BattlelandTroops
The best thing about the military is the way young men and women in uniform get things done. What they get done, of course, isn’t always their choice. Take the airdrop mission flown last week by the 774th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron out of the main U.S. base in Afghanistan at Bagram: the troops air-dropped a six-ton forklift to …
BattlelandTroops
You’ve got to feel a little bit sorry for the U.S. Air Force. First of all, their taxpayer-funded academy, out in Colorado Springs, Colo., gets rapped for being a hive of evangelical Christianity. The Air Force then earnestly tries to deal with – and encourage – religious diversity, and they get stung by stories like this in …
BattlelandTaliban
We’ve written more than once about the willingness of Afghan militants – most are so-called “$10 Taliban,” fighting simply for the paycheck — to lay down their arms if the price is right:
Vice President Joe Biden has estimated that only 5% of those fighting for the Taliban are “incorrigible, not susceptible to anything other than
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BattlelandNational Security
My previous posting, discussed some of the implications of our looming grand-strategic defeat in Afghanistan. Here, we address the narrower logistics question of how to bring our forces home.
The old adage that it is easy to get into Afghanistan but painful to leave is true for many reasons — a big one was just described in the 27
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BattlelandTroops
After we reported last March on the stupidity behind the death of Air Force Senior Airman James Hansen in Iraq, we spoke to his father. Like any Dad who sends his son off to war, he expressed something – let’s call it disillusionment and sorrow, more than anger – that no one had yet been held accountable for his 25-year old son’s …
BattlelandWeapons
There is no well-defined border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and – all too often amid the fog of war and firefights – there is no well-defined difference between the Pakistani military and anti-American insurgents crowded along that rugged frontier. That’s apparently why a U.S. air attack early Saturday killed at least 25 …
BattlelandNational Security
It is becoming increasingly clear that the AF-PAK war will end in yet another grand strategic defeat for the United States. To date, President Obama, has been able to distract attention from this issue, but given the stakes in 2012, that dodge is unlikely to last. Get ready for an ugly debate over “who lost the Afghan War.” To those …
BattlelandJapan
TOKYO – Japanese troops are being sent once again into the heart of the Fukushima radiation zone to battle contamination from the stricken nuclear power plant.
Specially trained troops will enter the 20-kilometer (12.4 miles) exclusion zone around the plant next month to decontaminate abandoned government buildings and …
BattlelandTroops
Even though our troops are pretty well paid, a big family or a jobless spouse can spell trouble when it comes to putting food on the table. As the Washington Post notes this Thanksgiving morning on its front page:
Hundreds of financially strained military families in the Washington area are lining up for turkeys and free groceries
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BattlelandVeterans
Families and communities — the rest of us, in other words — can play a role in helping to cut down on the epidemic of military suicides. Dr. Elspeth “Cam” Ritchie, a Battleland contributor and former top Army psychiatrist, and Dr. Margaret Harrell, a military personnel expert at the Center for a New American Security — who …
BattlelandVeterans
As Dave Barno said two weeks ago in Time:
“It’s a tough time to be in the family business,” says Dave Barno, a retired Army lieutenant general who commanded all allied troops in Afghanistan in 2003–05 and has two sons in the Army. “As my kids deploy around the world, they’re running into their playmates from when they
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BattlelandVeterans
….was not said once in Wednesday night’s nearly two-hour long Republican debate on national security matters.
BattlelandPolitics
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQAhzU9Y4Xg]
Wednesday night’s CNN Republican debate with its eight contenders and sound-bite responses was akin to a World Wrestling Entertainment bout. Bottom line: President Obama is a failure and President Reagan was tops.
Yet you can glean a fair amount about the candidates via some of …
