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Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has revealed his list of the risks and the most pressing threats to America’s security.

”This is going to be tough,” Panetta told reporters on the 26th. ”Obviously it will be a smaller force, and when you have a smaller force there are risks associated with that in terms of our capability to respond.”

So in the near future where will the world’s strongest military need to respond?

Panetta says there’s a long list of potential problems. Among his top concerns, he says, are: the ongoing war in Afghanistan; the threat of terrorism; the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan; Yemen; a nuclear-capable Iran; a nuclear-capable North Korea; proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; turmoil in the Middle East, and the potential for cyber warfare.

The U.S. military’s ground forces, specifically the Army and Marines are slated to lose nearly 100,000 troops. The Army will shrink to 490,000 troops down from the current 562,000. The Marines will shrink by 20,000, down to 182,000.

But retired Maj. Gen. Bob Scales says the Pentagon is ignoring the lessons of history.

”Every administration since the fall of the Berlin wall has been trying to cut heavy forces,” Scales said in an interview with Fox News on Thursday. ”So should we ever face a conventional enemy again – and we will – the chances are very high that we’ll march off to war with a force that isn’t heavy enough to fight sustained land combat.”

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President Barack Obama authorized the mission by SEAL Team 6 two days earlier, and minutes after he gave his State of the Union address to Congress he was on the phone with the American’s father to tell him his daughter was safe.

The Danish Refugee Council confirmed the two aid workers, American Jessica Buchanan and Poul Hagen Thisted, a Dane, were “on their way to be reunited with their families.”

Buchanan, 32, and Thisted, 60, were working with a de-mining unit of the Danish Refugee Council when gunmen kidnapped the two in October.

The raiders came in quickly, catching the guards as they were sleeping after having chewed the narcotic leaf qat for much of the evening, a pirate who gave his name as Bile Hussein told the Associated Press by phone. Hussein said he was not present at the site but had spoken with other pirates who were, and that they told him nine pirates had been killed in the raid and three were “taken away.”

A U.S. official confirmed media reports that the SEALs parachuted into the area before moving on foot to the target. The official said SEAL Team 6 carried out the mission, the same team that killed al Qaeda leader bin Laden in Pakistan last May. The raid happened near the Somali town of Adado.

The hostage rescue was carried out by the same SEAL unit behind the operation in Pakistan last May that killed bin Laden, two U.S. officials said on condition of anonymity to discuss the operation. The unit is the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, also known as SEAL Team 6. One official said that the team parachuted into the area before moving on foot to the target.

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A Western official said the rescuers and the freed hostages flew by helicopter to a U.S. military base called Camp Lemonnier in the Horn of Africa nation of Djibouti. Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the information had not been released publicly. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta visited Camp Lemonnier just over a month ago. A key U.S. ally in this region, Djibouti has the only U.S. base in sub-Saharan Africa. It hosts the military’s Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa.

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The two aid workers appear to have been kidnapped by criminals — sometimes referred to as pirates — and not by Somalia’s al-Qaida-linked militant group al-Shabab. As large ships at sea have increased their defenses against pirate attacks, gangs have looked for other money making opportunities like land-based kidnappings.

The Danish Refugee Council had earlier enlisted traditional Somali elders and members of civil society to seek the release of the two hostages.

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The two hostages were working in northern Somalia for the Danish Demining Group, whose experts have been clearing mines and unexploded ordnance in conflict zones in Africa and the Middle East.

Several hostages are still being held in Somalia, including a British tourist, two Spanish doctors seized from neighboring Kenya, and an American journalist kidnapped recently.

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The plan, to be unveiled by Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on the 26th and in budget documents next month, calls for a 30% increase in the U.S. fleet of armed unmanned aircraft in the coming years, defense officials said. It also foresees the deployment of more special-operations teams at a growing number of small ”lily pad” bases across the globe where they can mentor local allies and launch missions.

The utility of such tools was evident on January 25 after an elite team—including members of Navy SEAL Team Six, the unit that killed Osama bin Laden—parachuted into Somalia and freed an American woman and Danish man held hostage for months.

