Bigduke6

That is a textbook case of government officials avoiding responsibility, because it is other government officials that are supposed to be watching them. To break it down: 1. Senators want to know how many people the NSA monitors w/in the US. 2. NSA tells senators "thanks for asking" and sends the request to its internal ombudsman/overwatch division, the NSA inspector general (NSAIG). 3. One month later NSAIG makes a classified response. 4. The upshot of that NSAIG response, which is not classified, is: - NSAIG lacks the capacity to figure out how many people in the US the NSA eavesdrops on. - Were the NSAIG to perform such a survey, it would "violate the privacy of US persons" (I'll add in here, that if such a survey would violate US citizens' privacy were it conducted, it logically follows that the NSA, which is doing the eavesdropping, must already be violating US citizens' privacy. The survey would be of NSA activity. So nothing it uncovered, would not already have been done by the NSA. That the NSA is monitoring the US citizenry is perhaps not a surprise. However, it is a little peculiar that the man in charge of the NSAIG is cool with making it clear it is happening in a letter to a pair of senators.) 5. The NSAIG therefore cannot answer the senators' question. 6. The letter closes with the NSAIG informing the senators that the NSAIG is committed to "oversight of the intelligence community." One wonders what the NSAIG would do, if they were not committed to the oversight of the intelligence community. Frankly, declaring "commitment" and doing nothing is not exactly evidence of commitment. I suppose we should be grateful the NSA was gracious enough not to send agents to each of the senators' homes to play recordings of embarrassing phone calls made by the senators, and then to issue the instruction: "Vote more money for the NSA or else!" Of course, really, we don't know that either.

To be fair, part of this is due to the Axis running short of armor and indeed AT weapons in the East, and the Soviets being able to achieve armored breakthroughs (more or less, I'm generalizing here) at will. This brought down Red armor onto Axis infantry a whole lot more often than say in the early-to-mid war period, and of course a normal outcome of T-34 brigades rampaging through an Axis rear area is that Axis infantry is going to get itself to the closest town, village or city if at all possible. But even in Berlin something like 8-10 per cent all lost Soviet armored vehicles were to infantry weapons, and that was a battle where most of the Germans literally had nowhere to run.

