Russia says it has successfully tested a new antiballistic missile. Russian Defense Ministry released video of test on April 2, 2018, which was conducted at the Sary-Shagan testing range in Kazakhstan. The ministry said the missile is already in service and is used to protect the city of Moscow from potential air attacks.
Camp Century, a top-secret, subterranean, experimental missile base established in Greenland during the Cold War, may be exposed in the coming years due to accelerating climate change.
The camp was originally built in 1959, and the U.S. told the Danish government — who administered Greenland at the time — that the experimental base would be constructed to test the feasibility of a nuclear-powered base built under the ice. America also removed ice core samples to collect atmospheric and climate data from throughout the planet’s history.
But, unbeknownst to the people of Greenland or the Danish government, America also tested a concept dubbed Project Iceworm. Iceworm called for hundreds of ballistic missiles to be moved underneath the Arctic ice on subterranean trains.
These missiles would have been some of the only ones capable of reaching the Soviet Union at that time.
According to The Guardian, Century was:
Powered, remarkably, by the world’s first mobile nuclear generator and known as “the city under the ice”, the camp’s three-kilometre network of tunnels, eight metres beneath the ice, housed laboratories, a shop, a hospital, a cinema, a chapel and accommodation for as many as 200 soldiers.
The project was eventually scrapped because the ice in the area was moving at a faster than anticipated rate, potentially causing tunnels to collapse and railroads to break and twist.
Advances in missile design and new diplomatic agreements made the project largely moot. Weapons based in places like Turkey gave the U.S. the ability to threaten the Soviet Union directly with nuclear attack.
But America still had to decide how to decommission the top-secret base. It did so by removing the nuclear reactor and essential equipment. Then it left the rest of the base to be swallowed up by the ice.
Camp Century received more snowfall nearly every year than was able to melt off in the warm months. That would have caused the radioactive waste from the reactor as well as the poisons in pools of septic and industrial discharge relatively safe to bury. As long as the contaminants remain frozen under meters of ice, there would be no threat to anyone or the ecosystem.
But rising temperatures now reduce the surplus snowfall every year. The good news is that scientists don’t think that melting snow and ice will outpace falling snow until 2090, and it could take as much as another 100 years for Century to emerge from its tomb once again.
When that happens, everyone is going to get a good look at America’s dirty laundry as well as literal pools of soldier poop.
As the partial federal government shutdown enters its fourth week, another group is about to get hit in the pocketbook: retirees of the Coast Guard.
The 50,000 annuitants on the Coast Guard’s rolls will see their first missed check Feb. 1, 2019, if a budget agreement is not reached or another arrangement made, a service spokesman confirmed to Military.com.
“In order for the Coast Guard to pay its active-duty, reserve, civilian, and retired members, the service will require an FY19 appropriation, a continuing resolution, or passage of an alternative measure,” Lt. Cmdr. Scott McBride said in a statement.
As an active-duty Coast Guardsman, McBride himself will miss his first paycheck Jan. 15, 2019, if the status quo continues.
The partial shutdown, which began Dec. 22, 2018, was originally expected to affect end-of-year paychecks for all members of the Coast Guard.
But active-duty service members saw a last-minute save due to “extensive research and legal analysis,” Coast Guard officials announced Dec. 28, 2018. A determination was made that the service had the authority to dole out the remainder of pay and allowances for the month, despite the lapse in appropriations.
(U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 1st Class Matthew S. Masaschi)
The Coast Guard, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, worked hard to make sure that those on the retired rolls could continue to receive their paychecks as long as possible.
“In spite of the government shutdown, the U.S. Coast Guard has identified essential personnel who shall continue to report to work; they will be responsible for ensuring the retiree and annuitant payroll for USCG, [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] and [Public Health Service] is run and distributed on time,” states a message posted to the Coast Guard pay and personnel center Dec. 26, 2018. “As such, you may expect timely delivery of your pay on 31 December, 2018.”
But without a new injection of funds, the next monthly pay installment is halted.
Legislation introduced in the House and Senate this month would provide pay for active-duty Coast Guardsmen as well as contractors and civilian workers out of unappropriated U.S. Treasury funds in the event of a continued shutdown. It would also provide pay for any furloughed civilian workers and “such sums [as] are necessary to provide for Coast Guard retired pay.”
The legislation still awaits passage, however.
