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Western Asia, West Asia, or Southwest Asia, is the westernmost subregion of the larger geographical region of Asia, as defined by some academics, UN bodies and other institutions. It is entirely a part of the Greater Middle East and almost entirely a part of the Middle East, and includes Anatolia, the Arabian Peninsula, Iran, Mesopotamia, the Levant, the island of Cyprus, the Sinai Peninsula, and partly Transcaucasia. The region is considered to be separated from Africa by the Isthmus of Suez in Egypt, and separated from Europe by the waterways of the Turkish Straits and the watershed of the Greater Caucasus. Central Asia lies to its northeast, while South Asia lies to its east. Eight seas surround the region (clockwise): the Aegean Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea.

Western Asia covers an area of 5,994,935 km2 (2,314,657 sq mi), with a population of around 313 million. Out of the 21 countries located fully or partly within the region, 13 are a part of the Arab world. The most populous countries in Western Asia are Iran, Turkey, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen.

Southwest Airlines Co., typically referred to as Southwest, is one of the major airlines of the United States and the world's largest low-cost carrier. It is headquartered in Dallas, Texas and has scheduled service to 121 destinations in the United States and ten additional countries. As of 2018, Southwest carried more domestic passengers than any other United States airline. Southwest is the only low cost carrier that is also a Legacy carrier.

The airline was established on March 15, 1967, by Herb Kelleher as Air Southwest Co. and adopted its current name, Southwest Airlines Co., in 1971, when it began operating as an intrastate airline wholly within the state of Texas, first flying between Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. It began regional interstate service in 1979 and began expanding nationwide in the decades that followed. Southwest currently serves airports in 45 states and multiple Central American destinations.

Southwest's business model is distinct from other US airlines, as it uses a rolling hub and point-to-point network, allows free checked baggage, and does not charge change fees. It uses exclusively Boeing 737 jets in its fleet.

The airline has nearly 60,000 employees and operates about 4,000 departures a day during peak travel season.

The Pine Bluff Arsenal (PBA) is a US Army Joint Munitions Command installation located in unincorporated Jefferson County, Arkansas, just northwest of the city of Pine Bluff. PBA is one of nine Army installations in the United States that stored chemical weapons. PBA supplies specialized production, storage, maintenance and distribution of readiness products, and delivers technical services to the Armed Forces and Homeland Security. PBA also designs, manufactures and refurbishes smoke, riot control, and incendiary munitions, as well as chemical/biological defense operations items. It serves as a technology center for illuminating and infrared munitions and is also the only place in the Northern Hemisphere where white phosphorus munitions are filled. Its Homeland Security mission includes first-responder equipment training and surveillance of pre-positioned equipment.

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The Armor Survivability Kit (ASK) is an armor kit developed by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in 2003 to protect vehicles like the Humvee from small arms, explosive device fragments, and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs).

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The Interceptor Multi-Threat Body Armor System (IBA) is a bullet-resistant body armor system that was used by the United States Armed Forces during the 2000s, with some limited usage into the mid-2010s. IBA and its design replaced the older standardized fragmentation protective Personnel Armor System for Ground Troops (PASGT) body armor system that was designed in the late 1970s and introduced in the early 1980s.

The IBA system consists of its core component: the outer tactical vest (OTV), which can optionally be worn with a throat protector, groin protector, and biceps (or deltoid) protector. The latter three auxiliary protectors are removable from the main vest, which can be worn alone.

IBA was designed in the late 1990s as a replacement for the PASGT vest and the essentially-improvised ISAPO supplemental armor plate carrier, a combination widely criticized by US troops for its immense weight. It comes in a variety of color schemes and camouflage patterns depending on who the vest was produced for. It was used by most of the U.S. military's branches during much of the 2000s, and was even seeing limited use as late as 2015 among some National Guard units.

Beginning in 2007 the Improved Outer Tactical Vest began to replace the OTVs in the United States Army's service and since then it has been mostly replaced in its inventory, with the exception of a few OTVs still in service with the Army National Guard and U.S. Army Reserve. The U.S. Marine Corps has replaced the OTV with the Modular Tactical Vest (MTV) and Scalable Plate Carrier (SPC), although IBA is still used by the U.S. Navy for sailors aboard its warships as of 2017 and by the U.S. Army Reserve as of 2018. Though IBA has been mostly replaced in U.S. military service, it is still used by the militaries of some other countries that have diplomatic relations with the U.S., such as Ukraine, Iraq, and Moldova. As such, the OTV, which has been in production since the late 1990s, is scheduled to be produced by the U.S. until 2020, for sale to foreign customers.

