Missile defense

The US Department of Defense will spend another USD 440 million in the country's missile defense to neutralize the accelerated North Korean missile and nuclear program, the Associated Press reported.
 
Indisputable to the urgency of the matter is that the Pentagon has asked Congress to allow them to allocate funds from the current budget and not from the next year.
 

Russia and Turkey on Friday signed an agreement which has Ankara make a down payment on an advanced anti-missile air defense system.

 Turkey had previously indicated that it was interested in buying the Russian S-400 anti-missile air defense system to boost its air defense stature.

Russia has received an advance payment from Turkey for S-400 surface-to-air missile systems which Ankara is buying from Moscow, Kremlin aide Vladimir Kozhin said on Friday, the TASS news agency reported.
He also said, according to TASS, that Turkey would like to take delivery of the missile system before 2019. “The issue is under discussion,” Kozhin was quoted as saying.

By James Stavridis*

As the doomsday rhetoric intensifies between two untested and inexperienced leaders in Pyongyang and Washington, the risk of actual combat is rising.

US officials have reportedly said that Iran's claim it tested a ballistic missile over the weekend that could reach Israel was a lie, and a video of the launch was in fact recycled footage of a previous missile test, The Times of Israel writes.

US President Donald Trump once again expressed doubts about the effectiveness of the nuclear agreement with Iran, criticizing Tehran for a missile test, and accusing them of cooperating with North Korea, TASS reported, quoted by BTA.

"Iran has just tested a ballistic missile capable of reaching Israel. Not much of an agreement we have", wrote the American president on Twitter.

Turkey’s recent purchase of an advanced Russian anti-air weapons system may have violated a U.S. law that would require an automatic imposition of sanctions on the NATO member, a top Democratic lawmaker said today.

North Korea fired a missile that flew over Japan's northern Hokkaido far out into the Pacific Ocean on Friday, South Korean and Japanese officials said, deepening tension after Pyongyang's recent test of its most powerful nuclear bomb, reported Reuters. 

Commenting on Turkey's planned missile purchase from Russia, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has reportedly said that it is "up to each member state" of the alliance to make its own decisions on the purchase of weapons.

"It's up to each individual ally to decide on what kind of equipment it acquires," the Russian Sputnik news agency quoted him as saying on Sept. 14.

Russia carried out an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) test in the country’s remote northwest ahead of a huge war game scheduled to begin later this week that will involve thousands of troops near the Belarus western border with NATO countries.