Wars | featured news

North Korea put its rocket units on standby Friday to attack U.S. military bases in South Korea and the Pacific, after repeated threats and one day after two American stealth bombers flew over the Korean Peninsula in a military exercise. A U.S. official warned that the isolated communist state is “not a paper tiger” and its reaction should not be dismissed as “pure bluster.”

The influence of Tehran on its neighbor is growing, while the U.S., Iraqi officials and analysts say, pursues a policy of near-total disengagement... Ten years after the U.S.-led invasion to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, the geopolitical winner of the war appears to be their common enemy: Iran.

A Syrian opposition leader said Tuesday that he had asked the United States to defend rebel-held areas with Patriot missiles. NATO already has Patriot surface-to-air missile batteries in NATO-member Turkey to help defend the country from potential airstrikes by President Bashar Assad's regime.

An inquiry will begin “as soon as practically possible” over allegations that the weapons were used in Aleppo Province, said the Secretary General Ban Ki-moon.

The specter of chemical weapons attacks in the Syrian civil war emerged Tuesday, with the government and rebels each blaming the other for using such munitions.

Even cyberwar has rules, and one group of experts is publishing a manual to prove it. A handbook due to be published later this week applies the venerable practice of international law to the world of electronic warfare in an effort to show how hospitals, civilians, and neutral nations can be protected in an information age fight.

The U.S. war in Iraq has cost $1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans, expenses that could grow to more than $6 trillion over the next four decades counting interest, a study released on Thursday said.

It was a harrowing international debut for Chuck Hagel, whose first trip to Afghanistan as U.S. defense secretary went dramatically off-script and challenged the American narrative about the 11-year-old war.

North Korean state media said Monday that Pyongyang had carried through with a threat to cancel the 60-year-old armistice that ended the Korean War, as it and South Korea staged dueling war games amid threatening rhetoric that has risen to the highest level since North Korea rained artillery shells on a South Korean island in 2010.

Syria and Iran on Saturday condemned a move by the United States to give non-lethal aid to rebels fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, accusing Washington of double standards.