In the Senate, the Pay Our Coast Guard Act, introduced Jan. 4, 2019, was assigned to the Senate Legislative Calendar after reading; in the House, the Pay Our Coast Guard Parity Act of 2019 was introduced Jan. 9, 2019, and assigned to the Committee on Appropriations and the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, where it remains.
This article originally appeared on Military.com. Follow @militarydotcom on Twitter.
The ground war of Desert Storm lasted all of 100 hours. After giving Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army the Noah’s Ark treatment and raining death on them for 40 days and 40 nights, the Army and Marines very swiftly moved in and expelled the entire army all the way out of Kuwait and deep into their own territory.
But it wasn’t all Iraqi troops surrendering to helicopters en masse.
On Feb. 22, 1991, the First Marine Division already had 3,000 Marines and Corpsmen 12 miles inside of Kuwait. The grunts were on foot, carrying heavy packs along with their weapons for all of those 12 miles since the wee hours of the morning. They crossed a minefield and evaded Iraqi armor to do it, and they had already stormed Iraqi positions and taken prisoners. That’s when the Marines were informed that President Bush called a halt to the invasion to give Saddam time to leave Kuwait on his own.
Up until this point, some of the 92,000 Marines in the area of responsibility had already seen action, defending Saudi Arabia from Iraqi border attacks, Iraqi artillery attacks, and even an Iraqi amphibious assault on the Saudi city of Khafji. In each of these encounters, Marines were left unimpressed with the performance of the Iraqis on the battlefield, so they changed their tactics to make the best use of their speed and armor while making up for their lack of supplies – but the new plan required new logistical plans in the middle of the Saudi desert, which Navy Seabees accomplished in a hurry. The stage was set.
By the 20th of February, the First Marine Division was staged along the minefields that protected the Kuwaiti border with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The Marine engineers discovered a path through the mines by watching Iraqi defectors walk through the minefield. The Marines simply mimicked that path and within hours were miles inside Kuwait. The Marines, some carrying up to 100 pounds, walked for 30 miles and then crawled through a minefield. In chemical warfare gear.
Marines along the line began to break through the minefields so their heavy armor could roll through. At least three separate locations drove two lines through the mines under enemy fire. They did the same thing through an inner minefield. Once the Marines were through, they carried on to where the enemy was and began taking out the entrenched defenders immediately. Resistance was uncoordinated and incomplete. The First and Second Divisions invading Kuwait might have met more resistance, but Marines were landing all over the area.
Meanwhile, a Marine landing of reserve troops was going down in Saudi Arabia. For days before landing, these amphibious Marines had conducted training exercises throughout the Persian Gulf, making the Iraqis believe a large amphibious invasion of Kuwait was coming. Instead of that, the Americans moved that Marine force back to Saudi Arabia and replaced its force. That force held up 10 Iraqi divisions and 80,000 Iraqi troops who were just waiting to pounce on the invading Americans. All the while, their cities in Western Kuwait would fall.
Marine artillery was at work as well, destroying 9 APCs, along with some 34 tanks. By the time President Bush declared a cease-fire, Marines had defeated 11 Iraqi divisions, destroyed 1,600 tanks and armored vehicles, and taken 22,000 prisoners.
Shortly after the Marine advance, everything was over. Kuwait was liberated, and Iraqis were back in Iraq.
The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress has the nickname “Big Ugly Fat F***er” — or just the BUFF — but is it the biggest bomber that ever served? Believe it or not, that answer is, “No.”
There was a much bigger bomber in the fleet — and while it never dropped a bomb in anger, it was the backbone of Strategic Air Command in its early years. That plane was the Convair B-36 Peacemaker.
The Peacemaker was immense, according to a fact sheet from the National Museum of the Air Force: Its wingspan was 230 feet (compared to 185 feet for a B-52), the B-36 was 162 feet long (compared to just over 159 feet for the B-52), and it could carry up to 86,000 pounds of bombs, according to aviation historian Joe Baugher. The B-52’s maximum bomb load is 70,000 pounds, per an Air Force fact sheet.
How did you get such an immense craft off the ground? Very carefully.
The B-36 had six Pratt and Whitney R-4360 engines in a pusher configuration and four General Electric J47 jet engines. These were able to lift a fully-loaded B-36 off the ground and propel it to a top speed of 435 miles per hour.
