Military & War News and Discussions

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Pentagon Turmoil Deepens: Top Hegseth Aide Leaves Post
by Daniel Lippman and Jack Detsch
April 18, 2025

Introduction:

(Politico) Joe Kasper, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s chief of staff will leave his role in the coming days for a new position at the agency, according to a senior administration official, amid a week of turmoil for the Pentagon.

Senior adviser Dan Caldwell, Hegseth deputy chief of staff Darin Selnick and Colin Carroll, the chief of staff to Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, were placed on leave this week in an ongoing leak probe. All three were terminated on Friday, according to three people familiar with the matter, who, like others, were granted anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue.

The latest incidents add to the Pentagon’s broader upheaval in recent months, including fallout from Hegseth’s release of sensitive information in a Signal chat with other national security leaders and a controversial department visit by Elon Musk.

Caldwell, Carroll, Selnick and Kasper declined to comment. Two of the people said Carroll and Selnick plan to sue for wrongful termination. The Pentagon did not respond to a request of comment.

Conclusion:

“Everyone knew that Pete Hegseth did not possess the leadership qualities, background, or experience to be Secretary of Defense,” said Chris Meagher, who served as assistant Defense secretary for public affairs during the Biden administration. “Everything we’ve seen since then — the firing of several American heroes because of perceived lack of loyalty, the sloppiness of Signalgate, the complete lack of transparency, and now several political staff being shown the door — has only confirmed he doesn’t have what it takes to lead.”

Read more here: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/ ... 00299508

[firestar464]

Chinese J-10C fighters shock U.S. ally Egypt in joint exercise

https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2025/04/2 ... -exercise/

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I seriously doubt they'd dare risk nuking each other

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Exclusive: US Congress Republicans seek $27 billion for Golden Dome in Trump tax bill

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos- ... 025-04-24/

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More on that by Reuters:

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump- ... 025-05-20/

[wjfox]

Conflict between countries will dominate next 20 years, says former top UK government official

Sat 24 May 2025 07.29 BST

The next 20 years will be dominated by conflict between nations, the former head of the civil service has said.

Simon Case, who stood down as cabinet secretary in December, made the warning in his first major interview since leaving the job.

Speaking to the Times newspaper, he urged ministers to develop new means of launching Britain’s nuclear deterrent, which is kept aboard constantly patrolling submarines.

Land or jet-fired missiles should be considered, he said, in a move the government should announce as part of the coming strategic defence review, an overarching examination of the UK’s defence capability.

“In my view you wouldn’t rely on a single system for anything. That’s true in many walks of life, let alone nuclear deterrence,” he told the paper.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/202 ... vice-chief



LPhot Stuart Dickson/PA

[caltrek]

What Is Trump's "Golden Dome" Missile System and How Would It Actually Work?
by Tom Hale
May 23, 2025

Introduction:

(IFL Science) President Donald Trump has unveiled his plan to build a "Golden Dome" missile defense system to shield the US from attack, claiming it will be ready by the end of his time in office. That is, of course, if building such a system is even technically possible at the moment. Experts have questions over the feasibility, cost, and timeframe.

President Trump vowed to set up the advanced missile defense shield in an executive order in January 2025. He said the project draws inspiration from a concept first introduced during the Reagan administration in the final years of the Cold War. That initiative was famously nicknamed “Star Wars” by the media in the 1980s, due to its seemingly outlandish technological ambitions.

Now, President Trump says the technology has arrived – and that it’s more necessary than ever. On May 20, speaking from the Oval Office, he revealed the latest phase of the plan, announcing US Space Force General Michael Guetlein as lead program manager for the project.

“I'm pleased to announce that we have officially selected an architecture for the state-of-the-art system that will deploy next-generation technologies across the land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors,” President Trump said in the announcement.

The project is expected to cost around $175 billion with Trump stating it should be operational by January 2029. However, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated it could cost as much as $831 billion over two decades.

Read more of the IFL Science article here: https://www.iflscience.com/what-is-tru ... rk-79325

The IFL Science article cites this analysis as published in Advancing Physics: https://www.aps.org/publications/report ... e-defense

From the Advancing Physics presentation:

Based on its detailed and careful survey of the literature and analysis of published work, the report finds that creating a reliable and effective defense against the threat posed by even the small number of relatively unsophisticated nuclear-armed ICBMs that it considers remains a daunting challenge. The difficulties are numerous, ranging from the unresolved countermeasures problem for midcourse-intercept to the severe reach-versus-time challenge of boost-phase intercept. Few of the main challenges have been solved, and many of the hard problems are likely to remain formidable over the 15-year time horizon the study considered. The costs and benefits of such an effort therefore need to be weighed carefully.

