Battleland has been reading aircraft accident reports since shortly after Orville Wright and his passenger, Army Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, crashed at Fort Myer, Va., in 1908, making Selfridge the first person ever to die in a …
1,000 Words
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan issued a statement Thursday detailing the steps now being taken to curb so-called insider attacks that have killed 45 allied troops so far this year.
Marine General John Allen’s statement contains no news, but its length alone makes clear the U.S. and its allies, including Afghanistan, view the …
On the Jobs Front, Reservists Fight to Take the Lead
During my first summer as an Army officer I took a Combat Lifesaver course at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Other than a fellow new lieutenant–like me, a recent ROTC graduate–the class consisted of a company of artillerymen from the …
Unmanned Jet Headed to Carriers
Young boys of a couple of generations ago loved to get dizzy, flying their yellow Cox PT-19 with its buzzing .049 Babe Bee engine in endless circles. The “pilot” was connected to the plane via a pair of control lines that allowed the model planes to climb and dive…and occasionally crash.
That’s why the X-47B is so exciting. …
Same Old Story for Women in Uniform
The Army’s Women’s Health Task Force has just issued a paper dealing with the concerns of female soldiers serving in Afghanistan.
As usual, it contains both bad news and good news.
In terms of bad news, the themes are …
Iraq: How the CIA Says It Blew It on Saddam’s WMD
Now that we’re out of Iraq, the CIA has come clean on how it came to be bamboozled about Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) ferrets over at the National Security Archive (NSA) …
Capital Flight
“For all of our tactical valor, and the hedgehog nature of how our incredibly tough, brave and committed small units go about the missions we give them [in Afghanistan], once again our strategic compass is unmoored -- in part, maybe largely because we rotate 2-star and 3-star HQ constantly, leaving no enduring frame of reference for what we are doing.”
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TIME’s Correspondent-in-Chief: John Stacks (1942-2012)
A tribute to the magazine’s legendary chief of correspondents by TIME’s news director
The Time Has Come for an English Language Latino Network
Marketers, media and politicians take note: demographics indicate that more than half of Hispanics born in the U.S. are now English dominant—and the statistic is growing
Seeds of Peace
Army Colonel Brian Copes and the Indiana Army National Guard headed off to war with a pitchfork, not a rifle. As commander of the 1-19th Agribusiness Development Team in Afghanistan in 2009, Copes’ team deployed to Khost …
He NOEs What He’s Doing…
When helicopter pilots deftly hug the earth at treetop level, it’s called nap-of-the-earth – NOE – flying. It’s a technique designed to avoid enemy detection – flying under the radar, as it’s sometimes called.
It’s altogether something else to do it in a Navy F-18 jet fighter as in this video, anonymously posted on …