BattlelandSuicide
The rash of suicides among Army troops, including reservists, abated for the first time in four years in 2011, the service reported Thursday. The total of 278 was a 9% drop from the year before. But the toll continued to climb in the active-duty force, rising from 159 in 2010 to 164 last year.
A pair of leading indicators of …
BattlelandVeterans
BattlelandAuthor Q&A
After a decade of war in Afghanistan, there’s a new guidebook out on just who we’re fighting. It’s The Afghan Way of War by Robert Johnson, Oxford historian. It is his subtitle – How and Why They Fight – that should be required reading for the leaders of both the U.S. and U.K., as well as the grunts on Afghan soil. …
BattlelandVeterans
The Department of Veterans Affairs’ inspector general is out with a report assessing how well the VA’s regional office in White River Junction, Vt., does when it comes to awarding disability pay to vets:
True, it’s only a half-million dollars in over-payments. But when you extrapolate that sum – White River Junction is …
BattlelandMilitary Spending
…are apparently forcing the Defense Department-run high schools in Europe to “recondition and paint football equipment” for their players:
BattlelandIran
Attached herewith is an essay written by William R. Polk outlining a strategy for diffusing the Iranian crisis. I am posting it with his permission. He is a former State Department official — and historian and foreign policy …
BattlelandMilitary Spending
Seems all the bluster about cutting military spending by $1 trillion over the next decade – about 15% — isn’t the hair-on-fire moment that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and his congressional allies have been …
It’s progress, of a sort, when the Navy’s tailhook woes are linked to an actual tailhook – the hook that grabs the arresting cable on an aircraft carrier and lets the plane land safely – and not the debauchery that was common at the Tailhook Assocation’s annual gatherings. That kind of Tailhook trouble exploded into a …
“Cross-Domain Synergy -- the complementary vice merely additive employment of capabilities in different domains such that each enhances the effectiveness and compensates for the vulnerabilities of the others -- to establish superiority in some combination of domains that will provide the freedom of action required by the mission.”
BattlelandAfghanistan
Two things have happened since Monday worth noting. Both involve the deaths of Air Force personnel at the hands of radical Muslims. In one case – in which nine Americans died – the killer used a handgun apparently paid for by …
BattlelandAir Force
The crew members of that F-15E that went down in Libya nearly a year ago have finally surfaced to tell their story. Over at CNN’s Security Clearance blog, one of them tells Barbara Starr what it felt like:
Very much like if
…
While the Pentagon is trying to cool down the rhetoric with Tehran (“We seek to lower the temperature on tensions with Iran,” Pentagon spokesman George Little said last week), not everyone has gotten the message, apparently. Perhaps that accounts for the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments’ release Tuesday of …
BattlelandVeterans
Over at the VA’s blog, VAntage Point, an old salt who once served in the Navy writes about what it’s like to have his Army son fighting far from home – and then coming home.
“Every night when I went to bed, I prayed …