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[wjfox]

Everyone in the UK must prepare for missile attacks, warns top general

June 05, 2025

Britons should learn how to shelter from air raids, possibly in drills with sirens, says ex-military chief Sir Richard Barrons who co-wrote the Strategic Defence Review

The British public must to be taught how to survive a mass missile attack through a “national defence plan,” which could include air raid drills with sirens being tested.

This is a stark new warning from one of the UK’s top former generals, Sir Richard Barrons, who co-wrote the Government’s Strategic Defence Review.

This week, the Prime Minister accepted all of the review’s recommendations on how the Armed Forces should be supplied and organised for decades to come.

But Barrons has now gone further in an interview with The i Paper – arguing that “families and communities” across the country, as well as leaders of core public services and major companies, should learn how to cope with war.

https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/every ... al-3730408

[Lilymoon]

Iran Orders Material From China for Hundreds of Ballistic Missiles

Iran has ordered thousands of tons of ballistic-missile ingredients from China, people familiar with the transaction said, seeking to rebuild its military prowess as it discusses the future of its nuclear program with the U.S.

Read more here
https://www.wsj.com/world/iran-orders-m ... s-1e874701


Wow this look like Iran is getting ready to go to war with the US. The question is Iran going to have nuclear weapons?

[caltrek]

Golden Dome Dangers: An Arms Control Expert Explains How Trump’s Missile Defense Threatens to Make the U.S. Less Safe
by Matthew Bunn
June 6, 2025

Introduction:

(The Conversation) President Donald Trump’s idea of a “Golden Dome” missile defense system carries a range of potential strategic dangers for the United States.

Golden Dome is meant to protect the U.S. from ballistic, cruise and hypersonic missiles, and missiles launched from space. Trump has called for the missile defense to be fully operational before the end of his term in three years.

Trump’s goals for Golden Dome are likely beyond reach. A wide range of studies makes clear that even defenses far more limited than what Trump envisions would be far more expensive and less effective than Trump expects, especially against enemy missiles equipped with modern countermeasures. Countermeasures include multiple warheads per missile, decoy warheads and warheads that can maneuver or are difficult to track, among others.

Regardless of Golden Dome’s feasibility, there is a long history of scholarship about strategic missile defenses, and the weight of evidence points to the defenses making their host country less safe from nuclear attack.

I’m a national security and foreign policy professor at Harvard University, where I lead “Managing the Atom,” the university’s main research group on nuclear weapons and nuclear energy policies. For decades, I’ve been participating in dialogues with Russian and Chinese nuclear experts – and their fears about U.S. missile defenses have been a consistent theme throughout.

Russian President Vladmir Putin and Chinese leader Xi Jinping have already warned that Golden Dome is destabilizing. Along with U.S. offensive capabilities, Golden Dome poses a threat of “directly undermining global strategic stability, spurring an arms race and increasing conflict potential both among nuclear-weapon states and in the international arena as a whole,” a joint statement from China and Russia said. While that is a propaganda statement, it reflects real concerns broadly held in both countries.

Read more here: https://theconversation.com/golden-dom ... -258048

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Trump expresses interest in rolling back the clock to bring back the 'Department of War'

Source: MSNBC News

June 25, 2025, 12:57 PM EDT

Donald Trump and his team have been fixated in recent months on renaming things. From the Gulf of Mexico to the USNS Harvey Milk, from Veterans Day to the Persian Gulf, the president and his administration have made it painfully clear: They’re not satisfied with names and labels that much of the public finds familiar, and they’re eager to impose new ones.

Evidently, we can add the name of one of the nation’s oldest departments to the list. USA Today reported:

President Donald Trump suggested changing the name of Defense Department back to its pre-World War II moniker as the War Department, after the success in bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities. ‘You know it used to be called secretary of war,’ Trump told reporters June 25 at the conclusion of a NATO meeting in the Netherlands. ‘Maybe for a couple of weeks we’ll call it that because we feel like warriors.’



The Republican did not appear to be kidding. In fact, at his NATO press conference, the American president referred to Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth as the “secretary of war” and reflected on the title that hasn’t existed in a few generations. Trump added, “ (I)t used to be ‘secretary of war’; then we became politically correct. ‘Secretary of defense,’ maybe we’ll have to start thinking about changing it.”

Read more: https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-sho ... rcna215029

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