Things have gotten so grim in the defense world that advocates of maintaining current levels of military spending have started rolling out the heavy artillery. “Do we want to reinstitute the draft?” Rep. Howard McKeon, R-Calif., chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, asked Wednesday on Fox News. “Some of the cuts we’re talking …
Dispatches From the Third Front: Day 1–The Hero
In north San Antonio, just off of Interstate 35, a towering hospital building dominates Brooke Army Medical Center, one of two hospitals–along with the newly unified Walter Reed National Military Center–that treat some of the most grievously wounded troops from Iraq and Afghanistan. BAMC, as the soldiers call it, is one of the …
Evaluating Army Officers, Top to Bottom
For years there has been debate inside the Army about the optimum way to assess the performance of its officers. In an institution with more than a half-million people in uniform, what yardsticks work best to promote the good officers while weeding out the bad? Plainly the service needs some help: a recent study found than more than …
Officer X: Behind the Mask
What a fascinating time to be a gay man in the U.S. military. This time last year, I was sure the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) policy was here to stay for the next 2 to 3 years.
These initial words from my first post on Battleland are as true today as they were when I first Photoshopped a hastily-taken picture from my iPad, …
Wars, Yesterday and Today
There’s a profound sense of deja vu among those of us who came of age — in uniform, at school, in politics — during the Vietnam war. So much of what is happening today resonates with that conflict in ways both good and ill.
Lee Barnes has just written When We Walked Above the Clouds about his experiences early in the southeast …
“Does Mutual U.S.-China Economic Dependence Rule Out War?”
Continuing our discussion this week on China, we’re tackling a corollary of Tom Friedman’s McDonald’s Rule — countries with McDonald’s restaurants generally don’t wage war on one another — as we weigh the impact of economic ties between Beijing and Washington. Does the immense commerce between the two nations reduce the …
Officer X “Comes Out” Thursday
He’s that young U.S. military pilot who has been blogging here on Battleland anonymously since May. Officer X – or Ox, as he’s known around here — has kept his identity hidden because under “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” saying he was gay could have ended his military career. That formal ban had been in place for 17 years…ever since …
Study: Federal Spending on Defense Doesn’t Create As Many Jobs As Education Spending
Despite vast Republican opposition on federal spending to create jobs (“stimulus”), some Republicans (and, surprise!, defense contractors and defense contractor-funded consultant Loren Thompson) support federal spending on defense to create jobs or to support the ones that already exist, i.e. protecting the defense industrial base. For …
Japan Worries About China Nukes
TOKYO – Never mind natural resources or national pride.
China’s rapid military modernization and aggressive territorial claims are rooted in the calculus of nuclear deterrence, according to defense analysts in Japan.
Sumihiko Kawamura, deputy director of the conservative Okazaki Institute in Tokyo, says China has claimed …
Air Force’s F-22s Are Flying Again: Of Smoking Guns, and Smoking Holes
The Air Force has decided to let its fleet of F-22 fighters back into the air beginning Wednesday without fixing the problem that led to their grounding in the first place. Concerns that Raptor pilots were passing out due to a lack of oxygen — there’s another reason for drones — led to the fleet-wide grounding May 3.
After …
AFRICOM Gets Seriously . . . Nasty
In 2007, I wrote the first definitive piece for Esquire on the kernel code for Africom: namely, the Combined Joint Task Force – Horn of Africa. Back then, I described it as essentially a non-kinetic force, or no “trigger pullers.” But the piece led off with a quick summary of a special ops event that occurred in conjunction with …
Alleged War Savings and OMB Head-Butting
You know that the tussles over Pentagon spending were going to get interesting once Battleland‘s own Gordon Adams — who ran the Office of Management and Budget’s national-security shoppe when now-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ran OMB — started arguing math with his former boss. Gordon declaredMonday that the Obama …
Leading Afghan Indicators…Of What, We’re Not Sure
As the Taliban — or somebody — was assassinating former Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbani in Kabul on Tuesday, a top U.S. Air Force general was explaining what he called “an amazing success story” in that war-torn land. But one needs to be careful in drawing lessons from such successes. Especially given the fact that it …