U.S. and Kyrgyzstan officials jointly opened two border posts constructed by the Middle East District with ribbon cutting ceremonies at Aikol and Kulundu in the southern region of Batken in early December 2014.
The two new border posts were funded by the USCENTCOM Counter Narcotics Program, enabling a greater presence of the state border service in the remote regions and improving their capacity to interdict illicit trafficking.
MOSCOW — The US private military company Academi (formerly known as Blackwater) has confirmed its readiness to start training a Ukrainian battalion for street fighting, a military-diplomatic source told TASS on Tuesday.
“The private military company Academi has confirmed to the Kiev authorities its readiness to start training an experimental battalion of 550 men as of January at the request of Ukraine’s General Staff,” the source said.
The competition to build the U.S. Army's next service pistol is heating up. Currently the Pentagon is not happy with its current standard-issue Beretta M9 semiautomatic pistol. Common complaints range from the lack of stopping power of 9mm bullets fired from the M9, to concerns about the reliability of the weapon itself -- and its cost. As one Army spokesman noted at the time: "It's costing us more to replace and repair M9s than it would cost to go get a new handgun."
