Archive
Rasmussen: EU Pacts In Ex-USSR Dovetail With NATO Goals
National Radio Company of Ukraine
July 27, 2014
Rasmussen: Goals of association agreements similar to NATO goals
The North Atlantic Alliance has welcomed the signature by the European Union of association agreements with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova, describing this as a contribution to stability and prosperity in Europe, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said on Friday.
“I welcome the signature of Association Agreements between the EU and Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine,” he said.
Rasmussen said that the association agreements contributed to the consolidation of freedom, stability and prosperity in Europe. He also added that the objectives of the association agreements with the EU were similar to the goals that NATO shares and supports through its own partnership with Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova.
Germany: U.S. Trains Georgians, Romanians For NATO Strike Force
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Allied Command Operations
June 30, 2014
EXERCISE COMBINED RESOLVE II WRAPS UP WITH A BANG
Grafenwoehr, GERMANY: Exercise Combined Resolve II ended on Friday, 27 June with a literal bang as over 2,000 troops participated in a combined arms live fire exercise portion of the multinational six week long exercise.
The Combined Arms Live Fire Exercise (CALFEX) held at Grafenwoehr Training Area tested the compatibility of the newly rotated NATO response force U.S. land contingent, the Romanian Army’s land contingent of the Rapid Reaction Force and Georgian Army Soldiers.
“This is a offensive operation with the overall goal of not just sharing standard operating procedures but to have interoperability between the participants,” said Romanian Army Col. Adrian Popescu, Task Force commander. “The biggest thing we want to take away is the experience that we can gain from training with partner nations and by doing so improve our skills and tactics.”
Hosted by the U.S. Army Europe the exercise was meant to test and validate the NATO Response Forces capabilities through live firing of various weapon systems.
“The Task Force worked together with Romanian TR-85M1 Tanks, MLI-84M Infantry Fighting Vehicles, U.S. M1A2 Tanks and Bradley M2A3, in addition to air support from Apache helicopters,” said Colonel Popescu.
Combined Resolve took place over a six week period on two of the worlds most advanced training ranges and hosted over 4,000 troops from 15 Allied and partner nations.
Story by SHAPE Public Affairs Office
Thomas Mann: Parallel, oracle and warning
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Thomas Mann: Selections on war
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Thomas Mann
After leaving the United States, where he had lived in exile for thirteen years, for Switzerland in 1952:
“I only want to admit that, as in 1933, political matters were not excluded from my considerations. In that land so smiled upon, yet grown too powerful, an unfortunate world constellation has brought forth changes in the atmosphere which can be perceived as depressing and alarming.”
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From An Appeal to Reason (1930)
Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter
Every foreign policy corresponds to a domestic one which is its organic complement and forms with it an indissoluble intellectual whole.
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Art and war
[T]here are hours, there are moments of our common life, when art fails to justify itself in practice; when the inner urgency of the artist fails him; when the more immediate necessities of our existence choke back his own thought; when the general distress and crisis shake him too, in such a way that what we call art, the happy and impassioned preoccupation with eternally human values, comes to seem idle, ephemeral, a superfluous thing, a mental impossibility. So it was, sixteen years ago, when the war broke out that was to be for every conscious being so much more than a war.
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First World War: interests of the government versus interests of the people
Germany was led into that war by a system of government which – most naively from the historical point of view – put its own interests on a par with that of its people, and in the struggle to survive brought people and country to the last gasp.
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The Nazis
[T]he moment has already come when militant nationalism displays itself less militantly for foreign than for domestic consumption…Its hatred is levelled not so much without as within; yes, actually its fanatical love of the fatherland appears chiefly as hatred not of the foreigner but of all Germans who do not believe in its methods and whom it promises to destroy root and branch.
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From Europe Beware (1935)
Translated by H.T. Lowe-Porter
On global grandiosity and its consequence
An undisguised half-education, pathetically overwrought and subject to no kind of restraint, flings about its pseudo-knowledge and malignant theories, its mystagogic balderdash and millenial conclusions, to which an abashed or even culpably sympathetic academic world demurs only meekly, with misgivings, weakly trying to remind its opponents of a few facts in rebuttal.
It would be war, all-embracing catastrophe, the collapse of civilization. It is my firm conviction that this, and only this, can be the consequence of the activist philosophy of this kind of man.
U.S., NATO Allies Build Libyan Proxy Army – At Libya’s Expense
U.S. Department of Defense
June 26, 2014
Official: U.S. Committed to Training Libyan Security Force
By Terri Moon Cronk
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON: While Libya’s unsteady politics and deteriorating security have complicated efforts, the United States remains committed to training the country’s security forces, the Defense Department’s assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs told a House panel yesterday.
Security and successful development of Libyan armed forces are the biggest factors in Libya’s transition, Derek Chollet told the House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and North Africa.
“Last year, the United States committed to help train a Libyan general purpose force of 5,000 to 8,000 personnel. This kind of force will help the Libyan government form its core military,” he said, adding Libya is paying for the training, which could take up to eight years.
The United States is not alone in building Libya’s military — it has strong international support from other nations, such as the United Kingdom, Italy and Turkey, Chollet said.
But progress has been slow, he said, citing several factors that have hampered training.
“Libya’s political turmoil and a deteriorating security situation … make it difficult to have the necessary U.S. personnel on the ground in Tripoli to execute this program,” he said. “Other factors include a lack of vetted training candidates, a lack of pledged Libyan funding, and weak security institutions.”
About 40 Libyan military members recently attended U.S. professional education courses to help build the country’s security and enhance its military professionalism, Chollet noted, adding that last year the Libyans also paid for a national security seminar for 25 Libyan military leaders to attend the National Defense University here.
DOD also is helping the Libyan government develop its counterterrorism capacity, he said, through the global security contingency fund, which is expected to train several hundred Libyan special forces personnel.
Of deep concern, Chollet said, is that Libya’s borders have become major areas of instability in the movement of violent extremists, the trafficking of weapons, and the massive influx of immigrants.
DOD developed a program to help build Libya’s border security capacity through the global security contingency fund, he said, and the department also is coordinating with the European Union.
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Guy de Maupassant: Military hysteria, military presumptuousness
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Guy de Maupassant: Selections on war
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Guy de Maupassant
From An Affair of State
Translator unknown
Paris had just heard of the disaster of Sedan. The Republic was proclaimed. All France was panting from a madness that lasted until the time of the commonwealth. Everybody was playing at soldier from one end of the country to the other.
Capmakers became colonels, assuming the duties of generals; revolvers and daggers were displayed on large rotund bodies enveloped in red sashes; common citizens turned warriors, commanding battalions of noisy volunteers and swearing like troopers to emphasize their importance.
The very fact of bearing arms and handling guns with a system excited a people who hitherto had only handled scales and measures and made them formidable to the first comer, without reason. They even executed a few innocent people to prove that they knew how to kill, and in roaming through virgin fields still belonging to the Prussians they shot stray dogs, cows chewing the cud in peace or sick horses put out to pasture. Each believed himself called upon to play a great role in military affairs. The cafés of the smallest villages, full of tradesmen in uniform, resembled barracks or field hospitals.
NATO To Hold Conference In Qatar Next Year
Gulf Times
June 27, 2014
Qatar to host Nato conference in 2015
Qatar will host a North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) conference on the prevention of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in 2015, the local Al-Sharq daily has reported.
A delegation from Qatar participated in the Nato conference 2014, which focused on the disarmament and prevention of spread of WMD. It was hosted by the Swiss city of Enterlakine on June 23-24, 2014.
The delegation to the conference was presided by HE Sheikh Ali bin Jassim, ambassador of Qatar to the Kingdom of Belgium, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The delegation included representatives of the Qatar National Committee for Prohibition of Weapons.
Participation in the conference is made by Nato member countries or countries entered into partnership and co-operation agreements with the Nato. Other bodies such as the European and Atlantic Partnership Council, the UN, the European Union, Chemical Weapons Prohibition Organisation, the European Security and Co-operation Organisation and the Organisation for Prohibition of Nuclear Tests also participate.
The concluding session of the 2014 conference decided that the State of Qatar would host the conference in 2015. This would be the first time the conference would be held in the Middle East as a coronation to the partnership between Qatar and Nato.
Transatlantic Freedom, Democr…10,000 Cops For UK NATO Summit
Press TV
June 28, 2014
Britain to deploy 10,000 officers at NATO summit
Britain is planning to deploy 10,000 police officers to shut out anti-war protests during NATO’s summit in the Welsh city of Newport, documents reveal.
The Police Federation briefing documents released on Friday showed that there will be one officer for every protester at the Celtic Manor Hotel, which will host the NATO summit on September 4 and 5.
“To ensure the safety and secure passage of the event a mutual aid authority has been agreed to secure the deployment of nearly 10,000 officers,” it said.
This would be one of Britain’s biggest police operations since the 2012 Olympics and the biggest in Welsh history.
Peace activists, who have pledged to descend on the summit venue to express their outrage at NATO’s warmongering policies, criticized the British government’s decision, saying it is spending millions to protect NATO leaders from peaceful protesters.
“Together with billions spent on war and nuclear weapons we will now see vast sums being wasted on ‘protecting’ politicians from peaceful protesters,” said Kate Hudson, the General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
She said the deployment of large number of police forces at the venue is yet another example of public money being spent on the wrong priorities by the government.
“Our message is clear. End wars, disarm our nuclear weapons. And spend our money on meeting people’s real needs: education, jobs and the NHS,” she added.
In November last year, the CND blasted the coalition government for hosting the NATO summit in Wales, saying neither Newport nor anywhere else in the UK should host a summit of the NATO.
Maxim Gorky: Military museum; soaking the dirt and dust of the earth with copious blood
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Maxim Gorky: Selections on war
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Maxim Gorky
From The Specter (1938)
Translated by Alexander Bakshy
In the morning, performing however reluctantly the duty of the traveler, armed with a red Baedeker guide-book, Samghin strode through the streets of the city of stone, and this tidy, bleak city depressed and bored him. The damp wind scattered people in all directions; the iron shoes of shaggy-legged horses clanked; soldiers marched; a drum rattled; occasionally an automobile honked by, lumbering like an elephant, and the Germans stopped, respectfully according it the right of way and following it with friendly eyes. Samghin found himself in a square with a number of mountainous buildings spaced neatly over it, above each of them, between blue-gray clouds, its own piece of blue sky shining. Every one was a museum. Before Samghin could decide which one of them to visit, a thunderclap shook the air and rain descended in torrents. Samghin was compelled to seek shelter in the nearest museum, which proved to house a collection of armor, its walls covered with stupid, if brightly colored, paintings, all scenes from the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars. From special stands protruded rifles of various types, swords, sabers, crossbows, lances, daggers; stuffed horses in war array stood with the steel shells of knights rising from their backs. The multitude of variously treated metals yielded a nauseating, oily chill. Samghin pondered that without question most of these instruments designed for the performance of military duty had slashed human skulls, chopped off arms, pierced chests and abdomens, soaking the dirt and dust of the earth with copious blood.
NATO Chief Hails Historic Isolation Of Russia In Former Soviet Space
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
June 27, 2014
Eastern Partnership: The West’s Final Assault On the Former Soviet Union
Statement by the Secretary General on the signature of the European Union’s Association Agreements with Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine
I welcome the signature of Association Agreements between the EU and Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine. The Association Agreements, and the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area, will significantly deepen the political and economic ties between the EU and its three Eastern partners.
They contribute to the consolidation of freedom, stability and prosperity in Europe. They will allow close cooperation on strengthening the rule of law, advancing judicial reforms, fighting corruption, ensuring respect for fundamental rights and freedoms and strengthening democratic institutions. These are goals that NATO shares and supports through its own partnership with these countries and other partners.
GUAM, Frozen Conflicts And EU Association Agreements: Killing Commonwealth Of Independent States
Interfax-Ukraine
June 27, 2014
EU leaders: Association with Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia not final stage of cooperation
European Council President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso have said that the June 27 signing by the EU of Association Agreements with Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine is not the final stage of cooperation.
