It takes only a cursory glance at recent headlines to see that the Russian bear has not only awoken, but is angry, quite possibly rabid. Not content to merely create chaos in rewriting the map of Eastern Europe, or to panic its neighbours farther afield with constant bomber flights across their flanks, the Russians have also recently turned their sights to the far north. In mid-March, no less than 80,000 Russian troops (yes, that eighty thousand number is correct, at least according to TASS, one of Russia’s official news agencies) were involved in an airborne exercise in the Arctic. Billed as a “snap check of combat readiness,” Russia’s Northern Fleet, Airborne Forces and multiple other formations made a massive display of getting ready to fight in the north, going so far as to land air...

In news from Canada’s shooting war, it turns out that the mission to advise and assist Kurdish forces in northern Iraq had a much more rigorous amount of assisting involved than was initially made clear. In a press conference in Ottawa on Jan. 19, Lieutenant-General Jonathan Vance, head of the Joint Operations Command, and Brigadier-General Michael Rouleau, head of Special Operations Forces Command, told reporters that not only had Canadian special operations snipers directly engaged ISIL militants, but that the Canadian soldiers had been calling in airstrikes since November—no fewer than 13 times. While close observers have noted that the war against ISIL has been following the model of the successful 2001 campaign against the Taliban, which was to use coalition airpower guided by speci...