2.Jun 17, 2018
The IDF has created a unique unit so that Israeli-Arab Christians can fulfill their ambition to overcome the language barrier and serve their country.
By: United with Israel Staff
The IDF has launched a unique program for Israeli-Arab Christians which enables them to integrate into the army and serve their country.
The “Nachshon Platoon“ consists of 24 Arabic-speaking Christians who volunteered to join the IDF based on one motivation: to contribute to the State of Israel.
After years of low draft percentages among the Arabic-speaking Christian community in Israel, no more than a dozen draftees a year, things have now changed. In the latest draft class, 24 soldiers of the Arabic-speaking Christian community volunteered to serve in the IDF.
The motivated soldiers began their military service with a three-week preparatory program at the Michve Alon training base in Israel’s north to overcome their biggest challenge: Hebrew.
The Nachshon Platoon was established especially for the Arabic-speaking Christian population in Israel. It’s a place of education with a familial atmosphere.
“The preparations for the culminating ceremony make me very emotional,” said Lt. Sapir, commander of the Eyal Company, where the soldiers were first taken in.
“They’re amazing soldiers and their Hebrew has improved unbelievably. I’m sure they will go far in their service,” she added. “Our goal was to improve their Hebrew level with the understanding that they’re aiming for significant positions that require a proficient level of Hebrew.”
The course mostly consists of Hebrew lessons, along with lessons about heritage and connection to Israel, and additional subjects related to the soldiers’ unique identities.
“The fact that Arabic-speaking Christians have a course and a platoon of their own strengthens the idea that the IDF is a place that does, and always will, care for them,” explained Nachshon Platoon Commander Lt. Shlomit, who accompanied the soldiers throughout their training.
“The platoon is going to open a door for the whole Arabic-speaking Christian community,” Lt. Gardi, the course commander said.
‘Contributing to My Country’
Pvt. Assad, one of the course graduates, expresses pride in successfully completing the course, and his satisfaction is evident in every word he says.
“I used to not speak Hebrew at all. I knew almost nothing, but the course has made me comfortable with the language and I’ve tremendously improved,” he shared.
“The platoon is like a family, like brothers- far more than friends,” he said emotionally. “Everyone helps one another. We’re a team, something larger together.”
Assad grew up in an Arabic-speaking Christian family in northern Israel. His desire to volunteer in the IDF comes from a surprising place.
“My father is a truck driver. I wanted to be like him, to make him proud of me but it was important for me to contribute to my country as I am a part of it,” he explained.
As he had hoped, Pvt. Assad will soon begin his service as a cargo truck driver. “The course has provided me with the integration that I wanted and I am very pleased.”
Pvt. Tazmuz’s favorite word in Hebrew is self-confidence. “It’s what has improved the most in me,” he shares. “I have a good feeling about the job I’m going to be doing, but it’s not enough for me. I want to be an officer- that’s the largest contribution I can give.”
“Since its establishment, the IDF has been the people’s army, serving as a way to bring together all the different communities in Israel to meet,” concluded Lt. Col. Dorit Maoz, the Michve Alon Base commander. “We all have a common house within the IDF, with mutual values, responsibility, and caring for each other.”
Approximately 20 percent of Israel’s eight million citizens are Arabs. According to the Israeli Democracy Index, a public opinion survey conducted last year by the Israeli Democratic Institute and the Guttman Center for Surveys, 65% of Israeli-Arabs are proud to be Israeli.
Israel is the only safe haven for Christians in the Middle East, while their numbers diminish as a result of Muslim persecution in all other areas of the region.
(With files from the IDF Blog)
3. 11-04-2018
After Decades of Silence
The “AMCHA” organization was started 30 years ago by Holocaust survivors and health care professionals to address a “conspiracy of silence” and provide survivors with the support they need.
When Pnina Katsir turned 80, she finally told her daughter a secret she had kept for decades: she was a survivor of the Holocaust.
“I didn’t tell anyone. My kids didn’t know,” Katsir told Tazpit Press Service (TPS) at a ceremony for Yom Hashoah, Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day, on Wednesday evening. “I decreed silence on myself in order to raise a normal, happy family – not living in the shadow of that awful time.”
Yet Katsir, now 86, boldly recounted her experiences before a crowd of dozens at the Jerusalem ceremony, including many fellow survivors, their children and grandchildren, as well as a group of female soldiers. They had gathered to share stories and commemorate the vicitms as part of the AMCHA organization, an Israeli psychological and social support group for Holocaust survivors, which Katsir credits with giving her the tools to finally express herself.
