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".int" has an organizational purpose. It's for major international organizations, like the United Nations the the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the Confederation of Independent States (the former USSR) and the Organization of American States.

That give you an indication of what the Bush adminstrations priorities have been?

Interesting! There is also an annual NATO competition which typically involves an amphibious landing followed by a two day trek through snow (all of these events happen at a high latitude like Greenland, Iceland, or Scandanavia) to "rescue" a hostage being kept at a base in the mountains.

En route to, or at the base, the teams are met with full on resistance (every once in a while someone is killed and just about every time someone is seriously injured). Once the hostage has been "rescued" there is another two day trek back to the pickup rendez-vous which requires swimming over one mile from shore in freezing water and strong tides to a vertical recovery point.

The U.S. SEALS have never failed to win this competition!

And looking here www.nato.int most of the others too.
Plane in the original pic was just another f5, sheesh, has no one watched topgun!! Ok,Ok they used skyhawks there.

According to the second... Japan is first world ... the first draws the lines as Nato=1st warsaw=2nd everybody else=3rd..

Thankfully, this Clark has a single, well-defined chin.

Look, I would gladly agree that the US is spending too much on the military. But you seem to be exagerating when you state "America spends vastly more per capita on the military on Earth". Here is the obligatory link. You can see that the US per capita defense budget in 2001 was approximately $950 (adjusted for inflation to 1995 terms). France's budget was about $775 per person. Norway's was over $800 per person (Norway!?!). Yep, the US spends more per capita. But not "vastly more". Certainly far less than 2 or 3 times as anyone else.

I think a better method of comparison is to look at defense spending as a percentage of GDP. Here is another page that demonstrates this. The US spends about 3% of its GDP on defense. This is lower than Greece and Turkey by a wide margin. In fact, it is less than half the percentage China spends.

I'm not trying to justify what the US spends on its military. But I think it distorts the figures when one looks at US military spending without considering the size of the US economy or the per capita wealth enjoyed in the US. The US still does spend more per capita than Europe. But, then again, Europe had to call on the US to help them solve the Yugoslavia situation. With the relative ineffectiveness of European military spending, one could argue just as easily that Europe should increase its military spending (again, not my argument....but I don't like to hear statistics get twisted, and I thought this deserved a response).

Look, I would gladly agree that the US is spending too much on the military. But you seem to be exagerating when you state "America spends vastly more per capita on the military on Earth". Here is the obligatory link. You can see that the US per capita defense budget in 2001 was approximately $950 (adjusted for inflation to 1995 terms). France's budget was about $775 per person. Norway's was over $800 per person (Norway!?!). Yep, the US spends more per capita. But not "vastly more". Certainly far less than 2 or 3 times as anyone else.

I think a better method of comparison is to look at defense spending as a percentage of GDP. Here is another page that demonstrates this. The US spends about 3% of its GDP on defense. This is lower than Greece and Turkey by a wide margin. In fact, it is less than half the percentage China spends.

I'm not trying to justify what the US spends on its military. But I think it distorts the figures when one looks at US military spending without considering the size of the US economy or the per capita wealth enjoyed in the US. The US still does spend more per capita than Europe. But, then again, Europe had to call on the US to help them solve the Yugoslavia situation. With the relative ineffectiveness of European military spending, one could argue just as easily that Europe should increase its military spending (again, not my argument....but I don't like to hear statistics get twisted, and I thought this deserved a response).

Didn't you get the memo?

Arrrrrrgh!!! Yves Brodeur

You shouldn't use .int for that. .int is a real TLD, used by international organisations such as NATO.

Use .localdomain instead.

Norway is not a member of the EU. The other nordic nations, that is Sweden, Finland and Denmark, are. European Union
Norway is a member of Nato. Nato

The Soviet have 150-mm nuclear tactical warhead to be fired from a regular 150-mm artillery gun. These warheads are supposed to have a yield of less than a kiloton. The Soviet forces also have nuclear landmines, presumably to blow up large infrastructures.

The US have 155-mm nuclear artillery, such as the W-48 warhead, with a very low yield (less than 0.1 kiloton).

So I fail to see what's so new, exciting and dangerous about deployment of tactical, low yield nukes. Such dangerous gadget have been deployed since the fifties. Just because the poster did not know about it does not make it new.

To be exhaustive, NATO claims that all nuclear artillery shells and tactical surface warheads (anti-ship and anti-submarines) were eliminated between 1991 and 1993. So this article merely suggest that these weapons are returning to the Western arsenal.

-- SysKoll

You mentioned Switzerland and Iceland as countries that have "tried peace," with the implication that they have been enlightened and successful in this endeavor. It's worth pointing out that Switzerland has been avoided as a target for a couple of reasons: First, their geographic location is a very difficult for occupation; and second, virtually every male citizen of Switzerland is not only required to be a member of the military (militia) but is required to keep their equipment (read guns) in their home for rapid mobilization.