It all comes down to what one considers "decisive". Tacticians will consider unit manuever and soldier skill the critical issues in deciding the battle, operational experts will say formation mobility and relative concentration of force are what makes or breaks a campaign, and strategists will point to available material (and men, who to strategists are just another resource) and the logistical limits on that material as the main factors that determine a war's outcome. The closer you get to the strategic level, the more decisive artillery becomes. LLF makes a valid point that no one surrenders to a flying shell fragment, for that you need troops, but on the other hand, you pound men with artillery long enough, you will make them inclined to surrender if you offer them an opportunity. This is because artillery more than the other arms is unanswerable by the other arms. They must endure what the artillery hands out. The impact (get it?) of artillery is not just the people it kills or maims or even forces the heads down of during the battle, or even over the course of several weeks or months. Artillery has the capacity of convincing its targets their resistance is futile. Other arms can do that too, for instance tanks can convince infantry armed just with rifles to quit. Convince a man his prolonged resistance is futile and he will only die at the end, when his body too stops a random bit of flying metal, and there is only unit discipline left to keep him fighting. Outside of movies, there are very, very few groups of men on Earth can see their buddies struck down by something they can't respond to, over time, and not start wondering if unit cohesion and obeying senior ranks is all just an idiotic conspiracy that will get them killed for no reason. And that is how you get giant units surrendering to small ones: the men in the giant units have become convinced if they resist further they would throw away their lives pointlessly. Artillery, or in the modern day simply the generic category indirect fire weapon, is the arm that does the lion's share of that work. I guess the way to account for all this in a CM setting would be for the scenario designer to account for how much a unit had suffered casualties during previous days and months, when he built the scenario. Even a veteran infantry unit that has had a couple of casualties over say the last week, will fight far more effectively than a veteran infantry unit that has suffered 1/3 of its number casualties over the last month. True the survivors are now skilled at surviving, but frankly, a good part of that is simply choosing to ignore orders that would obviously get them killed or maimed if those orders were followed. And lots of times the junior officers, who share the same risks, are complicit. Perhaps if one is designing a battles where a unit has been in the line a long time, one should tweak unit motivation or leadership values somehow to account for a larger chance of unit insubordinance in battered units. I'm not saying it would be easy. Of course, it's not just artillery that can convince soldiers of the futility of their mission. You send men into a region and tell them "your patrols will make the locals friendly and make the locals hate the guerillas, and we will win", and even if those patrols produce no friendly casualties at all, if the guerillas keep showing up sooner or later the soldiers are going to start thinking their patrol mission is a crock. If, in fact, at best the patrols are doing nothing, and possibly they are antagonizing the local population, and in any case those patrols are putting friendly soldier lives at risk for no clear purpose, then the men performing those patrols will become less effective just as inevitably as if random artilery rounds were chipping away at men effective numbers. The process will not be as quick, obviously, as suffering drip-drip casualties from indirect because one's unit is in the line. Death or severe injury to his friends is the still the best weapon against a soldier's motivation. But continued "failure" can undermine unit morale and motivation just like accumulated artillery casualities. We have seen that in just about any counter-insurgency operation in the last century. Of course, the tacticians will say, "Not so, even at the ends of the counter-insurgencies the Americans in Vietnam or the Russians in Afghanistan fought effectively." To which I would respond, look at the units involved and in both cases you will see that as those conflicts wore on, the commanders relied more and more on picked troops who had volunteered for duty, and tried to keep the conscripted regulars out of the heavy fighting. Which in turn reduced the number of soldiers that count be effectively used against the insurgency. This is a direct outcome of falling motivation and morale because the average soldiers perceived the conflict as futile. My point is, artillery or more generally random bits of flying metal over time create a sense of futility in the enemy during a war better than any other weapon. True, these days it's most often roadside bombs or guided munitions, but I would argue the basic strategy has been unchanged for close to a century: If you hit the other guy with enough explosives over a period of months or even years, eventually he will quit and your side will win. A side note on the Cold War: In my youth I was a NATO Fulda Gap guy who was supposed to give his life halting the Big Red Machine. Now, as a tiring old man fate has placed me in an office with a former Red Army guy who, funnily enough, was in the service roughly at the same time as I was. His job was to help attack NATO. We were both in tactical intell/recon so we've had plenty to chat about over the years. Our considered opinion is we have no idea who would have won World War Three but we are absolutely sure neither of us would have lasted a month. Further, it seems pretty clear that our never having to fight each other is more down to luck than the wisdom of statesmen. In retrospect, we were told a lot of lies by our superiors at the time, clearly they were more interested in getting us ready to try and kill each other than telling us the truth. The Soviet leadership lied more and more shamelessly, and the NATO lies were smaller and better-packaged. But then the Soviet soldiery always suspected it was being systemically lied to, while us NATO guys for the most part believed what we were told and did not question the morality of our superiors. So we are not sure which of us, when we were Cold Warriors, was the more falsely-motivated. I think I can say for the both of us that the Cold War, in retrospect, looks like a giant scam run by both sides' governments to spend an obscene, ridiculous amount of money on weapons instead of schools and hospitals - at a time when nobody had any intention of attacking any one, on either side, not statesmen or average citizens. The idea, on both sides, seems to have been to make sure a substantial flow of money kept going to military programs in a time of peace, and screw the general population. We do not see big differences on either side about how government colluded with the arms industry to make this happen.

What Womble said. I was in a quick battle against a human (well, more or less) opponent and I bought like six 57mm to set up inside a village that had some trees clumped here and there. So I put the guns in the clumps, set "hide" and waited for the panzers. Lo an behold and every one of those guns gets mortared or MGed to death. Post-battle I find my opponent's scouts spotted them, usually at ranges of 500 meters or so. We thought about that a bit, and realized the engine had created a village that was essentially a golfing green with some buildings and trees planted in it. Put a gun on a golfing green a half-kilometer in direct LOS of me, and yeah, I'll probably spot it too. Bottom line, for a gun to have any chance of staying hidden it needs good concealing terrain, which would be debris, bush, tall grass, something like that. It's not like CM1 where is the unit is on "hide" the game engine sort of assumes the unit has sought out the best hidey-spot in the 40 meter square it's in, and gives it an initial camoflage bump. In CM2, either it's good concealment or not. Also, it sure seems to me buttoned-up vehicles find targets very well indeed, just in a pretty narrow arc. But from what I have seen to the front of a tank it really doesn't matter much if the TC is up or down, as far as spotting things is concerned. This is an impression not an established fact though.