Depending on the model, the B-36 had up to 16 20mm cannon in twin turrets. The B-36 entered service in 1948 – and it gave SAC 11 years of superb service, being replaced by the B-52. Five planes survive, all of which are on display.
Below, this clip from the 1955 movie “Strategic Air Command” shows how this plane took flight. Jimmy Stewart plays a major league baseball player called back into Air Force service (Stewart was famously a bomber pilot who saw action in World War II and the Vietnam War).
Also recognizable in this clip is the flight engineer, played by Harry Morgan, famous for playing Sherman Potter on “MASH” and as Detective Rich Gannon in the 1960s edition of “Dragnet.”
Kim Jong Un’s arrival in Vietnam for a second summit with President Donald Trump took an unusual turn when an aide appeared to miss his cue during a grand entrance.
Video footage of Kim’s arrival in Dong Dong, on the China-Vietnam border, shows the North Korean leader walking down a red carpet ramp from his personal armored train.
He initially descends alone. A few seconds later, an aide appears to realise what is going on, and quickly runs down the ramp to join Kim.
You can the moment in this video, via the Filipino ABS-CBN news channel. The aide’s sprint down the carpet comes around the 14-second mark:
The entourage had just completed a marathon 2,000-mile train ride from Pyongyang, across a vast expanse of southern China, which lasted two and a half days.
Experts say that Kim’s decision to travel by train could have been to avoid the appearance of being reliant on China, after he received significant attention for borrowing plane from the government-owned Air China to get to his last summit with Trump in Singapore.
The optics of Kim travelling by train could also remind North Koreans of Kim’s grandfather, who used the same train to get to countries like Vietnam as well as the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, The Associated Press reported.
Trump has characterized the summit as a follow-up to the leaders’ first summit in Singapore in June 2018, when North Korea made a vague commitment to working toward denuclearization.
Kim Jong Un and President Donald Trump shaking hands at the red carpet during the Singapore Summit in June 2018.
Pyongyang appears to have made little progress on that front since the first meeting. US intelligence and North Korea experts have warned that North Korea is unlikely to give up its nuclear arms.
Trump told the Governors’ Ball on Feb. 24, 2019, that he was “not pushing for speed” with North Korea’s denuclearization.
However, he tweeted on Feb. 25, 2019: “With complete Denuclearization, North Korea will rapidly become an Economic Powerhouse. Without it, just more of the same. Chairman Kim will make a wise decision!”
Trump tweeted on Feb. 25, 2019, that he was “Looking forward to a very productive Summit!”
This article originally appeared on Business Insider. Follow @BusinessInsider on Twitter.
Three of Australia’s warships were “challenged” by the Chinese navy in the South China Sea early April, 2018, according to an ABC report.
Defense sources told ABC that Australia’s navy was en route to Vietnam when it encountered polite but “robust” challenges from the People’s Liberation Army, but the specific nature of the challenges is not described. HMAS Toowoomba had departed from Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia, while HMAS Anzac and HMAS Success travelled through the South China Sea after leaving the Philippines.
It’s believed the interaction happened around the same time China was conducting its largest-ever naval parade on April 12, 2018. The massive show of force involved 10,000 naval officers, 48 naval vessels, submarines, the country’s only aircraft carrier.
During the event President Xi Jinping was on board one of the destroyers, overseeing the parade.
When questioned about the incident, Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull wouldn’t reveal any details.
“All I can say to you is we maintain and practice the right of freedom of navigation and overflight throughout the world,” Turnbull said. “In this context, you’re talking about naval vessels on the world’s oceans including the South China Sea, as is our perfect right in accordance with international law.”
The South China Sea is a highly contested and valuable region. It is a major shipping route and some claim it has more oil reserves thany any other area on the planet, except Saudi Arabia.
Numerous countries — including China, Brunei, Taiwan, Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Philippines — have territorial claims, making the South China Sea one of the most disputed places on the planet. For its part, China has been criticized for building artificial islands in the region and militarizing them with missile sites and air bases.
This isn’t the only problem Turnbull has faced with China of late.
In 2017, Turnbull proposed a new law to target and broaden the definition of foreign interference, after a wave of claims regarding China’s influence campaigns in Australia. The laws have been derided in China and since then the two countries have been sparring over strained diplomatic relations and China’s growing influence in the Pacific.
This article originally appeared on Business Insider. Follow @BusinessInsider on Twitter.