“There’s a conspiracy of silence among survivors and Israeli society,” explained Elisheva Flamm-Oren, AMCHA’s director of planning and development. “They are afraid to tell their children and burden them with what they went through, and Israeli society also doesn’t want to hear it – they prefer to project strength.”
AMCHA was started 30 years ago by Holocaust survivors and health care professionals to address this “conspiracy of silence” and provide survivors with the support they need. They now cater to 20,000 Holocaust survivors in five centers across the country, boasting 480 mental health professionals and a thousand volunteers. In the past year alone they logged 186,000 hours of therapy, 30% of which took place in house calls to survivors too frail to leave their homes.
“There’s a lot of power in meeting other survivors,” Flamm-Oren told TPS. “AMCHA created a place where you can come and talk about the past without fear. We want them to know that they are normal people who went through unimaginably abnormal circumstances.”
A Creative Healing Process
And the survivors do more than talk. They participate in AMCHA’s creative writing seminars and theatre troupes—who recently staged a play starring a 97-year-old actress—all designed to give survivors creative outlets to process their past traumas and communicate with younger generations.
“They know how to get you to open up,” said Katsir, who read a moving composition describing her childhood in a Ukrainian ghetto, including the “nightly task” she shared with her sister to clutch their grandmother’s legs as she slept in the hopes of keeping her warm.
For many survivors, the creative process has been enormously satisfying.
“I have a kind of Holocaust disease – it actually makes me feel good to talk about the Holocaust,” Elias Feinzelberg told TPS after reciting the Kaddish, the solemn prayer for the dead, at the ceremony. Feinzelberg, a very active 98-year-old who was born in Lodz, Poland, endured nine different concentration camps, including Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“I spoke at two schools today,” Feinzelberg said, proudly pointing to the pins on his blazer bearing the names of educational institutions around the world in which he has shared his story.
“Once I opened up,” Katsir said, “I realized how much energy I had wasted all these years on not talking.”
By: Jesse Lempel/TPS
4. THE DEEP STATE AND TYRANNY
The deeper dangers that the FBI IG report reflects.
June 18, 2018
Bruce Thornton
Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The Department of Justice Inspector General’s Report released last week didn’t tell us anything we didn’t know, but merely added more damning evidence for the corruption of the FBI and its investigations over the last few years. More worthy of comment, as Andy McCarthy writes, is its refusal to use common sense and note the obvious interconnections among the various bad actors, and the bond of political bias, seasoned with careerism and arrogance, that united them.
But the problems we are confronting reflect deeper dangers than the professional corruption of some functionaries of corrupt executive agencies armed with the coercive power of the state. The true moral of the story is the dangers to freedom of centralized and concentrated power––the very dangers consensual governments, including our own, were created to minimize.
The issue of political bias, which the IG report scanted, has to be understood in the larger nature of the large-scale bureaucratic public institutions that comprise the Deep State. In other words, the structure and functioning of the institution itself creates a bias that selects progressive employees. The bias insidiously becomes a second nature of which they often are no more conscious than a fish is that it’s wet.
Leftist ideology from Marxism to Progressivism is particularly useful for creating such self-serving agencies. American progressivism was founded on the conceit that “technopolitics,” the notion that modernity requires specialists and experts in the “human sciences” who can most efficiently manage the state. Progressives rejected the old democratic and republican notion that virtue, practical experience, and common sense, none of which is dependent on university credentials, are adequate for citizens to govern no matter their wealth, lineage, or education.
This debate about whether men in general are capable of self-government runs throughout the whole history of political philosophy. The antidemocrats denied that the masses are capable of acquiring the knowledge required for participating in government. The champions of democracy, like the Greek philosopher Protagoras, countered that for social life itself to exist, all men must be capable of acquiring the skills of managing relationships with other people. That task always necessarily involves hierarchies of power, common sense borne of experience, and notions of fairness and justice that form the heart of politics.
Two thousand years later, James Madison in 1792 defined the nascent political parties, the Federalists and the Democrat-Republicans, in the same terms. The former, Madison argues, hide their aggrandizement of power to an elite behind the ancient charge “that mankind are incapable of governing themselves,” even as the elites use government to further their own interests. The latter believe people “are capable of governing themselves” and can recognize that the opposite view is “an insult to the reason and an outrage to the rights of man.” Thus they oppose any measure “that does not appeal to the understanding of the general interest of the community” or “is not strictly conformable to the principles, and conducive to the preservation of republican government.” All men are capable of thought, and recognize the principles of political equality and freedom, the “rights of man” that government is created to protect and preserve.
