Military events we don't hear much about

Stategy Page has a top ten list of critical military events you don't hear much about. Here are three I found interesting.

1. Anti-Terrorism Operations. Oh, sure, you hear about this in the news, but never in detail. And it's the details that make or break these efforts. A lot of the effort is plain old detective work - a lot of stakeouts, many interviews with suspects, or their friends, family or neighbors. Even more underground are the electronic operations (bugging terrorist e-mail, phone calls) and crypto (breaking secret codes used on phone calls and e-mail.)

7. The Bug Race. Information warfare, centered on the Internet, is, more than anything else, a battle to find and patch (for the good guys) or exploit (for the bad guys) flaws in the enormous amount of computer software that runs the net. Much of this software is "open source" (the original instruction, in plain text) and available to anyone. The black hat hackers pore over this code looking for flaws. If they find a bug before the white hat (good guy) hackers, mischief, damage or major crimes will result. There's no magic involved. In fact, the major source of serious net crime remains insiders going over to the dark side. But for anyone else, it's a matter of who gets to the bugs first.

10. Who's Ready for What? The size of armed forces usually is reported in terms of quantity, not quality. This is odd, since most wars are decided by the quality of the troops, not how many of them there are. "Readiness" is the term most often used to describe this and you rarely get a straight answer when looking for the readiness of any armed forces. But it's how much readiness a forces has, not how many troops or weapons, that says it all regarding fighting power.

Thanks to Boinky for the link to Strategy Page.