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

Chinese Beidou system ( Image credits- Internet source) Source- Russia & India Report / Sputnik Russian and Chinese experts have developed a draft project to create a global international navigation system based on China’s BeiDou and Russia’s GLONASS satellite navigation for the member states of BRICS group and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, Russian Space Systems company said in a statement on Tuesday. On Monday, Russia's GLONASS Union said Russia and China would also finalize a deal this month to establish two joint ventures to develop, manufacture and sell new satellite navigation devices that would receive signals from three major navigation systems, BeiDou, GLONASS and US Global Positioning System (GPS). "The project was approved at the second meeting of the Chinese-Russian committee for important projects in the sphere of strategic cooperation on the satellite navigation," the statement reads. The Chinese-Russian project is based o

Image credits- NASA Source- Eurasia Review From a dusty atmosphere stretching across the Atlantic Ocean to daily views of clouds at sunrise, a new NASA camera keeping a steady eye on the sunlit side of Earth is yielding new insights about our changing planet. With NASA’s Earth Polychromatic Imaging Camera (EPIC), affixed to NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) about one million miles from Earth, scientists are getting a new view of our planet’s clouds, land surfaces, aerosols and more. Science results from the first EPIC images were discussed Monday at a media briefing at the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. EPIC captures a color image of the sunlit side of Earth at least once every two hours, allowing researchers to track features as the planet rotates in the instrument’s field of view. “With EPIC, you see cloud structure from sunrise on the left to sunset on the right,” said Jay Herman, EPIC instrument lead investigator at NASA’s Go

USS John C. Stennis  ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / White House ) Source- The National Interest Author- Dave Majumdar India hopes to build its own indigenous nuclear-powered aircraft carrier—complete with electromagnetic catapults—with the cooperation of the United States. In recent years, Washington and New Delhi have drawn closer together in the maritime security realm, due in part to China’s more expansive maneuvering in both the Pacific and Indian Oceans. The South Asian nation is already building a conventionally powered indigenous carrier called Vikrant, which India expects to commission into service in 2017. However, the 40,000-ton Vikrant follows a design philosophy similar to Russian vessels like the 45,000-ton INS Vikramaditya—which was originally commissioned into the Soviet Navy as Admiral Gorshkov. After extensive modifications that included the removal of its missile armament, the former Soviet vessel was equipped with a ski-jump aircraft launch

Swarm of bees ( Image credits- Wikimedia Commons / Zantastik) Source- Eurasia Review Author- Ben Zweibelson Since the 1990s, Western military organizations have demonstrated periodic interest in whether the emergent behavior of decentralized systems, commonly referred to as ‘swarm theory’ or ‘swarm behavior,’ might be relevant in military applications. Defence innovators such as the RAND Corporation sponsored multiple studies on swarm theory in the past decade and a half, and recent popular books such as The Starfish and the Spider offer tantalizing prospects on decentralized organizations for future military applications.2 Clearly, the notion of alternative organizational intelligence and decentralized problem solving has sparked the interest of military academia. Is this another techno-centric fad, or does swarm theory offer military applications superior to traditional methodologies? Can the joint military community gain anything from considering swarming constructs?

America entering into a defence cooperation agreement with Singapore, 2015 ( Image credits- DOD, USA) Source- The Diplomat Author- Shannon Tiezzi As my colleague Prashanth Parameswaran noted yesterday, the United States and Singapore just signed an enhanced defense cooperation agreement. The agreement covered a wide range of areas, including expanded defense dialogues and increased cooperation on cybersecurity and counterterrorism. However, the announcement that garnered the most attention was the news that Singapore will allow U.S. surveillance aircraft to operate from the city-state.  A U.S. P-8 Poseidon aircraft will be deployed in Singapore from December 7 to 14 – and it is widely expected to be used in part to keep tabs on China’s activities in the South China Sea. China was none too happy with the agreement. Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying told reporters that “the overall situation in the South China Sea is peaceful and stable,” just as regional count