The strategy reflects the Obama administration’s increasing focus on small, secret operations in place of larger wars. The shift follows the U.S. troop pullout from Iraq in December, and comes alongside the gradual U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, where a troop-intensive strategy is giving way to an emphasis on training Afghan forces and on hunt-and-kill missions.

Defense officials said the U.S. Army plans to eliminate at least eight brigades while reducing the size of the active duty Army from 570,000 to 490,000, cuts that are likely to hit armored and heavy infantry units the hardest. But drone and special-operations deployments would continue to grow as they have in recent years.

At the same time, the Army aims to accentuate the importance of special operations by preserving light, rapidly deployable units such as the 82nd and the 101st Airborne divisions.

”What we really want is to see the Army adopt the mentality of special forces,” said a military officer who advises Pentagon leaders.

The new strategy would assign specific U.S.-based Army brigades and Marine Expeditionary units to different regions of the world, where they would travel regularly for joint exercises and other missions, using permanent facilities and the forward-staging bases that some advisers call lily pads.

Many of the proposed bases will be secret and could temporarily house small commando teams, the officials said.

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The Pentagon, meanwhile, sees the bases and drones as part of an effort to offset cutbacks that some critics say will undercut the U.S.’s global dominance. The Pentagon says it will have more than enough force to fight at least one major troop-intensive ground war.

The Pentagon still will invest in some big-ticket items, including the F-35 stealth fighter, as a counterweight to rising powers, including China—although the department is poised to announce this week that it is going to slow procurement of the new plane, said defense officials.

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The plan envisions a 10% increase in special-operations forces over the next four years, from 63,750 this year to 70,000 by 2015, U.S. officials said. Mr. Panetta also will announce a buildup in the drone fleet in the coming years, U.S. officials said, following growth under predecessor Robert Gates.

The Air Force now operates 61 drone combat air patrols around the clock, with up to four drones in each patrol. Mr. Panetta’s plan calls for the military to have enough drones to comfortably operate 65 combat air patrols constantly with the ability to temporarily surge to 85 combat air patrols, officials said.

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The use of secretive commando teams and small, low-profile bases is appealing to the Obama administration because of the reduced costs, said a U.S. official briefed on the plans. They also risk less apprehension by host governments.

Military leaders are looking into the creation of new special-operations bases in Turkey and eastern Jordan, near the border with Iraq. U.S. officials said. Those will supplement a network of airstrips and other facilities in the region that house drones and operatives used for missions in Yemen, Somalia and beyond.

”By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon,” Gingrich vowed at a campaign stop on Florida’s space coast. ”And it will be American.”

The former speaker went even further, calling for a significant increase in the number of trips into orbit.

”We need to figure out how to do five or eight launches a day, not just one,” he insisted. ”If we’re going to get to the moon permanently, we have to do this. Does that mean I’m a visionary? You betcha.”

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”I will as president, encourage the introduction of the Northwest Ordinance for space to put a marker down that we want Americans to think boldly about the future and we want Americans to go out and study hard and work hard and together we’re going to unleash the American people to build the country we love.”

On the Northwest Ordinance Gingrich said:

“At one point early in my career I introduced the Northwest Ordinance in Space,” the Republican presidential candidate told thousands of voters on Florida’s Space Coast. Under Gingrich’s proposal, once there were “13,000 Americans living on the moon, they [could] petition to become a state.”

Comment: It is important for further space exploration that an American moon colony is established. The Obama administration has cancelled the plans for an American moon colony presented by earlier administrations. This is a dangerous mistake.

The launch of trilateral strategic consultations among the United States, India and Japan, and their decision to hold joint naval exercises this year, signal efforts to form an entente among the Asia-Pacific region’s three leading democracies. These efforts – in the world’s most economically dynamic region where the specter of a power imbalance looms large – have also been underscored by President Obama’s new strategic guidance for the Pentagon. The new strategy calls for “rebalancing toward the Asia-Pacific” and support of India as a “regional economic anchor and provider of security in the broader Indian Ocean region.”

At a time when Asia is in transition and troubled by growing security challenges, the United States, India and Japan are seeking to build a broader strategic understanding to advance their shared interests. Their effort calls to mind the pre-World War I Franco-British-Russian “Triple Entente” to meet the threat posed by the rapid rise of an increasingly assertive Germany.

