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ANDERSEN AIR FORCE BASE, Guam — To take part in its annual exercises with the United States Air Force here last month, Japan practiced dropping 500-pound live bombs on Farallon de Medinilla, a tiny island in the western Pacific’s turquoise waters more than 150 miles north of here. The pilots described dropping a live bomb for the first time — shouting “shack!” to signal a direct hit — and seeing the fireball from aloft. “The level of tension was just different,” said Capt. Tetsuya Nagata, 35, stepping down from his cockpit onto the sunbaked tarmac. The exercise would have been...

I have listened to the debates, pontificating, accusations and opinions regarding the incident with US Marines at Haditha, Iraq where Iraqi civilians died for the last weeks. At home, from local radio, from national radio, from the news, from politicians, from co-workers and from family. I decided today to weigh in with my own thoughts: The investigation is not complete. These soldiers are at war, they must be granted the same presumption of innocence that any of us should be afforded. Any thought of prosecuting, lamblasting, talking down to them, or making serious allegations and presumptions regarding them should wait...

When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld visited Iraq last year to tour the Abu Ghraib prison camp, military officials did not rely on a government-issued Humvee to transport him safely on the ground. Instead, they turned to Halliburton, the oil services contractor, which lent the Pentagon a rolling fortress of steel called the Rhino Runner. State Department officials traveling in Iraq use armored vehicles that are built with V-shaped hulls to better deflect bullets and bombs. Members of Congress favor another model, called the M1117, which can endure 12-pound explosives and .50-caliber armor-piercing rounds. Unlike the Humvee, the Pentagon's vehicle...

BAGHDAD, Iraq, May 24 - In what American military officials said was the largest Iraqi-led operation to date and evidence that the country's fledgling army was up and running, hundreds of Iraqi soldiers fanned out Sunday and Monday in a dangerous western suburb here, arresting 437 people they accuse of having ties to the insurgency. The officials said Tuesday that more than 2,000 Iraqi soldiers and special police commandos carried out the operation, which was aimed at rooting out insurgents and closing down car bomb assembly lines in Abu Ghraib, which is predominantly Sunni Arab and has been a hotbed...

London I think that this could still fail." Those words - uttered by a senior American officer in Baghdad last week - probably gave opponents of the war in Iraq, particularly those clamoring for a hasty exit, a bit of a kick. They should be careful what they wish for. For history strongly suggests that a hasty American withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster. "If we let go of the insurgency," said another of the officers quoted anonymously last week, "then this country could fail and go back into civil war and chaos." As many of the war's opponents...

IRKUK, Iraq, April 16 - Equipment plundered from dozens of sites in Saddam Hussein's vast complex for manufacturing weapons is beginning to surface in open markets in Iraq's major cities and at border crossings. Looters stormed the sites two years ago when Mr. Hussein's government fell, and the fate of much of the equipment has remained a mystery. But on a recent day near the Iranian border, resting in great chunks on a weedy lot in front of an Iraqi Border Patrol warehouse, were pieces of machine tools, some weighing as much as a car, that investigators say formed the...

WASHINGTON, April 8 - After two senior-level meetings between North Korean and Chinese leaders over the last two weeks to discuss the North's nuclear-weapons program, the Chinese have failed so far to persuade North Korea to rejoin nuclear disarmament talks, senior administration officials and diplomats said Friday. As a result of the continuing deadlock, informal discussions have begun among the five parties to the talks on new, more aggressive strategies that could be used if and when it is decided that the talks have reached a dead end. Among the steps being discussed, the administration officials and diplomats said, are...

Nelson Ching for The New York Times Chinese Navy sailors took part in a welcoming ceremony for the flagship of the American Seventh Fleet at a port call last month in Zhanjiang, China. A buildup by China's navy presents new concerns at the Pentagon. ZHANJIANG, China - At a time when the American military is consumed with operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, global terrorism and the threat of nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran, China is presenting a new and strategically different security concern to America, as well as to Japan and Taiwan, in the western Pacific, Pentagon...

For over two decades, a compact, powerful warhead called the W-76 has been the centerpiece of the nation's nuclear arsenal, carried aboard the fleet of nuclear submarines that prowl the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. But in recent months it has become the subject of a fierce debate among experts inside and outside the government over its reliability and its place in the nuclear arsenal. The government is readying a plan to spend more than $2 billion on a routine 10-year overhaul to extend the life of the aging warheads. At the same time, some weapons scientists say the warheads have...

The Army's plan to transform itself into a futuristic high-technology force has become so expensive that some of the military's strongest supporters in Congress are questioning the program's costs and complexity. Army officials said Saturday that the first phase of the program, called Future Combat Systems, could run to $145 billion. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said the "technological bridge to the future" would equip 15 brigades of roughly 3,000 soldiers, or about one-third of the force the Army plans to field, over a 20-year span. That price tag, larger than past estimates publicly disclosed by the Army, does not...