She married you, didn't she? *rimshot*

I'll put in two kopecks for v. Manstein's and v. Gudarian's memoirs. Both are (of course) self-serving and slanted. If you know what happened to the Jews in the Baltics then v. Manstein comes off as an arrogant, lying, aristocratic swine. But that's the point. Both of these generals weren't just skilled at mobile operations, to a great extent they invented them. A read of their books is a great insight into the minds of truly great generals, and at the same time their human limitations. Like, Gudarian ignoring higher command and pushing his attacks, and being absolutely sure he was doing the right thing for Germany, and yet at the same time subordinating himself to Hitler for years. OK, he argued, but he still took orders and never resigned, he waited to be sacked. To me this is the best kind of Eastern Front history, because it gives an insight into the minds of the men making the decisions, and at the same time they lay out in clear detail (albeit not always fully truthful) what they intended and how it worked out. I don't know of any similar quality general officers memoirs on the Soviet side. There are thousands of general and even field grade officer memoirs out there from every imaginable branch of service, of course, but they were all produced in the Soviet era and for every useful bit of military information you have to wade through pages and pages of Socialist references vague and obvious, and "colorful" but probably invented conversations. Zhukov's memoirs exist in English. Katukov, Vasielevsky and Rokkosovsky all wrote memoires as well, just for instance, sooner or later I bet a translation will appear. Recent research has produced some very solid operational history in the Russian language, for any one that can read it I highly recommend Tanki Vedet Rybalko, (Rybalko Commands the Tanks) which is an even-handed, factual history of Third Guards Tank Army in campaigns from the Volga to Austria. The write-up of 3rd Guards' on-the-fly crossing of the Dniepr (which, by the way, did some serious damange to Manstein's reputation as a general who could always predict the Red Army), is about dramatic as the Remagen crossing. But even that book really is just an outgrowth of the official campaign histories commissioned by the Soviet army in the 50s - 70s. Glantz has written up most of them and several are available in English translation. P.S. Personally I thought Hell's Gate was German-slanted. I am sure he stinted the Soviet side on the personal level, and on the operational level he seems to lean more on German history and research rather than Soviet. It's a detailed read but IMO it's not definitive.

Sburke, I hope you realize you and LLF are really falling down on your obligation to keep the rest of us entertained, try and sort that out please.

John, You don't happen to know what units the Russians were? What type, equipment, home bases, stuff like that. Also, maybe you know, were they brought in country by air or sea?

Those are some excellent screenies, I can almost smell the fallafel.

John, 100,000 troops make a pretty big footprint. I checked out your site but I couldn't really see where in Syria the Russians were at. In any case, the Russian military I've come in contact with seems reasonably equipped and paid. But that certainly isn't all of them. That SuMi-41 is a joint project between Sukhoi and Mikoyan, right? Well, at least the terran side of the aircraft I mean.

Guys, thanks for the support, just one guy's opinion. But bombing invaders is nothing new. John, I am surprised to hear that, first because the Russian installations are apparently almost permanent and they're busily pouring concrete to get rid of the almost, and second because Mr. Putin is not stupid and one organization in Russia that gets paid on time these days is any one with access to arms. The Army, FSB, police - it's been a good 8, maybe 10 years before those guys went any length of time without pay. Where did you hear the Russians bailed on Syria? In the region I work I encounter Russian soldiers and officers and police and so on now and again. Admittedly, this is probably the higher end I'm seeing, except for maybe provincial cops. I might call some of them maybe not overly educated or maybe way off the low-brow end of the PC scale, and definitely some of the police and officials are on the take, but the uniformed military from what I've seen of it I wouldn't call slovenly or unprofessional. And by and large they seem to be pretty well-fed and well-equipped.

Somewhere on the Eastern Front: Ivan: Those Capitalists will never open a second front. We're going to have to destroy those Fascists and flatten Germany all by ourselves. Sucks to be us. Oleg: Chill out Comrade. It's three weeks until we launch Bagration. Shut up and pass the Spam. And give me one of those Chesterfields.

Nidan1, that is terrific news! Congratulations! Still ... The fact you make the announcement here does not bode well for this little girl's self-esteem, if she should ever want to be seen in public with her grandfather.

