This surprising chart is contained in a new Pentagon report. “Annual numbers of hospitalizations with primary (first-listed) diagnoses of suicidal ideation at discharge have steadily and sharply increased (from 5 in 2006 to 355 in 2010),” the Pentagon notes. That’s a 7,000% increase in patients who reported thinking of killing …
Pentagon
Commando Dogs: Going After bin Laden — And IEDs
The mystery mutt who accompanied the SEALs on their mission to Osama bin Laden’s lair is coming in for a fair amount of attention. After all, people love their dogs, and if one can help take out the world’s most wanted terrorist, all the better. Their noses know: the dog’s keen sense of smell, to sniff out …
The Man Who Got bin Laden: The Most Deadly Would-be Journalist in the World
The man who commanded the SEAL team that hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden studied to be a reporter. If the Pulitzer Prize board establishes a new category — for killing the world’s most wanted terrorist — it’s a safe bet Bill McRaven will win it next spring.
Vice Adm. William McRaven, himself a SEAL, was on the ground in …
Military Health Care: Helping Retirees, Screwing the Taxpayers
Congressional Leader Will Fight President Obama’s Defense Cuts
Having rid the world of a terrorist mastermind, America is celebrating a great victory. Yet the military responsible for this success faces unprecedented wartime budget cuts.
President Obama has announced a goal of $400 billion in defense cuts over the next decade. Reductions of that magnitude will surely undermine the ability of the …
Speaking of Afghanistan…
Jim Lacey is a former Time colleague now a professor of strategic studies at the Marine Corps War College. He’s still writing:
While I was in Kandahar, General Petraeus announced that the Coalition faced about a hundred al-Qaeda fighters. Did anyone do the math? There are over 140,000 Coalition soldiers in Afghanistan, or 1,400 for
…
Wither the Afghan War
So now that Osama bin Laden has gone on to his just deserts, what impact — if any — will his demise have on the war in Afghanistan next door?
The military answer: none.
The political answer: accelerate that troop pullout.
The Final Room-by-Room Hunt For Osama Bin Laden
A senior U.S. intelligence official described Osama bin Laden’s compound with two words that are rarely spoken together: “opaque windows.” Once the U.S. became aware of the compound, a closer look made them even more curious. “The walls around the compound were up to 18 feet high,” a senior U.S. intelligence operative said Monday. …
Bin Laden: A Tale Of Two Mornings, Three Decades Apart
Just over 31 years ago, a much bleaker dawn greeted Americans awakening and getting ready to go to work than was the case Monday morning. Back in 1980, the U.S. military had just been humiliated at Desert One, deep inside Iran, trying to rescue the 52 hostages that had been held by Iran for six months. The U.S. military was forced to …
Panetta’s Challenge
When the President announced his new national security team last week most of the attention focused on David Petraeus at CIA and the problem of winding down the war in Afghanistan. Leon Panetta’s nomination as Secretary of Defense went almost unnoticed, by comparison.
But Panetta has the bigger challenge: how to manage a build down in …
Bin Laden: How They Got Him — And What Happens to al Qaeda Now
The reports started coming in more than a month ago: Osama bin Laden was on the move, and the U.S. had its eye on him. Stressed by the turmoil sweeping his part of the world – tumult he had no roll in sparking – bin Laden was trying to bolster al Qaeda’s credibility as young people Tweeted and Facebooked about a future that …
CBO Defense Option #6
This is our final selection from the Congressional Budget Office’s recent report on cutting federal spending, by slicing Pentagon programs among other things. It calls for dropping one of the Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers, and one of the 10 air wings that supply them with aircraft. Total savings, in outlays, over the next five years is …
Pentagon Cites Gains in Afghanistan
Army Gen. David Petraeus is leaving his successor, Marine Lieut. General John Allen, “tangible progress” in Afghanistan to build on, according to the Pentagon’s semi-annual assessment of how the war is going. Easy for him to say, since by fall he’ll be running the CIA in Langley, Va.