Articles from Contributor
How Drones Can Reinforce Failure
Gaeta, Italy — This report by independent journalist Gareth Porter is extremely important. Porter, one of our finest investigative journalists, highlights one of the central problems in drone warfare: how its imperfect …
Why It is Time to Clean the Pentagon’s Augean Stables
The military-industrial-congressional complex (MICC, to its friends and foes), is a political economy that places the interest of the domestic factions benefitting from huge defense budgets ahead of the interests of soldiers, …
Hardware v. People
For a good example of the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex’s (MICC’s) value system — which is hardware before ideas and people — read this New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof.
Note his opening paragraph:
Here’s a window into a tragedy within the American military: For every soldier killed on the battlefield this
…
Storm Clouds Gathering Over There…and Back Home
The disasters over the last three months — including American troops urinating on Afghan corpses, burning Qurans, and the massacre of Afghan civilians, including women and children, by at least one American soldier — have …
Who’s Going to Foot This Bill?
William Pfaff has written a stunning critique of Obama’s policy in Afghanistan — and what its implications are for what is left of the American republic. Note particularly the estimates for sustaining the American-created …
Sun Tzu or Bismarck: Who will Prevail in the 21st Century?
The first three chapters in Sun Tzu’s timeless classic “The Art of War” describe how to make net assessments by comparing your strengths and weaknesses and those of your adversary and how to formulate strategy. Near the end of Chapter 3, he sums up his advice, saying, “Know your enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles, you will …
F-35: Out of Altitude, Airspeed, and Ideas — But Never Money
No program better illustrates the pathologies of the weapons acquisition process as it is currently practiced by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex (MICC) than the entirely predictable, and in this case, predicted, …
Defusing the Iranian Crisis
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 …
The Heritage Foundation, Then and Now
By Thomas Christie, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney and Winslow Wheeler
Almost 30 years ago, in 1983, the Heritage Foundation stepped forward as a thoughtful, independent thinking participant in the then-raging debate over Ronald …
The `K Street Clausewitz’ Remembered
Mark Thompson’s 27 December posting, “General Newt,” alerted readers of Battleland to Karen Tumulty’s pastiche of mini portraits of Newt Gingrich’s martial prowess. Mark highlighted one the few passages that zeroed in on the insubstantial essence of the K Street Clausewitz.
Unable to contain my mirth, I immediately forwarded Mark’s …
“Clintonizing” Perpetual War
In the winter of 2002, a close friend, a liberal staffer on Capitol Hill, asked me if I thought the crazy fulminations of the neocons and the tough-guy rantings of an insecure President [1] could result in a war with Iraq? My answer was something like ‘read the Barbara Tuchman’s The Guns of August and you will get a good idea of …
Beating the War Drums in Versailles on the Potomac
On 12 December, I described a concatenation of warmongering pressures that were shaping the popular psyche in favor of bombing Iran. Now, in a 21 December essay, Steven Walt describes a further escalation of these pressures — …