BattlelandNational Security
Two of the most vexing issues in today’s Army clash in the lead article of the latest issue of its senior professional journal: letting openly gay men and women serve in uniform, and the shooting, allegedly by Army Maj. Nidal Hasan, at Fort Hood that left 13 dead in November 2009.
The link between the two? …
BattlelandNational Security
Once you’ve declared that no U.S. combat boots will be on Libyan soil, you do the next best thing: send in aerial ground-pounders. After more than a week of high-flying B-2s, F-15s and F-16s, the Pentagon has begun flying a very different kind of warplane over Libya in recent days.
The A-10 Warthog (not its official name, which is the …
BattlelandNational Security
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Zi6J7GbHA&feature=player_embedded#at=24]
No, not the booms of bullets and bombs, but the far more disquieting and insidious sound of calm-but-stern voices instructing Muammar Gaddafi’s Libyan loyalists, through their radios, to give up. The multilingual messages are broadcast from EC-130 …
BattlelandNational Security
Asia Times has reported that spy agencies are “stunned” by Osama bin Laden’s recent forays back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan:
Asia Times Online has learned that decision-makers have put a lot of weight on the information on Bin Laden’s movements as it has come from multiple intelligence agencies, in Pakistan, Afghanistan
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BattlelandNational Security
Did you realize what just happened? President Barack Obama sketched out his own doctrine on the use of U.S. military force, eclipsing the one crafted by Army Gen. Colin Powell nearly a generation ago. Obama spoke Monday night at the National Defense University and detailed, in a fairly nuanced way, how and why the U.S. is wielding its …
BattlelandNational Security
Here you can see a breakdown of just the sorties that are devoted to air-to-ground missions, the protect-the-people missions. Again, the numbers at right are totals for the entire operation. From Friday to Sunday, there was an increase in strikes from 91 to 107, but the majority each day were flown by our partner-nation pilots. I know
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BattlelandNational Security
In the 1980s, when the Reagan Administration’s defense buildup was in full swing, various military lobbying outfits would rent out the big halls in hotels around the capital to show off the latest weaponry they were trying to sell to the government. That’s so 20th Century. This week, the action moves to downtown D.C. and the huge new …
BattlelandNational Security
Josh Rogin over at Foreign Policy has put together a list of the countries participating in the various coalitions with the U.S. over the past generation in assorted military campaigns. Despite President Obama’s call for multilateral action, Rogin notes, Obama’s Libyan enterprise has the smallest coalition of the lot — 15 nations as of …
BattlelandNational Security
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAyCdfOXvec&feature=player_embedded#at=14]
A Monday morning video-for-thought, as President Obama prepares to address the nation from the National Defense University tonight at 7:30 p.m. EDT.
BattlelandNational Security
It was whiplash Sunday as Defense Secretary Robert Gates was followed on ABC’s This Week broadcast by former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The contrast between the mild-mannered Gates, with his soft Kansas twang, and Rumsfeld’s Chicago staccato couldn’t be clearer. Rumsfeld, once again, seemed to prefer certitude (a measure of a …
BattlelandNational Security
President Obama and his commanders have made it clear there will be “no American boots on the ground” in Libya. So how come 2,200 heavily-armed and ready-to-fight Marines are heading to just off “the shores of Tripoli,” as leathernecks like to sing? They’re the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU), and will be climbing aboard the …
BattlelandNational Security
Stephen Walt — now of Harvard and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and formerly of Princeton, the University of Chicago and the Pentagon’s Institute of Defense Analyses — obviously has a blue-ribbon foreign-policy pedigree. That’s what makes his argument this week that George W. Bush and Barack Obama are fundamentally …
BattlelandNational Security
If you needed any more evidence that the U.S. and its allies began writing the book on attacking Libya without knowing how the final chapter would read, the evidence is now in.
