U.S. 7th Army Fades Away In Europe

After spending over half a century years in Europe, the headquarters of the U.S. 7th Army headquarters is reorganizing as a deployable unit (meaning it can be ordered to another part of the world to supervise major military operations.)

The 7th Army headquarters ceased to be very mobile as it commanded a growing force of European based U.S. combat units in the 1950s. But this force went from two corps and over six divisions (18 combat brigades) during the Cold War, to the current four brigades (which are also subject to duty in distant combat zones, like Iraq or Afghanistan).

During the Cold War, there were over 300,000 U.S. troops in Western Europe, now it's about 40,000, and headed for 33,000 in five years. And if there's a crises somewhere else on the planet, there won't even be an army headquarters there to command what's left of American forces.

Russian bombers to test-fire missiles in Bay of Biscay

For background see 'A Good Old Missile Parade'

January 22, 2008
Russian bombers to test-fire
missiles in Bay of Biscay
Times Online and agencies in Moscow

Russia has sent two long-range bombers to the Bay of Biscay, off the French and Spanish Atlantic coasts, to test-fire missiles in what Moscow billed as its biggest naval exercise in the area since the Soviet era.

A Russian Bear-H bomber

Firing missiles off the coastline of two Nato members is the latest in a series of Kremlin moves flexing Moscow’s military muscle on the world stage.

Russian bombers joined aircraft carriers, battleships and submarine hunters from the Northern and Black Sea fleets for the Atlantic exercises, which come as the country enters an election campaign to choose a successor to President Putin.

“The air force is taking a very active part in the exercises of the navy’s strike force in the Atlantic,” the Russian air force said in a statement reported by Reuters. “Today, two strategic Tu-160 bombers departed for exercises in the Bay of Biscay, which ... will carry out a number of missions and will conduct tactical missile launches."

There was no immediate comment from Nato about the exercise.

Mr Putin has used military manoeuvres, including controversial North Sea overflights, to revive domestic and international respect for Russia’s armed forces which were shattered by the chaos of the 1990s.

He has also boosted military spending, renewed long-range bomber missions and approved a plan to upgrade Russia’s nuclear attack forces, which he said was needed after Nato built up its forces close to Russia’s borders.

But some analysts note that while the sabre-rattling is popular at home, Russian military spending in absolute terms is substantially lower than that of China, Britain or France and less than a tenth of that of the United States.

Discipline is also still a major problem for Russia’s armed forces, which rely heavily on conscripts and outdated equipment.

Russia last month said it would begin major navy sorties into the Mediterranean, with 11 ships backed up by 47 aircraft, that would then travel to the Atlantic for exercises.

The navy’s flagship aircraft carrier, the Soviet-made Admiral Kuznetsov, was leading the fleet in the Atlantic where Nato were trying to keep a close eye on Russian movements, Russian media reported.

“This is the biggest exercise of its kind in the area since Soviet times,” a spokesman for Russia’s navy said, adding that more details would be released later. There was no further

Information about where in the Bay of Biscay, which lies off the west coast of France and the northern coast of Spain, the missile tests were due to take place.

Russia’s air force said turbo-prop Tupolev Tu-95 strategic bombers, codenamed “Bear” by Nato, would join ATO, would join the exercise on Wednesday “From January 23, the aviation component in the zone where the exercises are going on will be widened and the following planes will take part: Tu-160, Tu-95, Tu-22 M3, Il-78, A-50,”, the air force said.

A Good Old Missile Parade

If you are my age or older,
You can remember the
USSR Missile Parade

Moscow returns to Soviet era
with weaponry on parade
Luke Harding in Moscow
Monday January 21, 2008
Guardian Unlimited

Russia’s defence minister, Sergei Ivanov, reviews troops during the military parade on Red Square in Moscow marking the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe.

It was one of the highlights of the Soviet calendar, and a chance for the world's only communist superpower to show off its military might.
For ordinary citizens, it was also a rare opportunity to eyeball their gerontocratic leaders standing on top of Lenin's tomb - and to check that they were still alive, and could wave.

But 17 years after the last communist tanks trundled through Red Square, the Kremlin has decided to revive the Soviet-era practice of parading its big weaponry.