Progressives, of course, for all their talk of “equal rights” and “equality” and “democracy,” in fact have more in common with the antidemocratic tradition. Rejecting the permanence of human nature and its vulnerability to the temptations of power and its corrupting influence, they argued that the new technologies and economic institutions had created problems beyond the understanding of the average man, but also created new understandings of how to improve human nature. Now power must be centralized and concentrated, and the federal government expanded with new agencies and offices staffed with credentialed technocrats who understand the “new sciences” of human nature and society, and so can create policies and rules that better serve the citizens now shrunk into wards of government agencies.
Having pursued these aims for over a century, progressives have midwifed the bloated Leviathan that now encroaches into our lives, communities, and businesses. The costs to our freedom and autonomy, as well as the weakening of the Constitutional order, are obvious. But the bureaucratic structure of government agencies leaves them vulnerable to the long-documented pathologies of bureaucracies equally malign to the common good.
The most critical danger is what the French call “professional deformation,” the way institutions filter and shape information, principles, and their actions to fit institutional orthodoxy, interests, and ideology. Professional knowledge and paradigms then become a stencil applied to reality, hiding information and facts that don’t fit the institution’s received wisdom, and leaving a neat pattern that is then taken for the whole of reality. This tendency is reinforced by the way careers and advancement are dependent on fealty to the professional paradigm rather than to principle or the greater good. The result is an institution closed on itself, impervious to those who “think outside the box,” devoted to the institutional received wisdom, and dedicated not to the function of its creation, but to the perpetuation of its own power and influence.
This danger exists in all large-scale bureaucracies, including private ones. But a bureaucratic corporation is in the end accountable to the market and its customers and shareholders. Government bureaucracies, however, are largely unaccountable to the sovereign people who give them power. Agency employees find that their careers and power are best nurtured by the party of big government that multiplies the regulations, laws, and rules that grow more and larger bureaucratic fiefdoms. That’s why the salaries and benefits of government workers are higher than in the private sector. And why they have both union and civil-service protections, which make firing them difficult. And why the Department of Justice charged with investigating Hillary Clinton’s various scandals gave 92% of its political donations in 2016 to Clinton. The lowest percentage of gifts to Democrats across all government agencies was 64%.
More important is the lack of accountability. The catalogue of Obama-era federal agency scandals reveals that the only accountability agency malefactors face is retirement on a fat government pension: The Office of Personnel Management, the Veterans Health Administration, the IRS, the ATF, the National Labor Relations Board, the General Services Administration, and just recently the FBI and DOJ, both of which have ongoing investigations that have already led to firings and resignations––all with pensions and, in the case of James Comey, hefty book contracts and speaking fees. That’s not accountability, but rather moral hazard, the removal of incentives to protect one’s actions against the risk of suffering their consequences.
This link between political ideology and the nature of large, unaccountable government agencies has been especially obvious the last two years. The security and investigative agencies have used obstruction, stone-walling, ignoring subpoenas, evasion, using heavy-handed redactions and elastic definitions of “national security” to thwart the efforts of Congressional committees staffed with elected representatives of the people, and thus are the instruments of accountability to the people. But the citizens’ interests and the agencies’ Constitutional duty to observe the division of power among the three branches are not as important as the agencies’ own power and survival. And their survival and power, even if their workers don’t consciously recognize it, requires the survival and power of the Democrat Party’s program of increasing the size and scope of the federal government.
Finally, this state of affairs is laying down the predicates of tyranny. When government agents swear an oath to uphold the Constitution, they are pledging fealty to its foundational principles, particularly the equality of all before the law. And when these agents are housed in multiplying bureaucracies intruding into our private lives and civil societies, they erode our autonomy at the same time they increase their own authority. They turn from servants of the people to their masters, and like most elites throughout history begin to see themselves as above the law, possessing an exalted status based on their perception that they are wiser and more virtuous than their fellow citizens, and so are exempt from the accountability that is the bedrock of constitutional government.
We have had now years of “investigations” into the various scandals of our government agencies and their appointed leaders. The worst occurred during the tenure of Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State, the highest office of foreign policy beside the president. Her crimes are obvious from the public record. Her lies and abuses of her office, all directed toward her own political advancement, were indifferent to the dangers she put the republic in when she willfully set up a non-secure, easily hacked server through which classified information was passed–– including from Barack Obama, who lied about his knowledge of this extra-legal arrangement. And still Hillary has not been held accountable, has not been made to suffer the consequences of her betrayal of her oath and indifference to the security of her fellow citizens.
