According to the Spanish newspaper El Pais , on Wednesday, December 27, 2017, Spain will increase its military spending by more than 80 percent over the next six years. Spain has spent 0.92% for its defense budget in 2017, one of the lowest spending in the alliance, alongside Belgium and Luxembourg.Story here.
Soon, the CMC will have two corps of light infantry (The Marine with six infantry and a SpOP brigades and the Airborne of the same), two Army Air Assault Brigades (the 121st and the 161th) and a super heavy Mech Infantry Division (the 112th) under its direct strategic command. It does not take much of an imagination to picture a Joint Rapid Reaction Force in the making. The JRRF (kuaisu fanyin budui) concept was first proposed by the British Army in the 1990s consists of combat and support elements from land, sea and air to a trouble spot rapidly and at a short notice. More importantly than just showing the flag, a JRRF is capable of fighting a high intensity small/medium scale engagement.Story here.
Next summer the Marines will select a new combat Assault Amphibious Vehicle to replace the current fleet, which has been in use for more than 40 years.Still seems like they're slow walking us (especially if you compare the pace of this program with the CH-53K) but ok.
The new Amphibious Combat Vehicle will be a wheeled, V-shaped hull armored personnel carrier designed to bring Marines from ship to shore and keep pace with an M1A1 Abrams tank rolling inland.
The final version will be selected from prototypes by SAIC and BAE Systems. Production is expected to begin next fall.
For now, however, the Corps will continue to upgrade the existing AAV fleet while the ACVs come into the inventory.
The Corps plans to purchase 204 ACV 1.1 versions and then move to acquire 490 ACV 1.2 versions after an initial production run.
The ACV must carry a crew of three along with 10 fully loaded Marine infantrymen and a remotely operated .50-caliber gun. It’s expected to later carry a dual .50-caliber machine gun and either a 40mm or 30mm cannon.
The SAIC version can carry the three-person crew and 11 infantrymen while the BAE Systems version can carry the crew plus 13 infantrymen.
Marines have 964 AAVs housed in three Assault Amphibious Battalions, two active and one reserve.
The first two months of 2018 will see two major shifts on the business side of the Pentagon, with the creation of three new offices that will report directly to the secretary of defense.Story here.
The goal, deputy secretary of defense Patrick Shanahan told reporters on Dec. 21, is to make the changes as irreversible as possible in a system notoriously impervious to substantive changes.
“We want to make sure that with the stroke of a pen or a few clicks of the keyboard, we can’t undo progress,” Shanahan said. “When you think about enduring change, you have to wire or alter the work so that you don’t regress. That’s the hard part about big bureaucracy — is making enduring change.”
The deputy acknowledged that the changes will lead to plenty of complaints from people whose offices are being moved around —“you’ll probably hear screaming and yelling because ‘change is bad,’ ” he predicted for reporters — but he said that “if you’re going to have a more performance-driven operation, you have to unwind the bureaucracy and reorganize.”
The IDF is strengthening infantry units by expanding the use of its advanced Armored Personnel Carrier, dubbed Namer, or “leopard,” and supplying the purple barets Givati Brigade in addition to Golani units already using the vehicle.Story here.
“After extensive trials, by the end of 2020 the entire brigade will be operating the Namer,” said a statement by the IDF’s Spokesperson’s Unit, adding that the development was a part of a process of integrating use of the Namer into the IDF as whole.
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| Yeah the fucking Army was smart enough to include this SF bubba jumping out of a plane in an commercial...even crusty, cynical bastards like me were saying "ok...that's sorta badass"... |
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| Multi-national battlegroup receives orders while on Operation Cabrit in Poland. The British Army are currently deployed on operations supporting NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) and currently have forces located in Estonia and Poland |
George Washington refused to come to the rescue when the pamphleteer who put him on his high horse faced the guillotine.Story here.
On December 28, 1793, at the height of the Reign of Terror in France, Paris police rousted Thomas Paine in the cold hours before dawn, arrested him as a “foreign conspirator” and locked him in a wet, 10-by-8-foot cellar in Luxembourg Prison. The only light came from cracks in a boarded-up window. Paine was sure the guillotine awaited him.
Citizen Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense helped ignite the American Revolution, was an enthusiastic early supporter of the French Revolution. He received a hero’s welcome when he arrived in Paris in 1792 and was even granted honorary French citizenship and a seat in the National Convention, the body charged with writing a constitution for the new republic. But Paine angered Maximilien Robespierre and other Jacobin extremists when he urged the Convention to spare the life of the deposed French king, Louis XVI. Instead, Jacobins brandished the king’s severed head in front of a cheering crowd. Then they proceeded to round up thousands of suspected counterrevolutionaries who, Paine observed, fell “as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off.” Now they’d come for him, too.