An Interfax-Ukraine reporter said that they stated this in Brussels on Friday, when speaking during the signing ceremony.
“These agreements are not the final stage of our cooperation… Your three countries will continue pursuing efforts to transform your societies, deepening democracy and modernizing the economy,” Van Rompuy said.
“Signing these Association Agreements with Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Areas should not be seen as the end of the road, but as the beginning of a journey on which the European Union and these three partner countries are embarking together today,” Barroso said.
Van Rompuy said that stronger political and economic ties would bring greater stability and prosperity to the entire European continent. At the same time, he noted that such cooperation could only be based on common values, particularly democracy, human rights, fundamental freedoms and the rule of law.
Speaking about the situation in the sphere of security and defense, he said that the EU stands by the side of Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia, having difficulties in relations with Russia.
“You have our support and solidarity, and our recognition of your territorial integrity,” Van Rompuy, adding that the EU is ready to engage with Moscow to dispel all possible misunderstandings.
Barroso, in turn, noted that the agreements signed allowed the three countries to implement reforms and move towards transformation into prosperous democracies.
“The task ahead is substantial. The Association Agreements’ main objective is to help to deliver on the partner countries’ own reforms, own ambitions. To succeed will require strong political will,” Barroso said.
At the same time, he said that all three countries needed to focus on judicial reform, improving efficiency and transparency and fighting corruption in order to make the reform process successful and irreversible.
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Franz Werfel: Don’t you hear the roar of the bombers, the clatter of heavy machine guns that envelop the globe?
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Franz Werfel: Selections on war
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Franz Werfel
From Star of the Unborn (1946)
Translated by Gustave O. Arlt
Stern eyes have been looking at me for some time. They are becoming ever sterner and now they even address me…Don’t you know what’s going on in the world today? Weren’t you yourself a persecuted victim? Aren’t you still? Don’t you hear the roar of the bombers, the clatter of heavy machine guns that envelop the globe, a Nessus garment woven of explosions? Worse than the noise, don’t you hear the death rattle of the mortally wounded in a thousand places and at every hour? And worse than this death rattle, don’t you hear the cry of torment and the dying gasp of the millions who are first ravished, then tortured, and finally massacred? Isn’t it your responsibility to keep your eyes focused on this monstrous reality that outfancies the maddest visions of a pain demon and is, at the same time, as final as a mathematical process? What higher duty have you than to catch the cry of torment and the gasp of the tortured and to preserve them in the graven word, at least for the brief span in which the experience and the expression of one generation remain intelligible to the next?
I can do nothing, oh, stern eyes, but lower my own before you. I confess and acknowledge: my time is short and I am wasting it unscrupulously. I have not forgotten that I, too, am persecuted. Nor have I become too deaf to hear the roar of the bombers, the clatter of heavy machine guns, the death rattle of the mortally wounded, the cry of torment and the dying gasp of the ravished, the tortured, the massacred. The monstrous reality, the mad visions of a pain demon, constrict my throat by day and night, where I walk and stand, on the street and in my room, at work and at play. Of course I am neglecting my duty. But this reality does not leave me even enough breath for an echoing groan to the cry of torment.
U.S. To Replenish Ukrainian Defense Sector To Continue 73-Day War
National Radio Company of Ukraine
June 25, 2014
U.S. offers to compensate Ukraine’s losses following curtailment of military-technical cooperation with Russia
The United States is weighing plans to expand military-technical cooperation with Ukraine and to compensate part of the Ukrainian defence industry’s losses following the curtailment of Ukrainian-Russian military-technical cooperation.
Ukrainian-American military-technical cooperation was discussed in talks in Kyiv between Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Regional Security and Security Assistance Gregory Kausner and representatives of Ukrainian profile organizations, Interfax-Ukraine has learned from informed sources. “The aid package proposed by the U.S. includes Ukraine’s broader military-technical cooperation with the United States and the European Union, as well as assistance and interaction in implementing Ukraine’s military-technical cooperation projects on the markets of third countries,” a source told Interfax-Ukraine.
“Another option, mostly intended for the Ukrainian defense-industry sector, is the placement of Western repair orders with Ukrainian defense companies in compensation for the losses suffered after military-technical cooperation with Russia was curtailed,” the source said. Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko told the National Security and Defense Council last week that military-technical cooperation with Russia would be banned, including exports of dual-purpose products. In the estimate of Ukrainian military experts, Ukraine’s losses involved will not exceed $300 million annually. Russia’s share in Ukraine’s arms and special services exports does not exceed 15%, the experts said.
NATO Aids Ukrainian Military In One-Sided Proxy War With Russia
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
June 25, 2014
NATO Foreign Ministers agree on Readiness Plan, endorse support package for Ukraine
NATO Foreign Ministers on Wednesday (25 June 2014) agreed on plans to develop a robust Alliance Readiness Action Plan for the Alliance’s Summit in Wales this September and endorsed a package of support measure to strengthen Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. “The Summit comes at a time when security challenges are multiplying beyond our borders,” NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said. “Today we stressed the importance of our collective defence.”
Ministers held talks with their Ukrainian counterpart Pavlo Klimkin and endorsed a package of additional measures to strengthen Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. This includes the creation of new trust funds to support defence capacity building in critical areas such as logistics, command and control, cyber defence and to help retired military personnel to adapt to civilian life. “Ukraine has a clear vision for rebuilding its defence and security sector and a clear strategy for resolving the crisis,” the Secretary General said. He stressed that President Poroshenko’s peace plan is “a major step forward and we fully support it,” and called on Russia to create conditions for the implementation of the peace plan, to end its support for separatist troops, and to stop the flow of weapons and fighters across its border.
Ministers agreed to maintain the suspension of practical civilian and military cooperation with Russia. “There will be no business as usual with Russia until Russia comes back into line with its international obligations,” Mr. Fogh Rasmussen said.
The ministers also discussed ways to strengthen cooperation with partners around the world and strengthen NATO’s ability to assist partners that need help in defence and security sector reforms. The Secretary General said: “we agreed that the Alliance will provide such support more systematically and more swiftly. We will work on ways to create a pool of military and civilian experts who are ready to deploy when needed and to strengthen coordination with other international actors.”
Alfred Neumann: The morals and manners of the War God
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Alfred Neumann: Selections on war
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Alfred Neumann
From Another Caesar (1934)
Translated by Eden and Cedar Paul
In Toulon, the King of Holland was waiting for the Queen – or, rather, Louis was waiting for Hortense…His blood was at enmity with him, in his own body and in the body of another. The War God was of his own blood. Enigmatic but inevitable; and from the War God came everything; the good that turned to evil, and the evil that remained evil. Only the stiffness of his limbs was a product of his own body, and perhaps not even that; for rheumatism had afflicted him since the Italian campaign, when he had been his brother’s aide-de-camp, and a valiant one moreover, for fear of Napoleon. From the War God came everything, even the hatred for his brother, and the hidden longing to rebel. From his brother, likewise, came his wife.
Colonel Louis had been ordered to marry Hortense, because the War God had had no children by her mother Josephine. Colonel Louis was dragooned into the marriage-bed in order to procreate a son for his great brother. He obeyed, without any choice in the matter, without love, and only from fear. Hortense obeyed, from love of the War God, who was her stepfather, and perhaps also the father of her first son. Maybe he was, maybe he was not. The War God gave his younger brother this terrible uncertainty as dowry – a venomous dowry; and, perhaps, the brooding did not begin with the birth of the first son, an eight-months’ child…
N was the sign under which Europe was conquered. An unceasing conquest, a sign and a signal; a new constellation: an anti-cross, an extraordinarily popular symbol to establish the young crown that stood above the letter. N was striding over the land and over the people. N was his signature to all documents except to those to which the formal “Napoleon” had to be appended in full. A continually larger, thicker, more impressive, more preposterously misshapen N; no longer a sign-manual, but the totem of a maniacal relationship to omnipotence…
The Prince Imperial was not, like other Christian children, baptized with a few days or weeks. The War God had no time to attend to the matter, and the youngster remained nameless for two years and a half. Meanwhile the clock had ticked away a good many seconds. N continued to win victories: against Spain, against Austria; even against God Almighty, whose sacraments he disregarded, because he wanted a new empress…There were troops standing to arms in Holland, Chronos was devouring his own children, and N was devouring the brother, who made no defence…
U.S. Air Force Ensconces Itself In Baltic Region
U.S. Air Forces in Europe
U.S. Air Forces Africa
June 23, 2014
Total force brings air power to Latvia
By Kristal Gault
U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Air Forces Africa Public Affairs
RIGA, Latvia: Saber Strike 2014 concluded June 20,2014, with a closing ceremony at the Ādaži Training Area, here.
This year’s U.S. Army Europe-led, multinational military exercise ran from June 9-20 across multiple locations within the Baltic States, and was comprised of approximately 4,700 service members from 10 partner countries.
The Saber Strike exercise program is an ongoing training effort that facilitates cooperation between the U.S., Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to improve combined operations capability in a variety of missions and prepare participating nations for possible future operations.
Saber Strike 2014 also involved participation from Canada, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Poland and the United Kingdom. Though led by ground forces, this year’s exercise incorporated a significant contribution from U.S. Air Forces in Europe and the U.S. Air National Guard.
“It’s really not just support,” said Brig. Gen. Mark L. Loeben, Director of Analysis and Assessments and senior reserve component advisor to the commander at Headquarters, United States European Command. “It is a joint exercise where we exercise the joint force. That’s really not only key to success in the real world, but is also a big part of our training objectives at European Command to exercise the joint force to the maximum extent possible.
“This exercise provides the opportunity for the U.S. Army and Air Force to work together,” Loeben continued. “We also work as a combined force so that if we ever had to take military action as a team, we would be ready.”
During real-world contingencies, the U.S. military services work together in a joint environment to accomplish its missions. Joint exercises, like Saber Strike 2014, provide vital opportunities for U.S. Forces to work together, and include integrated, total force training with U.S. National Guard units as well as our partner nations’ militaries to ensure that our national armed forces are interoperable and prepared to maintain regional security and stability.
U.S. Air Force participation in Saber Strike 2014 was nearly doubled from previous years as the exercise increases its joint capabilities. This year, there were over 250 U.S. Air Force active duty and guard Airmen at three exercise sites in Estonia and Latvia.
The Washington ANG was represented by Joint Tactical Air Controllers at the Ādaži Training Area, Latvia, working with their partner Latvian JTACS. The 148th Fighter Wing from the Minnesota ANG had eight F-16 Fighting Falcons bed down at Ämari Air Base, Estonia, that provided close-air support to ground forces in Ādaži. The 127th Wing, Michigan ANG, and the 171st Air Refueling Wing, Pennsylvania ANG, supported the fighters with KC-135 Stratotanker aerial-refueling aircraft.
U.S. Air Forces in Europe provided Airmen form the 435th Contingency Response Group for aerial port capabilities and aircraft maintenance at Ämari AB. Additionally, three C-130J Super Hercules aircraft made a historical landing at Lielvarde Air Base, Latvia, as the first U.S. Air Force aircraft to ever land at the former Soviet base. The aircraft brought equipment and approximately 100 Airmen from the 435th CRG to participate in bilateral base-opening training, as well as support the ground forces of the exercise with cargo drops at the Ādaži Training Area.
Planning for Saber Strike 2014 officially started about a year ago, but efforts to get the aircraft and forces on the ground at Lielvarde AB began nearly two years ago.
“The idea to bring U.S. aircraft to Lielvarde sparked during a conversation in July of 2012,” said Lt. Col Andrew Roberts, bilateral affairs office, U.S. Embassy – Latvia. “The U.S. Air Force needs locations like this to be able to exercise the full spectrum of opening a base, and the Latvian military gets an opportunity to train and practice on what it takes to receive these types of aircraft. It’s a mutually beneficial exercise, and it’s great to see it come to fruition.”