Iceland, on the other hand, is a barely noticeable strategic target except in terms of its possible use as a base in an "east versus west" war. It's also worth noting that Iceland is NOT really neutral in that they are a member of NATO for Heaven's sake!

Finally, being intelligent, educated and compassionate as a nation should never have anything to do with defending oneself or initiating military action. Violence is unfortunately sometimes necessary. Most of us don't like it, but if we ever forget it I'm sure that someone will come along to remind us (you may remember 9/11?).

Good luck with Utopia ("no place").

As a former German army guy, I greatly prefer the Keiler to that method. See here (Rheinmetal) or here (NATO). Works very well in the battlefield and is just loads of fun to drive ;-). Of course fuel air explosives also work fairly well. As long as you don't have anything that lives or should kept standing in the mine field. By the way, NATO has a lot of pretty good information on that site.

Thank you for putting things into perspective. I have never been to Poland, so can hardly picture what life is like there. Was in USSR in the eighties, and if that was any indication...

Most of the 20th century meant wars or occupation for Poland (I personally know people who were prisoners of the extermination camps in Oswiecim (Auschwitz), so I've heard a lot of really terrible stories), but there were times, where we had an empire that reached from the Baltic to the Black Sea, being a very important power in Europe, not only as a military power, but also in the terms of culture and science. Those were times of the great Aztecs civilisation in America.

Living in the exact centre of Europe is nice, but being exactly between the Germany and USSR used to be very unfortunate.

Now we're part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and soon we'll join the European Union. I do hope that things will change for better, and that the 21st century will mean, unlike the 20th century, first of all peace and freedom, but also a fast economical and technological growth for Poland.

A good introduction to Polish history is the History of Poland on Encyclopedia.com and the History of Poland on Wikipedia.

You can find more general info on Encyclopedia.com, on Wikipedia and on Britannica.com. If you're interested, there are lots of links to information about Poland on Polska.pl (Polska means Poland in Polish).

If you are ever on the West Coast of the US, drop me a line. Email is the last bit of my URL at the domain name in front of it. I'd be happy to show you one way of providing bandwidth to a community.

Yes. Dutch aircraft (IIRC, from the squadron where I served, 323 sqn) also took part in the operations in the Balkan a couple of years ago. Check the official NATO site.

Or copy and paste: http://www.nato.int/docu/basictxt/treaty.htm

NATO is - or was - about a common commitment to fighting an external threat, ie: the Russians. i don't think it was conceived as a way of making Germany play nice and refrain from plunging the continent into protracted warfare.

One top level domain that most people aren't aware of is the .int. It exists and the European Space Agency uses it for their subdomain

And NATO, among about 60 others.

dig axfr int @ns0.ja.net
for a full list.

Everybody knows the big US domains (.com, .org, .net, .edu, .gov). And anybody halfway with it knows about country codes too. (.de, .uk, etc.)

Additionally, most old timers remember when .mil addresses used to be more common (and often used, too!), and some of use even remember the old .arpa addresses. And the European Union currently has a .int address. But has anybody found a .nato address? In theory, the exist, but the closest I've ever come has been the NATO home page.

I don't have any reliable sources, but what I read makes sense to me. Rumors had that the VJ (Yugoslav Army)'s network was made up of i86 machines running localised versions of FidoNet software (BinkleyTerm, etc. - anyone remembers them?), and 2400 baud modems connected by underground wire. I doubt that the Pentagon can do anything about that... what was evidently done was not "cyber" at all. Maybe they tried to figure something out at the very beginning, but as things evolved it was very clear that iron was better than carbon, and much better than electrons.

Anyone willing to assess the quality of the warfare engineering can conveniently follow these two links, Railway Bridge I and Railway Bridge II, courtesy of NATO; I'm told that they did not make it onto the screens of the majority of North-American TV sets. Big prizes for those who spot the odd thing out in the movies.

I don't have any reliable sources, but what I read makes sense to me. Rumors had that the VJ (Yugoslav Army)'s network was made up of i86 machines running localised versions of FidoNet software (BinkleyTerm, etc. - anyone remembers them?), and 2400 baud modems connected by underground wire. I doubt that the Pentagon can do anything about that... what was evidently done was not "cyber" at all. Maybe they tried to figure something out at the very beginning, but as things evolved it was very clear that iron was better than carbon, and much better than electrons.

Anyone willing to assess the quality of the warfare engineering can conveniently follow these two links, Railway Bridge I and Railway Bridge II, courtesy of NATO; I'm told that they did not make it onto the screens of the majority of North-American TV sets. Big prizes for those who spot the odd thing out in the movies.

A lot of ppl seem to have got this wrong, along with Kats (my congrats on a good article btw). NATO web site was not hacked. It was a parody site that was.

Offical NATO site : http://www.nato.int

NATO parody : http://www.nato.org

Hope that clears some of the confusion.
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