Ernest Childers, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for knocking out two German machine-gun nests in Italy in World War II, died on March 17 in Muskogee, Okla. He was 87 and lived Coweta, Okla. The cause was complications of a stroke and a heart attack, said his wife, Yolanda Chadwell Childers. On Sept. 22, 1943, after securing the beaches in Salerno, Second Lt. Childers's unit, the 45th Infantry Division, began an assault on the mountain town of Oliveto Citra. When the division came under heavy machine-gun fire, he rounded up eight soldiers for a mission, despite having slipped...

COMMAND POST TANGO, South Korea, Sunday, March 20 - Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice stepped off her airplane in Seoul on Saturday evening, boarded an Army Black Hawk helicopter and immediately flew to this underground command bunker from which military commanders would direct any war against North Korea. "I wanted to come here to thank you for what you do on the front lines of freedom," she told more than 100 service members in the war room, carved deep inside a mountain south of Seoul. "I know you face a close-in threat every day." The visit, a strong reminder of...

BEIRUT, Lebanon, March 6 - The Lebanese faction Hezbollah declared its full support for Syria on Sunday, directly challenging opposition groups a day after Syria promised to gradually withdraw troops from Lebanon. Hezbollah's leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, spoke to reporters on Sunday in his stronghold in southern Beirut, breaking weeks of relative silence over the crisis concerning Syria's presence in Lebanon. He called for Lebanese to "express their gratitude" to Syria by joining a demonstration on Tuesday against United Nations Resolution 1559, which calls for Syria's withdrawal and Hezbollah's disarmament. "I invite all Lebanese to this meeting to refuse foreign...

WASHINGTON, March 1 - Senior members of Congress from both parties emerged from a meeting with President Bush on Tuesday warning Europe that if it lifts its ban on arms sales to China, the United States may retaliate with severe restrictions on technology sales to European companies. The warning came after Mr. Bush, on his trip to Europe last week, twice cautioned the Europeans not to lift the restrictions, in place for 15 years. His insistence was based, at least in part, on a new American intelligence assessment that Beijing is rapidly becoming better equipped to carry out a sophisticated...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 14 - The nation's fledgling missile defense system suffered its third straight test failure when an interceptor rocket failed to launch Sunday night from its base on an island, leaving the target rocket to splash into the Pacific Ocean, the Pentagon said Monday. The target rocket was launched from Kodiak, Alaska, at 9:22 p.m. Sunday (1:22 a.m. Monday, Eastern Standard Time), but the interceptor that was supposed to go up 15 minutes later remained on its pad in the Marshall Islands, the Missile Defense Agency at the Pentagon said. The target rocket fell into the ocean near Wake...

Andi Grant's modest 1,100-square-foot home in Connecticut is overflowing with beef jerky, tuna in pouches, socks, DVD's and other goods that she and a band of volunteers stuff in care packages for American troops. She does not take everything. She checks all packaged food, for instance, to make sure there has been no tampering. She will not forward pen pal letters, she said, because they create a sense of obligation and because too many are written by women looking for a spouse. "If it's pork, we can't send it because it might end up in the hands of kids who...

THE INSURGENCY WASHINGTON, Dec. 2 - The expulsion of Iraqi guerrillas and foreign fighters from Falluja has provided the American military with a treasure-trove of intelligence that is giving commanders insights into the next phase of the insurgency, and helping them reshape the American counterinsurgency campaign, senior Pentagon and military officials say. Documents and computers found in Falluja are providing clues to the identity of home-grown opponents of the new Iraqi government, mostly former Baathists. The intelligence is being used to hunt those leaders and their channels of financing, as well as to detect cracks, even feuds, within the insurgency...

LOCKHEED MARTIN doesn't run the United States. But it does help run a breathtakingly big part of it. Over the last decade, Lockheed, the nation's largest military contractor, has built a formidable information-technology empire that now stretches from the Pentagon to the post office. It sorts your mail and totals your taxes. It cuts Social Security checks and counts the United States census. It runs space flights and monitors air traffic. To make all that happen, Lockheed writes more computer code than Microsoft. Of course, Lockheed, based in Bethesda, Md., is best known for its weapons, which are the heart...

The Army has encountered resistance from more than 2,000 former soldiers it has ordered back to military work, complicating its efforts to fill gaps in the regular troops. Many of these former soldiers - some of whom say they have not trained, held a gun, worn a uniform or even gone for a jog in years - object to being sent to Iraq and Afghanistan now, after they thought they were through with life on active duty. They are seeking exemptions, filing court cases or simply failing to report for duty, moves that will be watched closely by approximately 110,000...