She and others her like her may think that the “deplorables” who do not enjoy such exemption are not smart enough to see through her lies and the machinations of government agencies bent on protecting her and their own minions. But they do see, and they are angry at such a gross injustice, the lack of punishments for crimes for which they would have suffered swift justice. They see the hypocrisy of the Mueller investigation, the absurdity of the “collusion” charge, and the blatant attempts of agencies to undo the legal election of a U.S. president. And their anger is righteous, for it is responding to a violation of one of our most sacred foundational principles: the equality of all before the law.
The cry for justice from “we the people” needs to be heeded. The behavior we are witnessing is more characteristic of a tyranny rather than a democratic republic. Aristotle defined tyranny more than two-thousand years ago as “arbitrary power . . . which is responsible to no one, and governs all alike, whether equals or betters, with a view to its own advantage, not to that of its subjects, and therefore against their will. No freeman willingly endures such a government.” Sound familiar?
But we need to stop enduring it. Enough with the endless investigations that lead nowhere and leave the guilty unpunished. Enough with absurdity of agencies investigating themselves in order to protect the institution they serve rather than the people. We need to see indictments and trials to restore the foundations of our political order. The president and his Attorney General need to give more support to the Congressional oversight committees trying to do their jobs of holding accountable the abusers of the public trust. As free men and women we can do no less than demand action.
5. 06-18-18
Israeli Former Minister Arrested on Suspicion of Spying for Iran
Former Energy Minister Gonen Segev, previously convicted of drug smuggling, forgery, and electronic commerce fraud, was charged with spying on Israel and giving Iran intelligence in time of war.
Former Minister and MK Gonen Segev was arrested on suspicion of spying for Iran, it was cleared for publication Monday. He served as Energy Minister in the Yiud party from 1995-1996.
Segev was arrested by the Shin Bet and the Israel Police last month on suspicion of committing the offenses of assisting the enemy in a time of war and of spying against the State of Israel.
At the end of the investigation, on June 15, 2018, the Jerusalem District Prosecutor’s Office filed an indictment against Segev in the Jerusalem District Court for these offenses, as well as for numerous offenses of giving information to the enemy. The indictment was approved by the Attorney General and the State Attorney.
Segev, who has previously been convicted of drug smuggling, forgery, and electronic commerce fraud, had lived in Nigeria in recent years. He arrived in Equatorial Guinea in May 2018. Segev was transferred to Israel at the request of the Israel Police, after Equatorial Guinea refused to allow him to enter its territory due to his criminal past.
Segev was detained for questioning by the Shin Bet and the police immediately after his arrival in Israel after they had received intelligence indicating that Segev was maintaining contacts with Iranian intelligence and assisting them in their activities against the State of Israel.
An investigation by the Shin Bet and the police found that Segev was recruited and acted as an agent on behalf of Iranian intelligence, and that in 2012 a connection was established between Segev and elements of the Iranian embassy in Nigeria. He later came twice to meetings with his operators in Iran.
The investigation revealed that Segev met with his Iranian operators around the world, in hotels and apartments which are believed to be used for secret Iranian activity. Segev also received a secret communications system to encrypt the messages between him and his operators.
The investigation also revealed that Segev gave his operators information related to the energy market, security sites in Israel, buildings and officials in Israeli political and security bodies, and more.
In order to meet the tasks he received from his Iranian operators, Segev maintained ties with Israeli citizens related to Israel’s security and foreign relations. Segev worked to connect some of the Israeli citizens to the Iranian intelligence, while trying to fool them and present the Iranian factors as innocent business agents.
At the request of the General Security Service and the Israel Police, the Court acquiesced and permitted the publication of the aforesaid details, and a gag order was imposed on the other details of the case.
Courtesy of Israelnn.com
6. THE WAR THAT CHANGED THE MIDDLE EAST
And gave Israel a bargaining chip for peace.
June 19, 2018
Joseph Puder
Last week marked the 51st anniversary of the June, 1967 Six Day War. It was a war I took part in as a young airman in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). For many Israelis, the Six Day War was a God given miracle, and a deliverance against immense odds. The national anxiety that preceded the War was marked by the Israeli government stockpiling coffins and rabbis consecrating parks as emergency cemeteries. The triumph of Israeli arms over the combined Arab forces was a sweet and exhilarating moment in history. Moreover, the liberation of the Old City of Jerusalem and its Western Wall was a most moving event.
