A confidential report submitted to Ayatollah Khamenei advises a massive expansion of military spending focusing on earmarking more money and scientific resources for developing missile and sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicles. The technology and manufacturing plants for sophisticated drones should be transferred to Gaza and Sudan – not Lebanon. This ...

Syria Friday shot down the Turkish Super Phantom jet with the sophisticated self-propelled medium range anti-air Pantsur-1 missile recently supplied by Russia. Short of time to master the improved missile system, the Syrian crews would have called on their Russian instructors to help launch them. debkafile:  Moscow and Damascus may have decided to stop the almost daily Turkish air force flights over the Syrian coast for spying on Russian arms deliveries through the Russian bases of Tartus and Latakia.

Syrian President Bashar Assad Thursday night, June 21, ordered his entire Air Force fleet of fighter bombers grounded to guard against more defections. Syrian officials are sure that the defection of Col. Hasan Merhi al-Hamadeh, who flew to Jordan aboard a MiG-21, was set up by the CIA - with more to come, to show the Syrian people and Arab world that even the Syrian air force, the part of the armed forces most loyal to Assad, was in fact slipping away from him.
 

The US President Barack Obama has ordered the US Navy and Air Force to accelerate preparations for a limited air offensive against the Assad regime and the imposition of no-fly zones over Syria - depending on Moscow's reaction.

Israel successfully test-fired a new intercontinental ballistic missile Wednesday, Nov. 2. Foreign sources say the ICBM tested was an upgraded Jericho 3 able to carry a 750-kilo nuclear warhead to a distance of 7,000 kilometers - further with a smaller warhead. Soon after the test, the IDF announced the Israeli and Italian air forces had concluded a joint maneuver at Sardinia, and a large-scale exercise had just begun to prepare central Israel for missile attack.