous. "If the Turkish military was going to do a coup, they would not be writing a 5,000-page memo about it," he stated.

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Honduras is still cleaning up the mess of their attempted coup last year, as they've fired the military leadership of the overthrow. Of course, the guy the generals kicked out of the top job didn't get it back, so although they've lost their jobs, they did get what they wanted.

New Honduran President Porfirio Lobo fired the military leaders responsible for leading the coup against then-president Manuel Zelaya last June.

Lobo, who took office on January 27, sacked Army General Romeo Vasquez, head of the Honduran armed forces, along with the top military commanders involved in the coup, including the heads of the army, air force and navy.

The president announced that Vasquez "will now retire," and immediately swore in his replacement, General Carlos Antonio Cuellar, who until now was the armed forces inspector general.

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An opinion piece in Nigeria seeks to explain why African coups can have the acquiescence of the locals.

I can not recollect whose idea it was who said 'the worst civilian administration is better than the best military government.' In all honesty, I don't believe such to be any where nears the truth. No worst thing is ever of value and there is nothing that qualifies as best that could be any where near goodness. Only those politicians that are characterized by failure and who want to cling unto power usually have such myopic beliefs.

This is Africa's situation. It is not however peculiar to Africa, but it is most common there. Leaders in Africa have this belief that they, and they alone have right of leadership. No matter the amount of colossal failure recorded by the African leader, he and his cronies will do everything to jeopardize the peace and the progress of a country to perpetuate them in power.

The third term bid of Obasanjo of Nigeria has caused the country enormous wastes in resources and has caused hardships of which we are still paying the price. When the move was resisted by Nigerians, Obasanjo decided to foist on Nigerians someone whom he knew can not withstand the terrain of the office of the President. And because 'Yar'adua was either power-drunk or he thought he could save Nigeria from the tumultuous situation, he accepted to be imposed on Nigerians by Obj. The script that Obasanjo drew against Nigerians seems to be working now that 'Yar'adua is hospitalised. We shall see who laughs last between Nigerians and obj.

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And speaking of... the Army in Niger is going to take one for the team (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) until the country can put a new constitution in place and call elections.

Niger's coup leaders say they will retain power over the country's newly appointed prime minister until a new constitution is adopted and elections are held. But they set no date for the polls.

The military ousted President Mamadou Tandja last Thursday (February 18) in the midst of a political crisis that began last year.

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poll by twiigs.com

By: Brant

BUB: World Roundup

Today's Battle Update Brief looks around the world at a few developing stories

Honduran military officers are cleared of coup-related charges.

The Supreme Court cleared six high-ranking military officers on Tuesday of charges of abuse of power in last summer’s coup. The six, including the armed forces chief of staff, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, were accused of illegally expelling President Manuel Zelaya from the country. A court had ordered the military to detain Mr. Zelaya, and the Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the commanders had not acted with malice and that they had Mr. Zelaya flown to Costa Rica to avoid violence. Mr. Zelaya’s term ends Wednesday, when he is expected to leave Honduras for the Dominican Republic.

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The NATO surge is having difficulty meeting their numbers.

NATO is struggling to make good on commitments to deploy extra forces to Afghanistan, one month after the Obama administration said it was counting on the alliance to send as many as 10,000 more troops to serve alongside U.S. soldiers.

On Tuesday, Germany said it would send 500 reinforcements to Afghanistan, disappointing U.S. officials, who had been pressing Berlin for at least three times that number. German officials, facing stiff domestic opposition to the war, said they would instead double their development aid to Afghanistan and begin withdrawing soldiers in 2011.

"We have nothing to be ashamed of," Chancellor Angela Merkel told reporters in Berlin. "It was not the case that the Americans asked us what we wanted to do, but rather we determined ourselves what we intend to do."

After President Obama announced his revised Afghan strategy in December, including the deployment of 30,000 more U.S. troops, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said allies had pledged about 7,000 "fresh forces." He also raised expectations that further commitments would be announced soon.

