Manoj Ambat's Blog dealing with Defence, Foreign Affairs, Strategic Affairs and Politics

In May, North Korean officials meeting with their Japanese counterparts in Stockholm, Sweden,  announced  that they would carry out a comprehensive, nationwide survey of all Japanese abductees currently living in North Korea. In return, the Japanese government  agreed to lift a number of sanctions currently in place  against the DPRK, allowing for the renewal of remittances that had previously flowed from Japan to North Korea, and end a movement ban between the two countries. This rather stunning agreement has raised hopes for a resolution to an issue that has bedeviled relations between the two nations for decades. Since 2002, when North Korean leader Kim Jong-il first admitted to then-Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi during a summit meeting that Japanese citizens had been kidnapped by covert agents, little progress has been made on the abductee issue. While Tokyo has continued to demand that the North come forth with more information on the fate of hundreds of individuals belie

Proud movement for India: An Indian Prof Mohan .B Menon has been elected as one of the directors of International Council on Education for Teaching and appointed to it's Director board. He will be responsible for Australia, Asia and Pacific regions. He has held several prestigious posts including the chief of Common Wealth of learning training for teaching, Chief of United Nations committe on the education for Palestine refugees including many other prestigious posts. He is presently the vice chancellor of Wawasan open university in Malaysia. He is the son of Ambat Balakrishnan Menon and Smt Sarojini Menon. Wishing him the very best

PLA ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons/ Author) By now the statistics of  China’s rise  are well-known. It has the world’s second largest gross domestic product (GDP). It will likely overtake U.S. GDP in the next decade. It is the world’s second largest spender on defense. It aims to build a blue-water navy, including aircraft carriers. It likely already has the missile and drone ability to deny the U.S. Navy the ability to operate inside the “first island chain” (from southern Japan south through Taiwan and the Philippines to the South China Sea) without unacceptable losses. It has the world’s largest population: one in seven persons today is a Chinese national. As Hugh White has  argued , the U.S. has never faced a greater challenger in its history as a world power. The U.S. roughly emerged as a great power in the 1880s. In that time, it has faced four major challengers: German nationalism in WWI, fascism in World War II, communism in the Cold War, and millenarian jihadism in

T-72 Ajaya of The Indian Army ( Image credits- Wikimedia  commons/Author-Vijay Patankar) The People's Liberation Type 96A main battle tank ranked number eight during the first round of the 2014 World Tank Biathlon individual race, which took place at a landfill in Alabino, near Moscow, according to Moscow-based news agency RIA Novosti on Aug. 5. Lieutenant General Yury Petrov, the chief referee of the tank biathlon, said the Russian tank completed the course in a time of 25 minutes and 39 seconds, followed by the Armenian team, which completed the course in 28 minutes and 58 seconds and Kazakhstan, with a time of 29 minutes and 53 seconds. China ranked number eight in the contest, however, Petrov said that the Chinese, Russian and Armenian teams were the only three teams to complete the round complying with all the rules and without serving penalty time. The tanks had to complete a course of up to 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) avoiding obstacles, crossing rivers and bridges

Sukhoi SU-35 ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons/  Dmitriy Pichugin) Russia can provide five major weapons systems to the People's Liberation Army of China, writes assistant professor Robert Farley from the University of Kentucky in an article for the Washington-based National Interest magazine. Russia's jet engines can solve China's lack of reliable power systems, Farley said. Not only fourth-generation fighters such as the J-10, J-11 and J-15  are facing this problem, but even fifth-generation stealth fighters like the J-20 and J-31 as well. "Russian engines don't have a reputation for extraordinary reliability, but they have consistently performed better than their Chinese counterparts," Farley said. China will acquire a new jet engine from Russia through the purchase of Su-35 fighters, said an analyst. It is likely to examine and replicate the engines, possibly jump-starting China's own jet engine industry. The provision of the Russian Tu-2

Indian Navy Frigate ( Pic credits- Wikimedia commons/ United States Navy) NEW DELHI: The Defence Ministry has asked the Intelligence Bureau to keep an eye on the private sector defence companies to prevent leakage of classified information about Indian military projects to foreign nationals. The move has come at a time when the Narendra Modi government is taking several steps to promote private sector in the military industrial sector and a number of new such firms are expected to come up in the near future. "The CEOs of private sector firms will have to report to the Intelligence Bureau about the visit of foreign nationals within 15 days of any such visit to their production facility," says a Defence Ministry circular issued recently. These firms will have to compulsorily provide details of the purpose and the details of the visits by these foreign nationals to the Intelligence Bureau, it said. The Defence Ministry has also made it mandatory for the private defence

A desi Global Positioning System (GPS) service is on the anvil and will be available from the middle of next year, according to a top scientist of the Indian space agency. “We will be able to offer our own indigenous GPS service with the Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS), being developed by Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO),” said Dr K Sivan, Director of ISRO’s Thiruvananthapuram-based Liquid Propulsion Systems Center. He disclosed this to the media on the sidelines of the 23rs convocation of the Thanthai Periyar Government institute of Technology here on Saturday. At present, India is making use of satellite services of other countries for the navigation applications using GPS. The IRNSS, developed by ISRO, would soon offer position information to users in India with accuracy for various applications such as mobile phones, terrestrial, aerial and marine navigation, disaster management etc . Out of the seven satellites planned, two have been already launche

Image credits- MEA, Government of India At first glance, the Kingdom of Bhutan would not seem to be a country that would factor heavily in the calculus of regional powers. With a land mass smaller than that of the Dominican Republic and with fewer people than Fiji, this landlocked Himalayan country has nonetheless become increasingly important strategically to both New Delhi and Beijing. The reason for this interest is not untapped mineral riches or a large consumer class, but Bhutan’s geographical location. As the Kingdom has only in recent years begun to open itself up to the outside world (only  legalizing television and the internet in 1999  ), it finds itself caught up in a discreet but high stakes diplomatic battle being waged between India and China. The centerpiece of this issue is territory. Between China and Bhutan there are three territorial areas of dispute:  The Jakarlung and Pasamlung valleys   on the Bhutan-Chinese north-central border, and the Doklam plateau in

House destroyed in Gaza ( Image credits- Wikimedia commons/ Author- Graha ) The war between Israel and Hamas is one of the more puzzling events in the recent annals of the decades-old Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A ceasefire had held between the two parties for nearly a year and a half; the strategic payoff of the latest conflict is vague for both sides, and neither side seemed to have an obvious interest in going to war. Even if it's clear that both Israel and Hamas had been preparing for a major conflict, with Hamas spending  40% of its budget  on its tunnel network and  booby-trapping UN infrastructure  and the Israelis looking increasingly committed to a long and already costly  ground operation inside of a hostile Gaza Strip, it's uncertain why the worst conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in well over a decade is happening now. The truth is that rival diplomatic, sectarian, and ideological blocs that have been on a steady collision course are colliding