Marines

“Latest Actual Costs”

I’ve been reading the publicly-released Pentagon Selected Acquisition Reports for decades. They’re the one place you can get a bottom-line price on various U.S. military weapons systems. But they’re generally two-page summaries, not the detailed reports that generate those summaries.

So hats off to Steven Aftergood’s Secrecy …

The Things They Say on Their Way Out the Door

Frankly, a week ago Sunday, in the Situation Room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out bin Laden. That all fell apart on Monday — the next day.

— Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking to Marines at Camp Lejeune on Thursday

Damn.

If you read enough stories of war and mayhem, your eyes tend to roll along from start to finish (assuming you get that far). But every once in awhile you’re stopped cold by a sentence, like this one. What brings you up short is that it surfaces without warning in the middle of a pretty positive story, kind of a reader’s IED. This one …

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