BattlelandWeapons
BattlelandNuclear Weapons
Always best when those kinds of disconcerting messages turn out to be false alarms. The ace FOIAers over at the National Security Archive at the George Washington University have just released a two-page once-SECRET memo that then-defense secretary Harold Brown sent to President Carter in 1980 over such a couple of false alarms that …
BattlelandMilitary Training
When will we say enough is enough? As I watch the atrocities mount in Syria, and our President apologize to the citizens of Afghanistan for an honest error, it highlighted not only the differences in culture between Middle …
BattlelandSpecial Operations
The Navy’s Military Sealift Command is sniffing around the nation’s shipping industry to see if there’s someone who might be able to help the service’s SEALs get around.
Lots of this is secret, of course, but the Pentagon …
BattlelandMilitary Mental Health
Here’s a pair of fascinating Pentagon charts. The one on the left is for U.S. male troops medically evacuated from the Iraq war over the past eight years; the one on the right tracks the same among female U.S. troops (more than 50,000 of both genders left this way). For about the first four years of the war, battlefield and other …
BattlelandWeapons
BattlelandKorea
The State Department declared Wednesday that Pyongyang has changed its stripes and agreed to suspend its nuclear activities and halt nuclear and long-range missile tests. If true, this is good news for the world and the North …
BattlelandMilitary Mental Health
Combat gets blamed for all sorts of ills. Some are obvious, like physical wounds. Others are less visible, and range from traumatic brain injury to post-traumatic stress disorder. Well, “deployment to southwest Asia” – that would be Afghanistan and/or Iraq –apparently also triggers headaches.
“Factors that appeared to be …
BattlelandMilitary
Those of us of a certain sell-by date recall John Paul Vann’s searing tale of Vietnam in Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie.
The title resonates in light of recent screw-ups by the U.S. military, with the addition of one …
BattlelandAir Force
Training for war – flying a jet fighter at low altitudes, for example – can be an unforgiving business. That’s the bottom line from an F-15 crash last October 24 in Nevada. The pilot wasn’t badly hurt, but the $32 million plane was totaled.
Accident investigators said they were unable to determine the cause of the crash, …
BattlelandWeapons
BattlelandAfghanistan
The Pentagon’s top bean-counter was ready when a senator asked him a simple question Tuesday: how much does it cost to keep a single American soldier in Afghanistan for a year? “Right now,” Robert Hale, the Pentagon comptroller responded, “about $850,000 per soldier.”
That’s akin to the $400-per-gallon cost of fuel, and $30-per-gallon …