Saber Strike 2014 allowed the U.S., the Baltics and other partner nations to integrate capabilities and interoperability to help sustain our alliance and partnerships. The integration of air power ensures we are ready to promote the security and stability of the region as a joint force.
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U.S. Air Forces in Europe
U.S. Air Forces Africa
June 23, 2014
USAF builds partnership with Baltic States
By Senior Airman Jonathan Stefanko
86th Airlift Wing Public Affairs
RIGA, Latvia: Airmen from the 435th Contingency Response Group arrived at Lielvarde Air Base, Latvia in Europe, June 16, 2014, to participate in the Air Force-specific portion to Saber Strike 2014.
Saber Strike is a regularly scheduled, reoccurring exercise that promotes the enduring commitment the United States and other allied nations have with the Baltic States.
“This is a capability we have not had the opportunity really train on in approximately six years,” said Master Sgt. William Mendez, 435th CRG contingency weather forecaster. “Coming to a foreign air base and truly starting from step in making it operable for our guys is a great experience.”
During the final week of Saber Strike 2014 the 435th CRG, in conjunction with the 37th Airlift Squadron, trained on the full capabilities to open the Latvian air base. They also trained with Latvian and Estonian service members on airfield operations, command and control of air and space forces, weather support, protection of operational forces, aircraft maintenance and aerial port services.
Exercising these unique capabilities with partner nations represents a step toward further development of the air base’s infrastructure and operations that could be used by the United States and other allied nations, stated Lt. Col. Andrew Roberts, bilateral affairs office, U.S. Embassy – Latvia.
“In many situations it’s almost a peer experience,” Roberts said. “We’re giving to them just as we are getting from them. So those lessons learned could come back into the U.S. Air Force structure and we can utilize them at our own bases.”
Building upon a foundation of friendship that started in 1991, the U.S. and Baltic States trained together to learn various techniques that ranged from transporting cargo to properly marshaling an aircraft.
“Working with our allied nations was not only a great teaching experience but we also learned various procedures they use which we can implement during joint missions,” Mendez said. “From sharing combat life-saver skills, jumping together from a C-130 J-model and for the first time, participating in sling-load operations with the Latvian counterparts.
Ukrainian writers on war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Ukrainian writers on war
Ivan Franko: Even the dove has the blood of men on its snowy white wings
Nikolai Gogol: The dove not seeing the hawk. War in the Ukraine
Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky: Man the despoiler, man the slayer
Junta Leader: Largest Military Operation In Ukraine’s History
National Radio Company of Ukraine
June 23, 2014
Ukrainian armed forces complete most large-scale military operation in Ukraine’s contemporary history
This is what Ukrainian President Poroshenko said in an address to the Ukrainian people.
“The army took the fire under control and set the mode of defense throughout most of the state border of Russia in Lugansk and Donetsk regions. Ukraine has sufficient strength and political will to resist the criminal armed formations.- said Poroshenko, explaining the meaning declared by June 27 truce.”We are prepared to restore the country’s territorial integrity using all the means available…,” he said.
Pentagon Tests Ground-Based Midcourse Interceptor Missile System
Missile Defense Agency
June 22, 2014
Target Missile Intercepted Over the Pacific Ocean During Missile Defense Exercise
The Missile Defense Agency, U.S. Air Force 30th Space Wing, the Joint Functional Component Command, Integrated Missile Defense, U.S. Northern Command and the U.S. Navy completed an integrated exercise of the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) element of the nation’s Ballistic Missile Defense System (BMDS). During the test today, a long-range ground-based interceptor launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, intercepted an intermediate-range ballistic missile target launched from the U.S. Army’s Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
The test, designated Flight Test Ground-Based Interceptor-06b (FTG-06b), will provide the data necessary to assess the performance of numerous BMDS elements for homeland defense.
Navy Vice Adm. James D. Syring, Missile Defense Agency director, said, “I am very proud of the government and industry team conducting the test today. Their professionalism and dedication made this test a success.”
He added, “This is a very important step in our continuing efforts to improve and increase the reliability of our homeland ballistic missile defense system. We’ll continue efforts to ensure our deployed Ground-based Interceptors and our overall homeland defensive architecture continue to provide the warfighter an effective and dependable system to defend the country.”
For this exercise, a threat-representative, intermediate-range ballistic missile target was launched from the Reagan Test Site. The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Hopper (DDG 70), with its Aegis Weapon System, detected and tracked the target using its onboard AN/SPY-1 radar, which provided data to the GMD fire control system via the Command, Control, Battle Management and Communication (C2BMC) system. The Sea-Based X-Band radar also tracked the target, and relayed information to the GMD fire control system to assist in the target engagement and collect test data.
About six minutes after target launch, the Ground-Based Interceptor was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base. A three-stage booster rocket system propelled the interceptor’s Capability Enhancement II EKV into the target missile’s projected trajectory in space. The kill vehicle maneuvered to the target, performed discrimination, and intercepted the threat warhead with “hit to kill” technology, using only the force of the direct collision between the interceptor and the target to destroy the target warhead. This was the first intercept using the second- generation Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle.
An operational crew of U.S. Army soldiers from the 100th Missile Defense Brigade, located at Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado, remotely launched the interceptor.
Initial indications are that all components performed as designed. Program officials will spend the next several months conducting an extensive assessment and evaluation of system performance based upon telemetry and other data obtained during the test.
The test was the 65th successful hit-to-kill intercept of 81 attempts since 2001 for the Ballistic Missile Defense System. The GMD element of the system has completed four intercepts using the operationally configured interceptor since 2006. Operational Ground-Based Interceptors are currently deployed at Fort Greely, Alaska, and Vandenberg Air Force Base, protecting the nation, our friends, and allies against a limited long-range ballistic missile attack.
Maxim Gorky: What in war is honorable, in peacetime is criminal
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Maxim Gorky: Selections on war
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Maxim Gorky
From Other Fires (1933)
Translated by Alexander Bakshy
Next day he woke up early and lay long abed, musing about a trip abroad. The pain was no longer so severe, probably because one can grow used to it; whereas stillness in the kitchen and the street was not customary and was disturbing. Soon, however, it began to be shaken by the jolts on the pink panes of the windows, coming from the street; after each jolt there came a dull, powerful drone unlike the sound of thunder. It was possible to imagine that instead of clouds a skin was stretched over the sky, upon which, as on a drum, something beat with an enormous fist.
“These are very big cannon,” Samghin concluded and said in a low voice, protestingly, “Swine!”
He jumped to the floor – the action nearly making him scream with pain – and began to dress, but lay down again, wrapping himself up to the chin.
“It’s madness and cowardice, to fire cannon, to destroy houses, the town. The hundreds of thousands of people are not responsible for the actions of a few dozen.”
***
“You, as a civilian, think it’s very simple: you flog seventeen, or nine, or four men – whatever the number – and it’s all over. You go to bed and sleep until the next expedition. So? No, sir. That is not such a simple matter. Before starting it, you have to drink, and after – drink again, drink long and deep…Captain Tatarnikov – you perhaps read about it – shot some peasants, reported himself, and there and then put a bullet through his head. That was called a scandal. The question was raised: should he be buried with music or without? And yet, in the Japanese War, he commanded a battalion and was awarded two crosses of St. George. Such a clever man and so full of fun…Played billiards divinely – ”
NATO Military Attachés Inspect Georgian Air Base
Ministry of Defense of Georgia
June 19, 2014
Military attaches visit Marneuli Aviation Brigade
The military attaches of foreign countries accredited to Georgia visited Marneuli Aviation Brigade of the Georgian Armed Forces. Brigade Commander COL Davit Abramishvili delivered the presentation to Diplomatic Corps` members on the structure and tasks of the military unit. The visitors were also informed on the completed and ongoing rehabilitation works at the brigade territory, as well as took view of the unit infrastructure.
The visit in the Aviation Brigade was carried out within the annual plan of the Association of Military Attaches accredited to Georgia. This Association incorporates 24 countries` representatives.
The goal of the Association is to have access to the first hand information over the ongoing reforms in Georgia`s security system. The Diplomatic Corps representatives are cooperating with Georgian Ministry of Defence within a bilateral military plan.
George Bernard Shaw: Rabid war maniacs reversed the order of nature
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
George Bernard Shaw: Selections on war
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George Bernard Shaw
From Preface to Heartbreak House (1919)
The Rabid Watchdogs of Liberty
Not content with these rancorous abuses of the existing law, the war maniacs made a frantic rush to abolish all constitutional guarantees of liberty and well-being. The ordinary law was superseded by Acts under which newspapers were seized and their printing machinery destroyed by simple police raids a la Russe, and persons arrested and shot without any pretence of trial by jury or publicity of procedure or evidence. Though it was urgently necessary that production should be increased by the most scientific organization and economy of labor, and though no fact was better established than that excessive duration and intensity of toil reduces production heavily instead of increasing it, the factory laws were suspended, and men and women recklessly over-worked until the loss of their efficiency became too glaring to be ignored. Remonstrances and warnings were met either with an accusation of pro-Germanism or the formula, “Remember that we are at war now.” I have said that men assumed that war had reversed the order of nature, and that all was lost unless we did the exact opposite of everything we had found necessary and beneficial in peace. But the truth was worse than that. The war did not change men’s minds in any such impossible way. What really happened was that the impact of physical death and destruction, the one reality that every fool can understand, tore off the masks of education, art, science and religion from our ignorance and barbarism, and left us glorying grotesquely in the licence suddenly accorded to our vilest passions and most abject terrors. Ever since Thucydides wrote his history, it has been on record that when the angel of death sounds his trumpet the pretences of civilization are blown from men’s heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind. But when this scripture was fulfilled among us, the shock was not the less appalling because a few students of Greek history were not surprised by it. Indeed these students threw themselves into the orgy as shamelessly as the illiterate. The Christian priest, joining in the war dance without even throwing off his cassock first, and the respectable school governor expelling the German professor with insult and bodily violence, and declaring that no English child should ever again be taught the language of Luther and Goethe, were kept in countenance by the most impudent repudiations of every decency of civilization and every lesson of political experience on the part of the very persons who, as university professors, historians, philosophers, and men of science, were the accredited custodians of culture. It was crudely natural, and perhaps necessary for recruiting purposes, that German militarism and German dynastic ambition should be painted by journalists and recruiters in black and red as European dangers (as in fact they are), leaving it to be inferred that our own militarism and our own political constitution are millennially democratic (which they certainly are not); but when it came to frantic denunciations of German chemistry, German biology, German poetry, German music, German literature, German philosophy, and even German engineering, as malignant abominations standing towards British and French chemistry and so forth in the relation of heaven to hell, it was clear that the utterers of such barbarous ravings had never really understood or cared for the arts and sciences they professed and were profaning, and were only the appallingly degenerate descendants of the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who, recognizing no national frontiers in the great realm of the human mind, kept the European comity of that realm loftily and even ostentatiously above the rancors of the battle-field. Tearing the Garter from the Kaiser’s leg, striking the German dukes from the roll of our peerage, changing the King’s illustrious and historically appropriate surname (for the war was the old war of Guelph against Ghibelline, with the Kaiser as Arch–Ghibelline) to that of a traditionless locality. One felt that the figure of St. George and the Dragon on our coinage should be replaced by that of the soldier driving his spear through Archimedes. But by that time there was no coinage: only paper money in which ten shillings called itself a pound as confidently as the people who were disgracing their country called themselves patriots.
Ukrainian Army Expands War Into Russian Territory
RIA Novosti
June 20, 2014
Independence Supporters, Ukrainian Army Fighting Near Russian Border
LUHANSK: Luhansk defense forces are currently engaged in fighting with the Ukrainian military near the border with Russia, a spokesperson for the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic told RIA Novosti.
“Starting from last night, protracted fighting has continued in the vicinity of the Dolzhanka and Gukovo checkpoints [The Ukrainian army is] trying to push us away from the border and take it under control,” the spokesperson said, adding that fighting is particularly fierce near the town Krasniy Partizan. There is no information on the number casualties so far.