The Office of Public Works (OPW) (Irish: Oifig na nOibreacha Poiblí) (legally the Commissioners of Public Works in Ireland) is a major Irish Government agency, which manages most of the Irish State's property portfolio, including hundreds of owned and rented Government offices and police properties, oversees National Monuments and directly manages some heritage properties, and is the lead State engineering agency, with a special focus on flood risk management. It lies within the remit of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, with functions largely delegated to a Minister of State at the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform with special responsibility for the Office. The OPW has a central role in driving the Government's property asset management reform process, both in respect of its own portfolio and that of the wider public service. The agency was initially known as Board of Works, a title inherited from a preceding body, and this term is still sometimes encountered.

The second oldest State agency in Ireland, the OPW subsumed the functions of the Commissioners and Overseers of Barracks (the Barrack Board) and the Board of Works / Civil Buildings Commissioners (which two agencies had in turn taken on the functions of the Office of the Surveyor General in 1762), the Directors-General of Inland Navigation (which had taken on the functions of the Fisheries Commissioners), and some functions of the Postmaster-General, and those of the Public Works Loans Commissioners. The OPW includes the Government Publications Office, and publishes the State gazette, Iris Oifigiúil, and also manages some aspects of the household of the President of Ireland. It for many years oversaw aspects of public procurement, including the first centralised national procurement office. Its fisheries functions later moved to more specialised departments, the inland navigation functions were largely transferred to Waterways Ireland in 1999, and many purchasing functions moved to the Office of Government Procurement in 2014.

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The Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America (SPP) was a supra-national level dialogue with the stated purpose of providing greater cooperation on security and economic issues. The Partnership was founded in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005, by Prime Minister of Canada Paul Martin, President of Mexico Vicente Fox, and U.S. President George W. Bush. It was the second of such regional-level initiatives involving the United States following the 1997 Partnership for Prosperity and Security in the Caribbean (PPS).

Since August 2009, the SPP is no longer active. It has been largely superseded by the annual North American Leaders' Summit, an event that was established as part of the SPP.

The State Partnership Program (SPP) is a joint program of the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and the individual states, territories, and District of Columbia. The program and the concept are entirely new, originating in 1993 as a simplified form of the previously established (1992) Joint Contact Team Program (JCTP). The JCTP aimed at assisting former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union Republics, now independent, to form democracies and defense forces of their own. It featured long-term presence of extensive and expensive teams of advisory specialists. The SPP shortened the advisory presence to a United States National Guard unit of a designated state, called a partner, which would conduct joint exercises with the host. It is cheaper, has a lesser American presence, and can comprise contacts with civilian agencies. Today both programs are funded.

The SPP is widespread. The JCTP is recommended when more extensive support is needed. Sometimes the names are interchangeable. A large share of originally JCTP activity was subsumed by the NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP) program made active in 1994. It prepares nations for membership in NATO. A typical path for a candidate has been SPP, PfP and then NATO. Once started, SPP activities appear to continue regardless of what other memberships a host nation may have. By nature the program creates close friends and allies.

Previously, and currently outside the program, the Guard was and is subject to a jurisdictional duality: it can be either Federally active or not. If inactive it is a reserve component only of the DoD. Its main function is as a state militia under the command of the Governor through the Adjutant General of the state or equivalent officer of the Territory or D.C. If active, it is entirely out of the jurisdiction of the state and under the DoD, which might or might not keep its original identity, but more likely plunders it for replacements or special units of the Regular Army or Air Force.

In the SPP, the State (or territory, etc.) and the DoD collaborate in the deployment of the unit, through the National Guard Bureau, and the Adjutant General of the State. The unit keeps its State identity. In the words of one source, it is "managed by the National Guard Bureau, but executed by the states." In that case there is collaboration between the state Adjutant General and the commander in the field.

The "partners" of the partnerships are the Guard units of various states and foreign nations that have requested and been granted partnerships. The program links National Guard units of U.S. States with partner countries around the world for the purpose of supporting the security cooperation objectives of the geographic Combatant Commands (CCMDs). It is not quite so cut-and-dried as pure security. There are quite a number of crisis relief and humanitarian activities.

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