The Military Balance 2005/6 Press Coverage
- An exercise in bravado
Iran's great strength is its manpower: an army numbering 350,000 soldiers, plus 125,000 Revolutionary Guards, says the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Yet such an imposing host will be of little use if any future attack on Iran's suspect nuclear facilities is directed, as is thought likely, from the air.
- Burma's new capital: a bunker too far?
Since 2002, the government has been on an accelerated arms-buying spree. It has upgraded navy and air-force weapons and increased the size of the army - from 180,000 men in 1988 to around 395,000 today, says London's International Institute for Strategic Studies.
- Simmons Tries To Convince Taiwanese
Right now, China is flooding the Taiwan Strait, which separates it from Taiwan, with an unprecedented level of naval construction, including submarine building that far outpaces United States construction. And its defense spending is more than three times the amount Taiwan spends, according to 2005 figures from the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
- Chinese build a high-tech army within an army
The US response to China has shifted as well in the past half year. This spring, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said in Singapore that China's military rise was illegitimate because China faced no threats. This point was seen as tactically clumsy even in Pentagon circles. "We [the US] spend $400 billion on defense. We don't have the right to decide other nations' threats," commented a career defense official in Washington.
- British troops in Iraq to withdraw
A British officer with extensive experience of Iraq said: "We are unlikely to up sticks and leave while America is still embroiled. We will maintain a presence alongside the US, albeit after we circle the wagons and go low-profile, to prevent other coalition members from leaving en masse."The International Institute for Strategic Studies predicted that coalition troops would have to remain to underpin Iraq's fledgling democracy "well into the next US presidency".The...
- U.S. Forces' realignment
The transformation is designed to enable the army to be better prepared for small-scale conflicts involving terrorist and guerrilla attacks, rather than conventional full-scale war involving tank divisions. In its "Military Balance 2005-2006" report, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies said irregular threats such as terrorism were overwhelmingly land based, and armies would assume a major combat role against them over the next few decades.