Earlier, Russia’s OSCE envoy Andrei Kelin said Russia would react harshly to any border violations on the Ukrainian side. An incident took place on the night of June 13, in which a Ukrainian infantry combat vehicle violated the Russian border in Rostov Region. The vehicle stopped on Russian territory near the town of Millerovo. The troops exited the vehicle and returned to Ukrainian territory. Later the infantrymen tried to return the vehicle, without success, as Russian border control cut the attempt short. The incident is being looked in to by Russian investigators.
The spokesperson also reported that the Ukrainian Air Force bombed the outskirts of Luhansk last night. “The plane approached the city, flew over the city, but for some reason dropped the bombs on an empty field, near Stanytsia-Luhanska,” said the spokesperson.
Since mid-April, Kiev authorities have been conducting a special military operation to suppress the pro-independence movement in Ukraine’s southeastern territories. Hundreds of people, including civilians, have died in the self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk people’s republics in the east of Ukraine over the past months.
Moscow, which describes the ongoing military actions as a punitive operation, has repeatedly called for an immediate end to the bloodshed.
U.S., German Defense Chiefs Discuss NATO And Afghan, Ukrainian, Iraqi And Syrian Wars
U.S. Department of Defense
June 19, 2014
Hagel, German Defense Minister Discuss NATO, Iraq
By Cheryl Pellerin
American Forces Press Service
WASHINGTON: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and German Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen met this morning at the Pentagon, reaffirming the two nations’ strong friendship and alliance, Pentagon Press Secretary Navy Rear Adm. John Kirby said in a statement.
The leaders discussed security challenges, ranging from post-2014 commitments in Afghanistan to recent developments in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine, Kirby said.
“Secretary Hagel and Minister von der Leyen discussed both nations’ efforts to reinforce NATO and to reassure our NATO allies since Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine,” he said, adding that such reassurance includes ongoing air, land and sea measures by the U.S. military and other NATO members.
The measures include President Barack Obama’s June 3 announcement of the European Reassurance Initiative of up to $1 billion to fund increased rotational presence and exercises across Europe, and Germany’s contributions, which in September will include support to NATO’s Baltic air policing mission, Kirby said.
Hagel also thanked von der Leyen for Germany’s contributions and sacrifices in Afghanistan.
“Germany has been the third largest contributor of troops and the leader of Regional Command North,” the press secretary said. “We welcome Germany’s willingness to continue leading Regional Command North as part of NATO’s post-2014 Resolute Support mission.”
Hagel and von der Leyen also discussed the upcoming NATO Summit, to be held Sept. 4-5 in Wales.
Kirby said the United States and Germany count on each other to be credible, capable partners as leaders in the transatlantic alliance and the global community.
“As the crises in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine remind us,” he added, “our leadership roles require investment in ready, modern, agile militaries.”
He added, “Both leaders recognized the importance of investing in capabilities that will strengthen our collective security.”
Both also agreed that, as the NATO Summit approaches, they must renew their commitments to transatlantic security, Kirby said.
After their meeting, Hagel left the Pentagon for the White House where the president met with members of his national security team in the Situation Room ahead of Obama’s statement on the U.S. response to violence in Iraq.
Von der Leyen, who Hagel invited to Washington in February during the Munich Security Conference, held a press conference on the steps of the Pentagon’s River entrance.
The German defense minister characterized her conversation with Hagel as “trustful and constructive,” and on the crisis in Iraq she said, “For the long term we need a sustainable solution for the whole region. That is, we have to integrate the diplomatic and political solution from neighboring countries of the whole region.”
Graham Greene: A hundred English Guernicas
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Graham Greene: He carried the war in his heart, infecting everything
Graham Greene: Letter On NATO Threat To Cuba
Graham Greene: None of us can hate any more – or love. You have to feel something to stop a war.
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Graham Greene
From Bombing Raid (1939)
[T]his is not the kind of war which entails much walking; it is a sitting war from which it is impossible to run...Once, miles away, little black flies at perhaps 8,000 feet, three fighters patrolled a parallel track and slowly dropped behind: we were unspotted. One felt a momentary horror at the exposure of a whole quiet landscape to machine-gun fire - this was an area for evacuation, of small villages and farms where children's camps might possibly be built, and it was completely open to the four aircraft which swept undetected from behind the tress and between the hills. There was room for a hundred English Guernicas.
Allies, Partners: 70-Nation NATO Strategic Conference In Bulgaria
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Allied Command Operations
June 19, 2014
JFC BRUNSSUM COMMANDER GIVES KEY NOTE ADDRESS AT STRATEGIC MILITARY PARTNERS CONFERENCE
The Strategic Military Partners Conference (SMPC) is an annual event that enables Chiefs of Defence (CHODs) of NATO and Partner nations to share their perspectives on strategic issues of common interest. As such, it is a core event within Supreme Allied Commander Transformation’s (SACT) Strategic Engagement Campaign. Its target audience consists of CHODs of NATO, Partnership for Peace (PfP) nations, Mediterranean Dialogue (MD) nations, Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) nations and Partners across the Globe (PatG) nations, and informs them about NATO’s transformational efforts.
By creating a common understanding amongst a wide array of partners and members of the Alliance alike, the intent of SMPC is to facilitate the exchange of ideas regarding transformation throughout the trans-Atlantic community.
The President of Bulgaria, His Excellency Mr. Rosen Plevneliev, welcomed the participants to the conference, which was held in Sofia on Wednesday, 18 June 2014, and emphasized that the security landscape has changed substantially and, as a consequence, cooperative security is more important than ever before.
The Bulgarian Chief of Defence, General Simeon Simeonov, also welcomed the participants, thanked them for travelling to Sofia, and highlighted the Bulgarian Armed Forces’ commitment to NATO.
Following a video message from the NATO Deputy Secretary General and Supreme Allied Commander Transformation’s Key Note address on Interoperability, Capacity Building and the military value of Partnerships, Commander Allied Joint Force Command Brunssum took the floor.
On SACT’s request, General Hans-Lothar Domröse gave a Key Note Address entitled ‘NATO and Partners’ Common Interests: Cooperation and Capacity Building’. During the Address, General Domröse echoed the words of the Bulgarian President as he also emphasized that Cooperative Security, as one of NATO’s Core tasks, is more important than ever due to the changing security landscape in Europe and worldwide.
General Domröse also presented the achievements of the International Community and NATO in Afghanistan and, in addition, provided his assessment of the NATO Response Force’s potential and constraints. He underlined that interoperability could only be enhanced by working/training together and invited all partners to provide forces and other capabilities in order to train together during Exercise Trident Juncture 2015.
General Domröse concluded that, on NATO’s military operational level, cooperation and capacity building with partners is on track, but requires sustained and strong support of the nations to fully optimize.
Story by JFC Brunssum Public Affairs Office
Guy de Maupassant: Selections on war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Guy de Maupassant: The Horrible
Guy de Maupassant: How and why wars are plotted
Guy de Maupassant: I only pray that our sons may never see any wars again
Guy de Maupassant: Military hysteria, military presumptuousness
Guy de Maupassant: Why does society not rise up bodily in rebellion at the word “war”?
Official: 65-Day U.S.-NATO Proxy War In Ukraine Is…War
National Radio Company of Ukraine
June 18, 2014
President: Ukraine amid new type of warfare
“Ukraine is in a state of war,” Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said.
“This is a new type of warfare with the use of professional subversive groups, mercenaries, volunteers, and the local population. And these volunteers and the local population have very ‘washed’ brains in a huge part due to the information war,” Poroshenko said during a graduation ceremony for the students of the National University of the Ukrainian Defence Ministry on Wednesday.
===================================================================
Interfax-Ukraine
June 18, 2014
Ukrainian army plans to buy around 1,000 APCs, says NSDC
The Ukrainian army is testing new APCs with the purpose of ordering the vehicles, spokesman for the National Security and Defense Council Volodymyr Chepovy has said.
“The Ukrainian Armed Forces will conduct comparative tests of BTR-3E1s and BTR-4Bs [Butsefal] to select the most suitable APC for the Armed Forces,” he said at a briefing in Kyiv on Wednesday.
He said that around 1,000 APCs would be bought.
Chepovy said that the issue of buying Dozor B lightly armored APCs is being discussed.
====================================================================
Interfax-Ukraine
June 18, 2014
Nearly 150 soldiers killed in fighting in east Ukraine; almost 360 injured – ministry
A total of 147 military servicemen have been killed and 267 injured since the armed standoff began in the eastern Ukrainian regions, the Director of the Military-Medical Department of the Defense Ministry, Medical Service Colonel Vitaliy Andronaty, told a parliamentary healthcare committee on Wednesday.
Ninety-two soldiers have suffered traumas in the anti-terrorist operation zone since March 8, including 14 sustaining combat traumas, he said. Of the 267 injured, 247 sustained combat injuries. Currently, 13 injured personnel are in critical condition.
The official pointed to shortages of sanitary transport vehicles. The Defense Ministry also needs sanitary vehicles with enhanced off-road capabilities. Andronaty said that patients and the injured get transported from the security operation zone by Mil Mi-8 helicopters and Antonov An-26 medical aircraft.
Earlier this week Ukraine’s First Deputy Prime Minister Vitali Yarema said that 125 government troops were killed in the southeast, including 96 military personnel, 22 policemen, as well as Ukrainian border guards and security officers.
…
It is important to assign trained, well equipped and well armed fighters on combat missions, he said…
====================================================================
Interfax-Ukraine
June 18, 2014
Poroshenko: Sloviansk to be encircled, armed opposition to be liquidated
Ukrainian law enforcement units will encircle Sloviansk to liquidate the armed opposition and regain full control over the state border in eastern regions, Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko said.
“We are taking resolute steps and conducting successful operations towards the restoration [of control] over the state border,” the president told reporters in Kyiv on Wednesday.
“We will do our best today to encircle Sloviansk; we are moving on and the circle is tightening in order to liquidate the militants led by the so-called Shooter [defense minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic Igor Girkin (Strelkov)] who are resisting Ukrainian servicemen with arms,” Poroshenko said.
The president said he was maintaining permanent contact with senior officials of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry and the anti-terrorist operation command.
===================================================================
Interfax-Ukraine
June 18, 2014
Army will always be No. 1 priority for Ukrainians – Poroshenko
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said that the army will always be the No. 1 priority for the state.
“I can assure you and the Ukrainian army will be the number one priority for me, for the Ukrainian government, the Ukrainian budget, and the Ukrainian population,” he said during a graduation ceremony for the students of the National University of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry on Wednesday
====================================================================
UNIAN
June 17, 2014
Poroshenko forbids cooperation with Russia in military area – Yarema
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko forbade cooperation with Russia in military area.
Poroshenko forbids cooperation with Russia in military area – Yarema/Photo UNIANFirst Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine Vitaliy Yarema said this on the air of “Svoboda Slova”.
“At sitting of the National Security and Defense Council the President of Ukraine strongly forbade cooperation in military area. From this day forth we ceased any cooperation in military-industrial complex area with the Russian Federation”, – said the first Vice Prime Minister.
Map: NATO on duty around the world
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Legend
NATO Missions & deployments
Since the Balkan crises of the mid-1990s, NATO has been continuously deployed on military operations and missions across three continents. NATO’s current deployments build upon the experience of over two decades.
Troop-contributing partners 
A wide range of partners contribute troops and equipment to NATO-led military operations and missions.
NATO command & control 
NATO is a political and military organisation which allows the 28 Allies to debate, decide and deploy quickly, seamlessly and effectively. This structure permits commanders to run the full range of operations, missions and exercises, under the political oversight of the Allies.
Sharing knowledge with partners 
Allies and partners are sharing skills and expertise in the fields of education, training and exercises and, more generally, capacity-building, to maintain interoperability between their forces and acquire long-term know-how.
NATO members 
The heart of NATO is the 28 members of the Alliance. They are bound together by the Washington Treaty, their common commitment to collective values and collective defence.
NATO partners
NATO has developed a network of structured partnerships with countries from the Euro-Atlantic area, the Mediterranean and the Gulf region, as well as individual relationships with other partners across the globe.
