For almost a decade, I’ve been getting statements from the Pentagon like this one:
If you can’t make out the small print, it’s an announcement of the combat death of Marine Cpl. Chad Wade, in Afghanistan, two months ago today. These terse messages are heartbreaking in their directness and numbing in their number. It’s important to …
[youtube = http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPn3V3KuhaM]
It was just over a month ago that Gen. James Amos, the Marine commandant, was fretting that repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” could be a “distraction” that could get his Marines killed on the battlefield. “I don’t want to lose any Marines to the distraction,” he said of openly gay …
The last time the Government Accountability Office surveyed U.S. arms sales to Egypt, in 2006, it reported:
Since 1979, Egypt received more than $60 billion in military and economic assistance from the United States and is currently among the largest recipients of U.S. assistance worldwide, along with Israel, Afghanistan and Iraq. In
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The U.S. Marines have a pair of warships — the USS Kearsarge and the USS Ponce — just hanging around the southern end of the Red Sea waiting to see if they’re needed to rescue U.S. diplomats and citizens from Cairo. They’re half of the Marines’ 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a mini-armada that recently dispatched 1,400 of its 2,000 …
The Pentagon, in its own slow way, is grappling with the coming end of the 18-year old “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that bars openly gay men and women from serving in the U.S. military. Top defense officials held a briefing today where they put a little bureaucratic meat on the bones of the change. But they refused to be pinned down …
You knew this was coming, right? In the tragicomedy of errors leading to the WikiLeaks dump, the notion that an Army private could not only access, but allegedly copy — and share with the world — data the U.S. government had labeled secret, we learn a key fact today: Army commanders sent Pfc. Bradley Manning to Iraq, where he …
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A couple of Navy doctors deployed to Helmand Province in Afghanistan with the Marines there spoke via long-distance to Pentagon reporters Thursday about the steps they are taking to tend to their troops’ mental-health needs. They emphasized their expanding and embedded nature of tending to Marine minds to make sure they remain healthy. …
It was only two weeks ago that the Obama Administration scrapped a plan to build a “virtual fence” along the U.S.-Mexican border to keep illegal immigrants out. The program — under development by Boeing and slated to cost $7 billion — was designed to harness video cameras and other sensors to deter border crossings. The Department of …
As protests continue in Cairo today, long-time Pentagon intelligence analyst John McCreary — now out of government and writing the well-read NightWatch blog — is eyeing events there with growing concern:
Despite a US statement that the government of Egypt is stable, the demonstrations show that it has suppressed a large undercurrent
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There wasn’t much national-security talk in President Obama’s State of the Union address tonight. There was rote thanks for “our troops and their families” engaged in two wars. Some folks breathed a sigh of relief as he proposed a five-year freeze on “annual domestic spending.” That’s Washington-speak for no cuts in the military’s …
Even as Defense Secretary Robert Gates modestly nips and tucks the rate of increase in military spending, his House GOP overseers are saying: Stop! The new chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon of California, and all seven of his GOP subcommittee chairmen, sent Gates a letter yesterday basically ordering him …
General Dave Petraeus has just sent his 140,000 troops in Afghanistan, including 97,000 Americans, a three-page status update. He praises them for their “tremendous work” in 2010 and warns “there is much hard work to be done in 2011.” He seems to hit all the right notes — the gains are fragile, and we must keep working closely with …