Why did Zuckerberg take his bride MickyD's in Rome? Consider: - He's 28 - He's spent pretty much his entire life as an over-achiever - He spent a lot of time studying dead languages (Latin/Ancient Greek) - He's the product of a strong Jewish-American family - He's a Harvard graduate - His adult life has been all about building a major corporation, and in recent years, pushing that business via Hollywood. He works 16 hour days. I've never met the man, but this to me is not the profile of an American who would travel abroad out of genuine curiosity about a foreign culture. Further, I would say there is an excellent chance that, were such a person were to travel, he would be close to positive his own culture was superior. Also, I think odds are pretty good that this is his Zuckerberg's first trip outside the US where he actually has had to function in a foreign culture. Yes, he definately has flown first class to China on corporate business, and maybe he's been to London or somplace like that for work as well, but that's as a CEO flying first class and staying in five star hotels. That's not the same thing as being in a city where they don't really speak English and you're the husband of a young wife, and the host company isn't choreographing your every meeting, meal and step. The guy's a 28-year-old American tech geek. That is not a person you commonly expect to take a summer backpacking around Europe. Drop a guy like that into a foreign city, how easy is it going to be for him to function? How much more stress would it be if that kind of man is with a new bride? For a person like that, almost anything he would try to do in a foreign country - order food, figure out traffic, find a restaurant with WIFI - would be a huge PITA. Everything is easy at home, in these foreign countries even the easy stuff is difficult. And right next to him his is new wife, and I don't care how rich a guy is if you stick a man in an uncomfortable situation, whatever it is, it is worse if he is a new husband and his bride is there to watch him flail. And then there is traditional European attitude of a meal being an opportunity for enjoyment of food and conversation vs. what a US whiz-kid like Zuckerberg would be likely to expect (and not expect) were he to sit down to a meal. There are people out there that consider meals and conversation a waste of time. Maybe he is one of them. I would guess Mr. and/of Mrs. Zuckerberg suffered foreign overload and decided they wanted something familiar and easy, and MickyD's certainly fits that bill. Of course, experienced travelers will hit MickyD's as well, sometimes, because you know the hygiene will be up to a reasonable level and local fast food isn't, or you're in a hurry and local food isn't prepared fast, or you're in a tourist trap and if you don't go to MickyD's you'll spend 50 bucks for a crappy lunch for two. I suspect the Zuckerbergs went to MickyDs because Mr. Zuckerberg was tired of feeling like a dunce ordering in a restaurant, or perhaps also because even if the waiter spoke English (which actually I think would be a pretty reasonable expectation in the parts of Rome tourists go to), because the Italian food they were brought was not the same as Italian food in the states. But, to be fair, there also is the possibility they went there because the alternative was a tourist pizzaria with tomato and cheese slices at three Euros a pop, and they just weren't going to put up with that kind of rip off. This is normal; the difference between outrageous and reasonable pricing may be marginal to the tourist and even more insignificant to an ueber-rich guy like Zuckerberg, but no one liked to be gouged. Maybe the Zuckerbergs decided prices at Roman trattorias were outrageous, they would not have been the first tourists ever to do that. Wiki informs me Mrs. Zuckerberg grew up in a Chinese-American family but she had to go to classes to learn Mandarin. According to Chinese media, Zuckerberg hired a tutor to learn some Chinese before going to Beijing, and further, that he is a workaholic and that said Chinese language sessions took place during breakfast. At the end of it he according to the report was able to "chat" with his grandmother-in-law in Chinese. I'd lay odds that means exchange a few words in baby language; Mandarin is hard for English-speakers and this guy as nearly as I can tell never studied a living language. You can multitask all you want, but learning a live foreign language is a long-term, full-time endeavor, and there are no short cuts to finding one's way around a foreign culture. Zuckerberg does not strike me as the kind of person who would be interested in doing that. Bottom line I bet MickyD's for lunch was for him most of all a short cut.

The forums ain't the same place without you John, whenever you weigh in here it's a good day for BFI.

Didn't the Commonwealth usually call those tanks "Honey"? Thereby avoiding taking sides in the War of Rebellion/War Between the States dispute.

