Lightweight, but heavy oomph: combat experience in Afghanistan, Iraq and other asymmetric conflicts is influencing the development of compact light machine guns that can dominate the 'mid-range battlespace'.
In the early 1970s the engineers of Belgium's FN Herstal developed the Minimi, the world's first 5.56 mm light machine gun (LMG), in anticipation that Nato would adopt the 5.56 x 45 mm cartridge as a standard small arms calibre. Several Nato armies were planning to follow the example...

Kurukshetra Counsel.
Byline: Devdutt Pattanaik Of the 18 days of the Kurukshetra battle described in the Mahabharta, nine days were indecisive. The Kauravas , with 11 armies, outnumbered the seven armies of the Pandavas. For the Pandavas, it was critical that Bhisma, the old but very able commander of...

The French Navy and the Seven Years' War.
The French Navy and the Seven Years' War, by Jonathan Dull. France Overseas: Studies in Empire and Decolonization. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2005. xiii, 445 pp. $35.00 US (cloth). It was the world's first world war. From 1754 to 1763 the fleets and armies of England...

First-ever joint China-India military exercise in Dec.
NEW DELHI: The world's largest and third-largest armies will hold their first-ever joint military exercise in December, with Indian Army troops engaging with soldiers from the People's Liberation Army in a counter-terrorism manoeuvre in China. Though the exercise will be a small one, involving only 100-odd soldiers,...

Surge protectors: the mixed motives behind the Freedom's Watch ad campaign.
LATE THIS SUMMER, just as American political armies were squaring off over the next, and likely last, act of President Bush's Iraq War policy, a new pro-war group called Freedom's Watch announced a $15-million ad buy over several months in key states. The first ads featured soldiers who had...

Islam's Christian Captives.
Captives and their Saviors in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, by Jarbel Rodriguez (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America, 2007). 225 pp. For centuries, Muslims have captured Christians in exchange for demands of one kind or another. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the United...

Teacher's centenary unites over 100 students across border.
Almost 60 years ago, the British divided India and Pakistan. More recently, an Englishman re-united some Indians and Pakistanis. Over 100 students from India and Pakistan came together recently to celebrate the centenary of their teacher - Hugh Catchpole, an Englishman who taught at the Rashtriya Indian Military College...

Is king crypto's crown secure? The blending of civil and military technologies in the first decade of the 21st century has created new military applications for encryption. Users are realising that there is more than one way that a potential enemy can glean unprotected secrets.
Just over a month after the start of the ceasefire that ended the 34 days of war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 came first suggestions that the guerrillas had been able to intercept and decipher Israeli tactical radio communications, an intelligence breakthrough that had helped...

Malegaon to Mauritius: On the trail of 1857.
The gleaming towers of Singapore are a far remove from the squalor of Malegaon, but a common historical thread runs through both, as it does through habitats as diverse as Mauritius and Jabalpur, the powerloom townships of Malegaon and Bhiwandi and the Muslim quarters of Madanpura and Mominpura in...

Rampage.
WE made the acquaintance of spree killers not so long ago; perhaps the first was Charles Starkweather, who went on a lethal joyride with his underage girlfriend in 1958. Seung-Hui Cho, the murderer of 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech, is only the latest, and most lethal. ...