As the GIUK gap returns to importance, NATO must look to regenerate its anti-submarine force. The recent U.S. promise to fund upgrades to Iceland’s military airfield at Keflavik is no diplomatic bone thrown to a small ally. The improvements will allow the U.S. Navy’s new P-8 Poseidon maritime patrol aircraft to keep an eye on…
Category: Future Warfare
Going Inside the Ukrainian Power Grid Hack
IT WAS 3:30 p.m. last December 23, and residents of the Ivano-Frankivsk region of Western Ukraine were preparing to end their workday and head home through the cold winter streets. Inside the Prykarpattyaoblenergo control center, which distributes power to the region’s residents, operators too were nearing the end of their shift. But just as one…
How NATO Can Disrupt Russia’s New Way of War
Here are a few things the West can do against Moscow’s potent combo of special forces and electronic warfare. The Ukrainian soldiers peered over the cold dirt edge of their trench. The artillery had abated, but the whine of a nearby spotter UAV promised its imminent return. In the distance, they could see camouflaged spetsnaz…
Crusader Corner: How ISIS Gets it’s Bombs
Nearby farming and mining mean easy access to explosive components Islamic State builds its improvised explosive devices using components from 51 different companies in 20 countries. That’s the startling conclusion of a new report from Conflict Armament Research. “These findings support growing international awareness that [Islamic State] forces in Iraq and Syria are very…
Crusader Corner: How Gitmo is Used in Jihadist Propaganda (Hint: It’s Less than Obama Suggest)
In his last year in office, President Obama has submitted to Congress a plan to achieve what he had promised to do in his first: Close the facility housing terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In the interim, Obama and a series of other officials, including former CIA Director David Petraeus, have called the prison a propaganda tool for terrorists….
Espionage Files: Navy Engineer with Secret Clearance Indicted After Iranian Passports and Illegal Money Found
Well it appears the Iranians are hard at work trying to place people in sensitive positions to spy on us. Wonder how many other yet undiscovered turd “moles” are floating around in the punch bowl? -SF A US Navy electrical engineer who works in the Washington D.C. Navy Yard for the Naval Sea Systems Command…
PMC’s Return to Iraq
Behind the president’s directive to ‘accelerate’ the counter-ISIS campaign came a surge in the number of contractors assisting in the campaign against ISIS. The number of private contractors working for the U.S. Defense Department in Iraq grew eight-fold over the past year, a rate that far outpaces the growing number of American troops training and…
Cyber-Warfare: Nitro-Zeus
A new documentary on “Stuxnet”, the joint U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear program, reveals it was just a small part of a much bigger cyber operation against the nation’s military and civilian infrastructure under the code name “NITRO ZEUS” The United States hacked into critical civilian and military infrastructure in Iran to allow its operatives…
Matthew Bracken Talks SHTF and Dirty Civil War
MATTHEW BRACKEN is a former Navy SEAL (BUD/S Class 105), a Constitutionalist, and a self-described “freedomista”. This interview was first published in the Fall 2014 issue of Forward Observer. You might think that the most courageous thing Matt Bracken’s ever done is taking a SEAL team to Beirut, Lebanon in 1983, the same year of…
Seven Ways Crowd-Sourcing is Changing Society
I highly Recommend everybody read the book Future Crimes by Marc Goodman to get an in-depth look at how deep this cyber rabbit hole really goes. And really read those “Service Agreements” and “Privacy Statements” before you download that next free app!-SF The term was coined in 2005 when businesses began attempting to gather data…