Shaolin Kung Fu is one of the oldest and most intense forms of Chinese martial arts. Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, and a number of other martial arts movie stars have also made Kung Fu one of the most famous forms.
As a part of a religious order, the Shaolin monks were persecuted by Chinese Communists during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. The temple was mostly destroyed and stayed that way for years. But when Jet Li made “Shaolin Shi,” it was enough to make Mao give in: the temple was rebuilt and some much-needed tourism revenue came in as Kung Fu made a comeback.
Here are a few things you may not have known about Kung Fu and the elite Shaolin Monks.
Legend has it that the founder of the Shaolin order, a Buddhist monk from India named Bodhidharma, spent nine years meditating in a cave near his monastery. The legend has it that to keep him from falling asleep, the monk cut off his eyelids and threw them on the ground.
Green Tea began to grow from the spot where he threw his eyelids and now Buddhist monks use green tea to maintain their focus during meditation.
The word “dojo” is reserved for places that teach Japanese martial arts, like Aikido. When entering a kwoon, bow at a 45-degree angle with your hands at your chest — the right in a fist, and the left open-palm.
This represents the yin and yang and that your heart is at peace.
Again, much of the look of the loose-fitting gi and colored belts comes from the Japanese practice. Traditional Chinese Kung Fu doesn’t use colored belt levels (though some Western teachers might use them as a teaching tool). Chinese Kung Fu uses a uniform that is tight at the ankles and sometimes even at the wrists.
Ok, he wasn’t an actual werewolf. In the late 19th century lived a monk named Tai Jin. The poor guy suffered from a condition known as hypertrichosis. Also known as “Werewolf Syndrome” because of the insane amount of body hair that grows on affected areas.
It might have helped his self-esteem to know that, according to legend, he was the best fighter in all of China.
Tai Jin was abandoned at the monastery as a baby because of his body hair. The monks raised him and trained him. He eventually dedicated himself to one form of martial art. Legend also has it that upon meeting the 12 masters of Shaolin, the boy threw a dagger into the ceiling, killing a would-be assassin. He explained to the masters that he could hear 13 people breathing, not just 12.
For more about the Shaolin monks and their founder, check out the above episode of Elite Forces.
Now that Donald Trump is set to become the 45th President of the United States, everyone is wondering what his potential cabinet will look like.
Perhaps most consequential is who he picks for Secretary of Defense — a civilian leadership position at the Pentagon in charge of roughly 3 million military and civilian personnel.
Also read: 6 weapons systems that are likely to gain from a Donald Trump win
Here’s who it could be, according to reporting from Politico and The Hill:
A reliable Trump surrogate on the campaign trail, Flynn is seen as a likely choice for the top spot at the Pentagon. He previously served as the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency,retiring in 2014 after 33 years in uniform. Flynn was a career military intelligence officer who served during the Cold War, Operations Desert Storm, Enduring Freedom, and Iraqi Freedom, and others.
“He’s about leading from the front. He’s about taking the hard jobs. He’s about driving change,” Adm. Michael Rogers, the head of the National Security Agency, said of him in 2014. “He’s always about the men and women around him.”
There’s just one problem for Flynn, however. Since he’s only been out of uniform for two years, he’d require a waiver from Congress to serve as Defense Secretary, since the law requires a seven year gap for military officers who want to serve as the Pentagon’s civilian leader. He could still serve in some other spot, such as national security advisor.
Former Secretary of State and retired four-star Gen. Colin Powell is not a fan, however. In leaked personal emails reported by BuzzFeed News, Powell described Flynn as “abusive with staff, didn’t listen, worked against policy” and called him “right-wing nutty.”
Another name being floated is Jeff Sessions, a Republican senator who has been in office since 1996. He supported the 2003 Iraq War and opposed the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and the lifting of the ban on women serving in combat roles, foreshadowing major policy reversals he could potentially implement as Defense Secretary.
Sessions has personal military experience, having served as a Captain in the US Army Reserve for 13 years. He currently sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee and has been advising Trump on national security since March. “He would obviously be a very strong fit” for Defense Secretary, said Joe Kasper, the chief of staff for Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.).
President George W. Bush’s former national security advisor may reprise that role in a Trump administration, or be tapped to lead the Pentagon as Defense Secretary.