Partnership for Peace partners
Founded in January 1994, the Partnership for Peace programme aims to promote peace, security and stability through cooperation across the Euro-Atlantic area and beyond. It currently numbers 22 countries.
Mediterranean Dialogue partners
Created in December 1994, the Mediterranean Dialogue builds political consultation and practical cooperation between NATO and seven countries in the Mediterranean area.
Istanbul Cooperation Initiative partners
Launched in June 2004, the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative promotes political consultation and practical cooperation between NATO and four countries in the Gulf region.
Partners across the globe
NATO cooperates on an individual basis with a number of countries, which are not part of its partnership framework. These countries develop cooperation with NATO in areas of mutual interest and some contribute to NATO-led military operations and missions.
Video highlights & Feature stories 
NATO is on duty 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, deterring threats, defending Allies, conducting operations, carrying out exercises, developing new capabilities and working with partners. These video and web features highlight just some of the Alliance’s latest activities.
NATO Missions & deployments Troop-contributing partners NATO command & control Sharing knowledge with partners NATO members Partnership for Peace partners Mediterranean Dialogue partners Istanbul Cooperation Initiative partners Partners across the globe Video highlights Feature stories
Siegfried Sassoon: Our deeds with lies were lauded, our bones with wrongs rewarded
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Siegfried Sassoon: Selections on war
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Siegfried Sassoon
Ex-Service
Derision from the dead
Mocks armamental madness.
Redeem (each Ruler said)
Mankind. Men died to do it.
And some with glorying gladness
Bore arms for earth and bled:
But most went glumly through it
Dumbly doomed to rue it.
The darkness of their dying
Grows one with War recorded;
Whose swindled ghosts are crying
From shell-holes in the past,
Our deeds with lies were lauded,
Our bones with wrongs rewarded.
Dream voices these — denying
Dud laurels to the last.
Baltics: NATO Commander Pushes Assurance Measures Re Russia
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Allied Command Operations
June 17, 2014
JFC Brunssum Deputy Commander visits Exercise Saber Strike
Brunssum, THE NETHERLANDS: Deputy Commander Joint Force Command Brunssum (JFCBS), Air Marshal Graham Stacey, witnessed firsthand a number of Exercise Saber Strike 2014 serials during a visit to Latvia on Monday, 16 June 2014. During his visit, he also met the JFCBS team deployed to the region in the framework of the NATO Assurance Measures developed as a consequence of Russia’s intervention in the Ukraine.
Saber Strike 2014 is an annual, US Army Europe-led, Field Training, Live Fire, Command Post and Computer Aided security cooperation exercise spanning the Baltic States. This years’ event involves participants from 10 countries and is taking place from 9-20 June.
The JFCBS “Assurance” Team has been deployed to Latvia to further enhance close coordination with the host nation and to gain first hand information on what support Latvia might seek from NATO in the light of the crisis in Ukraine. At the same time, the team is observing Exercise Saber Strike 2014 with an eye to identifying lessons that might be incorporated in future Alliance planning.
During his visit, Air Marshal Stacey met with the Chief of Staff of the Joint Headquarters of the Latvian Armed Forces, Brigadier General Juris Zeibarts, and exercise Co-directors, Brigadier General Ainars Ozolins, Latvian Army and Major General Mark McQueen, U.S. Army to discuss the exercise and recent developments in the region.
Air Marshal Stacey pointed out: “It is very much about working together and building the partnerships. The JFCBS “Assurance” team is here in order to capture relevant lessons learned regarding operational capability and interoperability between allies and partners”.
“I think now we have a real opportunity in NATO to improve what we have been doing: build our capabilities, build our collaboration and build on working together. This visit is an opportunity to look sensibly at the responsiveness of our forces and it is also a good chance to look at how Brunssum can continue to build on our relationship pave the way to long term cooperation”.
Brigadier General Zeibarts expressed his appreciation to Air Marshal Stacey for finding the time to travel to Latvia to observe “Saber Strike 2014” and stressed the role of the NATO JFCBS team to enhance further cooperation was a welcome development.
Brigadier General Zeibarts supported the desire to develop further strong cooperation amongst Allies. “Taking into account the changed situation in the region, it is important to emphasize the principles of collective defence and partnership, as well as demonstrate the NATO Assurance measures”, he said. Brigadier General Zeibarts stressed: “all the Baltic States and Poland share the same concerns and appreciate strengthened NATO presence in the region”.
Story by JFC Brunssum Public Affairs Office
NATO To Hold Strategic Military Partner Conference In Bulgaria
Focus News Agency
June 17, 2014
Bulgaria to host NATO’s Strategic Military Partner Conference 2014
Sofia” Bulgaria is to host NATO’s Strategic Military Partner Conference 2014 at the level of Chiefs of Defence, which will be hosted at the Kempinski Hotel Zografski in the capital Sofia, the press centre of the Defence Ministry announced.
The event will be held from June 17 until June 19. It is organised by NATO Allied Command Transformation (ACT).
The conference will be opened by Bulgarian Chief of Defence General Simeon Simeonov and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, General Jean-Paul Paloméros.
Some 69 delegations have been invited to take part in the conference and some 300 representatives of NATO member states and countries which are NATO’s partners in the Partnership for Peace, the Mediterranean Dialogue, and other initiatives are expected to attend the conference.
The event aims at a discussion on further strengthening of cooperation as well as on the new complex challenges for security globally. The forum will provide a chance to a range of NATO’s partners and members to establish common positions and exchange ideas on the state and further development of processes connected with defence and security.
Maxim Gorky: Military Tower of Babel
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Maxim Gorky: Selections on war
====
Maxim Gorky
From The Magnet (1931)
Translated by Alexander Bakshy
“As I was saying: with Colonel Perpotzki, we were taking the Chinese capital, Peking…”
He was telling the story for the workers, but his words flew straight into Samghin’s face.
“So, you don’t want to shoot? No, sir. Then stand in that same place. Aliosha went and stood next to the shot body; made the sign of the cross. It was all over in a moment: Platoon, fire! There’s your Christ! Christ is no defence for a soldier, none at all! The soldier is a man outside the law…
****
“Barracks are a pimple on the earth, a boil, you see?…”
****
They emerged on the sunlight flooded Field, which was covered with greyish scorched turf. Undulating gently, the ground rose in the distance to reach the smoky clouds; far off, the uniform conic shapes of the camp tents rose like snow hills; to their left, again the dark background of the woods, mowed rows of white toy-like soldiers; still further to the left rose into the blue void between the clouds a brick building, bright red in the sun, girt with the little sticks of the scaffolding and surrounded by huddling crowds of workmen who looked like little children. A white rider on a bronze-hued horse moved resplendent against the sun towards the soldiers marching with glittering bayonets.
“At one end of the city Varavka has built a slaughter-house and a prison,” grumbled Inokov, strolling along the edge of a ravine, “and at the other end, his competitor is building barracks.”
Grey dry blades of grass crackled under Clim’s feet. Open spaces humbled and saddened him. Keeping step with Inokov, he felt like melting away in the rays of the sun, in the hot air, saturated with the odour of parched grass. He had no desire to speak, nor to listen to Inokov’s grumblings. He walked on, fixing his gaze on the construction-work of the barracks; they were rising in three buildings, trapeze-shaped; the middle one was nearly finished, the bricklayers putting on the last rows of the third storey. One could see distinctly the little figures in red and blue blouses and white aprons, moving about the edge of the wall, and workmen loaded with bricks, moving with heavy steps up the planks through the web of the scaffolding. The path continued along the edge of the ravine, deeply cut by water in a clay soil, one slope littered with garbage and overgrown with shrubs and weeds, the other grimly bare, iron-coloured, and scratched as if with nails. There was strong contrast between this deep fissure in the earth and the huge building, the building being raised by those little human beings. Samghin reflected that it would require many thousands of those brightly coloured little figure to fill up the ravine to the brim.
Suddenly Inokov, as if he had stumbled over something, nudged Clim and shouted:
“Damnation. Run quick!”
He dashed ahead agilely as a boy.
For a few seconds Clim did not realize what he was seeing. Apparently the blue patch of the sky had jerked the wall forward and, swelling, over it, was pressing and turning it over. The poles of the grey wooden cage imprisoning the vast building began to sway, bending slowly and as if unwillingly towards Clim, stripping the wall and dragging it forward. Cracking, rattling, snapping bricks were tumbling on the ladders.
Not until Samghin saw the workers jumping off the wall in the chaos of poles and boards that were sliding to the ground; saw them pitch over the hods of bricks they were carrying on their backs and bolt with terrible speed down the steps, the bricks, falling behind them, beating an increasingly clamorous tattoo on the wood until their uproar drowned out the racket of cracking and crashing – not until then, did Samghin realize that the wall was collapsing. He ran, and felt the ground bumping under his feet, bringing the falling building nearer and nearer. The wall was crumbling piece-meal, exhaling brown dust. The yawning mouths of the windows grimaced disgustingly. One of them projected the long end of a wide plank and wagged it like a tongue.
It was incredible that people could flash through the air so swiftly, in such unnaturally distorted poses, and plop on to the ground with a thump so loud that Clim heard it even through the crashing and the cracking, and the discordant shrieks of horror. A few men dashed to the ground as if they had been pushed by the air; apparently they wanted to leap over the writhing heap of poles and boards, but the lumber, shaking like the legs of a spider, caught them as they fell and transfixed them in a vise. In a window a man appeared, grasping a long stick; the sides of the window collapsed, the man dropped the stick, threw up his arms and tumbled over backwards.
A wide straw hat shot into the air and dropped, rolling towards Samghin’s feet. He leaped aside, looked back, and realized instantly that he had not run away from the catastrophe, as he had intended to, but was twenty steps from a hideous pile of wood and bricks in which striking boards and poles jerked and swayed. Clim’s knees were shaking. He sat on the ground, blinking. Pulling off his spectacles he saw bricklayers and carpenters scatter in all directions, their hands shaking…
NATO Holds South Caucasus Seminar In Azerbaijan
AzerNews
June 16, 2014
Baku hosts NATO seminar on South Caucasus
Baku is hosting NATO Parliamentary Assembly’s 86th seminar “Rose-Roth” on June 16, titled:”South Caucasus: Challenges and opportunities.”
Addressing the opening ceremony of “Rose-Roth” seminar, President of NATO Parliamentary Assembly Hugh Bailey said NATO will continue its efforts in helping the sides of the Armenian-Azerbaijani Nagorno-Karabakh conflict to reach an agreement.
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“Azerbaijan is located in a complex region. Nagorno-Karabakh conflict can only be resolved by means of compromise. In turn, NATO will continue its efforts to ensure that parties of the conflict will come to an agreement,” Bailey said.
He also expressed satisfaction that the seminar is attended by representatives of Armenia.
Also, speaking at the seminar, Azerbaijani Parliament Speaker Ogtay Asadov said it is necessary to establish a relationship based on mutual trust, promoted cooperation devoid of double standards in order to overcome the conflicts in the South Caucasus.
Asadov hoped that this seminar will have an impact on the situation in the South Caucasus.
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Referring to the close cooperation between Azerbaijan and NATO, Asadov added that the country intends to continue its cooperation with this organization.
He also stressed the close ties between Azerbaijan and Europe on the issue of energy security.
Then, Asadov asked the participants to express their views on the situation in Iraq, where several Turkish diplomats were taken hostage.
NATO and Azerbaijan are actively cooperating on democratic, institutional, and military reforms, and enjoy practical cooperation in various areas.
The cooperation plan between Azerbaijan and NATO is set out in the Individual Partnership Action Plan (IPAP) on Azerbaijan.
Azerbaijan aspires to achieve Euro-Atlantic standards and get closer to Euro-Atlantic institutions. In this regard, supporting reform in the security sector and establishing democratic institutions are the key elements of the NATO-Azerbaijan cooperation.
