Briton Ben Anderson is a documentary filmmaker (the BBC, HBO, the Discovery Channel), but he turns to the written word in No Worse Enemy: The Inside Story of the Chaotic Struggle for Afghanistan. The book offers a gritty – and …
Pentagon
58%
Body Armor for Women…At Last
Forget `Trust, But Verify.’ Make It `Don’t Trust, And Verify.’
Trainer Aircraft…With Training Wheels
It was one of the saddest stories Battleland ever did: reporting on the three cadets at the Air Force Academy who died, along with their instructors, in a trio of separate crashes of the T-3 Firefly trainer aircraft from 1995 to …
“The worst I’ve ever seen.”
Fill ‘er Up!
“Green-on-Blue” Attacks Generate Red Light
After months of simultaneously taking seriously and dismissing the “green-on-blue” attacks inside Afghanistan as the work of Afghan troops bent on killing due to perceived cultural slights, NATO forces have officially pared back …
The Third War on Terror
How does President Obama’s approach to tackling terror resemble President Reagan’s? It’s not a trick question. John Arquilla has a nifty comparison of the two commanders-in-chief and their approaches to dealing with …
Carrier Wars
U.S. aircraft carriers are a big roll of the dice. The U.S. Navy has begun building the Ford class of carriers, which are going to end up costing $15 billion each once they’re outfitted with the warplanes that are the reason …
9.4%
Hurried, Harried, Harriers…and Harry
It was a grim weekend in Afghanistan. A surprisingly sophisticated insurgent attack wiped out a half-dozen U.S. warplanes, green-on-blue attacks continued, as did mistaken allied attacks on women and girls collecting firewood. …
“When an 82-year-old pacifist nun gets to the inner sanctum of our weapons complex, you cannot say `Job well done.' She's in the audience. Would you please stand up, ma'am? We want thank you for pointing out some of the problems in our security.”