Battleland

Suspicious Vehicle Closes Roads Near Pentagon




UPDATE: Never mind. Move along. Nothing suspicious in backpack or car, police say. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Police took a person into custody Friday morning in connection with a vehicle containing a suspicious device stopped close to the Pentagon. Pentagon police say they are looking for accomplices who may have fled the …

Dr. Frankenstein — or Military Miracle Worker?

A U.S. military doctor deployed to Iraq subjected troops suffering from traumatic brain injuries to treatment with an unapproved drug, in which he had a financial stake, that may have harmed them, Pentagon investigators report. But a colleague of the doctor insists the probe is a perplexing witch hunt — and that the medication helps …

Harrier Jump Jets For Sale: Cheap!

Strange little story in Britain, where the Telegraph reports that the UK military is selling its used AV-8B Harrier jump jets to the U.S. Marines for spare parts. After pumping $1.6 billion into the jets over the past decade, the Ministry of Defence reportedly got only $55 million for 40 of the aging warplanes. Not true, the MOD

Can’t Tell? Then Publish!

In buildings on military installations, it is common to see a rack of news papers and magazines as you walk in. On a few of those racks now lays a magazine put out by an independent network of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered servicemembers known as OutServe.

This is the organization’s second issue of the magazine and so …

The CIA-After-Next: Who’s Gonna Run This World

Outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates has done a lot of good things over his tenure: he carved out a bureaucratic space for the small-wars crowd (Army, Marines, SOF) and he engineered the Navy-Air Force Full Employment Act (otherwise known as the AirSea Battle Concept) to keep the rest of the Building happy; he was tough enough on …

Afghanistan: A “Strategy of Tactics”?

Tom Barnett raised some eyebrows Wednesday with his grim prognosis on Battleland on the U.S. role in Afghanistan:

It’s a dependency – pure and simple. The longer we stay, the more we’ll infantilize the system. Ten years in and virtually everything we’ve set about to create is still described as “fragile” – meaning it collapses and

War Powers Debate is Much Ado about Congress

The debate about whether President Obama’s war in Libya threatens to violate the 1973 War Powers Resolution is interesting because it exposes a bit of potential hypocrisy on the part of the president. Here is rule-of-law Obama, a former senator, at risk of violating the law and trampling on the authority of the legislative branch of …

The Third Rail: Guns and Suicide in the Army

As a top Army psychiatrist until last year, I always found the Army’s silence about guns’ role in our rising suicide rate disquieting. The Army is committed to lowering the rate of suicide. But there’s a curious third rail that is seldom publicly discussed: the risks of suicide by firearm. Approximately 70 percent of Army and …

Army Uniforms: Everything But Uniform



First, the Army ditches the black beret for most soldiers at most times. Now it’s abandoning the wearing of combat fatigues inside the Pentagon. “Is it bad that this excites me more than the death of Bin Laden?” one soldier, apparently from Fort Drum, N.Y., writes on an Army Facebook page. “Kidding…Kind of.”

A decade after 9/11, …

  1. 1
  2. ...
  3. 250
  4. 251
  5. 252
  6. ...
  7. 309