Well, sort of. I don't really disagree but I think it's a little bit more involved than insurgents just sitting down and concluding "Before we didn't like IEDs, but now we do." The Viet Cong had a pretty good bombing campaign going against the regime us Americans were propping up, it was a pretty standard tactic to warn the head of the strategic hamlet cooperating with the Americans he better stop, and if he didn't some one might frag him. If you look at the ongoing insurgency in the Caucasus, the rebels have been bombing the Russians for years. If the target is troops or paramilitary policy (which are pretty much the same thing) it seems like the approach is set off a bomb, wait for the authorities to show up and then set off a bigger one. Sometimes by remote, sometimes by suicide bomber. If the target is an official cooperating with the Russians, it seems like a bomb under his car that gets him when he's about to go to work is the standard. But they use drive-by shootings fairly often as well. I think what's changed is the big rich countries have improved at moving troops in and out of disuputed areas, this being a function of big rich country combat capacity and a higher vehicles to troops ratio than in the past; these days no one lacks a ride. You might say that in the past the armies supressing insurgencies had to go out into the boonies to hunt down the rebels (well, they still do sometimes) but these days the number of vehicles zooming around the theater make it easier for the insurgents to make their kills just bombing the "invader" soldiers as they drive from "a" to "b". I'd say it's sort of a toss up as to whether roadside bomb technology or soldier transport protection technology are driving the train. Point is when you have a high-tech military operating against an insurgency the soldiers of that military are relatively vulnerable when they're packed into a vehicle, moving, and can't use all their weapons. One can debate whether supressing an insurgency by having soldiers drive around a lot and walk little is a better strategy than having soldiers walk a lot and drive little. The first approach probably makes for less soldier casualties overall but more spectacular attacks when it happens, and that ain't necessarily a good thing, because an insurgency isn't just about keeping soldier casualties down, it's about convincing the insurgents they can't "win". A smashed expensive armored vehicle burning nice and hot and say four or five "invader" dead and wounded at a swoop, which the insurgents put into that condition by cleverness and timing, and can slap onto the internet, might very well do more for convincing the insurgents they're on the right track, than say a week of watching the soldiers patrol on foot through the sticks, and picking off say eight or nine of them with booby traps or sniping or something. It's all down to psychology. The rich army pretty much always has the option of upping the tech ante and if it wants more force protection then more force protection it shall have. But the better-protected the rich army soldiers are, the more the insurgents and the populace will see the rich army soldiers to be failing against the insurgency, if the insurgents can kill and/or would the rich nation soldiers from time to time. In the recent US/NATO wars, one might argue, the insurgents just have been given sufficient time to think of ways to overcome the US/NATO force protection technologies. Since the US/NATO strategy is pretty much always to prioritize force protection over (say) lots of dismounted infantry saturating a disputed district, it sort of naturally follows the insurgents have few options but to come up with better ways to crack armored vehicles. Or, simply bypass the armored vehicles and convert a local supposedly helping out the foreign soldiers, to the insurgency, and get him to kill several foreign soldiers on their base before they kill him. That's also pretty spectacular, but it's time-consuming for the insurgents. If the war goes down that road some more then you'd expect the rich armies putting their local hires through lie detector tests or something, and then the insurgents would get better at recruiting people able to fox a lie detector, or even better corrupting the person administering the test.

Yeah, that's the one. Thanks. SBK

I think the point is that supposedly a lot of the Star Wars movie where the good guys have to fly little fighters down into a canyon on a Death Star to shoot some special panel to blow it up, was inspired by the Dambusters movie. Aircraft moving fast inbetween giant walls, technicolor AAA, several good guys crash leaving the Hero the final shot to take out the Target, etc. etc. But you can't replicate those stiff-upper-lip British officer pilots with their oh-so-regional workman crew, as they cheerily Get On With It and Muddle Through. They're gone the way of the dinosaur, sad really.

I think it's because we've solved all the problems of the world, what's left to argue about?

We should not forget Stanislav Petrov, who one month before Able Archer was the Soviet air defence officer sitting in a bunker, and when a computer glitch informed him the Americans had launched five ICBMs, he decided not to inform the Kremlin of incoming nukes and so, arguably, prevented World War Three.

We can only hope. Of course, if this weapon system has a good enough lobby at Congress, then they'll pitch "well every squad needs to have one, because most of our future opponents have body armor" or "because the threat is evil terrorists we need lots of light vehicle killers in the force, hand-held rockets and missiles or the section SAW won't cut it." And then, if US forces just happened to be involved in a counter-insurgency war, the inevitable will happen and the bad guys will get the weapon. Which arguably would be a huge force enhancer for them; if I was taking on US troops I would love to have access to a portable, easily concealable MG that could kill vehicles and punch through flak jackets. And of course if we field one then sooner or later so will the Russians and Chinese and Brazilians and maybe even Israelis. I'm not sure that's a long-term good for US forces. I kinda doubt the developers thought that one through though. And maybe everything will turn out great.

