Military History

Private Bradley Manning: Hero or Traitor?

Army Private Bradley Manning represents a Rorschach tests for many Americans. The Army arrested the 24-year-old two years ago after classified material he allegedly downloaded from a military intelligence network while serving in Iraq ended up being made public by WikiLeaks. His supporters laud him for exposing war-crime atrocities, …

How To Build a War Machine

Arthur Herman is one of those scholars who grips the past and just won’t let go, which is lucky for those of us stuck in the present. In these days where attention spans are collapsing into overflowing rivers of data, every once in awhile you need a historian to point out what’s important.

Herman’s new book, Freedom’s Forge:

Letters from Abbottabad: Bin Laden’s Bleak Final Days

The latest batch of Osama bin Laden documents shows what you’d expect from a one-time terror mastermind whose best years were behind him. He’d spent six years confined to a house with several of his wives, and where the only way he could get outside was to walk inside the walled compound, or atop the walled rooftop.

Nearly 200 …

Highway (of Death) Robbery

You may recall the infamous “Highway of Death,” that stretch of six-lane Highway 80 from Kuwait City into Iraq and on toward Basra. The U.S. military rained firepower down on retreating Iraqi troops there in the late stages …

A Sad Anniversary Celebration

It’s sad that what should be a day of quiet satisfaction – the anniversary of the death of Osama bin Laden, the killer of nearly 3,000 innocents – has degenerated into a political spitball fight.

Battleland well …

SIOP’s Sire Dies

The Single Integrated Operational Plan — SIOP, for short — was the non-descript label the U.S. military assigned to its doomsday plan to wage nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Born in 1961, the many-layered targeting list died in 2003, after the end of the Cold War. A key developer, Air Force Lieut. General Glenn A. Kent, died …

AVF = All-Volunteer Forever!

After recent ruminations on the wisdom of returning to some form of military conscription, a Reagan-era Pentagon official counters with the blessings of today’s All-Volunteer Force. Elliot J. Feldman writes in Saturday’s Washington Post that the woes of today’s force are due, in large measure, to civilians failing to keep a tighter rein …

South Korean Seasickness

Seoul has lost its bid to have the world’s mapmakers allow the Sea of Japan, the body of water between Japan and the Korean peninsula, also to be known as the East Sea. Japan is pleased, according to Stars and Stripes.

The International Hydrographic Organization met this week in Monaco and elected to keep Sea of Japan as the only …

The USS Harvey Milk?

You could see this coming. As Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has colored outside the lines when naming new naval vessels, special pleadings were bound to follow. His decision to christen Navy ships for Rep. John Murtha, labor leader Cesar Chavez, civil rights leader Medgar Evers, former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and President …

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