Korea-watchers had been holding their breath, after South Korea offered its pest-control services Tuesday to North Korea to help eradicate pests at ancient tombs in North Korea revered by those on both sides of the 38th Parallel. The unspecified pests are apparently killing pine trees surrounding the Koguryo tombs, located in the …
Special Operations
Who Teaches SEAL Team 6 How to Fight?
The guys who got Osama bin Laden need boxing lessons. According to a contract solicitation issued Feb. 1, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group — that’s SEAL Team 6, to us civilians — wants former special-operations types and other flying fists to school them in “combative training.”
Who’d have thunk the gang …
The Man Who Believed Himself
TOKYO – Wars can attract some odd, fringe characters, but I never met anyone stranger or more out on the fringe than Jonathan Keith Idema, who died recently in Mexico of complications from AIDS.
A career con artist and military wannabe, Idema showed up early during the war in Afghanistan. He posed variously as a government …
What Makes Insurgents Tick?
It’s not – surprise! – what you think:
…We see insurgency as a form of collective, goal-focused activity that comes about when nefarious people exploit the weaknesses of a political system…And since insurgency is
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Photo Op: Wind Chill
Killed in Iran: Part of a Nuclear Trifecta
It has been a busy day or so on the nuclear front:
— An Iran nuclear scientist was assassinated Wednesday morning in Tehran.
— The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock warning of nuclear war to 11:56 …
Watching SEAL Team 6
Things Should be Getting Pretty Tense in Tehran
U.S. to Go After Kony and the LRA
In a short statement on Friday, the State Department announced that the U.S. is sending 132 advisors to Uganda to help capture elusive rebel leader Joseph Kony and end the terrorism of his Lord’s Resistance Army. Kony has led the LRA for nearly 25 years. He and his lieutenants have been under an arrest warrant from the International …
Special Forces Navy
You won’t learn much from the most interesting contract announcement the Pentagon made Thursday (click on it to enlarge). It’s for as much as $400 million to “develop, test, produce, field, and sustain a modern, clandestine, agile, adaptive, technically relevant, reliable, and operationally capable combatant craft system in support …
“How Did the U.S. Military Retool Itself Post-9/11?”
In the decade after 9/11, just how much did the U.S. military have to recalibrate to fight the wars it found itself launching in Afghanistan and, 18 months later, in Iraq? This week, on Command Post, we discuss the retooling of the American armed forces with Eric Schmitt of the New York Times — co-author of Counterstrike: The Untold …
Kind of Makes You Wonder What It Takes to Win the Highest Award
The Air Force brass has nominated Staff Sergeant Robert Gutierrez for the Air Force Cross, its second-highest award for bravery. He was the lone Air Force targeteer assigned to an Army special-forces team in Afghanistan nearly two years ago. The unit’s night-time missi0n: capture a top Taliban leader in the western part of the …
Baby-Killing Python Slated to Help Train Army Rangers
Do you find this unsettling?
A python that killed a 2-year-old Florida girl in 2009 will now be used in training at Eglin Air Force Base. The 8-foot, 6-inch python, named Gypsy, has lived at the Camp Rudder snake house since shortly after the incident. The albino Burmese python now will be used in swamp training at ranger camp…
It seems
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