BattlelandMilitary Spending
BattlelandMilitary Spending
BattlelandMilitary Spending
Sequestration’s Shadow Darkens
House and Senate Republican leaders released a letter Friday — the 13th — that will effectively kill an increasingly favored option in Washington to temporarily delay the onset of sequestration (automatic budget cuts) by three or six months.
It comes on the heels of President Obama’s former campaign manager floating the idea …
BattlelandSnafus
Navy’s Scarecrow: “If I Only Had a Brain”
Battleland’s pop was in the trucking business. It was always a thrill for him and his younger brothers when Dad rumbled home in a huge Mack tractor that we’d drive around the neighborhood after dinner. We thought of that as we read this story about a Navy doctor who – while entrusted with a deceased service member’s brain en …
BattlelandMilitary Mental Health
Suicide’s Twin Challenges
It has been a tough couple of months, burrowing into the challenge of military suicides…and repeatedly coming up empty-handed. My editors seemed like Pete Chiarelli when he became the Army’s No. 2 officer nearly five years ago: determined to find a way to halt suicide in the ranks, and frustrated when it proved to be so elusive. It …
BattlelandVeterans
Smart Business Plan: Hire a Vet
I know — from personal experience — that folks out there who do the hiring for their companies have no idea what the experience and work ethics are of military veterans.
Although I retired 12 years ago and opted to go to graduate school instead of looking for work right away, I too have faced a brick wall when it came to finding a …
BattlelandMiddle East
Is Syria’s Civil War Leaching Into Iraq?
Vivienne Walt reports:
For months, Syrian opposition groups have smuggled weapons and fighters into the country across the borders of Turkey and Lebanon. Now another of Syria’s influential neighbors—Iraq—says its territory is being used as a base for al-Qaeda attacks against the regime of President Bashar Assad. Speaking to a
…
BattlelandWar Story
Dust Wars
Army Major Casey Holler served as a company commander in Kirkuk, Iraq, in 2005-2006, and spent 2009-2010 in Afghanistan as a logistics planner at Forward Operating Base Salerno in southeastern Afghanistan.
Logistics – git thar fustest with the mostest, in the apocryphal words of Confederate Civil War General Nathan Bedford Forrest …
BattlelandMilitary
War and Politics: When the Overlap Causes Friction
A nearly-familiar name re-entered the headlines this week in one of those stories I classify in the potentially scandalous, but more likely overblown and will be resolved eventually category.
Last month, allegations surfaced …
BattlelandSyria
The Rebels: We Need Intel More Than Arms
It took Twitter five years to hire a Washington lobbyist. That was quick compared to Apple, which took 25 years to begin paying someone to represent its interests in the capital.
Violence had been raging in Syria for 14 months …
Guarding the Grain
BattlelandSuicide
Self-Inflicted Crisis
Military suicides are at record levels, but the causes remain elusive…
BattlelandR&D
Why the Fight Over the “Great Green Fleet” is Fuelish
Next week in the Pacific Ocean, more than 25,000 American sailors and Marines will conduct one of the largest naval war games ever held. Along with grueling training under combat conditions, this will be an important test for …
BattlelandSuicide
Captains Courageous
The two soldiers couldn’t have been more different. One was young and handsome enough to be known as “Captain Brad Pitt,” a 2007 West Point graduate trained to deliver ordnance from the Army’s most terrifying flying machine, an AH-64 Apache helicopter gunship. The other was a decade older, a bomb-squad grunt who high school …