Remember Mom or Dad telling you not to fiddle with the car radio while driving? They didn’t want you running off the road.
It can get far more serious when you’re flying an Air Force fighter and you’re distracted …
BattlelandSnafus
BattlelandSnafus
BattlelandPeople
Life, and Death, on the Fringe
It was with great sadness Wednesday that I learned of the death of retired TOPGUN pilot Navy Captain Carroll LeFon, killed Tuesday morning when his jet crashed at Naval Air Station Fallon in Nevada.
LeFon was better known
…
BattlelandMilitary Spending
Mitt’s Rich — And So Is His Defense Budget
If nearly doubling the Pentagon budget over the past decade (not counting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) isn’t sufficient, GOP front-runner Mitt Romney has a solution: lock in defense spending at 4% of gross domestic product. That way, within a decade, we’ll have our first $1 trillion annual defense budget as we spend 42% more …
BattlelandAfghanistan
Afghan Mission: Implausible
Bored sitting around your desk? Want some action for a change? Well, the Agency for International Development has just the gig for you: AID is seeking a “senior press liaison” for its Afghanistan outpost to “ensure the production of clear, powerful news advisories and releases.” You’ll be expected to “tell the USAID story …
BattlelandAuthor Q&A
Afghanistan: Shok Therapy
A pair of intrepid reporters has just published No Way Out: A Story of Valor in the Mountains of Afghanistan. Veteran journalists Mitch Weiss, now at the AP — who won a Pulitzer Prize while at the Toledo Blade in 2004 — and Kevin Maurer, who has traveled frequently with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, tell the tale of a Special Forces team …
BattlelandCongress
Caucus Belli
When the defense budget begins tightening, nervous lawmakers don’t circle the wagons – they set up a caucus. That’s what happened earlier this week as about a dozen lawmakers created the Congressional Mobility Air Forces …
BattlelandVeterans
“Stuff” Civilians Say to Veterans
Sometimes you get the impression Berlitz or Rosetta Stone should offer U.S. civilians classes on how to speak to folks who have served in the military. Just another sign of the growing gap between U.S. society and those defending it that Battleland wrote about last Veterans Day.
BattlelandProcurement
Update: About That F-35 Audit
Home At Last…
BattlelandMilitary
Afghanistan: First Tragedy, Now Farce
If you follow the commentariat on Afghanistan, you can sense a growing sense of pessimism. Some handle it more deftly than others:
The most insidious objection to realism in the AfPak region comes from those ready to label it a “cut-and-run” strategy. This is the kind of logic that leads some folks to sleep with an unattractive
…
BattlelandNavy
Sailors’ Time at Sea Heading Skyward
Wars come and go in cycles, and so does everything that accompanies them. The U.S. public wanted war after 9/11, but now they are exhausted. Weapons wax and wane from complex (F-111) to simple (F-16) to complex again (F-35). And …
BattlelandArmy
RIP: Magnificent Valor
In the spring of 1944, the focus of the American army in Europe was the fighting in Italy. Van Barfoot was a sergeant in the 157th Infantry, part of the 45th Division. The 25 men in his platoon, like the other 150,000 Americans on the beachhead, had been bombed and shelled regularly by German aircraft and artillery since they arrived …
BattlelandAir Force
Air Force Rocks
When Battleland thinks of an Air Force-related rock group, Jefferson Airplane for some reason springs to mind. But today’s Air Force isn’t relying on some psychedelic 1960s’-era band for its cred. Instead, it’s counting on Max Impact, made up of Air Force non-commissioned officers.
Granted, it’s not the Air Force Strings …