RUSSIAN MIGHT

Generally good answer but to nit pick what you left out was the flawed Japanese pre war training program that was very elitist and purposely focused on a rather small highly trained cohort of pilots rather than quantity as well as quality. Look at the U.S. or British training system the contrasts are striking. Just the entrance criteria were so elitist that few could even qualify for pilot training and training was so tough and realistic that losses were high just as in say Japanese destroyer crews for example.

PATRICK ARMSTRONG—As far as I know, most Western intelligence agencies (but not the one I was involved with) would have agreed with his prediction that Russia was, inevitably, going down to “obscurity”. The fear then was of chaos – rogue generals, nuclear weapons gone missing (remember suitcase nukes, “red mercury”?): Russia’s weakness was the threat, not its strength. We appreciated how badly off Russia was but also knew that Russia in its thousand years has often been down but never out. We also knew that there was more to Putin than the absurdities that were said about him.

THE SAKER—Hypersonic and long range missiles have changed the face of naval warfare forever and they have made aircraft carriers pretty much obsolete: if even during the Cold War the top of the line U.S. carriers were “sitting ducks”, imagine what any carrier is today?  The old saying, “shooting fish in a barrel” comes to mind.

The AK-47 is an important weapon because it enabled some of the poorest countries to arm their fighters with a first-class field weapon in their struggles against the empire.

Kerry demanded that the Iraqi leadership force all the aircraft flying from Iran to land and conduct a thorough search of them by the Iraqi police and US intelligence agencies. However, Iran’s influence on Baghdad was even stronger – since the spring of 2012, an Iranian aerial bridge was organized across Iraq, through which Iranian C-130 transport planes regularly transferred weapons and equipment to Syria. And the US could do nothing with this corridor. All they had achieved was a short-term flight ban for the Iranian Air Force, but it lasted only 2 months.