The number of Azerbaijan’s peacekeepers in Afghanistan doubled in 2009. Currently, some 90 Azerbaijani servicemen are serving in ISAF. A company and then a battalion of peacekeepers were established in the country as part of the Azerbaijani armed forces in 1997.
In the past, Azerbaijan actively supported NATO’s operations in Kosovo.
Azerbaijan is among the eight partner countries that have confirmed their presence in Afghanistan after 2014.
George Bernard Shaw: War and frivolous exultation in death for its own sake
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
George Bernard Shaw: Selections on war
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George Bernard Shaw
From Preface to Heartbreak House (1919)
Evil in the Throne of Good
This distress of the gentle was so acute that those who shared it in civil life, without having to shed blood with their own hands, or witness destruction with their own eyes, hardly care to obtrude their own woes. Nevertheless, even when sitting at home in safety, it was not easy for those who had to write and speak about the war to throw away their highest conscience, and deliberately work to a standard of inevitable evil instead of to the ideal of life more abundant. I can answer for at least one person who found the change from the wisdom of Jesus and St. Francis to the morals of Richard III and the madness of Don Quixote extremely irksome. But that change had to be made; and we are all the worse for it, except those for whom it was not really a change at all, but only a relief from hypocrisy.
Think, too, of those who, though they had neither to write nor to fight, and had no children of their own to lose, yet knew the inestimable loss to the world of four years of the life of a generation wasted on destruction. Hardly one of the epoch-making works of the human mind might not have been aborted or destroyed by taking their authors away from their natural work for four critical years. Not only were Shakespeares and Platos being killed outright; but many of the best harvests of the survivors had to be sown in the barren soil of the trenches. And this was no mere British consideration. To the truly civilized man, to the good European, the slaughter of the German youth was as disastrous as the slaughter of the English. Fools exulted in “German losses.” They were our losses as well. Imagine exulting in the death of Beethoven because Bill Sykes dealt him his death blow!
Straining at the Gnat and swallowing the Camel
But most people could not comprehend these sorrows. There was a frivolous exultation in death for its own sake, which was at bottom an inability to realize that the deaths were real deaths and not stage ones. Again and again, when an air raider dropped a bomb which tore a child and its mother limb from limb, the people who saw it, though they had been reading with great cheerfulness of thousands of such happenings day after day in their newspapers, suddenly burst into furious imprecations on “the Huns” as murderers, and shrieked for savage and satisfying vengeance. At such moments it became clear that the deaths they had not seen meant no more to them than the mimic death of the cinema screen. Sometimes it was not necessary that death should be actually witnessed: it had only to take place under circumstances of sufficient novelty and proximity to bring it home almost as sensationally and effectively as if it had been actually visible.
For example, in the spring of 1915 there was an appalling slaughter of our young soldiers at Neuve Chapelle and at the Gallipoli landing. I will not go so far as to say that our civilians were delighted to have such exciting news to read at breakfast. But I cannot pretend that I noticed either in the papers, or in general intercourse, any feeling beyond the usual one that the cinema show at the front was going splendidly, and that our boys were the bravest of the brave. Suddenly there came the news that an Atlantic liner, the Lusitania, had been torpedoed, and that several well-known first-class passengers, including a famous theatrical manager and the author of a popular farce, had been drowned, among others. The others included Sir Hugh Lane; but as he had only laid the country under great obligations in the sphere of the fine arts, no great stress was laid on that loss. Immediately an amazing frenzy swept through the country. Men who up to that time had kept their heads now lost them utterly. “Killing saloon passengers! What next?” was the essence of the whole agitation; but it is far too trivial a phrase to convey the faintest notion of the rage which possessed us. To me, with my mind full of the hideous cost of Neuve Chapelle, Ypres, and the Gallipoli landing, the fuss about the Lusitania seemed almost a heartless impertinence, though I was well acquainted personally with the three best-known victims, and understood, better perhaps than most people, the misfortune of the death of Lane. I even found a grim satisfaction, very intelligible to all soldiers, in the fact that the civilians who found the war such splendid British sport should get a sharp taste of what it was to the actual combatants. I expressed my impatience very freely, and found that my very straightforward and natural feeling in the matter was received as a monstrous and heartless paradox. When I asked those who gaped at me whether they had anything to say about the holocaust of Festubert, they gaped wider than before, having totally forgotten it, or rather, having never realized it. They were not heartless anymore than I was; but the big catastrophe was too big for them to grasp, and the little one had been just the right size for them. I was not surprised. Have I not seen a public body for just the same reason pass a vote for £30,000 without a word, and then spend three special meetings, prolonged into the night, over an item of seven shillings for refreshments?
The One That Almost Got Away: NATO Reclaims Malta
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Allied Maritime Command
June 13, 2014
NATO MINE COUNTER-MEASURES SHIPS VISIT MALTA
Valletta, MALTA: Standing NATO Mine Counter-Measures Group TWO (SNMCMG2) arrived in Valletta on Thursday, 12 June 2014, for a scheduled port visit during the Group’s deployment to the Mediterranean to enhance maritime security in the region and strengthen relations between NATO and Malta.
During this port visit, the Commander of SNMCMG2, Commander Matthias Seipel, will meet with the Commander of the Maritime Squadron of Malta’s Armed Forces (‘Midalja Ghal Qadi tar-Repubblika’). NATO units will also participate in joint training activities with the Maltese Maritime Squadron to enhance interoperability.
The crews of SNMCMG2 units will also have an excellent opportunity to enjoy the unique historical and cultural heritage of Malta.
“Maintaining a fruitful dialogue with Malta is of great importance to preserve our awareness of the region and deepen cooperation with our Mediterranean partners,” said Commander Seipel.
Since Germany assumed command of SNMCMG2 in June 2013, the Group has patrolled in the North Red Sea, Black Sea and Mediterranean Sea, including support to NATO’s counter-terrorism Operation ACTIVE ENDEAVOUR. During this deployment, the Group conducted mine counter-measures activities, including Historical Ordnance Disposal operations. The Group had also participated in a number of exercises such as the Greek exercise ARIADNE 13 and the Turkish exercise NUSRET 13.
Story by HQ MARCOM Public Affairs Office
León Bloy: The Sword
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
León Bloy
From León Bloy devant les Cochons (1894)
Translated by John Coleman
The lament of the sword. The first time the Spirit of Sabaoth spoke about me, it was to keep men from forgetting that I had been seen all aflame on the threshold of the lost Eden.
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At once I became War, and my fearful Name everywhere became the sign of Majesty.
I appeared as the sublime instrument of Providential blood-letting and, in my wonderful unawareness as the Elect of Fate, I espoused through the centuries every human feeling capable of speeding Fate on.
Anger, Love, Enthusiasm, Greed, Fanaticism and Insanity I served in so perfect a fashion that the history books have been afraid to tell the whole story.
During six thousand years I have made myself drunk, at all points of the globe, on massacre and throat-slitting.
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I have killed old men who were like palaces of Suffering. I have cut off the breasts of women who were like light, and I have run little children through who looked at me with eyes of moribund lions.
Daily have I galloped on the pale Horse along the avenue of cypresses “from the womb to the grave,” and I have made a fountain of blood out of every son of man within my reach.
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The world then was in ecstasy over my beauty. Christian lads dreamt of me. I was given the last kiss of dying monarchs, conquerors latticed in steel knelt with their eyes on me and whole continents were made to run with blood at the prayer I inspired.
When enthusiasm for the Cross had died away, I condescended to become the badge of what men called Honor, and, in this lowered state, I still appeared sufficiently magnificent for the whole of Europe one day to throw itself at the feet of a single Master who had placed me in the monstrance of his heart.
Most certainly he did not pray, this Emperor of Death, but all the same I strewed about him the ecumenical prayer of Sacrifice and Devotion – the dreadful red prayer that bellows forth in the slaughterhouses of nations.
Ah! it was not so splendid as the past! but who will say how beautiful it was? I know something about it, I, the Sword, of whom it is written that I shall devour everything at the end of ends!
Audio: Deployment Of U.S. Bombers To Europe Alarming
Press TV
June 14, 2014
Deployment of US bombers to Europe ‘alarming’: Analyst
A political analyst says it’s an “alarming” development that the US has deployed two of its nuclear-capable bombers into Europe near Russia’s borders.
The deployment of two B-2 stealth bombers into Europe for training could be very “dangerous,” said Rick Rozoff from Stop NATO International Network on Saturday.
The deployment comes at a time of conflict in Ukraine. US fighter jets have previously been deployed to Europe on similar training missions to show support for NATO allies.
With the military escalation between Eastern Europe and US allies, Rozoff warned, “the situation may be developing. This could rapidly get out of hand. We could see something catastrophic.”
“We could see, in fact, the use of nuclear weapons. And that’s the worst case scenario but that’s one that has to be considered,” he added.
The US Air Force said the mission for the pair of stealth bombers is to conduct flights in Europe and to become familiar with air bases and operations in the area.
“This deployment of strategic bombers provides an invaluable opportunity to strengthen and improve interoperability with our allies and partners,” said Adm. Cecil Haney, commander of US Strategic Command.
“The training and integration of strategic forces demonstrates to our nation’s leaders and our allies that we have the right mix of aircraft and expertise to respond to a variety of potential threats and situations,” Haney said.
The B-2s are assigned to the 509th Bomb Wing at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri.
Pro-NATO Hawk To Be Next Finnish Prime Minister
Xinhua News Agency
June 14, 2014
Finland to have a pro-NATO prime minister
By Juhani Niinisto
Finland’s Alexander Stubb and NATO’s Anders Fogh Rasmussen in earlier meeting
HELSINKI: The delegates of a traditional conservative party of Finland on Saturday elected a value liberal and supporter of Finnish membership in NATO as its chairman.
Alexander Stubb, aged 46, succeeds Jyrki Katainen as the chairman of the ruling National Coalition Party, and will take Katainen’s post as the prime minister later this month.
Addressing the party assembly before the vote on Saturday, Stubb said that, if elected, he would have to convince both the “nation’s leadership” and the people about the NATO issue.
Finnish President Sauli Niinisto had made outspoken caution towards ideas of a Finnish membership in NATO and public support level of a membership was at 22 percent in April.
Commenting to Xinhua, Timo Soikkanen, professor of political history at Turku University, said that Stubb will probably be the most pro-Western prime minister of Finland since World War Two.
Soikkanen said the pro-NATO attitude within the Finnish elite has been evident since the start of the Ukraine crisis.
On the Finnish ideological scene, the election of Stubb as party chairman is likely to enhance liberal attitudes within the Finnish conservative party, Soikkanen said.
In the first domestic political reactions, the chairman of the populist Finns party Timo Soini described Stubb as a “NATO hawk” and said that the party had switched from conservatism to liberalism.
In the final vote within the National Coalition Party in Lahti, central southern Finland, Stubb defeated moderate conservative social affairs minister Paula Risikko 500-349. In the first round of the election economic affairs minister Jan Vapaavuori dropped off the race, having got a few votes less than Risikko.
The formal change of the cabinet posts will be preceded by policy talks between the coalition partners. The Finnish five-party coalition government is to review next week agreements on economic savings plans agreed during the previous cabinet.
The talks may not be totally without friction as the second main party in the coalition, the Social Democratic Party, has difficulty in accepting them without at least some changes.
The support levels of the social democrats have been declining and their new chairman Antti Rinne is facing pressure to try to alleviate the impact of the savings.
Stubb was a member of European Parliament 2003-2008. He served as Finnish foreign minister 2008-2011. Since 2011 he has been the minister for Europe affairs and foreign trade.
In the 2014 election for EU Parliament last month, Stubb gathered the largest voter support in Finland.
Stubb’s native language is Swedish. He is the first native Swedish speaker as prime minister of Finland since social democrat K. A. Fagerholm in the 1950s.
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Finnish Broadcasting Company
June 14, 2014
Finns Party chair Soini: National Coalition elected NATO hawk
Reacting to the election of Alexander Stubb as National Coalition Party chair, Finns Party chair Timo Soini said that contender Jan Vapaavuori would have been a strong player as party leader.