For the first time since the fall of the Soviet Union, combat vehicles will return to the heart of Moscow, driving past the Kremlin during Russia's annual military parade on May 9, Russia's defence ministry confirmed today.

As well as six thousands soldiers in shiny new uniforms, Russian generals plan to show off their latest tanks and rockets, including the country's new, and lethal, intercontinental ballistic missile, the Topol-M.

"Under the plan adopted by the president, land and air military equipment will be involved in the parade on Red Square," General Yuri Solovyov said today. The parade will include the new S-300 missile defence system - which Russia has just sold to Iran - and 32 fighter jets.

The decision to revive one of the most pregnant symbols of the Cold War is likely to provoke criticism from Russia's opposition, who accuse president Vladimir Putin of turning Russia into a pastiche version of the Soviet Union.

It might also raise a few quizzical eyebrows inside Britain's Moscow embassy. Last week Russia forcibly closed the British Council's two regional offices in St Petersburg and Yekaterinburg using what British officials described as "'classic KGB tactics".

On Friday, Britain's ambassador in Moscow, Tony Brenton, compared post-communist Russia to the Soviet Union after officers from Russia's main domestic intelligence agency - the FSB - interrogated British Council workers.

President Putin has already demonstrated his fondness for Soviet emblems. He has updated the Soviet national anthem. Last year he said Russia should preserve the hammer and sickle on victory flags, arguing it was a part of Russia's past.

Today, one observer said that the Kremlin was using different symbols from Russia's Soviet and pre-revolutionary past to recreate a 'new national idea' of Russian greatness.

"It's a very complicated postmodern mix that borrows from the Soviet past, but also from Russia's imperial past and the tsarist era," Nikolay Petrov, scholar-in-residence at the Carnegie Centre in Moscow said.

He added: "It's an ideological concept. The point is to show that Russia was great before the revolution, was great during Soviet times and to say we are restoring its greatness."

The Soviet Union's military parades, to celebrate victory over the Nazis on May 9 and the Bolshevik revolution on November 7, were a twice-yearly feature of Soviet life, watched by millions live on TV.

The parades invariably featured portraits of Lenin and Stalin, as well as balloons, motorcades and rictus-like grinning folk dancers. Kremlinologists used the occasion to try and divine who might become the next Politburo leader - by scrutinising who stood nearest to the current general secretary.

"We will be using military vehicles. But we haven't decided yet which and how many war machines will be used," Oleg Yushkov, spokesman for the Moscow military district told the Guardian. "We'll know by mid-March," he added.

Combat vehicles were last paraded in Red Square on November 7, 1990, shortly before the Soviet Union vanished. No parades were staged from 1991 to 1994. Parades resumed in 1995, but without any of the tanks and 20 metre-long missiles characteristic of the Soviet epoch.

As well as rehabilitating old Soviet imagery, Putin has also boosted defence spending. After the Soviet Union's demise, Russia's vast military economy collapsed. The squeeze continued in the 1990s, but since 2000 spending has gone up, with last year's budget of $31bn almost four times the amount spent in 2001.

Liberalism Will Lose This 'Cold War

Liberalism Will Lose This “Cold War”
By Christopher Adamo

On June 24, 1948, after having isolated West Berlin inside of the boundaries of Communist East Germany, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin suddenly cut off all road shipments into the city, essentially laying siege to it with the expectations that it could be starved into subjection and thus added to his expansionist regime.
In a daring and decisive response President Harry Truman ordered every available military cargo plane to the area thereby providing a lifeline of food and supplies to the beleaguered West Berliners. In many respects, the famous operation that became known as the Berlin Airlift represented the initial indirect “volley” of the Cold War.

Over the next four decades, the United States and the Soviet Union, vying for dominance on the world scene, engaged in one pitched battle after another on innumerable fronts. Yet throughout that entire time, incidents of direct military confrontation were almost nonexistent, since both sides feared the possibilities if any such engagement escalated to the point of involving either nation’s massive nuclear arsenals.

Nevertheless, virtually every meeting of the two superpowers, every cultural competition and every technological contest, represented a surrogate clash intended to establish dominance by one party over the other, while at all cost avoiding the direct use of military arms. As time passed the United States of America emerged time and again as the clear winner, thus eventuating the collapse of the USSR.

