Events like this sort of val­i­date parts of the CNO’s new mar­itime strat­egy, don’t they? This from Military​.com

Sailors from the Norfolk-​​based destroyer James E. Williams boarded a North Korean mer­chant ship that had been hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia, while two other Navy ves­sels tailed a pirated Japanese ship in the same region.
The Williams, which left Norfolk in July , was about 50 nau­ti­cal miles from the ship Dai Hong Dan in the Arabian Sea when it received word of the pirate attack, said Lt. John Gay , a spokesman for the Navy’s Central Command in Manama, Bahrain.
The Williams dis­patched a heli­copter and ordered the pirates to give up their weapons via a bridge-​​to-​​bridge radio. The North Korean crew, which had retained con­trol of the steer­ing and engi­neer­ing spaces, then con­fronted the pirates and gained back con­trol of the bridge, accord­ing to a Navy news release.
Initial reports from the North Korean crew said two pirates were killed and five oth­ers cap­tured, the release said.
Soon after­ward, the North Korean crew per­mit­ted a small party from the Williams to come aboard, Gay said.
Three corps­man, accom­pa­nied by armed Sailors and a Williams crew mem­ber who spoke Korean, boarded the Dai Hong Dan from a rigid hull inflat­able boat. The corps­man assisted wounded crew mem­bers and attack­ers.
Three Koreans were trans­ported to the Williams for med­ical atten­tion before being returned to their ship, Gay said. The pirates were being held on the Dai Hong Dan.
Hundreds of miles away in the same region, two other Navy ships were track­ing a Japanese-​​owned ship seized by pirates over the week­end, Gay said.
The spokesman said that two “coali­tion” ships from Combined Task Force 150 had responded to the hijack­ing of the Golden Mori , a Japanese-​​owned ship reg­is­tered in Panama.
Combined Task Force 150, which con­ducts mar­itime secu­rity oper­a­tions in the Arabian Sea and Gulf of Aden, includes ves­sels from the Pakistani, British, French, German and U.S. navies.
Navy offi­cials with knowl­edge of the inci­dent con­firmed that the U.S. destroy­ers Porter and Arleigh Burke, both based in Norfolk, responded to the Golden Mori’s dis­tress call.
One of the respond­ing ships fired warn­ing shots in front of the Golden Mori.
It also aimed dis­abling shots at two skiffs — the boats the pirates used to approach the ship — towed behind the Golden Mori. The skiffs caught fire and sank, Gay said.
Gay said coali­tion crew mem­bers have observed men car­ry­ing small arms aboard the bridge of the ship, which was hijacked in the Gulf of Aden, a crit­i­cal body of water between Yemen, Djibouti and Somalia that links the Red and Arabian seas.
After the hijack­ing, the Golden Mori sailed 380 miles south and remained off Somalia’s coast, Gay said.

The arti­cle also rolls out the duty critic (it wasn’t my turn):

“Essentially, you don’t want to use a bil­lion dol­lar DDG [guided mis­sile destroyer] to sup­press pirates,” [Robert Work, a retired Marine offi­cer and ana­lyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington] said. “That’s a mis­sion for a much smaller ship. But we have a lot of ships in that area because of ongo­ing oper­a­tions in the Horn of Africa. These are ships designed for high-​​end war fight­ing, not chas­ing pirates.”

Hey, not every day’s a mis­sile day. Plus, as we say in the fighter busi­ness, a kill’s a kill, right?

Kudos to our black­shoe brethren here.

(Official U.S. Navy photo show­ing a pirate ship headed for Davy Jones’ locker.)

– Ward

Heres another inter­est­ing arti­cle from our friends at Aviation Week that I thought was wor­thy of a com­ment or two. Its a great exam­ple of how inter­net journalism/​blogging can bring some value added to read­ers inter­ested in defense issues and technology.

Bill Sweetman ran across a series of entries at the Secret Projects blog, which yours truly occa­sion­ally takes a look at, and found some really cool pic­tures clicked at a Russian aero­nau­tics lab that shows some intrigu­ing tech­nol­ogy being devel­oped there.

Aside from the whiz bang of it all, this sort of post tugs at my Cold War heart strings being a stu­dent of Soviet for­eign pol­icy and Cold War diplo­macy, theres still a part of me that looks at Russia as this dark, closed place where crazy sci­ence exper­i­ments are allowed to run amok. Revelations of a vari­ety of weapons devel­op­ment pro­grams that went on behind the iron cur­tain revealed only as the wall fell have kept those embers smoldering.

This post comes a day after an equally inter­est­ing show was broad­cast on the History International Channel titled Secret Superpower Aircraft. This series was like manna from heaven for some­one like me who still yearns for the kind of Cold War rivalry that drove aero­space tech­nol­ogy to its lim­its. The Avro Arrow? The F-​​103 Thunder Warrior? Hmmmm, yummie.

Well, enough about my addic­tion, feed yours with Bill Sweetmans arti­cle at Military​.com. Heres an excerpt:

The invalu­able Secret Projects web­site car­ries frame grabs from an early-​​2000s Russian TV doc­u­men­tary, filmed at the vast TsAGI wind-​​tunnel com­plex at Zhukovsky. While wind-​​tunnel mod­els are not equiv­a­lent to real hard­ware, and while known sen­si­tive mate­r­ial wouldn’t have been shown, the mod­els are a real indi­ca­tion of Russian indus­try and gov­ern­ment thinking.

First is a flying-​​wing air­craft, look­ing (from the inlet and exhaust shape) like a four-​​engine bomber.

There is also a stealth fighter design that super­fi­cially resem­bles the Lockheed YF-​​22.

Significant dif­fer­ences from the US fighter include promi­nent leading-​​edge root exten­sions and a dif­fer­ent wing and tail plan­form. This may be the rumored Sukhoi design nick­named Big Ears, a pre­cur­sor to the T-​​50 PAK-​​FA.

– Christian