Monday, Jan 05th
Last update08:04:20 AM GMT
Military Glance
THE running of Britain’s nuclear bomb base at Coulport on the Clyde is to be handed over to a consortium of multinational private firms led by the controversial US arms dealer, Lockheed Martin, the Sunday Herald can reveal.
Defence ministers in Westminster have decided that the highly sensitive job of managing more than 200 Trident nuclear warheads, and arming the Royal Navy’s submarines with them, should be taken over by the group of companies within the next year.
Russian military experts forecast that Western nations will have 80,000 cruise missile by 2020, a deputy commander of the Russian General Staff said on Saturday.
"We expect Western countries to have at least 80,000 cruise missiles by 2020, including about 2,000 of them nuclear-powered," Gen. Igor Sheremet said in an interview with the Ekho Moskvy radio station. He added these missiles are clearly not simply designed for drilling or intimidation purposes.
general installed just last month as the Army's top officer is President Barack Obama's surprise choice to become the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, two people familiar with the selection process said Wednesday.
Gen. Martin Dempsey, an accomplished veteran of the Iraq war, would succeed Navy Adm. Mike Mullen as the president's top military adviser when Mullen's term as chairman ends Sept. 30. Dempsey would have to be confirmed by the Senate.
he Supreme Court on Monday declined to scrutinize how a discredited military lab analyst helped convict men like former Navy hospital corpsman Ivor Luke. The court's decision leaves intact Luke's 1999 court martial conviction, secured with the help of U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Laboratory analyst Phillip Mills. Mills' own career subsequently collapsed amid revelations that he had falsified a report.
But because Navy investigators had destroyed the evidence used to convict Luke of indecent assault, Mills' work could not be double-checked. That's left Luke to argue for the past five years, ever since Mills' misconduct was discovered, that a general pattern of questionable work should suffice to cast doubt on a specific conviction.
The military's premier crime lab has botched more of its evidence testing than has been previously known, raising broader questions about the quality of the forensic work relied on to convict soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.
Now, the Supreme Court could weigh in, while two senators want the Pentagon to open a full-blown investigation. If they start looking, Pentagon officials will find that the crime lab's problems extend beyond one discredited analyst.
Gilbert resident JoAnn White says she was wounded while serving with the Air Force during the Vietnam War and has not been able to work since. Her injuries were not inflicted by a foreign enemy. She said she was raped and sexually assaulted during her military career by men who were supposed to be on her side.
White says her pain is as emotional as it was physical, and was exacerbated by a system that shrugged off her reports without investigating them.
U.S. troops fighting in Afghanistan are experiencing some of the greatest psychological stress and lowest morale in five years of fighting, reports a military study.
"We're an Army that's in uncharted territory here," says Gen. Peter Chiarelli, Army vice chief of staff, who has focused on combat stress. "We have never fought for this long with an all-volunteer force that's 1% of the population."
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