In nature, most seals are black, with relatively few white ones. The Navy’s SEALs have exactly the opposite problem – they’re overwhelmingly white, with hardly any blacks. So they’re trying to do something about …
BattlelandSpecial Operations
BattlelandSpecial Operations
“This is a president who is shrinking our Navy, shrinking our Air Force, wants to shrink our active-duty personnel by 50-to-100,000, is cutting our military budget by roughly a trillion dollars…The right course is to add ships to our Navy, to modernize and add aircraft to our Air Force, to add 100,000 troops to our active-duty personnel and to strengthen America's military.”
“I don't want even the men to be over there.”
BattlelandAir Force
Flying Blind: Defog of War
Surely you’ve been driving down the street when, though no fault of your own, your windshield fogs up and you suddenly find yourself driving blind. Now imagine you’re flying an F-16 on the verge of landing amid an air show crowd – not to mention lots of vintage airplanes – when your canopy cockpit fogs up.
That’s precisely …
BattlelandAfghanistan
Bus Station for Afghanistan: Coming and Going…Now Going, For Good
The Manas air base in Kyrgyzstan has been the Greyhound Bus terminal for U.S. troops flowing in and out of Afghanistan for the past decade. But that’s coming to an end in two years. Kyrgyz President Almazbek Atambayev told …
BattlelandMilitary Personnel
PTSD…And Cash
The Army removed Colonel Dallas Homas, commander of Madigan Army Medical Center in Washington state, on Tuesday from his post because of an investigation into whether post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnoses were reversed …
BattlelandCongress
Number of Vets in Congress Is Shrinking…
…but it remains much higher than the percentage of military veterans in the general population.
BattlelandMilitary Mental Health
They Don’t Seem to Get Better…
That might be one conclusion to be drawn from this wrenching chart in a new Congressional Budget Office report on how the Department of Veterans Affairs is handling wounded troops suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. The chart shows that nearly all the troops afflicted with both ailments remain …
BattlelandLeon Panetta
“Leon the Lip”
Leon Panetta first ran afoul of a president when he was a lowly federal staffer more than 40 years ago. The president was Richard Nixon, who didn’t like the way Panetta, then a civil-rights advocate at the old Department of …
BattlelandMilitary Justice
About That Mistaken Shootdown: The Rest of the Story
BattlelandNuclear Weapons
Iran’s Nuclear Flashpoint
Parchin is the Iranian nuclear site the the Tehran government barred IAEA inspectors from seeing this week. What could be there? There has been a cat-and-mouse game underway involving Parchin for several years, and the end game may be looming.
If this is the beginning of the end game, it has been a long time coming. “This huge …
BattlelandNuclear Weapons
IAEA = Iran Asking for Extreme Action
Like it or not, the world just moved a big step closer to war with Iran over its nuclear program. It may only be the perception of war that’s a step closer, but sometimes that’s all that counts (and sometimes, the reality and the perception are the same thing). The International Atomic Energy Agency issued a grim statement …
BattlelandMilitary Training
Grambo!
Army Sergeant Sandra Coast graduated from Basic Combat Training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo., last Friday at age 51. “Everybody in the world thinks I am a total nutcase,” she tells the post’s public-affairs officer. “I just want …
