This Friday, the Air Force will award Francis Gary Powers – the pilot of the ill-fated U-2 spy plane shot down by the Soviets in 1960 and held captive for 21 months – a posthumous Silver Star. It’s the latest in a series of sorrys the U.S. has offered Powers’ family following his poor treatment at the hands of the the government he …
People
Sequestration or Not, Defense Budget to Continue Its Decline
While many in Washington assume that Congress will solve sequestration by the end of the year–the problem Congress created when the Super Committee failed–recent comments by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) indicate …
Flying Through the Glass Ceiling
Heroism Seven Full FYDPs Ago Recognized
President Obama presented the Medal of Honor Wednesday to Rose Sabo-Brown, widow of Specialist Leslie H. Sabo, Jr., U.S. Army, in the East Room of the White House. Sabo earned the decoration posthumously for his heroic actions in …
Pentagon: We Don’t Call Them POWs Anymore
Lots of people call Bowe Bergdahl, who has been held by insurgents on the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier for nearly three years, a prisoner of war. Even his father, Bob, used the term for his son in a recent chat with Time’s …
2012 Military Spouse of the Year
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, …
Not (Just) Another Reading List
My Battleland colleague Nate Rawlings has done excellent work at keeping us all aware of trends in official Army reading lists. Like many veterans, I suppose, I have a shelf of books I own solely because some previous commander put it on his mandatory reading list. These lists are handed down as part of the boilerplate leadership …
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 …
To the Shores of Morocco…
Why Are Military Marriages So Strong?
There’s a head-turning article in the latest edition of the Journal of Family Issues (admittedly something rarely found on Battleland’s nightstand) about how well military marriages are faring after 10 years of war.
After …
“We were initially briefed there would be 10 to 15 possible insurgents in the area…And what we found out after the fact -- once we got back -- after analyzing the intelligence, that there was over a hundred that had moved into the area during the fight.”
Pentagon Contractor = Iranian Contractor?
Is a Pentagon contractor doing business with Iran, the North Star of the Axis of Evil (NSAE)? Former Time comrade Adam Zagorin probes the relationship among the Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport Company, Tehran, and the Pentagon. It’s an investigation for the Project on Government Oversight, an independent stone unturner. “Amid renewed …