Right now he chairs the United States Institute of Peace, a federally-funded think tank that promotes conflict resolution around the world. He’s also a principal of RiceHadleyGates LLC, a consulting firm he founded with former national security advisor Condoleeza Rice, former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and Anja Manuel, a former State Department official.
Hadley is a controversial figure. The false allegation that Iraq tried to buy uranium from Niger prior to the invasion made its way into President Bush’s State of the Union speech in 2003, which Hadley later apologized for.
He also sits on the board of defense contractor Raytheon, a potential conflict-of-interest he’d have to remedy should he be tapped by Trump.
He’s been hawkish on Iraq and Iran. He’s also been skeptical of Russian military moves and was critical of the Obama administration’s “Russian reset.” He has also acknowledged the national security implications of climate change.
Last but not least is former Sen. Jim Talent. Talent served in the Senate for much of the Bush administration, finally losing to Sen. Claire McCaskill in 2006. He currently serves on the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission, a group created by Congress that examines the US-China relationship and prepares an annual report on its national security implications.
Like Hadley, Talent is also an Iraq War hawk. Though he wasn’t in Congress for the 2002 vote to go to war, he said in 2006 that he still would have invaded Iraq even with the knowledge there were no weapons of mass destruction.
He wants to enlarge the size of the Army, and opposes the release of detainees from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He has been critical of Trump’s approach to NATO — setting conditions to automatic defense of NATO countries — writing that such a move could isolate America from its allies.
Whoever gets picked, the next Defense Secretary will face myriad challenges, from the ongoing fight against ISIS and China’s moves in the South China Sea to the ongoing stress on the military imposed by sequestration.
A number of defense secretaries who served under Obama have criticized him for “micromanagement.” Trump, it appears, seems to be more of a delegator who will let the Pentagon chief take the reins of the military.
“He will empower his SecDef to lead the way,” Kasper said.
The next Defense Secretary may also end up dealing with a nuclear-armed North Korea, and Russia is very likely to test the limits of the next President in eastern Europe. He or she also needs to reinvigorate a military plagued by low morale.
Trump will also make appointments for many other positions in the Pentagon and the military services, such as service secretaries, policy undersecretaries, and advisors. Those spots may be filled from his list of retired military officers or outsiders. The current leadership at the Pentagon is already preparing for that transition.
A barber wears a face covering while cutting hair at the barber shop on Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, April 10, 2020.
When Marine Corps family members in Maryland reached out to their congressman with concerns about crowded base barber shops, Rep. Jamie Raskin said that — of all the challenges the country faces during the coronavirus pandemic — this was an easy one to solve.
“The people who joined the Marines are protecting us and we have an obligation to protect them,” Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, told Military.com. “[Grooming standards] can be relaxed in a way that does not endanger our national security.”
Raskin, who wrote a letter to Marine Commandant Gen. David Berger on Tuesday, is the latest to question the service’s adherence to strict grooming standards during the global pandemic. A video shared on social media that showed Marines without masks lined up to get their hair cut prompted Defense Secretary Mark Esper to ask, “What don’t you guys understand?”
In his letter, Raskin urged Berger to relax Marine Corps grooming standards temporarily “to protect both Marines and the barbers and hairdressers who serve them.”
Berger has received the letter but wishes to keep private his communication with lawmakers, Maj. Eric Flanagan, the commandant’s spokesman, said.
The commandant has left decisions about relaxing standards to stem the spread of coronavirus up to commanders, but Raskin said the massive health crisis the pandemic presents calls for top-down guidance.
“This calls for precisely the kind of institutional leadership and cohesion that the Marines are famous for,” he said. “The commandant can act here to prevent high-risk situations from materializing.”
I’m asking the @USMC Commandant to temporarily relax grooming standards in the Marine Corps during the COVID19 pandemic to avoid putting Marines & base barbers at unnecessary risk of infection. Our fighting forces protect us & we must protect them (with no risk to nat. security). pic.twitter.com/meuZG9ToOv
— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) April 22, 2020
Having Marines wait in lines for haircuts as cases of COVID-19 continue to rise in the military ranks is unnecessary, Raskin said. The ongoing public health struggle against coronavirus, he said, requires leaders to help reduce any unneeded close physical contact.
Each of the military services has issued its own guidance on how to enforce grooming standards during the pandemic. The Navy, the service hit hardest by the coronavirus crisis, was the first to give commanders the authority to relax male and female hair-length rules on March 18.