It is important to recognize the various “fronts” on which that war was conducted from the end of World War II until the Soviet downfall in 1988. From the technological battle signified by the Space Race (decisively won by the United States on July 20, 1969 as Astronaut Neil Armstrong planted the American flag on the surface of the moon) to the “line in the sand” of Reagan’s Grenada invasion, each stood as a milestone which could either foretell of America’s ultimate victory, or signal its
eventual defeat.

Indeed, the “Cold War” was no less a war than the two Twentieth Century World Wars that preceded it. And though not as dramatic on the nightly news for sheer death and mayhem, its battles were no less significant.

Sadly, many in the country believed that with the end of the Evil Empire, life would somehow become inherently safe. Adages of the “Peace Dividend” were heard incessantly, with an underlying message being that somehow, no more threats to America or the Free World existed, nor would any ever arise again. And for that time of utopian carelessness, America and the Free World are now paying an enormous price.

Dire threats, from militant Islam to the burgeoning Chinese empire, to the resurrection of Communist dictatorships in South America, are rearing their ugly heads. Worst of all, in face of such dangers, American elitists remain unwilling to recognize them and thus leave the country comparatively ill prepared to deal with them in the manner that it was during the heyday of the Soviet threat.

The dark force of liberalism and “political correctness” are working tirelessly to reorder America in their image. If allowed to continue unchecked they will cripple America’s ability to thrive and prosper, since an America made over in the image of the left can do neither. And if America fails, the rest of Western Civilization will follow.

Those who sought to undermine America during the original Cold War as campus radicals and participants in the leftist fringe underground are doing it this time around as tenured professors, entrenched politicians, and “mainstream” media pundits. More than just making noise and calling attention to themselves, they now influence policy and invoke the power of government to implement their agendas.

Consider, as one stark example, the present energy situation. America needs to access the petroleum reserves within its jurisdiction if it is to have any chance of extricating itself from dependence to hostile foreign governments, but more than eighty-five percent of America’s oil fields have been locked up by the eco-lobby.

In a telling act of institutionalized indifference, the recently passed “Energy Bill” does nothing to open America’s natural resources for the strength and security of Americans. Instead, it contains politically palatable but pointless symbolism, such as the outlawing of incandescent light bulbs, and the imposition of fuel standards that can only be achieved by severely degrading driving safety.

The fact that Americans, after a bit of grumbling at the gas pumps, will simply pay more money and keep driving, is at once a tribute to the nation’s prosperity and a disturbing harbinger of the likelihood that they will do nothing to properly address the problem before it reaches critical mass.

Federal Judges, through reprehensible abuses of power, find and expand “constitutional rights” for every vile enemy of the United States, including combatants who were taken prisoner in armed conflict against this country. Those who pose a real threat to the safety of Americans, such as the “flying Imams” who were removed from a commercial flight as they conducted an apparent dress rehearsal for a hijacking, are granted legal power to inflict revenge on their victims.

The infamous Kyoto Treaty would have hamstrung U.S. industry while granting exceptions to increasingly industrialized foreign competitors. Along with various other UN resolutions intended to accomplish the same ends, it mirrored the work of the “unilateral disarmament” crowd who would have abolished America’s nuclear deterrence force and thus left us defenseless against a Soviet nuclear attack.

The Old Testament Book of Nehemiah served as testimony of God’s providential Hand on His people and their resulting strength. It recounts the wall around Jerusalem that was rebuilt in less than two months, and how neighboring leaders recognized the strength of those who had built it.

What message is borne to the rest of the world by the fact that, in six years after the 9/11 attacks, no new towers have been built since any attempts to do so invariably become mired in “pc” squabbles? Just as disgraceful is the nation’s inability to recognize and support Americans and American greatness as exemplified by the abysmal “monument” to Flight 93, which has become a symbol of appeasement and concession.

Even more essential to the future than the physical symbolism of shining monuments, the towers resurrected, or even the continued prowess of America’s economic engine, the moral, cultural and spiritual roots of the nation are in grave need of restoration.



http://www.therealitycheck.org/2007/12/26/liberalism-will-lose-this-%e2%80%9ccold-war%e2%80%9d/