BattlelandTroops
The fighting season in Afghanistan is in full swing, and the early reports indicate this one will be tough. After last year’s surge, American units, and the Afghan Army and police they’re partnered with, will be fighting to hold the areas they paid for dearly a year ago. One of the key provinces will be Kandahar.
In the months …
BattlelandWeapons
The U.S. military is the world’s pre-eminent military force — by far — and most of that is because of its people and the way they train and led. But they’re none to shabby on the hardware side of the house, either. I just cobbled together a menu of the weapons systems used in recent U.S. military actions for Time.com and it has …
BattlelandPakistan
Henry Kissinger had a sobering op-ed in the Washington Post Tuesday that laid out the reality of the US position in Afghanistan.
First, the fundamental conundrum of “nation building” in a fake state:
But nation-building ran up against the irony that the Afghan nation comes into being primarily in opposition to occupying forces.
…
BattlelandNational Security
Megan McCloskey at Stars and Stripes has just run the first of a two part piece on suicide in the army and it’s a ripper. In it, she details what drove Army Specialist Brushaun Anderson to kill himself at a remote firebase in Iraq on New Year’s Day, 2010. I think it should be required reading for leaders at all levels of the Army.
A …
BattlelandTroops
The Navy keeps losing commanders over problems associated with sexual fraternization. A dozen COs have been relieved of command this year so far, many of them because of relationships they shouldn’t have been having. Over on the U.S. Naval Institute’s blog, CDR Salamander — a respected but anonymous former Navy officer — weighs in …
BattlelandSpecial Operations
Contrary to Stan McChrystal’s SEAL-hiring spree, there aren’t many businesses run like the famed special-forces team that killed Osama bin Laden last month. This piece from the Harvard Business Review explains why. “Most organizations can’t grow the professionalism of elite special forces units because they are constantly shifting …
BattlelandPentagon
…make you wonder just what the heck it is we are doing in Afghanistan. It’s a new, 33-page Army contract solicitation seeking Facebook and Twitter experts who can sell the U.S. message to the locals. Makes one wonder why we are investing our blood and treasure in a fight that has to be sold to the people whose lives we are supposedly …
BattlelandNational Security
The news that the Obama administration is stepping up the secret war in Yemen says a lot about the White House. The Obama administration, it is said, has a bit of an infatuation with special operations. According to some sources, Obama has unleashed the military’s special operations command even more aggressively than the Bush …
BattlelandNational Security
CIA chief Leon Panetta goes before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Thursday like one of those guys on the old Ed Sullivan show trying to keep all those plates spinning atop wooden poles, running from one to another to keep them from falling to the floor and smashing to bits.
These are his goals:
BattlelandVeterans
Before I introduce myself, I want to thank all of the readers of this column for your kind words about my first post. David Self was a wonderful person and a dedicated NCO. Men and women like him are the backbone of our armed forces; they do the tough business in training and in combat. We lose them far too often and it’s always …
BattlelandVeterans
Apparently war is an equal-opportunity destroyer, screwing up female troops’ minds as much — pretty much no more, no less — than those belonging to their male comrades. That’s the bottom line in a new study trying to contrast the mental wounds of war in both genders.
“Study findings suggest that both exposure to combat-related …
BattlelandNational Security
Recently there has been a lot of buzz in BattleLand about Post-Traumatic Stress (PTS), like this first-hand account by Ron Capps, or any of Mark Thompson’s posts. Currently a huge campaign is going on in the United States urging those affected to seek assistance, complete with billboards, TV ads, and self-help …
BattlelandBattleland
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said during his farewell tour in Afghanistan that troops there were poised to deliver a “decisive blow” against the Taliban.
I’m not sure why anybody would buy that kind of rhetoric at this late date, unless they had some reason to believe this decisive blow was somehow different from the “turning point” …