The Air Force also issued guidance last month to commanders about relaxing grooming standards. Soldiers have been told to follow the service’s hair regulations, but not to be overboard with extra cuts to keep it super short during the outbreak.
In his letter, Raskin stressed that it only takes one infected Marine or barber to spread COVID-19. That could lead to a chain reaction of COVID-19 cases in the ranks, he warned.
The congressman acknowledged that military leaders have a lot to consider when it comes to new policies during the unprecedented situation caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But if family members are worried about their Marines’ safety, public leaders have an obligation to consider their concerns, he said.
“I hope the commandant can strike the right balance,” Raskin said.
This article originally appeared on Military.com. Follow @militarydotcom on Twitter.
After decades of appearances in video games, cartoons, plush figurines, and all other manner of merchandising, Sonic the Hedgehog is getting his own live-action film.
That film — titled “Sonic the Hedgehog” — was scheduled to arrive November 2019. But the first trailer for it landed earlier this year, and the reaction was strong to say the least. Strongly negative, that is.
The issue mostly centered on the look of Sonic:
Old Sonic (left) and new Sonic (right).
(Sega/Paramount Pictures)
After years of cartoon depictions of the speedy blue hedgehog, the pseudo-real version of Sonic had some people freaking out. So much so, in fact, that the film’s director vowed to change the look of Sonic ahead of the movie’s release.
Moreover, the movie was delayed to re-work Sonic’s look — it’s now scheduled to arrive on Feb. 14, 2020.
Now, six months later, we’ve got a new trailer with a much, much less weird-looking Sonic.
No teeth! More cartoony! And he’s got gloves!
(Paramount Pictures/Sega)
Take a look at the latest trailer for “Sonic the Hedgehog” right here:
This article originally appeared on Business Insider. Follow @BusinessInsider on Twitter.
The Pentagon says U.S. military commanders were told by their Russian counterparts that there were no Russians in a paramilitary force whose attack on a base in eastern Syria early February 2018 led to a massive counterstrike by U.S. forces.
The comments by Defense Department spokeswoman Dana White on Feb. 22, 2018, add another piece to the puzzle surrounding the Feb. 7 incident, which Moscow said this week caused dozens of casualties among fighters from Russia and other former Soviet republics but did not involve uniformed Russian troops.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and other U.S. military officials have repeatedly said that U.S. military commanders were in contact with their Russian counterparts at the time of the clash. But White’s comments are the clearest to date that the U.S. military was told there were no Russians in the attacking force.
“The strike in Syria — our strikes were done out of self-defense. We were very clear about that. We saw those — that group moving towards us. We still don’t know, and I won’t speculate, about the intentions or the composition of that group,” White said.
“What I can tell you is that we used our deconfliction phone line, and we used it before, during, and after the strike. And we were assured by the Russians that there were no Russians involved,” she said.
The clash in Deir al-Zor Province appears to be the first time that U.S. forces engaged directly with Russians in Syria, where Russian forces are backing President Bashar al-Assad’s government in a devastating seven-year civil war.
The revelation that Russian mercenaries were killed stoked fears of an outright hostile confrontation between Russians and U.S. forces. But the Russian government has distanced itself from the incident and its public comments have been subdued.
The United States has said that air and artillery strikes launched after as many as 500 pro-government forces attacked a base housing U.S.-backed opposition forces and U.S. military advisers killed about 100 of the attackers.
No Russian official directly acknowledged that Russian citizens were involved until Feb. 15, 2018, when Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said that about five people who were “presumably Russian citizens” may have been killed.
On Feb. 20, 2018, the Russian Foreign Ministry said “several dozen” citizens of Russia and other former Soviet republics were wounded in the lopsided exchange.
With accounts from relatives and acquaintances of Russian fighters in Syria mounting, some open-source researchers and media reports have said that dozens or hundreds of Russians were killed.
Russia has given Assad’s government crucial support throughout the war in Syria, which began with a government crackdown on protests.
Moscow helped turn the tide of the conflict in his favor by launching a campaign of air strikes in 2015 and stepping up its military presence on the ground.
In Russia, anger is growing among relatives of the dead and survivors, and supporters of private military companies like Vagner, which is believed to have sent hundreds of contract soldiers to Syria.
The company is financed by a wealthy St. Petersburg businessman, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is known for his close ties to the Kremlin.
