President Obama is visiting Bethesda Naval Hospital Wednesday afternoon, and that’ll get some coverage in Thursday’s papers. But today, on page 1 of the Metro section of the Washington Post, is the kind of story that too often goes untold. It’s a simple article about how nine women — who have spent months caring for their husbands at …
National Security
The New Pirate-Terror Link
After yesterday’s horror in the Indian Ocean — where Somali pirates killed four Americans after seizing their yacht four days earlier — it’s hard to imagine something worse. Alas, there may be something worse. At least some of these pirates have allied themselves with the Somali-based Al Shabaab rebels, a group that professes loyalty …
Pirates Kill 4 Americans, U.S. Navy Says
The fate of the four Americans held by pirates on their yacht off Somalia ended in tragedy today as all four perished at the hands of their captors, Navy officials say. “This did not end the way we wanted it to,” says a Navy official. “After we’d be talking to the pirates for four days we were hoping for a better ending.”
Vice Adm. …
Stockpile Follies
History is a video, but policy-makers and academics too often see it as a snapshot. The latest example involves all the heavy breathing due to China’s supposed choke hold on so-called rare-earth elements like cerium, lanthanum and, neodymium vital to 21st Century technologies.
A report released Friday warns that U.S. leadership in …
Rep. Chicken Little (R-Ariz.)
Amid the real wars, the real lagging economy, the real budget crunch and the real turmoil in the Middle East, it’s great some lawmakers have time to go all Buck Rogers on us:
The threat of an electromagnetic pulse weapon represents the single greatest asymmetric capability that could fall into the hands of America’s enemies. Should a
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Marines Handling "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" Repeal Smartly
The Marines declared themselves, in a Pentagon survey conducted last year before the congressional vote to end “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” to be the service most opposed to letting openly gay men and women serve in uniform. It’s amazing what a little leadership can do. Friday morning, the Marines’ top officer declared his 200,000-strong …
Getting to "Zero Threat"
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has wrapped up two days of testifying before armed services committee — perhaps his final appearance before both panels — and the House gave him a nice going-away present: it voted to kill the $3 billion second-engine line for the F-35 fighter. As the debate over the power plant showed, defense-budget …
Vital Women's Work in Afghanistan
So much of what’s being done by U.S. troops in Afghanistan isn’t bullets and bombs. Here’s a fascinating peek at one of the most important of those so-called “non-kinetic” endeavors — the deployment of female Marines to help and befriend Afghan women. Because Afghan society frowns upon their women talking to men outside their …
House Kills F-35's Second Engine
The pork on Capitol Hill turned rancid as the House struck a blow for using the defense budget for defense — and not for jobs — Wednesday afternoon. That’s because it voted 233-198 against $450 million in funding for a second engine for the F-35 warplane.
It’s a switch from last year’s vote and shows that even the Pentagon isn’t …
Do You Feel $1 Billion Safer Today?
Pentagon contracts have become increasingly fuzzy in recent years, with descriptions of just what it is we’re getting for our money tough to discern. The latest example was at the top of the list of contracts announced by the Pentagon late Tuesday. It’s paying four companies as much as $281.7 million each (where do they come up with …
Happy 69th, Kim Jong Il
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The happy citizens of North Korea took to the streets of their capital of Pyongyang Wednesday to celebrate the birthday of their authoritarian mob boss, Kim Jong Il. Reports from the isolated regime show throngs of troops and school kids offering …
Nervous U.S. Navy Eyes on Bahrain
While the troubles in Egypt and Tunisia are important in Washington’s geo-strategic calculations, they don’t rank highly in its selfish concern over real estate. All that changes when it comes to the tiny Persian Gulf state of Bahrain, an island tucked between Saudi Arabia and Qatar on the gulf’s western shore with fewer than 1 million …
The Pentagon Can!
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Singer Tom Smith has retooled The Candy Man, a song written for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film, and most famously covered by Sammy Davis Jr. in 1972. This video is now bouncing around the Pentagon, as its inhabitants seek to recover from …