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The intention of the three democratic powers is to create an “ententecordiale” without transforming it into a formal military alliance. Yet this entente could serve as an important strategic instrument to deter China’s rising power from sliding into arrogance. The three partners also seek to contribute to the construction of a stable, liberal, rules-based regional order.

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Important shifts in American, Japanese and Indian strategic preferences and policies, however, are needed to build meaningful trilateral collaboration. Japan, America’s treaty ally, has established military interoperability only with U.S. forces. After its 2008 security-cooperation declaration with India, Japan must also build interoperability with Indian naval forces, so that, as former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has said, “Japan’s navy and the Indian navy are seamlessly interconnected.”

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Whereas Japan is separated from China by a sea and the United States is geographically distant, China has sharply escalated border violations and other incidents in recent years to increase pressure on India, even as the U.S. has maintained tacit neutrality on Sino-Indian disputes.

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Building true military interoperability within the entente will not be easy, owing to the absence of a treaty relationship between the United States and India, and to their forces’ different weapon systems and training. But given that no formal tripartite alliance is sought, limited interoperability may mesh well with this ententecordiale’s political objectives. Indeed, the entente’s political utility is likely to surpass its military value.

Even so, the deepening cooperation between the United States, India and Japan can help to strengthen maritime security in the Indo-Pacific region – the world’s leading trade and energy seaway – and shape a healthy and stable Asian power equilibrium.

Brahma Chellaney is professor at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi and the author of Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India, and Japan (HarperCollins).

There are few geopolitical atlases. The Duncan-Stroud is concentrated on areas of conflict around the world. It is impossible to include every actual or potential trouble spot in a book of this size, but the major areas of strategic importance are covered.

The book has 15 sections–12 of which are regionally focused on trouble spots–together with a useful stop-press addition. Each section is lavishly illustrated with maps and photographs, mostly in color, and there are helpful summaries and tables in the margins.

The section on the United States provides a sound analysis of the military reach and global intentions of the only superpower. In addition, there is a realistic examination of ballistic missile defense and a critical survey of sanctions.

The treatment of Russia and the former Soviet Union raises many more problems, given the abundance of trouble spots. Apart from the development of Russia itself and its military capabilities, the areas considered are the northern Caucasus, the Baltic States, and the Kuril Islands.

The section on the Balkans presents the most complete coverage in the book. Each state is considered in the context of past, present, and future problems, and myriad issues are treated under the rubric of ”The Crescent of Crisis.” The highlights are oil in the Caspian Basin, the Kurds, and the Tigris and Euphrates. Among these trouble spots are the southern Caucasus and Afghanistan.

Middle East flashpoints appear in three sections entitled ”The Middle East,” ”North Africa,” and the ”Middle East-African Interface.” Prominence is given to the continuing Arab-Israel conflict and future water problems.

The section which follows on ”Sub-Saharan Africa” offers examples from each area of the continent. It is both detailed and well illustrated.
All the major states are included in the section on South Asia, and there are useful sub-sections on Kashmir and Myanmar. The section on East and Southeast Asia considers most trouble spots in the region. The final section is focused on Latin America.

Throughout the regional parts of the text, historical background provides an appreciation of the current issues which are detailed in a clear and unbiased fashion. The key points are tabulated in the margins, and each section concludes with a bibliography and list of Web sites. As a concise guide to trouble spots, these sections compare well with other available reference works.

In many respects it is unfortunate that the remaining sections on strategic matters were included. Some subsections attempt to cover huge topics in only a few pages, while the overall selection reveals obvious omissions.

On balance, Trouble Spots is an invaluable reference for both experts and armchair critics who depend on television for news coverage of world events. It deserves a place on the bookshelf of anyone interested in international security affairs, if only for its excellent maps.

This review is based on a review by British Professor em. Ewan W. Anderson, who is the author of An Atlas of World Flashpoints: A Sourcebook of Geopolitical Crises. The Anderson review was published on Internet in 2002 by the Business Library

Citing ”serious and deepening concerns,” the EU agreed to impose a full embargo on Iranian oil, including existing contracts, by July 1. Other new sanctions targeted the Central Bank of Iran and Iranian petrochemical exports to the EU, according to a statement by the Council of the European Union.

