BattlelandPresident Obama
Picking up on Mark’s thread this morning, Galrahn, the eminent blogger at Information Dissemination, likewise sees a fight that’s getting nasty, arguing yesterday that the Army was “lucky” (in that, Will-no-one-rid-me-of-that-meddlesome-flag-officer! way) to see two of its great rivals for the position of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs …
BattlelandNational Security
Wait, the chaplains are in the news… again? Military chaplains never make the headlines. Weird!
According to a letter written on Monday by retired chaplains and religious agencies to the services chiefs of chaplains, gays getting married in base chapels “creates an environment that is increasingly hostile to many chaplains – …
BattlelandTerrorism
My old classmate Fareed Zakaria recently made the argument that counterterrorism beats nation-building when it comes to winning the war on terror. Taking Osama Bin Laden’s killing as a point of American pride, he says that sort of military/intelligence operation is what we’re good at, and so we should stick with it versus pursue the …
BattlelandNational Security
“In my opinion, any future defense secretary who advises the President to again send a big American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or Africa should have his head examined, as General MacArthur so delicately put it.”
BattlelandNational Security
The U.S. Army feels and bleeds just like the rest of us. While it may lack the swagger of the Marine Corps, it does more broadly reflect both the glory and the garbage of a country of more than 300 million.
Having covered it for more than 30 years, I could feel its mortification in 1995 after authorities fingered Timothy McVeigh as the …
BattlelandNational Security
Even before the military officially allows openly gay men and women to serve, there’s talk from the Army’s (outgoing) senior general that it’s time to revisit the ban on women serving in infantry units.
BattlelandNational Security
The Pentagon inspector general has just issued an unsettling report, especially if you have a loved one currently in harm’s way in the uniform of the U.S. military:
We are performing a series of Interceptor Body Armor audits in response to a congressional request. This audit covered six contracts valued at $434 million awarded to Point
…
BattlelandNational Security
Poignant story from the Killeen Daily Herald:
SALADO, Texas – A soldier who was severely wounded in the Nov. 5, 2009, shooting at Fort Hood and his fiancee are getting the house of their dreams, courtesy of the ABC television show “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” and an army of volunteers working this week. Staff Sgt. Patrick
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BattlelandNational Security
Tough story in the Clarksville, Tenn., Leaf-Chronicle this morning about a soldier with PTSD who says he went AWOL, instead of returning to Afghanistan, because of the lack of mental-health services at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. “All I wanted was to be treated,” Specialist Jeff Hanks, who also served in Iraq in 2008, said outside the …
BattlelandNational Security
The Army has just released its internal investigation into the Fort Hood shootings a year ago that left 13 people dead at the hands, according to eye-witnesses, of Maj. Nidal Hasan. He’s the Army psychiatrist and Muslim who shouted — according to some of those witnesses — “Allah Akbar” (“God is great”) as he methodically killed 12 …
BattlelandNational Security
It’s always enlightening to dive into the military’s historical archives, because armies have been doing the same things for hundreds of years. While the troops in charge today might think they’re blazing a new trail, chances are good soldiers a generation or two earlier traveled the same path, now overgrown with the passage of …
BattlelandNational Security
Good piece in the Washington Post this morning. The story is buried in the Metro section when it really should be on Page One. It has to do with the engravings on troops’ grave markers at Arlington National Cemetery, the nation’s troubled final resting place for its honored dead. It tell us something about the Army we’d rather not …
BattlelandNational Security
The man behind the fusillade of bullets that felled 13 people at Fort Hood last November enters the public spotlight for the first time starting Wednesday. That’s a 24-hour delay, granted by the military judge to give Maj. Nidal Hasan’s defense team until then to detail their request for postponing the legal proceeding until Nov. 8. …