NATO leaders had been lobbying Germany and France, in particular, ahead of an international conference on Afghanistan scheduled for Thursday in London. On Monday, however, French President Nicolas Sarkozy reaffirmed his previous refusals to send additional combat forces to Afghanistan, although he held out the possibility of dispatching more military trainers and civilian aid workers.

NATO has not provided a precise breakdown of where its promised 7,000 new troops will come from. But it appears that only about 4,000 of those forces were not previously announced or deployed.

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CyberWar cooperation is becoming more popular as resources are pooled to fend of the Chinese.

The US and its Nato allies have been urged to collaborate more intensely to fend off the threat of cyberattacks in the aftermath of the alleged Chinese assault on Google.

The Pentagon’s top cyber-strategist said shared warning systems had to be established and government contacts broadened.

In an interview with the Financial Times, William J. Lynn, US deputy defence secretary, said America and the UK had been working to counter the growing international danger of cyberattacks.

But he warned that the US, UK and other states had to deepen cross-border collaboration if they were to deal with a form of warfare that ignored national boundaries.

“You can’t just protect the system by defending yourself from inside your own country,” Mr Lynn said on a visit to London. “International co-operation is imperative for establishing the chain of events in an intrusion and quickly and decisively fighting back.”

Mr Lynn said the US defence department was subjected to thousands of cyber attacks each day, as hackers sought to break into systems run by the Pentagon.

“The kind of defence we want is not something akin to the Maginot Line, but more like manoeuvre warfare. You can’t just sit behind firewalls. You need an active defence that is seeking out and countering threats on the internet,” he said.

By: Brant

BUB: Around the World in a Single Post!

Japan's naval support in the Indian Ocean is heading home.

The Japanese Defense Ministry Friday ended its Indian Ocean refueling mission for the U.S.-led anti-terrorism effort relating to Afghanistan.

Defense Minister Toshimi Kitazawa's order issued to Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force came after a law authorizing the refueling mission expired.

Kitazawa told reporters the demand for the refueling operations, in effect since December 2001, had been declining in recent years, Kyodo News reported.

Instead, the new Japanese government of Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama has pledged up to $5 billion in civilian aid to Afghanistan.

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The Italian government is using defense spending to prop up domestic industry. Hmmmmm....

Into 2010, the Italian government appears to begin to see defence procurement as a means to protect employment. This suggests that defence procurement spending will bottom out in 2009, before returning to marginal growth in 2010. In total, the report estimates that defence spending will reach EUR27.4bn in 2009. The global economic slowdown has yet to seriously impact defence expenditure in the country, a trend that the Stockholm International Peace Research Unit (SIPRI) believes is consistent around the globe. In 2008, global military spending reached US$1.5trn, an increase of 4%.

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Hackers are targeting defense industry secrets. Suspicions are inevitably pointed at the Chinese.

The cyber-attacks that have compromised computers at Google and other US technology companies doing business in China have also been aimed at extracting secrets from defence contractors, investigators said yesterday.

Malicious software on machines at companies attacked in the latest blitz sent proprietary data off to six web addresses in Taiwan that had received information from US defence groups before.

The defence companies had been attacked using methods similar to those deployed against nearly three dozen high-tech groups including Google, which went public with the spying matter this week, pointing a finger at the Chinese government.

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The pseudo-coup by the military in Honduras is likely to lead to a trial soon.

Top military chiefs in Honduras have been ordered not to leave the country as they face trial over the ousting of President Manuel Zelaya last June.

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The Iraqis seem to have gotten the hang of of handing out death sentences. Sorry, bad pun.

A Baghdad court on Thursday sentenced 11 Iraqis to death for their roles in the first of a series of audacious attacks last year to target government buildings in the heart of the city.
The August bombings of Iraq's foreign and finance ministries were a major blow to Iraq's Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, who is seeking to reassure Iraqis his government has security under control ahead of crucial March elections.
Iraqi Supreme Judicial Council spokesman Abdul-Sattar Bayrkdar said a criminal court in Baghdad's eastern Risafa district found the 11 defendants guilty of financing, planning and participating in the Aug. 19 bombings that devastated the foreign and finance ministries.
The blasts killed more than 100 people.

By: Brant