The embargo comes as the U.S. and the EU expand efforts to starve Iran of oil revenue, amid fears that Iran is moving toward development of a nuclear weapons, despite Tehran’s assertions that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

The EU’s move is already cause adjustments in the oil market. Refiners in Spain and Italy have already begun to phase out some Iranian oil purchases in anticipation of the embargo; those efforts promise to increase as the July deadline approaches.

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It is estimated that the EU imported 600,000 barrels a day of oil from Iran from January to October 2011.

Much of the EU is looking to the other suppliers in the Persian Gulf to fill that gap. The Spanish government said Monday that Saudi Arabia will make up for the loss of Iran’s oil supply.

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The EU decision is likely to further squeeze an Iranian economy already under pressure from the effect of Western sanctions. Iran’s currency, the rial, fell 10% to a record low following the EU decision, Reuters reported.

The EU pledged on January 23 to continue with its ”dual track” approach—enacting sanctions on the one hand, while remaining open to negotiations on the other.

The move comes as U.S. officials also apply pressure on consumers of Iranian oil, including China, India and other Asian countries, to trim Iranian imports.

The new book by US Professor Bert Chapman contains eight chapters, a map appendix and glossary and is an important source guide for those who want to learn or learn more about the science of geopolitics. Generally geopolitics is regarded as a sub-science of political geography. It has other connections beside geography: history and political science are two of these.

Chapter 1 introduces the history of geopolitics and presents important geopoliticians.

Chapter 2 is about thirteen selected countries and their geopolitical practices. The presentation often refers to official publications of these countries.

Chapter 3 on present and emerging geopolitical flash points lists 34 of them including geographical locations and geopolitical issues.

Chapters 4 through 7 are bibliographic essays.

Chapter 5 deals with monographic scholarly literature and compares classical and critical geopolitical scholarship published since the 1980s.

Chapter 8 has short biographical essays about eleven geopolitical scholar based on the sub-categories classical and critical geopolitical scholarship.

There are many books on geopolitics but this one is exceptional as it offers information for both experts and lay readers by source of information, including entirely new species of information about geopolitics.

The unique quality of Professor Chapman’s book is illustrated by Chapter 7. It is devoted to new sources of information about geopolitics covering “Gray Literature: Dissertations, Theses, Technical Reports, Think Tank Publications, Conference Proceedings, and Blogs and Social Networking Utilities.”

But we can read in the organization of the book itself a message about geopolitics. It shows geopolitical thinking itself as a technology-supported cognitive activity by both decision making experts and affected laypeople of filtering out and processing new sources of information in order to draw conclusions about relationships in geographic space for the purpose of guiding choices and actions.

Maps are important in geopolitics. They have undergone a widening of production from individual map copiers and printing presses to publishing on the Internet. There is a widening of creation from specialized cartographers to hundreds of thousands of GIS users. Finally, a widening of data and information provisioning itself, where map producers have become their own data providers through geospatially-enabled mobile devices and technology-supported networks like spatial data infrastructures (SDIs).

This review is based on a presentation of the book by Robert Aguirre on mackinderforum.org. The forum seeks to promote the study of geopolitics.

raise the profile of geopolitics as a field of study and to increase its academic standing;

bring together military officers, diplomats, policy makers, academics and businessmen to debate contemporary geopolitical issues;

provide a forum for the exchange and dissemination of new geopolitical ideas and concepts; and

investigate the geopolitical foundations of democratic institutions and ideals.

Panetta also told the crowd of 1,700 gathered in the hangar bay of the USS Enterprise that the ship is heading to the Persian Gulf region and will steam through the Strait of Hormuz in a direct message to Tehran.

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”That’s what this carrier is all about,” said Panetta. ”That’s the reason we maintain a presence in the Middle East … We want them to know that we are fully prepared to deal with any contingency and it’s better for them to try to deal with us through diplomacy.”

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But Congress has expressed strong support for the current U.S. carrier fleet and has passed a law requiring the Defense Department to maintain all 11 of the ships.

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Panetta’s remarks came amid the roar of fighter jets taking off and landing on the flight deck above, as the Enterprise conducted training operations about 100 nautical miles (160 kilometers) off the coast of Georgia.