Some relatives have said their loved ones were lured by the company’s relatively high wages but were deceived into thinking they were going to work on construction projects.
Forget everything you think you know about losing fat. I’m going to sum it up into one simple sentence.
“Burn more energy than you take in.”
That’s it.
When trying to figure out how to do this, most people ask the same basic question:
“What type of cardio should I do?”
That’s the wrong question entirely.
The right question is:
How can I most significantly impact the amount of calories I burn in a day?
The answer may surprise you…
All these two are doing is strengthening the heart and working those calves a bit… but not burning much fat.
Photo by Tomasz Woźniak on Unsplash
Most people assume that if they jack up the amount of activity they do, they will be able to “burn” the most calories and lose the most weight.
In reality, the largest factor contributing towards our daily calories burned isn’t our activity, no matter how much we run or how many times we visit our local Box in a day–it’s our resting metabolic rate.
Resting metabolic rate is the amount of calories we burn just from existing. It’s about 75% of all calories burned in a day. By figuring out how to manipulate it, we can have the largest impact on total calories burned and melt the most fat off our frames.
The question then is what type of exercise will impact resting metabolic rate the most?
Squats work nearly every muscle in the body… Including the smile muscles.
When we lift weights, we are causing (healthy) damage to our muscles that requires repair. That repair requires a lot of energy that can take up to 48 hours to complete.
In a properly set-up training plan, each session gets progressively harder and causes more damage than the previous session, which causes the body to work harder to repair it, and therefore, to burn more calories in its resting state.
The repair process also ensures that you are bigger, which requires more energy just to sustain your size. It literally increases your resting metabolic rate!
We know what you maniacs do when you get bored…
Your body is like the barracks that young E-dogs live in. Lifting is like Libo. When it occurs, things get messed up and need repair.
The repair process in the barracks gets things back to baseline. But depending on how hard they threw down, sometimes things need to get reinforced, like doors. On the next Libo, it’s going to take a much harder drop kick from LCpl Schmuckatelli to knock in that door.
The repair process in your body reinforces your muscles every time you cause muscular damage through weight training, so that you are always getting stronger and burning more calories.
No one in the history of running has ever started running like that.
Photo by Spencer Dahl on Unsplash
If you want to be muscular with a low percentage of body fat, lifting is a better choice than cardio. The primary purpose of cardio is to work your cardiovascular system, NOT to burn fat. The amount of calories that cardio burns is limited to just the moments you are actually running. Unlike lifting, where the body continues burning calories during the repair phase for 48 hours after your training session, for cardio, there is no significant after-effect.
When we run, we are working out our hearts. As a result, when we run at a long slow pace, cardio forces the rest of our body to become more efficient at moving by doing things like improving our form and shedding excess body weight indiscriminately, which often means shedding muscle. Cardio prefers to make the muscle it doesn’t shed more efficient and thrifty, rather than larger, stronger, and hungrier for energy.
Essentially, running just makes you a more efficient runner, as the body optimizes its processes so that you actually use as little energy as possible, rather than burning more calories. It’s common for people doing cardio for weight loss to completely plateau after awhile, because their body’s gotten really good at doing cardio. They might spend an hour on the elliptical machine and burn almost no fat at all.
Running makes you more efficient at using the energy you already have.
Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash
If you’re a runner, running a mile at your current weight burns fewer calories than it did when you were obese and had terrible running form.
In our barracks analogy, cardio is the new Commanding Officer that takes away Libo. What that CO is really doing is taking away the opportunity for the repair process to make the barracks more resilient against drop kicks.
Over time, not only are you burning fewer calories while running than you used to, but you are burning fewer calories in general because you have less muscle mass.
Worse yet, if you don’t compensate for this change in body weight and total calories burned in your diet, cardio can potentially cause you to actually GAIN FAT.
It takes a lot more than just weightlifting to look like this. Gains like this are made in a lab…
Photo by Damir Spanic on Unsplash
When training, if you aren’t causing damage to your muscles through resistance training, your body is instead trying to figure out how to do that training more efficiently. That efficiency will come with less fat burned over time.
The most effective way to increase the amount of energy you burn in order to facilitate fat loss is by resistance training.
The alternative, cardio, comes with the negative side effect of indiscriminately targeting muscle as well as fat in its purge towards efficiency.
If you want a more in-depth explanation of how these two types of exercise work, check out this article on the topic.
