BattlelandWar Story
Building Bridges in Afghanistan
Major James Palmer liked to think of himself as a bridge builder when he was in Afghanistan in 2010 and 2011…most likely because, as an Army engineer, he is a bridge builder. Anyone who has had to live without a bridge in his …
BattlelandCool Military Acronyms
CREW
It’s a Marine program designed to protect leathernecks from IEDS. It stands for the corps’ Counter Radio Controlled Improvised Explosive Device Electronic Warfare – CREW. OK, so they cheated a little bit. This CREW contract just got bumped up to a half-billion dollars: 16.8% of it to be spent in Charleston, S.C., 5.5% to be …
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BattlelandMilitary Spending
Mongers
Sequestration continues to loom. That’s the law Congress passed last year, duly signed by the President, that requires $1.2 trillion in automatic deficit-reduction cuts over the coming decade. They’d come from discretionary spending if lawmakers and the President can’t come up with a better idea by Jan. 2.
Half of those cuts …
BattlelandR&D
Surefire Way To Render Unmanned Drones Obsolete…
No doubt the Pentagon is behind this: a human-powered quad-rotor helicopter. If this thing, ahem, really takes off, unmanned drones are doomed…
All kidding aside, congratulations to the team at the University of Maryland, and pilot Kyle Gluesenkamp, for getting this muscle-fueled whirlybird airborne for 50 seconds last Thursday …
BattlelandMilitary Mental Health
Why Is the UK’s PTSD Rate So Much Lower Than the U.S.’s?
Among the most interesting presentations at last week’s DoD-VA Suicide Prevention conference was one titled Time Bombs or Tidal Waves? The View from Blightly. It compared and contrasted the different psychological consequences …
BattlelandMilitary Women
Great Moments in Navy History
The USS Gerald R. Ford will be the first aircraft carrier ever built without urinals, the independent Navy Times reports in a story not yet on line. In a related move, the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima now boasts a beauty salon.
BattlelandProcurement
Probably Not Vanilla Wafers
From Monday’s contract announcements:
The Boeing Co., Huntington Beach, Calif., is being awarded a $36,197,205 firm-fixed-price, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract to produce 12 modified wafers for the Minuteman III missile system. The location of the performance is Orange County, Md. Work is to be completed by Aug. 31, 2015.
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BattlelandCyber
Cyber Warfare Treaty: DOA, Thanks to President and Pentagon
Misha Glenny making a smart case in the New York Times for a cyber arms control treaty, but it won’t happen.
Why?
For the same reason why the U.S. has refused – for many years now – to engage other great powers on a treaty …
BattlelandMilitary Benefits
Payday, for Officers
We posted the enlisted-vs.-civilian pay chart last Friday. One reader noted that doesn’t include officers. So here’s a chart from the same Pentagon report comparing U.S. military officers’ pay to that earned by their civilian counterparts with similar levels of education. The 11th Quadrennial Review of Military Compensation …
BattlelandMilitary Spending
Money Matters
Here’s an eye-opening chart from the green-eyeshade crowd over at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. It shows how far U.S. spending and revenues have veered from the projections made by the Congressional Budget Office in January 2001.
Key takeaways:
1. Entitlement and defense spending didn’t increase all that
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BattlelandAfghanistan
A Misdirected Surge?
That was the headline, minus the question mark, atop Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s story on the front page of Sunday’s Washington Post. It dealt with the U.S. military’s focus on Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan in recent years instead of the more vital Kandahar Province next door.
The story comes from Chandrasekaran’s new book: …