“December 17, 2011, marked the first time in 20 years that the Air Force had not flown a sortie over Iraq.”
BattlelandMilitary
Reduced U.S. Role in Afghanistan: Politics, By Other Means
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s statement Wednesday that the U.S. plans to hand off all combat missions in Afghanistan sometime in 2013 has triggered howls from hawks who maintain it’s a step down a slippery slope headed to …
BattlelandProcurement
Look Out, 4-Star General Coming Through…the Revolving Door
On Friday last week, Raytheon, a major defense contractor, announced it scored a four-star general! Marine Corps Gen. (Ret.) James E. Cartwright, the recently departed vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, joined the …
BattlelandMilitary Spending
Stake This (Defense) Job and Love It
Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson famously declared in 1775, but it beats banging the drums for defense spending because of the jobs it creates. Yes, jobs are critical in these tough economic …
BattlelandIraq
Watching the Cracks Widen in Iraq
“Al-Maliki is pushing my country to reach a turning point with deeply sectarian dimension.”
— Tariq al Hashimi, Iraqi vice president, January 29
Is Tariq Hashimi’s statements to Nuri Al Maliki a thinly veiled threat or a …
BattlelandTroops
Who Teaches SEAL Team 6 How to Fight?
The guys who got Osama bin Laden need boxing lessons. According to a contract solicitation issued Feb. 1, the Naval Special Warfare Development Group — that’s SEAL Team 6, to us civilians — wants former special-operations types and other flying fists to school them in “combative training.”
Who’d have thunk the gang …
BattlelandAfghanistan
Afghanistan’s Training Wheels
If all U.S. combat troops are going to leave Afghanistan by January 1, 2015, it makes sense that they back away from Afghanistan’s front lines before New Year’s Eve, 2014. Think of it as the dimmer on your dining room light – slowly turn it down instead of plunging from full light to darkness.
BattlelandTaliban
Stop The Presses: Pakistan Supports the Taliban
Think Long War Journal has just about the right reaction to this non-news.
BattlelandPeople
The Man Who Believed Himself
TOKYO – Wars can attract some odd, fringe characters, but I never met anyone stranger or more out on the fringe than Jonathan Keith Idema, who died recently in Mexico of complications from AIDS.
A career con artist and military wannabe, Idema showed up early during the war in Afghanistan. He posed variously as a government …
BattlelandAir Force
Air Force Meets `The Graduate’: “Plastics.”
Bombs hurt too much. That’s why the Air Force has just dropped a 500-pounder from a B-1 with a carbon fiber body – what you and I think of as plastic – instead of a metal case. It’s designed to destroy its target while minimizing the risk of collateral damage. The Pentagon ordered the bomb for urgent use in Central Command’s …
BattlelandIntelligence
Death By a Thousand Threats
It’s like snowballs and snowflakes: if you take enough flakes and press them together, you might end up with a snowball. At least that’s what Battleland thought as it checked out the opening statement of Director of National Intelligence James Clapper to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee Tuesday:
BattlelandChina
Whoosh! “What Was That?” Chinese, To Go
Military aviation guru Bill Sweetman has the latest on China’s stealthy J-20 fighter – you know, the one that kicked up a stink a year ago when it flew while then-defense secretary Robert Gates was visiting the Middle Kingdom – and finds some surprises in the latest issue of Defense Technology International:
“While it was …
BattlelandTerrorism
Women in Combat: Dying to Kill
Female suicide bombers are better than their male counterparts, at least in some ways, according to an Army assessment:
Although women make up roughly 15% of the suicide bombers within groups which utilize females, they were
…