Safe and sunny skies here? Never. We remain calm in a hurricane, sure, but this week was filled with rough sailing in international waters. The Russians flew their anti-sub planes (obnoxiously) near a U.S.-Japanese naval exercise. North Korea might (or might not!) be developing nuclear torpedoes and mines. Puntland's testing out a (potentially destabilizing) militia to go after Somalia's pirate problem. Since the U.S. is going to be in Afghanistan forever and a day, think-tankers thought through what a (counterterrorism-centric) residual force ought to look like after 2014. Washington gave satellite info and ammo (in secret) to Saudi Arabia for the kingdom's fight against band of Yemeni rebels.
What else, what else... Right, big weapons: A world-record setting electromagnetic railgun; computerized grenade launchers; high-strength sniper rifles; eau d'al-Qaeda. The Air Force remained coy about its secret space plane even while pictures of its landing emerged. We got ahold of new stats on homemade bombs in Afghanistan and documents threatening courts-martial for troops who try to use their work computers' USB ports in the post-WikiLeaks world.
For now, we're out like a fading hologram. (We covered that this week, too.) But the weekend is a mere 48 hours long. We'll be back in the maelstrom soon enough.