As it turned out, National Coalition delegates thought otherwise. Soini did not appear to warm to Stubb as much.
“Stubb is so pro-NATO, so right-wing. The National Coalition got caught up in the voting for the European Parliament election,” Soini said, referring to Stubb’s landslide voter support in last month’s European Parliament elections.
Soini summed up the new National Coalition leader in a few choice words.
“A radical, market liberal NATO hawk. The National Coalition is moving from conservatism to liberalism,” he added.
“Two inexperienced leaders out front”
The opposition leader appeared to scoff at the idea of supplementary government talks between Stubb and the recently-elected leader of the Social Democratic Party, Antti Rinne.
“We have an inexperienced duo at the forefront. Katainen has driven the country to this point. It’s not easy. Social and health care reform is all over the place and the two main authors – Katainen and Urpilainen — are gone,” he remarked.
Soini conceded that the choice of chair was an internal matter for the National Coalition.
“Today is the best day of Alexander Stubb’s life. Politically I have a different view. Now people will see what the National Coalition is really about, behind Katainen’s curtain of fog,” he concluded cryptically.
Henry James: Beguiled into thinking war, worst horror that attends the life of nations, could not recur
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
American writers on peace and against war
William Dean Howells to Henry James: The most stupid and causeless war
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Henry James
Member of the Anti-Imperialist League
From Mr. and Mrs. Fields (1915)
If at such a time as this a man of my generation finds himself on occasion revert to our ancient peace in some soreness of confusion between envy and pity, I know well how best to clear up the matter for myself at least and to recover a workable relation with the blessing in eclipse. I recover it in some degree with pity, as I say, by reason of the deep illusions and fallacies in which the great glare of the present seems to show us as then steeped; there being always, we can scarce not feel, something pathetic in the recoil from fond fatuities. When these are general enough, however, they make their own law and impose their own scheme; they go on, with their fine earnestness, to their utmost limit, and the best of course are those that go on longest. When I think that the innocent confidence cultivated over a considerable part of the earth, over all the parts most offered to my own view, was to last well-nigh my whole lifetime, I cannot deny myself a large respect for it, cannot but see that if our illusion was complete we were at least insidiously and artfully beguiled. What we had taken so accurately to believing in was to bring us out at the brink of the abyss, yet as I look back I see nothing but our excuses; I cherish at any rate the image of their bright plausibility. We really, we nobly, we insanely (as it can only now strike us) held ourselves comfortably clear of the worst horror that in the past had attended the life of nations, and to the grounds of this conviction we could point with lively assurance. They all come back, one now recognizes, to a single supporting proposition, to the question of when in the world peace had so prodigiously flourished. It had been broken, and was again briefly broken, within our view, but only as if to show with what force and authority it could freshly assert itself; whereby it grew to look increasingly big, positively too massive even in its blandness, for interruptions not to be afraid of it.
It is in the light of this memory, I confess, that I bend fondly over the age – so prolonged, I have noted, as to yield ample space for the exercise – in which any challenge to our faith fell below the sweet serenity of it. I see by that any measure I might personally have applied the American, or at least the Northern, state of mind and of life that began to develop just after the Civil War formed the wellspring of our assumption. Odd enough might it have indeed appeared that this conception should need four years of free carnage to launch it; yet what did that mean, after all, in New York and Boston, into which places remembrance reads the complacency soon to be the most established – what did that mean unless that we had exactly shed the bad possibilities, were publicly purged of the dread disease which had come within an inch of being fatal to us, and were by that token warranted sound forever, superlatively safe? – as we could see that during the previous existence of the country we had been but comparatively so. The breathless campaign of Sadowa [the decisive battle in the Austro-Prussian War], which occurred but a year after our own sublime conclusion had been sealed by Lee’s surrender, enlarged the prospect much rather than ruffled it, and though we had to confess that the siege of Paris, four years later, was a false note, it was drowned in the solidification of Germany, so true, so resounding, and for all we then suspected to the contrary so portentously pacific a one. How could peace not flourish, moreover, when wars either took only seven weeks or lasted but a summer and scarce more than a drawn-out autumn? – the siege of Paris dragging out, to our pitying sense, at the time, but raised before all the rest of us, preparing food-succor, could well turn round, and with the splendid recovery of France to follow so close on her amputation that violence fairly struck us as moving away confounded. So it was that our faith was confirmed – violence sitting down again with averted face, and the conquests we felt the truly golden ones spreading and spreading behind its back.
U.S. Marines Conduct Military Training In Georgia
Ministry of Defence of Georgia
June 12, 2014
Training in shooting in frames of a joint exercise “Agile Spirit 2014” is over
The training of military servicemen in shooting finished at the Vaziani military firing ground in the frames of a joint exercise “Agile Spirit 2014” of Ministry of Defence of Georgia and the United States Department of Defense.
During two days, the Georgian and the U.S. military servicemen were adopting the shooting technique from firearms of different type and caliber.
The military servicemen were practiced in shooting skills from automatic firearms, manual anti-tank grenade launchers, machine-guns and automatic grenade launchers. The soldiers will be scored according to the degree of target damage that will be reflected in the evaluation of the training results.
The following step will be tactical trainings which will be ended with the final Georgian-American training. During tactical preparation the soldiers will practice in the operations like which they will have to fulfill in the ISAF mission.
Around 350 military servicemen of the United States Marine Corps Black Sea Rotational Forces and 42nd Battalion of IV Mechanized Brigade of GAF are taking part in the exercise.
Guy de Maupassant: I do not understand how these murderers are tolerated walking on the public streets
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Guy de Maupassant: Selections on war
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Guy de Maupassant
From Bed No. 29
Translator unknown
When Captain Epivent passed in the street all the ladies turned to look at him. He was the true type of a handsome officer of huzzars. He was always on parade, always strutted a little and seemed preoccupied and proud of his leg, his figure, and his mustache…
“There’s a great dandy. When shall we stop feeding all these good-for-nothings who go dragging their tinware through the streets? For my part, I would rather be a butcher than a soldier. Then if there’s blood on my table, it is the blood of beasts, at least. And he is useful, is the butcher; and the knife he carries has not killed men. I do not understand how these murderers are tolerated walking on the public streets, carrying with them their instruments of death. It is necessary to have them, I suppose, but at least let them conceal themselves, and not dress up in masquerade, with their red breeches and blue coats. The executioner doesn’t dress himself up, does he?”
NATO Drills: Largest-Ever U.S. Air Force Deployment To Poland
U.S. Air Forces in Europe
U.S. Air Forces Africa
June 12, 2014
US flies, trains with NATO allies during Exercise EAGLE TALON
By 2nd Lt. Katrina Cheesman
52nd Fighter Wing Public Affairs
LASK AIR BASE, Poland: U.S. and NATO allies are flying and training together in the skies above Poland, June 9 to 13, during the Polish-led combined Exercise EAGLE TALON, which includes air assets from France, United Kingdom, the U.S. and Poland.
This is the first time the U.S. Air Force participated in EAGLE TALON, according to Maj. Matthew Spears, commander of the U.S. Aviation Detachment in Poland, and marks the largest deployment of U.S. Air Force equipment and personnel to Poland.
In addition to U.S. and Polish armed forces, various air assets participating in EAGLE TALON include NATO Airborne Early Warning and Control System aircraft, British AWACS and French Mirage 2000s, according to Polish air force spokesperson Lt. Col. Artur Golawski.
This sort of training with NATO allies enhances understanding of each other’s tactics and procedures for future allied operations, said Polish air force Lt. Col. Pawel Marcinkowski, 3rd Training Squadron commander, Lask Air Base, Poland.
“EAGLE TALON is the next exercise in line to enhance interoperability with each other and be ready to respond to NATO contingencies if needed,” Marcinkowski said.
The exercise encompasses large-force formations providing air defense, which trains pilots to attack and defend targets with NATO allies. During the exercise, NATO wingmen are either on a blue or red team to simulate friendly and enemy aircraft.
“The exercise is an excellent opportunity to exchange experience with people who are more proficient with more combat hours,” said Polish air force Lt. Lukasz Gradzinski, 6th Squadron training officer from 31st Tactical Air Base, Poznan AIr Base, Poland. “I think everyone is excited about this exercise…and we [Polish air Force] want to be better and more cooperative with our NATO allies.”
The U.S. Aviation Detachment in Poland coordinated U.S. participation in EAGLE TALON during the Av-Det Rotation 14-3, marking it as the largest theater security cooperation event ever hosted by the U.S. Air Force Aviation Detachment in Poland, according to Av-Det officials.
“The Av-Det Rotation 14-3 that we had previously scheduled is enhanced by the participation in EAGLE TALON, which has been an objective of both the U.S. Air Force and the Polish air force since we stood up the Av-Det,” Spears, a native of Pueblo, Colo., said. “It’s demonstrating our capability to support multiple operations at the same time.”
Av-Det Rotation 14-3 is the third planned aviation rotation this year, involving 18 U.S. F-16 Fighting Falcon fighter aircraft from the 480th Fighter Squadron and nearly 400 personnel from the 52nd Fighter Wing, Spangdahlem Air Base, Germany.
More than 300 of those Airmen will support the 18 F-16 fighter aircraft at Lask Air Base, and nearly 100 Airmen from the 606th Air Control Squadron will assist in controlling the skies above Poland from Powidz Air Base.
In addition to flying together, NATO allies train to coordinate and plan successful missions on the ground before the aircraft launch from multiple air bases and meet each other in the air.
The 606th Air Control Squadron from the 52nd FW will provide tactical control to aircraft flying in Poland from Powidz Air Base during Av-Det Rotation 14-3 and EAGLE TALON. The 606th ACS is a control and reporting center unit that provides air control to various aircraft flying in the same air space.
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During EAGLE TALON, the U.S. will continue to work with Polish armed forces to refuel aircraft during the exercise. To enhance flying operations, U.S. forces will hot pit refuel aircraft, which refuels the aircraft while its engine is still on and shortens the flying window while increasing capability to fix aircraft in a timely manner.
This will be the first time this process has been executed in Poland.
“It’s an amazing experience to support other countries during this exercise. It’s a lot of work, long hours, but I am having a blast,” said Staff Sgt. Ayla Shelton, 480th Aircraft Maintenance Unit dedicated maintenance scheduler, who coordinated U.S. weekly flying with the schedule of Polish fighter aircraft during the exercise. “It’s fulfilling to know we are able to train and exercise with our allies, and that it will make future NATO operations even better.”
U.S. B-52s, B-2 Nuclear Stealth Bomber Refuel Over Britain
U.S. Air Forces in Europe
U.S. Air Forces Africa
June 12, 2014
B-52s, B-2 refuel over U.K.
A B-52 Stratofortress deployed to RAF Fairford, England from Barksdale Air Force Base, La., performs air refueling with a KC-135 Stratotanker from RAF Mildenhall, England June 11, 2014, over the United Kingdom. The B-52 fuel tank can hold up to 312,197pounds of fuel during the refueling mission.
(U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Christine Griffiths/Released)
NATO Air Force Chief Inspects Air Patrolling In Poland
Xinhua News Agency
June 13, 2014
NATO air force commander visits Polish airbase
WARSAW: NATO air forces commander General Frank Gorenc Thursday visited the tactical airbase in Malbork, northern Poland, to inspect the Baltic Air Policing operations currently being carried out from the base by Poland and France.
Gorenc was shown round the base and spoke with its commanders as well as Polish and French pilots flying the Air Policing patrols.
Gorenc commended the organization of the patrols and especially the cooperation between Polish and French flight teams, which in his opinion was helping de-escalate [?!] the tension caused by the crisis in Ukraine.
Gorenc said that the NATO Baltic Air Policing project was aimed to protect the Alliance’s Baltic members Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia and claimed that, in this context, the number of planes flying the patrols had been raised from 4 to nearly 20…
“We wanted to show that we’re together, that collective defense is NATO’s backbone and that it works”, general Gorenc declared.