The War was not of Israel’s choosing. Egypt’s dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser sought to avenge the humiliation of the 1948 Egyptian defeat. Having received massive amount of arms from the Soviet Union, and financial aid to boot, he was confident of victory. In 1948, Nasser was deputy commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary forces that secured the Falluja pocket. In August, 1948, his brigade was surrounded by the Israeli forces. Appeals for help from Jordan’s Arab Legion went unheeded. The brigade refused to surrender, however, negotiations between Israel and Egypt resulted in the ceding of the Falluja Pocket to Israel.
Some historians believe that Nasser did not want to engage in a war with Israel, principally because his army was bogged down in Yemen. Nasser however, managed to escalate his rhetoric and actions. On May 13, 1967, the Soviet Union delivered a warning to Cairo that Israel was amassing troops on the border with Syria and would attack within a week. Twenty-four hours following the Soviet alert, Egypt’s Supreme commander Abdul Hakim Amer ordered the Egyptian army to be on full alert for war.
Forty-eight hours later, Nasser ordered the UN peacekeepers stationed in the Sinai to get out. The UN peacekeepers had patrolled the border area between Egypt and Israel since 1957, following the Sinai Campaign in which Israel captured the Sinai only to return it to Egypt under American pressure, but with guarantees that Israel would have freedom of navigation through the Suez Canal and the Straits of Tiran. The departing UN peacekeepers were replaced by Egyptian soldiers Nasser dispatched to the Sinai border with Israel.
Nasser’s belligerency stepped up a notch higher when he announced Egypt’s blockade of the port of Eilat by shutting the Straits of Tiran to Israeli ships. That in itself was an act of war. Western powers, including the U.S., did nothing to reverse Nasser’s actions despite guarantees given to Israel. On May 16, 1967, Nasser sent a message to the UN Emergency Force commander stationed in Gaza, stating, “I gave my instructions to all United Arab Republic (the name remained even after the Egyptian-Syrian merger dissolved) forces to be ready for action against Israel the moment it might carry out any aggressive action against any Arab country. Due to these instructions our troops are already concentrated in Sinai on our Eastern border. For the sake of complete security of all UN troops, I request that you issue your orders to withdraw all troops immediately.”
Using the “Voice of the Arabs” (Sawt al-Arab) radio broadcast to whip up the Egyptian masses and the fawning Arab masses throughout the Middle East, Nasser, through this mouthpiece announced on May 18, 1967, “The Zionist barrack in Palestine is about to collapse and be destroyed. Every one of the hundred million Arabs has been living for the past nineteen years on one hope – to live to see the day Israel is liquidated. There is no life, no peace, nor hope for the gangs of Zionism to remain in the occupied land. As of today, there no longer exists an international emergency force to protect Israel. The sole method we shall apply against Israel is a total war which will result in the extermination of the Zionist existence.”
On May 20th, 1967, Syria’s Defense minister and later President Hafez Assad declared: “Our forces are now entirely ready, not only to repulse aggression, but to initiate the act ourselves and to explode the Zionist presence in the Arab homeland of Palestine. The Syrian army, with its finger on the trigger, is united. I believe that time has come to begin a battle of annihilation.” Not to be undone, Iraq’s President, Abdul Rahman Arif chimed in, declaring on May 31st, 1967, “Our goal is to wipe Israel off the map.”
In the meantime, Israel’s Prime Minister Levi Eshkol made a disastrous broadcast to the anxious nation on May 28, 1967. He stammered and fluffed, which compounded insecurity in the nation. As a result, he was compelled to vacate the Defense Ministry portfolio he held. Moshe Dayan became the Defense Minister, which raised the national morale. The young “sabra” (native born Israelis) generals now got the green light to mobilize the reserves. On June 1, 1967, Israel formed a National Unity Government that included Menachem Begin, and on June 4, 1967, the cabinet made the decision to go to war.
The balance of forces gave the Arab armies (Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq) total advantage. According to U.S. Major John W. Dorough, the Arabs had more than four times the advantage in artillery pieces; 203 for Israel against 962 for the Arabs. The Arabs had more than three times more SAM missiles; 160 versus only 50 for Israel. In manpower, tanks and combat aircraft, Dorough’s estimates were 210,000 Israeli troops vs. 309,000 for the Arabs (not including Iraq’s Third Armored Division with another 15,000-20,000 troops), 1,000 Israeli tanks vs. 2,337 tanks for the Arabs, and more than twice the aircraft, 286 for Israel vs. 682 for the Arabs.
