Free Republic

November 26, 2010: Russia has grounded all of its MiG-31 interceptors after one crashed. The 200 or so in service will be examined to see if there is a common defect that might cause others to crash. MiG aircraft in general have a reputation for these kinds of problems....frpa

Al Qaeda is having a bad year so far. While many media pundits like to paint the Islamic terrorists as on a winning streak, it doesn't look that way from the other side. In Iraq, al Qaeda continues to bomb Shia "heretics" and Sunni "apostates". Most of the victims are unarmed Moslem civilians, and this is regularly condemned throughout the Islamic world. Al Qaeda believes that all this carnage will somehow arouse the Sunni Arab world to make war on the Iraqi government, and get the Iraqi Sunni Arabs back in power. As absurd as that sounds, remember that al...

December 17, 2005: StrategyPage doesn’t just report on Cyber War, sometimes we get caught in the middle of it. We got an electronic nastygram from China recently when, as we were installing a new server, at a hosting site (to improve response time, and lessen the workload on the volunteer staffers who maintain the server). There was a gap of a few days between the time the new server went online, and the hardware firewall (which is a bear to configure) got installed. Into that opening, some Chinese hackers got onto the server and tried to take it over. Actually,...

September 23, 2003: American troops in Iraq are fighting against lousy living conditions, in addition to the occasional armed Iraq. First of all, the majority of the 127,000 U.S. troops don't see any combat at all. And all some of them hear are Iraqis shooting at each other come night fall, or just people firing weapons into the air to celebrate one thing or another. While some U.S. troops have taken up residence in Iraqi army bases (including some that were bombed) or one of Saddam's many "palaces" (most of which are like military bases or industrial parks with a...