Known as the Big E, the warship and the other six ships in the carrier strike group will deploy to the Middle East in March. Its presence there will allow the U.S. to maintain two carrier strike groups in the Gulf region, where they can support battle operations in Afghanistan, anti-piracy efforts and other missions in the area.

”The Big E is going to be an important symbol of that power in that part of the world,” said Panetta, whose tour of the ship included stops on the bridge and the flight deck, as fighter jets catapulted off the ship.

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The decision to maintain 11 carrier groups, Panetta said, is part of the Defense Department’s five-year budget plan that will include $260 billion in savings. Overall, the Pentagon must come up with $487 billion over the next 10 years.

The USS Enterprise will be replaced by the USS Gerald R. Ford, which is the first in a new class of technologically advanced carriers. There will be about a 33-month gap before the Ford is commissioned, but Congress has granted a waiver allowing the Navy to drop to 10 carriers for that period of time.

The Enterprise Carrier Strike Group includes the carrier itself, Carrier Air Wing 1, Destroyer Squadron 2, guided-missile cruiser USS Vicksburg, guided-missile destroyers USS Porter, USS James E. Williams and USS Nitze. Together they carry more than 5,000 personnel, with about 4,500 of them on the USS Enterprise.

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The air wing includes more than 50 aircraft, ranging from fighter jets and helicopters to electronic warfare aircraft.

The USS Enterprise has had a long and storied career. In October 1962, it helped set up a blockade around Cuba during the Cuban missile crisis. The Big E, as the ship is called, also was dispatched to the North Arabian Sea after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, unleashing more than 800,000 pounds of ordnance during the early days of the Afghanistan war.

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The Delta 4 rocket roared spaceward from a Cape Canaveral Air Force Station launch pad carrying the Wideband Global SATCOM 4 satellite, the latest addition to the military’s highest capacity communications system in history. Liftoff occurred on time at 7:38 p.m. EST (0038 Jan. 20 GMT).

Built by Boeing, the $464 million WGS-4 satellite is the fourth in a growing constellation of high-capacity satellites that provide tactical communications to and between ground forces, as well as relay data and imagery from surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. The new satellites can provide more than 10 times the communications capacity of its predecessor system, Boeing officials said.

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The WGS system is the only U.S. military communications satellite network capable of providing simultaneous X and Ka band communications, and it offers point-to-point communication, broadcast and multicast services for troops, according to a mission description.

The 13,200-pound (5,987-kilogram) WGS-4 satellite is equipped with solar arrays to generate power and relies on a xenon ion drive for propulsion. It in will fly in a geosynchrounous orbit about 22,369 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth to provide communications services for troops in the Middle East.

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The first WGS satellite was launched in 2007, with two more following in 2009. With WGS-4 now in orbit, the next satellites in the constellation — WGS-5 and WGS-6 — are expected to launch by 2013, Boeing officials said.

The Air Force also ordered another satellite for the constellation, WGS-7, from Boeing in September 2011. On Wednesday (Jan. 18), Air Force officials also exercised options for yet two more satellites — WGS-8 and WGS-9 — in a deal worth $673 million.

”With these options exercised, we are able to expand the WGS constellation and provide communications resiliency for combatant commanders worldwide,” said Craig Cooning, vice president and general manager of Boeing Space & Intelligence Systems, in a statement. ”This will give warfighters the ability to ensure that vital communication links are available at all times, even in the event that one or more critical nodes are disabled.”

The WGS-9 satellite is funded through an international partnership between the U.S. Air Force, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxemburg and New Zealand.

Thursday night’s launch was overseen by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin that relies on the Atlas and Delta evolved expendable launch vehicle (EELV) families.

”WGS-4 will provide important capabilities to the soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines protecting our freedoms around the world,” said Jim Sponnick, ULA’s vice president of mission operations, in a statement. ”This mission begins the most aggressive launch campaign in the history of the EELV program, with nine national security and two NASA launches scheduled this year.”

The launch on January 20 marked the third orbital launch of 2012 and followed two satellite launches by China last week. The next mission for United Launch Alliance will be on Feb. 16, when the company plans to launch an Atlas 5 rocket carrying the U.S. Navy’s Mobile User Objective System 1 satellite.