Gorenc, who also serves as commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe in Ramstein, Germany, also spoke with Polish Defence Minister Tomasz Siemoniak in Warsaw, discussing the presence of NATO forces in Poland, joint military exercises, the modernization of the Polish army, NATO’s position towards the Ukraine crisis, and Polish-U.S. cooperation in air and missile defense.
Siemoniak assured Gorenc that Poland was open to such cooperation and prepared to erect and maintain related infrastructure.
NATO Conducts Emergency Meeting Over Iraq
Sofia News Agency
June 11, 2014
NATO Holds Emergency Meeting over Iraq ISIL Activity
Alliance ambassadors convened late Wednesday upon request by Turkey after a terrorist group took tens of Turkish citizens hostage in Iraq.
At the meeting in Brussels NATO ambassadors discussed the situation in Iraq, where militants from the Islamic State of Iraq and Levant (ISIL) kidnapped 80 people at the Turkish Consulate in Mosul.
The head of Turkey’s mission to the city was also among those abducted.
Turkey’s Daily Sabah reports the meeting was not called under Article 4 of NATO founding treaty (the one allowing consultations when there is a threat to any member’s territory), but took place only for information purposes.
The UN Security Council also denounced the actions at the Turkish consulate in Mosul.
US Vice President Joe Biden was quoted by the BBC as offering assistance to Ankara.
Abductions in Iraq followed attacks carried out by ISIL in Mosul and Tirkit, two of the major Iraqi cities, which were captured by militants.
In Mosul alone, the activity of ISIL has forced 500 000 people to flee.
The UN reports of a “dire” humanitarian situation around the city.
Iraqi officials have confirmed that Tikrit, the hometown of former leader Saddam Hussein and capital of the Salahuddin province, is being held by hundreds of militants and also that the provincial governor missing.
ISIL, an offshoot of Al-Qaeda, claims control of territories in the east of Syria and the also in Western and Central Iraq and is seeking to create its own enclave.
Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has requested the Iraqi parliament that a state of emergency be declared following the latest events.
U.S.’s Rice: NATO Must Boost Military Spending Against Russia
Xinhua News Agency
June 11, 2014
U.S. again urges NATO allies to boost defense spending
WASHINGTON: U.S. National Security Advisor Susan Rice on Wednesday once again urged NATO members to increase their spending on defense in the light of the Ukrainian crisis.
“As we approach the NATO summit in Wales this September, we expect every ally to pull its full weight through increased investment in defense and upgrading our alliance for the future,” the top foreign policy advisor to President Barack Obama said in remarks delivered at the Center for a New American Security in Washington D.C.
“Europe needs to take defense spending seriously and meet NATO’ s benchmark — at least two percent of GDP — to keep our alliance strong and dynamic,” she stressed, echoing a refrain repeated lately by Obama, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Secretary of State John Kerry following the outbreak of the Ukrainian crisis.
Of NATO’s 28 member states, only four — the United States, Estonia, Greece and Britain — have defense budgets of at least two percent of GDP.
“Just as we reassure allies in the face of Russia’s actions, we must upgrade NATO’s ability to meet challenges to its south,” Rice said.
Russia retook Crimea from Ukraine in March and has been accused of destabilizing eastern Ukraine by Washington and its allies.
In her speech, Rice also defended the Obama administration’s preferred approach to collective action in its handling of foreign policy issues, a central theme of the president’s speech at the U. S. Military Academy in West Point in late May.
“Collective action has long been the hallmark of effective American leadership,” the advisor said. “When we spur collective action, we deliver outcomes that are more legitimate, more sustainable and less costly.”
“In today’s world, the reality is: many transnational security challenges can only be addressed through collective action,” she added.
Janus-Faced Bloc: NATO, EU Boost Strategic Military Cooperation
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
June 11, 2014
Directors of the NATO International Military Staff and European Union Military Staff met for an informal consultation
Heads of the NATO International Military Staff (IMS) and European Union Military Staff (EUMS) met 10 June at NATO Headquarters for the second time in 2014. The meeting was co-chaired by the Directors General (DG) of both organisations; Air Marshal Sir Christopher Harper (DGIMS) and Lieutenant General Wolfgang Wosolsobe (DGEUMS).
These informal staff-to-staff talks are part of the NATO-EU strategic military dialogue, which has been ongoing since 2003. The ultimate goal of this high level event is to continue improving the staff to staff interaction between IMS and EUMS on topics of common interest related to security, defence and crisis management.
In their opening remarks, the Director Generals stressed the importance of IMS-EUMS complementarity and encouraged the continuation of such staff-to-staff engagements since such events greatly contribute to the mutual awareness.
During the meeting both organisations presented ongoing works on which they can cooperate in order to ensure coherence, mutual reinforcement and non-duplication of effort. The last part of the meeting was devoted to an open discussion on current affairs.
Wrapping up the discussions, Air Marshal Harper stated that the current challenges faced by both NATO and EU call for a more coherent, efficient and improved relations, to enable the Organizations to provide effective responses to rapidly evolving crises. Both the IMS and EUMS leaderships underlined that NATO and EU, sharing the same values, interests, challenges and most of the same member states, are more than just partners; any possible effort to strengthen their relationship must be pursued.
Maurice Maeterlinck: Bloodshed, battle-cry and sword-thrust are the joys of barbarians
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Maurice Maeterlinck
From The Treasure of the Humble (1898)
Translated by Alfred Sutro
The true artist no longer chooses Marius triumphing over the Cimbrians, or the assassination of the Duke of Guise, as fit subjects for his art; for he is well aware that the psychology of victory or murder is but elementary or exceptional, and that the solemn voice of men and things, the voice that issues forth so timidly and hesitatingly, cannot be heard amid the idle uproar of acts of violence. And therefor will he place on his canvas a house lost in the heart of the country, an open door at the end of a passage, a face or hands at rest, and by these simple images will he add to our consciousness of life, which is a possession that is no longer possible to lose.
But to the tragic author, as to the mediocre painter who still lingers over historical pictures, it is only the violence of the anecdote that appeals, and in his representation thereof does the entire interest of the work consist. And he imagines, forsooth, that we shall delight in witnessing the very same acts that brought joy to the hearts of the barbarians, with whom murder, outrage and treachery were matters of daily occurrence. Whereas it is a far cry from bloodshed, battle-cry and sword-thrust that the lives of most of us flow on, and men’s tears are silent to-day, and invisible, and almost spiritual…
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From The Buried Temple (1902)
Translated by Alfred Sutro
There is in Flanders a breed of draught-dogs upon which destiny alternatively lavishes her favour and her spite. Some will be bought by a butcher, and lead a magnificent life. The work is trifling: in the morning, harnessed four abreast, they draw a light cart to the slaughter-house; and at night, galloping joyously, triumphantly, home through the narrow streets of the ancient towns with their tiny, lit-up gables, bring it back overflowing with meat. Between-times there is leisure, and marvelous leisure. among the rats and the waste of the slaughter-house. They are copiously fed, they are fat, they shine like seals, and taste in its fullness the only happiness dreamed of by the naive, ferreting instinct of the honest dog. But their unfortunate brethren of the same litter, that the lame sand-pedlar buys, or the old collector of household refuse, or the needy peasant with his great cruel clogs – these are chained to heavy carts or shapeless barrows; they are filthy, mangy, hairless, emaciated, starving; and follow till they die the circles of a hell into which they were thrust by a few coppers dropped into some horny palm. And, in a world less directly subject to man, there must evidently be partridges, pheasants, deer, hares, which have no luck, which never escape the gun; while others, one knows not how or why, emerge unscathed from every battue.
Russian Border: U.S. Army Secretary At NATO Joint Warfare Center In Norway
U.S. Army
June 11, 2014
SecArmy McHugh examines comprehensive training at NATO’s Joint Warfare Center
By Inci Kucukaksoy, JWC PAO
STAVANGER, Norway: Secretary of the Army John M. McHugh was at NATO’s Joint Warfare Center in Stavanger, Norway, on Monday, to meet with leaders and Soldiers and to assess the U.S. Army’s manning and support to NATO.
McHugh was welcomed by German Army Maj. General Erhard Buehler, commander ofJoint Warfare Center, known as JWC, and U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. John W. Doucette, the deputy commander and chief of staff.
During a meeting with Buehler, McHugh had comprehensive discussions about JWC’s structure, mission and current activities. The discussions focused on JWC’s unique capabilities as NATO’s premier operational-level training center for full-spectrum joint operational level warfare.
The center’s multinational staff detailed to McHugh how JWC delivers training and exercises for the NATO Command and Force Structures, following a 15-month planning timeline, and using turn-key facilities and advanced technologies.
“JWC is NATO’s brain trust for modelling and simulation, as well as launching new simulation capabilities,” said Doucette, referring to the center’s IT capabilities.
In addition to exercises, JWC’s warfare capacity, its contributions to the lessons learned process and other transformational elements were outlined during the briefing.
“NATO is a vital force with an eye to the future,” McHugh said. “The value of what’s being done at JWC is self-evident, and helps provide a better understanding of NATO’s training efforts and the ability to better assess our place in this structure to improve areas of assistance and cooperation between the U.S. and our NATO Allies.”
NATO’s current priority is providing training for ongoing operations, such as International Security Assistance Force training event 14/01, which is currently taking place at the JWC, until June 13.
McHugh also observed training at JWC’s state-of-the-art training facility, and met with exercise participants. The participants included the training audience and the subject matter experts who fulfill the role of trainers. The experts come directly from the Afghanistan theatre and those who recently redeployed from the two theatre headquarters, which are the International Security Assistance Force and the International Security Assistance Force Joint Command.
Additionally, the Afghan officials and police coming from Afghan Ministries of Interior and Defense, and the National Military Command Centre, are here to support the exercise.
…
U.S. Army personnel from the JWC staff and those participating in International Security Assistance Force training event 14/01 had the opportunity to meet with McHugh where he thanked them for their valuable service and commitment.
George Bernard Shaw: The Long Arm of War
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Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
George Bernard Shaw: Selections on war
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George Bernard Shaw
From Preface to Heartbreak House (1919)
The Long Arm of War
The pestilence which is the usual accompaniment of war was called influenza. Whether it was really a war pestilence or not was made doubtful by the fact that it did its worst in places remote from the battlefields, notably on the west coast of North America and in India. But the moral pestilence, which was unquestionably a war pestilence, reproduced this phenomenon. One would have supposed that the war fever would have raged most furiously in the countries actually under fire, and that the others would be more reasonable. Belgium and Flanders, where over large districts literally not one stone was left upon another as the opposed armies drove each other back and forward over it after terrific preliminary bombardments, might have been pardoned for relieving their feelings more emphatically than by shrugging their shoulders and saying, “C’est la guerre.” England, inviolate for so many centuries that the swoop of war on her homesteads had long ceased to be more credible than a return of the Flood, could hardly be expected to keep her temper sweet when she knew at last what it was to hide in cellars and underground railway stations, or lie quaking in bed, whilst bombs crashed, houses crumbled, and aircraft guns distributed shrapnel on friend and foe alike until certain shop windows in London, formerly full of fashionable hats, were filled with steel helmets. Slain and mutilated women and children, and burnt and wrecked dwellings, excuse a good deal of violent language, and produce a wrath on which many suns go down before it is appeased. Yet it was in the United States of America where nobody slept the worse for the war, that the war fever went beyond all sense and reason. In European Courts there was vindictive illegality: in American Courts there was raving lunacy. It is not for me to chronicle the extravagances of an Ally: let some candid American do that. I can only say that to us sitting in our gardens in England, with the guns in France making themselves felt by a throb in the air as unmistakeable as an audible sound, or with tightening hearts studying the phases of the moon in London in their bearing on the chances whether our houses would be standing or ourselves alive next morning, the newspaper accounts of the sentences American Courts were passing on young girls and old men alike for the expression of opinions which were being uttered amid thundering applause before huge audiences in England, and the more private records of the methods by which the American War Loans were raised, were so amazing that they put the guns and the possibilities of a raid clean out of our heads for the moment.
