Chas Freeman was President Nixon’s interpreter during Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972. Now, nearly 40 years later, after an impressive diplomatic and defense career, he’s interpreting China for the rest of us.
Last week he said:
The balance of prestige, if not yet the balance of power, between the United States and China
…
The Vulcans were the foreign-policy realists of the George W. Bush Administration. Their presence on his campaign team before his 2000 election as President blunted suggestions that the Texas governor lacked sufficient overseas chops. But now one of those Vulcans has come forward to shed some light on the goings-on inside their …
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-_JvYhXn1s&feature=player_embedded#at=60]
OK — admit it. It’s been awhile since the nation had such a sense of accomplishment. But the Navy SEALs — admired not only for their bravery, but for their willingness to do so invisibly — have touched a lot of folks around the country. What lawmaker …
The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program is “the largest defense acquisition program in U.S. history” and it’s engine “represents over 10% of the overall program price, or about $100 billion,” according to the Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Representative Howard “Buck” McKeon (R-CA).
For the past five years, all four …
If our dealings with Pakistan are hampered by the same flawed assumptions we used in our hunt for Osama bin Laden, the road ahead for Washington and Islamabad is likely to be rocky. Over at Small Wars Journal, Will Chalmers, a research assistant at the Centre for Security, Armed Forces and Society at the Royal Military College of …
So last week, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen was telling us that everything was going swimmingly in his alliance’s effort to force Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi from power. “We have succeeding in taking out a lot of his capacities, and now you see the opposition is gaining ground,” Rasmussen said Thursday. “We are …
During U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ visit to China in January, Beijing heralded his arrival with the first public flight of its J-20 stealth fighter. Tonight, in honor of the arrival of General Chen Bingde, chief of staff of China’s People’s Liberation Army, the U.S. will return the favor: with a joint concert featuring the …
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 White House and Pentagon won’t admit it, but everybody else knows the size and scope of the continuing U.S. presence in Afghanistan is now subject to debate. That’s the result of a perfect storm of factors — the killing of Osama bin Laden, the weariness of the American public, and the continuing zaniness of Afghan President …
Stars and Stripes’ Rumor Doctor(the U.S. military has just about as many rumors as it does secrets, and believe me — the rumors tend to be more interesting) Jeff Schogol was told that the military doesn’t award secret commendations. Does that mean the SEALs who took out Osama bin Laden — in addition to not being able to …
“So did you kill Gaddafi last night?”
NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen laughed generously at the temerity of the question. The former Danish prime minister — now chief of the most powerful military alliance in history — unspooled his political answer to an impolitic query. “Let me stress that we do not target …
We noted the other day that there is a growing split between the U.S. military and U.S. society. Here’s another example: there is now a magazine for military spouses called, believe it or not, Military Spouse. This tells us two things: military spousing has become almost a career-lifestyle thing, and advertisers believe military …
