BattlelandPolitics
GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich, speaking Tuesday in Bluffton, S.C., called the impending budget cuts to be levied on the Pentagon under sequestration – paring back military spending to 2007 levels — “destructive” and “very dangerous to the survival of the country.”
The rhetoric on this topic bedevils chances …
BattlelandPentagon
Todd Purdum takes a big look in the January issue of Vanity Fair at the national-security state through the prisms of Ike Eisenhower – a key player in World War II – and George Kennan – the architect of Washington’s “containment” policy in the Cold War. He finds it a grim, grey place that these American national-security …
BattlelandSpecial Operations
BattlelandVeterans
Over on the VA blog, VAntage Point, Army vet Kate Hoit asks, and tries to answer, that vexing (at least for some vets) question:
The definition can be unclear. And it wasn’t the first time I’d encountered confusion over the topic. Former service members give a variety of answers when posed with the question. I’ve heard it all:
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BattlelandTroops
Our troops deserve every good thing that comes their way. Yet the House vote late Tuesday – designed to whisk them through airport security, unlike their fellow citizens — is another wedge between the defenders and defended that we wrote about in a Time cover story a couple of weeks back. The House approved the relaxed standards …
BattlelandPentagon
The Air Force has been busy adding more generals. But the same has been happening across the Defense Department, although the overall DoD growth isn’t quite as striking as it is within the Air Force alone. In a post this afternoon on the POGO blog, my colleague Ben Freeman wrote that:
Seventeen general and flag officers were scheduled
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BattlelandTroops
BattlelandPakistan
Attached is a very important essay analyzing the political aspects of the current crisis with Pakistan, written from the point of view of leftist Pakistani intellectual. For those readers who are unfamiliar with the author, Tariq Ali graduated from Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics, and was President of the …
BattlelandWeapons
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4arnATc04U]
Who needs unmanned aerial vehicles when you’ve got Yves Rossy at the helm of a manned aerial vehicle in a Swiss air show?
BattlelandPentagon
It’s not a good thing when the new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff visits Europe and it leads to a story like this from his own press shop:
It’s not his emphatic answer that counts, of course; it’s the fact that he felt obligated to state, in response to a question, that the U.S. military is not in decline — and then say …
BattlelandPentagon
When we first wrote about how the Pentagon could save $1 trillion over the coming decade way back in April, we felt more alone than an Air Force pilot in a drone hanger. Now everyone’s getting into the act. The most recent to weigh in: BusinessWeek magazine and the Financial Times newspaper. They write in the wake of the Super …
BattlelandNational Security
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1a4xK4P6Eo]
Chances are, if you read Battleland, you’ve seen pictures or videos of paratroopers jumping out of the back of an aircraft. But have you ever considered the small miracle it takes to arrive at that particular point in space at that exact planned time? In combat, there is little to …
BattlelandWeapons
Saturday’s strike on two Pakistani military outposts by U.S. airpower near the village of Salala isn’t the first time such an attack has been carried out in response to fire from such Pakistani forts into nearby Afghanistan.
This from Pajhwok Afghan News in June:
Afghan officials said the [NATO helicopter] attack in Mohmand
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