At this reporter’s airbase, all leaves were canceled, and feverish work ensued to prepare every aircraft for combat. During the night of June 4th, the Jordanians, under Egyptian command, shelled our base. The next morning, on June 5th, war broke out. At noon, our base commander announced with great emotion that “as of this moment the Arab Air Forces ceased to exist.” By the end of the week, Israel was in control of the Sinai, the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. A week later, our squadron toured the Old City of Jerusalem, the Wall, and Hebron. We didn’t arrive as conquerors, but rather as liberators. We returned to our most cherished historical and religious roots.
The Six Day War changed the map of the Middle East. It gave Israel more secure borders and lent the Jewish state an aura of invincibility (at least until the 1973 Yom Kippur War in which Israel triumphed albeit at a high cost). Most importantly however, it provided Israel with a bargaining chip for peace. Israel was ready to return the Sinai to Egypt for peace, and 10 years later President Anwar Sadat came to Jerusalem, thus stunning the world and Israelis in particular. In 1979, at Camp David, a peace treaty was signed between Egypt, the largest and most important Arab state, and Israel. Jordan followed Egypt in 1994. Minor border adjustments were made to satisfy the Jordanians, and to date, a solid peace has endured. Israel still controls defensible and natural borders along the Jordan River and the Golan Heights.
Perhaps the most profound change in the Middle East has been the realization by the moderate Sunni-Arab states that Israel will not be defeated militarily, and that it is a permanent fixture in the region. In fact geo-politically, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states no longer see Israel as a threat but as an ally against a hegemonic Iran. The Six Day war was the catalyst in that change.
7. BANKRUPT STATE TO SPEND $200 MIL ONOBAMA CENTER
June 19, 2018
Daniel Greenfield
What better way could there be to celebrate Obama’s legacy than bankrupting a bankrupt state for the greater glory of Barry?
Illinois now has the worst credit rating in the municipal bond market. Moody’s Investment Services pegs Illinois’ debt at Baa3, and it could further downgrade that credit rating later in 2018.
The State of Illinois incurred deficits reaching nearly $15 billion in 2017, and those deficits are projected to double to $30 billion in 2018. Illinois has also accumulated hundreds of billions in unfunded liabilities in public sector pension and health-care plans. This has exposed local jurisdictions to the risk of default or bankruptcy. In response, Illinois has issued large bailouts, further weakening the finances of the state’s government. The courts have exacerbated this problem by ruling the Illinois Constitution mandates state bailouts for public sector pension and health plans
Do you know what’s going to make it all better? A big, giant Obamaville!
Public works projects around the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago could cost Illinois taxpayers nearly $200 million, The Washington Examiner reported Saturday.
Illinois approved a $224 million legislature budget earlier this month that included $174 million for road work near the presidential center and $50 million to for the Garfield Gateway rail project two miles away, the report said. About $200 million of that total budget would come from state taxpayers. Half of the $50 million is funded through a 2016 Transportation Department grant.
Don’t call it spending, it’s an investment. You know like all of those Obama investments that took the national debt high while keeping the economy low.
Pensions are less of a priority than another useless center glorifying the 21st century’s worst president.
NATO air forces must be able to defend against peer competitors and anticipate the growing role of cyber and space-based assets, according to a new NATO joint airpower strategy released on Tuesday (26 June 2018). While air power has played a central role in NATO’s collective defence and crisis management for decades, the strategy is the first of its kind since NATO was founded in 1949.
“For almost 70 years, airpower has been a core part of NATO’s military capabilities. From deterring the Soviet Union during the Cold War, to operations in the Balkans in the 1990s and the fight against international terrorism in the deserts of Afghanistan, air power has helped to protect our people and achieve our political objectives,” said NATO spokesperson Oana Lungescu. She added: “As we take steps to increase the readiness of armed forces across the Alliance, the new strategy will help ensure that allied air forces remain world class, flexible and ready for any possible contingencies.”
The new strategy lays out the current and future security environment in which allied air forces are likely to operate in. Acknowledging that decades of uncontested air operations may be coming to a close, the strategy cautions that modern air defence systems, cyber and electronic warfare could impact NATO air operations. The document also makes the case for special forces, maritime and cyber units to better support of air power with intelligence, targeting support and post-strike assessments.
NATO’s strategy holds that allied air forces must be able to fight in all terrains and environments, including heavily defended and congested airspace. While current NATO air operations will continue, the document provides a blueprint for the development of airpower doctrines and new capabilities. The last comparable document, the Alliance’s maritime strategy, was released in 2011.