In other New Cold War News, guess what, the Chinese and the Russians are doing a medium-sized naval exercise in the Yellow Sea, seven ships participating on the Russian side led by a cruiser. Live fire, air-sea ops, sub hunting, joint response to a maritime disaster, and of course the great catch all "anti-terrorism training." Starts on Sunday, runs two week sI think. These exercises don't happen so often, the last major (about a regiment on each side plus aircraft) joint training between the two countries took place in 2009, and ONLY naval exercise ever since the Soviet Union broke up took place in 2005, and that was like a frigate on each side. So there's some fodder for those wanting the US taxpayer to cough up for a couple more aircraft carriers, see, our old Cold War enemies are planning something! Also the ceasefire in Syria seems to holding more or less, at least today.

Threads like this are great for forcing you to find out neat stuff. So, I was curious about how close Uyghur was to modern Turkish, and I was suspecting the difference would be huge. Wrongo, in fact there seems to be close to a one-to-one correspondence of basic root words, and what's more one might very well argue Uyghur and Uzbek are just dialects of the same language, as they are mutually intelligible the same way Azeri and Turkish is mutually intelligible. So had the Red Chinese access to Uyghur speakers, it would have been like having a bunch of people on your side that spoke say Spanish, and the task is to use them to brainwash POWs that speak Portuguese or maybe Italian. Yossarian is right, the language is very similar to Turkish. However, that led me (thank you Wiki) to take a gander at the history of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Lo and behold and it seems like the first real Han attempt to assert sovereignty over the region was in the 18th century, as Russia and China began beating up on the local Emirs, and the borders roughly as we know them today only got settled in the late 19th century. After that there was the Chinese Republic, a warlord made the place a Moslem republic, then Nationalist Chinese destroyed that state, then the Soviets invaded, set up a puppet state, started making the place over into a Socialist satellite. However, World War Two intervened, and the general the Soviets set up to run the place decided to kick the Communists out (killing Mao Tse Dung's brother in the process), so once WW2 was over and Mao and Cho won the civil war the Soviets agreed the territory should be part of the PRC. The PLA marched in in 1949, shortly after they chased the Nationalists to Taiwan. Given that kind of turmoil, I kind of suspect the PLA's ability to recruit Uyghur speakers a year later was probably pretty undeveloped. It must have been hell for people there to live through that chaos, but reading that kind of history from afar is just cool. Of course, there was always the possibility the Soviets could have helped out by recruited their own Uyghur speakers (a/k/a Uzbeks); or even better Gagauz from Moldavia or the Meskhetians from Georgia, as the Gagauz language is even closer to Turkish than Uzbek/Uyghur, and, as nearly as I can tell, Meskhetian was simply Turkish spoken by ethnic Turks, just living on the Soviet side of the Caucasus. Them Turks sure did get around.

Well of course if you want to talk good infantry the Red Chinese and their Winter offensive 1950-51 are pretty much one of the classic definitions of best ever. Allies have air supremacy and unlimited ammunition, and the Chinese have nothing bigger than 120mm mortars, and their supply is animal- or human-powered, and still they manage to infiltrate three army groups to jump-off positions, achieve, strategic surprise and inflict one of the biggest routs US forces have ever been subjected to. I just checked, 8th Army's retreat was the longest ever conducted by a US major formation. True terrain, weather and MacArthur helped, but still, that's some serious infantry achievement for you. Viz the Turks this just in. It's just tough to have a good army if you don't sort the politics ahead of time. ANKARA, Turkey (AP) — Turkish police have searched the homes of dozens of former military personnel, including one retired general, in a new probe against the military. They are accused of pressuring the country's first pro-Islamic prime minister to resign in 1997 for allegedly trying to increase the profile of Islam in this predominantly Muslim but secular country. Authorities say an arrest warrant has been issued for the suspects, including Ret. Gen. Cevik Bir, for attempting to overthrow the government in 1997. The probe comes as the country's Islamic-rooted government tries to bury military influence in politics. Earlier this month, Turkey put two elderly leaders of a 1980 military coup on trial. Hundreds of suspects, including several officers, are separately on trial for allegedly plotting to topple the current government.