* US Secretary of State John Kerry's off-the-cuff remark - meant to be rhetorical - that Bashar al-Assad could still avoid strikes by "[turning] over every bit of his weapons to the international community within the next week" was taken as a serious offer by the...
Lighterage from USS Seay(click to view full) Lighterage is about loading or unloading ships using lighters (barges) that can form a sort of ad-hoc ramp or shuttle from ships at anchor; they are often used when a port's dockside is too shallow for the ship, or dockside...
* National Journal notes how America has been taking a sharp turn inward. That isolationist streak was already apparent in the US House of Representatives during debates about Libya in 2011. This dynamic can lead to otherwise unlikely alliances across the aisle which...
* Support for President Obama's request to strike Syria appears wobbly in the US Congress and even more shaky abroad. WaPo on Congress | WSJ on Russia | Reuters on strike costs. * From the Economist, a magazine that ended up deeply regretting its staunch support for...
Syrian update * Will lukewarm support from the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committees for a resolution [PDF] authorizing strikes against Syria translate into 60 votes in the US Senate as a whole? Then there's the House, where some pro-defense lawmakers may try to tie...
CVN-71, Indian Ocean(click to view full) The USS Theodore Roosevelt [CVN 71] was built by Northrop Grumman's Newport News sector. Commissioned on Oct 25/86, CVN 71 is expected to remain in service until 2036. As it approaches its mid-life stage, however, the wear...
* After hearing John Kerry and Chuck Hagel (see video below), the US Senate's Foreign Relations Committee came up with a resolution [PDF] narrowing the scope of a possible military intervention against Syria by explicitly ruling out the presence of US troops "on the...
* After President Obama decided to seek Congressional authorization for strikes against Syria, his administration submitted a resolution whose language appears up for negotiation. Two Senate hearings (one of them classified) are scheduled tomorrow to bolster support...
* British Prime Minister David Cameron came to the House of Commons armed with an intelligence dossier from the Joint Intelligence Committee, as well as a legal opinion from the Attorney General. He narrowly grounded his case for military action against Assad's regime...