I&A June Update, July topics

I&A's June issue is being finalized today and tomorrow and should begin to be distributed on Saturday.

July topics are shaping up as follows:
Air Defense: Azerbaijan
Facility Analysis: The PN port in Karachi
Tech Notes: A new IADS classification methodology

More content will be incorporated into the July issue as soon as I decide what to include.

New I&A Features?

I&A subscribers: the April issue of I&A was pretty big. The May issue, not so much. The June issue is going to be bigger than the April issue, potentially by a significant margin, thanks to both the Soviet/Russian ABM feature and the Chinese Strategic SAM Network feature.

I'd be interested to hear any ideas for new feature types. Not specific topics (although those are also always welcome), but different feature types like Historical Perspective or Current Events.

My goal is to bring in a few new feature types to help flesh things out a bit and keep the issues "fuller". I don't want to type just for the sake of meeting a pagecount, or half-ass something to have something published. And yeah, some topics are just by nature going to be huge, like the two mentioned above, or the S-300P/S-400 feature from April. But some new features would be a nice set of additions to keep things a bit more interesting and help offset the times when the content just isn't going to be that huge.

One idea I will be debuting this month is basically similar to the old Image of the Week. My tentative title is Imagery Highlight. The idea is to focus on one specific image (maybe two if a comparison is in order), with a small bit of text describing the significance of what you see.

Any other ideas?

I&A May Update and June Topics

I&A's May PDF is being finalized and will begin to be distributed on Wednesday. The text is complete, right now I'm annotating and inserting imagery. There's been one change: the Soviet/Russian ABM piece has been pushed back to the June issue. I was basically faced with the choices of rushing it and not really doing anything substantial, or pushing it back to allow it to be fully developed. Fortunately one of I&A's contributors submitted an article on Armenian air defenses to replace the ABM piece, so the overall content of the May issue will not suffer.

The June issue is shaping up nicely (and will be released on time and on target around the 15th of June) and should feature the following topics:

Current Events: Chinese Naval Air Power developments
Air Defense: China's Strategic SAM Network
Strategic Warfare: Soviet/Russian ABM Systems
Historical Perspective: undecided for now
Software Review: Google Earth
Reading List: Resources for the IMINT Analyst
And the usual extra bits.

Some of you might ask why I'm doing a software review of Google Earth, a program that should at this point be well known to everyone. The reason for doing Google Earth first is to establish a baseline for comparison. In the future I'll start reviewing and examining some other programs and tools, and being able to compare them to Google Earth will make their usefulness and unique features far more apparent. Plus, evaluating a well-known program first will allow me to focus more on the format and content of the Software Analysis piece, making future entries that much easier to generate.

I&A May 2011

The May I&A PDF may be a week late due to the fact that it's the end of the semester here. I've been giving exams and am now due to work on submitting final grades and whatnot. Add to that the fact that I've had exams of my own, and it's been a bit busy! That being said, I'll do my best to get everything done on time, and this won't affect the release of the June PDF.

Here are the current topics for the May PDF:

-Current Events: seriously, do you need to ask?
-Air Defense: Russian ABM systems (prepare for this one to be large, it's covering current and historical systems, deployment, performance, etc)
-Strategic Warfare: Pakistani Nuclear Facilities (contributor feature)
-Historical Analysis: SAM Site Analysis
-Book Review: Biohazard
-May 2011 Links, Source List, and What Is It?
-May 2011 PDF

I&A April 2011

The April PDF is in the process of being distributed. I have now found a whole new problem: GMail limits the number of messages I can send in a 24 hour period. So, about half of the subscribers got it today, and about half of you will have to wait until tomorrow. Next month I will try and figure out how to do this using YET ANOTHER method, to get around GMail's rule. Someone suggested Google Groups as an option, that may work but may be a bit irritating to have to deal with multiple Google whatsits just to send out a web link. If you've got any ideas, let me know. I can't simply host the PDF file here or release it for open download through Google Docs as it'd evaporate my bandwidth limit in about 0.2 seconds.

Anyway, here's what the April issue ended up containing:

-Current Events: The Libyan Lesson
-Air Defense: The S-300P/S-400
-Air Defense: Contact Line (Contributor Feature)
-Strategic Warfare: War of the Weird
-Historical Analysis: SAM Modernization in China
-Facility Analysis: Fukushima (Contributor Feature)
-Reading List: Military Classics
-April 2011 Links, Source List, and What Is It?
-April 2011 KML file

All for now. Back to trying to figure out GMail.

The Falcon Missile

A while ago I mentioned that I was working on a history of the Hughes Falcon missile family. Well, after about a decade or so of (gradual) research and writing, I now have a finished product.

Anyone interested in this facet of Cold War history can download the PDF file here: click

April I&A PDF Update

Just a brief update regarding the April I&A PDF. The S-300P feature looks to be longer than the March issue all by itself! As for Current Events, I decided to actually look at Libya, but from a different perspective. The Current Events feature will focus on the need for nations like Syria and Iran to upgrade their IADS after witnessing how easily the UN forces took down Libya's network.

Furthermore, I&A will feature its first two contributor-authored pieces in April. These will consist of a current look at Nagorno-Karabakh in light of some recent political developments, and an analysis ofthe damage to the Fukushima reactor complex in Japan. Hopefully these will be the first of many contributor-authored pieces!